Nick Roark's Blog, page 55

“He has removed your sin as far as the east is from the west” by Sam Storms

“I’m not a scientist. Oh, how I wish I were! I simply don’t have the brain for it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try to understand science. The one area of science that has long fascinated me is astronomy.

The sheer magnitude of the universe has always captivated my attention and fueled my imagination. This fixation on the heavens and all they contain was stimulated greatly by the creation of the Hubble Telescope.

What you are about to read is no abstraction that bears no influence on your life. It is far more than mere statistics that account for the size of the universe. I can say that with confidence because of what the psalmist wrote:

He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us. (Ps. 103:10–12)

As you’ve seen from the subtitle of this book, our focus is on not only the dozen things God has done with our sin, but also three things He never will do. Two of them are mentioned here.

God does not and never will deal with us according to our sins. God does not and never will repay us according to our iniquities. We’ll address both of these wonderful truths later on. But here, I want us to focus on the removal of our transgressions from us as far as the east is the from west.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t say something about the intervening sentence. David rejoices in the fact that God’s steadfast love toward those who fear Him can be measured only by the height of the heavens above the earth. David was not an astronomer. He had no grasp of the unimaginable magnitude of the height to which he refers. But we do today.

A good illustration to help us fathom the unfathomable is the light-year. A light-year is how far light travels in 1 calendar year. If you have a big calculator, you can figure it out for yourself. Multiply 186,000 times 60, and you have a light-minute. Multiply that figure by 60, and you have a light-hour.

Multiply that figure by 24, and you have a light-day, and that by 365, and you have a light-year. So, if light moves at 186,000 miles per second, it can travel 6 trillion miles (6,000,000,000,000) in a 365-day period. That’s the equivalent of about 12,000,000 round trips to the moon.

Let’s assume we are speeding in our jet airplane at 500 miles per hour on a trip to the moon. If we traveled nonstop, 24 hours a day, it would take us just shy of 3 weeks to arrive at our destination. If we wanted to visit our sun, a mere 93 million miles from Earth, it would take us a bit more than 21 years to get there.

And if we wanted to reach Pluto, the (dwarf) planet farthest away in our solar system, our nonstop trip would last slightly longer than 900 years! Of course, we’d all be dead by then, but I trust you get the point.

Now, try to get your mind around this: The Hubble Telescope has given us breathtaking pictures of a galaxy some 13 billion light-years from Earth. Yes, 13 billion light-years! Remember, a light-year is 6,000,000,000,000 (6 trillion) miles. That would put this galaxy at 78,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth!

In case you were wondering, we count from million, to billion, to trillion, to quadrillion, to quintillion, to sextillion. So, this galaxy is 78 sextillion miles from earth.

I can barely handle driving for more than 3 or 4 hours at 65 miles per hour before I need to stop and do something, either eat at McDonald’s or, well, you know. The thought of traveling at 500 miles per hour nonstop, literally 60 minutes of every hour, 24 hours in every day, 7 days in every week, 52 weeks in every year, with not a moment’s pause or delay, for—are you prepared for this?—20,000,000,000,000,000 years.

That’s 20 quadrillion years! And that would get us just to the farthest point that our best telescopes have yet been able to detect. This would be the mere fringe of what lies beyond.

Pause for a moment and let this sink in.

Are you beginning to get a feel for what it means to know that God’s love for you, that love that took unimaginable steps to remove the guilt of your sin, is greater than the distance between the heavens and the earth? Take as much time as you need.

If there is a clear sky tonight, go outside and gaze into the expanse above. Pick a star, any star. It seems fairly close. Want to visit? Surely it couldn’t take that long to get there. It almost seems you can extend your hand and touch it.

Well, not quite.

The nearest star to us is a system of three called Alpha Centauri. The closest of those is Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.3 light-years from Earth.

If we were bored with Pluto and wanted to extend our journey, speeding along nonstop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, we would land on the closest star to Earth in a mere 6 million years! That’s 500 miles per hour for 6,000,000 years.

Beginning to get the picture? It’s a very small illustration of how high the heavens are above the earth.

Let’s speed up our travel a bit. Suppose our airplane was fast enough to go from Earth to the sun in only 1 hour. That’s traveling at 93 million miles per hour. Imagine what that would do to the radar gun of your local police department!

