Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 77

What Would Jesus Do?

I’m pretty sure the WWJD? fad is dead and decaying in the landfill of Christian knick-knacks, and good riddance, but the question has always been and continues to be absolutely relevant. The problem was not the question; the problem was the hawking of the question, the branding of the question. But the question, for all that, is still essential to Christian discipleship.

The other problem with the fad was the nearly-immediate indications that the usual evangelical guardrails and idolatries were in full swing. People were interested in asking the question mostly or largely within the preconceived notions of what they already thought Jesus would do. Jesus would be very concerned about the things I’m very concerned about: recycling and reducing my carbon footprint. I haven’t heard about any revivals that broke out wherein the wearers of said bracelets began reading their Bibles carefully and suddenly repented of their previous well-loved sins and began walking in a radical holiness against the rising tide of unbelief. Of course we serve the Lord of the Universe, and I’ll not be surprised to meet a band of brothers in glory who did use the motto to some glorious end, but the point stands in general. There was no wide spread repentance for abortion or homosexuality or porn habits or greed.

And for lots of evangelicals, there were no serious discussions about which tables should be flipped over at the next Mega Super Christian Conference, which Christian leaders should be sarcastically mocked on Facebook, or which evangelical taboos should be joyfully breached. But isn’t that what Jesus did? And suddenly the air goes out of the room, and everyone gets nervous. Turns out the Ben Franklin-Neutered Bible was the one everyone was sort of assuming you’d use to get your ideas from. This is the Disney-fied, warm-feelings gospel of vague sentimentality and saccharine schmaltz. And all of that is bad enough, but there’s an assumption lurking beneath it all that’s even worse.

So the first false assumption is that Jesus only said nice things and did nice things for all the nice people (which is pretty much everybody except Hitler and Stalin and Trump). Jesus was an effeminate, benevolent wizard who went around lisping sweet nothings of kindness and grace and sprinkling glitter on everyone wherever He went. This is problematic on many levels, and chief among them is the fact that it’s just not true. But it’s not true in both directions: it’s not true in the sense that Jesus also mocked hypocrisy, denounced false teachers, intentionally enraged religious leaders, and told stories intending to confuse the listening crowds. But it’s also not true in the other direction: Jesus was not indiscriminately merciful and gracious to all. And this is the other assumption lurking in the shadows: a denial of the particularity of God’s sovereign love.

In other words, Jesus healed some people and not others. He spoke to some people and not others. He explained His parables to some people and not others. He comforted some; He discouraged others.

Now here’s the point: As soon as someone starts trying to actually imitate Jesus and launch a sarcastic takedown of a famous and respected Christian leader for their hypocrisy, all the cries arise about that not being very Christ-like. And then when the fellow points out the fact that Jesus did in fact do that very sort of thing, the immediate comeback is “well, but you’re not Jesus.” To which one good answer is, “I know, but I’m still supposed to try.” But notice that if you stand up and say, “I love everyone!” — you won’t receive the same pushback: “Hold it, bud, you’re not Jesus.” Heh. Not a chance. The assumption is that it’s perfectly acceptable to be indiscriminate with kindness and love and mercy (so-called), but it’s not acceptable to imitate the militance of Jesus.

And the insidious, demonic lie riding beneath all this is the belief that indescriminate “kindness” and “love” and “mercy” are always automatically good, and that hatred and anger and militance are only (at best) occasionally (but only very rarely) good. Love and kindness is a straightforward good; and hatred and anger are dangerous.

But this is not biblical at all.

All of these verbs need direct objects in order to declare their value. Love what? Kind to whom? Mercy to whom? Hate what? Angry at what? Why? By what standard?

God is angry with the wicked every day. Hell is the place where God’s wrath burns forever against evil men. God shows mercy to some, and passes over others. God loved Jacob, and He hated Esau.

What would Jesus do? Sometimes Jesus would not give money to the missionaries. Sometimes Jesus would praise the lavish sacrifice of a costly oil poured on his feet. Sometimes Jesus would rebuke the alcoholic beggar. Sometimes Jesus would heal the blind beggar. Sometimes Jesus would eat with pharisees. Sometimes Jesus would mock the scribes.

Now, from one vantage, this kind of selectivity can only be seen as capricious and random. But from a biblical perspective, God’s selectivity is driven by His infinite wisdom and holy priorities.

Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory…?

(Rom. 9:21-23)

And Jesus says, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect” (Mt. 5:48). In our flesh, we think this means “playing god,” blessing and damning randomly, like two school boys smashing ants on a sidewalk. But Jesus already addressed that problem: “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt. 5:44). And “do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21).

So our task is to learn wisdom, and specifically, we must learn the wisdom of the cross. Far too many Christians think that the wisdom of the cross is a bland, random act of losing that God magically turned into the power of salvation. But it wasn’t that at all. The cross was God’s intentional, premeditated act of loving wisdom, exhaustively calculated to save “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev. 7:9). The cross also included the intentions of wicked men who thought they had put God in a jar. It included the folly of cowardly disciples hiding in the shadows. It included a big rock rolled in front of the tomb and a regiment of soldiers standing outside. It included all the sins of God’s people fully paid for without any remainder. It included all of the rebellion and hypocrisy and brokenness of the saints. It also includes within it the eternal condemnation of all sin, which is great mercy for all of those who trust in Christ and it is the damnation of all those who reject Him. In other words, the cross took all of human history, all our human woe, all our sorrow, all our brokenness, all our guilt and shame into account, and God said to the Devil, ‘Check mate.’ The cross is not a sentimental story about how God feels about the human race. The cross is God’s wise and determined action to deal with the human race once and for all. What would Jesus do? He would freely obey His Father’s will for the joy set before Him.

One of my favorite stories I’ve heard about Jim Wilson’s ministry was the time he had some fellow over to his house who needed counsel, and one of the kids kept running through the room and asking his dad questions. Eventually the guest got a bit upset by this and asked Jim if he could make the kid stop interrupting, and Jim said, “No, I can’t do that. He’s more important than you.”

God’s love is no bland sentimentalism. God’s love is fierce and daring and meticulous and calculated and righteous and lavish and wise. And we are called to imitate that.

God’s Holy Violence

So this last Sunday I continued my sermon series through the Gospel of Luke, coming to Luke 19:28-48, which includes the triumphal entry, Christ weeping over Jerusalem, and the cleansing of the temple. In the course of that message, I said this:

Christians really must get their minds and hearts around the fact that the way of Jesus is the way of a holy violence (Lk. 12:49, 51-53, cf. 14:26-27). To say this out loud in our world is to invite the cries of hate, religious extremism, terrorism, crusades, inquisitions, and abuse-shaming. But the Bible teaches that we will either have the violence and hostility of the cross, the only path of real peace or else there will be violence and hostility in our homes and streets and there will never be peace. There are no other options.

And I tweeted a portion of that yesterday morning. You can read the full outline here or listen to the audio of the sermon here.

Following the sermon, I’ve receive a few questions, specifically wondering if I’m creating confusion by likening the way of Jesus to “violence” or the cross as some kind of active violence. One friend linked to some of Peter Leithart’s work on the word “violence” in Scripture, who argues that it is almost exclusively used to describe immoral, wicked, and malicious acts.

