Divine invitation

Since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart
in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience
and our bodies washed with pure water.

—Hebrews 10:19-22 (ESV)

This is the invitation to us from the word of God: Jesus has opened the way for you—take advantage! You have a great high priest in whom all your sins are forgiven—don’t be afraid! You are invited to come freely into the presence of the living God—so come! Approach God! Draw near! Don’t be afraid—in Jesus you have been washed, you have been purified, you are forgiven! God has put a new heart and a new spirit within you—his Spirit—he’s renewing you from the inside out. No matter what you’ve done, God sees you in Jesus, as he’s making you to be, and he loves you. Come to him, come close to him, with full confidence and trust, for you are welcome.

This is an invitation that should give us heart and courage, and I suspect it’s one that many of us can’t hear too often. There are some folks who are quite sure they’re just wonderful, but for those of us for whom self-doubt is a familiar companion, this is a particular blessing. It’s very reassuring to know that it’s not about self-esteem or self-worth or believing in ourselves, all of which place a great weight squarely on our shoulders; rather, it’s about believing in God and his faithfulness and the power of what Jesus has done for us, and knowing that it doesn’t matter how we feel: whether we’re up or down and whatever the Devil may be whispering in our ears, Jesus saved us, God loves us, and we are his.

Which should give us courage to hold fast to our hope in Christ, and to our open declaration of that hope—which of course we must do if we are to draw near to God through him. If we begin to lose hope, or if we become ashamed to proclaim it, then we will naturally look for alternatives, and we will not draw near to God through Christ; but we have reason to be bold, for our hope is sure and certain. We have every reason for confidence in the faithfulness of God, because we have seen it in Jesus; we have every reason to be confident that Jesus is enough, because he has already done far more than we could ever have imagined. And we have every reason to proudly proclaim our hope to all who will listen, and to keep proclaiming it even when times get hard, even when we hurt, and even when there is opposition, because Jesus has never failed us yet. He doesn’t make the road easy, but if we hang on tight to him, he always leads us through.

(Excerpted from “Draw Near”)

Gospel hope and gospel change

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.

—Hebrews 6:19-20a (ESV)

And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

—Hebrews 6:11-12 (ESV)

The gospel rests ultimately on the fact that God is faithful. We have hope because God who cannot lie and who cannot go back on his word made a promise, and in Jesus, he kept it. In Jesus, we need not worry about being swept away by the storms of life or capsized by their waves, for our hope in him is a soul anchor, a sure and steadfast anchor for the soul that holds us firm and steadfast where we need to be in the face of the worst life can throw at us. Nothing in this world can pull that anchor loose, because it isn’t hooked onto anything worldly: it’s hooked onto the very throne of God.

An Observation on the Importance of Humility in Planning: With Special Direction to the Inadvisability of Premature Declarations of Victory

Yeah, the title's very 17th-century, but I’m in a weird mood.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

—James 4:13-17 (ESV)

Oh, well . . . I’m starting to feel better, and I think I’m actually rolling on writing again, so . . . praise God.

Ephesians 5:18-23

Don’t get drunk on wine, which leads to dissipation

          but

be filled up by the Spirit

• addressing each other with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs

• singing and playing to the Lord with all your heart

• giving thanks always for everything

• to God the Father

• in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ

• submitting to one another in reverence for Christ

• wives to husbands as to the Lord

                  because

• the husband is the head of the wife

          just as

• Christ is the head of the church

• being himself the Savior of the body

(This is my own rendering of this passage, laid out in such a way as to show the development of this one, long, classically Pauline run-on sentence. Most English translations chop the sentence up; in particular, they chop it at verse 22 and insert a heading on the order of “Wives and Husbands,” making it appear that Paul is ending one section and starting a whole new thought. In actual fact, he’s still in mid-flight—verse 22 doesn’t even contain a participle, let alone an imperative verb.)

On liking Jesus and building the church

A church sign I passed today has up what I would guess is the title of this coming Sunday’s sermon: “They Like Jesus but Not the Church.” Of course, I know that isn’t original, but comes from Dan Kimball’s book of the same title, but it got me thinking. Taken purely as a cultural observation, that would seem to be hard to argue—there are indeed a great many people who like Jesus but don’t like his church at all, and there are certainly churches out there that make it easy to understand why. No question, the American church needs to do a better job in a number of ways at living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, starting with actually being committed to living out the gospel and representing Jesus to the world, instead of all the other junk we so often get on about instead.