Traveling nonstop at 93 million miles per hour, it would still take us over 78 years to reach 61 Cygni, a star in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan), roughly 10.9 light-years from Earth.

If you aren’t satisfied with visiting a single star, perhaps you’d like to take a look at the next galaxy in our cosmic neighborhood. The Andromeda Galaxy is a giant spiral, almost a twin of our own Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have determined that there’s probably a black hole at its center 1 million times the mass of our sun.

Although Andromeda is closest to us it’s still a staggering 2.5 million light-years away (a mere 15 quintillion miles, or 15 followed by 18 zeros). On dark nights in the fall, it’s barely visible to the naked eye as a small misty patch of light. Some are frightened to hear that it’s moving toward us at 75 miles per second.

No need to panic or rush to build a bomb shelter. At that pace, given its distance from earth, it might reach our Milky Way in about 6 billion years! Some say it will take only 3 billion years, so perhaps you should begin working on that bomb shelter after all!

In case you’re wondering—on the assumption that your brain is still able to calculate the seemingly incalculable—our trip to Andromeda would last a paltry 4.2 trillion years (that’s 4, 200,000,000,000 years).

Here’s one more for you to ponder: Shrink the earth to the size of a grapefruit. Pause for a moment and let the scale sink in. On this basis, the moon would be a ping-pong ball about 12 feet away. The sun would be a sphere as big as a 4-story building a mile away. Pluto would be an invisible marble 37 miles away.

Now, put our entire solar system into that grapefruit. The nearest star would be over half a mile away. The Milky Way would span 12,000 miles! Now reduce the entire Milky Way to a grapefruit! The nearest galaxy to us, Andromeda, would be at a distance of 10 feet. The Virgo cluster would be a football field away.

Those calculations are the best I can do to explain how high the heavens are from the earth, all in order to illustrate how “great” God’s steadfast love is for you. Incalculable love. Immeasurable love. Indecipherable love.

King David’s point is that the distance between Earth and this distant galaxy, a mere 78 sextillion miles, is a pathetically small comparison to the likelihood that you will ever be dealt with according to your sins or repaid for your iniquities!

If you were ever inclined to pursue your transgressions so that you might place yourself beneath their condemning power, 78,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles is an infinitesimally small fraction of the distance you must travel to find them!

One of the reasons we struggle to enjoy all that God is for us in Jesus is that we live under the influence of a lie. The lie is that our lifetime of sins, which often feels incalculable, is very close at hand, nearer to us than we feared.

But David’s assurance is that God has removed our sins from us “as far as the east is from the west.” By “remove,” he means that God has taken steps to eliminate any possibility that our sins and acts of idolatry and immorality could ever be used against us to justify our condemnation.

And just how far is the east from the west?

Once again, we should remember that David is not speaking as a scientist. He’s not giving us precise mathematical or astronomical calculations.

He’s trying to describe, as best he can, the utter impossibility that the penal consequences of our sins will ever return upon us. I’m quite sure that the way I will now explain David’s language would be challenged by modern astronomers. But bear with me.

If I were to venture due east from my home in Edmond, Oklahoma, unhindered, undeterred, and in an immovable and unbending straight line, I would soon pass through the states of Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, before crossing the Atlantic Ocean into parts unknown.

If my wife were to do the same going west, we would never again lay eyes on each other. She would travel through northern New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California before passing above the Pacific Ocean. Neither of us would ever reach the end of our journey.

Don’t think of this as two individuals traversing our globe, as if one launched out going east and the other going west, only to encircle the globe and finally bump into each other halfway around the world. David wasn’t thinking in those terms.

His point is that God takes the guilt of our sins and propels them eastward, and takes you and me personally and sends us westward, each on a perfectly straight line.

When and where will the two ever meet up? Never, of course.

And those are the chances, if you will, the odds, that you and I will ever encounter our sins or their power to condemn.

I’ve often wondered why the Spirit of God stirred the hearts of the biblical authors to make use of such extravagant and mind-bending images and illustrations. But I now think I know why.

We—or perhaps I should speak only for myself. I am a hardheaded, slow-witted doofus who lacks the capacity to believe anything so wonderful as this.

Were God to have written in the psalm that He loves us and has taken our sin away, that would, of course, have been enough for some people to fathom. When certain folk hear of the love of God, their response is something along the lines of: “Well, of course He loves me! I’m a lovable person! There’s nothing so surprising about all that.”