First off, I don’t have any problem with making that lexical-moral-theological point. The biblical usage is significant and striking. The wicked are violent, and while God may use force, bring destruction, and wipe out cities and nations, strictly speaking, the Bible seems to reserve the word “violence” perhaps without exception to acts of the wicked. That is important to note. I’ve made a similar point in a more limited way with the story of the exodus. Strictly speaking, the word “armies” never applies to Pharaoh and his troops. The biblical text says that Pharaoh has chariots and horses and soldiers and might, but it never says that he has “armies” per se. The only uses of the word “armies/hosts” in the exodus narrative always refer to the children of Israel. They are the armies of Lord. And I believe this has some rich theological import for us to consider. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to take this lexical-theological point and then insist that Pharaoh really, historically had nothing that at all resembled “armies.” Likewise, while we can certainly make the lexical-moral point about the word “violence,” we must not be manipulated into a corner where God’s righteous acts are explained away as human fury tampering with the record or else implicitly convicting God of actual immorality.

One of the weaknesses of academics is that sometimes they can be manipulated by the facts. This happens often because academics are busy doing good work in a particular area, and because they are specialists, they aren’t watching the whole field. This is why Christian academics and scholars need pastors (and vice versa). Sometimes pastors are weak on the facts, and they need the specialists holding up their arms in the battle. Pastors need the specialists, and the specialists need pastors.

There are at least a couple of things to consider when it comes to speaking of God’s “holy violence.” While I’m happy to grant that biblically speaking “violence” is ordinarily charged with immorality, it’s important that we not cede ground to the secularists. The primary reason we’re having this conversation (or at least why it can tend to be a somewhat emotionally charged conversation) is because we’ve been groomed by our secular overlords for the last few hundred years to believe that wars and violence and bloodshed are primarily caused by “religion.” Our enlightened secularist priest-nannies remind us regularly in soothing tones that secularism is the solution to all of our religious fits and tantrums. And part and parcel with this is the constant barrage that the God of the Old Testament is blood-thirsty, tyrannical, abusive, and, among other things, a moral monster. “I could never believe in a God who… destroyed the world with a flood, nuked Sodom and Gomorrah, ordered Israel to slaughter men, women, and children during the conquest of Canaan, commanded the stoning of sodomites and adulterers, etc.”

I have no problem at all insisting that strictly speaking the Bible refuses to categorize any of those divinely sanctioned judgments as “violence,” given the fact that they were ordered by God and therefore were completely just and holy and good. But our enemies (and our Enemy) are often more crafty than we are. If the Christian scholar or preacher, does in fact celebrate the goodness of God in destroying Sodom and Gomorrah and Jericho and Agag the Amalekite and dashing Babylonian babies against the rocks (Ps. 137:9), then I have no qualms with him. But often, perhaps unintentionally, the lexical move is the prelude to compromise, retreat, and eventual surrender. Please read me carefully: I’m not accusing anyone in this current conversation of doing that, but I am generally concerned that the Church is a skittish pony that jumps at the slightest sounds of offense and reprimand. In other words, call me jumpy, but there are a lot of incentives out there for people to downplay the holy war of God against all sin and evil and our record is pretty miserable. And if you can’t see that, you aren’t paying attention and are not qualified to be part of this discussion. If your primary concern is that using the phrase “holy violence” may incite Christian terrorism, then congratulations, you’ve been thoroughly discipled by the High Priests of Modern Secularism.

And here’s how I know: Do you have the same concern when you read Jesus when He says:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. (Matt. 10:34)

If not, why not?

If not, then you aren’t reading the Bible carefully. You have been trained to read the Bible with soothing secular lullabies thrumming in your ears. Wake up.

The centerpiece of God’s holy war is the cross of Jesus. The cross was a most brutal and violent act by wicked men, and yet, God, without engaging in anything sinful, commandeered that violence for His own purposes such that the sin of His people was laid on Him who knew no sin in order that the wrath of God against sin might be satisfied. In the cross, Paul says that God was “killing the hostility” that exists between God and man (Eph. 2:16). In this way, Jesus is our peace, our only peace. And the call of the gospel is to take up this cross and follow Jesus, in this way of peace. That call to repentance and obedience is a call to join Jesus in laying our lives down, but this is not merely a passive thing. The New Testament describes this as warfare, a holy war. Jesus says that the hand that causes us to sin should be cut off and the eye that causes us to sin should be plucked out (Mt. 5:29-30). Paul says that we must put to death what is earthly in us (Col. 3:5). “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). The mortification of the flesh is an active, daily crucifixion of our old man, a holy hatred and violence against the flesh. As John Owen put it, “be killing sin or it will be killing you,” and “let not that man think he makes any progress in holiness who walks not over the bellies of his lusts.” Add to this the command that we put on the full armor of God and wrestle against the powers of darkness (Eph. 6). Or again:

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, but ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete (2 Cor. 10:3-6).

Finally, I would remind folks of Hebrews 11. There in Hebrews 11, we are told that the heroes of the faith engaged in many different acts of obedient faith. Some left homes and families, some received power to bear children, some rejected the fleeting pleasures of this world, but some “through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (Heb. 11:33-34). In other words, while the Bible is clear that the center of warfare is the cross of Jesus, obedience, and repentance, and the weapons for that warfare are not of the flesh — nevertheless that same faithful obedience and repentance will sometimes require acts of self-defense, civil disobedience, execution of criminals, and just war (e.g. Dan. 6, Acts 4, Rom. 13). While I do believe that the herem war motifs of the Old Covenant were pointing to the cross, mortification of sin, the Great Commission, and ultimately Hell itself, obedience to Jesus still requires justice in the public square, and when the Word of God requires it, the use of judicious and holy violence. Let the secularists shriek, but we will obey the Lord Jesus.

“Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, ‘So will Babylon the great city be thrown down with violence, and will be found no more…” And when that happens, the people of God will shout, “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just…” (Rev. 18:21, 19:1)

Can you shout Hallelujah? There is no other way to have the peace of God.

“The Lord goes out like a mighty man,

like a man of war he stirs up his zeal;

he cries out, he shouts aloud,

he shows himself mighty against his foes” (Is. 42:13).

 

Photo by Henry Hustava on Unsplash

Beauty, Lust, and Nothing

Lust is hunger for nothing.

Lust is the primeval, fallen instinct and demand for nothingness, nihil.

Lust or covetousness is idolatry, the worship of idols.

And idols are literally, nothing (1 Cor. 8:4).

Lust is the worship of nothingness, blankness, emptiness, the dark, the formless, the void.

Why?

Why do we desire nothingness?

Because we desire to make reality for ourselves. We desire to make ourselves, our own meanings, our own futures, our own universe, or as Oprah might put it, our own truth.

This is why the New Testament so often warns against evil desires, lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes. Lust is not just a minor or even somewhat perverse sexual desire. One of the great tricks of the devil has been to isolate “lust” to the category of sexual desire. Of course lust happens there, but biblically speaking, lust is something far broader and deeper and cosmic in nature. It includes sexual rebellion and anarchy, but it is actually the foundational desire for all rebellion, all anarchy, all lawlessness, all self-deification. This is why there can be no coherence or status quo for the sexual revolution. It is necessarily nihilistic. It cannot stop until there is nothing, until everything that has been made has been unmade.

Many times in the New Testament lust is tied to the flesh, desires for things, for stuff, for gratification:

“And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful” (Mk. 4:19).

