A few years ago I watched the movie “The Apostle.” It’s about a Southern Pentecostal/holiness preacher who seems to be sincere–he’s definitely not a con artist–but who is plagued by gross inconsistencies. Both he and his wife are guilty of long-term adulterous relationships. In a fit of anger, he kills his wife’s lover with a baseball bat. He then leaves the area and begins preaching somewhere else as The Apostle. His new church grows very quickly, but his life continues in the same pattern. He tries to seduce a woman who is separated from her husband, and he beats up a man who tries to disrupt one of his church services. In the end, the police catch up with him and he is arrested for murder. The movie closes with him on a chain gang, preaching to the other prisoners.
What is wrong with this man? He sincerely believes in Jesus Christ. He prays all the time and believes he is called by God to preach the gospel. But none of this has any effect on the way he orders his life. The same is true of others in the story. They have great, exhilarating times of worship and prayer together, but their lives remain unchanged. They talk about God’s power. They think they feel His power among them when they worship and pray, but there’s no evidence of it in their daily lives. This is a common problem, although the inconsistencies usually aren’t as blatant as those in the movie. But this problem raises a question: how does the reality of God’s sovereign power connect with our weakness? We worship the Lord of the Universe, the One who possesses all power in heaven and on earth. How does this make a difference in our daily lives?
The first thing we need to realize is that God’s sovereign power doesn’t necessarily make us feel stronger. The people in “The Apostle” wanted to feel God’s power surging through them, lifting them up and carrying them along. So they worked themselves up by repeating the same words over and over, producing an emotional state where they felt like God was among them. But He wasn’t. It was nothing but a counterfeit, produced by their own efforts. God’s presence transforms us, and these people were not transformed.
In the fall of 1977, I was part of a group traveling overland to India from Belgium. We had been working with Operation Mobilization in Europe since the early summer, and were now committed to working with OM India for the next two years. Because we had several drivers, we were able to travel through the night much of the time, but that wasn’t safe in Afghanistan (because of the danger of bandits). In Afghanistan, we had to travel all day to get to a large town, where we would spend the night in a walled compound. On one of our nights there we were entertained by two sufis. Sufis are Islamic mystics. One of them played the harmonium, which is an instrument with a small keyboard and bellows on the back (like an accordion). A harmonium player uses one hand for the bellows and the other for playing notes on the keyboard. The other man was playing the tablas, a set of two bongo-like drums. Their music was highly repetitive, and it slowly built in intensity and speed. It was very powerful, and I quickly realized that if I allowed myself to get pulled in I would end up in a trance-like state. This is what sufis do. They have spiritual experiences by using the right techniques to achieve the kind of mental state they want.
About a year later I was in Kathmandu, Nepal, and a friend and I visited a Buddhist temple. There were monks sitting on the floor all around us as we walked in; someone was playing a gong and another person was playing a drum. I don’t think any of the monks even saw us walk in, as they were completely caught up in a trance. And I felt the same thing I had felt in Afghanistan. As the music built in speed and intensity, I realized that I had to consciously resist to avoid getting pulled in myself. My friend and I left after a very short time.
The thing that is clear in both these cases is that it’s possible to have spiritual experiences that are not brought about by the work of the Holy Spirit. That’s what the people in “The Apostle” were doing. They were using techniques very similar to those used by Sufis and other mystics. They thought the power of God was among them, and they had great experiences. But their lives were unaffected. The problem with counterfeit experiences like this is that they satisfy us with something less than the real thing. They’re addictive. They become idols, which keep us from seeking God. And they deceive us into thinking we have something which we don’t have.
When God is at work among us, or within us, we don’t necessarily feel stronger. We may be intensely aware of our own weakness and frailty; we may even be unaware of what God is doing at the time. In Isaiah 40, we find the people of Israel complaining: “My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God.” In many ways, this whole chapter is an answer to that complaint. Their complaint has two parts: 1) there’s a theological dimension to their problem: “My way is hidden from the Lord;” God doesn’t know what is going on; He’s lost sight of me; 2) there’s also an experiential dimension: “my cause is disregarded by my God;” I’ve been crying out to Him for help and nothing has happened; He’s not answering my prayers.
The people are intensely aware of their weakness at this point. This chapter is full of the majesty of God. It’s one of the most exalted passages in the whole Bible. But the people feel nothing but their own weakness. Paul has a similar experience in 2 Corinthians 12. He’s an apostle, with a high calling and lots of responsibility. But he is plagued and hindered by a thorn in the flesh. So he cries out to God to remove it. Surely this problem has to be removed, so that he can carry on his work as an apostle. He cries out to God repeatedly about this, and after the third time he receives this answer: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Do you think Paul, at this point, begins to feel God’s power in a different way? What he feels is his own weakness, but he’s received this assurance that as he labors in faith, God will be at work in ways that Paul can’t understand or explain. His weakness is a condition for God’s work, not a hindrance. But God’s work doesn’t make him feel any less weak. We have a picture of this working in 2 Corinthians 4: “For we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you” (vv. 7-12). What Paul experiences, what he feels, is his own weakness. And, at the same time, he sees God working in ways that he can’t explain, doing things that Paul could never accomplish himself.
Part of the problem with the people in the movie is that they were on the wrong track. They were looking for the wrong thing. They wanted God to give power to them, so that it would be theirs to use. The reality is that God uses us in our weakness. We still feel weak, because the power remains His. “We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”
God often gives us a strong sense of His presence at the beginning of our Christian life, to help us get started in following Him, and to help us make a strong break with our past. But I’ve known many Christians who go to great lengths trying to reproduce these feelings, who become dependent on them. Much contemporary worship, with its emphasis on creating the right kind of mood, is doing this very thing. During Lent one year I read The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, a Spanish Christian who lived in the 1500's. One of his major points is that God doesn’t want us seeking a certain way of feeling; He wants us to seek Him. So, after awhile, He begins to lead us through times of dryness, when we feel nothing of His presence, to teach us to walk with Him obediently by faith. The demand for exhilarating worship experiences is not a mark of spirituality; it’s a sign of immaturity. In its worst forms, it leads to the kind of excess and inconsistency that are portrayed in “The Apostle.”
Notice how Isaiah answers their questions, in verse 28: “Do you not know?” He begins with theology, reminding them of the truth. The people in “The Apostle” began with experience, with trying to arrive at a certain way of feeling. That’s the wrong place to start. Our problem is very often that we’ve forgotten the truth. Our eyes have become clouded. Satan has sidetracked us and deceived us, and we’re no longer thinking clearly. So our first need, in this situation, is to be reminded of the truth.
What is the truth? “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.” He’s been telling them this all through the chapter. “Who has scooped up the ocean in his two hands, or measured the sky between his thumb and little finger, Who has put all the earth’s dirt in one of his baskets, weighed each mountain and hill? Who could ever have told God what to do or taught him his business?” (vv. 12-13, The Message). God knows all about their situation, and He has the power and wisdom to come to their help. They’ve lost sight of who God is. He goes on later in the chapter: “Have you not been paying attention? Have you not been listening? Haven’t you heard these stories all your life? Don’t you understand the foundation of all things? God sits high above the round ball of earth. The people look like mere ants. He stretches out the skies like a canvas–yes, like a tent canvas to live under. He ignores what all the princes say and do. The rulers of the earth count for nothing. Princes and rulers don’t amount to much. Like seeds barely rooted, just sprouted, They shrivel when God blows on them. Like flecks of chaff, they’re gone with the wind” (vv. 21-24, The Message).
God knows everything that is going on, and He has enough power and wisdom to deal with the situation. The problem is not with their feelings, but with their understanding. They need to begin by remembering who God is. Jesus reassures His disciples in the same way: “Don’t be afraid of those who want to kill you. They can only kill your body; they cannot touch your soul. Fear only God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Not even a sparrow, worth only half a penny, can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to him than a whole flock of sparrows” (Matthew 10:28-31, NLT). He reminds them of the truth about God, their Father.
Having reminded the people of the truth, Isaiah now urges them, in verses 29-31, to wait on God, to hope in Him and look to Him for help. It doesn’t help to know that God is all-powerful, unless we know that He is also inclined to help His people. So Isaiah tells them, in verse 29, “He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.” Those who are weary don’t have the strength to work themselves into a frenzy that makes them feel like they’ve received God’s power. In my early Christian life, I learned to pray with lots of energy and fervor, and I believe I was often guilty of the kind of counterfeit experiences I’ve been describing. But in 1978, while I was in Nepal, I came down with hepatitis, and for a long time I just didn’t have the physical strength to pray in that way. For awhile, it destroyed my spiritual life, but eventually I had to rethink my assumptions about prayer.
Often we aren’t aware of our own weakness, so Isaiah reminds us, in verse 30: “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall.” Even at the height of our strength, we are weak and needy. It’s not those who feel strong, but those who hope in the Lord who experience His power. The word translated “hope,” in verse 31, includes three things: 1) a sense of expectation and certainty; 2) a willingness to wait patiently; 3) a sense of rest and trust (Alec Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah, p. 308). Knowing the truth enables us to hope in Him. Knowing who God is, knowing that He is all-powerful, and that He possesses all wisdom, and that He is faithful in coming to the rescue of His people, enables us to wait on His time. It’s His work, not ours. We may not feel very triumphant. But He is faithful, and He is more than able to fulfill His promises: “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever” (v. 8). We can rest in Him and wait expectantly, because it doesn’t depend on our arriving at a triumphant state of mind. It depends on the sovereign God, the ruler of the Universe, acting on behalf of His people in faithfulness to His promises. We don’t need to work ourselves into a frenzy, like the people in “The Apostle.” Doing that will get us nowhere. We need to know and believe the truth, and then knowing and believing the truth, we wait expectantly on God.
In the end, the people in the movie were more absorbed with themselves than with God. They were more concerned with arriving at the kind of feeling they wanted than they were with God Himself. What God is calling us to, in this chapter, is to become less absorbed with ourselves and more absorbed with Him. How do we do that? First of all, by following the order Isaiah follows here: we begin with theology, with the truth about who God is. Very often our spiritual problems are the result of an inadequate view of God. J.B. Phillips, who wrote a paraphrase of the New Testament, also wrote a book entitled, Your God is Too Small. This is often the root of our spiritual problems: our God is too small. We’ve lost sight of the God of the Bible and have reduced Him to more manageable proportions. So we need to begin by reminding ourselves of who God is.
I’ve, in the past, suggested several ways to do this, but these things won’t help unless you put them into practice. Our false ideas are usually deep-seated, and they won’t die easily. We need to be willing to expend some effort in this area. Don’t be satisfied with the absolute minimum in your devotional life. If you have devotions in the morning, try getting up 15 minutes earlier, to give yourself a little more time. Sing hymns that worship God for His majesty and glory. Read slowly through Knowing God, by J.I. Packer, or The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer. Just read a page or so each day, as part of your devotional time. Make use of written prayers, like those of John Baillie in A Diary of Private Prayer. Pray regularly through the Psalms. Read prayerfully and meditatively through this passage in Isaiah for the next week or two, asking God to make Himself known to you. Expend some effort, invest some time, in filling your mind with a bigger view of who God is.
Expend some effort, and be diligent, but don’t be in a hurry. God doesn’t work on our timetable. Remember that the word “hope,” in verse 31, includes the idea of patiently waiting on God’s time. Psalm 27 has this same idea. The Psalm begins with great confidence: “The Lord is my light and my salvation–so why should I be afraid? The Lord protects me from danger–so why should I tremble?” The psalmist is confident, but he’s also conscious of danger. He is surrounded by enemies who want to kill him. Here’s how the Psalm ends: “Yet I am confident that I will see the Lord’s goodness while I am here in the land of the living. Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord” (vv. 13-14, NLT). The foundation of his confidence and security is God. But God acts according to His own sovereign wisdom, so the psalmist exhorts us to wait patiently on Him. The people in “The Apostle” were in a hurry. They wanted God to act right away; they expected Him to submit to their desires at the moment. They rushed ahead and produced their own counterfeits, because they weren’t willing to wait for the real thing.
God’s sovereignty means that He is in charge. The God described in Isaiah 40 is not one who will submit to our foolish whims. We can’t command Him to do what we want, and He can’t be manipulated by our clever techniques. He calls us to bow before His Lordship, to fall on our faces in worship and awe. He calls us to exalt Him, and to conform our lives to His will. And then, He calls us to trust in His faithfulness and wisdom to come to our help in His own way and His own time. A.W. Tozer said this: “If we are true Christians this we can know, that the boundless power of our infinite God is all around us, enfolding us, preserving us in being and keeping us unto salvation ready to be revealed. Let us look trustfully to God and expect ‘the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places’” (“The Power of God to Usward, in Born After Midnight, p. 27).
Our feelings of weakness are not a problem. They’re not a hindrance in our spiritual lives. Our feelings of weakness are a necessary condition for learning to trust in God’s power. Acknowledge your own weakness and poverty, and cultivate the fellowship of the One who rules all things by the word of His grace, who is exalted beyond our comprehension, the One before whom every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth will one day bow. “[His] gracious favor is all you need. [His] power works best in your weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9, NLT).
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Fellowship With the Holy God, 1 John 1:1-2:2 (Knowing God Series)
At the beginning of this series we talked about the fact that we were created to know God and worship Him, to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The abundant life that Jesus came to give His followers is not a life of prosperity, luxury and ease, but a life of fellowship with God. This is eternal life: knowing God, as Jesus says in John 17:3. This is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. St. Augustine said “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, a modern English version by Hal M. Helms, p. 7). Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. This is the way we were made, and we can’t escape it, no matter how hard we try. The constant restlessness of our society in always grasping for something new and novel, something to relieve the meaninglessness of life in this fallen world, grows out of this. We’re restless, because we were created for something better. God gives us good things in this life, but there’s always a sense of incompleteness about them. I’ve often recommended John Baillie’s book, A Diary of Private Prayer. One of his prayers, which I’ve adapted somewhat, expresses this idea: “We thank you, O Lord, that you have so put eternity in our hearts that no earthly thing can ever satisfy us completely. We thank you that every present joy is mixed with sadness and unrest, to remind us that we are not yet home. And above all, we thank you for the sure hope and promise of an endless life which you have given us in the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen” (see A Diary of Private Prayer, p. 91).
Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. God gives us good things, but He won’t permit us to find fulfillment in them alone. In doing that, He’s not being miserly. He’s not depriving us. He’s protecting us from idolatry. He’s calling us to Himself, the source of all good things. And when we’re walking with Him, gratefully enjoying the things He gives us, these things don’t have the sense of bitterness and emptiness that they do apart from Him. C.S. Lewis has a good description of how this works: “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a [swim] or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home” (C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, p. 18). Our Father refreshes us on the journey; but we must remember that we are still on a journey. These pleasant inns which our Father gives to refresh us are only a foretaste of what’s ahead. He is the source of all good, and our hearts will only find rest in fellowship with Him. “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
In the last sermon, we looked at the goodness of God, that this God who created us to know Him is a God who delights in showing kindness, compassion and mercy. Many Christians have been stern and rigid because they think that’s what God is like. They think of God as a humorless, harsh, demanding taskmaster who makes excessive demands and is never pleased with anything we do. A.W. Tozer, in an attempt to correct this perception, wrote this: “The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.... The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 15).
The passage we’re looking at today is about fellowship with God. John begins by testifying to his personal acquaintance with Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of life: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched–this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” He’s not writing to them about his own theories. He’s an eyewitness. He’s speaking of things he knows for certain. And his purpose in writing is this: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”
John wants them to know God. That’s why he’s writing. But he’s concerned with a different problem than the one we confronted in the last sermon. One of Satan’s strategies is to deceive us about who God is, and if he doesn’t succeed in one direction he’ll try something else. He persuaded Eve that God wasn’t good, that He was depriving them of something really beneficial by forbidding them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). But if we resist this temptation, he’ll try the opposite error. He’ll try to persuade us that God’s goodness means He doesn’t really care that much about our sins. I’ve often heard this sort of thing, that because God is good, He won’t punish us for our sins. I’ve talked to many people who see God as a benevolent, grandfatherly figure who is up in heaven wringing His hands, wishing we’d behave better, but who will forgive us in the end anyway, no matter what.