But for most of us, knowing ourselves as we do, it takes more than a simple affirmation of divine love for sinners to awaken us to the sheer magnitude of what God has done for us. It takes a comparison of the height of God’s love with the height of the heavens above to drive home the point.

It takes asking me to conceive of the inconceivable distance between east and west to open my eyes to this truth.

I do not easily acknowledge God’s love for me. If I were put in his place, I would never love me!

God knows this, and has thus taken these elaborate verbal steps and the use of seemingly outlandish illustrations to overcome my resistance to the reality of his love.

I hope and pray that it is beginning to sink into your soul as well.”

–Sam Storms, A Dozen Things God Did with Your Sin (And Three Things He’ll Never Do) (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 97-103.

“The enormous advantages enjoyed by believers” by J.C. Ryle

“Let us observe, finally, the peculiar privileges of those who hear the Gospel of Christ.

We read that our Lord said to His disciples, ‘Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them, and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.’ (Luke 10:23-24)

The full significance of these words will probably never be understood by Christians until the last day.

We have probably a most faint idea of the enormous advantages enjoyed by believers who have lived since Christ came into the world, compared to those of believers who died before Christ was born.

The difference between the knowledge of an Old Testament saint and a saint in the apostles’ days is far greater than we conceive.

It is the difference of twilight and noon-day, of winter and summer, of the mind of a child and the mind of a full-grown man.

No doubt the Old Testament saints looked to a coming Saviour by faith, and believed in a resurrection and a life to come.

But the coming and death of Christ unlocked a hundred Scriptures which before were closed, and cleared up scores of doubtful points which before had never been solved.

In short, ‘the way into the holiest was not made manifest, while the first tabernacle was standing.’ (Heb. 9:8) The humblest Christian believer understands things which David and Isaiah could never explain.

Let us leave the passage with a deep sense of our own debt to God and of our great responsibility for the full light of the Gospel.

Let us see that we make a good use of our many privileges. Having a full Gospel, let us beware that we do not neglect it.

It is a weighty saying, ‘To whomsoever much is given, of them will much be required.’ (Luke 12:48)”

–J.C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on Luke (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1858/2012), 1: 280. Ryle is commenting on Luke 10:21-24.

“His riches are ours” by Richard Sibbes

“Christ is a Son; the Spirit tells us we are sons.

Christ is an heir; the Spirit tells us we are heirs with Christ.

Christ is the king of heaven and earth; the Spirit tells us that we are kings, that His riches are ours.

Thus we have ‘grace for grace,’ (John 1:16) both favor and grace in us, and privileges issuing from grace, we have all as they are in Christ.

Even as in the first Adam we receive of his emptiness, curse for curse, ill for ill; for his blindness and rebellion we are answerable; we are born as he was after his fall: so in the second Adam, by His Spirit, we receive grace for grace.”

–Richard Sibbes, “A Description of Christ,” The Works of Richard Sibbes, Volume 1 (ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart; Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1639/2001), 1: 19.

“He requires no more than He gives” by Richard Sibbes

“A weak hand may receive a rich jewel. A few grapes will show that the plant is a vine, and not a thorn.

It is one thing to be deficient in grace, and another thing to lack grace altogether.

God knows we have nothing of ourselves, therefore in the covenant of grace He requires no more than He gives, but gives what He requires, and accepts what He gives.

What is the gospel itself but a merciful moderation, in which Christ’s obedience is esteemed ours, and our sins laid upon Him, wherein God, from being a judge, becomes our Father, pardoning our sins and accepting our obedience, though feeble and blemished!

We are now brought to heaven under the covenant of grace by a way of love and mercy.”

–Richard Sibbes, “The Bruised Reed,” The Works of Richard Sibbes, Volume 1 (ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart; Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1639/2001), 1: 58.

“Bow the knee to Christ in holy awe” by Joel Beeke

“If Christ were not God, there would be no Christianity.

His deity is crucial for our faith. The doctrine of Christ’s full divinity also has massive practical significance for the Christian life.

Here we offer some spiritual directions to help you apply this truth to your life:

1. Recognize the horrible evil of your sins.

William Perkins said,

“No man could save our souls, no, not all the angels of heaven, unless the King of heaven and earth, the only Son of God, had come down from heaven and suffered for us, bearing our punishment. Now the consideration of this must humble us and make us to cast down ourselves under the hand of God for our sins … that some tears of sorrow and repentance might gush out for this our woeful misery.”