But the Bible also frequently describes lust as far more cosmic, as something reaching down into the very core of reality:

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (Jn. 8:44).

“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of this world” (1 Jn. 2:16).

The lust of the flesh, the lust of our eyes is full of the worldly pride of the devil.

“Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves…” (Rom. 1:24).

This lust flows directly from the rejection of God our Maker and the worship of created things (idols) in place of God. Lusts arise from that origin, the desire to displace God our Maker.

“This I say then, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other…” (Gal. 5:16-17, cf. Rom. 6:12, 7:7-8, Eph. 2:3, 4:22, Col. 3:5, 1 Thess. 4:5, 1 Tim. 6:9).

Many of these New Testament references frame lust as the crucial point of battle for the Christian, warfare between God’s Spirit and our former self or the remaining rebellion in our flesh. These lusts are not merely the desire to gratify some particular appetite, they are flash points of the deeper, ancient desire to dethrone God, to unmake and remake the world according to our own whims, to be our own maker, to be the captains of our destinies, to be gods.

Let me connect the dots a little more.

Lust for food, for sex, for wealth, for respect, for intimacy, for love – on the surface, it can be difficult to see how these can be desires for nothing. Because of course that is not at all what we think we are desiring. What we think we want is that thing, that experience.

But this is the insidiousness of lust. That thing, that precious, that experience, that pleasure does not exist. The devil holds out an image, a picture, an imaginary offer, a mirage. But you say, yes it does exist! I saw it on the commercial. I saw the joy on her face, the pleasure in his eyes. I’ve imagined being loved like that, desired like that, cherished like that. Exactly. You’ve imagined it. It was a picture, a movie. It isn’t real. It’s fabricated. You’ve seen an image that seems to depict joy, happiness, pleasure, but it’s an image, an icon, an idol. It isn’t real.

Ok, you say, but I know my friend is real. I’ve seen her marriage, her car, her body, his job, his family, his leadership. She is real; he is real. Yes, of course they are real, and it very well may be that they truly enjoy those gifts. But lust imagines that you could steal them for yourself. Lust imagines taking what is not yours and enjoying it as though it were. But this is the thing: that’s impossible. You cannot actually steal what is not yours and enjoy it as though it is. Yes, you can steal another man’s car, another man’s job, another man’s wife, but when you have done so, you will find that you don’t actually have what they had. Because it turns out that the enjoyment and pleasure in the gifts of God is all bound up in the fact that these things are gifts from God, received with joy and thankfulness.

So there we are again, recognizing that lust and covetousness is not merely desiring something that is not yours – it is actually desiring nothingness, desiring the world unmade, the gifts of God un-given, so that you can remake the world according to your own wisdom. This is why lust is not merely a little bit of foolish daydreaming. The Bible describes it as central to the great war:

“For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts…” (2 Tim. 3:6).

“For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world…” (Tit. 2:11-12).

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Tim. 4:3-4).

All of this is why when it comes to the triumvirate of virtues: truth, goodness, and beauty, Christians must always insist on a hierarchy with truth at the top, followed by goodness, and beauty the necessary derivative of truth and goodness, but not the other way around. Men naturally want pleasures and joy without sound doctrine. This is what lust always wants: pleasure and beauty and joy without truth. Itchy ears turn away from the truth. Lust is the demand for fables.

In other words, beauty does not exist by itself. True beauty is only and always the glory and radiance of truth and goodness. But the moment beauty is divorced from the foundation of truth and goodness it is offering a false world, a mythological world, a non-existent world of beauty apart from God’s truth and goodness. Of course sin and rebellion in God’s world is always parasitic. Sin and rebellion only exist by secretly drawing their strength from the truth they hate and despise. Who gave you that mind? Those hands? Those eyes? That breath in your lungs? Those feelings throbbing in your heart? The One who made you has given you those gifts, those gifts we so quickly use to demand nothingness, that the world be unmade, and remade, according to our lusts. Talk about fables.

So then, the end of our lusts is literally nothing. There is nothing there. It is cold, dark, and utterly lonely.

But we serve the God who creates ex nihilo. We serve the God speaks light into our darkness, who speaks life into our death. We serve the God who does not leave us in our vain imaginations. We serve the God is the Truth, which is to say the God who is the only foundation of all goodness and beauty. He came for us in the person of His Son, the Truth in flesh, in order to tell the truth about our sin and folly, in order to stand in our place, to receive that deep and furious judgment due to us, in order to bring us home, in order that the truth might set us free. Seen in this light, self-control, temperance, sobriety, and modesty – these are not virtues that deny the goodness of this world in any way. Rather, they are emphatically the virtues that ground us precisely in the goodness of this world. They understand that all the false offers of pleasures and self-seeking are fables, myths, fleeting sparks that fade to black. But the truth of God, the sound doctrine of God, is the foundation of all beauty. And at His right hand are pleasures forevermore.

 

Photo by Wexor Tmg on Unsplash

Fresh Supplies of Grace

Temptations work for good, as they engage the strength of Christ. Christ is our Friend, and when we are tempted, He sets all His power working for us. ‘For in that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted’ (Heb. 2:18). If a poor soul was to fight alone with the Goliath of hell, he would be sure to be vanquished; but Jesus Christ brings in His auxiliary forces, He gives fresh supplies of grace. ‘And through him we are more than conquerors’ (Rom. 8:37). Thus the evil of temptation is overruled for good.

-Thomas Watson

The Right Kind of Argument

A good Christian is not a grave to bury God’s mercies, but a temple to sing His praises… The mercies of God quicken. As they are lodestones to love, so they are whetstones to obedience… He argues from the sweetness of mercy to the swiftness of duty. He spends and is spent for Christ; he dedicates himself to God.

-Thomas Watson

 

Retreating with Dignity

The Protestant church in the West has largely succumbed to a plan of cultural engagement that might be called retreating with dignity.

In disobedience to the express command of Jesus to disciple the nations, teaching them to obey everything God has commanded, the Reformed and Evangelical churches of the West have decided that this would be too dangerous, too costly, and we’d prefer to run to catacombs cheerfully, without any of the bloodshed of actual martyrdom, but then talk about being in the catacombs as if we were just as brave and courageous as those first Christians. This is the spiritual equivalent of buying pre-ripped jeans at Old Navy.

Of course people don’t just come out and say that they’re planning to retreat and disobey Jesus. It isn’t cool to say that you’re afraid. That would be unseemly. So it’s all couched in Bible verses and pious sounding theologizing. And then decade after decade, we, for some reason, find ourselves on a cultural reservation getting smaller and smaller, and it’s just a deep mystery found in the recesses of the providence of God and in the fact that there are still more books to write and conferences to plan that help fund my comfortable upper middle-class lifestyle (that I will routinely signal the requisite white guilt about). Or something.

So let me give you an example. A couple days ago, I tweeted out a link to an article on The Gospel Coalition Canada website, with my comment: “This is what it looks like for God’s people to defend Baal worship in our day.” The article was entitled “Speaking the Truth in Love,” and of course that is a line from the Bible, but the application of that verse has become such a distortion of anything Paul had in mind on the topic, you should pretty much just read that line in the vast majority of articles so-titled, as “I’m getting ready to compromise, but I plan to do so in style.” And sure enough, Dr. Steven West does not disappoint us.