John wants to correct this misconception, so he tells us, in verse 5: “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” This contrast between light and darkness is common in Scripture. It’s often used to describe the conflict between truth and error. For example, Psalm 119:105: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.” Or, in John’s gospel, Jesus says: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Light, when it’s used in this way, symbolizes truth, and darkness symbolizes error.
But light and darkness are also used in a moral sense. For example, in Isaiah 5: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (v. 20). Here, the contrast is between good and evil. Paul uses this same image in Ephesians 5: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth). Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible” (vv. 8-14). In this passage, light symbolizes holiness and righteousness, but also the truth that makes things visible, that exposes the works of darkness. Both of these images are important in the way John uses light and darkness in his letter.
Here’s one more example, from John’s gospel: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God” (John 3:19-21). Light symbolizes truth and holiness, and darkness symbolizes sin and error. Evil hates to be exposed for what it is, so it is opposed to both holiness and truth. That’s the point of what Jesus said to His brothers: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil (John 7:7).” He speaks the truth about sin and unrighteousness. He exposes wickedness to the light of the truth, contrasting it with the holiness of God.
So, with all that in mind, what does John mean when he says “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”? The primary stress here is on His holiness. The following verses deal with the problem of sin in relation to a holy God. So, the most important idea in this verse is God’s absolute holiness and purity (although the emphasis on truth is also here, especially in verses 7-2:2). He wants to be sure his readers understand, so he states it both positively and negatively, in the strongest possible terms: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. Eugene Peterson does a good job of bringing this across in The Message: “God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.”
God’s holiness points primarily to two things. The most basic idea is His separateness, “His uniqueness, His distinction as the Wholly Other, the One who cannot be confused with the gods devised by men..., the One who stands apart from and above the creation” (ISBE Revised, vol. 2, p. 755). God stands apart from, and infinitely exalted above, His creation. But holiness also points to His moral perfection, “His absolute freedom from blemish of any kind” (Ibid.). One of the best pictures of God’s holiness is in Isaiah 6: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty’” (Isaiah 6:1-5). God’s holiness isn’t something we discuss over coffee and then go on with our business. When we come face to face with God’s absolute holiness and purity, we’re overwhelmed with a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re undone. We fall at His feet, like Peter, when he realized who Jesus was, crying out “depart from me, Lord; I am a sinner” (Luke 5:8).
In 1977, while I was at Operation Mobilization’s September conference preparing to go to India, I bought a hymnal. I didn’t grow up in the church, so I really didn’t know many hymn tunes at this point, and the hymnal I bought only had words. But I read through it as part of my devotions. Because I knew so few tunes, I often ended up using the same tunes for many different hymns. I learned a lot about God, and about worship, from reading through that hymnal. Some of my best memories from my time in India are the times I was able to get away from the team and away from other people to sing to the Lord. (It’s not always easy to get away from people in India. Sometimes I’d climb a tree in the early morning, before the rest of the team was up, or I’d walk out into the fog on a foggy morning.) This is one of the hymns I discovered in that hymnal. It’s not only about God’s holiness, but everything the author says about God in worship is pervaded with an understanding that he is worshiping One who is absolutely holy and pure.
My God, how wonderful thou art,
Thy majesty how bright;
How beautiful thy mercy seat,
In depths of burning light!
How dread are thine eternal years,
O everlasting Lord,
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored!
How wonderful, how beautiful
The sight of thee must be,
Thine endless wisdom, boundless power,
And aweful purity!
O how I fear thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!
Yet I may love thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as thou art,
For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
No earthly father loves like thee;
No mother, e’er so mild,
Bears and forbears as thou hast done
With me, thy sinful child.
Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture will it be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on thee!
(Frederick William Faber, 1814-63)
In worshiping the holy God, Faber is filled with adoration, awe, holy fear, hope, tears of repentance, and love. He’s aware of worshiping the One before whom angels cry out continuously “holy, holy, holy.” God is holy. In Him there is no darkness at all. “God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.” In 1978 I read a book by a Christian psychologist who was disturbed by the idea of God’s holiness. It seemed clear to him that an emphasis on God’s holiness would lead to psychological disturbances, and that the New Testament only teaches about a God of love. But the book was foolish and shallow, and the author clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. There’s more of God in the third stanza of Faber’s poem–“How wonderful, how beautiful The sight of thee must be, Thine endless wisdom, boundless power, And aweful purity!” than there was in 100 or so pages of that other man’s book. He didn’t know God very well, because he presumed to dictate what God should be like. We need to know God as He is, and as He has revealed Himself. And knowing Him, we will find that He is worthy of worship, that our greatest privilege is to fall on our faces before Him in adoration, wonder and praise.
But this still leaves us with a problem, the same problem that both Isaiah and Peter recognized. How do we, as sinful people in a fallen world, live in fellowship with a holy God? This is the problem John addresses in verses 7 through the beginning of chapter 2. He answers the question in three different ways, responding to three different problems, but his basic answer is this: we confess our sins to God, bringing them into the light of His truth, and He both forgives us and purifies us, so that we don’t continue in captivity to sin.
In verses 7-8, he deals with the problem of those who claim to have fellowship with God, but who continue living in habitual sin: “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” In John’s time, there were some teachers who associated evil with the material world and good with the spirit. This was an early form of a teaching known as Gnosticism. Some of them became extreme ascetics, punishing their bodies in an attempt to be free from the evil of the flesh, but others decided it didn’t really matter what they did in their bodies, since God is pure spirit anyway and matter is inherently evil. They believed sinning with their bodies wouldn’t harm their relationship with God. John is countering this teaching by asserting that we can’t have fellowship with God, who is light, and be living in darkness at the same time. The answer, in verse 8, is to walk in the light as He is in the light. This means bringing our sins before Him in confession, and also turning away from our sins and seeking to become more like Him (remember that John is using light here to signify both moral purity and truth). He’s saying that we need to confess our sins and turn away from them.
The next problem, in verses 8-9, is the claim to be perfect and without sin. Here’s how it reads in the New English Bible: “If we claim to be sinless, we are self-deceived and strangers to the truth.” Perfectionism gives us a false vision of ourselves; it leads us to self-deception and unreality. It puts us out of step with the truth. If we think we’re perfect, our self-perception is distorted. The solution is to confess our sins to God; and when we do that He forgives and cleanses us. The final problem, in verse 10, is similar. Verse 8 deals with those who claim to be perfect right now, while verse 10 talks about those who claim not to be guilty of sin at all: “If we claim that we’ve never sinned,” as it reads in The Message. All three problems put us in the darkness of sin and falsehood, out of fellowship with the God who is light, in whom there is no darkness at all. If we try to continue living in sin, and claim to have fellowship with Him at the same time, we’re denying His nature. We’re trying to pretend that He’s someone other than who He is. If we claim to be without sin, either that we’re not guilty at all or that we’ve been made perfect already, we’re rejecting God’s verdict against us, which then keeps us from bringing our sins into the light of His truth for cleansing.
The first two verses of chapter two give a summary of what John has been saying: “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense–Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” God’s desire is that we live increasingly in freedom from sin. He’s freed us from the kingdom of darkness and made us part of the kingdom of His only Son. We’re new creatures. We’re no longer in bondage to sin. That’s the argument Paul develops at some length in Romans 6. We’re to be growing in holiness.
But we still find that all we do falls short of God’s glory, that everything we do is tainted with pride and self-seeking. And, as much as we might wish it were otherwise, Christians still fall into sin. So provision has been made for this as well. Jesus is our advocate. He speaks to the Father in our defense. He intercedes for us. He is our lawyer, representing us. He is the One who paid the debt for our sins and provided for our forgiveness. God is holy. In Him is no darkness at all. He won’t overlook sin and rebellion. But He’s provided a way, which doesn’t violate His holiness or undermine His justice. Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. When we’re accused by Satan, when he comes to us and reminds us of all the horrible things we’ve done, we don’t need to worry. Jesus speaks in our defense. Everything our accuser says may be true, but it doesn’t matter. The price has been paid in full. We can have fellowship with the God of light, in whom there is no darkness at all.
Our holy God is a loving and merciful Father. After Isaiah cried out in despair, this is what happened: “Then one of the seraphim flew over to the altar, and he picked up a burning coal with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with it and said, ‘See, this coal has touched your lips. Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven” (Isaiah 6:6-7, NLT). This God, “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see,” (1 Timothy 6:15-16) has loved us with a holy love and has given us free access into His presence. Let’s not be afraid to face the truth about ourselves and to bring our sins into the light of His presence, where we receive forgiveness and cleansing. “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.... If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
O how I fear thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!
Yet I may love thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as thou art,
For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture will it be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on thee!
Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. God gives us good things, but He won’t permit us to find fulfillment in them alone. In doing that, He’s not being miserly. He’s not depriving us. He’s protecting us from idolatry. He’s calling us to Himself, the source of all good things. And when we’re walking with Him, gratefully enjoying the things He gives us, these things don’t have the sense of bitterness and emptiness that they do apart from Him. C.S. Lewis has a good description of how this works: “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a [swim] or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home” (C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, p. 18). Our Father refreshes us on the journey; but we must remember that we are still on a journey. These pleasant inns which our Father gives to refresh us are only a foretaste of what’s ahead. He is the source of all good, and our hearts will only find rest in fellowship with Him. “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
In the last sermon, we looked at the goodness of God, that this God who created us to know Him is a God who delights in showing kindness, compassion and mercy. Many Christians have been stern and rigid because they think that’s what God is like. They think of God as a humorless, harsh, demanding taskmaster who makes excessive demands and is never pleased with anything we do. A.W. Tozer, in an attempt to correct this perception, wrote this: “The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.... The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 15).
The passage we’re looking at today is about fellowship with God. John begins by testifying to his personal acquaintance with Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of life: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched–this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” He’s not writing to them about his own theories. He’s an eyewitness. He’s speaking of things he knows for certain. And his purpose in writing is this: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”
John wants them to know God. That’s why he’s writing. But he’s concerned with a different problem than the one we confronted in the last sermon. One of Satan’s strategies is to deceive us about who God is, and if he doesn’t succeed in one direction he’ll try something else. He persuaded Eve that God wasn’t good, that He was depriving them of something really beneficial by forbidding them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). But if we resist this temptation, he’ll try the opposite error. He’ll try to persuade us that God’s goodness means He doesn’t really care that much about our sins. I’ve often heard this sort of thing, that because God is good, He won’t punish us for our sins. I’ve talked to many people who see God as a benevolent, grandfatherly figure who is up in heaven wringing His hands, wishing we’d behave better, but who will forgive us in the end anyway, no matter what.
John wants to correct this misconception, so he tells us, in verse 5: “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” This contrast between light and darkness is common in Scripture. It’s often used to describe the conflict between truth and error. For example, Psalm 119:105: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.” Or, in John’s gospel, Jesus says: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Light, when it’s used in this way, symbolizes truth, and darkness symbolizes error.
But light and darkness are also used in a moral sense. For example, in Isaiah 5: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (v. 20). Here, the contrast is between good and evil. Paul uses this same image in Ephesians 5: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth). Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible” (vv. 8-14). In this passage, light symbolizes holiness and righteousness, but also the truth that makes things visible, that exposes the works of darkness. Both of these images are important in the way John uses light and darkness in his letter.
Here’s one more example, from John’s gospel: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God” (John 3:19-21). Light symbolizes truth and holiness, and darkness symbolizes sin and error. Evil hates to be exposed for what it is, so it is opposed to both holiness and truth. That’s the point of what Jesus said to His brothers: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil (John 7:7).” He speaks the truth about sin and unrighteousness. He exposes wickedness to the light of the truth, contrasting it with the holiness of God.
So, with all that in mind, what does John mean when he says “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”? The primary stress here is on His holiness. The following verses deal with the problem of sin in relation to a holy God. So, the most important idea in this verse is God’s absolute holiness and purity (although the emphasis on truth is also here, especially in verses 7-2:2). He wants to be sure his readers understand, so he states it both positively and negatively, in the strongest possible terms: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. Eugene Peterson does a good job of bringing this across in The Message: “God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.”
God’s holiness points primarily to two things. The most basic idea is His separateness, “His uniqueness, His distinction as the Wholly Other, the One who cannot be confused with the gods devised by men..., the One who stands apart from and above the creation” (ISBE Revised, vol. 2, p. 755). God stands apart from, and infinitely exalted above, His creation. But holiness also points to His moral perfection, “His absolute freedom from blemish of any kind” (Ibid.). One of the best pictures of God’s holiness is in Isaiah 6: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty’” (Isaiah 6:1-5). God’s holiness isn’t something we discuss over coffee and then go on with our business. When we come face to face with God’s absolute holiness and purity, we’re overwhelmed with a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re undone. We fall at His feet, like Peter, when he realized who Jesus was, crying out “depart from me, Lord; I am a sinner” (Luke 5:8).
In 1977, while I was at Operation Mobilization’s September conference preparing to go to India, I bought a hymnal. I didn’t grow up in the church, so I really didn’t know many hymn tunes at this point, and the hymnal I bought only had words. But I read through it as part of my devotions. Because I knew so few tunes, I often ended up using the same tunes for many different hymns. I learned a lot about God, and about worship, from reading through that hymnal. Some of my best memories from my time in India are the times I was able to get away from the team and away from other people to sing to the Lord. (It’s not always easy to get away from people in India. Sometimes I’d climb a tree in the early morning, before the rest of the team was up, or I’d walk out into the fog on a foggy morning.) This is one of the hymns I discovered in that hymnal. It’s not only about God’s holiness, but everything the author says about God in worship is pervaded with an understanding that he is worshiping One who is absolutely holy and pure.
My God, how wonderful thou art,
Thy majesty how bright;
How beautiful thy mercy seat,
In depths of burning light!
How dread are thine eternal years,
O everlasting Lord,
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored!
How wonderful, how beautiful
The sight of thee must be,
Thine endless wisdom, boundless power,
And aweful purity!
O how I fear thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!
Yet I may love thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as thou art,
For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
No earthly father loves like thee;
No mother, e’er so mild,
Bears and forbears as thou hast done
With me, thy sinful child.
Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture will it be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on thee!
(Frederick William Faber, 1814-63)
In worshiping the holy God, Faber is filled with adoration, awe, holy fear, hope, tears of repentance, and love. He’s aware of worshiping the One before whom angels cry out continuously “holy, holy, holy.” God is holy. In Him there is no darkness at all. “God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.” In 1978 I read a book by a Christian psychologist who was disturbed by the idea of God’s holiness. It seemed clear to him that an emphasis on God’s holiness would lead to psychological disturbances, and that the New Testament only teaches about a God of love. But the book was foolish and shallow, and the author clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. There’s more of God in the third stanza of Faber’s poem–“How wonderful, how beautiful The sight of thee must be, Thine endless wisdom, boundless power, And aweful purity!” than there was in 100 or so pages of that other man’s book. He didn’t know God very well, because he presumed to dictate what God should be like. We need to know God as He is, and as He has revealed Himself. And knowing Him, we will find that He is worthy of worship, that our greatest privilege is to fall on our faces before Him in adoration, wonder and praise.
But this still leaves us with a problem, the same problem that both Isaiah and Peter recognized. How do we, as sinful people in a fallen world, live in fellowship with a holy God? This is the problem John addresses in verses 7 through the beginning of chapter 2. He answers the question in three different ways, responding to three different problems, but his basic answer is this: we confess our sins to God, bringing them into the light of His truth, and He both forgives us and purifies us, so that we don’t continue in captivity to sin.
In verses 7-8, he deals with the problem of those who claim to have fellowship with God, but who continue living in habitual sin: “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” In John’s time, there were some teachers who associated evil with the material world and good with the spirit. This was an early form of a teaching known as Gnosticism. Some of them became extreme ascetics, punishing their bodies in an attempt to be free from the evil of the flesh, but others decided it didn’t really matter what they did in their bodies, since God is pure spirit anyway and matter is inherently evil. They believed sinning with their bodies wouldn’t harm their relationship with God. John is countering this teaching by asserting that we can’t have fellowship with God, who is light, and be living in darkness at the same time. The answer, in verse 8, is to walk in the light as He is in the light. This means bringing our sins before Him in confession, and also turning away from our sins and seeking to become more like Him (remember that John is using light here to signify both moral purity and truth). He’s saying that we need to confess our sins and turn away from them.