2. Trust Christ’s sufficiency for complete salvation.

Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706) said that the doctrine of Christ’s deity

“commends to us the sufficiency and perfection of our Mediator, from which it is said that all fullness dwells in him (Col. 1:19), and He fills all in all (Eph. 1:23), so that from His fullness we can draw grace upon grace (John 1:16); indeed, in Him we are made complete (Col. 2:10).”

In giving Christ for sinners, God has given all of Himself. Surely, then, you can rest upon Christ as all that you need for salvation and eternal life.

You are foolish, but in Christ is all wisdom (2:3).

You by nature are dead in sin, but in Christ is resurrection from the dead (2:13).

You are guilty of many transgressions, but in Christ is complete forgiveness, the cancelling of all our debts (2:13–14).

Brown said,

“He who died on the accursed tree, ‘the just for the unjust,’ is none other than the ‘I Am,’ ” and therefore, “who shall set any limits to the efficacy of His atoning blood and vicarious righteousness?”

You have been a slave of Satan and his demonic forces, but in Christ is total victory against all the powers of darkness (2:15).

In a word, you are empty of all spiritual good, but “ye are complete in Him” (Col. 2:10) if you trust Him and receive Him (2:6–7).

3. Find comfort in Christ’s sonship and your adoption in him.

If you rejoice that Jesus is the Son of God, then you may also rejoice that you are an adopted son or daughter of God by union with him (Gal. 4:4–5; Eph. 1:5).

Perkins said,

“Whereas Christ Jesus is the Son of God, it serves as a means to make miserable and wretched sinners, that are by nature the children of wrath and damnation, to be sons of God by adoption.… Let all such as fear God enter into a serious consideration of the unspeakable goodness of God, comforting themselves in this, that God the Father has vouchsafed by His own Son to make them of the vassals of Satan to be His own dear children.”

4. Bow the knee to Christ in holy awe.

The glory of Christ’s deity calls you to go beyond a consideration of your own salvation and to contemplate the Savior. He does not exist for you, but you and all things exist “for him” (Col. 1:16).

Thomas Goodwin said,

“God’s chief end was not to bring Christ into the world for us, but us for Christ. He is worth all creatures. And God contrived all things that do fall out, and even redemption itself, for the setting forth of Christ’s glory, more than our salvation.”

Therefore, “be swallowed up with profound awe and self-abasement” before the glory of Christ, as Brown said, because when you gaze upon him, you stand in the presence of the holy, holy, holy Lord.

5. Think often and warmly of Christ.

Since Christ is God, you should be thinking about him all the time, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit. This is the taproot of Christian spirituality: to set your mind and desires upon Christ (Col. 3:1–2).

John Owen said,

“The principal actings of the life of faith consist in the frequency of our thoughts concerning him; for hereby Christ liveth in us.… A great rebuke it ought to be unto us, when Christ has at any time in a day been long out of our minds.”

And when we do think of Christ, Owen said, “all our thoughts concerning Christ and his glory should be accompanied with admiration, adoration, and thanksgiving.”

6. Live unto the Lord Christ.

Direct your life and death at him as your great goal and holy ambition (Phil. 1:20–21; 3:8–12). He died and rose again so that His people no longer live for themselves, but for Him (Rom. 14:8–9; 2 Cor. 5:14–15).

Brown said,

“To live to any Being is the highest worship that can possibly be rendered to Him. We are commanded to live to Christ, taking His will as our highest law, and Himself as our highest end of existence.”

The great tragedy of fallen humanity is that we live to ourselves. Brown exclaimed,

“Oh the frightful guilt of this, as seen in the light of the absolute soleness of Jehovah’s glory, that infinite chasm which subsists between him and all creatures whatsoever!.… We transfer from God to ourselves the esteem, the confidence, the fear, the love, the service, which are due only to him.”

Repent, therefore, of living unto yourself, and live unto Christ.

7. Offer yourself to God in gratitude for his Son.

God’s gift of his Son to us displays the infinite depths of his love (John 3:16). Paul says, “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32).

Your only fitting response is to give yourself to God (Rom. 12:1).

Perkins said,

“Whereas God the Father of Christ gave His only Son to be our Savior, as we must be thankful to God for all things, so especially for this great and unspeakable benefit.… We should give unto God both body and soul in token of our thankfulness for this wonderful blessing that He has given His only Son to be our Savior.”

Give yourself to God for Christ’s sake, today and every day of your life, until you see Him face-to-face and are liberated to live wholly and solely for His glory.”

–Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 2: Man and Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 2: 777–780.

“Preaching is the chariot that carries Christ up and down the world” by Richard Sibbes

“Christ must be ‘preached.’ (1 Timothy 3:16)

Preaching is the chariot that carries Christ up and down the world.

Christ doth not profit but as He is preached.

For supernatural benefits, if they be not discovered, they are lost; as we say of jewels, if they be not discovered, what is the glory of them?

Therefore there must be a discovery by preaching, which is the ordinance of God for that end.

Whereupon God stirred up the apostles before, that were the main converters of the world.

They had some prerogatives above all other preachers.

They had an immediate calling, extraordinary gifts, and a general commission. In them was established a ministry to the end of the world.

‘Christ, when He ascended on high and led captivity captive’ —He would give no mean gift then, when He was to ascend triumphantly to heaven— the greatest gift He could give was, ‘some to be prophets, some apostles, some teachers, for the building up of the body of Christ, till we all meet a perfect man in Christ.’ (Ephesians 4:11-13)

‘I will send them pastors according to my own heart,’ saith God (Jeremiah 3:15).

It is a gift of all gifts, the ordinance of preaching.

God esteems it so, Christ esteems it so, and so should we esteem it.”

–Richard Sibbes, “The Fountain Open,” The Works of Richard Sibbes, Volume 5 (ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart; Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1638/2001), 5: 508-509.

“Our help is laid on One that is mighty” by J.C. Ryle

“We should observe, in the fourth place, the majesty and dignity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We read that He said, “All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth who the Son is but the Father; and who the Father is but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him.” (Luke 10:22)

These are the words of one who was very God of very God, and no mere man. We read of no patriarch, or prophet, or apostle, or saint, of any age, who ever used words like these.

They reveal to our wondering eyes a little of the mighty majesty of our Lord’s nature and person. They show Him to us, as the Head over all things, and King of kings: “all things are delivered to me of my Father.”

They show Him as one distinct from the Father, and yet entirely one with Him, and knowing Him in an unspeakable manner. “No man knoweth who the Son is but the Father: and who the Father is but the Son.”

They show Him, not least, as the Mighty Revealer of the Father to the sons of men, as the God who pardons iniquity, and loves sinners for His Son’s sake: “No man knoweth who the Father is but he to whom the Son will reveal Him.”

Let us repose our souls confidently on our Lord Jesus Christ. He is one who is “mighty to save.”

Many and weighty as our sins are, Christ can bear them all.

Difficult as is the work of our salvation, Christ is able to accomplish it.

If Christ was not God as well as man we might indeed despair.

But with such a Saviour as this we may begin boldly, and press on hopefully, and await death and judgment without fear.

Our help is laid on One that is mighty. (Psalm 89:19)

Christ over all, God blessed forever, will not fail any one that trusts in Him.”

–J.C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on Luke (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1858/2012), 1: 279-280. Ryle is commenting on Luke 10:21-24.

“An amazing story about a person you want to be like” by Mark Dever

“Let me tell you an amazing story about a person you want to be like. And please hang in there through some of the details. I can’t tell stories any other way.

John Harper was born in a Christian home in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1872. When he was about fourteen years old, he became a Christian himself, and from that time on, he began to tell others about Christ.

At seventeen years of age, he began to preach, going down the streets of his village and pouring out his soul in passionate pleading for men to be reconciled to God.

After five or six years of toiling on street corners preaching the gospel and working in the mill during the day, Harper was taken in by the Reverend E. A. Carter of Baptist Pioneer Mission in London.

This set Harper free to devote his whole time and energy to the work so dear to his heart—evangelism.

Soon, in September 1896, Harper started his own church. This church, which he began with just twenty-five members, numbered over five hundred by the time he left thirteen years later.

During this time he had been both married and widowed. Before he lost his wife, God blessed Harper with a beautiful little girl named Nana.

Harper’s life was an eventful one. He almost drowned several times. When he was two-and-a-half years of age, he fell into a well but was resuscitated by his mother.

At the age of twenty-six, he was swept out to sea by a reverse current an]d barely survived. And at thirty-two he faced death on a leaking ship in the Mediterranean.