One question I received about this was whether there was anything Dr. West actually said that was objectionable or whether it was the implication of what it seemed like he meant. And actually it was both. The compromise begins early on when he writes:

In contemporary English, gender-inclusivity is normative. So instead of saying, “When a doctor goes about his rounds,” in contemporary English we say, “When a doctor goes about their rounds.” Instead of saying, “We need peace for every man,” the normative expression would be, “We need peace for everybody [or every person, or every human being].”

Gender-inclusivity does not specify a male or female gender when the class being referred to is not gender-specific. Since both men and women can be doctors, a gender-inclusive word is preferred when referring to doctors as a generic category. This widely accepted convention, however, is not what the gender-neutral pronoun debate is about.

Actually, Dr. West, you are wrong. Just because this convention is “widely accepted” does not mean that it is not what the gender-neutral pronoun debate is about. This is a great example of evangelical amnesia, another contributing factor in our decades-long retreat. Frequently what evangelicals come to accept as “widely accepted convention” turns out to be last decade’s defeat. We lose a battle, accept the terms of surrender, and then when the same enemy shows up five years later, we immediately forget that it was the same enemy who took us out to the wood shed last time. And when that same enemy shows up again asking for 100 more acres, our alzheimer-ridden seminary professors stand up and clear their throats and assure everyone that this has nothing to do with what happened last time. No, this has nothing to do with that, they wave their hands about nervously, this is a “widely accepted convention” and very, very “normative.” Nothing to see here, people.

Yes, Dr. West, the “gender inclusive” movement most certainly does have to do with the “gender neutral pronoun” movement. It has to do with whether Jesus is Lord or not. It has to do with whether the Bible is God’s authoritative word to us and the standard that we must love and the standard that we must teach the nations to love. Has God said anything in His word about nouns and pronouns? Has He said anything particularly about the relationship between the words we use and the genders/sexes they refer to? Yes, as a matter of fact, He has. In fact, He did so right at the very beginning when He created man. And by “man” I mean what God says that word can and does often mean: both men and women. Man can refer both to a human of the male sex and can also refer to both men and women collectively. It is, in the terminology of our preening overlords, “gender inclusive.”

Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them man when they were created (Gen. 5:2).

This means that the ordinary, generic way that God instructs us to refer to people in general is after man. God created us. We did not create ourselves. Therefore, God gets to name us. And God named us (all of us) man. This same pattern continues throughout the Bible, up to and including the New Testament in the gospel itself. Paul says,

For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise… And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. (Gal. 3:26-29, 4:6-7)

So notice what Paul says. He says that all (male and female) are sons. Why? Because Jesus is the new Adam, the new Man, and because He is the Son of God. There is no other salvation, no other inheritance to be found in God. There is only the inheritance of the perfect Son. Therefore, to be a Christian is to be in the Son, and to receive the Spirit of the Son. Therefore “son” is another gender inclusive word, because of the facts of our salvation and because God says so. And we should not miss the fact that all of this is why it is perfectly reasonable and fully biblical for Christians to be addressed as “brothers.” Despite the mincing and prancing of the editors of the ESV, we do not need their censorious footnotes reminding us constantly that “brothers” means “brothers and sisters.” Yes, thank you, but the whole Bible explains that fact. We all fell in Adam our first covenant head, and there is no salvation outside of Jesus, our new covenant head. Therefore, Dr. West, while it is true that both men and women can be doctors, and a gender-inclusive word is preferred when referring to doctors as a generic category, you are wrong to say that “man” and “he” are not inclusive terms. The Bible says that “man” is an inclusive term. You are disobeying and disregarding God’s clear word on this matter.

The connection between this disobedience to God’s Word in one place and the next one being offered is the simple question: Does God’s Word give us direction here in our use of nouns and pronouns? Dr. West frames the question in terms of freedom — is a Christian free to adopt a rebellious pronoun for the sake of winning his brother?

Let’s try this logic on in a couple of ways:

Is a Christian free to adopt racially derogatory epithets in order to minister to white supremacists? Would it be OK for the sake of loving those sinners to adopt their preferred names for classes of people they believe are inherently inferior to them? You’d (presumably) say of course not. Why? Because that would be offensive to the various people those racial slurs refer to. That use of language is humiliating and degrading. Exactly right. And ze and zir and calling biological males “she” is a degrading slur of a far higher magnitude than any racial slur. Our God-given sex is more fundamental, more essential to who we are as human beings than what land our ancestors came from or what shade of skin we have. The animus behind this pronoun swapping is far more spiteful and hateful than anything any Simon Legree ever came up with. It is a curse flung at Heaven and a middle finger pointed at every human being made male and female in the image of the Living God. And while we’re here: where are all the Christians pleading for loving the white supremacists? Where are the appeals to the fact that this is a very complex pastoral challenge, ministering to these racists? How many racists are you close friends with, my brother? How many have you ministered to? O, you mean loving those kinds of sinners is different? You mean it isn’t cool, isn’t sexy? Right… because this isn’t actually about obeying the living God, it’s about setting up Baals on the high places on the sly. Which leads me to my next example.

Dr. West’s logic is no different than a pastor standing up in the first century A.D. asking: Is a Christian free to put a little incense in a fire? Certainly, a Christian (or anyone for that matter) shouldn’t be coerced into putting incense on an altar. But what if given the context, given the situation, doing so would allow a Christian to build relationships with certain pagans, to show those pagans the love of Christ? It’s just incense in a fire, after all. Right, tell that to Daniel and his three friends. Tell that to the thousands who have lost their lives rather than worship any god but the living and true God. Everybody knows putting a pinch of incense on the altar is how you worship the emperor as a god. That altar is dedicated to Zeus or Aphrodite. And the thing we need to understand and see clearly is that gender neutral pronouns are a religious altar dedicated to the false god Demos — the deity of the whims and demands of a rebellious people.

And this is what I meant by defending Baal worship. Idols and false gods always pose as authorities and powers. The reason no one is wringing their hands about ministering to white supremacists is because they have so little power in our day. But everyone knows that in the current pantheon certain victims and minorities have been granted a sacred, priestly status. So-called transgenders, sodomites, lesbians have been granted the power. Therefore everyone is worried about offending them. They are sacred and to hurt their feelings is to sin against them and blaspheme. But what of the white supremacists? Is there any call to be careful about the language you use about them? No, they’re like pedophiles and rapists and they receive the rage and hate and spite of our mad, capricious world. Of course these are heinous sins, but that is because God says so, not because Demos says so. So who are you most afraid to offend? That is your god. All the Christians making room to go soft on what the Bible says in the name of loving unbelievers are afraid of those people. That is the high place they are tolerating, the Baal worship they are defending. But you cannot serve God and mammon. You cannot be a witness for Jesus while disobeying Him.

There are many linguistic conventions that vary from culture to culture, language to language, and there is such a thing as honest poetic and stylistic freedom that exults in Christ and the way He has made the world. But rebellion is also a widely accepted convention. That’s what this whole movement is about:

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us’ (Ps. 2:3).

So enough with this foolish naivete. He who sits in the heavens laughs. We are Christians, bought with the blood of Christ. He is Lord. He is Lord of language. He is the Lord of pronouns. He has spoken, and therefore, we must not be silent. He has spoken, and we must tell the truth. Jesus has been given all authority in heaven and on earth. He is our God; we must fear Him. What pleases Him? What offends Him? He has sent us out into the world to disciple the nations, and this includes teaching all of them how to use pronouns properly.