The next problem, in verses 8-9, is the claim to be perfect and without sin. Here’s how it reads in the New English Bible: “If we claim to be sinless, we are self-deceived and strangers to the truth.” Perfectionism gives us a false vision of ourselves; it leads us to self-deception and unreality. It puts us out of step with the truth. If we think we’re perfect, our self-perception is distorted. The solution is to confess our sins to God; and when we do that He forgives and cleanses us. The final problem, in verse 10, is similar. Verse 8 deals with those who claim to be perfect right now, while verse 10 talks about those who claim not to be guilty of sin at all: “If we claim that we’ve never sinned,” as it reads in The Message. All three problems put us in the darkness of sin and falsehood, out of fellowship with the God who is light, in whom there is no darkness at all. If we try to continue living in sin, and claim to have fellowship with Him at the same time, we’re denying His nature. We’re trying to pretend that He’s someone other than who He is. If we claim to be without sin, either that we’re not guilty at all or that we’ve been made perfect already, we’re rejecting God’s verdict against us, which then keeps us from bringing our sins into the light of His truth for cleansing.
The first two verses of chapter two give a summary of what John has been saying: “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense–Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” God’s desire is that we live increasingly in freedom from sin. He’s freed us from the kingdom of darkness and made us part of the kingdom of His only Son. We’re new creatures. We’re no longer in bondage to sin. That’s the argument Paul develops at some length in Romans 6. We’re to be growing in holiness.
But we still find that all we do falls short of God’s glory, that everything we do is tainted with pride and self-seeking. And, as much as we might wish it were otherwise, Christians still fall into sin. So provision has been made for this as well. Jesus is our advocate. He speaks to the Father in our defense. He intercedes for us. He is our lawyer, representing us. He is the One who paid the debt for our sins and provided for our forgiveness. God is holy. In Him is no darkness at all. He won’t overlook sin and rebellion. But He’s provided a way, which doesn’t violate His holiness or undermine His justice. Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. When we’re accused by Satan, when he comes to us and reminds us of all the horrible things we’ve done, we don’t need to worry. Jesus speaks in our defense. Everything our accuser says may be true, but it doesn’t matter. The price has been paid in full. We can have fellowship with the God of light, in whom there is no darkness at all.
Our holy God is a loving and merciful Father. After Isaiah cried out in despair, this is what happened: “Then one of the seraphim flew over to the altar, and he picked up a burning coal with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with it and said, ‘See, this coal has touched your lips. Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven” (Isaiah 6:6-7, NLT). This God, “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see,” (1 Timothy 6:15-16) has loved us with a holy love and has given us free access into His presence. Let’s not be afraid to face the truth about ourselves and to bring our sins into the light of His presence, where we receive forgiveness and cleansing. “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.... If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
O how I fear thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!
Yet I may love thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as thou art,
For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.
Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture will it be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on thee!
Thursday, May 23, 2013
The Name of the Lord, Exodus 34:1-7 (Knowing God Series)
One of the things we hear often in our popular culture is that all religions are pretty-much the same. They all worship the same God, but do it in different ways. “What’s the big deal anyway? Worship is worship, whether the object of worship is God, Allah, or Brahman. Prayer is prayer, no matter what name we give to the listening force” (Terry Muck, Those Other Religions in Your Neighborhood, p. 51). The differences between different religions, in this view, are really just differences of style and taste. Some people prefer one style, and others prefer another, but ultimately these differences are not significant.
The problem with this view is that different religions teach very different things about who God is, and these differences affect the way we live our lives. The men who high jacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center did it because of what they believed about God. When the apostle Paul, before his conversion, participated in the killing of Stephen, he thought he was acting in obedience to God. The same is true of those who’ve taken part in human sacrifice throughout the centuries, thinking that what they were doing would put them in God’s good graces. What we believe about God affects the way we live our lives.
Even if we believe in the God of the Bible and have trusted in Jesus Christ alone for our salvation, misconceptions about God can continue to plague us. I read this quote by A.W. Tozer in the first sermon: “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.” He was speaking about Christians, and he was especially concerned about our tendency to lose sight of God’s goodness. He says this a little later in the same chapter: “Much Christianity since the days of Christ’s flesh has... been grim and severe. And the cause has always been the same–an unworthy or an inadequate view of God. Instinctively we try to be like our God, and if He is conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 14). He wants to reassure Christians that God is good, kind and gracious, not a stern, exacting task-master. He’s concerned that Christians often have an inadequate view of God.
If there’s any place in Scripture where we’d expect to find a grim, stern view of God it’s at Mt. Sinai, where the Law was given. Think of what has just taken place. Moses had gone up into the mountain to receive the law, and had been gone for over a month. As the days passed by, the people got tired of waiting, so they asked Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make them an idol. They said “Come, make us gods who will go before us” (32:1).
Aaron asked for their gold earrings, which he made into a calf. And when he showed it to them, the Israelites cried out: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt” (32:4). Aaron then built an altar in front of the calf, and the people proceeded to worship it. At that point, Moses returned. (It’s interesting to notice how often we give in just before a trial or temptation is over.) In his anger, Moses had smashed the original tablets into pieces, and God had judged the people for their rebellion, killing several thousand of them. Things were not going well in the spiritual life of the nation. They had received so much from God in their deliverance from Egypt, but they had very quickly rebelled and turned to idolatry.
All this immediately precedes the passage we’re looking at today. That’s the background to verse 1: “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.” What we’d expect, at this point, is a revelation of God’s severity and wrath against the sin of idolatry. And yet, in the context of everything that has just happened, here at Sinai where He is giving the Law to Israel, when God reveals Himself to Moses the primary focus is not on His wrath, but on His goodness. Here’s a definition of God’s goodness: “The goodness of God is that which disposes Him to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of good will toward men. He is tenderhearted and of quick sympathy, and His unfailing attitude toward all moral beings is open, frank, and friendly. By His nature He is inclined to bestow blessedness and He takes holy pleasure in the happiness of His people.... The goodness of God is the drive behind all the blessings He daily bestows upon us” (A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, p. 88). When we say “God is good,” we’re saying that He delights in showing kindness, compassion and mercy. God reveals Himself, in this passage, as good, kind and generous, but at the same time He doesn’t undermine, or cancel out, His holiness or His severity in dealing with sin and rebellion.
In chapter 33, immediately after the incident with the golden calf, God had said: “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way” (33:3). This is the point He’s making: “I’m still sending you into the promised land, and I’m sending an angel with you, but I’m not going to manifest my presence among you. I’m going to give you outward success, but I’m not going to be with you.” Moses finds this intolerable, so he begins crying out to God. He’s not interested in outward success unless God is among them. He wants to know God, and he wants the people to know Him. Near the end of chapter 33, we see him hungering and reaching for more of God, both for himself and for the people. In verse 13, he says: “If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people.” Verse 15: “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.” And verse 18: “Now show me your glory.” No matter how much of God he has, Moses wants more. And God responds with this promise: “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence” (v. 19). The passage we’re studying in chapter 34 is the fulfillment of this promise.
When God proclaims His name to Moses, He’s doing more than identifying Himself. Names in our culture are primarily used to identify us, to give us a label. They’re used in that way in the Bible also, but names are also intended to reveal a person’s true nature. Abram and Sarai, after they receive God’s promise, become Abraham and Sarah. Abraham means “father of many,” and Sarah means “princess.” After he wrestles with God, Jacob receives the name Israel, which means “one who struggles with God.” So names in the Bible are more than just labels to distinguish one person from another. They are meant to tell us something about the person. When God proclaims His name to Moses, He’s telling Moses what He is like. He’s proclaiming His true nature.
The name He proclaims is “the LORD.” In the NIV (and in many other English translations), LORD, in capital letters, is used to translate God’s name. We don’t know exactly how this name was pronounced. The Hebrew alphabet is made up entirely of consonants, and vowel points were added many centuries after the Old Testament was written. God’s name is written, in Hebrew, YHWH. The ancient Jews were afraid of taking God’s name in vain, so instead of speaking God’s name when they read Scripture, they substituted the Hebrew word adonai, which means “lord.” When Jewish Scribes, between the 6th and 10th centuries, added vowel points to the text, they put the vowels for adonai with the divine name YHWH, as a visual reminder to those reading the text aloud. This resulted in the name “Jehovah,” which is found in some translations; Jehovah is the result of combining the original consonants with the vowels for adonai. Yahweh is the best guess scholars have arrived at. It’s good to know that any time you encounter the word LORD (in capital letters) it’s a translation of this name, Yahweh.
But what does the name mean? It’s used primarily in the context of God’s covenant relationship with Israel, and it especially points to His self-existence, the fact that He is not dependent on anyone or anything else for His existence. One writer says this name “gives expression to the self-determination, the independence of God.... The name... signifies primarily that in all God does for His people, He is from-within-determined, not moved upon by outside influences” (Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology, pp. 118-19). Something of this meaning comes across in Exodus 3:14, where God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush: “God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.” Our lives are dependent on all sorts of things: air, water, food, protection from harm. All we need to do is watch the news to be reminded how fragile our lives are. Psalm 104 celebrates God’s creation: “O Lord, what a variety of things you have made! In wisdom you have made them all. The earth is full of your creatures.... Every one of these depends on you to give them their food as they need it. When you supply it, they gather it. You open your hand to feed them, and they are satisfied. But if you turn away from them, they panic. When you take away their breath, they die and turn again to dust” (vv. 24, 27-29, NLT). God is not like that. He is not dependent on anyone or anything else for His existence. He is complete in Himself. He is. He always has been and always will be. So, when He blesses His people, He is not being coerced by external forces.
This name proclaims His absolute lordship in the universe. It proclaims that He is God, that there is no one else like Him. But look how He elaborates: “I am the Lord, I am the Lord, the merciful and gracious god. I am slow to anger and rich in unfailing love and faithfulness. I show this unfailing love to many thousands by forgiving every kind of sin and rebellion” (New Living Translation). This God–who exists eternally in Himself, who is not dependent on anyone or anything for His existence, who is the rightful lord of all, and before whom every knee will one day bow–this God is good, and gracious and merciful. Tozer has a great description of fellowship with this God: “The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.... The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 15). God is good, and He will never be otherwise. Knowing Him fulfills the deepest desire of our hearts.
But, having said all that, notice that, in verses 1-3, God gives Moses very clear, definite instructions which he needs to carry out in order to receive this revelation. God’s goodness doesn’t mean that He’s easy-going and indifferent, that we can approach Him casually and flippantly, any old way we like. Moses needs to follow God’s instructions in preparing the stone tablets and presenting himself on the mountain the next morning, and he needs to be sure that no one else comes near. God is revealing His goodness to Moses, but anyone else who draws near will die. God is good, and He is holy. There’s no contradiction between these things.
There’s a tendency, in contemporary American churches, to forget God’s holiness, to approach Him casually, to speak to Him as if He were one of us. Remember that John the apostle, who had an especially close relationship with Jesus during His earthly ministry, fell down in fear at the feet of the risen Christ on the island of Patmos: “I saw a gold menorah with seven branches, and in the center, the Son of Man, in a robe and gold breastplate, hair a blizzard of white, eyes pouring fire-blaze, both feet furnace-fired bronze, his voice a cataract, right hand holding the Seven Stars, his mouth a sharp-biting sword, his face [blazing like the] sun” (Revelation 1:12-16, The Message). He’s straining the limits of his language to describe the risen Lord in all His glory. Then he says: “I saw this and fainted dead at his feet.” We need to keep these things together. We approach God freely as our heavenly Father, knowing that He cares for us and delights in our fellowship. But at the same time we approach Him reverently, knowing that He is holy, that He is exalted beyond our comprehension. If we were to see Him revealed as He is, our first response would be fear. If we let go of either of these things, our relationship with God will be distorted. God is good, and He is holy.
The last thing to notice is at the end of verse 7: “Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” God’s goodness and compassion don’t cancel out His severity in dealing with sin. God’s goodness presents us with an invitation to repent of our sins and to bow before His lordship. The temptation then is to use God’s goodness as an excuse to keep on sinning, to assume that because God is good and merciful He will overlook our persistent rebellion. When people in our culture think of God’s goodness, this is usually what they’re thinking. They think of God as an indulgent, Santa Clause-like figure. He wishes we’d behave better, but He’ll forgive all of us in the end anyway.
Paul confronts this problem in Romans 11. He’s writing primarily to Gentile Christians about what has happened to Israel because of their rebellion and refusal to believe the gospel. But he doesn’t want these Gentile Christians to become presumptuous, so he says this: “Don’t think highly of yourself, but fear what could happen. For if God did not spare the branches he put there in the first place, he won’t spare you either. Notice how God is both kind and severe. He is severe to those who disobeyed, but kind to you as you continue to trust in his kindness. But if you stop trusting, you also will be cut off” (vv. 20b-22, NLT). God is good, but His goodness is not a license to sin. Paul calls us to hold both of these things together, the goodness and the severity of God. We’ve experienced His goodness, but we need to beware of presumption.
The way we get into trouble is by isolating God’s goodness from all the other things He’s revealed about Himself. And yet, the primary stress, in God’s relationship with His people, is on His goodness. That’s the emphasis even at Sinai, despite Israel’s rebellion and idolatry. If we become so worried about His holiness and severity that we can no longer rejoice in His goodness, we’ll do harm to our souls and our relationship with Him will be impoverished. Remember Tozer’s words: “The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.”
Here’s a suggestion, if you start to lose sight of God’s goodness. Read through the gospels, being attentive to the ways Jesus deals with people. Notice how patient and gracious He is with His disciples. Most of His severity is reserved for the hard-hearted religious leaders and for those who persist in unbelief. Jesus “reflects God’s own glory, and everything about him represents God exactly” (Hebrews 1:3, NLT). If you start losing sight of God’s goodness, the place to begin is with Jesus, who reveals God perfectly in human form. Read through the gospel accounts prayerfully, asking God to make Himself known to you as you read. He is kind and gracious to sinners, but He doesn’t say, “Oh, it’s not such a big deal. God the Father is good and forgiving.” He says, “your sins are forgiven. Now go, and stop sinning.” And then He demonstrates the full extent of His goodness by going to the cross to pay the penalty for our sins. In the cross, both the goodness and severity of God are revealed. His severity is poured out on His only Son, who took our sins upon Himself. And, because of this, we experience His goodness.
Meditate on God’s infinite goodness displayed in the sacrifice of His only Son. He “does not leave the guilty unpunished.” But the punishment for our guilt was more than we could bear, so God the Son took the punishment upon Himself. The guilt has been punished, and we have been pardoned. The debt is paid in full. If you begin to grasp the meaning of God’s goodness, you won’t want to use it as an excuse for sin. You’ll cry out, like Isaac Watts, “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” May God enable us to see Him more truly as He is and to give Him worship that is worthy of His great name.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Knowing the Only True God, Jeremiah 9:23-24/John 17:3 (Knowing God Series)
When I was growing up in Northern California, in the 60's and 70's, I and most of my friends were obsessed with finding a sense of meaning and purpose in life. One of the popular songs we listened to began with the words, “I don’t want no gold watch for working 50 years from nine to five.” The adults we knew seemed to be living such meaningless lives, going through the same routines year after year. We wanted to do something worthwhile, something exciting. We thought life should be more than what we saw all around us.
The author of Ecclesiastes struggled with the same thing. Here’s how the book begins: “Smoke, nothing but smoke.... There’s nothing to anything–it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again–the same old round.... Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing” (1:2-5, 8, The Message). I hadn’t read Ecclesiastes at that point, and I would have been surprised to find these kinds of things in the Bible. I would have been surprised to learn that a biblical writer agreed with my perception that the life that was being offered to me at that point, the life to which most people I knew resigned themselves, was meaningless, that it lacked any sense of purpose.
In the introduction to Ecclesiastes in The Message, Eugene Peterson makes this observation: “Everything we try is so promising at first! But nothing ever seems to amount to very much. We intensify our efforts–but the harder we work at it, the less we get out of it. Some people give up early and settle for a humdrum life. Others never seem to learn, and so they flail away through a lifetime, becoming less and less human by the year, until by the time they die there is hardly enough humanity left to compose a corpse.” One group resigns itself to the meaninglessness of existence and just goes through the routine. The other group fights against the sense of meaninglessness but never arrives at anything better; those who follow this route end up destroying themselves in the process.