But stop a minute. If we were truly a Christ-centered gospel-driven Spirit-actuated community of committed believers who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, would that mean that “they,” whoever “they” are, would like the church and we would all feel nicely validated? The thing about Kimball’s title, which our neighboring church pastor borrowed for his sermon, is that most people don’t seem to take it or offer it as merely an observation, but rather as a criticism—that if we just did this church thing right, whatever “right” is supposed to look like, that “they” would like us. The underlying assumption here is, I think, that it’s perfectly reasonable that the world around us should like Jesus, and that if we were just more like Jesus, the world would like us too, our churches would grow, and we would be more “successful.”

It’s a widespread assumption, in part because it’s a very comfortable one for an American church that, by and large, still hasn’t realized that Christendom is dead, has been given its eulogy, and is now feeling the thumps of the gravediggers’ shovels; but there are voices that demur. Above all, there is this one:

Parenthood is disciple-making

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”

—Deuteronomy 6:4-7 (ESV)

That might sound like a tall order, but think about it: those of us who are parents are always teaching our kids, when we’re at home and when we’re on the road, when we go to bed and when we get up—we’re teaching them by everything we say and don’t say, by what we tell them to do and don’t tell them to do, by what we let them get away with and what we enforce. Everything we do teaches them something, and helps shape them into the kind of people they’re going to be. In biblical terms, by the things we say and the things we do, whether we’re intentional about it or not, we are most assuredly making our children disciples, followers, of something. The only question is, what?

In the end, everybody comes up with their own answer. Some people answer it by not bothering to answer it, or by not even considering the question; that very rarely ends well. Some answer it just by going along with what the world around us thinks; that also often doesn’t end well, since the world is fickle and unstable, not to be trusted. Some answer it by imposing laws and rules and harsh punishment; that may produce good behavior, but it often produces rebellion in the end, and it does not breed love, because it does not know grace. Children need grace. We all need grace, children are just more aware of it; we adults aren’t really any better, just better at faking it.

People come up with a lot of answers, but the Bible’s answer is consistent: if you want children who honor you, raise them to honor God—and not as a harsh taskmaster, but as the one who is love, and as the giver of grace; yes, he disciplines us, but he does so because he loves us, so that we will grow. Raise them in the gospel, to understand the gift they’ve been given, that they may learn to love the giver more than the gift. Point them to Jesus, and the rest will follow.

(Adapted from “The Ministry of Parenthood”)

Jesus didn't come to save your agenda

I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret
of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things
through him who strengthens me.

—Philippians 4:11b-13 (ESV)

What we tend to miss when we take just that last verse, just that last sentence, out of context is that "I can do all things" does not mean "Jesus will help me do whatever I want." The promises of God are not promises for our worldly success, they are promises that he is just as much in control and just as much sustaining us for our good in times of disaster and pain as in times of wealth and health. As Jared Wilson sums it up in a great post titled "Kill Your Jesus Talisman,"

Jesus is no talisman. Crucify "Jesus as key to your personal achievement" and he will stay dead. But the real Jesus achieves a victory greater and far superior to any wish-dream of any man. He is life itself, and life eternal. Worship that Jesus.

Worry?

These are fretful days—an unprecedented ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the situation in Afghanistan is coming apart, Turkey appears to be turning from ally to enemy right before our eyes, the economy's in the tank and shows no real signs of climbing out, Iran continues to loom, and the Seattle Mariners are 19-31. (OK, so that last is nowhere near as serious as the others, but it still depresses me.) And of course, the list goes on and on, including such things as our government voting to abandon the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Zaire) to government by rape. These are not the salad days for most folks.

Which is why it was apropos, when I gathered the younger ones up to tuck them in (our eldest having uncharacteristically fallen asleep on her floor before 8pm) and pulled out the Jesus Storybook Bible to read to them before bed, to find ourselves here, at the Sermon on the Mount:

Wherever Jesus went, lots of people went, too. They loved being near him. Old people. Young people. All kinds of people came to see Jesus. Sick people. Well people. Happy people. Sad people. And worried people. Lots of them. Worrying about lots of things.

What if we don't have enough food? Or clothes? Or suppose we run out of money? What if there isn't enough? And everything goes wrong? And we won't be all right? What then?

When Jesus saw all the people, his heart was filled with love for them. They were like a little flock of sheep that didn't have a shepherd to take care of them. So Jesus sat them all down and he talked to them. . . .

"See those birds over there?" Jesus said.

Everyone looked. Little sparrows were pecking at seeds along the stony path.

"Where do they get their food? Perhaps they have pantries all stocked up? Cabinets full of food?

Everyone laughed—who's ever seen a bird with a bag of groceries?

"No," Jesus said. "They don't need to worry about that. Because God knows what they need and he feeds them."

"And what about those wild flowers?"

Everyone looked. All around them flowers were growing. Anemones, daisies, pure white lilies.

"Where do they get their lovely clothes? Do they make them? Or do they go to work every day so they can buy them? Do they have closets full of clothes?"