 

Photo by Jed Adan on Unsplash

The Anxiety of Ahaz

Introduction

Unbelief rarely descends like lightning. Apostasy doesn’t happen over night. Men do not wake up one morning and decide to ruin their lives. Unbelief happens like erosion, like water slowly freezing, like a pipe slowly corroding. The process is almost imperceptible. Hearts harden by a million moments, clenched fists, gritted teeth, bracing against pain and agony, loss and disappointment. And near the center of it all is fear.

Unbelief has a tragic, self-fulfilling logic about it. Fear begets fear. Anxiety begets anxiety. Bracing against another hurt, another disappointment, that very bracing, reflexive defensiveness almost guarantees the next disappointment. Self-protectiveness, worry, anxiety can’t help but see anything and everything that isn’t expected or according to plan as some kind of micro- or macro-aggression. Everything is going wrong; everything is coming apart; nothing is going as planned. And quickly this fearful, defensive mindset is projected on everyone and everything else. I think this way, therefore, everyone else must think this way too. I think this way, and therefore, the world must be this way.

Ahaz the Anxious

What kind of man burns his own sons in fire? What kind of man does this? A terrified man, a man enslaved by fear. Ahaz became king of Judah when he was only 20, and all the indications are that his life was characterized by fear, anxiety, dread, massive insecurities. He walked in the ways of the kings of Israel. He made metal images of the Baals. He sacrificed and made offerings on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree. He was paranoid, obsessed with what the nations around him were doing. They afflicted him, and he obsessed over them. When he saw the altar of Tiglath-Pileser, King of Assyria in Damascus, he ordered one just like it built in the temple in Jerusalem. And then he proceeded to remodeled a bunch of the temple because of the King of Assyria. He was anxious, obsessed, insecure. And Chronicles says that “in his distress, he became yet more faithless to the Lord for he sacrificed to the gods of Damascus that had defeated him and he said, ‘Because the gods of the kings of Syria helped them, I will sacrifice to them that they may help me.’ But they were the ruin of him and all of Israel” (Chron. 28:22-23). Eventually Ahaz even shut up the doors of the temple and only worshipped other gods making offerings on all of the high places. And yes, he even offered his own sons in the fires of Molech. That tragic, anxious logic is seen here: fear of loss, fear of death, fear of pain, fear of failure, fear of losing the kingdom leads to Ahaz willingly causing loss and death and pain and destruction. Surely he thought there was no other way. He felt trapped. There’s nothing else I can do.

It was at some point during these days when the king of the northern kingdom of Israel and the king of Syria banded together to attack Jerusalem. And the heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook like the trees of the forest shake before the wind (Is. 7:2). This was no passing anxious thought, not just a little worry. This was a practiced, studied panic. It was his old friend, fear, and not without reason. Previously those two kings had struck Judah and killed 120,000 men of valor in one day (2 Chron. 28:6). You see? This world is a terrifying place. Horror happens. Tragedy strikes. Things go terribly wrong. How you can not be afraid?

When the Truth Comes

But the Lord sent the prophet Isaiah to Ahaz in order to say to him, “Be careful, be quiet, do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint… It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass… And within sixty-five years Ephraim will be shattered from being a people…” And again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be as deep as Sheol or high as heaven” (Is. 7:11). But Ahaz would not ask. Ahaz had practiced his unbelief and anxiety for many years. He had nurtured his fears. His heart could not hear the offer of the Lord to comfort him. What went through Ahaz’s head? Who knows? Did he think it was a trick? Was it a set up? Was he being mocked? Could he simply not believe that what he was being told was true? How could such mighty nations be gone so quickly? Perhaps it seemed impossible for things to change.

When you practice fear and anxiety and worry, the truth seems worthless. This is because fear and anxiety function on counterfeit truth, that is, lies that pass themselves off as truth, or at least possible truth. What if that happens? And then what if that happens? And then what if… ? And the questions and concerns and fears quickly crowd the mind. And untrue conclusions and results start looming up seemingly more and more likely to come to pass. This sickness, that problem at work, these children, my marriage, my parents, my bills… and our worries and fears come to be taken as truth. Our circumstances seem like immoveable realities. And when truth comes we can have practiced our fears so diligently that we are impervious to the truth. The truth seems ridiculous, outlandish, maybe even offensive.

But God chose Ahaz, a wicked man, a hardened fool, as the one to first hear His solution to all fear, all anxiety, all dread, all panic. “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Is. 7:14). What a strange sign. And there are many puzzling aspects to the prophecy. How is that sign exactly related to the situation Ahaz and Judah were facing? Was it fulfilled in some way during those days? Regardless, Matthew says it was fulfilled at the birth of Jesus.

And yet, the sign is also the answer to the fear of Ahaz, to the dread of Judah, to the anxiety and worry that enslaves all men. The solution cannot come from us. We cannot deliver ourselves from this situation. We cannot heal ourselves. We cannot fix ourselves. We cannot save ourselves. We cannot protect ourselves from every eventually, from every threat, or death itself. Perhaps the most insidious element of fear is the hidden pride down at its core. It’s one thing to be afraid of heights or war or childbirth, a certain natural, human fear. But it’s another thing entirely to be ruled by fear, to be enslaved by insecurity and worry and dread. And those habits are always a sort of grasping for security, grasping for control, grasping for the feeling of safety, but they are always ultimately based on the assumption that we can do something to fix ourselves. If I just get this put right. If I just start eating more healthy. If I just get a different job. If I just get married or have a baby or fill in the blank… then I’ll be OK, then I will feel safe and secure. But it’s not true. It’s never true. You go from one high place to another, from one hill to another, from one green tree to another. But you cannot summon up your salvation. You cannot summon up your Savior – any more than a desert can produce a garden or a virgin can conceive a child.

Conclusion

I remember when my wife and I had been married a couple of years and we had not been able to get pregnant. We sought out some medical advice, and we were told that we might not ever have children. That was incredibly hard news for us. And it might have completely crushed us. It might have hardened us. It might have made us fear what else was to come, what else was to go wrong. It might have turned us in on ourselves in fear and anxiety and disappointment and hurt. But in God’s kindness, He taught us to fight fear and anxiety. And the odd thing, the wonderful thing is that I don’t really know where it came from. One day as we were still reeling from this news, we decided to thank God for our situation. And we so we did. We thanked God for not giving us any children. And it became our habit for some time when we prayed to thank God for not giving us any children, and then in the same prayer, in almost the same breath, we would also ask God to give us children. God taught us to fight fear and anxiety, and he taught us to do that by giving thanks. This is what Paul says, “do not be anxious for anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:6-7). Giving thanks to God is how the peace of God guards our hearts and minds. Looking back, I have no idea where that came from. And yet, of course I do. God was with us.

This was the sign for Ahaz, and his response should have been praise. It should have been thanksgiving. God promised to be with wicked, anxious, doubting Ahaz. He promised to be Immanuel, but he could not hear it. He would not hear it. His heart was hard in its anxiety and fear. But it’s still the sign for us all. We need God to come for us. We need God with us. We need Immanuel. We need the son of Mary to be born for us; we need the son of Mary to be born in us so that He may take away our fear.