But what is the root of the problem? Why does life so often seem so unsatisfying? Why is there such a sense of restlessness and discontent in our hearts? Because we were created to know God and worship Him, to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The abundant life that Jesus came to give His followers is not a life of luxury and ease, but a life of fellowship with God. This is eternal life: knowing God. This is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. St. Augustine said “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, a modern English version by Hal M. Helms, p. 7). Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. This is the way we were made, and we can’t escape it, no matter how hard we try.
These verses in Jeremiah 9 deal with this same issue from a different perspective. God had given Jeremiah this message to deliver; verse 23 begins with the words, “This is what the Lord says,” and verse 24 closes with “declares the Lord.” This is a message from God to His people. Jeremiah ministered during one of the darkest period’s in Israel’s history. At one point, he said this to the people in Judah and Jerusalem: “For the past twenty-three years–from the thirteenth year of Josiah son of Amon, king of Judah, until now–the Lord has been giving me his messages. I have faithfully passed them on to you, but you have not listened” (Jer. 25:3, NLT). The people were determined to walk away from God. But because we were created to be worshipers, when we turn away from God we don’t stop worshiping. We just end up worshiping something less than God Himself. We take that which belongs to God alone and give it to His creatures. That’s what happened to Israel at this point. They didn’t stop worshiping. They turned away from God and started worshiping idols.
And in turning away from God, they sought meaning and purpose in other things. They sought to meet their spiritual needs through idolatry. But idols don’t really exist. They’re gods created in our own image. They don’t do anything, in themselves. They’re not capable of filling the God-shaped vacuum in our lives. So when we turn away from God we turn to all sorts of other things in a desperate attempt to fill the sense that something is wrong, that something is missing. Verse 23 lists some of the things people use in this way: wisdom, strength, and riches.
The author of Ecclesiastes sought meaning in all these things and he concluded that none of them gave him what he really wanted. When we don’t have these things it often seems, from a distance, like they’ll be the very thing we’re hoping for. (Why do people spend so much money on lottery tickets, for example?) But when we get these things, they disappoint us. The book of Ecclesiastes is an extended commentary on what Jeremiah 9:23 says. The book itself doesn’t have much positive teaching. Its function is to undermine our false hopes, to turn us in the right direction. Here’s more from Peterson’s introduction: “But [Ecclesiastes] is most emphatically and necessarily in the Bible in order to call a halt to our various and futile attempts to make something of our lives, so that we can give our full attention to God–who God is and what he does to make something of us. Ecclesiastes actually doesn’t say that much about God; the author leaves that to the other sixty-five books of the Bible. His task is to expose our total incapacity to find the meaning and completion of our lives on our own.” We’re incapable of finding a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives on our own, apart from God. That’s why God’s message through Jeremiah begins with these words: “Don’t let the wise brag of their wisdom. Don’t let heroes brag of their exploits. Don’t let the rich brag of their riches” (The Message).
The Eagles were my favorite rock group in the 70's. In the mid-70's they were at the top of the recording world. Everything they did was successful, and they made millions of dollars. But they were miserable, and they reached a point where they just couldn’t keep it together any more. It took them months to record their final album, and for much of the time it seemed like they were spinning their wheels, getting nowhere. Part of the problem was that they were heavily into drugs at the time, but it was more than that. They were discovering that success is never what we expect it to be. Their song, “After the Thrill is Gone,” describes something of what was happening in their lives: “What can you do when your dreams come true and it’s not quite like you had planned?” They were experiencing what the author of Ecclesiastes experienced and what Jeremiah warned about: “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches.”
Verse 24 gives the positive side. Here’s the thing that’s worth boasting about, here’s the thing that’s really worthwhile, here’s the thing–the only thing–that won’t finally disappoint us: knowing God. If you want to boast, boast about this. If you feel a sense of emptiness in the depths of your heart, if you find yourself wondering what’s the use of doing all the things we do in life, here’s the answer.
He describes this knowledge in two ways: “that he understands and knows me.” First, there are things we need to know about God. We need to know the truth about Him, what He’s like. Part of knowing God is understanding who He is, knowing the things He’s revealed about Himself in His Word. There’s a tendency, in the contemporary church, to think that theology is a waste of time. Several years ago, in a popular evangelical magazine, there was a discussion about the book, The Prayer of Jabez. Some people were very enthusiastic about the book, and others were critical. The following month, one of the letters to the editor said, “God rescue us from the theologians!” The point was that this book is helping a lot of people, and theologians have no business criticizing it. Theology, in this view, is only about irrelevant, and often divisive, details. Theologians need to get out of the way and let us get on with living the Christian life.
When I first started reading theology, in 1978, I felt guilty, like I was falling away from genuine Christianity. I had to keep bringing myself back to the fact that I was only studying what God has revealed about Himself in His Word. We need to know the truth about who God is. One of Satan’s strategies is to tell us lies about God. That’s what he did with Eve in the garden. He undermined her assurance in God’s goodness. He convinced her that God was keeping them from something good by forbidding them to eat from the Tree, and that He was doing it out of selfishness: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). A.W. Tozer said, “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than low or unworthy conception of God” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 13). We need to know enough to discern and reject Satan’s lies. This is one of the purposes of theology.
So one side of the knowledge Jeremiah describes in v. 24 is knowing the truth about who God is, knowing what He’s revealed about Himself. But that’s not the only thing. Just studying the truth in a detached way can actually destroy us spiritually. God our Creator and Lord is not a subject for our hobbies. We study about Him in order to know Him better. When we try to separate these things, we endanger our own souls.
Jeremiah uses two words here, to make sure we hold onto both things. We need to understand who God is, and we need to know Him through a personal encounter. The Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones has had a major impact on my life. I first read his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount when I was travelling in North India in 1978, and it changed the way I look at Scripture. Since then I’ve probably read 20 or so of his books, some of them more than once. I’ve also read his two-volume biography by Iain Murray and have read his published letters and a number of essays about him and have listened to some recorded sermons. But I never met him and he died in 1981. I know a fair amount about him, but I don’t know him. I could learn more about him by talking to people who knew him, but I still wouldn’t know him in the way I know the members of my family. I know a lot about them, but I also have a relationship with them. We interact with each other every day and care for one another. There’s a whole dimension that we can’t get simply by gathering information about someone. God’s desire is that we not only learn about Him, but that we cultivate a relationship with Him. He wants us to know Him.
Samuel Rutherford was a Scottish preacher in the 1600's. Listen to something he wrote from prison: “Would to God that all this kingdom, and all that know God, knew what is betwixt Christ and me in this prison–what kisses, embracements, and love communion! I take his cross in my arms with joy; I bless it, I rejoice in it. Suffering for Christ is my garland. I would not exchange Christ for ten thousand worlds! Nay, if the comparison could stand, I would not exchange Christ with heaven” (The Letters of Samuel Rutherford, p. 213). This isn’t the language of detached theological speculation. He knew the truth about God; much of his ministry had been occupied with theological controversy. Rutherford understood the necessity and value of theology. But he also knew God in personal experience. And in prison he was finding a closer communion with Christ than he had ever known before.
This is eternal life: to know the only true God. The passage in John 17 also contains both elements: we need to know the truth about God, we need to know who He is; but it’s more than a detached knowledge about someone. Eternal life is knowing God. But Jesus adds something here: “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” We know God through the free gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Don’t think of this free gift as a once-and-done thing. We don’t “get ourselves saved” to ensure that we’ll be admitted to heaven when we die, then go on to live our lives without giving it any more thought. Through Jesus Christ we are admitted into fellowship with the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Through Jesus Christ, we are able to spend the rest of our lives–even the rest of eternity–getting to know God better. The point of salvation is to restore us to fellowship with God, not merely to ensure a comfortable after-life. “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
“You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Does that describe your experience? Is your heart restless, filled with a sense of longing, a sense that something is missing? If so, what are you doing about it? Are you hungering and thirsting for more of God, the only one who can fulfill this longing? Are you seeking Him. Or are you allowing other things to drown out His Spirit?
Or maybe the voice of His Spirit has already been dulled over the course of your life. Maybe you’ve already given up and settled for a humdrum life. But even so, I suspect there are times when you wish things were otherwise, when you feel the weight of the meaninglessness of life in this world apart from God. God has made you for Himself; no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the fact that you were created for fellowship with God.
We begin by confessing that we’re sinners, receiving the free gift of mercy through Jesus, who paid in full the penalty for our sin. But then, having begun, how do we grow to know Him better? To begin with, by studying His Word, reading attentively to know what He’s said about Himself. And by spending time in His presence, meditating on His Word and praying in response to what you read. I often quote A.W. Tozer, because he hungered and thirsted after God for a lifetime, and he said a lot of helpful things in that area. He was especially concerned about the lack of spiritual growth he observed in Christians he knew. He was concerned at seeing people who’d been Christians for 30 or 40 years, but who seemed to have made no progress toward spiritual maturity. Here’s what he said about the problem: “The causes of retarded growth are many. It would not be accurate to ascribe the trouble to one single fault. One there is, however, which is so universal that it may easily be the main cause: failure to give time to the cultivation of the knowledge of God” (“We Must Give Time to God,” in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 10-11). For the most part, we don’t know God very well because we don’t spend time in His presence. We need to make time for Him, and we need to persevere in seeking Him over the course of our lives.
But beyond this, here are a few other suggestions before I close. 1) If you want to know God better, don’t take sin lightly. Jeremiah says that God exercises “kindness, justice and righteousness on earth.” He’s concerned about righteousness. Don’t be careless with what you consider “little sins.” Sin will cloud your relationship with God and will prevent you from knowing Him better. We need to take seriously the damage that sin causes in our relationship with God. But, at the same time, we need to know what to do when we do fall into sin. John’s first letter says this: “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin; but if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense, Jesus Christ the righteous one” (2:1). The idea is to avoid sin, but when we do fall into sin we need to avoid wallowing in discouragement and self-pity. The solution–the only solution–is to come boldly into God’s presence and ask for mercy.
2) Avoid things that dull, or take the edge off, your spiritual appetite. These are things that may be legitimate in themselves, but they tend to keep you from seeking God. Other people seem to engage in these things harmlessly, but it doesn’t work that way for you. I have friends who don’t own a TV for that reason. They see others who watch in moderation, but if the TV is there in the house they lose control over it, and soon they find that their prayer life has been undermined. For others it can be a hobby that consumes all your free time, or a certain type of books or music; not things that are sinful in themselves, but they end up harming you. They dull your spiritual appetite and draw you away from seeking God. Excessive recreation is another possibility. Whatever it is in your life that gets in the way of seeking God, you need to avoid it. Don’t make excuses, and don’t try to justify yourself. Admit your weakness, cry out to God for help, and lay the thing aside. It may be fine for others, but not for you. Here’s another quote from Tozer: “A thousand distractions would woo us away from thoughts of God, but if we are wise we will sternly put them from us and make room for the King and take time to entertain Him. Some things may be neglected with but little loss to the spiritual life, but to neglect communion with God is to hurt ourselves where we cannot afford it. God will respond to our efforts to know Him. The Bible tells us how; it is altogether a matter of how much determination we bring to the holy task” (Ibid., pp. 12-13).
3) Put yourself in places where you’ll grow in the knowledge of God. Don’t miss an opportunity to be someplace where people seem to be enjoying fellowship with Him. Discipline yourself to attend times of corporate prayer, whether you feel like it or not. Don’t allow yourself to avoid corporate worship unless you’re truly unable to be there. Christ has promised to be present when His people are gathered in His name. We tend to pamper ourselves too much in this area. By taking yourself in hand and dragging yourself to church when you really don’t want to go, you’re demonstrating to God that you’re in earnest, that you truly desire to know Him. He’ll respond to your diligence. And, related to this point, seek out fellowship with people who know God better than you do. We learn by example, and hunger for God is contagious. Seek out people who are hungering for more of God.
We’re faced with two alternatives. We can’t escape who we are. We can’t escape the fact that we were created to know God and worship Him. We can spend a lifetime trying to live as if things were otherwise. We can seek to live for ourselves, grasping after whatever we think will make us happy. But we’ll find, again and again, that it’s not what we were hoping for. Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. So the only real solution is to surrender to His will and seek Him. This is the conclusion the author of Ecclesiastes reaches near the end of the book: “Honor and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young, Before the years take their toll and your vigor wanes, Before your vision dims and the world blurs And the winter years keep you close to the fire” (12:1-2, The Message). Or this, from Hosea the prophet: “Come, let us return to the Lord! He has torn us in pieces; now he will heal us. He has injured us; now he will bandage our wounds. In just a short time, he will restore us so we can live in his presence. Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him! Then he will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring” (6:1-3, NLT). Let’s press on to know Him. Let’s make it the business of our lives to know Him.
The author of Ecclesiastes struggled with the same thing. Here’s how the book begins: “Smoke, nothing but smoke.... There’s nothing to anything–it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again–the same old round.... Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing” (1:2-5, 8, The Message). I hadn’t read Ecclesiastes at that point, and I would have been surprised to find these kinds of things in the Bible. I would have been surprised to learn that a biblical writer agreed with my perception that the life that was being offered to me at that point, the life to which most people I knew resigned themselves, was meaningless, that it lacked any sense of purpose.
In the introduction to Ecclesiastes in The Message, Eugene Peterson makes this observation: “Everything we try is so promising at first! But nothing ever seems to amount to very much. We intensify our efforts–but the harder we work at it, the less we get out of it. Some people give up early and settle for a humdrum life. Others never seem to learn, and so they flail away through a lifetime, becoming less and less human by the year, until by the time they die there is hardly enough humanity left to compose a corpse.” One group resigns itself to the meaninglessness of existence and just goes through the routine. The other group fights against the sense of meaninglessness but never arrives at anything better; those who follow this route end up destroying themselves in the process.
But what is the root of the problem? Why does life so often seem so unsatisfying? Why is there such a sense of restlessness and discontent in our hearts? Because we were created to know God and worship Him, to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The abundant life that Jesus came to give His followers is not a life of luxury and ease, but a life of fellowship with God. This is eternal life: knowing God. This is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. St. Augustine said “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, a modern English version by Hal M. Helms, p. 7). Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. This is the way we were made, and we can’t escape it, no matter how hard we try.
These verses in Jeremiah 9 deal with this same issue from a different perspective. God had given Jeremiah this message to deliver; verse 23 begins with the words, “This is what the Lord says,” and verse 24 closes with “declares the Lord.” This is a message from God to His people. Jeremiah ministered during one of the darkest period’s in Israel’s history. At one point, he said this to the people in Judah and Jerusalem: “For the past twenty-three years–from the thirteenth year of Josiah son of Amon, king of Judah, until now–the Lord has been giving me his messages. I have faithfully passed them on to you, but you have not listened” (Jer. 25:3, NLT). The people were determined to walk away from God. But because we were created to be worshipers, when we turn away from God we don’t stop worshiping. We just end up worshiping something less than God Himself. We take that which belongs to God alone and give it to His creatures. That’s what happened to Israel at this point. They didn’t stop worshiping. They turned away from God and started worshiping idols.
And in turning away from God, they sought meaning and purpose in other things. They sought to meet their spiritual needs through idolatry. But idols don’t really exist. They’re gods created in our own image. They don’t do anything, in themselves. They’re not capable of filling the God-shaped vacuum in our lives. So when we turn away from God we turn to all sorts of other things in a desperate attempt to fill the sense that something is wrong, that something is missing. Verse 23 lists some of the things people use in this way: wisdom, strength, and riches.