Everyone laughed again—who's ever seen a flower putting on a dress?

"No," Jesus said. "They don't need to worry about that because God clothes them in royal robes of splendor! Not even a king is that well dressed!" . . .

"Little flock," Jesus said, "you are more important than birds! More important than flowers! The birds and the flowers don't sit and worry about things. And God doesn't want his children to worry either. God loves to look after the birds and the flowers. And he loves to look after you, too."

Thank you, Father. That's just what I needed to hear.

To be driven by grace

My thanks to Jared Wilson for pointing out this gem from one of my favorite NT scholars,
D. A. Carson:

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

That's dead-on, but as Jared goes on to say, it does raise another question: what does grace-driven effort look like, and how is it different from all other forms of effort?

I think grace-driven effort springs from parking ourselves at the gospel and beholding. People who behold (super)naturally move into mission. . . .

We don't graduate from the gospel. We hold true to it. And it alone propels us out and empowers us to press on.

Grace-driven effort is effort that flows from the joys and wonders of worship that flows from beholding the amazing gospel of God's grace.

That's dead-on too. If you're having trouble seeing the distinction, you might say it's between doing something because you have to and doing something because you want to. Legalistic religion motivates by pushing and bribing, the carrot and the stick. The push may be an appeal to fear—which is a very powerful driver in most people's lives, since an awful lot of folks out there are slaves to fear in one way or another—or it may be a guilt trip, or it may play on people's sense of their own weakness and inadequacy; the bribe tends to be tailored to people's "felt needs" (hence the popular "7 Steps to a Better ________" approach). Whatever the particulars, it's all about control, both for the leader and for the followers.

The opposite to that, of course, is the drift that Dr. Carson talks about. Grace-driven effort is a wholly other thing; it is the action that springs from amazed gratitude at the unparalleled and almost incomprehensible grace of God; from joy in worship that focuses our minds and hearts on his beauty and goodness; from desire for his restful purity and undivided holiness, which frees us from our chaotic impurity and unrighteousness, which divides us against ourselves; and from whole-hearted love for him who first loved us, and who loved us that much.

The problem, I think, is that too few of us preachers actually trust that message to have any effect; it's too easy and too tempting to go for the "short cut," to go right to messages prescribing whatever efforts we deem most important. But effort which does not arise in response to the gospel of grace, even if it seems to be in the right direction, is not the right sort of effort, and in the end, it will not bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

—Philippians 3:12-16 (ESV)

Response to feetxxxl

So on Friday, I put up a post which was sort of about homosexuality but not really; my primary interest was to use that argument to consider our popular theology of suffering, which from a biblical point of view is thoroughly deficient. Predictably, though, someone popped up to ignore the actual content of the post and mount a spirited if more than a little muddled defense of homosexual sex, at fair length—which I think served, ironically enough, rather more to reinforce my point than to challenge it. Much of the content of those comments, I’ll address in that thread; but there were a couple attempts at scriptural argument to which I wanted to respond at greater length.

to start with where is the “easy yoke and light burden” in your condemnation of homosexuality

The same place as in my condemnation of adultery, murder, gossip, lying, substance abuse, theft, cheating, idolatry, and every other sin. Jesus is not here saying that he will never ask us to struggle against our sin—after all, elsewhere, he says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s clearly not in view. Rather, he’s saying two things. One, to pull from a pastor down in Florida,

The word “easy” simply means “fit for use” or “fits well.” Consider for a moment—in context, a “yoke” was used to harness one ox to another for working the fields. Jesus, being the master carpenter knew how to build well-fitted yokes that eased the burden on the oxen.

Did a well-fitting yoke mean the oxen would no longer be doing the work of plowing the field? No. Did it mean they would no longer be constrained to go only where the driver of the team told them to go? No. What it meant was that there would be no unnecessary difficulty and no unnecessary pain for them as they plowed, because the guidance of the driver—Jesus, in this metaphor—would be well-fitted to their size and strength as he sought to accomplish his will through them.

Two, to say that Jesus’ burden is light is not to say that if we follow Jesus, we’ll never have to carry anything that’s hard to bear; that’s just not life in this world. It certainly wasn’t for his disciples, most of whom would die painful deaths for their faith. But you see, a yoke holds together two oxen; the key is not the size of the burden, but the one who bears it with us. What makes the burden light for anyone who takes up Jesus’ yoke is that the believer is yoked together with the Spirit of God, and the Spirit provides the strength to bear the burdens we have to bear—and to bear them lightly, for all that they would be heavy to bear on our own. To find Jesus’ yoke well-fitted and his burden light, we have to actually accept it and put it on.

the fruit of the spirit of galatians the essence of the spirit of christ and the 2nd commandment( love your neighbor….) the summation of all new covenant law(gal,romans)

This comment betrays a very poor understanding of Scripture. It may be willfully so, since this commenter is trying to argue for a version of Christianity that has no vertical component to holiness, only a horizontal one (which, of course, would leave everyone free to define the latter as it suits them, without reference to the biblical witness). Here’s what Jesus has to say about that:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.