Do Not Give Your Strength to Women

The book of Proverbs ends with King Lemuel giving an oracle that his mother taught him. It begins with the question that many mothers have asked many sons over the centuries:

“What are you doing, my son? What are you doing, son of my womb? What are you doing, son of my vows?” (Prov. 31:2).

Not much has changed in three millennia. Heh.

But then his mother warns him saying, “Do not give your strength to women, your ways to those who destroy kings” (Prov. 31:3).

There are several lines of fruitful thought here. First, don’t miss the fact that a woman is warning her son about other women. Second, the warning is specifically about a man giving his strength to women. And the concluding thought is related. As is often the case with Proverbs, the second line is an elaboration of the first. By giving his strength to women, Lemuel puts his kingdom in jeopardy.

Looking back in Proverbs, we see at least one direct application of this when Solomon warns his sons about the forbidden woman:

“For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil, but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps follow the path to Sheol… Keep your way far from her, and do not go near the door of her house, lest you give your honor to others and your years to the merciless, lest strangers take their fill of your strength, and your labors go to the house of a foreigner…” (Prov. 5:1-10)

Surely Solomon has many things in mind here by “strength” — a man’s wealth, his energy, his labors — everything he has worked hard for will be sucked away by the black hole of the forbidden woman. Specifically, all of his labors will go to the house of a foreigner. Again, in the case of a king, this means the end of the kingdom. A kingdom’s security depends directly on the security of the king.

But this can happen in various ways, some obvious and explicit, some more subtle and implicit. Samson is a great and obvious example. He literally gave a woman the secret of his physical strength and thereby lost it all. Solomon is another example. He intermarried with many foreign wives and took many concubines, presumably for political gain and expediency. This was the way of the nations around Israel — daughters and sisters were given as wives to kings as demonstrations of allegiance and political alliance. There were likely some political consequences of this folly during Solomon’s reign but the greatest consequence was this:

“For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after others gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father… Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem. And so he did for all his foreign wives, who made offerings and sacrificed to their gods” (1 Kgs. 11:4, 7-8). 

But all of this can still seem too abstract. Solomon’s heart was turned away from the Lord his God by his foreign wives, and this results in him spending enormous time, energy, money, man-labor on worthless and evil things. Remember the energy and strength and resources needed to build the temple of God. Now multiply that times 700 for worthless projects. But his strength was actually already being given away in the process of getting married to all of these women. Even assuming these marriages were a matter of quick transactions with little formality (or dignity), Solomon is already giving his strength away in hours, attention, care for something that God had prohibited. “You shall not enter into marriage with them…” (1 Kgs. 11:2) and “[the king] shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away…” (Dt. 17:17).

But this is the point: The glory of men is their strength. When Paul exhorts the Corinthians to be strong, he admonishes them to “act like men” (1 Cor. 16:13). This strength means sacrificial obedience to God. It means obeying God all the way up to and including death. This is the pattern that Jesus, the perfect man, gave to us in His life and death. This glory of masculine strength is to be used for the good and protection of women, but this glory is not to be given away to women. This is the downfall of homes, churches, kingdoms, and civilizations.

And here’s where I will put my foot in the cow pie of modern sensibilities and track it through the house. Many Christian men give their strength to Christian women. Christian men give their strength away to their wives. Christian men give their strength to elders’ wives, deacons’ wives, city council women, savvy business women. And here I’m not talking about any kind of overt sexual sin. I’m not talking about the youth pastor running off with one of the secretaries. I’m not talking about committing adultery and affairs and the inevitable sexual abuse that follows those cultures — although that is one of the consequences that often comes with this whole package. I’m talking about what’s happening three miles up that river, long before any inkling of sexual sin enters the mind. And it often happens in the name of sacrifice. A man thinks he’s being manly when he defers to a Christian woman. And the Christian woman, having heard sermons about this sort of thing over the years, believes that the appropriate thing for the godly man to do is defer to her on this Sunday School question. He should sacrifice what he wants for her, put her interests ahead his own — right? Isn’t that what Paul says somewhere?

Right, Paul does say that somewhere, but this is also what Eve thought in a garden about six thousand years ago, and Adam chose the wrong sacrifice. Adam should have refused his wife’s offer and walked her straight to the Lord and confessed their disobedience and offered to die in her place. That was the sacrifice he should have embraced — sacrificial obedience. And so, yes, there will be many opportunities for men to defer to women in day to day matters, as a matter of courtesy and kindness, but a man must also be fully aware of the deep temptation in his soul to give his strength away to her. There’s a cowardly, lazy, and abdicating bum in the soul of every man that really would love to play all day and have all the meals made, magically appearing on the table every several hours. And many women see this tendency in men and think that what their men need is a little mothering — and in marriage this can include the woman providing sex at various intervals to keep her man docile. But that man has given his strength away and is in the process of forfeiting his kingdom. This is a horse-trading scam that ends in the shame and misery of everyone involved.

In other words, men are required by God to take responsibility for whatever situation they find themselves in. And they are required to use the physical, mental, emotional, financial strength God has given them to lead those around them to safety and blessing. This means preeminently leading in and towards wholehearted obedience to God. And this must not include any deference to preferences that would lead in any other direction. Men are finite, and this means there are only so many hours in the day, so much brain power, so much strength — this is never an excuse for disobedience, but it is a very legitimate reason for wise allocation of resources: “What king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?” (Lk. 14:31) So what are you using your strength for? How are you spending your minutes, your hours, your energy, your money? Are you using your strength sacrificially in obedience to God for the good others?

Many men cultivate countermeasures to their abdication and weakness. A man who does not rule his own house, tries to make up for the emasculated feeling in his soul and maybe he spends his weekends watching men beat each other up on UFC or he plays at being brave by watching horror movies or football games. Or maybe he goes hunting or plays shoot ’em up video games or listens to thrasher metal music or engages in theological wrangling on the internet until 3am — he cultivates a sort of masculine catharsis where he can feel manly for a few hours or a few days before going back to work where he gives his strength to women (or effeminate men), before going back home where he gives his strength to his wife and kids, before going back to church where committees of mothering women are the puppet masters behind the stage, pulling the strings on the men. But of course men who allow for this are being effeminate. They are not actually being strong for the good of their families, churches, and communities. They are no better than other drug abusers and porn users who take pills and hits to cope with that deep pit of failure in their gut.

Part of the strength that God requires of men is the strength of repentance and course corrections. When men wake up and realize they have been sleeping on the job, when they have allowed themselves to become preoccupied with worthless things, things that don’t matter, things that will fade away in the end, they must repent. They must take responsibility for the situation they have allowed to develop, that they have created by their abdication, and they must confess their sin, seek forgiveness, and begin to give their strength to what matters, to what will last in obedience to God. Of course, the reason why hunting and sports and theological sparring can be good for men is because those are great ways to train men to use their strength with discipline and thoughtfulness. To the extent that men cultivate their strength by these methods, you’ll find no objections from me. My only caution is the tendency that men have to use these as substitutes for real masculine leadership where there is actual skin in the game, where it might actually hurt. But if one is practice and training for the other, then go, fight, and win.