If anything, these brushes with death simply seemed to confirm John Harper in his zeal for evangelism, which marked him out for the rest of the days of his life.

While pastoring his church in London, Harper continued his fervent and faithful evangelism. In fact, he was such a zealous evangelist that the Moody Church in Chicago asked him to come over to America for a series of meetings.

He did, and they went well. A few years later, Moody Church asked him if he would come back again. And so it was that Harper boarded a ship one day with a second-class ticket at Southampton, England, for the voyage to America.

Harper’s wife had died just a few years before, and he had with him his only child, Nana, age six. What happened after this we know mainly from two sources. One is Nana, who died in 1986 at the age of eighty.

She remembered being woken up by her father a few nights into their journey. It was about midnight, and he said that the ship they were on had struck an iceberg.

Harper told Nana that another ship was just about there to rescue them, but, as a precaution, he was going to put her in a lifeboat with an older cousin, who had accompanied them. As for Harper, he would wait until the other ship arrived.

The rest of the story is a tragedy well known. Little Nana and her cousin were saved. But the ship they were on was the Titanic.

The only way we know what happened to John Harper after is because, in a prayer meeting in Hamilton, Ontario, some months later, a young Scotsman stood up in tears and told the extraordinary story of how he was converted.

He explained that he had been on the Titanic the night it struck the iceberg. He had clung to a piece of floating debris in the freezing waters.

“Suddenly,” he said, “a wave brought a man near, John Harper. He, too, was holding a piece of wreckage. “He called out, ‘Man, are you saved?’

“‘No, I am not,’ I replied.

“He shouted back, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.’ (Acts 16:31)

“The waves bore [Harper] away, but a little later, he was washed back beside me again. ‘Are you saved now?’ he called out.

“‘No,’ I answered. ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.’ (Acts 16:31)

“Then losing his hold on the wood, [Harper] sank. And there, alone in the night with two miles of water under me, I trusted Christ as my savior. I am John Harper’s last convert.”

–Mark Dever, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 13-15. For more on John Harper, see Moody Adams, The Titanic’s Last Hero: Story About John Harper (Columbia, SC: Olive Press, 1997), 24–25.

“His praise will know no end” by Jim Hamilton

“The One to whom the Scriptures point, whose coming we await, is the true and better Adam, bridegroom and beloved.

He is the great Priest over the heavenly house of God, giving us the new and living way by which we draw near.

Our Prophet like Moses, by whom God accomplished the fulfillment of the exodus.

The King of God’s creation, He is the righteous sufferer, who Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree.

His praise will know no end.”

–James M. Hamilton, Jr., Typology: Understanding the Bible’s Promise-Shaped Patterns (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2022), 360.

“There is no school like the school of the cross” by John Newton

“I thank you for your condolences and prayers, especially the latter. I am a debtor to the prayers of my friends. The Lord has heard them on my behalf.

I have been, and am, wonderfully supported. My attachment to my dear wife was very strong, indeed idolatrous; yet I have been far from sinking under the stroke.

There is no school like the school of the cross. There men are made wise unto salvation; wise to win souls.

In a crucified Saviour are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

And the tongue of the truly learned, that can speak a word in season to them that are weary, is not acquired, like Greek and Latin, by reading great books; but by self-knowledge and soul exercises.

To learn navigation by the fire-side, will never make a man an expert mariner. He must do his business in great waters. And practice will bring him into many situations, of which his general theory could give him no conception.

I hope my late trial has not be wholly lost upon me. I am willing to live while the Lord pleases, for I am His, and not my own.

Independent of His will, I see little worth living for. I hope, from henceforth, I shall be a pilgrim and a stranger upon earth.

This world is too poor to repair my loss. It is a wound which can only be effectually healed, by Him that made it.

And faithful, indeed, are the wounds of such a friend. (Proverbs 27:6)

May we die daily.

May we live forever.

Amen.”

–John Newton, Wise Counsel: John Newton’s Letters to John Ryland Jr., Ed. Grant Gordon (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2009), 243.

This quote is from a letter written on March 26, 1791, following the death of Mary, Newton’s beloved wife of forty years. Newton preached her funeral sermon from Habakkuk 3:17-18, a passage which he had reserved from his first entrance in the ministry for this particular service, if he should survive her. He later wrote: “The Bank of England is too poor to compensate for such a loss as mine.”