You see, the first thing before all others is these: Love the Lord your God with absolutely everything that is in you. Commit yourself to him wholeheartedly, without reservation, and with absolutely nothing in your life that's more important to you than him.

Put bluntly, then: if you aren’t willing to give up homosexual sex to follow Jesus, then you’re in violation of the greatest commandment. That’s idolatry, and it’s a sin.

Of course, this is also true of everything else, including many things which aren’t sinful, so in and of itself, it doesn’t prove that homosexual sex is sinful. However, I’ve never met anyone trying to argue from Scripture in favor of homosexual sex who did so disinterestedly, with no vested interest in the argument; everyone I’ve ever seen argue that position had an a priori commitment to demonstrating that the scriptural witness conformed to the position they wanted to take, and they would not accept or even consider the possibility that the Bible might flatly contradict them. As I’ve already said, it’s my observation that their refusal rested on one proposition which they would not allow to be challenged:

God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.

They valued that more than they valued God; they would only accept a God of whom that statement could be true. That’s idolatry.

Homosexuality and the theology of suffering

It seems to me that all the theological arguments in support of the proposition that homosexual sex isn't sinful boil down, ultimately, to one assertion:

God couldn't possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.

That's really the bottom line right there, I think. All of the irrelevant arguments* about genetics are simply efforts to reinforce the second half of that sentence, to convince people that not acting on homosexual desires really is that hard and that painful. And yes, I do think this is the bottom line both for those who have desires and for those who don't but who support the pro-homosex position—such folks would, on my observation, affirm this for themselves, and so they're being logically and morally consistent in affirming that this must be true for others as well. (In that respect, I must admit they have a certain moral superiority to many who uphold the scriptural prohibition of homosexual activity, who are simply holding others to a moral standard which they would never dream of applying to themselves. The divorce rate among self-identified evangelicals bears eloquent witness to that.) In our suffering-averse, death-avoiding culture, I suspect you would find overwhelming agreement with this proposition: "God couldn't possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful."

To which I can only say: You have no idea. Our difficulty squaring a loving God with one who allows us to suffer—indeed, who actively sends us trials and uses suffering and struggle (and, yes, failure) for our growth—is ours, not the Bible's. Consider how God tried Abraham, Ezekiel, Hosea, Job; consider how he answered the disobedience of Jonah; consider how he rewarded the faithful witness of Paul. Consider the testimony of Hebrews 11, which offers this summation of the life of faith:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

And ultimately, consider Christ, and the suffering God willingly endured for us. We have a hard time when James says, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds," but to him, it makes perfect sense: "for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." His priorities are not our priorities, and indeed, God's priorities are not our priorities; we're focused on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain—not necessarily in a crude, hedonistic sense, but even if the pleasures we value are intellectual and rarified, it doesn't change the basic equation—while God is on about something else entirely in our lives.

For the sake of argument, grant everything the advocates of same-sex marriage and ordination of those who practice homosexual sex and the full societal normalization of homosexual practices claim and declare and argue about homosexual desire—grant it all, every last contention and conclusion, and set it against the biblical texts. Does it justify setting aside the historic interpretation of Scripture that homosexual practices are sinful? No, it doesn't, because God doesn't let us off that easily.

Indeed, as much as our culture tends to fixate on sex in various ways, and as powerful as our sexual desires and drives are, they aren't our deepest or most fundamental desires, and they don't fuel our strongest or most elemental temptations. When Paul references homosexual practice in Romans 1, it's in the course of making a greater point about a deeper, more fundamental and more powerful temptation: the temptation to idolatry. Unfortunately, the 21st-century American church largely hasn't followed him there, and thus hasn't even confronted the lesson it truly needs to learn from that, which isn't about sex at all: it is, rather, that yes, God could and does want me to do something that hard and that painful. He wants me to take everything, right down to the thing I most desperately do not want to give up—whatever that may be—and lay it at his feet in total self-surrender.

And here's the kicker: he wants me to do it joyfully, and in fact he gives me every reason to do it joyfully; he wants me to lay it all down, as hard and as painful as it will be, because he has something far better to give me in return. In exchange for my life, he gives me his, which is a life that can face trials and sufferings and still sing hymns of praise from a jail cell at midnight. It's a life that can see pain, and even struggles with temptation, not as something to be avoided or something of which we should only be expected to take so much, but rather as an opportunity to know the grace of Christ and share in his ministry.