The author of Ecclesiastes sought meaning in all these things and he concluded that none of them gave him what he really wanted. When we don’t have these things it often seems, from a distance, like they’ll be the very thing we’re hoping for. (Why do people spend so much money on lottery tickets, for example?) But when we get these things, they disappoint us. The book of Ecclesiastes is an extended commentary on what Jeremiah 9:23 says. The book itself doesn’t have much positive teaching. Its function is to undermine our false hopes, to turn us in the right direction. Here’s more from Peterson’s introduction: “But [Ecclesiastes] is most emphatically and necessarily in the Bible in order to call a halt to our various and futile attempts to make something of our lives, so that we can give our full attention to God–who God is and what he does to make something of us. Ecclesiastes actually doesn’t say that much about God; the author leaves that to the other sixty-five books of the Bible. His task is to expose our total incapacity to find the meaning and completion of our lives on our own.” We’re incapable of finding a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives on our own, apart from God. That’s why God’s message through Jeremiah begins with these words: “Don’t let the wise brag of their wisdom. Don’t let heroes brag of their exploits. Don’t let the rich brag of their riches” (The Message).
The Eagles were my favorite rock group in the 70's. In the mid-70's they were at the top of the recording world. Everything they did was successful, and they made millions of dollars. But they were miserable, and they reached a point where they just couldn’t keep it together any more. It took them months to record their final album, and for much of the time it seemed like they were spinning their wheels, getting nowhere. Part of the problem was that they were heavily into drugs at the time, but it was more than that. They were discovering that success is never what we expect it to be. Their song, “After the Thrill is Gone,” describes something of what was happening in their lives: “What can you do when your dreams come true and it’s not quite like you had planned?” They were experiencing what the author of Ecclesiastes experienced and what Jeremiah warned about: “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches.”
Verse 24 gives the positive side. Here’s the thing that’s worth boasting about, here’s the thing that’s really worthwhile, here’s the thing–the only thing–that won’t finally disappoint us: knowing God. If you want to boast, boast about this. If you feel a sense of emptiness in the depths of your heart, if you find yourself wondering what’s the use of doing all the things we do in life, here’s the answer.
He describes this knowledge in two ways: “that he understands and knows me.” First, there are things we need to know about God. We need to know the truth about Him, what He’s like. Part of knowing God is understanding who He is, knowing the things He’s revealed about Himself in His Word. There’s a tendency, in the contemporary church, to think that theology is a waste of time. Several years ago, in a popular evangelical magazine, there was a discussion about the book, The Prayer of Jabez. Some people were very enthusiastic about the book, and others were critical. The following month, one of the letters to the editor said, “God rescue us from the theologians!” The point was that this book is helping a lot of people, and theologians have no business criticizing it. Theology, in this view, is only about irrelevant, and often divisive, details. Theologians need to get out of the way and let us get on with living the Christian life.
When I first started reading theology, in 1978, I felt guilty, like I was falling away from genuine Christianity. I had to keep bringing myself back to the fact that I was only studying what God has revealed about Himself in His Word. We need to know the truth about who God is. One of Satan’s strategies is to tell us lies about God. That’s what he did with Eve in the garden. He undermined her assurance in God’s goodness. He convinced her that God was keeping them from something good by forbidding them to eat from the Tree, and that He was doing it out of selfishness: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). A.W. Tozer said, “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than low or unworthy conception of God” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 13). We need to know enough to discern and reject Satan’s lies. This is one of the purposes of theology.
So one side of the knowledge Jeremiah describes in v. 24 is knowing the truth about who God is, knowing what He’s revealed about Himself. But that’s not the only thing. Just studying the truth in a detached way can actually destroy us spiritually. God our Creator and Lord is not a subject for our hobbies. We study about Him in order to know Him better. When we try to separate these things, we endanger our own souls.
Jeremiah uses two words here, to make sure we hold onto both things. We need to understand who God is, and we need to know Him through a personal encounter. The Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones has had a major impact on my life. I first read his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount when I was travelling in North India in 1978, and it changed the way I look at Scripture. Since then I’ve probably read 20 or so of his books, some of them more than once. I’ve also read his two-volume biography by Iain Murray and have read his published letters and a number of essays about him and have listened to some recorded sermons. But I never met him and he died in 1981. I know a fair amount about him, but I don’t know him. I could learn more about him by talking to people who knew him, but I still wouldn’t know him in the way I know the members of my family. I know a lot about them, but I also have a relationship with them. We interact with each other every day and care for one another. There’s a whole dimension that we can’t get simply by gathering information about someone. God’s desire is that we not only learn about Him, but that we cultivate a relationship with Him. He wants us to know Him.
Samuel Rutherford was a Scottish preacher in the 1600's. Listen to something he wrote from prison: “Would to God that all this kingdom, and all that know God, knew what is betwixt Christ and me in this prison–what kisses, embracements, and love communion! I take his cross in my arms with joy; I bless it, I rejoice in it. Suffering for Christ is my garland. I would not exchange Christ for ten thousand worlds! Nay, if the comparison could stand, I would not exchange Christ with heaven” (The Letters of Samuel Rutherford, p. 213). This isn’t the language of detached theological speculation. He knew the truth about God; much of his ministry had been occupied with theological controversy. Rutherford understood the necessity and value of theology. But he also knew God in personal experience. And in prison he was finding a closer communion with Christ than he had ever known before.
This is eternal life: to know the only true God. The passage in John 17 also contains both elements: we need to know the truth about God, we need to know who He is; but it’s more than a detached knowledge about someone. Eternal life is knowing God. But Jesus adds something here: “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” We know God through the free gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Don’t think of this free gift as a once-and-done thing. We don’t “get ourselves saved” to ensure that we’ll be admitted to heaven when we die, then go on to live our lives without giving it any more thought. Through Jesus Christ we are admitted into fellowship with the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Through Jesus Christ, we are able to spend the rest of our lives–even the rest of eternity–getting to know God better. The point of salvation is to restore us to fellowship with God, not merely to ensure a comfortable after-life. “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
“You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” Does that describe your experience? Is your heart restless, filled with a sense of longing, a sense that something is missing? If so, what are you doing about it? Are you hungering and thirsting for more of God, the only one who can fulfill this longing? Are you seeking Him. Or are you allowing other things to drown out His Spirit?
Or maybe the voice of His Spirit has already been dulled over the course of your life. Maybe you’ve already given up and settled for a humdrum life. But even so, I suspect there are times when you wish things were otherwise, when you feel the weight of the meaninglessness of life in this world apart from God. God has made you for Himself; no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the fact that you were created for fellowship with God.
We begin by confessing that we’re sinners, receiving the free gift of mercy through Jesus, who paid in full the penalty for our sin. But then, having begun, how do we grow to know Him better? To begin with, by studying His Word, reading attentively to know what He’s said about Himself. And by spending time in His presence, meditating on His Word and praying in response to what you read. I often quote A.W. Tozer, because he hungered and thirsted after God for a lifetime, and he said a lot of helpful things in that area. He was especially concerned about the lack of spiritual growth he observed in Christians he knew. He was concerned at seeing people who’d been Christians for 30 or 40 years, but who seemed to have made no progress toward spiritual maturity. Here’s what he said about the problem: “The causes of retarded growth are many. It would not be accurate to ascribe the trouble to one single fault. One there is, however, which is so universal that it may easily be the main cause: failure to give time to the cultivation of the knowledge of God” (“We Must Give Time to God,” in The Root of the Righteous, pp. 10-11). For the most part, we don’t know God very well because we don’t spend time in His presence. We need to make time for Him, and we need to persevere in seeking Him over the course of our lives.
But beyond this, here are a few other suggestions before I close. 1) If you want to know God better, don’t take sin lightly. Jeremiah says that God exercises “kindness, justice and righteousness on earth.” He’s concerned about righteousness. Don’t be careless with what you consider “little sins.” Sin will cloud your relationship with God and will prevent you from knowing Him better. We need to take seriously the damage that sin causes in our relationship with God. But, at the same time, we need to know what to do when we do fall into sin. John’s first letter says this: “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin; but if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense, Jesus Christ the righteous one” (2:1). The idea is to avoid sin, but when we do fall into sin we need to avoid wallowing in discouragement and self-pity. The solution–the only solution–is to come boldly into God’s presence and ask for mercy.
2) Avoid things that dull, or take the edge off, your spiritual appetite. These are things that may be legitimate in themselves, but they tend to keep you from seeking God. Other people seem to engage in these things harmlessly, but it doesn’t work that way for you. I have friends who don’t own a TV for that reason. They see others who watch in moderation, but if the TV is there in the house they lose control over it, and soon they find that their prayer life has been undermined. For others it can be a hobby that consumes all your free time, or a certain type of books or music; not things that are sinful in themselves, but they end up harming you. They dull your spiritual appetite and draw you away from seeking God. Excessive recreation is another possibility. Whatever it is in your life that gets in the way of seeking God, you need to avoid it. Don’t make excuses, and don’t try to justify yourself. Admit your weakness, cry out to God for help, and lay the thing aside. It may be fine for others, but not for you. Here’s another quote from Tozer: “A thousand distractions would woo us away from thoughts of God, but if we are wise we will sternly put them from us and make room for the King and take time to entertain Him. Some things may be neglected with but little loss to the spiritual life, but to neglect communion with God is to hurt ourselves where we cannot afford it. God will respond to our efforts to know Him. The Bible tells us how; it is altogether a matter of how much determination we bring to the holy task” (Ibid., pp. 12-13).
3) Put yourself in places where you’ll grow in the knowledge of God. Don’t miss an opportunity to be someplace where people seem to be enjoying fellowship with Him. Discipline yourself to attend times of corporate prayer, whether you feel like it or not. Don’t allow yourself to avoid corporate worship unless you’re truly unable to be there. Christ has promised to be present when His people are gathered in His name. We tend to pamper ourselves too much in this area. By taking yourself in hand and dragging yourself to church when you really don’t want to go, you’re demonstrating to God that you’re in earnest, that you truly desire to know Him. He’ll respond to your diligence. And, related to this point, seek out fellowship with people who know God better than you do. We learn by example, and hunger for God is contagious. Seek out people who are hungering for more of God.
We’re faced with two alternatives. We can’t escape who we are. We can’t escape the fact that we were created to know God and worship Him. We can spend a lifetime trying to live as if things were otherwise. We can seek to live for ourselves, grasping after whatever we think will make us happy. But we’ll find, again and again, that it’s not what we were hoping for. Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. So the only real solution is to surrender to His will and seek Him. This is the conclusion the author of Ecclesiastes reaches near the end of the book: “Honor and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young, Before the years take their toll and your vigor wanes, Before your vision dims and the world blurs And the winter years keep you close to the fire” (12:1-2, The Message). Or this, from Hosea the prophet: “Come, let us return to the Lord! He has torn us in pieces; now he will heal us. He has injured us; now he will bandage our wounds. In just a short time, he will restore us so we can live in his presence. Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him! Then he will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring” (6:1-3, NLT). Let’s press on to know Him. Let’s make it the business of our lives to know Him.
Monday, May 13, 2013
A Life of Praise, Psalm 134
Psalm 134 is the last of the Psalms of Ascent, or Pilgrim Songs. These songs were not written by one person, nor were they written intentionally as a collection. They were written by many different people over an extended period of time, and then later these psalms were collected into a group, because they were especially suitable for singing on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And as pilgrim songs, they’re also relevant to a life of discipleship. As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are strangers and pilgrims in this world. We live in this world, and we interact with people, but our relationship with this world has been changed forever because of Jesus Christ.
When we come to Christ we become new creatures by being united with Jesus in His death and resurrection. This is why Paul could say, in 2 Cor. 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” We have died and been raised with Christ, and because of this our relationship with this world can never be the same. We once belonged here, but now we don’t. Everything has changed. One commentator says it this way: “It is nothing less than a removal into a new sphere of being. [The Christian] is translated from earth to heaven; and with this translation his point of view is altered, his standard of judgment is wholly changed” (J.B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon, p. 209).
Have you felt this? You once felt very much at home here in this world, but now you don’t. Your relationship with unbelieving family members is not what it used to be. You try to maintain relationships with unbelieving friends, but the relationship is different than it was, and they sense that something has happened to you. You find yourselves interested in things that you couldn’t even understand before you were a Christian. I love T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi.” One of the Magi is speaking, after the long journey back to their homes: “were we led all that way for/ Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,/ We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,/ But had thought they were different; this Birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death./ We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,/ But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/ With an alien people clutching their gods./ I should be glad of another death.” They made the long journey home, but when they got there they found that they had changed. It wasn’t home anymore. They could no longer be at ease in the world. Have you felt this? Something has happened. It’s not just that you’ve changed your ideas about religion and have decided to be a good church-goer. You’re a new creature; you’ve been crucified and raised with Christ. And you’re no longer at home in this world, “with an alien people clutching their gods.”
Scripture is full of this message that our true home is in heaven. We’re here in this world, but we’re on our way to a better place. “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14). We need to remind ourselves of this over and over, so we don’t get caught up in the priorities of this world. One of Satan’s strategies is to cloud our thinking and confuse our priorities. So it’s a good thing to sing these pilgrim songs regularly. They remind us of who we are and where we’re going. And they help equip us for a life of discipleship over the long term (which is why Eugene Peterson entitled his study of these psalms A Long Obedience in the Same Direction).
This last psalm in the series functions as a benediction to the whole collection, especially the final verse: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” But it’s also the conclusion of these pilgrim songs. Psalm 120 was a psalm for starting out, and along the way a number of different aspects of pilgrim life have been covered. But this is the last word, the thing that the series ends with. Conclusions are important. In both speaking and in writing we use conclusions to say “this is what I want you to take from this message; this is the conclusion I want you to draw from all of this.” And the conclusion of this psalm is that praise is central to a life of discipleship. It’s not the only thing–we’ve talked about many other subjects in this series–but it is central, and this series ends with it as a way of ensuring that praise has an important place in our thinking.
If you’re reading a version other than the NIV, the word “praise” may not be there at all. For example, the RSV reads: “Come, bless the Lord.” The word translated “praise” in the NIV is most commonly translated “bless.” It’s the same word that is used in verse 3: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” But when the word is directed toward God, it means praise, so often the NIV translates it in this way. 1 Kings 1:48, in the RSV, is: “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who has granted one of my offspring to sit on my throne this day, my own eyes seeing it.” And in the NIV it reads: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel....” We see the same tendency in the New Testament. Ephesians 1:3, in the RSV says “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,” and in the NIV it reads “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” These are just two different ways of saying the same thing. When we bless God, we are praising Him.
Praise is central to a life of discipleship because of who God is. It’s easy to get sidetracked in this area. There are so many other things to occupy our attention. It’s so easy for other things–good and important things–to displace praise from its central place in our lives as disciples. This is one of the weaknesses of the self-help emphasis in much of evangelicalism today. The sheer number of books, radio programs and sermons along these lines sometimes gives the impression that the purpose of the gospel is to enable us to get our lives together (to get out of debt, order our families along biblical lines, fix our marriages, live successful lives, etc.). The chaos and turmoil of living in a fallen world is overwhelming at times, so anything that promises to help bring relief is likely to have some immediate appeal. And many of these things are good and important. But the primary purpose of the gospel is not to help us get our lives together. The purpose of the gospel is to reconcile us to God. And when we’re reconciled to God, the natural result is praise. Praise is central to a life of discipleship because God is at the center of our lives as disciples. This is a good test to apply to ourselves. If we begin to notice that we are praising God less and less, something has gone wrong. In all likelihood, God has been crowded out and displaced in our lives by something else.
Verse one is, first of all, an invitation to praise. Praise is a great privilege. When we consider who we are and who God is, it’s a wonderful thing that we’ve been invited to praise Him, that He desires to receive praise from the likes of us. Sometimes praise arises spontaneously, in response to God’s mercy and grace, or from a new appreciation of something He’s done. We may be especially moved in worship by a fresh realization of who God is and what He’s done for us. Or we may be overwhelmed with gratitude by God’s intervention in our lives, realizing that He loves us and is watching over us. Or we may have received a clear answer to prayer.
There are times like this when we can’t seem to help ourselves. Praise just wells up from our hearts. And at such times, we need to know that God desires to receive our praise. He’s invited us. He delights in the praises of His people. We can go one step further: when we feel praise arising in our hearts in this way, God is inviting us to praise Him. The Holy Spirit is drawing us, inviting us into His presence. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the great Welsh preacher of the 20th century, said this in a series of lectures to preachers: “Above all–and this I regard as most important of all–always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this–always obey such an impulse. Where does it come from? It is the work of the Holy Spirit; it is a part of the meaning of, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure’ (Phil. 2:12-13). This often leads to some of the most remarkable experiences in the life of the minister. So never resist, never postpone it, never push it aside because you are busy. Give yourself to it, yield to it; and you will find not only that you have not been wasting time with respect to the matter with which you have been dealing, but that actually it has helped you greatly in that respect. You will experience an ease and a facility in understanding what you were reading, in thinking, in ordering matter for a sermon, in writing, in everything, which is quite astonishing. Such a call to prayer must never be regarded as a distraction; always respond to it immediately, and thank God if it happens to you frequently” (Preaching and Preachers, pp. 170-71). This applies not only to preachers, but to all of God’s people, and it applies equally to praise. When you feel a sense of gratitude welling up in your heart, when you feel the urge to lift up your heart in praise, respond to it. God is inviting you into His presence. Don’t think of it as an interruption or a distraction. It’s a gracious invitation from the King of Kings.
But verses one and two are also a command to praise. We’re called to praise God, whether the desire is there or not. These first two verses address those who serve in the Temple. At certain points in the festival, it was the custom to spend the night, or at least part of the night, in worship. So the psalmist cries out to them: “Praise the Lord! Don’t just go through the motions and carry out your duties with cold and lifeless hearts. Lift up your hands and praise Him!”
We have a tendency to downplay the importance of what we do with our bodies in worship. We don’t want to fall into empty ceremonialism, so we do away with ceremony altogether. But what we do with our bodies affects us. The act of lifting up our hands in worship can help us lift our hearts to God. Kneeling in God’s presence, or falling on our faces before Him, can be an important step in humbling ourselves before Him. Acting reverently can help us become more reverent in God’s presence. The things we do affect the way we think and feel.
Western society has gotten this backward in recent centuries and has assumed that the process needs to begin in our minds. The assumption is that we need to think ourselves into the right frame of mind, and then we can go on to act in the right way. But the process is often just the reverse of this. Eugene Peterson has wise counsel on this: “You can lift up your hands regardless of how you feel; it is a simple motor movement. You may not be able to command your heart, but you can command your arms. Lift your arms in blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise. We are psychosomatic beings; body and spirit are intricately interrelated. Go through the motions of blessing. God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along” (A Long Obedience, p. 188).
We also make the mistake of thinking that structure will restrict our freedom. We want our relationship with God to be free and spontaneous, so we resist the idea of structuring our spiritual lives. But we’re created in such a way that we function most freely within structures and forms. If you want to experience freedom and joy in playing a musical instrument, you need to submit to a considerable amount of order and discipline. You need to learn the forms and structures which will work musically with that instrument, and you need to develop the physical skills to play within those structures. And having done that, you’ll then be more able to play with freedom and spontaneity. If you try to avoid the process of discipline and training, you’ll probably give up in frustration (or else everyone around you will wish you had). It’s the same with sports. We develop the ability to perform with freedom and spontaneity by beginning with order and discipline. We train ourselves to function within the structures of the sport.
This is true also in our spiritual lives. We function best with order and structure, and we need to train ourselves in spiritual disciplines. Learning to praise God is no exception. What do you say when you feel the desire to praise God? Things like “O Lord, we just want to praise you because you’re so awesome,” are OK as a starting point. But we need to learn a more adequate language and vocabulary for praise, like “Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep. O Lord, you preserve both man and beast. How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light” (Psalm 36:5-9).
How do we learn to praise like this? Think of the Psalms and other prayers in Scripture and the great hymns and praise songs of the Church as a school of prayer and praise. We learn to praise God by immersing ourselves in these things over a lifetime, and as we continue using them they become part of us. It’s interesting to look at Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the whale. His prayer is made up almost entirely of quotations from the Psalms, but it’s more than a collection of quotations. He’s not just reciting memory verses. It’s really his prayer, in the language of the Psalms. By praying the psalms all his life he’s internalized the language of the psalter. It’s become his language for praise and prayer, and when he comes into this situation of desperate need, he cries out to God, and what comes out is psalm prayer. He’s immersed himself in the school of prayer; he’s developed a language and vocabulary to use in God’s presence.
It’s a good thing to structure your devotional life in ways that will help you learn to praise God. The same structure isn’t going to work for everyone. We need to allow for differences in the way God has made us, which is why booklets on how to have a “quiet time” end up helping some people but not others. There are many different ways to go about structuring our prayer lives. But be intentional in submitting yourself to the school of prayer and praise that’s available to us in God’s Word and in the music and written prayers of the Church.
The last thing to notice here is that God’s blessing stands at the beginning and at the end of our praise. Verse three is a response from the Temple servants: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” Our praise always begins with God: He has invited us to praise Him, and we’re always praising in response to something He’s done or said. Praise, by its very nature, is responsive speech. So we respond to God with praise, but then He responds with further blessing. We can’t manipulate God or use praise as a magical formula, as some have tried to do. We don’t use praise to get what we want. We praise God because He is worthy, and He responds to us as a loving Heavenly Father. He is always primary. We bless and praise Him because of His abundant mercy and blessings to us, and then He responds to us with further blessing. Our praise is surrounded on all sides by God’s blessing. And, as we’ve seen in recent sermons, this is not an individualistic thing. The very structure of this psalm puts praise into a communal context. The congregation begins by addressing the priests: “Praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord who minister by night in the house of the Lord.” And the priests respond: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.”
Over the past hundred years or so the Church has increasingly lost sight of the centrality of God’s glory. A hundred years ago, most evangelical Christians looked at the Christian life very differently than we do today. Most would have understood, without question, the first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” The first part of that answer is essential to a life of praise: “The chief end of man is to glorify God.” God’s glory is absolutely central to a life of discipleship. All too often, especially in America, it seems that we’ve retained the second half of the statement: “The chief end of man is to enjoy God forever,” and have completely lost sight of God’s glory.
Praise is central to our pilgrimage through this world as disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ, and a new realization of God’s majesty and glory is essential if we are to live a life of praise. We can cultivate a fresh awareness of God’s glory by submitting ourselves to the school of prayer and praise that’s available to us in God’s Word and in the Church’s worship and music. We live a life of praise by ordering our lives so that praise is a priority. And when God fills our hearts with a desire to praise Him, we respond. And as we continue living in this way, we find more and more that our lives are characterized by praise, until that day when we praise Him face to face, together with apostles, prophets, martyrs and angels, crying: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.... To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (Revelation 4:11; 5:13).
When we come to Christ we become new creatures by being united with Jesus in His death and resurrection. This is why Paul could say, in 2 Cor. 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” We have died and been raised with Christ, and because of this our relationship with this world can never be the same. We once belonged here, but now we don’t. Everything has changed. One commentator says it this way: “It is nothing less than a removal into a new sphere of being. [The Christian] is translated from earth to heaven; and with this translation his point of view is altered, his standard of judgment is wholly changed” (J.B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and Philemon, p. 209).
Have you felt this? You once felt very much at home here in this world, but now you don’t. Your relationship with unbelieving family members is not what it used to be. You try to maintain relationships with unbelieving friends, but the relationship is different than it was, and they sense that something has happened to you. You find yourselves interested in things that you couldn’t even understand before you were a Christian. I love T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi.” One of the Magi is speaking, after the long journey back to their homes: “were we led all that way for/ Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,/ We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,/ But had thought they were different; this Birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death./ We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,/ But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/ With an alien people clutching their gods./ I should be glad of another death.” They made the long journey home, but when they got there they found that they had changed. It wasn’t home anymore. They could no longer be at ease in the world. Have you felt this? Something has happened. It’s not just that you’ve changed your ideas about religion and have decided to be a good church-goer. You’re a new creature; you’ve been crucified and raised with Christ. And you’re no longer at home in this world, “with an alien people clutching their gods.”
Scripture is full of this message that our true home is in heaven. We’re here in this world, but we’re on our way to a better place. “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14). We need to remind ourselves of this over and over, so we don’t get caught up in the priorities of this world. One of Satan’s strategies is to cloud our thinking and confuse our priorities. So it’s a good thing to sing these pilgrim songs regularly. They remind us of who we are and where we’re going. And they help equip us for a life of discipleship over the long term (which is why Eugene Peterson entitled his study of these psalms A Long Obedience in the Same Direction).
This last psalm in the series functions as a benediction to the whole collection, especially the final verse: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” But it’s also the conclusion of these pilgrim songs. Psalm 120 was a psalm for starting out, and along the way a number of different aspects of pilgrim life have been covered. But this is the last word, the thing that the series ends with. Conclusions are important. In both speaking and in writing we use conclusions to say “this is what I want you to take from this message; this is the conclusion I want you to draw from all of this.” And the conclusion of this psalm is that praise is central to a life of discipleship. It’s not the only thing–we’ve talked about many other subjects in this series–but it is central, and this series ends with it as a way of ensuring that praise has an important place in our thinking.
If you’re reading a version other than the NIV, the word “praise” may not be there at all. For example, the RSV reads: “Come, bless the Lord.” The word translated “praise” in the NIV is most commonly translated “bless.” It’s the same word that is used in verse 3: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” But when the word is directed toward God, it means praise, so often the NIV translates it in this way. 1 Kings 1:48, in the RSV, is: “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who has granted one of my offspring to sit on my throne this day, my own eyes seeing it.” And in the NIV it reads: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel....” We see the same tendency in the New Testament. Ephesians 1:3, in the RSV says “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,” and in the NIV it reads “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” These are just two different ways of saying the same thing. When we bless God, we are praising Him.
Praise is central to a life of discipleship because of who God is. It’s easy to get sidetracked in this area. There are so many other things to occupy our attention. It’s so easy for other things–good and important things–to displace praise from its central place in our lives as disciples. This is one of the weaknesses of the self-help emphasis in much of evangelicalism today. The sheer number of books, radio programs and sermons along these lines sometimes gives the impression that the purpose of the gospel is to enable us to get our lives together (to get out of debt, order our families along biblical lines, fix our marriages, live successful lives, etc.). The chaos and turmoil of living in a fallen world is overwhelming at times, so anything that promises to help bring relief is likely to have some immediate appeal. And many of these things are good and important. But the primary purpose of the gospel is not to help us get our lives together. The purpose of the gospel is to reconcile us to God. And when we’re reconciled to God, the natural result is praise. Praise is central to a life of discipleship because God is at the center of our lives as disciples. This is a good test to apply to ourselves. If we begin to notice that we are praising God less and less, something has gone wrong. In all likelihood, God has been crowded out and displaced in our lives by something else.
Verse one is, first of all, an invitation to praise. Praise is a great privilege. When we consider who we are and who God is, it’s a wonderful thing that we’ve been invited to praise Him, that He desires to receive praise from the likes of us. Sometimes praise arises spontaneously, in response to God’s mercy and grace, or from a new appreciation of something He’s done. We may be especially moved in worship by a fresh realization of who God is and what He’s done for us. Or we may be overwhelmed with gratitude by God’s intervention in our lives, realizing that He loves us and is watching over us. Or we may have received a clear answer to prayer.
There are times like this when we can’t seem to help ourselves. Praise just wells up from our hearts. And at such times, we need to know that God desires to receive our praise. He’s invited us. He delights in the praises of His people. We can go one step further: when we feel praise arising in our hearts in this way, God is inviting us to praise Him. The Holy Spirit is drawing us, inviting us into His presence. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the great Welsh preacher of the 20th century, said this in a series of lectures to preachers: “Above all–and this I regard as most important of all–always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this–always obey such an impulse. Where does it come from? It is the work of the Holy Spirit; it is a part of the meaning of, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure’ (Phil. 2:12-13). This often leads to some of the most remarkable experiences in the life of the minister. So never resist, never postpone it, never push it aside because you are busy. Give yourself to it, yield to it; and you will find not only that you have not been wasting time with respect to the matter with which you have been dealing, but that actually it has helped you greatly in that respect. You will experience an ease and a facility in understanding what you were reading, in thinking, in ordering matter for a sermon, in writing, in everything, which is quite astonishing. Such a call to prayer must never be regarded as a distraction; always respond to it immediately, and thank God if it happens to you frequently” (Preaching and Preachers, pp. 170-71). This applies not only to preachers, but to all of God’s people, and it applies equally to praise. When you feel a sense of gratitude welling up in your heart, when you feel the urge to lift up your heart in praise, respond to it. God is inviting you into His presence. Don’t think of it as an interruption or a distraction. It’s a gracious invitation from the King of Kings.
But verses one and two are also a command to praise. We’re called to praise God, whether the desire is there or not. These first two verses address those who serve in the Temple. At certain points in the festival, it was the custom to spend the night, or at least part of the night, in worship. So the psalmist cries out to them: “Praise the Lord! Don’t just go through the motions and carry out your duties with cold and lifeless hearts. Lift up your hands and praise Him!”
We have a tendency to downplay the importance of what we do with our bodies in worship. We don’t want to fall into empty ceremonialism, so we do away with ceremony altogether. But what we do with our bodies affects us. The act of lifting up our hands in worship can help us lift our hearts to God. Kneeling in God’s presence, or falling on our faces before Him, can be an important step in humbling ourselves before Him. Acting reverently can help us become more reverent in God’s presence. The things we do affect the way we think and feel.
Western society has gotten this backward in recent centuries and has assumed that the process needs to begin in our minds. The assumption is that we need to think ourselves into the right frame of mind, and then we can go on to act in the right way. But the process is often just the reverse of this. Eugene Peterson has wise counsel on this: “You can lift up your hands regardless of how you feel; it is a simple motor movement. You may not be able to command your heart, but you can command your arms. Lift your arms in blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise. We are psychosomatic beings; body and spirit are intricately interrelated. Go through the motions of blessing. God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along” (A Long Obedience, p. 188).
We also make the mistake of thinking that structure will restrict our freedom. We want our relationship with God to be free and spontaneous, so we resist the idea of structuring our spiritual lives. But we’re created in such a way that we function most freely within structures and forms. If you want to experience freedom and joy in playing a musical instrument, you need to submit to a considerable amount of order and discipline. You need to learn the forms and structures which will work musically with that instrument, and you need to develop the physical skills to play within those structures. And having done that, you’ll then be more able to play with freedom and spontaneity. If you try to avoid the process of discipline and training, you’ll probably give up in frustration (or else everyone around you will wish you had). It’s the same with sports. We develop the ability to perform with freedom and spontaneity by beginning with order and discipline. We train ourselves to function within the structures of the sport.
This is true also in our spiritual lives. We function best with order and structure, and we need to train ourselves in spiritual disciplines. Learning to praise God is no exception. What do you say when you feel the desire to praise God? Things like “O Lord, we just want to praise you because you’re so awesome,” are OK as a starting point. But we need to learn a more adequate language and vocabulary for praise, like “Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep. O Lord, you preserve both man and beast. How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light” (Psalm 36:5-9).
How do we learn to praise like this? Think of the Psalms and other prayers in Scripture and the great hymns and praise songs of the Church as a school of prayer and praise. We learn to praise God by immersing ourselves in these things over a lifetime, and as we continue using them they become part of us. It’s interesting to look at Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the whale. His prayer is made up almost entirely of quotations from the Psalms, but it’s more than a collection of quotations. He’s not just reciting memory verses. It’s really his prayer, in the language of the Psalms. By praying the psalms all his life he’s internalized the language of the psalter. It’s become his language for praise and prayer, and when he comes into this situation of desperate need, he cries out to God, and what comes out is psalm prayer. He’s immersed himself in the school of prayer; he’s developed a language and vocabulary to use in God’s presence.
It’s a good thing to structure your devotional life in ways that will help you learn to praise God. The same structure isn’t going to work for everyone. We need to allow for differences in the way God has made us, which is why booklets on how to have a “quiet time” end up helping some people but not others. There are many different ways to go about structuring our prayer lives. But be intentional in submitting yourself to the school of prayer and praise that’s available to us in God’s Word and in the music and written prayers of the Church.
The last thing to notice here is that God’s blessing stands at the beginning and at the end of our praise. Verse three is a response from the Temple servants: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.” Our praise always begins with God: He has invited us to praise Him, and we’re always praising in response to something He’s done or said. Praise, by its very nature, is responsive speech. So we respond to God with praise, but then He responds with further blessing. We can’t manipulate God or use praise as a magical formula, as some have tried to do. We don’t use praise to get what we want. We praise God because He is worthy, and He responds to us as a loving Heavenly Father. He is always primary. We bless and praise Him because of His abundant mercy and blessings to us, and then He responds to us with further blessing. Our praise is surrounded on all sides by God’s blessing. And, as we’ve seen in recent sermons, this is not an individualistic thing. The very structure of this psalm puts praise into a communal context. The congregation begins by addressing the priests: “Praise the Lord, all you servants of the Lord who minister by night in the house of the Lord.” And the priests respond: “May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.”
Over the past hundred years or so the Church has increasingly lost sight of the centrality of God’s glory. A hundred years ago, most evangelical Christians looked at the Christian life very differently than we do today. Most would have understood, without question, the first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” The first part of that answer is essential to a life of praise: “The chief end of man is to glorify God.” God’s glory is absolutely central to a life of discipleship. All too often, especially in America, it seems that we’ve retained the second half of the statement: “The chief end of man is to enjoy God forever,” and have completely lost sight of God’s glory.
Praise is central to our pilgrimage through this world as disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ, and a new realization of God’s majesty and glory is essential if we are to live a life of praise. We can cultivate a fresh awareness of God’s glory by submitting ourselves to the school of prayer and praise that’s available to us in God’s Word and in the Church’s worship and music. We live a life of praise by ordering our lives so that praise is a priority. And when God fills our hearts with a desire to praise Him, we respond. And as we continue living in this way, we find more and more that our lives are characterized by praise, until that day when we praise Him face to face, together with apostles, prophets, martyrs and angels, crying: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.... To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (Revelation 4:11; 5:13).
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Living in Unity as God's People, Psalm 133
We saw, in Psalm 132, that God deals with His people through covenants, and that He doesn’t deal with us as autonomous individuals but as members of a body. He leads us to Himself individually, calling us by name; but when we turn to Him we become part of His covenant community, the body of Christ. When we turn to Him, He places us in the Church. But our attitude toward the Church is seriously affected by the spirit of individualism that dominates our culture at the present time. We read this quote from Thomas Reeves on the prevailing spirit in American churches: “Religious individualism seems to be at the core of American Christianity. This is a characteristic in harmony with our historic sense of personal independence as well as the considerable socioeconomic mobility we have long enjoyed. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney concluded, ‘Typically Americans view religious congregations as gatherings of individuals who have chosen to be together, in institutions of their own making and over which they hold control–fostering what sometimes, in the eyes of observers from other countries, appears as “churchless Christianity.”’ For Americans, ‘religious authority lies in the believer–not in the church, not in the Bible, despite occasional claims of infallibility and inerrancy on the part of some’” (Thomas Reeves, “Not So Christian America,” in First Things, October 1996, p. 19).
This spirit of individualism seriously undermines the unity of the church, because when we see the church as a gathering of individuals who have chosen to be together, in an institution of our own making and over which we hold control, our commitment to the body is conditional and tentative. If the church is going in a way that pleases us, we’ll stay. But if anything happens that we disagree with, we’ll move somewhere else. Reeves goes on: “What we now have might best be labeled consumer Christianity. The psychologist Paul C. Vitz has observed, ‘The “divine right” of the consumer to choose as he or she pleases has become so common an idea that it operates in millions of Americans like an unconscious tropism.’ Millions of Americans today feel free to buy as much of the full Christian faith as seems desirable. The cost is low and consumer satisfaction seems guaranteed” (p. 21). If our relationship to the church is dominated by a consumer mentality, we’re going to maintain our distance. We’re here primarily to get something for ourselves–that’s the way we approach the marketplace, and it’s appropriate in that setting. When we were living in Elizabethtown there were three grocery stores to choose from. I was in the habit of going to one of them, and I went there for the first few years; even when I wasn’t altogether happy with it, I continued going, because I knew where to find things. But then the employees became increasingly rude and unhelpful, so after this happened to me a few times I quit going and went to the store across the street. The prices were comparable, and they were polite. I had no commitment to the other store. I was only there to buy what I needed, so there was no reason for me to stay there when I was unhappy with their service. This is an acceptable approach to the market place.
But the Church is not a business enterprise. We’re not selling a product. We’re not seeking to enlist people in our cause. Church is not a place where we go to get something for ourselves. The Church is a body of people with whom God has entered into a covenant relationship. In the Church we’re part of a community that has its roots in what God has done in the past and which is dependent on His promises for the future. God is at the center, and His purposes are primary. We’re not in charge here; God is. The Church is not “individuals who have chosen to be together, in institutions of their own making and over which they hold control.” The Church is a body of people whom God has called together, in an institution which He ordained from eternity and over which He exercises sovereign lordship. We’re not in charge here. The Church doesn’t belong to us, and we’re placed here because of His lordship, not because of our own selfish whims.
Remember that these are pilgrim songs. The people of Israel were expected to travel to Jerusalem three times each year to worship at the Temple. They usually traveled in groups, because of the danger from bandits. And worshiping in Jerusalem was a high point in their spiritual lives. In Psalm 133 the psalmist is in Jerusalem worshiping and he looks around at his fellow-worshipers and cries out: “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!” Those who are gathered with him are “brothers.” They’re part of the same family. They’re not just people who by a happy coincidence have found that their felt needs are all being met in the same place. They’re bound together as part of God’s family, and they are living in unity.
But unity is not something that comes naturally to us. Notice the psalmist’s attitude in this opening verse: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!” (The Message). As he looks around at the worshiping crowd, the experience of unity takes him by surprise and he cries out with joy. He’s reveling in the experience of oneness. This series of pilgrim songs begins with a complaint: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I lived among those who hate peace. I am a man of peace; but when I speak, they are for war” (Psalm 120:5-7). His experience in this world has not led him to expect that kind of unity, so when he experiences it in Jerusalem, it catches him by surprise. We set out on pilgrimage from this world, sick of the hatred and strife that are all around us, and we find to our surprise and delight that we are not alone. We are part of a large body; we’ve been included in something that God has been doing for many centuries. And at times, worshiping with these people, we get glimpses into the unity that exists around God’s eternal throne and we cry out in wonder: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!”
Thomas Hobbes, was a 17th century philosopher. After observing human behavior and studying history, he concluded that “Out of civil states, there is always war of every one against every one” (Leviathan, p. 100). He concluded that people are naturally at war with one another, that unless there was an external power to restrain them, this state of war would repeatedly break out into actual violence. He would have agreed with the statement that unity does not come naturally to us. He would have said that our natural tendency is in the opposite direction. Was Hobbes just a cynical, crotchety old academic? A few years ago I heard a woman lecturer who seemed embarrassed that there were once people in the world who thought such things (and she specifically singled out Hobbes, although she misspelled his name and I suspected she was reacting to something she'd heard about him). But when we look around at the condition of the world, when we look at places like Afghanistan or Iraq or parts of the former Soviet Union, when we see how easily the fabric of society disintegrates and the horrible things people do to one another, Hobbes’ assumptions don’t seem so far-fetched. He was more in touch with the observable behavior of humans than those are who think people are basically good and that what they need is just more education.
The psalmist is excited to see brothers getting along with each other. The Bible doesn’t paint a very positive picture about relationships between siblings. The first two brothers we read about in the Bible, Abel and Cain, did not live together in unity. Cain became jealous of his brother’s relationship with God and murdered him. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of his relationship with their father, so they sold him into slavery. And the later historical books of the Old Testament are full of stories about brothers in the royal family fighting for power and killing one another as rivals.
In fact, whenever power is at stake we find unity dissolving. Karl Barth said this about the desire for power: “Where the will for power is present, as it always is, there it is always questionable, and the likelihood is–this is the tragic mistake–that the relativity of creaturely power will be forgotten and secretly or openly the battle [will be] joined for an absolute power–a battle in which man on a small scale or a great can only finally rush into disaster” (Ethics, p. 137). As creatures, we only have the right to a very limited degree of power, but the temptation is always to push for absolute power. The temptation is to be like God, the temptation of Eve in the garden. How many church splits in reality have very little to do with theological differences, and everything to do with the desire for power!
Sin isolates us from one another. We’re all trying to be like God, and living in this way leads to increasing fragmentation in every relationship. Sin separates us from God, because we’re rebelling against His sovereign lordship and seeking to be little gods ourselves. But it also separates us from one another. J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, revolves around a quest to destroy a great ring of power. Sauron, the dark lord, is wholly evil and if he captures the ring the whole world will come under his reign. The fellowship of the ring, those who set out to destroy it, is led by a wizard named Gandalf, the most powerful enemy of Sauron. At one point, a member of the company asks Gandalf to take the ring and use it for good, to destroy Sauron. But he refuses. Using the ring would corrupt him, would turn him into a new dark lord. It would isolate him from the whole company, because they would become rivals, rather than companions. If he used the ring to destroy Sauron, he would become evil himself. Grasping after power, even with the intention of using it for good, would corrupt him. The temptation to be like God turns everyone into a potential rival. Sin separates us from one another (and then, finally, even from ourselves).
And this lust for power, this desire to be in control, frequently enters into the life of the church. The apostle John complains in his third letter about Diotrophes, who “loves to be first,” and is wreaking havoc in the church (3 John 9-10). George Whitefield, the great evangelist of the 18th century, said: “O that I may learn from all I see, to desire to be nothing! And to think it my highest privilege to be an assistant to all, but the head of none. I find a love of power sometimes intoxicates even God’s own dear children, and makes them to mistake passion for zeal and an overbearing spirit for an authority given them from above. For my own part, I find it much easier to obey than govern, and that it is much safer to be trodden under foot than to have it in one’s power to serve others so” (George Whitefield, by Arnold Dallimore, vol. 2, p. 339). Sin separates us from one another, and it frequently deceives us into thinking we’re serving God when we are only serving ourselves. Our natural condition as sinners is not unity. Unity doesn’t come naturally to us.
But even though unity doesn’t come naturally to us, and even though we even seem to enjoy some measure of discord and discontent, when we experience true unity we recognize it as what we’ve been longing for. We began our pilgrimage crying out “too long have I lived among those who hate peace.” Unity in the Church is both precious and refreshing. It’s a foretaste of the life of heaven.
The psalmist uses two images to describe the experience of unity among God’s people. First, it’s “like precious oil poured on the head.” He’s speaking here about the anointing oil that was used to ordain the high priest. Eugene Peterson has a good description of the way oil is used in Scripture: “Oil, throughout Scripture, is a sign of God’s presence, a symbol of the Spirit of God.... There is a quality of warmth and ease in God’s community which contrasts with the icy coldness and hard surfaces of people who jostle each other in mobs and crowds. But more particularly here the oil is an anointing oil, marking the person as a priest.... When we see the other as God’s anointed, our relationships are profoundly affected” (A Long Obedience, pp. 174-75). These other people in the church are not our competition. We are anointed as priests to serve one another. We are each anointed with the Spirit and called to exercise our gifts for the good of the body.
The second image is the dew from Mt. Hermon. In Palestine, dew and rain are equally important. It seldom rains between April and October, and during this period vegetation is dependent on the heavy dews which are common there. “The dews are so heavy that the plants and trees are literally soaked with water at night” (ISBE, vol. 1, p. 941). We can see the importance of dew in that society from passages like Hosea 14:5: “I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily.” Or Micah 4:5: “The remnant of Jacob will be in the midst of many peoples like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass....” The dew gave life and refreshment to an otherwise parched land. The dews were especially heavy on Mt. Hermon, the highest mountain in the region, so the psalmist imagines this dew falling on Mount Zion, as a picture of the experience of unity among God’s people. “The oil flowing down Aaron’s beard communicates a sense of warm, priestly relationship. The dew descending down Hermon’s slopes communicates a sense of fresh and expectant newness” (Peterson, p. 176). Both of these emphasize God’s presence among His people.
These two images point to the fact that we experience true unity in the Church only through God’s transforming power in our midst. The anointing oil symbolizes the Holy Spirit, and dew of Hermon points to God’s refreshing, renewing presence. Unity is not natural to us; we experience it only through the transforming power of God in our midst.
Of course, there have been many attempts to create organizational unity in the past century. There’s nothing wrong with this–although in most cases it hasn’t been successful. But organizational unity, even when it does succeed, is less than what the psalmist is talking about here. In attempting to create unity, we’re often tempted to do one of two things. We either reduce the content of our faith, or we reduce the number of people who, in our estimation, hold to the true faith. In reducing the content of our faith, we’re trying to lay aside our differences in the interest of our more basic unity. There’s wisdom in this, but there’s also a temptation to go too far, to lay aside things that are truly essential to the gospel. That was what happened in many of the mainline churches in the early 20th century. Gresham Machen, the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, wrote a book entitled Christianity and Liberalism in which he argued that liberalism had become a different religion; it had gone so far in its attempts to accommodate that it was no longer Christian.
But there’s also a temptation to become sectarian, to say that all those people who aren’t organizationally tied to us are not true believers anyway (or that maybe they are true believers, but their faith is deficient in some way). When I was in graduate school, my New Testament professor said “you could fit into a thimble the scholars who believe Paul wrote the book of Ephesians.” He was able to say that, not because there aren’t any scholars who believe Paul wrote Ephesians, but because most biblical scholars from the German schools didn’t believe he wrote it, and those who didn’t follow the German schools didn’t count as true scholars. He created a strong majority by excluding all the dissenters.
A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend who had left the Orthodox Presbyterian church because, in his words, “they weren’t faithful to the Westminster Confession” (the Westminster Confession of Faith is the doctrinal statement that Presbyterians–at least conservative Presbyterians–use to define their theological position). As far as I can tell, the Orthodox Presbyterians are as serious about the Westminster Confession as anyone around. (In my view they’re too faithful to the confession). But there were some minor points that this friend wasn’t happy about, and he found a small group of people on the Internet who felt the same way and they formed their own church, a church that really takes the confession seriously (the only one in the area). But if that church lasts for any length of time, they’ll experience other splits, because there will always be some areas where we can’t come to complete unanimity. When we try to create unity by reducing the number of true believers, we set up a process of increasing fragmentation as we continue to separate over our disagreements. I had a friend in graduate school who had so many doctrinal peculiarities–none of them involved him in heresy; he just combined views that usually aren’t seen together in the same person, or even the same denomination–that it was difficult for him to worship anywhere. Even when he was able to get past the differences himself, if he opened his mouth it got him into trouble. People might acknowledge him as a true believer (which he was) but they didn’t think he belonged in their church. And the difficulty was that he didn’t exactly fit in any church.
For the sake of living together in the church we do need to make some concessions with those who don’t fully agree with us. We all have some mixture of truth and error in our theological understanding, and in those areas where God’s people have had centuries of disagreement, we need to allow people the freedom to think differently than we do. Thinking differently in this way will not exclude them from the true Church. We don’t have the right to make the boundaries more strict than God has chosen to make them.
But it’s not this kind of organizational unity that the psalmist is so excited about. This kind of unity is good and desirable, but this psalm is talking about something more. Notice the second half of verse 3: “for there the Lord bestows his blessing.” What is he referring to here? Mt. Zion, which he just mentioned in the previous phrase? Yes, but he’s not thinking primarily about the city of Jerusalem. Mt. Zion, as it’s used in the psalms, usually refers to the dwelling-place of God, the place where God has chosen to make Himself known (Prevost, A Short Dictionary of the Psalms, p. 80). Verse 1 and this closing phrase are closely tied together. Notice that this psalm consists of an opening statement and a conclusion, with two illustrations sandwiched in the middle. The conclusion is tied to the end of the second illustration–there refers to Mt. Zion. But it’s also tied to the opening statement. “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.... For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.” The place where God bestows His blessing of eternal life is Mt. Zion, the place where He makes Himself known, the place where His people unite together in His presence. It’s Mt. Zion, the place where God’s people come together in His name, where “brothers live together in unity.”
So how do we achieve this kind of unity? We recognize our oneness in God’s presence. We come together regularly to worship, not worshiping for what we can get for ourselves, but offering worship and praise to God our Lord and Creator, because He is worthy. And we pray that the oneness we experience in His presence might increasingly become a reality in our daily lives. Paul describes the process in Galatians 5. Christ has set us free from the tyranny of sin and the burden of trying to live under the Law (Galatians 5:1). But that doesn’t mean we just do whatever we want. “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ If you keep on biting and devouring one another, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other” (vv. 13-15). They can use their freedom to indulge the sinful nature, or they can use their freedom to serve one another in love. If they indulge their sinful nature they’ll end up destroying one another.
He goes on to present another contrast. They can either live by the Spirit, or they can live by their old, sinful nature. They can follow their old, sinful way of life, indulging whatever desires they have, and certain things will result. If they live in this way, their lives will be characterized by the works of the flesh, or works of the sinful nature, which will drive them further and further apart: things like hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy (vv. 20-21). But they’re not powerless victims of their old desires. They’ve been given the Holy Spirit, and as they cultivate His presence, as they seek to walk in obedience to God’s Word, trusting in His transforming power, the fruit of the Spirit will become increasingly evident in their lives. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (vv. 22-23).
The more our lives are characterized by the fruit of the Spirit, the more we’ll be living together in unity. Paul concludes his discussion in this way: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. If we are living now by the Holy Spirit, let us follow the Holy Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives. Let us not become conceited, or irritate one another, or be jealous of one another” (vv. 24-26, NLT). Through the Spirit we’ve been given eternal life; we’re living by His power. So we need to follow His leading in every part of our lives. As we trust in His transforming power within us, and seek to live in obedience to God’s Word, we’ll be able to say increasingly, “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity!”
This spirit of individualism seriously undermines the unity of the church, because when we see the church as a gathering of individuals who have chosen to be together, in an institution of our own making and over which we hold control, our commitment to the body is conditional and tentative. If the church is going in a way that pleases us, we’ll stay. But if anything happens that we disagree with, we’ll move somewhere else. Reeves goes on: “What we now have might best be labeled consumer Christianity. The psychologist Paul C. Vitz has observed, ‘The “divine right” of the consumer to choose as he or she pleases has become so common an idea that it operates in millions of Americans like an unconscious tropism.’ Millions of Americans today feel free to buy as much of the full Christian faith as seems desirable. The cost is low and consumer satisfaction seems guaranteed” (p. 21). If our relationship to the church is dominated by a consumer mentality, we’re going to maintain our distance. We’re here primarily to get something for ourselves–that’s the way we approach the marketplace, and it’s appropriate in that setting. When we were living in Elizabethtown there were three grocery stores to choose from. I was in the habit of going to one of them, and I went there for the first few years; even when I wasn’t altogether happy with it, I continued going, because I knew where to find things. But then the employees became increasingly rude and unhelpful, so after this happened to me a few times I quit going and went to the store across the street. The prices were comparable, and they were polite. I had no commitment to the other store. I was only there to buy what I needed, so there was no reason for me to stay there when I was unhappy with their service. This is an acceptable approach to the market place.
But the Church is not a business enterprise. We’re not selling a product. We’re not seeking to enlist people in our cause. Church is not a place where we go to get something for ourselves. The Church is a body of people with whom God has entered into a covenant relationship. In the Church we’re part of a community that has its roots in what God has done in the past and which is dependent on His promises for the future. God is at the center, and His purposes are primary. We’re not in charge here; God is. The Church is not “individuals who have chosen to be together, in institutions of their own making and over which they hold control.” The Church is a body of people whom God has called together, in an institution which He ordained from eternity and over which He exercises sovereign lordship. We’re not in charge here. The Church doesn’t belong to us, and we’re placed here because of His lordship, not because of our own selfish whims.
Remember that these are pilgrim songs. The people of Israel were expected to travel to Jerusalem three times each year to worship at the Temple. They usually traveled in groups, because of the danger from bandits. And worshiping in Jerusalem was a high point in their spiritual lives. In Psalm 133 the psalmist is in Jerusalem worshiping and he looks around at his fellow-worshipers and cries out: “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!” Those who are gathered with him are “brothers.” They’re part of the same family. They’re not just people who by a happy coincidence have found that their felt needs are all being met in the same place. They’re bound together as part of God’s family, and they are living in unity.
But unity is not something that comes naturally to us. Notice the psalmist’s attitude in this opening verse: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!” (The Message). As he looks around at the worshiping crowd, the experience of unity takes him by surprise and he cries out with joy. He’s reveling in the experience of oneness. This series of pilgrim songs begins with a complaint: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I lived among those who hate peace. I am a man of peace; but when I speak, they are for war” (Psalm 120:5-7). His experience in this world has not led him to expect that kind of unity, so when he experiences it in Jerusalem, it catches him by surprise. We set out on pilgrimage from this world, sick of the hatred and strife that are all around us, and we find to our surprise and delight that we are not alone. We are part of a large body; we’ve been included in something that God has been doing for many centuries. And at times, worshiping with these people, we get glimpses into the unity that exists around God’s eternal throne and we cry out in wonder: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!”
Thomas Hobbes, was a 17th century philosopher. After observing human behavior and studying history, he concluded that “Out of civil states, there is always war of every one against every one” (Leviathan, p. 100). He concluded that people are naturally at war with one another, that unless there was an external power to restrain them, this state of war would repeatedly break out into actual violence. He would have agreed with the statement that unity does not come naturally to us. He would have said that our natural tendency is in the opposite direction. Was Hobbes just a cynical, crotchety old academic? A few years ago I heard a woman lecturer who seemed embarrassed that there were once people in the world who thought such things (and she specifically singled out Hobbes, although she misspelled his name and I suspected she was reacting to something she'd heard about him). But when we look around at the condition of the world, when we look at places like Afghanistan or Iraq or parts of the former Soviet Union, when we see how easily the fabric of society disintegrates and the horrible things people do to one another, Hobbes’ assumptions don’t seem so far-fetched. He was more in touch with the observable behavior of humans than those are who think people are basically good and that what they need is just more education.
The psalmist is excited to see brothers getting along with each other. The Bible doesn’t paint a very positive picture about relationships between siblings. The first two brothers we read about in the Bible, Abel and Cain, did not live together in unity. Cain became jealous of his brother’s relationship with God and murdered him. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of his relationship with their father, so they sold him into slavery. And the later historical books of the Old Testament are full of stories about brothers in the royal family fighting for power and killing one another as rivals.
In fact, whenever power is at stake we find unity dissolving. Karl Barth said this about the desire for power: “Where the will for power is present, as it always is, there it is always questionable, and the likelihood is–this is the tragic mistake–that the relativity of creaturely power will be forgotten and secretly or openly the battle [will be] joined for an absolute power–a battle in which man on a small scale or a great can only finally rush into disaster” (Ethics, p. 137). As creatures, we only have the right to a very limited degree of power, but the temptation is always to push for absolute power. The temptation is to be like God, the temptation of Eve in the garden. How many church splits in reality have very little to do with theological differences, and everything to do with the desire for power!
Sin isolates us from one another. We’re all trying to be like God, and living in this way leads to increasing fragmentation in every relationship. Sin separates us from God, because we’re rebelling against His sovereign lordship and seeking to be little gods ourselves. But it also separates us from one another. J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, revolves around a quest to destroy a great ring of power. Sauron, the dark lord, is wholly evil and if he captures the ring the whole world will come under his reign. The fellowship of the ring, those who set out to destroy it, is led by a wizard named Gandalf, the most powerful enemy of Sauron. At one point, a member of the company asks Gandalf to take the ring and use it for good, to destroy Sauron. But he refuses. Using the ring would corrupt him, would turn him into a new dark lord. It would isolate him from the whole company, because they would become rivals, rather than companions. If he used the ring to destroy Sauron, he would become evil himself. Grasping after power, even with the intention of using it for good, would corrupt him. The temptation to be like God turns everyone into a potential rival. Sin separates us from one another (and then, finally, even from ourselves).
And this lust for power, this desire to be in control, frequently enters into the life of the church. The apostle John complains in his third letter about Diotrophes, who “loves to be first,” and is wreaking havoc in the church (3 John 9-10). George Whitefield, the great evangelist of the 18th century, said: “O that I may learn from all I see, to desire to be nothing! And to think it my highest privilege to be an assistant to all, but the head of none. I find a love of power sometimes intoxicates even God’s own dear children, and makes them to mistake passion for zeal and an overbearing spirit for an authority given them from above. For my own part, I find it much easier to obey than govern, and that it is much safer to be trodden under foot than to have it in one’s power to serve others so” (George Whitefield, by Arnold Dallimore, vol. 2, p. 339). Sin separates us from one another, and it frequently deceives us into thinking we’re serving God when we are only serving ourselves. Our natural condition as sinners is not unity. Unity doesn’t come naturally to us.
But even though unity doesn’t come naturally to us, and even though we even seem to enjoy some measure of discord and discontent, when we experience true unity we recognize it as what we’ve been longing for. We began our pilgrimage crying out “too long have I lived among those who hate peace.” Unity in the Church is both precious and refreshing. It’s a foretaste of the life of heaven.
The psalmist uses two images to describe the experience of unity among God’s people. First, it’s “like precious oil poured on the head.” He’s speaking here about the anointing oil that was used to ordain the high priest. Eugene Peterson has a good description of the way oil is used in Scripture: “Oil, throughout Scripture, is a sign of God’s presence, a symbol of the Spirit of God.... There is a quality of warmth and ease in God’s community which contrasts with the icy coldness and hard surfaces of people who jostle each other in mobs and crowds. But more particularly here the oil is an anointing oil, marking the person as a priest.... When we see the other as God’s anointed, our relationships are profoundly affected” (A Long Obedience, pp. 174-75). These other people in the church are not our competition. We are anointed as priests to serve one another. We are each anointed with the Spirit and called to exercise our gifts for the good of the body.
The second image is the dew from Mt. Hermon. In Palestine, dew and rain are equally important. It seldom rains between April and October, and during this period vegetation is dependent on the heavy dews which are common there. “The dews are so heavy that the plants and trees are literally soaked with water at night” (ISBE, vol. 1, p. 941). We can see the importance of dew in that society from passages like Hosea 14:5: “I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily.” Or Micah 4:5: “The remnant of Jacob will be in the midst of many peoples like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass....” The dew gave life and refreshment to an otherwise parched land. The dews were especially heavy on Mt. Hermon, the highest mountain in the region, so the psalmist imagines this dew falling on Mount Zion, as a picture of the experience of unity among God’s people. “The oil flowing down Aaron’s beard communicates a sense of warm, priestly relationship. The dew descending down Hermon’s slopes communicates a sense of fresh and expectant newness” (Peterson, p. 176). Both of these emphasize God’s presence among His people.
These two images point to the fact that we experience true unity in the Church only through God’s transforming power in our midst. The anointing oil symbolizes the Holy Spirit, and dew of Hermon points to God’s refreshing, renewing presence. Unity is not natural to us; we experience it only through the transforming power of God in our midst.
Of course, there have been many attempts to create organizational unity in the past century. There’s nothing wrong with this–although in most cases it hasn’t been successful. But organizational unity, even when it does succeed, is less than what the psalmist is talking about here. In attempting to create unity, we’re often tempted to do one of two things. We either reduce the content of our faith, or we reduce the number of people who, in our estimation, hold to the true faith. In reducing the content of our faith, we’re trying to lay aside our differences in the interest of our more basic unity. There’s wisdom in this, but there’s also a temptation to go too far, to lay aside things that are truly essential to the gospel. That was what happened in many of the mainline churches in the early 20th century. Gresham Machen, the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, wrote a book entitled Christianity and Liberalism in which he argued that liberalism had become a different religion; it had gone so far in its attempts to accommodate that it was no longer Christian.
But there’s also a temptation to become sectarian, to say that all those people who aren’t organizationally tied to us are not true believers anyway (or that maybe they are true believers, but their faith is deficient in some way). When I was in graduate school, my New Testament professor said “you could fit into a thimble the scholars who believe Paul wrote the book of Ephesians.” He was able to say that, not because there aren’t any scholars who believe Paul wrote Ephesians, but because most biblical scholars from the German schools didn’t believe he wrote it, and those who didn’t follow the German schools didn’t count as true scholars. He created a strong majority by excluding all the dissenters.
A couple of years ago I was talking to a friend who had left the Orthodox Presbyterian church because, in his words, “they weren’t faithful to the Westminster Confession” (the Westminster Confession of Faith is the doctrinal statement that Presbyterians–at least conservative Presbyterians–use to define their theological position). As far as I can tell, the Orthodox Presbyterians are as serious about the Westminster Confession as anyone around. (In my view they’re too faithful to the confession). But there were some minor points that this friend wasn’t happy about, and he found a small group of people on the Internet who felt the same way and they formed their own church, a church that really takes the confession seriously (the only one in the area). But if that church lasts for any length of time, they’ll experience other splits, because there will always be some areas where we can’t come to complete unanimity. When we try to create unity by reducing the number of true believers, we set up a process of increasing fragmentation as we continue to separate over our disagreements. I had a friend in graduate school who had so many doctrinal peculiarities–none of them involved him in heresy; he just combined views that usually aren’t seen together in the same person, or even the same denomination–that it was difficult for him to worship anywhere. Even when he was able to get past the differences himself, if he opened his mouth it got him into trouble. People might acknowledge him as a true believer (which he was) but they didn’t think he belonged in their church. And the difficulty was that he didn’t exactly fit in any church.
For the sake of living together in the church we do need to make some concessions with those who don’t fully agree with us. We all have some mixture of truth and error in our theological understanding, and in those areas where God’s people have had centuries of disagreement, we need to allow people the freedom to think differently than we do. Thinking differently in this way will not exclude them from the true Church. We don’t have the right to make the boundaries more strict than God has chosen to make them.
But it’s not this kind of organizational unity that the psalmist is so excited about. This kind of unity is good and desirable, but this psalm is talking about something more. Notice the second half of verse 3: “for there the Lord bestows his blessing.” What is he referring to here? Mt. Zion, which he just mentioned in the previous phrase? Yes, but he’s not thinking primarily about the city of Jerusalem. Mt. Zion, as it’s used in the psalms, usually refers to the dwelling-place of God, the place where God has chosen to make Himself known (Prevost, A Short Dictionary of the Psalms, p. 80). Verse 1 and this closing phrase are closely tied together. Notice that this psalm consists of an opening statement and a conclusion, with two illustrations sandwiched in the middle. The conclusion is tied to the end of the second illustration–there refers to Mt. Zion. But it’s also tied to the opening statement. “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.... For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.” The place where God bestows His blessing of eternal life is Mt. Zion, the place where He makes Himself known, the place where His people unite together in His presence. It’s Mt. Zion, the place where God’s people come together in His name, where “brothers live together in unity.”
So how do we achieve this kind of unity? We recognize our oneness in God’s presence. We come together regularly to worship, not worshiping for what we can get for ourselves, but offering worship and praise to God our Lord and Creator, because He is worthy. And we pray that the oneness we experience in His presence might increasingly become a reality in our daily lives. Paul describes the process in Galatians 5. Christ has set us free from the tyranny of sin and the burden of trying to live under the Law (Galatians 5:1). But that doesn’t mean we just do whatever we want. “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ If you keep on biting and devouring one another, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other” (vv. 13-15). They can use their freedom to indulge the sinful nature, or they can use their freedom to serve one another in love. If they indulge their sinful nature they’ll end up destroying one another.
He goes on to present another contrast. They can either live by the Spirit, or they can live by their old, sinful nature. They can follow their old, sinful way of life, indulging whatever desires they have, and certain things will result. If they live in this way, their lives will be characterized by the works of the flesh, or works of the sinful nature, which will drive them further and further apart: things like hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy (vv. 20-21). But they’re not powerless victims of their old desires. They’ve been given the Holy Spirit, and as they cultivate His presence, as they seek to walk in obedience to God’s Word, trusting in His transforming power, the fruit of the Spirit will become increasingly evident in their lives. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (vv. 22-23).
The more our lives are characterized by the fruit of the Spirit, the more we’ll be living together in unity. Paul concludes his discussion in this way: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. If we are living now by the Holy Spirit, let us follow the Holy Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives. Let us not become conceited, or irritate one another, or be jealous of one another” (vv. 24-26, NLT). Through the Spirit we’ve been given eternal life; we’re living by His power. So we need to follow His leading in every part of our lives. As we trust in His transforming power within us, and seek to live in obedience to God’s Word, we’ll be able to say increasingly, “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity!”
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