Every great leader has failed in many ways (except Jesus), and their greatness does not come from their perfection but rather from their determination to get up and try again, to keep going and not give up. That might sound like some kind Gatorade or Nike commercial, but this is no humanistic mantra. Repent and believe again. The gospel is still for you. There really is glory on the other side of every obedient sacrifice. But men like to take falls, we do the math and choose the smaller sacrifice, what seems like the easier sacrifice, but in fact, God requires men to choose the obedient sacrifice, not the convenient one. Often a godly woman, a mother like King Lemuel’s will give good and wise counsel and a good man will take it, but a man must still choose for himself. They will be his choices, his decisions, and he will stand before God one day and give an answer for how he has used his strength.

Do not give your strength to women. Use your strength, in obedience to God, for their good.

 

Photo by Ben Rosett on Unsplash

Gratitude that Overcomes the World

Gratitude — true gratitude — requires truth.

And this is not the same thing as sincerity. People can be sincerely wrong. Lies can become so ingrained, so repeated, so believed that people say them and believe them sincerely. So it is that sincerity becomes the substitute for the truth in a world gone mad with hypocrisy and flattery. But truth is not the feeling of truthfulness or the intention of truthfulness. Truth is truth all the way down. It’s truth in the inward parts; it’s truth grounded in reality, the way things really are.

Gratitude requires this kind of truth. Otherwise, gratitude is just another form of relativism. Gratitude points at something, holds something, tastes something and gives thanks for that thing, for that flavor, for that gift. But giving thanks for nothing in particular or for the feelings conjured inside your head or gut is only sentimentalism and doesn’t need anything out there in the real world for it to occur. And so we’re left with thankfulness being a personal, subjective feeling that may come and go, that can be set off by anything or nothing. It doesn’t need a reality or even anything good or true to come into being, and therefore it really is only as deep as your feelings — which come and go and flipflop and meander.

But Christian gratitude is grounded in reality, in what is true both in my heart and out there in the world. It’s certainly true that our different and varied experiences color our appreciations, our tastes, our loves, but our varied experiences do not overwhelm reality. They do not displace reality — thank God. Despite our circumstances, our stories, God is still God, the world is still the world, and what is objectively good is still objectively gift.

So when we give thanks, we are giving thanks not merely for the feeling of thankfulness, we are giving thanks for what is true. We are pointing out into the world and claiming that this thing, this turkey, this table, this home, this family, these children, these neighbors and friends are real and that they are true gifts from a true Giver. We are saying that they exist, and we are saying that they exist by grace. And when we say thank you, we are trying to say this all the way down.

The corollary of all of this of course is that we cannot give thanks for what is not true. We cannot give thanks for evil — in the sense that we cannot affirm it. We cannot call evil good or good evil and celebrate that. Because that is a lie. We cannot give thanks for an adulterous relationship, for fornication, for drunkenness, for theft, for envy, for bitterness. They are all lies about what is true and good and beautiful. Of course, God in His kindness gives hardships and difficulties, and we can and we must give thanks in all things. But we do not give thanks for disorder and perversion in the world, we give thanks to the Lord who overrules and triumphs with His goodness through the disorder and rebellion of sinful men in a fallen world. And we are able to give thanks for these things in this way because it is true.

So this is the leaven of the gospel, the leaven of sincerity and truth — truth that goes all the way down. And this is true gratitude, true thankfulness — joy that delights in the wine and the laughter and the candles and the pies but it delights in them precisely because they are real, because they are true and good gifts from a Good and Faithful Giver, the One in whom there is no shadow of turning, the One from whom every good and perfect gifts come down from above.

This is why we confess our sins. This is why we forgive quickly and gladly. This is why we sing at the top of our lungs. This is why we love all men in the truth. This is why we make toasts. This is why we tell jokes. This is why we give thanks. Because the truth is like gravity, and despite the madness of sinful men, everything really does come down. Do not fear the claims of madmen. Do not cower at the officious rulings of the wicked. Our God is in heaven, and Jesus is at His right hand. All things have been delivered into His hands; He is there interceding for us. And He must rule until all of His enemies have been put beneath His feet. This is the truth, the truth that sets all men free. Lift a glass (lift two, since you have two hands), and give thanks. This is the gratitude that overcomes the world.

 

Photo by Phil Botha on Unsplash

What is the Gospel?

Introduction

The word “gospel” means “good news.” Literally, it’s a “good message” and is related to the word for “messenger” or “angel.” One place we can look to understand what the gospel is Isaiah 40: after many chapters of judgment proclaimed on Israel and Judah and the nations, God proclaims, “Comfort, comfort my people… speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned…” (Is. 40:1-2). And right after that is the famous verse, “A voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Is. 40:3-5). Isaiah goes on to tell Jerusalem to go up on the high mountains and announce this good news (Is. 40:9).

Bad News Before Good News

The good news of the gospel comes in the face of bad news. The gospel interrupts bad news. Some news always seems good: you won the lottery, you’ve been selected for a free Caribbean cruise. But the gospel is the kind of good news that comes in the face of bad news. It’s like waking up one morning and realizing that you completely forgot about the huge project that’s due today and your entire grade rides on it, and you arrive at school ashamed and terrified only to receive the good news that your teacher has moved the due date to next week. The bad news, the bad situation has been interrupted, overtaken, completely altered and reversed by the good news. This is what the gospel is like.

There are various things that can and do go wrong in this world, but the worst things are the things that you cannot change. They are like mountains that you cannot move. They are like canyons that you cannot cross. I remember as a young boy we visited my grandpa in Arkansas, and he took me and my siblings to a toy store so that we could pick out a toy. I picked out something excitedly and brought it to my grandpa and he told me he didn’t think it was a good choice and to pick something else out. And for whatever reason, in my six or seven year old little heart, I was angry and bitter at my grandpa for not letting me get what I had selected. We went home to California, and I never saw my grandpa again. He died a year or so later. And one day it hit me that I had been angry and bitter with my grandpa, and I had never made it right. And now there was nothing I could do. It was like a mountain that could not be moved, a canyon that could not be crossed. It was really bad news.

But sometimes the bad news is a bad situation that just eats at you, something you try to fix, but nothing you do seems to work. Maybe it’s someone in your family who hurts you or someone you just can’t get along with. Maybe it’s your dad, maybe it’s your mom, an older brother or sisters, an aunt or uncle, or grandparent, or a classmate or a teacher. Or maybe it’s you. You know that you’ve hurt others, you’ve said things that hurt others. Maybe you’ve thought things in your heart that are angry, unclean, shameful. You try to be better. Maybe you pray about it. But it just doesn’t get better; it doesn’t go away. It’s still there, nagging you, eating at you. Maybe you try not to think about because it just makes you feel bad. Maybe it even makes you feel physically sick.

I remember when I was probably 12 or 13 lying to my parents several times; it would eat at me. I would feel awful, even physically sick, and I would try my hardest not to think about it. I would tell myself not to be so sensitive. I would tell myself lies about the lies, that they weren’t really bad lies, or very big lies, or that they wouldn’t hurt anyone. And I would feel so sick, and finally I would go to my parents and confess that I had lied. And then I would feel such relief, and I would determine to myself that I wouldn’t ever tell a lie again. And then, a few months later, I would tell another lie. And I would start it all over again, explaining to myself why I didn’t need to worry about this one, or that since I really wasn’t going to do it again, God would understand. And this happened a number of times, and I felt like I just couldn’t stop. It was like a horrible, rough road full of potholes, and for some reason I just couldn’t avoid them. No matter how hard I tried, I always ended up in another pothole, and there was nothing I could do about it. That’s bad news.