*I say these arguments are irrelevant because they commit, ironically enough, the genetic fallacy. Desires are neither stronger nor more justifiable, nor for that matter more expressive of our sense of our own identity, for being genetic rather than the product of our experience and the choices we have made. Whatever conclusions one may draw about a neurological and neurochemical component to homosexual desires, and whatever answer one may offer to the chicken-and-egg question of whether that component is cause or effect of those desires (or, for that matter, stands in some other relation altogether to them), the whole matter is logically irrelevant to the question of what any given individual ought to do with those desires. Whatever their source, the desires exist, and they are what they are, and they must be considered on that basis. The rest is all so much smoke.

Put not your trust in princes

Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the sojourners;
he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The Lord will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, to all generations.
Praise the Lord!

—Psalm 146 (ESV)

The gospel of the rainbow

God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again
become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

—Genesis 9:12-15 (ESV)

Yes, it’s the rainbow to which God is referring, but there’s more going on here than that; the rainbow is being used symbolically in a very interesting way. The bow, of course, was a major weapon for hunting; equally of course, it was a major weapon of war, the best way for human beings to kill either animals or each other at a distance. A drawn bow was a sign of hostility; in the ancient Near East, among Israel’s neighbors, stars in the shape of a bow would have been seen as a sign of the hostility of the gods. But here, God has hung his bow in the heavens—pointing up. It isn’t pointing down at the earth to strike, it’s pointing up, away from the earth. Instead of a sign of war and hostility, it’s a sign of peace.

And it’s one other thing, though of course the early readers of Genesis couldn’t know it. God had aimed his wrath against sin at the earth, striking it with the flood; now he would take that wrath and reverse it, aiming it up—at himself, at his own heart. Tim Keller argues, and I think he’s right, that what we’re seeing here is a prefiguring and a foreshadowing of the work of Christ: the rainbow isn’t just a sign of God’s promise that he will never again deal with human sin by flooding the world, it’s an indication of how he will deal with it, by taking all its pain and penalty on himself. God makes this covenant with Noah, he promises never to send another flood, because he already knows that his final victory over sin is going to come a very different way. He knows that while punishing us for our sin—or allowing the consequences of our sin to fall on us, which is often enough the same thing—is frequently necessary, all the punishment in the world will only produce a more cautious and circumspect sinner; it will never make a saint, and what God wants is for us to be saints. To accomplish that, he needs to show us grace, so that we can respond not with fear and the desire to avoid punishment but with love and gratitude and joy.

Thus we have the gospel of the rainbow, which gives the lie to the idea that the God of the Old Testament is somehow different from God as we see him revealed in Jesus. Yes, law is necessary; it’s necessary to show us, so clearly that we cannot avoid the truth, that God’s standards of holiness are too high for us to meet, so that we understand our desperate crying need for grace. Yes, punishment for sin is necessary, for many reasons; as rough as this world can be sometimes, it would be far worse if the evil that we do were never punished. But these things aren’t what God is on about, even in the Old Testament. He doesn’t want to terrify us into obeying him; he wants, rather, to love us into trusting him so that we obey him because we trust him, and love him, and know he loves us. That’s why his ultimate answer to more sin wasn’t more floods, more natural disasters, more judgment; his ultimate answer was the cross.

(Excerpted from “The Covenant of the Rainbow”)

The heroes of old

One thing you’ll find, if you spend a lot of time reading the literature of the ancient world, is that a lot of that literature focuses on stories of giant heroes, men who were incredible warriors and leaders because they were simply more gifted than the normal run of humanity—especially physically, as they were usually tall, powerful, and athletic. Don’t think Shaq, think a guy who could bench-press Shaq and then dunk him for good measure. The Babylonians had the story of Gilgamesh. The Irish sang of Fionn mac Cumhaill and Cúchulainn. The British gave the world the epic of Beowulf, who killed the monster Grendel in single combat. And of course, the Greeks told tale after tale of demigods and other heroes, from brutal Hercules to crafty Odysseus, as well as the legend of the great city of Atlantis, lost beneath the waves. That’s just a few examples—there are plenty of others.

Now, your professional academic skeptics will tell you that these are all myths, and the first thing they’ll mean by that is “complete inventions”; but I’m not so sure. I won’t say that I believe a one of these stories happened exactly as we have them, but in my experience, stories don’t come from nothing, either; and the fact that we find these sorts of stories in so many different human societies suggests to me that there’s a kernel of memory lurking there in the back of the mind, that then works its way out in stories that are particular to each society and culture.

One of the things that makes me think so is that the Bible, too, knows of the existence of these heroes of old, these men of renown—but as is so often the case, it has a rather more skeptical take on them than the rest of the world. Part of this is that those heroes of old were such violent people as a whole; for all the complaints about all the wars in the Old Testament and all the times God commands the Israelites to utterly defeat another nation in judgment for their idolatry, the Bible nowhere celebrates war the way most ancient texts do. It has no long passages offering lovingly-detailed descriptions of battle, and it never glorifies warriors for their feats of arms. War is certainly presented as a necessity in various places in the Old Testament, but there is no trace of the theme common in the ancient world that the purpose of life was to win glory and the way to do so was through valor in combat. That’s a big, big difference between the Scriptures and, say, the Tain, the account of Cúchulainn and the great Ulster cattle raid.

(Adapted from “The Days of Noah”)

Genesis 3 and the voice of temptation

When the serpent tempts the woman in Genesis 3, he doesn’t start off with a question, but with a statement—with a statement he knows is false, and that he knows she knows is false. This is because if he were to ask her a question, she would have to think in order to answer it, and while he wants her to talk to him, he doesn’t want her to think; he wants her to react without thinking, and his opening false statement gets him the reaction he wants.

You see, the serpent wants the woman to talk about God without talking to God. Specifically, he wants her to talk about God to him, so that he can sow doubt and distrust in her ear; but if it ever occurred to her to bring God into that conversation, to allow God to respond to the snake’s lies, then the game would be up, and all his efforts to breed distrust would go for nothing. So he wants her to react without thinking too hard about it, so that he can keep her in that mode of talking about God without actually asking God to join the conversation—which is always a bad mode for us as believers to be in.

(Adapted from “The End of the Beginning”)

Fire the committee

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners,
and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

—James 4:8 (ESV)

This verse has been echoing in my mind ever since I preached on James 4:1-10 a few months ago; which is why this post from the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund really struck me today:

You and I are not integrated, unified, whole persons. Our hearts are multi-divided. There is a board room in every heart. Big table. Leather chairs. Coffee. Bottled water. Whiteboard. A committee sits around the table. There is the social self, the private self, the work self, the sexual self, the recreational self, the religious self, and others. The committee is arguing and debating and voting. Constantly agitated and upset. Rarely can they come to a unanimous, wholehearted decision. We tell ourselves we’re this way because we’re so busy with so many responsibilities. The truth is, we’re just divided, unfocused, hesitant, unfree.

He’s right; and as he says, it isn’t enough just to “accept Jesus” if all that means is that we give Jesus a seat on the committee, which too often is all we do. That leaves us still divided in our allegiance—divided against God, divided against ourselves. The only real solution is far more drastic:

The other way to “accept Jesus” is to say to him, “My life isn’t working. Please come in and fire my committee, every last one of them. I hand myself over to you. Please run my whole life for me.” That is not complication; that is salvation.

“Accepting Jesus” is not just adding Jesus. It is also subtracting the idols.

Which is why, as C. S. Lewis said, Christ plus anything equals nothing—because if we insist on hanging on to anything else, we don’t get Jesus.

Imago Dei

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

—Genesis 1:26-27 (ESV)

If you look to Catholic and Protestant theology to find out what it means that human beings are made in the image of God, you’ll find a lot of differing explanations, containing a lot of wisdom, but mostly missing the key fact: in the ancient world, the phrase “image of God” primarily meant a statue of a deity in a temple. Worship in those days focused on those images; where the image of a god or goddess was, that god or goddess was understood to be present in the image. As a consequence, people believed that if they created these images and built houses for them, brought sacrifices and observed the ceremonies faithfully, they could ensure that their gods would be with them—and that if they didn’t, their gods would abandon them.

Genesis 1-2 take a very different view. All creation is God’s temple, and Genesis 1 shows us God building it for himself; then he resolves to create his image—human beings—to place within that temple. In Genesis 2:7, we see him forming his image out of the dirt—perhaps out of the heavy clay by the river, much as the priests of Egypt made their idols; then, having breathed life into the first human being, God installs him in the temple, in the garden which he has created for the purpose. In presenting God’s creative work in this way, Genesis makes it clear that the pagans and their idols are merely a poor copy of the one true God.

This was, and remains, a dramatic challenge to the pagan worldview; and odd though it may sound, it’s not only a religious challenge, but also a political one. You see, theologically, the pagan nations around Israel understood that their chief god, whichever one that might be, ruled their nation; but as a practical matter, clearly it was the king who ruled. Thus, logically, it must be that the king ruled the nation as the representative of the god, and so they spoke of the king being the image of their god—the god’s physical representation who ruled on his behalf.

This is of course a profoundly elitist view—only the most powerful and important person in the nation was worthy of this label; everyone else was less important, second-class. Their gods and goddesses would smugly accept their worship, but disdained to identify themselves with such insignificant creatures. Out of this came the mindset that some human lives were more important than others, which as a practical matter meant that your life was only important to the degree that you were of use to the king. From that sort of perspective, our modern notions of equality and human rights would have seemed like ridiculous drivel; if the king is the image of the god and you aren’t, obviously the king is greater and you are lesser, and you don’t have rights, you’re just allowed to do whatever the king wants you to do.

That was pretty much the way ordinary people were seen by those who ruled the nations around Israel—they existed to serve their rulers in whatever way those rulers might desire; which is why Genesis was such a radical text. Its insistence that all people are made in the image of God blew that elitism away and replaced it with a very, very different view of humanity—rooted in an equally different view of God. This was a God who identified himself not only with the important people, but with all people, declaring that he had created all people in his image; this was a God who had created humanity not to be his slaves, serving his comfort and doing his dirty work (which was why the Babylonians, for instance, believed their high god Marduk had created humanity), but in order that he might love us and we might love him.

There’s an important lesson in this: no human life is worth less than another. That might seem too obvious to need saying, but in fact it needs frequent repetition; the idea that some lives are worth less than others is one which keeps cropping up all over the place. These days, we see it in, among other places, the euthanasia movement, and in some of the arguments made in favor of abortion. Princeton professor Peter Singer is the clearest example of this, arguing at every opportunity that some people’s lives are not worth living—and that their family members should be free to kill them if it seems preferable. Against this idea, in all its forms, stands Genesis (and indeed the whole of Scripture), which declares unequivocally that God has made all people in his image, and loves all whom he has made. It is not ours to regard anyone as less important, or less human, than anyone else, no matter what excuses we might offer; whenever we look at another human being, regardless of any other considerations, we see the image of God in them, and we must treat them accordingly, without exception.

(Adapted from “Toledot” and “In the Image of God”)

The pursuit of God

I would be willing to bet that if you read the Bible much, you have a favorite part. For some, it will be the letters of Paul; others love the gospels best, for their stories of Jesus; and still others are drawn first to the Psalms. For my part, I love all those, and others, but I go first to the prophets, and especially to Isaiah. I’m not sure why that is, but I think our vacation to the canyonlands of Utah and Arizona a few years ago gave me an insight: like standing on the rim of Bryce Canyon or inside Double Arch, in the prophets I am captured by the power of God’s imagination, and the power with which it communicates his love and his beauty.

At the same time, though, reading the prophets can be more than a little frightening. I say this especially as a preacher, for anyone who stands to preach the Word is exercising a small part of the prophetic ministry and calling (which is one reason why preaching is such a dangerous act, at least for the preacher). The prophets are people who have been captured by God to a greater degree than almost anyone else, and in their impassioned calls to the people of God, we see the gulf between our sinfulness and God’s holiness more clearly than almost anywhere else. We also see, just as clearly, God’s absolute determination to cross that gulf with his love and redeem us despite ourselves, a determination which led to the birth of the Son of God, and his death on the cross.

And of all the prophets, I think we see most clearly the lengths to which God will go—and to which he will command his prophets to go—in Hosea. This is a deep and remarkable book, and a remarkable story. It begins with this command: “Go marry an adulterous woman and have children of adultery, for the land has been unfaithful to Yahweh.” So he goes and marries Gomer, and they have a son; and then she has two more children, and while we can’t be sure, the text suggests that maybe they weren’t Hosea’s. Things escalate, and she abandons her husband and children for her lovers; and in all this, God tells Hosea, the pain and hurt of the prophet’s experience, the betrayal he suffers, mirror God’s experience with Israel. Just as Hosea’s wife has gone chasing after other men—pretty much any man she thinks she can get something from, it sounds like—so Israel has gone chasing after other gods.

Now, we know how this sort of story ends—in divorce court—and that’s pretty much how it ended in Hosea’s day, too. But that’s not what happens here. Instead, we see Hosea’s determination to woo his wife back, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered, and to rebuild their marriage into what it should have been; and through him, through this acted parable, this enacted prophecy, of the love of God, we see God’s determination to do the same with Israel. And so God tells Hosea, “Go love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as Yahweh loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods”; and so he does.

I have to wonder what Gomer thought of this. Here she’s run away from her husband, she’s living with her lover, and one day her husband shows up on the doorstep and says, “I’d like to buy my wife back.” And what does she hear from the guy? Protestations of love? Demands that Hosea leave and never come back? No, she hears, “Sure—how much?” That can’t have been good for her ego. But on the other hand—she’s left her husband, she’s shamed him before all his people, she’s run off to be with another man—and yet, despite all that, her husband not only still wants her back, he’s willing to pay a steep price to get her back. That had to have made her look at Hosea in a new way.

So what does she make of it all? How does she respond to this costly demonstration of her husband’s love? We don’t know. We know what Hosea tells her, but we don’t know how she responds—we don’t know what becomes of them. We’re given the assurance that at some point in the future, Israel will return to God, that that relationship will be restored; but whether the same applied to Gomer and Hosea, we aren’t told. We’re left hanging, the story unfinished, wondering what happened next.

Now, strange as that is, I think there’s good reason why Hosea’s story stops in the middle; and if you’ve been wondering why we’re talking about this on the first Sunday of Advent, here’s the reason. You see, Jesus does much the same thing in the story of the prodigal son and his brother—we’re left hanging at the end with the father’s appeal to his older son, with no hint given of the older son’s response. The reason for that was that the older son represented the Pharisees and their allies, and it was up to them to make that response. The story—the real story—wasn’t finished. In the same way here, the deeper story wasn’t finished; telling the end of Hosea and Gomer’s story would have given it a false sense of closure. But this way, we’re drawn in to try to finish the story ourselves.

That’s important, because the deeper story here is the story of Advent. Remember, the season of Advent is a season of waiting and preparation for the coming of Christ—preparation to celebrate his first coming, which we do on Christmas, and preparation for the time when he will come again. The cry of Advent is “Come, Lord Jesus! Come, O come, Immanuel! Come and buy us back, come and set us free!” And the message of Advent is that he did come and buy us back, at a far greater cost than just silver, barley, and wine—he bought us back and set us free at the cost of his own life; and having done so, he is coming again to take us home with him.

Now, we all know this, or at least, we’ve all heard it before; but I wonder if we’ve ever thought about what this really means for our lives. I hadn’t, until a colleague of mine gave me a copy of the book Furious Pursuit. I have a number of quibbles with the book, but I still highly recommend it, because the audacious truth at the center of this book is something we desperately need to hear: Christianity isn’t about us chasing God, it’s about God chasing us. It isn’t about us earning his love, it isn’t about us being good enough or obeying hard enough; to pull from another colleague of mine, from a sermon that nearly put me on the floor, “We hear God saying, Obey me, obey me, obey me, but that’s not right. Yes, God wants our obedience, but that comes later. What God is really saying is Trust me, trust me, trust me; and as we learn to trust, we learn to obey.” Christianity isn’t about you straining every muscle to hold on to God, it’s about the fact that God will never let you go—never—and that whether you run to him, run away, or just try to ignore him, he will never stop pursuing you, because he loves you.

That’s what Advent is about. It’s about a God who loves you so much, who loves all of us so much, that even though we had rejected him, he came down to this earth, looked the devil square in the eye, and said, “I’d like to buy my people back.” We were in rebellion, we had set ourselves against him as his enemies; despite all that, at the right time, he died for us, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered. The Son of God traded in his throne and his crown for dirty straw and dirtier diapers; he gave up all the wealth of heaven for the poverty of homelessness; he set aside all the power and honor of deity to accept the powerlessness and shame of a criminal’s execution on a torture device. And he did it all for you.

What will you do?

“All to Jesus I surrender . . .”

Let us look at our lives in the light of this experience and see whether we gladly glory in weakness, whether we take pleasure, as Paul did, in injuries, in necessities, in distresses. Yes, let us ask whether we have learned to regard a reproof, just or unjust, a reproach from friend or enemy, an injury, or trouble, or difficulty into which others bring us, as above all an opportunity of proving how Jesus is all to us, how our own pleasure or honor are nothing, and how humiliation is in very truth what we take pleasure in. It is indeed blessed, the deep happiness of heaven, to be so free from self that whatever is said of us
or done to us is lost and swallowed up in the thought that Jesus is all.

—Andrew Murray

Amen. May it be so.

HT: Ray Ortlund

One unique incomparable Savior

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 18
Q. And who is this mediator—
true God and at the same time
truly human and truly righteous?

A. Our Lord Jesus Christ,¹
who was given us
to set us completely free
and to make us right with God.²

Note: mouseover footnotes for Scripture references (does not work in IE 6).

As Reformed Christians, we affirm that salvation is all of Christ and none of us, because no one but he could have accomplished it. He is unique, and not in any minor way; he is the only one who could encompass the work that needed to be done and the price that needed to be paid so that we might be saved, and no one else could even have begun to approach it. We don't have to be worthy, we have no claim on pride in our own salvation, we cannot undo or lose this great gift—it is all of Christ, bestowed on us through his Holy Spirit by his incomparable grace and unfathomable love toward us who were his enemies, until he redeemed us despite ourselves and made us his friends.