Our Sin Against God and God Alone

But these examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The Bible teaches that these impossible problems, these failures, these sins are ultimately all rooted in our broken relationship with God, our Maker, our Father. What is so very obvious is the fact that we didn’t make ourselves. We were created, and we have been given this gift called life. And yet, you can walk through this world not acknowledging this gift, not knowing the Giver, your Maker. Everyone senses that something isn’t quite right in this world. There’s all this beauty, all this goodness, and yet there’s all this evil, all this suffering, all this pain, and you can easily feel lost, lonely, confused, overwhelmed. What’s wrong with me? You might ask yourself. Why do I feel this way? Why do I think these awful thoughts? Why do say these awful words? And maybe you’re like me, and you try to stop, you confess it even, and then it just happens over and over and over again. And it just seems impossible to stop.

The Bible says that the root of all of this impossibility is our sin against God. It’s not just that we’ve sinned against one another. Think about it: We were made by God but we can’t see Him, hear Him, touch Him. But this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, and it isn’t God’s fault. It’s our fault. We were born under a curse; we were born under an evil spell. We are born as rebels and traitors. We’ve run away from God our Maker. We’ve despised Him, hated Him, ignored Him. All of those sins and others that we commit against one another, we’re actually committing against Him as well. How could we be happy in this world – sinning against the One who made us and all things? Not being in fellowship with Him? We know we’ve sinned against other people, and worst of all, we’ve sinned against God. And now we are under the curse of sin and death. Sin deserves death. We’ve betrayed the One who made us, and we deserve death and Hell forever. Sin pretends that God isn’t there, and Hell is where God gives us up to eternal suffering and separation from Him. And plus there’s death and dying all around us. We’re on a battlefield, and everyone is dying. Sooner or later, there will be a tombstone with your name it, with my name on it. On one end of the Moscow Cemetery there’s a stone with my father in-law’s name on it, and on the other end there’s a small plaque with my son’s name on it. And new names appear almost daily.

This is the most impossible situation of all. This is the worst news. How can we make this bad situation, right? How can we talk to Someone we can’t even see? How can we know if He’ll have mercy on us? If there’s a God, He’s holy and just, and He punishes sinners. He can’t let sin just go. He can’t just pretend it’s not there. If He does that for your lies, for your lust, for your anger – why shouldn’t He do that for everyone else? But that would be evil, and He would be no god. This is the immovable mountain, the uncrossable canyon, the roughest road, the most uneven path. We’re unclean, and we can’t wash ourselves. We’re guilty, and we can’t change that fact. And we’ve run into a wilderness where we can’t see God, hear God, or touch God. We can’t find our way back to God. Like my realization about my grandpa, it’s too late. Nothing can be done.

Every Valley Shall Be Lifted

This is why Isaiah said, “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”

You see: the bad news is that every one of us have impossible valleys in our lives –canyons that cannot be crossed, impossible mountains in our lives – things we cannot change, impossible uneven ground in our lives – things we cannot fix, impossible rough places in our lives – things that seem like they’ll never get better. And ultimately, our sin separates us from God. We’ve lied, and we can’t stop lying. We’ve lusted, and we can’t stop lusting. We’ve hated, and we can’t stop hating. We’ve cheated, and we can’t stop cheating. We’ve stolen, and we can’t stop stealing. We’ve been hurt, and we can’t stop hurting. We’re afraid, ashamed, embarrassed, guilt-ridden, and it seems impossible to change anything. But Isaiah says, go up on a high mountain and tell my people, “Comfort, comfort, says your God… speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned.” Tell her the good news, the gospel, that “every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”

The Gospel

The good news of the gospel of Jesus comes in the face of our bad news. If you haven’t yet reckoned with the bad news, then the gospel doesn’t seem like such good news. But if you stop for a moment and tell the truth about yourself and this world, the bad news starts piling up pretty quickly: the mountains and the valleys and the rough roads seem impossible. But what Isaiah foretold, John came announcing. And he pointed at a man named Jesus of Nazareth, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.’ You see, the worst news is that we’ve sinned against God and now we can’t find Him. We’ve rebelled against our Maker, and now we can’t get back to Him. We can’t see Him, we can’t talk to Him, we don’t even know what He thinks of us. And into this world came Jesus, who was born of a Virgin, who lived a perfect life, who walked on water, who calmed the storms, who healed the blind, the lame, the deaf, who raised the dead. Jesus said that He came to lead us back to our Father, our Maker. He said He came to show us the way back. He said that if we knew Him, we would know His Father. And He said that He came for the lost and the sick and the suffering. He said he came for the poor, for the needy, for the sorrowful, for the prostitutes and tax collectors. And He said that he came to give His life as a ransom. A ransom is the payment required to return something. Jesus says He came to give His life as a ransom for many. He came to give His life to bring us home.

So this is the good news of the gospel of Jesus. In the face of the impossibility of our sin, the impossibility of finding the God we have wronged, God Himself has come to find us. And not only has He come to find us, He has come in the person of His only Son in order to pay all the costs associated with our return home. Our sin deserves death, and God in His justice and mercy and love sent His Son to seek and save the lost, to receive the justice we deserve by standing in our place, so that God might offer us mercy without ignoring any of our sin. He who knew no sin, became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.

This is why Isaiah says to go up on a high mountain and cry out with a loud voice. “Comfort, comfort my people… speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned.” This is why John cries in the wilderness that every valley will be lifted up and every mountain and hill will be made low and every rough place will become plain. God came in His Son Jesus Christ to break through every barrier that keeps us from Him. The good news is that God has come for us, and that He has paved a road straight back home for us. There are no impossible valleys, no impossible mountains, no impossible potholes for God because He paved the way by the blood of Jesus.

Now, most of you are from Christian homes and you attend Christian churches, and you regularly hear Bible readings and prayers and you hear the words God and Jesus and gospel regularly. But you need to know that it’s entirely possible for all of that to just be words. So my question for you is this: is it good news? It is good news for you?

In order for it to be good news it has to interrupt your bad news. It has to be the answer to your bad news. It has to be the answer to the impossible valleys, the immoveable mountains, and all your roads full of potholes. Even as a young boy, I remember realizing that there was no way to make things right with my grandpa. Only God could make things right. And so I prayed and I asked Him to somehow make it right. And He did. He lifted that valley. He brought that mountain low. And though it was a process, He delivered me from my lying tongue and taught me to love the truth. He made that rough place plain. And let me tell you – you never outgrow your need for the gospel. I’m still a sinner, and I still face mountains and valleys and potholes. I still run up against walls that feel like impossibilities, things that cannot change, things that seem completely stuck. But God is not stuck. God is not trapped. The good news of the gospel is that not even death is too difficult for God. Because He is the God of the resurrection, the God who breaks through the impossible.

Have you experienced that? Do you know that joy? That peace? Do you hear the words of comfort and does your heart sing? Is Jesus your priceless treasure – your glory, your crown? Or do you really want this comfort but you aren’t really sure it actually exists? Have you heard about this comfort but never really felt it?

Jesus says, come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

[Note: This was a talk originally given for an assembly at Logos School last week. Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash]