Faith Presbyterian Church (PCA, Tacoma, WA) Sermon Texts

Controversy

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Proverbs

Why is the church as weak as she is? Why can you and I not be more proud of her? Why is the church so often a poor recommendation of the Christian faith? Our Lord said that his disciples would be known for their love for one another and so we are to be a household of love, of unity, of mutual respect; but we are often, alas, virtually the reverse. The Lord Christ said that the world would know that the Father sent him into the world by observing the unity of the body of Christ. What unity? Constant bickering, hateful speech, division again and again, have weakened the church and now we display to the world a body of Christ so broken into little pieces that it is no wonder that so few take seriously the message of the church about where to find peace and love. “Physician, heal thyself!” When was the last time any unbelieving public figure said, “My how those Christians love one another.”

And just as it is true that the church as an institution has suffered greatly from division and dispute, the individual Christian has often been drawn up into unfruitful controversies that, while they get the blood up, prove eventually to be pointless and harmful, from which disputes consequences ensue that no one foresaw when the fighting began. I doubt any of us realizes the extent to which the gospel has suffered and Christians have suffered the loss of holiness and integrity and usefulness because of controversy, dispute, and the unkindness that so regularly accompanies disagreement about one thing or another. We immediately, especially we conservative Protestant Christians, trumpet the need to stand up for the truth because a failure to do so has cost the fidelity of so many churches through the years. Think of the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and so on who are now so many enemies of the gospel. But we tend to forget how weak the true gospel witness is in the world today in some large part because of the disproof of that message that the world observes in the behavior of real believers and their really believing churches.

No wonder then that the subject of controversy gets as much attention as it does in Proverbs. If one is to live skillfully in this world, one must avoid the damaging if not deadly pitfalls of argument. Nothing is more likely to destroy harmony, to damage relationships, and to weaken collective action and to bring bitterness to the individual heart than the disunity and ill-will fostered by argument, and so a man or woman who learns how to avoid unnecessary argument in the first place and properly to manage necessary argument in the second is the wise, the skillful person. You know how often this subject is addressed in Holy Scripture.

“I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you…” [1 Cor. 1:10-11]

“I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to agree with each other in the Lord.” [Phil. 4:2]

“Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value and only ruins those who listen.” [2 Tim. 2:14]

“Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.” [2 Tim 2:23]

Or think of Paul and Barnabas and their inability to surmount a disagreement they had prior to Paul’s second missionary journey.

“Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company.” [Acts 15:37-39]

The son of encouragement and the great apostle to the Gentiles couldn’t find a way to work out their disagreement. Unbelievable!

The history of early Christianity, during the time the apostles were still alive, was a history of dispute and argument in the church and a history of harm done to the church and it’s life and it’s witness by those arguments and it has been the same ever since. Well, if the church were beset with quarrels in those heady days, no wonder we find a good bit of attention devoted to controversy, its avoidance and its management, in the teaching of Proverbs. This is one of the perennial problems in human life that we can count on Proverbs to address.

Much of its teaching has to do with the avoidance of argument or conflict in the first place, and, so it would seem, virtually no matter what.

“Do not contend with a man for no reason, when he has done you no harm.” [3:30]

“There are six things that the Lord hates…” we read in 6:16-19, and, in addition to such things as haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, we have in the final and emphatic place, “one who sows discord among brothers.”

“Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.” [10:12]

“A hot-tempered man stirs up strife, but he who is slow to anger quiets contention.” [15:18]

“Starting a quarrel is like breaching a dam, so drop the matter before a dispute breaks out.” [17:14]

“Whoever loves transgression loves strife.” [17:19]

“It is an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife, but every fool will be quarreling.” [20:3]

“Whoever meddles in a quarrel not his own is like the one who takes a passing dog by the ears.” [26:17] Not even Samson grabbed a fox by its ears. Most dogs were wild in Israel in those days and grabbing one by the ears was a sure way of getting bit. The busybody who likes to get involved in disputes, any disputes – someone else’s will do fine – is very likely to end up suffering harm as well as causing it. [cf. Waltke, ii, 358]

As you can see, the primary emphasis in Proverbs is to refrain from argument or contention. Controversy is the path of fools not the wise. Now, to be sure, there is a kind of controversy that is necessary. We must stand up for the truth of God, for the rights of those who are being abused, and so on. But while that is clearly taught in the rest of the Bible, there isn’t a lot about that in Proverbs. Most of its advice is to stay as far away from controversy as one can.

Indeed, in Proverbs we find that it is a mark of the godly that they are people of peace and harmony and foster such harmony between others.

“When a man’s ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him. [16:7]

And, typically in Proverbs you will find that the controversialist is driven to dispute by flaws in his character.

“Drive out a scoffer, and strife will go out, and quarreling and abuse will cease.” [22:10]

“For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer [we might substitute “a gossip” for a “whisperer”], quarreling ceases. As charcoal to hot embers and wood to fire, so is a quarrelsome man for kindling strife.” [26:20-21]

“A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends.” [16:28]

“A greedy man stirs up strife…” [28:25]

And why is it that controversy is so dangerous and needs to be avoided at all costs?

“A brother offended is more unyielding than a strong city, and quarreling is like the bars of a castle.” [18:19] The concluding simile there describes the “difficulty of penetrating beyond the psychological barriers he consciously erects to make himself invulnerable to any and every approach toward reconciliation.” [Waltke, ii, 84] “This observation is an implicit warning to avoid conflict because of the intractable problems that will arise.” [Longman, 359] Hard feelings caused by conflict are very difficult to surmount and very often, even in the church, they are never surmounted.

People will inevitably disagree. Christians will inevitably disagree. No two people think alike about absolutely everything. But we are taught in Proverbs that it is one thing to disagree, another thing altogether to quarrel. There is a disposition toward argument and dissension that must be put to death because it is sinful, pure and simple. And what precisely does that mean? Well here is the great George Whitefield, the Great Awakening evangelist, who lived in a day when controversy among brothers did terrible damage to the ministry of the gospel during a time of tremendous opportunity.

“It is best for the gospel minister, simply and powerfully to preach those truths he has been taught of God, and to meddle as little as possible with those who are children of God, though they should differ in many things. This would keep the heart sweet, and at the same time not betray the truths of Jesus…. I have not given way to the Moravian Brethren, or to Mr. Wesley, or to any whom I thought was in error, no, not for an hour. But I think it is best not to dispute when there is no probability of convincing.” [Dallimore, ii, 76-77]

That last line is priceless: “it is best not to dispute when there is no probability of convincing.” If that advice, and only that advice, were followed, a great measure of argument in the church would immediately disappear.

And some other practical counsel fleshes out the meaning of Proverbs’ virtually universal prohibition of the pursuit of controversy. Here is Matthew Henry, the English pastor and celebrated Bible commentator. “The worst thing we can bring to a religious controversy is anger.” [BOT 256 (Jan ’85) 141-142] And in my experience anger is what is nearly always brought to a religious controversy. Herman Bavinck, the great Dutch theologian of the late 19th century and early 20th century, was a politician, a member of Parliament, and a Reformed churchman. He knew of what he spoke when he once said, “Politics is often seamy. Church politics are always seamy.” Why do we get so angry and turn a discussion of our differences into a fight? Well, says, John Newton, “There is a principle of self, which disposes us to despise those who differ from us.” [Letters (pb. ed.) 102-104] How dare he or she not take the same opinion on the matter that I do!

There is nothing that can be done about the existence of disagreements. But there is a great deal that can be done about the way in which we talk about them and handle them in the church. The 4th century church father, Jerome, was a great man, but he was a horrid controversialist. He quite forgot the biblical injunction that “the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone…correcting his opponents with gentleness.” [2 Tim. 24-25] Jerome was a master at putting the worst construction on a man’s words, at name-calling, and at prickliness. How different his contemporary Augustine, who seemed to be able to conduct controversy virtually free of any personal antipathy and of whom, as a controversialist, it has often been said that he was fortiter in re, suaviter in modo: strong in his convictions but gentle in his manner. The difference between the two men led one biographer to observe that Jerome was as unlikely to keep a friend as Augustine was to lose one. [Wills, St. Augustine, 85]

Or take John Wesley, a great man and greatly used by God, but a horrible controversialist, the very sort of man who should never have engaged in it. In one egregious instance of where a controversial spirit will carry an otherwise good and honest man, in the midst of contention about predestination between the Arminian camp and the Calvinist camp of Great Awakening preachers, Wesley printed a tract which he issued under the name of his Calvinist opponent Augustus Toplady, author of the hymn Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me. Toplady had published a 134 page book on predestination, still in print today, The Absolute Predestination of God, which Wesley condensed in a very distorted way into a 12 page tract and then published it as if it had been written and published by Toplady himself. In other words, the tract was an out and out fraud. The final paragraph, a complete fabrication, was a Wesley invention.

“The sum of all is this: One in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are reprobated. The elect will be saved, do what they will; the reprobate will be damned, do what they can. Reader believe this or be damned. Witness my hand, A- T-.

So here was Wesley publishing a work of his own devising, publishing it under another man’s name, and presenting Toplady’s views in the worst possible light, as if they were the same as Wesley’s caricature of them. It was dishonest, deceitful, and unmanly. When a howl of protest went up, Wesley made only this reply.

“I do not fight with chimney-sweepers. He is too dirty a writer for me to meddle with. I should only foul my fingers.” [In Tompkins, 170-171]

These are two earnest Christians talking about one another and they didn’t even have blogs!
As so often in the church’s past we observe that with friends like these we have no need for enemies!

Controversy has undone a great many of whom we might have expected better. We greatly admire, and rightly, Samuel Rutherford for his timeless expression of the place of love for Christ in Christian experience. But he had a reputation as a stormy controversialist. One of his friends admitted that he was “naturally hot and fiery,” and those who felt the sting of his attacks came to have a jaundiced view of the great man. They certainly didn’t admire him as we do. One described him as “a hater of all men not of his opinion, and one who if ever so lightly offended, unreconciliable, void of mercy and charity, although a teacher of both to others.” [In J. Coffey, Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The mind of Samuel Rutherford, 3] That’s our beloved Samuel Rutherford he’s talking about and that’s what controversy and argument did to his reputation!

So you see how important it is to take this instruction to heart. Even the best of men can and have stumbled here and have found their characters wanting when put to the test of disagreement with brothers. Controversy is no stranger to us, of course, and we know its ill effects only too well. Our controversies – such as those that created the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Bible Presbyterian Church in 1937 (the latter the mother denomination of Faith Presbyterian Church) – have been precisely of that kind forbidden in Proverbs and against which we are warned so sternly. They are of the kind that happen between men of virtually identical principles who have managed to find something about which they disagree, often a relatively minor, often an extremely minor something in the total scheme of things. In that case it was wine and the place of the millennium in our eschatology!

I think, for example, of the controversy that erupted in the Free Church of Scotland between men of impeccable orthodoxy and deep spiritual life upon the evangelistic campaign conducted by Dwight Moody in the middle 1870s. Most everyone was thrilled with the results of Moody’s preaching until it was criticized in a 31 page pamphlet for not being Calvinistic enough by Dr. John Kennedy of Dingwall, one of the most famous and honored men of Presbyterian Scotland in the day. But, of course, many men of his own denomination were enthusiastic supporters of Moody, greatly encouraged by the results of his preaching, and so his attack on Moody was effectively an attack on them. So one of those men, the great hymn writer and faithful pastor Horatius Bonar, issued a reply in the name of all of them, a 78 page pamphlet of his own. Bonar argued that Kennedy’s attack on Moody’s preaching was based on misquotations, on statements taken out of context, and on sweeping generalizations that were simply not true. The fact of the matter is that the two men – Kennedy and Bonar – and the men who agreed with each of them were of different temperaments and of different theological emphases. They shared the same Presbyterian faith, the same reformed theology, but they were not entirely like-minded. The controversy brought those differences to the surface.

They differed, for example, on whether a gospel preacher can say that God’s love prompted him to offer salvation to any and every man and that God wanted every hearer of the gospel to be saved. Dr. Kennedy, strong Calvinist that he was, was willing to say that God offers salvation to all who will believe, but was not willing to say that there is divine love in the free offer of salvation to any and every sinner. He denied, in his words, “the call of the gospel as expressive of the love of God to each individual to whom it is addressed.” Dr. Kennedy certainly preached the love of God, but as a Calvinist he believed he shouldn’t individualize it because, of course, who knows who belongs to the company of the elect. Dr. Bonar, on the other hand, an equally strong Calvinist, was very ready to say that in the gospel there is to be seen God’s heart of love toward all, to each and every person to whom the gospel is ever addressed. That dispute exists still today in the Presbyterian and Calvinist world. If you’re wondering, we come down on Bonar’s side regarding that question. And so the controversy continued until, like so many others, it petered out and to virtually no one’s regret faded into the mists of time to be thankfully forgotten. [cf. the account of Iain Murray in A Scottish Christian Heritage, 186-201] It certainly accomplished nothing good. It besmirched some reputations; it infuriated some brothers, but it changed virtually no one’s mind, and it didn’t stop Moody’s preaching or, thankfully, prevent large numbers of Scottish folk responding in faith to Moody’s gospel invitations.

Well so our controversies in 1937 and the hard speech and the foolish taking of sides that resulted in a church split that continues to this day. Many of the men involved in that split would later say that it was sin and they were responsible for it, but it has not been fixed, it has really not been repented of and there are still two churches where there ought to be one. The issues that were made a test of unity in those days, by the way, aren’t issues any longer in either of the two churches – plenty of people in the PCA and the OPC drink wine and ministers hold all three of the primary millennial views to the interest of virtually no one – but they were enough to divide the body of Christ in 1937. So, in neither the short nor the long term did the division profit the cause of Christ. In fact, so soon after the departure from the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1936, the second split simply confirmed the stated opinion of the theological liberals who now controlled the Presbyterian church: we weren’t standing up for the gospel at all; we were simply cross-grained folk who couldn’t get along if we didn’t get our way about everything. Within a year we managed to convince a great many people (including the editors of America’s major daily newspapers) that that was precisely what we were. They forgot about us in the blink of an eye.

And what of our present disputes? I’m thankful to say that in our Presbytery at least, they have been managed with a great measure of decorum and brotherly regard, but when a man is taken to trial with the view to driving him from the brotherhood, in the adversarial process that a trial inevitably is, there will be as there was speech that would never have been uttered otherwise. I was Dr. Leithart’s defense counsel and I said things about other men in that role, in disputing the prosecution’s argument and in undermining the authority of his witnesses, that I hope very much I would never otherwise have said. A man was presented as an expert witness, so it was our responsibility to show, in Dr. Leithart’s defense, that he wasn’t an expert at all, that he only pretended to scholarship, that he was a known controversialist, and so on. Does anyone think that he will forget what was said about him in that trial?

“A brother offended is more unyielding than a strong city, and quarreling is like the bars of a castle.” [18:19]

There are some people in our church who seem to think that trials clarify matters and are good for peace and harmony in the long run. I doubt that very much. Trials make adversaries of men who were friends before and deepen suspicions that existed already. We should go there as infrequently as we possibly can.

But what of those who say that the gospel is at stake. So said Dr. Kennedy in Scotland in the 1870s and his voice was one to be reckoned with. But so were the voices of Horatius and Andrew Bonar, Alexander Whyte, and, for that matter, Charles Spurgeon, who all took the other side in that dispute. The fact of the matter is that those who accuse some of our men of denying divine election or justification by faith are actually accusing them not of explicitly denying those doctrines – for to a man they confess them and explicitly record their agreement with those doctrines as they are expressed in our theological standards – I say they are actually accusing them either of not realizing that they deny the doctrines or of being insincere in their profession of them. That’s a very different kind of accusation and must be made much more circumspectly. When you profess to know another man’s mind better than he knows it himself, you must have the smoking gun in your possession. Nothing else will do. The fact is that we are engaged in a dispute that pits against one another men who agree about virtually everything in Christian theology: the inerrancy of the Bible, the doctrine of the Triune God, of Jesus Christ, of his atonement, Calvinism’s doctrine of sovereign grace, paedobaptism, and Presbyterian church government. Are there differences among PCA ministers and people in regard to certain doctrines and practices? Of course there are. There have always been significant and interesting differences of understanding among Reformed ministers. But there are differences and then there are differences. Some rise to great importance; many do not.

Taking the teaching of Proverbs together we conclude with this summary:

There are people – and most of these people probably know and if they don’t they should know who they are – who should never involve themselves in controversy because they haven’t the characters for it. As Alexander Whyte bluntly put it: “If we cannot do it with clean all-men-loving hearts, let us leave all debate and contention to stronger and better men than we are.” [Bunyan Characters, i, 141-142] There are scoffers, we read in Proverbs, and whisperers who love to engage in controversy. But we should never indulge in any controversy spawned by such people or regard their opinions in the matter as of any consequence whatsoever. That kind of controversy is sinful, pure and simple. It is proud, selfish, and harmful. Such people are utterly forgetful of the constant warnings of Holy Scripture against a controversial spirit.
But if there must be some discussion of differences, then that discussion must be conducted with a view to avoiding the sins of temper and of dishonesty that so regularly accompany dispute and contention. We are back to Johan Albrecht Bengel’s four little words in his comment on Matthew 7:1: sine scientia, necessitate, amore. If the controversy is not conducted with knowledge it is to be abandoned. Period. Nowadays I have learned to ask clarifying questions. If someone asks me if I am against the so-called Federal Vision, I now invariably ask, “And what you mean by Federal Vision; what is Federal Vision in your view.” Usually when I receive the answer I can say, “Oh, yes, I’m definitely against that.” But then I go on to say, “But it so happens that I don’t know anyone who is for that, including the people who are most closely associated with Federal Vision.” It has dismayed me to see how little care has been taken to make sure that a man’s views are accurately represented and not caricatured. If the controversy is not conducted out of necessity, that is, if there is nothing really at stake that requires us to contend, then it must be abandoned. Whatever one’s opinions about the current dustup in the PCA, I have yet to hear or read a single persuasive argument that we need to contend about these things. I fear that what we are about nowadays in our church is recreational controversy, controversy for the fun of it. But nothing in Holy Scripture suggests to me that the Lord looks kindly upon controversy disturbing his church when there was no particular need for it apart from the desire of some men to have a good fight about something. And, finally, if the controversy is not conducted in love, if it is not conducted with mutual regard, with kindness, and with proper respect, we should lay it down at once and no one should dare to touch it again. The treatment of people on the blogs should have brought an end to all of this a few years ago and it should have been the settled intention of the church not to raise it up again until it was made clear to everyone that the church would never tolerate again that kind of speech between brothers that was becoming commonplace on the internet. There is a study now underway at Duke University on theological controversy on the internet and the Presbyterian Church in America is being used as an example of how it not to be done. We should be ashamed of ourselves. We’re supposed to be mature Christians. We’re behaving like children. Controversies waged like ours has been will not help; they will only harm the interests of God and the gospel.

I have seen not one good thing come out of this controversy. I could claim to have learned some theology and church history in preparing papers and testimony for the trial, but the entire process has hurt the church, distracted men from their proper work, produced a great deal of anger and ill-will, deepened animosity, and all the while has done nothing to bring harmony and peace. Nobody is changing his mind. I know this will infuriate some, but I think what we are going through is an unseemly and childish spat between aggressive or militant traditionalists, on the one hand, and, for want of a better term, theological progressives on the other, both of whom are committed to the full authority of the Word of God and the Reformed faith.

“It is an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife, but every fool will be quarreling.” [20:3]

Jesus' First Sermon

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Luke
referring to: Luke 4:14-30

Text Comment

v.16 Jesus was a church-going man and had been all his life. It may interest you to know that this is the earliest description of a Jewish synagogue service that we have.

v.17 It does not appear that Jesus chose which book of the Bible would be given to him from which to read, but he may have chosen the particular text in Isaiah.

v.19 Jesus read from the opening verses of Isaiah 61. The “year of the Lord’s favor” is another way of referring to the era of salvation, as before in chapter 2 we read of the time of the “consolation of Israel” and the time of “the redemption of Jerusalem.” The age of the Messiah is what is meant.

v.20 It appears that it was the custom to read the Scripture standing up and to deliver the sermon sitting down.

v.21 This astonishing statement was already being visibly demonstrated in the Lord’s ministry, had been for some weeks or maybe a few months before this. In 7:22 we will read that in answer to questions from John the Baptist, Jesus sent this reply: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the good news preached to them.” In other words, the very things Isaiah prophesied would mark the year of the Lord’s favor had come to pass. Jesus’ contemporaries did not doubt that the kingdom of God would come someday, but Jesus told them and then proved that it had come that very day, that they were the favored generation upon whom the fulfillment of the ages had come!

v.22 Everybody was at first mesmerized by the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ. We don’t know exactly what it was that captivated them though we have reference to the authority with which he taught and the gracious words that came out of his mouth. In his teaching there was a combination of learning and of strength and power of insight that they had not heard before. It was striking and all the more for these people in Nazareth because, of course, Jesus had grown up in their midst. They knew him and had known him as a boy and a young man.

v.23 Jesus had already made a reputation for himself by healing miracles and teaching, as we gather from v. 14. But he knew that the people of Nazareth did not believe. As we will read of the Jews so often later, their enthusiasm for Jesus was superficial and would prove to be temporary. Perhaps what they meant is that they admired Jesus’ speaking gift, but didn’t agree with his message. “What we have heard you did…” is what they said, not “What you did at Capernaum…” [Morris, 127] They weren’t persuaded that the stories they had heard about Jesus were actually true. The point of the parable, a common one in the ancient world, is not immediately clear. Why would Jesus be thought to need to heal himself? The sense seems to be that Jesus should do for them in Nazareth what he had done in Capernaum, great signs that they had heard of, but which they had not seen. They wanted to see such signs themselves and felt that they deserved, as his hometown, whatever he had given to others. [cf. Green, 216-217]

v.24 Jesus’ remark is a rebuke to their expressed desire to see a miracle. Jesus wasn’t an entertainer! But along the way he lays claim to being a prophet. But in the next verses he reminds them that Israel has a tradition of rejecting the prophets the Lord sent to them and the result is that others received the blessing the Jews missed for their unbelief.

v.28 The people get the Lord’s point and are infuriated, both by the suggestion that they fail to believe just as their forefathers did and by the suggestion that God’s blessings may, as a result, go elsewhere.

v.30 It is a question whether the Lord’s escape from this lynch mob is intended to be taken as something miraculous or not. It is hard to tell. But it was not his time to suffer death and so he escaped. [cf. Bock, i, 420] In any case, with v. 16, this final statement frames the narratives and completes it: Jesus came to Nazareth as we read in v. 16; now he went away. [Green, 208] As we learn elsewhere, it was Capernaum, a village on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, not Nazareth the Lord’s hometown, that was to be the center of his ministry.

Finally, well into Luke’s fourth chapter – and his are long chapters, making up the longest book in the New Testament! – Jesus begins his public ministry. Actually, from the other Gospels, including the Gospel of John, we learn that Jesus began his public ministry shortly after his baptism and the forty days in the wilderness being tempting by the devil; he began it in Jerusalem and he appeared on the scene there as a firestorm. He performed his first miracles there, gave his first teaching there, and before he reached Nazareth on this occasion, he had performed miracles in Galilee as well. It appears that he had already changed the water to wine at Cana in Galilee and had performed miracles of healing. Immediately huge crowds of people began to follow him and listen to him and reports about him began to spread like wildfire. The first report Luke provides his readers of the Lord’s public work is that of a sermon that Jesus preached in the synagogue in Nazareth, a synagogue in which he must have worshipped many times as a boy and a young man. By that time, very clearly, his reputation was already building and there was a tremendous interest in him on the part of people in general. We may forget that in his public work, first and foremost Jesus was a preacher. He was always preaching, he was preaching even when he was not working miracles, and after the synagogues were closed to him he preached to tremendous crowds in the open air, as many of his followers would do as well in the ages that followed. In what we might call today the Q and A that followed the sermon in Nazareth that day, Jesus made some further points.

What is so important about this first paragraph in Luke’s account of the Lord’s public ministry is that it so clearly introduces the great themes of the history that is to follow. We find here in the Lord’s return to Nazareth, his hometown, what we will find throughout the rest of the Gospel. We find, for example, the unbelief of the Jews and not only unbelief but real antipathy. Don’t imagine that this is not true to life. Lynch mobs are part and parcel of human history and, for that matter, of American history. I was reading recently an account of the United States in the Jacksonian era, and was reminded how violent that period was. Mob violence against Indians, against immigrants, against any group of people thought to pose some threat to another group was commonplace. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, was effectively murdered by a lynch mob. There were then and are today a lot of a lot of little people in the world who quickly turn to violence when their sense of themselves is threatened, when they fear some threat to their personal interests, or because they are easily stirred to a frenzy by demagogues. Palestine in Jesus’ day was such a place with many such people. America today is just such a place.

But more important, what we have here is the basic outline of the Lord’s message, the message that he will preach throughout Galilee and Judea over the next three years. It is the message that centuries before the prophets had foretold would be the message of the Servant of the Lord when he came and the Lord emphasizes that fact by making the words of Isa. 61:1-2 his own and then by saying to the assembly before him, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” which was to say, “I am the one Isaiah was speaking about; I am the one who is anointed to proclaim the good news…”

The message that Jesus preached that day and would preach through the next three years had two parts. The first part of that message was that there is grace and mercy from God for those who are troubled. He specifically mentioned a number of such people, but in each case, as will become still clearer as the Gospel narrative continues, the physical description served to identify a wider and deeper condition of life. The “poor” are not simply those who are economically disadvantaged. They may be physically destitute, many of those to whom Jesus referred were, but the poverty he spoke of refers to any and every way in which a person may be destitute in life, may be thought to stand outside the favor of God. The poor in the Gospels are simply those people who are in great need of God’s mercy and help and know that they are. The poor, in that sense, included the Lord’s disciples, none of whom, so far as we know, was financially destitute.

That last point is very important. There are many people who are objectively poor in this world – are destitute of what makes life good, and comfortable, and happy – but who will not admit it and will not seek help from the one who can give it. As Jesus will later put it, it is not those who are well who need a doctor but those who are sick and he did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. But, in each case, as the context will make perfectly clear, the “well” and the “righteous” are not people who actually have no need of God’s grace, but rather people who don’t realize and who will not admit that they have any such need. They may be objectively sick and objectively sinful, but in their own minds they are healthy and righteous. The Lord had no message of grace for them! He came to bring good news to those who were poor, by which he meant to those who knew and realized that they were poor.

And so with “the captives,” and “the blind” and “the oppressed.” There were, of course, literally blind people to whom the Lord would miraculously restore their sight, but there was as well a spiritual blindness that the Lord encountered and he opened the eyes of many more people who could see perfectly well in the physical sense but who had been blind to the salvation of God. They may have had 20/20 eyesight, but they had never seen themselves as sinners, never seen God as a gracious savior, and never seen the new life that God grants to those who trust in him. The recovery of sight throughout the Bible, but especially in the Gospels, is a metaphor for receiving the truth of God and being saved. “I was blind but now I see,” was a confession on the lips of many more people than the man born blind to whom the Lord gave sight in John 9, the man who first uttered those words, the words that John Newton took up into his famous hymn Amazing Grace: “I once was blind but now I see.” It is a way of speaking of salvation as the illumination of the mind and heart, coming to see things one did not see before.

In the same way, captivity and oppression in the Gospels are primarily to be understood as spiritual states or conditions not as physical ones. It is very interesting and important to note, something you may want to write in the margin of your Bible, that the word translated “liberty” in the ESV twice in v. 18 is the word aphesis, the ordinary word for “forgiveness.” For example, in Luke 24:47, where we read of the Lord commissioning his apostles to preach “the forgiveness of sins” in Jesus’ name to all nations, we have again that same wordaphesis. Release from captivity or from oppression is again a metaphor for release from the guilt and power of sin. Remember what the angel told Joseph before Jesus was born: “he will save his people from their sins.” He might just as well have said that Jesus would deliver his people from captivity. It means the same thing because man’s captivity to sin is his real captivity, the origin of all the other forms of bondage he suffers in his life. Most people don’t think that their bondage as a bondage to sin or that their oppression is the result of their sin, but those who come to realize that are in a fair way of being saved and going to heaven! This concentration on sin and forgiveness as a bondage, remember, was a feature of John the Baptist’s ministry in preparation for the Lord’s ministry. He proclaimed, we read in 3:3, “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Same word, aphesis, there too.

What is true of all of these states or conditions of life, of course, is the helplessness of those subject to them. They are prisoners, they are blind, they are overwhelmed. In each case the solution to their problems is beyond their power to effect. But Jesus comes to proclaim in himself sight, healing, and deliverance. This is what the Bible means by grace: divine mercy to the helpless, freedom to those who are in bondage, and life for the dead. And that is what people find when they believe in Jesus Christ.

Most of us have heard this so many times, we are so familiar with this message – “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” – that it is hard for us to reckon with how earth-shattering it is and how utterly unique. It may help you to appreciate anew and afresh the gospel of Jesus Christ if you realize that most people alive in the world today have absolutely no idea that God is a merciful God and that he offers grace and help to us in our need. I have always loved reading this section of a speech delivered before the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1901 by Max Müller, then Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University.

“I may say that for 40 years, as at Oxford I carried out my duties as professor of Sanskrit, I devoted as much time to the study of the holy books of the East as any other human being in the world. [That’s a remarkable thing to be able to claim!] And I venture to tell this gathering what I have found to be the basic note, the one single chord, of all these holy books – be it the Veda of the Brahmans, the Purana of Siwa and Vishnu, the Qur’an of the Muslims, the Sendavesta of the Parsis, etc. – the one basic note or chord that runs through all of them is salvation by works. They all teach that salvation must be bought and that your own works and merits must be the purchase price. Our own Bible, our sacred book from the East, is from start to finish a protest against this doctrine. True, good works are also required in this holy book from the East, and that even more emphatically than in any other holy book from the East, but the works referred to are the outflow of a grateful heart. They are only the thank offerings, only the fruits of our faith. They are never the ransom of the true disciples of Christ. Let us not close our eyes to whatever is noble and true and pleasing in those holy books. But let us teach Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims that there is but one book from the East that can be their comfort in that solemn hour when they must pass, entirely alone, into the invisible world. It is that holy book which contains the message – a message which is surely true and worthy of full acceptance, and concerns all humans, men, women, and children – that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” [Cited in Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, iii, 491-492n]

You begin to appreciate the gospel, the good news, when you realize that no one else, literally nobody else, has such good news to proclaim. No one! It is not good news to learn that you are on your own to get to heaven by your own endeavor. It is not good news when you know yourself a sinner that there is no promise of forgiveness, that no one has undertaken to secure it. It is not good news to be a captive but to have no deliverer. It is not good news to learn that God is waiting on you to satisfy his demands whatever they may be. But it is good news beyond belief to the poor, the helpless, the blind, the captive, and the oppressed to learn that God himself has taken the initiative to bring us salvation, that he is offering deliverance to us as a free gift. It is good news beyond belief to learn that “bliss is not for sale and cannot be earned.” [C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 33-34]

In fact, we are the only ones in the world, we Christians, who can look the human condition in the eye and not blink. No one can bear to face that human condition, not as it really is – corrupt, tragic, and dying – if there is no real remedy. That is why men are always seeking to describe the human condition in more positive terms than it deserves; to make it seem less bleak. We defy men to free themselves from guilt without an atonement and to free themselves from a sinful nature without the new birth. But neither atonement nor a new nature lies within our power to achieve. They are divine works and so must be divine gifts and if you don’t believe that you cannot look the human condition in the eye and not blink. Everybody blinks. Everybody treats the human condition as if it were not as helpless as in fact it is. This is the first part of the Lord’s message: God is merciful to sinners and will save those who welcome and trust in his Son.

The second part of the Lord’s message, and there will be much of this as well as we make our way through the Gospel of Luke, is that there is a sizeable community of human beings who remain and will remain uninterested in this message of divine mercy and will reject it.

It is surely a remarkably phenomenon, if not one of the most remarkable phenomena in all of recorded history, that the preaching of Jesus Christ, delivered with such authority and with such grace and with such perfect form; perfect preaching that it was, delivered by the best man who ever lived, and confirmed as it was by countless public acts of supernatural power, was not widely received or believed by those who heard him. Indeed, he was finally executed by people who had heard his sermons and seen his miracles or, at least, knew he had performed them. The problem was not with the good news; it was rather that there were few people who were poor enough to receive it.

What makes the good news so good and so imperative is that the specter of divine wrath and of punishment for sin looms over the world. There is a fate to which all human beings are consigned unless they are saved. This is the point that Jesus made, somewhat obliquely to be sure, in the afterword of the sermon. He will make that point much more bluntly as we proceed and, as a matter of fact, it was not a point in dispute among the Jews of those days. They knew of God’s judgment and of his wrath. They knew of hell as well as of heaven. Often in preaching the message judgment comes first, it sets the stage, the context and then comes the message of grace, mercy and redemption. But here the order is reversed.

But the message of judgment was not neglected, it was not omitted. The good news requires a context and judgment is that context. First the Lord draws attention to the fact his message wasn’t really accepted or believed by the people who heard it in Nazareth. The very notion that they expected to receive his attention because Nazareth was his hometown betrayed a complete failure to grasp spiritual reality. It was their need that had brought him to them, not their claim on his attentions.

Then, to confirm his point, he mentioned two examples from Israel’s past when Israel lay under God’s hand of judgment on account of her unbelief and disobedience and God’s mercy was shown instead to outsiders, to a Phoenician widow and a Syrian general. Jews knew very well that Israel had been judged often before for her unbelief and her disobedience, but the Jews of Jesus’ day were not willing to think themselves Jews like that! Instead of contrition and repentance, instead of worry and self-examination, this recollection of utterly typical anecdotes from Israel’s past produced only offended anger and outrage sufficient to create a lynch mob. This was a community of people unready to confess their poverty, their blindness, or their captivity. These were the healthy who needed no physician, the righteous who needed no repentance. The attitudes of their heart still compelled them to compare themselves favorably to others like the people in Capernaum, the sure mark of foolish pride and spiritual blindness. As the Pharisee would later say in Jesus’ story, “I thank you, Father, that I am not as that man.” It’s very interesting and it is somewhat obliquely said here – I am not sure all of you would say you would have caught this in your first reading of this narrative – but the Jews in Nazareth by a sort of innate spiritual instinct took offence at Jesus and what Jesus said for precisely the right reason! They got what he was saying. He was actually saying that they needed him! That they were poor and blind! No one was going to talk to them like that, especially no whippersnapper from their own town!

The Lord Jesus was as much as saying to them that he had brought no good news to them because though they were part of the world he came to save, they were not part of the audience to whom his words of hope and love and grace were addressed.

This too is a truth that we will, alas, see illustrated with depressing regularity through the remainder of the Gospel, just as we see it demonstrated with the same depressing regularity before our eyes every day. There are those who are being saved and those who will not be saved and the opposite of salvation is not nothing, but judgment and divine wrath and the punishment demanded by God’s justice.

There is a tragic aspect to life in this world, and its origin and its foundation lie here: multitudes of people who have no interest in God’s mercy and who are utterly indifferent to the good news that Jesus proclaimed and that he himself became by his death and resurrection.

But I want you to notice this: the two parts of the Lord’s message as a preacher have a definite order. The order is, in fact, dramatically emphasized here. Today, Jesus said, the gospel is proclaimed, the captives are set free, the blind receive their sight. Today! That “today” is our day as well and it continues to be today until the year of the Lord’s favor has drawn to its end and history comes to its close.

You remember Paul’s statement:

“Now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.” [2 Cor. 6:2]

And in Hebrews 3 and 4 a similar thought is carefully worked out and if you follow that author’s thought you get this:

“…so long as it is called Today” [and it still is ‘today’] the opportunity of salvation remains.”

What is so striking about the Lord’s message that day in Nazareth – and knowing the Bible as they did they would have immediately noticed this – is that he left out the second half of v. 2 in Isaiah 61. The Lord omitted the final part of the second verse. In Isaiah’s original, we read:

“…to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of out God…”

But the Lord left off the last phrase. He concentrated his attention on the good news of mercy for the poor and blind. He certainly did not deny the reality of God’s judgment of the unbelieving and the wicked, but on that day he began with God’s mercy. It wasn’t until people asked him questions, responded or didn’t respond, that he went on to remind them of the rest of the story. And so it continues through the Gospel. Good news first so that all who will hear it, may hear it. This is not yet the day of God’s judgment. This is the today of the good news.

You may well wonder if there is so much woe in our world, so much punishment, so much of the wages of sin, how terrible must be God’s judgment if this is not yet that judgment, not yet. These are but the first fruits of that ultimate, final judgment, the anticipations of divine wrath, it, the warnings of its coming. But until it comes, it is the day of mercy and the year of the Lord’s favor toward all those who know themselves poor, blind, and captive.

Whether there were one or two or three in Nazareth that day that heard the Lord’s sermon and rejoiced in the proclamation of mercy to them we do not know. We may well hope that there were, some of the holy family’s friends, perhaps. But most of Nazareth was not nearly poor enough to hear good news in what Jesus had to say. They heard only offense. These people, religious, upright, moral as they measured morality, they were too rich, too sharp-sighted, too free to care for a message addressed to the poor, the blind, and the captive. They would never accept as a first principle that salvation had to be a divine gift because nothing short of God’s great work of redemption through his son would be sufficient to save a place as proud and as wicked as Nazareth was.

Blaise Pascal, the French polymath and extraordinary Christian, once wrote:

“There are two kinds of men: [And by that he meant there are only these two kinds of people in the world.] the righteous who know themselves sinners, and the rest, sinners who believe themselves righteous.”

That is a brilliant summary of that day in Nazareth. And still today it is the same. There are some of you, no doubt, who can’t bear to admit that you are poor and blind and captive. It makes you angry when people say that you are. You get your hackles up, you are defensive. But why? You are poor, blind and a captive. We know you are. We’ll think better of you if you admit it. And what good is the opinion of the unbelieving world that comforts you in your illusions about yourself. They will believe anyone rich, sharp-sighted, and free; including many you know are nothing of the kind.

There is mercy from God for the poor, but not for those who insist that they are rich. There is the sight of a wonderful new world and of God himself, but not for those who boast of their 20/20. There is the delicious air of freedom for those who know themselves captives, but not for those who insist that they are already free.

A great message; a life changing message, a heart stirring and soul lifting message, a transforming message, an indescribably wonderful message, but a message only for those for whom it comes as wonderfully good news!

Hard Work

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Proverbs

In our sermons on the themes of Proverbs, we have so far considered the sexual life, marriage, money, and speech, certainly key dimensions of any human life as you will immediately recognize. Manage these wisely and well and much happiness and good must come; manage them poorly and they will cause untold harm and sorrow. Proverbs majors on the major issues of life and so it does with our subject this evening: the importance of working hard, of being industrious, on the one hand, and the sin and unwisdom of laziness, of indolence, on the other. Some of Proverbs’ most memorable teaching is devoted to this subject.

Go the ant, O sluggard;
   consider her ways, and be wise.
Without having any chief, officer, or ruler
   she prepares her bread in summer
   and gathers her food in harvest.
How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
When will you arise from your sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber,
   a little folding of the hands to rest,
   and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
   and want like an armed man. [6:6-11]

There is something very typical about this teaching. You can find it in Aesop’s Fables, you can find it Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms, and you can find it in the teaching of responsible parents all over the world today. There is nothing distinctly Christian about it, though, of course, as we made a point of emphasizing in introducing the book of Proverbs, the larger context of the teaching of the book, its motivation, its spirit, and its end or goal is distinctively Christian. Or, perhaps we should say, when non-Christians commend the importance of industry and hard work, they are in fact borrowing Christian capital, little as they may realize it.

By that I mean that there is a sense in which we ought to relish the typical nature of this teaching. What you have in the Bible, as well as an account of the history of redemption and a summons to holiness of life, is an explanation of the world and of human existence. The Bible is a book of truth about the way things are and always will be while this world endures. It is precisely this measure of confidence that people can have about the nature of human life that enables wise people to be reliable prophets of the future, at least in a broad way. There were plenty of people, as you know, who knew and who said that an economy based on inflated home values and unsecured or inadequately secured debt was bound to be punished for it sooner or later. To base a country’s economic life on the assumption that house prices always rise and never fall is foolish and will sooner rather than later be proved to be so. Why is that? Because that is how the world works; how God made it to work. Lies sooner or later pay a wage in the world created by the God of truth.

“Those strange old scriptures present life as having been ordered in a certain way, with certain laws as inextricably built into it as the law of gravity is built into the physical universe.” [F. Buechner in Plantinga, Not the Way it’s Supposed to Be, 116]

That is, again and again in the Bible we find teaching that is not really first a description of how life ought to be, but of how life is. This is one of the things that make the Bible such a wonderfully satisfying book. You read it and you understand the world, everyone’s world, your own and that of every other human being. The Bible is an open window on reality!

What you find in so much of human life is a protest against reality. People want the world to behave differently than it does. There is much of this in physical science, there is much in politics, and there is much of it in the social sciences. The problem is very often conceived in modern life in terms of conforming reality to the wishes of men. That is why there is so much futility in human endeavors to make the world better. Wisdom requires us rather to conform our desires to reality, not the other way round. Wisdom requires us to accept the limitations imposed upon us by reality and live accordingly. So much of modern social and political thought is utopian to one degree or another: a better world lies just around the corner for us to create with this initiative or this program or this social change. The fact that we never seem to turn the corner hardly seems to matter. The fact is, however, we are creatures, only that; and we have been placed in God’s world, a world that works in a certain way according to certain principles the reach of which we cannot escape. All human beings share this world and so there is a reality common to us all and a measure of wisdom that can be common to us all as well.

Listen to this from Karl Barth. I don’t ordinarily quote Barth in my sermons, but this is particularly well said.

“What is the obviously outstanding feature of world history? … [It] is the all-conquering monotony – the monotony of the pride in which man has obviously always lived to his own detriment and that of his neighbor, from hoary antiquity and through the ebb and flow of his later progress and recession both as a whole and in detail, the pride in which he still lives…and will most certainly continue to do so till the end of time…. History…constantly re-enacts the little scene in the Garden of Eden.” [CD IV/I, 505-508]

And, of course, part of that scene is the desire on the part of Adam and Eve to have something for nothing rather than to undertake the effort that God had summoned them to invest in obedience and service. Ever since man has been looking for the piece of fruit, the shortcut that would make the hard work of a consecrated life somehow unnecessary. But find it they have not nor will they ever find it.

So if Proverbs’ teaching about hard work proves to be teaching that is widely understood by many people around the world, teaching that one can find in the moral instruction of other religions and philosophies of life, that is only as it should be and as we should expect it to be.

In Proverbs and in life poverty is caused by one of three things, though in Proverbs the emphasis falls on the last two. Poverty is caused by catastrophe – drought, war, earthquake – or it may be caused by tyranny or oppression, the evil of other men, or it may be caused by idleness. Poverty is not caused by a lack of resources available in the world as one nowadays often hears. The cause of poverty is never that the earth God has given us is not good enough or does not supply us with adequate resources. The fact is the Bible teaches us to believe that God has given men a surplus if only they will lay claim to it. Have you thought about this? Prosperity can be achieved working but six days out of the seven. A few months of work in tilling and sowing can produce a harvest adequate to feed us for twelve months. There will be enough to care for widows and orphans as well. We are never poor because God has not adequately provided for us. Even today there is no place on earth where human ingenuity and industry cannot render a people prosperous if only corrupt government or human foolishness and greed have not intervened to destroy potential or are not intervening to prevent many people from sharing in the harvest of blessing that God has provided for them. Think about some of the most benighted places on earth today – Yemen, Somalia – those places were once very prosperous countries.

What is more, in the case of Proverbs’ teaching about work and industry, we are talking both about obedience to the law of God and about what we would nowadays call character. Unlike much of what Proverbs teaches us about the sexual life or the right attitude toward money, finer points of Christian living than are covered in the commandments of the Law, here we actually have a commandment that expressly addresses the subject. Not only is a life of work implied in the 8th commandment against theft and the 10th against covetousness, but the 4th commandment is devoted to the obligation of men to be workers. We can sometimes forget that the 4th commandment, requiring the keeping of the Sabbath day, expressly requires us to work on the other six days. This rhythm of work and rest is found everywhere in the Bible. The Bible is not opposed to rest or to play, but it requires them to be given a place after work. We were put here in this world, even Adam before the fall, to work, to be a steward of the world, to bring from it by work all of the great blessing that God has placed within it for our welfare and our enjoyment. It is because we must work and work hard that the day of rest becomes so important. The Bible doesn’t say work five days, but six and in a culture which expects two days off from work Christians should be careful to be sure that they don’t treat Saturday as simply another day of rest or play and not in fact a day for other kinds of work to be done. There is always enough work to be done if only one is willing: work at home, work for others, whatever. Fathers, your children, your sons especially, need to see you as a hardworking man.

So to work is to obey the Law of God and, as with all obedience, it ought not to be feigned or half-hearted, but be willing and unqualified, something we do enthusiastically. We ought to be hard workers six days of the week and take our day of rest as seriously on the seventh. Attitudinally, therefore, we are to be workers. It is to be our way of life to work hard. So a disposition toward industry, a discomfort with the idea that we are not using our time fruitfully, that we are being lazy or self-indulgent is more than obedience; it is part of a godly character, an attitude, a viewpoint on life, that ought to be characteristic of God’s people, not only according to Proverbs, but according to the rest of the Bible. It was the Apostle Paul, if you remember, who put the point most bluntly of all:

“If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work…” [2 Thess. 3:10]

That is, there is nothing in the Christian faith that can ever be thought to undermine the importance of a life of hard work, of faithful work, of industry and perseverance in responsibility. In any case the wisdom of industry and the unwisdom of idleness are sufficiently important to Proverbs’ conception of skillful living for the point to be repeated many times throughout the book.

“Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense.” [12:11]

“The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor.” [12:24]

“Whoever is slothful will not roast his game, but the diligent man will get precious wealth.” [12:27]

“The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.” [13:4]

“The way of a sluggard is like a hedge of thorns…” [15:19]

“Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys.” [18:9]

“Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger.” [19:15]

“The sluggard buries his hand in the dish and will not even bring it back to his mouth.” [19:24]

“The sluggard does not plow in the autumn; he will seek at harvest and have nothing.” [20:4]

“Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty; open your eyes and you will have plenty of bread.” [20:13]

“The sluggard says, ‘There is a lion outside! I shall be killed in the streets.” [22:13]

“Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.” [22:29]

“Prepare your work outside; get everything ready of yourself in the field, and after that build your house.” [24:27]

“I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense, and behold it was all overgrown with thorns; the ground was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down. Then I saw and considered it; I looked and received instruction. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.” [24:30-34; very similar to 6:6-11]

“The sluggard says, ‘There is a lion in the road! There is a lion in the streets!’ As a door turns on its hinges, so does a sluggard on his bed. The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; it wears him out to bring it back to his mouth. The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly.” [26:13-16; similar to 22:13]

And of the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31 we read:

“She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household…” [v. 15]

“She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.” [v. 27]

Taking all of this together, we may note some characteristic emphases:

The idler or sluggard, the lazy man or woman always seeks the easier path, the path of least resistance. That is why bed and sleep figure so largely in these proverbs. It is always easier simply to stay in bed. There is the implicit recognition then that hard work requires effort to control the will; it requires initiative, discipline, and sacrifice. It is easier to be lazy, a fact that should not be ignored. The discipline of hard work needs to be instilled in children and then consciously practiced through life precisely because it is contrary to our tendency to prefer the easy way. Remember the steps that Charles Simeon took to discipline himself to get out of bed early in the morning: first vowing to give half a crown to his cleaning lady whenever he was late getting out of bed; and then, when he found himself staying in bed and excusing himself because, after all, she needed the money, vowing to throw a gold crown in the River Cam every time he was late out of bed. Simeon knew the value of money and that last vow did the trick! But even a holy man, a godly man, a serious Christian man found that hard work required of him a certain discipline and the taking of steps.
The idler or sluggard is inclined to be blind to consequences, even when they are pointed out to him. Like many other character flaws, once allowed a place, they are hard to eliminate. There will always be a reason not to do what one should and to do it with not as much effort and dedication as ought to be given to it. “There is a lion in the street” refers to the world of excuses – often perfectly pathetic excuses – people can find to avoid or postpone hard work. I have heard many of these excuses through the years and have learned the truth of this teaching of Proverbs: idleness easily becomes a habit and habits are hard to break. We’ve watched this among a few, thankfully very few, of our young people in this church who have grown up to be idlers and as much as we cajoled and urged them and as much as we punished them and as much as we exhorted them, we found it impossible to create in them a real love for hard world. Hard work is a virtue best instilled early in life, parents, because it is very difficult to turn a lazy person into a hard worker later on in life. This is a matter of great importance, even more so in our day when institutionalized idleness is now so easily caught by young people. No culture has ever made idleness, useless activity not directed to any important end or goal so much a part of life for young people as Western culture has. A boy who spends hours playing video games is very likely to grow up to be a man who does not meet his responsibilities in life because those responsibilities cannot be met in the time one has left when he has sated himself at play.
Laziness always catches up with a person sooner or later. A student can pay little attention in class, skip the reading assignments, and take perfunctory notes, and he or she will suffer nothing until it comes time to take the examination. But by then it is too late to learn what should have been learned throughout the semester. A really effective teacher prevents this by whatever particular step or device he has chosen to use. I once had a class with the philosopher, Gordon Clark, in the January inter-term at Covenant Theological Seminary. Dr. Clark’s way of preventing this from happening in his classes was to intimidate, that’s a weak word, to terrorize his students. I remember on the first day of class he handed out a reading list. I thought that was interesting, something for my file. If I ever wanted to know what Gordon Clark thought were the most important things to read about religious epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, I’d always have his list. He didn’t say anything about what we were supposed to do with that list, but the next day in class he began with the first name on his class list s and said, “Mr. Baker,” (or whatever the man’s name was who was first on the list) “did you read Augustine’s De Magistro last night?” And Mr. Baker, of course, said, “No Sir, I didn’t.” “Did you read The First Meditation of Descartes?” “No Sir, I didn’t.” Of course everybody in the class and Dr. Clark knew this fellow hadn’t read a thing last night. But he went right down the list – work after work after work – “Did you read this one, did you read this one?” to which the student had in ever increasing embarrassment to say, “No, I didn’t read that either.” All the rest of us were sitting there praying, “Lord, if you’ll just keep him from calling on me I will serve you for the rest of my life.” But I have never been as prepared for a class as I was for that one for the remainder of its course.

I heard a story about a young boy who was taking the violin and was taken by his father to hear Itzhak Perlman in concert. They bought the kind of ticket that allowed those who possessed it to go to the back of the concert hall after the concert to meet the great musician. This boy said to Mr. Perlman, “I would give anything to be able to play the way you play.” To which Perlman replied, “Would you really give anything?” The boy said, “Yes, I would.” “Would you give fourteen hours every day?” “Oh!” said the boy. Most everything that is really worthwhile, everything that is truly a great reward in human life, everything you really wish for comes to those who work hard for it. If you are the kind of person who doesn’t work hard, it is almost a certainty that you will live without the satisfaction of those wonderful rewards.

Hard work provides both earthly reward (success) and a spiritual satisfaction and fulfillment not to be compared with another hour in bed. Wisdom is reckoning with consequences both good and bad. We’ve noticed that in the teachings of Proverbs already over and over again. The Bible is never embarrassed to make this connection between work and prosperity, between individual effort and individual success. I was struck reading recently that early on in the settlement of Plymouth the pilgrim settlers learned the same lesson that the Soviet Union had to learn the hard way: collectivism in labor and ownership does not and will not produce nearly as impressive results. Communal farming at Plymouth, which was the plan at first, had yielded meager results and the people were starving, but when, out of necessity, individual settlers were given control over specific parcels of ground and the right to the production of their fields, harvests immediately increased in quality and quantity. Why? Because people worked harder when their work was tied directly to the results. If people would work as hard for the communal farm as for their own, Soviet agriculture might have prospered instead of failed, but hard work was key and communism did not produce an ethic of personal industry. One of the abiding and undeniable facts of life is the connection between industry and prosperity, between hard work and reward, the latter a reason for and goad to the former.

“Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense.” [12:11]

“Work,” Luther famously observed, “is holy, the hidden mask behind which the hidden God gives us what we need.” And the holiness of work and so of hard work, industry, is found everywhere in the Bible. The place of work as an instrument of trust in the Lord is everywhere in the Bible. The old adage “laborare est orare,” “to work is to pray” is an expression of that theology of life. If the Lord has summoned you to work so as to enjoy the full measure of his blessing, if he has promised to reward your industry, then to work for a believer is to trust the Lord, to count on his provision to be given in the way in which he has promised to give it. We know, of course, that this is not the whole story. A hard-working Christian can be thrown into prison for his loyalty to Christ, or can suffer some ailment that makes it impossible to work, but, as a generality, and Proverbs deals with what is ordinarily the case, the Lord blesses us and provides for us and grants us prosperity through industry, through hard work. You cannot find a lazy man or woman among the saints whose lives and examples are commended to us in Holy Scripture. Jesus was a very hard-working man and has left us an example that we should follow in his steps. So was the Apostle Paul, a man who wore himself out in the cause of the gospel.

Those, of course, were men of genius and extraordinary public gifts. But even genius does not make hard work unnecessary. Geniuses are typically very hard workers because while they can see the great use to which their genius, their gifts can be put, hard work is still required to exploit them. Indeed, the more you learn of the great writers, the great inventors, the great political leaders, the great military men, the more you appreciate the phenomenal amount of work they invested in their achievements. I read recently that Ernest Hemmingway would quote the Latin proverb ars celere artem est, “It is an art to hide your art.” What he meant by that was, “Don’t let them see how much work you put into this manuscript, how many times you went over it, how many words and phrases you changed again and again and again until you had it just the right way. Let them think it just came off your pen that way.” I’m reading a new biography of the 19th century Scot Presbyterian, man of letters, and editor of the influential British Weekly, Robertson Nicoll. It was once said of him that “he edited five papers with his right hand and contributed to as many more with his left; that he was not a man but an army of men, directed by one cool controlling brain.” [Gammie, Preachers I Have Heard, 89]

But in life industry is as valuable in the case of the plodder, which most of us are. Let’s be honest. We may not have great gifts, but most of what is accomplished in the world is accomplished by people who set themselves to accomplish a piece of useful work and then keep at it until it is done. In fact, it is interesting and important that while the Romans and the Greeks despised manual labor and consigned such work in largest part to slaves, among the Jews there was no such contempt for working with one’s hands.

Contempt for certain sorts of work is pagan not Christian. Rabbi Judah, in the second century, is quoted as saying, “He who does not teach his own son a trade, teaches him to be a thief.” [Cited in Stott, The Incomparable Christ, 138] Jesus had a trade; Paul had a trade; Peter and John had trades, all of them different by the way. Jesus was a carpenter (Mark 6:3), Paul a tentmaker (though the term found in Acts 18:3 could refer to a leather-worker), and Peter and John were fishermen. It is surely interesting that the principal figures of the New Testament history were tradesmen who had to work hard to make a living. A great many Christians since have drawn encouragement from the fact that Jesus and his Apostles, by and large, belonged to what we would nowadays call “the working class” not the professional class.

The entire grand panoply of achievement that we observe everywhere we look in our world: the extraordinary productivity of modern agriculture, the remarkable technological transformation of our world, the obliteration of boundaries in commerce and financial enterprise is simply staggering. You take this for granted, but those of who are old enough to realize how rapidly and profoundly the world has changed, even in our own lifetime, realize what staggering achievements these are. Nowadays we can eat grapes twelve months of the year, unheard of just a generation ago. We produce more food from less land and in measures that would stagger the imagination of our forefathers, most of whom were farmers. You remember, I’m sure, those days not so long ago when if you traveled to Europe, you had to calculate the amount of money you would require on your trip and get that amount in travelers checks before you left home. Nowadays, you need no money in your pocket because you can put your card in an ATM anywhere in the world (Asia, Australia, Africa – as we discovered last Spring – Europe, Russia) and get as much of the local currency as you may require. And if you want to call your children in another part of the world, you have only to ring them up on your cell phone as you are whizzing down the interstate. These stupendous advances in human productivity are certainly not redemption, they do not portend peace with God, but they are dramatic demonstrations – demonstrations we take far too much for granted – of the extraordinary fruitfulness of the human mind and of the earth God has given us when these things are exploited by hard working human beings.

May I say as an aside that it is under Christianity that the people of the world – all people, rich and poor alike – have prospered the most. Buddhism, with its eschatology of annihilation, has no future orientation to teach people to provide for future generations; Hinduism’s inflexible cast system cannot reward the hard worker with a greater measure of prosperity; and Islam seeks to impose the limitations of a seventh century culture on a modern economy, thus frustrating the enterprise of the hard-working. But in Christian cultures, resting as they do on the doctrines that this world is God’s gift to man and his stewardship and that man himself has been made in the image of the creative and working God, both creativity and enterprise have been fostered and richly rewarded.

Do these advances and does this prosperity come with their own problems? To be sure. The corrupting power of human sin can spoil the very best things and does. But no one should minimize the extraordinary things that human beings achieve when they put their minds to something and work hard. And if that is true for human beings in general, how much more for the children of the heavenly father, whose work is offered in gratitude to God and in a desire to serve him.

We Christians can fear an emphasis on hard work because it may seem to undermine a proper Christian dependence on God’s grace. If we make a point of teaching our children to work so as to achieve, will they continue to believe that at bottom they must receive their salvation and all of God’s blessings as gifts freely given to them and not as their own achievements? Can we insist on our children learning the connection between labor and prosperity while still giving all glory to God for a salvation they did not and could not earn?

The answer to that question should be crystal clear in every Christian’s mind. In the Bible there is never a conflict between faith and work, between receiving and achieving. “I can do all things,” Paul said, “through Christ who strengthens me.” God made us to work and he saves us to restore us to that life of meaningful and holy work that he made for us. Work is not the curse, as some have thought. Adam was a worker before sin entered the world. Pristine and sinless life was a hard-working life. The curse has made work toilsome but work itself is not the curse any more than marriage or family or the Sabbath – the other institutions of pre-fall human life – are the curse. And so everywhere in the Bible and in Christian history, faith has made workers of men and women. That is as it ought to be. Are we to think that faith would make us indolent, lazy, idle, and useless to others? No one would ever dare say so. Virtually any biblical commandment you can think of requires us to work. Try to love your neighbor as yourself without working; try to provide for your family – and he who doesn’t do that is worse than an infidel – without working; try even to run the race or fight the fight without working. “Work out your salvation…for it is God who is in you…”

God’s grace is given to us to make us the right kind of workers and to bless our labors and make them fruitful in the right way. So it is no surprise at all that, contrary to the popular imagination of harp playing and cloud sitting, that in the Bible heaven is a place of fruitful and useful work. We are going to be working forever and ever.

God made us with the capacity for useful and fruitful work because as a worker himself he loves the working life and because as our creator he made us with the capacity to achieve through work and because as our Savior he has restored us to the life we ought to live, to that wonderful, satisfying calling of fruitful work. God works all the time; he is never idle. Are we not to be like him? Eden before the fall was a place of work and of enjoying the fruits of labor. Heaven will be such a place as well. And so our lives in between; so must earth be.

And most of us, I think, have had the experience of how satisfying hard work can be! Hard workers are a much happier lot than the lazy, and Christians who work hard find an immense amount of satisfaction in their work, just as Proverbs teaches they will. As the poet has it:

Blest work! If thou dost bear God’s curse,
What must his blessing be!

The world as God made it is a place where hard work brings blessing. It is to trust the Lord and to honor him that we live our lives according to that truth and teach our children to do the same.

The Temptation

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Luke
referring to: Luke 4:1-13

Text Comment

v.2 One of the most interesting features of the account of the Lord’s temptation as we have it reported in Matthew, Mark, and Luke is that the information could have come only from Jesus himself. No one else was witness to the events. But note the important fact that the Lord went into the wilderness full of the Holy Spirit and was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. Obviously this event at the headwaters of his ministry was essential to it and to his preparation for his life’s work. God directed him into the path of the Evil One. Jesus had to suffer a supreme temptation right away to clarify the nature of his life and work and to make clear the course that he had to take. Perhaps the sense of what follows is that the first question that had to be answered and decisively was what sort of Messiah would Jesus be. Satan would offer him a variety of options, each of which the Lord would refuse.

Comparing the three accounts of the temptation furnished by the synoptic Gospels we may conclude that Jesus was tempted throughout the period of the 40 days, though the three temptations reported may have come at the end of that period. [Bock, i, 369-370]

There is a powerful understatement here, of course. After 40 days without food he was hungry. We can’t tell from the words used whether we are meant to think that Jesus ate nothing for 40 days and so must have been sustained by the power of the Holy Spirit or only that he was fasting in some significant measure during that time. The 40 days is surely significant. There are many periods of 40 units of time (Moses and Elijah had 40 day fasts; Moses was on Mt. Sinai for 40 days to receive the covenant, Israel was in the wilderness for 40 years, and so on). The 40 days emphasizes then the significance of this period of time. It represents a turning point.

v.4 In the first place the Devil tempted him to employ his powers for his personal use and perhaps for the physical benefit of others, perhaps to become a kind of social reformer and benefactor of the poor. That prospect would have appealed to the Lord’s large heart. [Morris, 121] What is clear already is that Jesus knew, as did Satan, that he had unusual powers. We could not be tempted by the challenge to turn stones into bread, but he could.

His reply is immensely important for at least two reasons. First, what it effectively means is that what is not in agreement with the Word of God, Holy Scripture, cannot be right or true. This will be Jesus’ constant viewpoint. Here Scripture is used to test Satan’s remark and to find it wanting. Second, the Lord’s reply makes clear that there are many things with which human beings must be concerned besides bread. We are not simply animals, some American university professors’ opinion notwithstanding. Jesus will later say, and articulate for all of us this higher interest in life, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” You will sometimes hear Christian people excuse their unethical employment by saying, “Well, I’ve got to eat.” The answer Jesus taught us to give is, “No you don’t; you have to obey God; that is all you have to do.”

v.6 As you know from your reading of the Bible there is a real sense in which Satan is the prince of this world and it belongs to him. Satan was not here claiming an authority he did not have. It is the Bible itself that refers to the Devil as “the ruler of this world.” [e.g. John 12:31; Rev. 13:2]

v.8 The temptation, then, was a messianic ministry of earthly power and rule. This was hardly far-fetched as a vision of the Messiah’s kingdom. It was, in fact, what most Jews were hoping for and expected when the Messiah appeared: a political and military kingdom far greater than that of Rome. The price of such glory and power – with which, no doubt Jesus could have done much good – was that the Son would have to renounce allegiance to his father. The Devil doesn’t say that, of course; he merely asks for Jesus’ worship. Again the Lord replied with Scripture. He was not free to give his worship to anyone but the living God.

Take note of the devil’s guile and craft. He formed his temptations with subtle insight into the Lord’s mind, his loyalties, and his purposes in the world. The devil doesn’t craft temptations that fall on deaf ears. Poorly crafted temptations don’t work. The devil never says to us “Wouldn’t you like to betray your heavenly Father and your Savior and everything that you stand for? Ruin your life? Shame your loved ones?” That may be what he is after, but he tempts us more subtly and hides the consequences well out of sight. All we hear is, “Wouldn’t a bit of this taste good? What’s the harm in a little pleasure? Who will know?”

v.11     In the third case the temptation seems to have been to indulge in the spectacular in order to make people enthusiastic for his rule, his teaching, and to compel their wonder and belief. [Morris, 122] The Devil assures him that if he uses this strategy he cannot fail to build his kingdom and that he has nothing to lose; he will certainly be safe because of the Lord’s promise to protect him. But he does so by taking scripture texts out of context. The Lord replies by reminding Satan of the real meaning of the Word of God.

            All three of the Lord’s replies are taken from Deuteronomy and from that section of Deuteronomy – a very important book of the Old Testament, often called the Romans of the OT – from 6:13-8:3, a section that deals with the time Israel spent in the wilderness. The texts cited by Jesus are from the teaching that the Lord gave to Israel in the wilderness before her mission of conquest in the Promised Land. These were the lessons Israel failed to learn, but Jesus, in himself a new Israel, a new beginning for the people of God, learned them and practiced them. Where Israel failed, her Redeemer has succeeded; where she fell prey to temptation, he manfully resisted to the end.

v.13 The final phrase reminds us that there would be no freedom from temptation in his life just as there is none in ours. What a wearying, exhausting life he had to live, enduring and resisting every temptation to the bitter end. We hardly know what that would be like because in so many cases we capitulate easily and early to the temptations that come our way. You cannot know the power of a temptation until you have resisted it to the end.

The last time I preached on the Lord’s temptation, some eight years ago as we made our way through the Gospel of Matthew, I drew from the temptation of the Lord instruction for our own battle with temptations every day. It is entirely right to find that instruction in this text for Jesus was a man and he resisted his temptations with precisely the same resources that are available to us and none other. He was a man who knew how to resist temptation. Who better to show us the way to live a godly life in a world beset with temptations of every kind than the one human being in the history of mankind who did it perfectly? As the author of Hebrews twice reminds us, the life of temptation is a point at which the Lord’s own life touches our own and by his temptations he became able to help us in ours. You can return to that sermon if you wish and consider the temptation of the Lord from that viewpoint.

But this morning I want to address from this text another very obvious and highly significant dimension of this episode in the Lord’s personal history. Suddenly, and for the first time, without any introduction or preparation in the text of Luke, a mighty adversary of Jesus appears on the scene. We’ve heard nothing of the devil to this point. We are, of course, as Christian readers of Holy Scripture, used to the name, but imagine someone reading the Gospel of the Luke for the very first time and wondering who in the world this devil is and where did he come from and why was he seeking to undermine and destroy the life work of Jesus? He would ask such questions and we can well imagine what answer would have been given. The devil is the chief of the fallen angels, a mighty being whose rebellion against God, however futile, is intractable. Bereft of any of the influences that keep wickedness in bounds among human beings, the devil is a vicious and malevolent being who seeks the destruction of anyone who might be regarded as friendly to God and so it was inevitable that he seek with might and main to prevent the Son of God from accomplishing his work of reconciling mankind to God, to make a great company of human beings the friends of God. The devil seeks the exact opposite of that for which Jesus came into the world: the destruction of the kingdom of God among the world of men. And so we are alerted here, at the beginning of Luke’s account of the ministry of the Lord Jesus, to the fact that he had a mighty adversary who fought him tooth and nail every step of the way from Bethlehem to Calvary.

It was a true insight that led John Milton – after portraying the devil’s temptation of our first parents and the moral failure of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the fall of the human race through their sin in his immortal masterpiece, Paradise Lost – I say, it was a true insight for Milton to devote his sequel, Paradise Regained, to the account of the Lord’s baptism and temptation in the wilderness at the headwaters of his ministry. Mankind falls and mankind rises in a scene of temptation. In the first case Satan succeeded in ruining the human race; in the second he met his match and the die was cast. The cross was still some three years in the future, but the outcome was never to be in doubt. Paradise Regained begins:

                        I who erewhile the happy Garden sung,
                        By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing
                        Recover’d Paradise to all mankind,
                        By one man’s firm obedience fully tried
                        Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil’d
                        In all his wiles, defeated and repuls’t,
                        And Eden raised in the waste wilderness.

This is the new beginning for you, for me, for the human race precisely because the devil had met his match, the one who holds the world in his power was beaten by the champion of the people of God.

But supremely important as this must be, the place of the devil and his work in the world, both during the ministry of the Lord Jesus and at all other times, remains shrouded in mystery. He will be mentioned a few other times in Luke, but not regularly and when he is mentioned it is in passing. Where was the devil before this? How had he attacked Jesus in the years of his boyhood and young adulthood? We don’t know. Was it the devil who prompted the insane Herod the Great to attempt to eliminate the baby Jesus by killing all the baby boys in Bethlehem? It seems likely, but we are not told. We learn that he kept some people in terrible bondage to him whom the Lord later delivered; we know that he provoked Judas to betray the Lord; and we are told enough to know that behind the scenes he was busily at work attempting to frustrate the Lord’s ministry and bring it to ruin, but we are not told how he did this, we are not even told that he did this except in very general terms. We know that the Lord fought him and defeated him – bound the strong man as Jesus would once put it – but we are never shown another encounter like this one in the wilderness.

Indeed, throughout the Bible the situation is the same. We are told enough about the Devil to know that he is a great power in the world and that he is an adversary of the kingdom of God and so of every Christian believer who is seeking to live his or her life for the sake of the kingdom of God. But we are told precious little about how the devil works. We are told to resist him and that if we do he will flee from us, but we are never told precisely what that means. Luther is supposed to have thrown an ink well at the devil, but, of course, Satan is not a physical being and so wouldn’t be troubled by an object thrown at him. Some Christians today have developed an entire technology of resisting the devil, how a Christian is to talk to him and what he is to say to him, but, while this in some respects may reflect sound biblical sense, such things are nowhere taught in the Bible. Taking the whole of Scripture together, resisting the devil amounts to offering the kind of arguments that Jesus offered the devil here at his temptation; it amounts to prayer and to biblically informed obedience. In other words, there is nothing said about a Christian’s dealing with the devil other than that such dealing is best done by the practice of faith and obedience. “Trust and obey” is how Christians resist the devil.

To be sure, we learn something here of his manner of working. Calvin once put it: “Satan is an acute theologian.” And Jonathan Edwards went further, “Satan was trained in the best divinity school in the universe.” Satan obviously knows how to turn even the most sacred truth into an argument for betraying God and one's calling in life as a Christian. How many times has he whispered to you, “You can be forgiven for this later.” He uses biblical truth in his attack on Jesus here and only the Lord’s sharp-sightedness and deep understanding of the meaning of Scripture prevented his being deceived into disobedience. Paul will later speak of the devil’s wiles and fiery darts and our need to withstand them and, presumably, we do that by doing what Jesus did so artfully here: to reply to Satan’s deceitful suggestion with the unvarnished truth of the Word of God. You need your biblical wits about you if you would not be the devil’s dupe!

But, be that as it may, we are not told precisely how the devil tempted Jesus later, how he tempts us, or even how much of the temptations we must resist come from him and his minions. Our great impediments to salvation and godliness of life John tells us are “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” but we are never told how to know from which of the three any particular temptation comes, or how the devil or his demons suggests a temptation to a human mind. Some have claimed to be able to tell. Some of our own men, good and wise and reliable theologians, have claimed to be able to tell.

The celebrated John Duncan, Scottish Presbyterianism’s “Rabbi” Duncan, was once asked whether the tempting of Satan could be distinguished from the seduction of sin. He replied, “O yes; I’ve caught him at it; I’ve caught him at it.” [Moody Stuart, 173] But as highly as I regard Duncan’s spiritual learning, I don’t know precisely what that means or how one would be able to explain the difference between the source of two temptations to someone else when the Bible does not. How would a Christian know that it was the Devil himself and not one of his demons who was tempting him or her? Has any one of us ever been in the crosshairs of Satan himself the very one at the top of the kingdom of evil? Who can say? Obviously if the Devil did to us what he did to Jesus – engage in a conversation – that would be one thing, but there is no other episode in the Lord’s life or in the rest of the Bible quite like this one. We are not Jesus and, understandably, the devil doesn’t deal with us as he dealt with him.

The devil is a being of great power, but he is not God. He is not omniscient or omnipresent or omnipotent. As Luther famously put it: “The devil is God’s devil.” As another theologian put it, and I think this is right, “No single heart-secret is known to any single devil.” [Duncan, Just a Talker, 56] There are a lot of things about your life the demons don’t know; God does, but they don’t. There are things he can do but many things he cannot; but the Bible never explains in any detail either his powers or his limitations. We are reminded that he who is in us is greater than he who is in the world, but it is with such general statements that we must remain content.

We see the devil here in extended conversation with the Lord Jesus. Did that ever happen again? Did the devil conclude from his defeat in the wilderness that there was no benefit to be gained by such a direct confrontation and try more indirect approaches thereafter? We are not told. We are left knowing that the devil was at work, but we are not shown him at work or are shown very little of his working after this early episode.

So much of both ancient and contemporary fascination with devils and creatures of the unseen world has no basis in the teaching of Holy Scripture and is not morally serious as the Bible’s teaching about the demonic realm always is. The devil doesn’t have a tail or hold a pitchfork; demons don’t look like the grotesque images of the medieval gargoyles. We live in a time of renewed interest in supernatural beings, in the occult, and in the unseen world. Perhaps you have noticed how much of this there is in modern entertainment: from ghosts to vampires, from angels to spiritual aliens, from the dead accompanying the living to out of body experiences by those who have come near to death. Some of this is due to the macro change in our culture from rationalistic modernism to a more irrational postmodernism. People have lost confidence in science and reason and have turned to every manner of opinion about life, about the world, and about the meaning of things. This has opened the door to a new interest in the supernatural, though much of it a Christian would have to admit is pure fantasy and nonsense. Some of this openness to the supernatural is also the fruit of what has become on a more personal level a hard, increasingly violent, and disappointing world. People are looking for help and if science and rationality can’t give it to them, they are quick to look elsewhere. But in virtually every case it is searching but not finding.

In the Bible we find supernatural beings – both good and evil – whose presence in the world is a factor in human experience and human history. But there is nothing fantastic, nothing mythical about the Bible’s revelation of this dimension of existence. There is nothing frivolous; it is part of the Bible’s moral account of the world and human life. Once you have admitted the existence of God himself, a pure spirit who has no body, is not visible, there can be no real argument left against the existence of angels and demons. But there also can be no doubt that we are limited in our knowledge of these beings to only what God has revealed. We know and can know nothing more. The devil will be perfectly happy if we underestimate his powers or if we overestimate them. It matters not to him whether he has his way with us because we are unconcerned and unprepared, we don’t take our Christian life and the spiritual warfare seriously because we have forgotten all about the devil, or if he has his way with us because we live in fear of him because we imagine his powers to be greater than they are. Either way he has the better of us. We must confine ourselves to what we know and be content with that and live according to the Word of God. Jesus himself thought it vital that you and I know of his confrontation with the Devil in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry. But he did not choose to go on to give us details of the kingdom of darkness. He did not go on to tell us much more, as he might have done.

So the question posed to us by this episode at the beginning of the Lord’s ministry is this: what is the significance of our knowing that Jesus was tempted in this way by the devil and that he prevailed. Let me suggest briefly three things.

Surely the first thing is that we are here taught the great and terrible issue of human life. There are vicious beings in the world that are out to destroy human beings, to bring them into their control and keep them there. When the Son of God came into the world to bring salvation to the lost, there was a kingdom and a king ready to oppose him at every turn. If the existence of the devil and demons explains anything in human history, surely it explains the virulence and viciousness and relentlessness of human evil and unbelief. Why do human beings never learn? Why are we in thrall to the same foolishness and moral idiocy to which mankind has always been subject? Why does human evil reach such a pitch and so easily and constantly. The things human beings do to other human beings are so often so much more than merely thoughtless or cruel. They are outrageous in their pure wickedness and yet the perpetrators are blissfully unaware or actually pride themselves on their moral superiority and again and again it is has been left to a later generation of human beings to wonder how supposedly decent people could have been so heartless and so despicable and so inhuman in their treatment of others. It will be left to a later generation to wonder about us in the same way. Is this not evidence of a power at work in the world, of an evil influence capable of bringing the human heart under its malevolent power?

If the devil and demons are real, this world and life in this world suddenly take on a more serious cast. Must they not? If the devil is real, your life and the life of every other human being is part of a desperate struggle for control, part of a cosmic warfare, and to the victor belongs the spoils. And the spoils in this case are the souls of men; your life and mine. Any soldier who has been in combat will tell you what a great difference there is between practice and the real thing, when enemies are trying to kill you and succeeding in many cases in killing those beside you. The difference to human life that the existence of the devil makes and the knowledge of his existence is the difference between sleeping and wakefulness, the difference between a hot tub and a hot seat. On a battlefield a matter of life or death appears as exactly what it is: a matter of life or death. And everything else – your wants and needs, money, taxes, career prospects, relationships, all the rest, appears as what it is: not a matter of life or death. Admit the devil and life immediately becomes much more serious.

So, what we have in this account of the Lord’s temptation is a window on the desperate, life or death struggle into which he pitched himself for our sakes. We could never prevail against the devil, but he could and did for us. It wasn’t his life that hung in the balance those 40 days in the wilderness; it was our life, yours and mine. Great powers were colliding those days in the wilderness but our captain was victorious.

And that leads us to the second lesson: the magnificence of the Lord’s achievement, the sweeping grandeur of his victory. It would have been, we suppose, terrible and back-breaking and heart-breaking work for him to deliver us from our guilt and from the power of sin had there been no devil. But to add the devil’s relentless opposition to him at every turn makes the Lord’s work and so his achievement only the more staggeringly glorious. His was victory over the greatest conceivable powers united against him. When Christ came into the world he had his work cut out for him. He must not only suffer for our sins and live a perfectly righteous life on our behalf which no other human being came close to doing; he had to do that against untiring opposition and every manner of sinister effort to undo him. Just once; had Jesus stumbled just once, it would all have been for naught. On guard at every moment, he wielded the weapons of his war against a cunning and calculating foe until the battle was finally won. You and I will never fully grasp the greatness of the Lord’s victory or what it cost him to win it, but to know that he had to ward off the devil every step of the way, that an entire kingdom of evil was ranged against him at every step goes some way to teach us what a Savior and what a salvation we have got in Jesus Christ!

And, finally, we see here the certainty of our salvation. Here in the wilderness we are to find a great confidence, a lightness of step as we make our way through the world, and a sense of security. The devil couldn’t dislodge him, couldn’t deflect him from his calling and his goal, and had to retire from the field beaten. He wouldn’t give up, but the die was cast. The devil is our adversary too. He is working to ruin our faith and to break our connection to the Lord Jesus just as he worked to ruin our Savior. But he failed, and as surely as Israel knew it was victorious when Goliath’s body hit the ground, so every Christian knows himself safe, secure, when he or she has committed himself to our champion, the Lord Jesus Christ. Our enemy, our adversary, has already been conquered; his kingdom already consigned to perdition. has already been judged and given over to perdition. He may continue to rage, but he has met his match and his doom is sure. And we are to live in the knowledge of that fact.

In the account of the Lord’s temptation we are given a window on the world. There is a kingdom of evil that seeks evil for everyone, that desires to draw up everyone into its rebellion against God. But in the event, it must fail and it has failed at the key point to defeat the kingdom of God. Take away from this great paragraph of Holy Scripture and this great episode in the history of salvation the greatness of our Savior, the futility of unbelief and rebellion against God, and the certainty that as we stand with the Lord and follow him we will sooner rather than later find ourselves suddenly amidst the great host marching triumphantly under the banner of the King of Kings through the gates of the city of God.

The devil did his best but it was not good enough, not nearly good enough. The devil’s project no matter how long he continues it is hopeless. He is swimming against the current of God’s universe and must at last be swept away. He wears himself out in a futile attempt to conquer the Almighty who has already conquered him. And so the forces of evil in the world, ultimately already put in their place, are not only destructive and infuriating, they are also genuinely ludicrous. This led C.S. Lewis famously to observe that “the devil is (in the long run) an ass.” [Plantinga, Not the Way it’s Supposed to Be, 123] Compare him to the Lord Christ and he shrinks, look at both of them long enough and the devil shrinks away virtually to nothing; shrinks until every Christian should scoff at him and retake his or her place with Jesus in the prospect of eternal, universal, and unconditional victory.

Speaking and Listening

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Proverbs

If we are to live wisely, if we are to be skillful in the way in which we make our way through this world, if we are to embody in flesh and blood the image of a godly and happy life as that life is described to us in the Word of God, making something genuinely worthy and fruitful of our lives to the blessing of ourselves, our families and others and giving glory to God, there can be no doubt that one area of behavior that must be made subject to wisdom is our speech, both the uttering of words and the hearing of the words of others.

Speech is the great power of human life. It is a power so remarkable that if we weren’t so used to it and take it so much for granted, we would stand utterly amazed, dumbfounded at the power we wield through speech every hour and every day of our lives. Noam Chomsky, certainly no conservative creationist, but known from his work at MIT as the father of modern linguistics, got himself into hot water with the evolutionary community a few years back by admitting that there is nothing like the power of speech in the rest of the natural world; that human beings are, as he put it, “hard-wired for language,” and that no one has ever suggested a remotely plausible pathway by which such powers could have been produced by undirected biological processes. Whether the baby is born in China to speak Mandarin, in Kenya to speak Swahili, in Denmark to speak Danish, or in the United States to speak English, the child by instinctive imitation learns to form words and sentences and to reduce his or her thoughts to words and to communicate those thoughts to other minds by speaking the words in the order and grammar appropriate to that language. Utterly remarkable! Utterly mysterious! But it is the power that is possessed by every human being.

And this power is the stuff of human life. It is by the spoken word (and eventually the written word) that we communicate with one another. It is this power that makes a distinctly human relationship possible, the expression of love as humans experience love; it is this power that makes education possible, and culture and civilization possible. Everything we take for granted about our lives as human beings depends upon the power of speech. It is the chief instrument of human life, this power to communicate thoughts in words.

So if we are going to live a good life, a useful life, and, in particular, if we are going to live a godly life, our speech must be submitted to and so controlled by our Christian faith. It must be governed by the law of God and motivated by the love of God and man. If speech is the chief instrument of our lives, then it of all things must be distinctly, obviously, and intentionally the speech of a Christian!

But, what is also obvious is that our sinfulness, human fallenness affects nothing so obviously as it affects our speech. The Bible is full of this melancholy fact. In a famous passage in James 3 we read that “no human being can tame the tongue;” it is “a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell.”

And no one has to read very far in the literature of Christian spirituality, that is, the practice and experience of the Christian life, before he comes to some statement either acknowledging the difficulty of taming the tongue, or of taking the sin out of our speech, or the impossibility of being godly if one is not godly in one’s words. What a mess we make with our words and what good we so often fail to do when the right words were there to be spoken and would have made such a great and good difference.

Here is Alexander Whyte on a subject virtually every great Christian writer tackles sooner or later. [Walk, Character, and Conversation of our Lord, 244-246]

“A holy man used to say when he returned home from a night of table-talk that he would never accept such an invitation again, so remorseful did such nights always leave him; so impossible did he find it for him to hold his peace, and to speak only at the right moment, and only in the right way. And, without his holiness, I have often had his remorse, and so, I am quite sure, have many of you. There is no table we sit at very long that we do not more or less ruin either to ourselves or to some one else. We either talk too much, and thus weary and disgust people; or they weary and disgust us. We start ill-considered, unwise…topics. We blurt out our rude minds in rude words. We push aside our neighbor’s opinion, as if both he and his opinion were worthless, and we thrust forward our own as if wisdom would die with us. We do not put ourselves into our neighbor’s place. We have no imagination in conversation, and no humility, and no love. We lay down the law, and we instruct people who could buy us in one end of the market and sell us in the other if they thought us worth the trouble. It is easy to say grace; it is easy to eat and drink in moderation and with decorum and refinement; but it is our tongue that so ensnares us. For some men to command their tongue; to bridle, and guide, and moderate, and make just the right use of their tongue, is a conquest in religion, and in morals, and in good manners, that not one in a thousand of us has yet made over ourselves.”

And, fact is, the damage we have far too often done with our words is too often never repaired. We can’t repair it, either because we don’t even know that damage was done or because the wound we caused was too great and hurts too much, or because the opportunity to repent and restore either never appeared or was missed when it did. Someone’s reputation was harmed by the words we spoke and sometimes harmed in the minds of people who neither know the person nor will ever meet him. Gossip we spread is then spread by others still farther and wider and no one can collect all the ill-reports even if he wished to do so. Our words have spread dissension and then the division between others takes on a life of its own and can’t be undone.

The story is told of Saint Philip Neri (1515-1595) that he once gave an unusual penance to a novice who was guilty of gossip, a sin hardly one in ten thousand is not guilty of. Neri told the young monk to take a feather pillow to the top of the church tower on a blustery day and there release all the feathers to the wind. Then he had to come down from the tower, collect all the feathers dispersed far and wide over the countryside, and put them back into the pillow. Of course there was no way for him to do it; he could collect only a few of the feathers, not enough to remake the pillow, and that was Neri’s point, driven home in an unforgettable way. The sins of the tongue, however easy to commit, are terribly difficult to undo.

No wonder then that Proverbs should have so much to say about our speech, what it ought to be and what it must not be. I told you last week that by one count there were 84 verses in Proverbs that dealt in some way with money. Well, in my Bible I have 111 verses underlined in yellow, the color I use to identify verses having to do with speaking and listening: more than ten percent of the whole.

Speech is as important as it is, in the first place, because it is an index of your character. It doesn’t take a person very long to realize that the words a person speaks – at least over time – reveal the inner man or woman.

“On the lips of him who has understanding, wisdom is found…” [10:13]

“The words of a man’s mouth are deep waters…” [18:4]

The connection between the soul and the mouth is too immediate to be able to control at all times. If a person never thinks of some people or some things, his speech will usually be bereft of those people and those things; if a person is always thinking some things, sooner or later his speech will disclose the fact. If a person has a judgmental heart, his words will sooner or later give it way and if a person is kind, loving, and sympathetic, we will know that also from the words he or she speaks. If a person is humble or proud, materialistic or other-worldly, thoughtless of God or attuned to the glory of God, the fact will almost always be disclosed sooner rather than later by his or her speech. And the same will be disclosed by the way one listens to the words of spoken by others.

But speech is also so important in Proverbs because so much good or harm can be done with our words.

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.”

The sense of that last line seems to be that one will “eat” the consequences of his words according to whether his words are good or bad. Those who love life will speak one way and his words will bring life, those who love death will speak accordingly and produce results accordingly. [Waltke, ii, 86] So, for example 13:3:

Consider the good done by the right kind of speech:

“Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.”

Or 15:23:

“To make an apt answer is a joy to a man, and a word in season, how good it is!”

Or 21:23 and 28:

“Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble.”

“A false witness will perish, but the word of a man who hears will endure.”

“There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” [12:18]

And, on the contrary, sinful speech spawns trouble of every kind.

“A fool’s lips walk into a fight, and his mouth invites a beating. A fool’s mouth is his ruin, and his lips are a snare to his soul.” [18:6-7]

“If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked.” [29:12]

So what are the characteristics of wise, of godly speaking? Well, the Bible has much to say in answer to that question, but if we confine ourselves to the teaching of Proverbs we can mention these:

It is honest.

You remember Diogenes, of 4th century B.C. Athens, one of the founders of Cynic philosophy, who was famous for stunts, such as walking about Athens in the daytime with a lamp explaining that he was trying to find an honest man. Cynic philosophy is not the same thing as cynicism in the modern sense of the term, but all of us have become cynics in that latter sense because real honesty, genuine honesty, is so hard to find. We now fully expect our politicians to deceive, if not to lie outright; we don’t expect the truth from a television newscaster or a newspaper columnist. We live in a world awash with propaganda and a world changed by the discovery that in a media age such as ours brazen lies often, if not usually, work better than the truth. When was the last time a politician or a newscaster, or a commentator, whatever his politics, said something like, “Now, I want to be careful not to misrepresent the situation in any way. There is, of course, a sensible argument to be made on the other side. Here it is and here is why I disagree with it.” By the time he finished the third sentence the television audience would be asleep. The systematic misrepresentation of things for the sake of an advantage may be normal but it is not biblical; it is not wise to tell lies or to get a reputation as someone whose word cannot be trusted. Genuine honesty is a beautiful thing in large part precisely because it is so rare.

“Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment.” [12:17]

“Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord…” [12:22]

“Whoever gives an honest answer kisses the lips.” [24:26]

“A faithful witness does not lie, but a false witness breathes out lies.” [14:5]

“A lying tongue hates its victims, and a flattering mouth works ruin.” [26:28]

Perhaps it is especially true that a wise man speaks the truth about others. He is especially scrupulous about the truth when it concerns someone else besides himself. He doesn’t lie about himself, of course, but he considers it a matter of the greatest importance not speak of others in a way that is untrue or that he does not know to be true.

Wise speech is also sparing of words, reticent, self-controlled.

Speech being as hard to control as it is, as subject to our flesh as it is, again and again the godly learn that, in general, the fewer the words they speak the happier and holier they will be.

This is a major emphasis in Proverbs.

“A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back.” [29:11]

“Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.” [13:3]

“Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble.” [21:23]

“The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer, but the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things.” [15:28]

“Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him.” [29:20]

And, most famously, 10:19:

“When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.”

And 17:27-28:

“Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.” Or, in other words, keep your mouth shut and let people indulge the illusion that you have something to say instead of opening your mouth and proving to them that you don’t! Proverbs is very emphatic on this point. Most of us talk too much and a great deal of the harm we do to ourselves and others would not be done if only we talked less. Woman Folly, for example, is loud! She talks all the time.

What is more, when you constantly give vent to your thoughts and attitudes without careful reflection and thought and preparation, you put yourself in the power of someone who has the wit to expose your words for what they are. I am sure that has happened to all of us at one time or another: someone has made a riposte to the things we have said and we have been immediately ashamed and embarrassed. The famous story is told of George Whitefield who, once before he began to preach, was handed a note upon which was written but one word: “Fool!” Whitefield described the note to the great congregation and then said, “I have often received notes of abuse with no signature, but this is the first time I have received a signature but no note.”

At his clandestine seminary which was moved from place to place as they hid from the Nazi authorities in pre-war Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer made it a rule that the brothers were not aloud to speak about one another in any way if the other man were not present. No matter what motive a brother might claim to have, no matter how high-minded he may appear to be, or intend to be, the fact is conversations so often take a turn and it is simply better not to have them at all behind a brother’s back. [Life Together, 91-92] If we did this we would have to cringe far less when reading Pascal’s remark that if only our friends knew what we have said about them behind their backs, we wouldn’t have four friends left in the world!

I’ve always remembered the remark made by Wellington, the English general, about Talleyrand, the French statesman. “He is not lively or pleasant in conversation, but now and then he comes out with a thing you remember all the rest of your life.” [Cited in Paul Johnson, Napoleon, 99] Or, if I may paraphrase, “If you want people to hang on your words, don’t utter so many of them.”

Third, wise speech is kind.

Our great calling in life is to love God and our neighbor. But what we sometimes forget is that the primary instrument of love (as of hatred) is speech. Many more people feel the power and glory of love from words that are spoken to them in the same way that many more people are deeply harmed by words than are ever shot or knifed or beaten. We may say that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” but the truth is the reverse. Words do terrible harm and there a great many people – you know them – who suffer all manner of alienation and confusion and heartbreak in their adulthood because of words that were spoken to them when they were young or words that were never spoken to them when they were young. Words can do terrible harm and harm that endures for a lifetime. Words are the hands and feet of both love and of hatred. And, in some ways, words are worse because while a broken bone can be mended, the harm of words sometimes goes down so deep it can never be got out. A Jewish sage once compared the tongue to an arrow. “Why not use another weapon, a sword, for example?” the rabbi was asked. “Because if a man unsheathes his sword to kill his neighbor, and his friend pleads with him for mercy, he may be persuaded to return the sword to its scabbard; but an arrow, once it is shot, cannot be called back.” Remember, it was the Lord Jesus himself who compared cruel words to murder!

And think of this: someone brought this to my attention as I was reading the other day how much words spoken and written had to do with the awful experience of African American slavery in our country. If words used to identify African American slaves had been changed, if they had been words of respect, honor and equality the institution of slavery would have been ended much sooner than it was and without a cruel war. Spoken words, probably more than anything else, made the slaves seem even to people we would describe as “decent people” in their minds less worthy of respect, of protection and of the honor due to a human being made in the image of God. How powerful words are to bless and to hurt!

“Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad.” [12:25]

“A gentle tongue is a tree of life,....” [15:4]

“The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.” [10:11]

“The lips of the righteous feed many…” [10:21]

“Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.” [16:24]

“Whoever covers an offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends.” [17:9] Even Bertrand Russell, whose own ethics left much to be desired, was perceptive enough to observe that “nobody ever gossips about other people’s secret virtues.”

“Better is open rebuke than hidden love.” [27:5] In other words, if you wish to love and to be seen to love another you must open your mouth and love that person with your words.

“There are those whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives…” [30:14] The mouth can do a lot of harm to others, or it can do a lot of good. So the wise man or woman must intend for his or her words to do good; he must make a point of employing them for good, and must guard his words to make sure he takes the harm and hurt out of them. A wise man or woman knows that it matters not only whether the report that you are spreading is true; it matters as much with what gracious and loving or jealous or hurtful intention you spread it.

And, of course we could go on at some length listing the characteristics of wise and skillful speech as Proverbs describes it.

It is constructive. “Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute.” [31:8] In other words, use your speech on purpose in the service of others. But don’t throw it away. “Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the good sense of your words.” There is a great deal of argument that is utterly useless and should never be indulged in. It does no one any good at all.
It is humble. “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.” [27:2] Self-deprecation is the next best thing to silence, unless it is obviously contrived and masks a false humility. Wise men, in fact, have made a practice of self-deprecating speech. I love remarks like Chesterton’s who, after he got very heavy, once remarked to a friend that “Just the other day in the underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.”
It is gentle. “With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.” You don’t have to shout to be heard or to influence others.
It is apt. “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.” [25:11] “To make an apt answer is a joy to a man, and a word in season, how good it is!” Of course, you have to be thoughtful about your words to speak aptly; both measuring what to say and when to say it. “Whoever blesses his neighbor with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, will be counted as cursing.” [27:14] One wonders what words were exchanged last week in that Rotterdam apartment early in the morning that led to the knifing of Seattle Mariner’s outfielder Greg Halman. The timing of words can be everything; literally the difference between life and death.

And then, of course, there is the counter-responsibility of a right listening to the speaking of others. To drink into gossip is as bad as spreading it in the first place. To give ear to a critical word about another is as bad as having said it yourself and, in many if not most cases, if you listen to the remark you will repeat it to someone else and become the tale-bearer yourself. What is more, the most effective way to shut up hurtful speech is to refuse to listen to it. A man who speaks wisely will also speak wisely to the fool who is speaking badly. “I’m sorry, I have no business listening to this” or “We shouldn’t be talking about someone who isn’t here to defend himself” or “You really ought to take this up with him or with her.” [Jack Collins, Syllabus, 82]

You remember Shakespeare’s Othello. There is no more vile or evil villain in all of the bard’s plays than Iago, whose evil was perpetrated almost exclusively through words, words that others had to be willing to believe for them to do the damage Iago intended. Iago wanted to destroy the Moorish general for having bypassed him for a promotion. Knowing Othello’s jealous nature, he spread the report that Othello’s new wife, Desdemona was having an affair with another man. The charge seemed preposterous at first, but the rumor was repeated often enough by enough people that soon Othello believed the slander and murdered his beloved in a rage, only almost immediately to learn that Iago’s words were a lie. For Othello, “hell,” as an old adage has it, “was truth seen too late.” He was as guilty as Iago for drinking into the gossip he heard. It is a principle we ought all to live by: never to believe gossip; always to assume it is untrue!

Johann Albrecht Bengel, the godly German Lutheran Pietist, is famous as a biblical commentator for his Gnomon Novi Testamenti, in English, Notes on the New Testament, first published in Latin in 1742 and then in many editions thereafter. It is one of the most influential biblical commentaries ever published and in Latin it is a masterpiece of compression. No one said more with fewer words than Bengel.

His comment on the Lord’s remark in Matthew 7:1, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged…” takes but four words: “sine scientia, necessitate, amore.” The judgment the Lord is talking about, the passing of judgment that he is forbidding, is any judgment that is offered without knowledge, without necessity, and without love. If you don’t know the facts, if there is no particular need for you to pass judgment, and if you can’t do it without love for the other person, then keep your mouth shut. Four words. I think we could well summarize the teaching of Proverbs both regarding speaking and listening with those same four words: without knowledge, necessity, love.

I don’t know about you, but so much of my regret in life – and I have a great deal of regret! – has to do with the words I spoke or the words for cowardice or cluelessness or unconcern or a hard heart I didn’t speak when I should have and could have. According to Lloyd Jones, “Look back and think of the times when you were unhappy and you will find that it was almost certainly due to something you said and which you regretted perhaps for days.” [BOT 275-6 (Aug/Sept 1986, 7-12]

Consider this remark of a Scottish man about Alexander Smellie, the 19th century Presbyterian pastor and author,

“…after almost fifty years of friendship I can testify that I never heard him say a word of anyone that was ungenerous or unworthy.”

You know, I have known people of whom I could say the same thing. This is not something beyond us, brothers and sisters. I say, I hear such a remark about a man and think immediately how much I wish I deserved to be remembered for such an astonishing self-control and mastery of my tongue. How pleased the Lord must have been with such a life. But it is to just that kind of mastery of our words – the intentional deploying of our words in order to accomplish holy things – that Proverbs is after in all its teaching. Wisdom is the submission of our speech to the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is, after all, one aspect of the Christian life that, however difficult to achieve, is not at all difficult to grasp. In one respect this is an extraordinarily difficult part of the Christian life. It is difficult because the distance from mind and heart to mouth is so short. But, in another respect, this is a simple part of true godliness and wisdom. I mean, it is simple to understand. It is not difficult to explain what in fact our speech ought to be. It is to be our goal that the words of our mouths be pleasing in God’s sight and convey love and useful information to our neighbor. It will mean, it must mean that we speak less than now we do, but how satisfying to speak so well. Four words: without knowledge, necessity, love. Take out the bad speech and then work to sanctify the rest.

It is our principle instrument of life so it ought to be a principal intention of our lives to be wise and skillful here of all places. Winston Churchill once said, “Words are the only thing that last forever.” He wasn’t a Christian and got that wrong, of course. There are many things that last forever. But words are chief among the things that last forever, so let’s be committed, for our Savior’s sake, to make the words we speak worth remembering forever.

The Holy Trinity Near the Jordan River

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Luke
referring to: Luke 3:15-38

In Luke chapter 4 we have so far read the account of the ministry of John the Baptist and its remarkable effect. Now we can continue with what remains of Luke’s account of John’s ministry and then the genealogy of the Lord.

Text Comment

v.15 This is very interesting isn’t it, that the power of the Word of God in the mouth of John, felt as it had been in the hearts of so many, made them wonder if John might be the Christ. The point is certainly that John and his preaching were something remarkable, something that had never been seen or heard among the Jews for a long time. It is a mark of the greatness of the Messiah that his forerunner should have been mistaken for him. They had no one to compare John with, but, of course, as soon as Jesus appeared there would be no more thought of John as the Messiah. The very point John will now make!

v.16 John makes two points about the one who is coming after him: he is greater in himself and his baptism will be greater. Untying a man’s sandals was a slave’s work, demeaning. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that among the Jews even a Hebrew slave was above such work. [Bock, i, 320-321] So it is noble humility for John to say that he wasn’t worthy to untie the sandals of the one who was coming.

v.17 The two aspects of the Messiah’s baptism – the Holy Spirit and fire – appear to be explained in the gathering of wheat and the burning of the chaff. So the Messiah will bring both salvation and judgment. Remember, we have already heard from Simeon that Jesus would cause both the rising and the falling of many in Israel.

v.18 This is not the only place in the New Testament where a message that included eternal judgment was nevertheless described as good news. There can be no good news without the bad news; there can be no great salvation if there is nothing to be saved from. What is more, if those who are being saved are not assured that there will be a final and eternal conquest of evil, there can be no ultimate good news. [Morris, 115]

v.20 As I mentioned last Lord’s Day morning, Herod had divorced his wife to marry Herodias, who had divorced her husband to marry Herod. Herodias’ husband was Herod’s half-brother, though he was a private citizen and not a king. So, beside the immoral divorces, the new marriage was incestuous and John had boldly pointed that out. Remember, this is Herod Antipas, the son of the Herod who was king when John and Jesus were born.

Luke is not writing chronologically here; in talking about John’s imprisonment he has advanced the story considerably. Luke is simply completing his account of John’s ministry. We know from the other Gospels that John continued his ministry after Jesus had begun his and wasn’t arrested until some time after the public appearance of Jesus.

v.21 When you compare this account with those in Matthew and Mark it is clear that the opening of the heavens and the descent of the Holy Spirit occurred immediately as Jesus was coming up out of the water. The earliest artistic depictions we have of Christian baptism – and they are early, from the 2nd century – show the minister who is baptizing and the one who is being baptized standing in a shallow stream, with the minister pouring water over the catechumen’s head. Whether that is what happened or Jesus was immersed in the Jordan River no one can say.

It has long been discussed why Jesus would have wanted to be baptized by John, whose baptism was a baptism of repentance when Jesus had nothing to repent of, sinless man that he was. It is apparently, on Jesus’ part, an act of identification with sinners and with their sin, an identification that will eventually take Jesus to the cross.

Luke alone tells us that Jesus was praying at the very moment he was coming up out of the water. Here is Alexander Whyte:

“My brethren, will nothing teach you to pray? Will all his examples, and all his promises, and your own needs, and cares, and distresses, not teach you to pray? What hopeless depravity must there be in your heart when, with all He can do, God simply can’t get you to come to Him in prayer. … Only pray, O you prayerless people of His, and the heaven will soon open to you also, and you will hear your Father’s voice, and the Holy Ghost will descend like a dove upon you.” [Walk, Character, and Conversation, 90] There is, you see, a powerful inducement to our prayer here and the need for prayer. Our Savior was a perfect man, there was no sin in his heart or life, he had very few worldly wants and sin and want is what takes up the lion’s share of our prayers is it not; but he still felt all the time his great need for communion with his heavenly Father. How much more we sinners need to pray!

v.22 It is very interesting that there is no antecedent to the Holy Spirit being likened to a dove. Here is where the dove is first introduced as a symbol of the Holy Spirit: it was not taken so far as we know from either Jewish or Greek sources; it originates at the baptism of Jesus when at least both Jesus and John saw the dove and understood it to be a sign of the Holy Spirit.

c.38 As is well known, Luke’s genealogy of Jesus differs greatly from the one provided by Matthew in the first chapter of his Gospel. Luke gives the line from Adam to Abraham which Matthew does not (Matthew starts with Abraham); the two genealogies are quite similar from Abraham to David; but diverge substantially from David to Joseph. Some have sought to solve the problem created by the differences by suggesting that Luke gives us the genealogy of Mary not of Joseph, but there are insurmountable problems with that suggestion, not least that it is not what Luke says he is giving us, namely the genealogy of Jesus through Joseph. There are a variety of other complicated suggestions to account for the differences, but in our present state of knowledge it is impossible to be sure which explanation is most likely to be correct.

The fact that the genealogy goes all the way back to Adam serves to “tie mankind into one unit. The fate of every human being is wrapped up in Jesus. His ministry, as seen from heaven and from the beginning of human history, represents the focal point of that history.” [Bock, i, 360] And, of course, as the genealogy confirms, Jesus is also the legal heir of David the king, as the Messiah must be.

In his typically extravagant way of saying things, Martin Luther said that the New Testament begins at the Jordan and at the baptism of Jesus. It is here that Jesus is first introduced to the world and here that his ministry begins. It is at this time, we learn in the Gospel of John, that it was first publicly proclaimed that Jesus is the Lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world. The baptism of Jesus marks the commencement of the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ of whom we have heard virtually nothing for nearly thirty years of his life.

We don’t know what prompted Jesus to leave Nazareth, his trade, his family, and his home to make his way south the seventy miles or so to where John was preaching to the great crowds that gathered to hear him. Perhaps it was simply the news that John had begun to preach and that great congregations were listening to him gladly. Jesus must have known how John’s life and calling and his own were inextricably bound together by the circumstances of their birth and by what the angel had said to both parents before the boys were born. In any case, somehow Jesus knew that God’s hour had struck and that the time had come for him to begin his life’s work. And so it was that he left his home and walked south, apparently by himself, to meet John and his destiny near the Jordan River.

One day shortly thereafter, perhaps at the end of a long day of preaching and baptizing – v. 21 suggests that Jesus was baptized after everyone else – John saw Jesus approaching and knew at once who he was. He was abashed to learn that Jesus wished to be baptized; indeed at first he refused. We read in Matthew that John said, “I need to be baptized by you…” But Jesus insisted that it must be done “to fulfill all righteousness” and so John performed the rite. Jesus had to be baptized for the same reason he had to be circumcised when he was eight days old, which circumcision, like John’s baptism was a sign of cleansing from sin. It was an act of identification with sinners; Jesus was taking their place as sinner and bearing their sin. As we will understand more fully as the Gospel and the rest of the New Testament proceed, because we who believe in him are united to him – as all that he did he did for us and in our place it is as if we were there where he was – when he was washed in the Jordan we were washed in the Jordan because he was washed for us. When he received the Holy Spirit, we received the Spirit as well; and when the Father expressed his love and approval that was spoken over us as well.

But his baptism was also his ordination if we might call it that. It was his outward coronation as the Prince of Life, his official, public installation as the King of Kings. No merely human inauguration or royal coronation was ever remotely like this! The entire Trinity, the one God in three persons, gathered for the ceremony that day near the Jordan. The Father spoke aloud from heaven of his love for and approval of his Son and the Holy Spirit descended upon him as a dove, equipping the Son for the work that he was now to begin. And, of course, we already read that Jesus would impart the Holy Spirit to others. [cf. R. Letham, The Holy Trinity, 141, 217]

Now it is perhaps too much to say that at this early stage the doctrine of the triple personality of the one, living and true God was fully understood by John or by John’s disciples who would soon become the disciples of the Lord Jesus. Monotheism had been dinned into them until it was the first and foremost article of their faith: there is but one God. The fact that God exists in three persons could only have been revealed on top of and after the revelation of God’s unity had been completely and permanently embraced by the people of God. One must first be a monotheist before one can become a Trinitarian. One must first confess the one and only God before he can then do justice to the three persons. We must be at one and the same time and with equal commitment monotheists and Trinitarians. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are but one God, and each mysteriously is the whole God, not simply a part of God, a third of God if you will. It is the highest conceivable mystery, but the mystery that explains all that is.

So here at the Jordan, if it were not yet clear to anyone that Jesus was God the Son incarnate – an unfathomable mystery in its own right; the second person of God who now has taken a second nature, a human nature into his person – I say if that was not entirely clear, it is certainly not to be assumed that John, who witnessed the Lord’s baptism, heard the voice of God from heaven, and saw the dove, interpreted it all in terms of the presence and activity of the triune God.

But looking back on the baptism from the vantage point of later events and later revelation, it is perfectly and unmistakably clear, as it would have been to Luke when he wrote this account, that the three persons were present and active at that moment near the Jordan. The Father blessing and approving the Son, the Son receiving the Father’s approval and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit descending upon the Son. Through the rest of the Bible we hardly ever see the three persons at once as we see them here at Jesus’ baptism. This is one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of mankind!

We stand before a great mystery here, to be sure, as we always do whenever we must reckon with the life and work of the Triune God. But we also have here something impossibly grand and important: God himself in his fullness at the outset of the saving work of Jesus Christ. There is an adage in Christian theology: opera Dei ad extra indivisa sunt, the external works of God – that is all of God’s works of creation, providence, and redemption – are undivided, which is to say that they are the works of all three persons of the triune God together. Since the Godhead is one in essence, one in knowledge, and one in will or purpose, it would be impossible for any work of God not to be the work of all three persons. To be sure it is the Son who comes to earth as a man, it is the Spirit who anoints and equips and accompanies and enables the incarnate Jesus to perform his ministry, it is to the Father that the Son prays, and so on. In that respect there is a differentiation, but all of this is the will and the work of the Godhead together. At every single point all three are active to the same end.

Indeed, it has sometimes been asked by curious theologians if one of the other persons of the Godhead might have become a man instead of the Son. Perhaps the Father would have become Mary’s baby or the Holy Spirit. In Christian theology generally it has been held, however, that the relationships between the three persons that are revealed in the work of redemption are reflections of something in the very nature of the eternal relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is, it had to be the Son who came to earth because of who the Son is in relation to the Father and the Spirit. It has to be the Spirit who came upon the Son because of the nature of the relationship between the Spirit and the Father and the Son and so on. We may not understand what those relationships are that are that are described by those terms Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but those eternal relationships explain what happened and, in particular, why each person of the Godhead had the role that he did in the grand drama of redemption. It was the Father who had to send the Son, it was the Son who had to come to be a man, it was the Spirit who had to equip and enable the Son to fulfill his calling on earth.

But what is absolutely clear and made clear here at the crucial first step of the Lord’s ministry – something that will be made still more clear as we proceed through the history of redemption in Luke and Acts – is that our salvation is the work of the Triune God, couldn’t have been anything else but the work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and is what it is, takes the form that it does, precisely because it is the work of the Triune God. It is because God is triune that we, made in his image as we are, are persons at all, persons as we all know ourselves to be, individual centers of self-consciousness in relation to others, and it is because God is triune that there is such a thing as redemption and so good news to proclaim.

Just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit met at the Jordan, so they would meet at the cross, and at Pentecost, and so they would meet in your life and your heart, astonishing as that is to believe. There is nothing more mysterious and nothing more practical than the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. However, most of us struggle, I think, fully to appreciate the practical importance of the Trinity to our understanding of life and our own salvation.

One theologian wrote, some years ago speaking of our difficulty of reckoning with the Trinity in the course of our life as we think about and work out our salvation:

“We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.” [Karl Rahner, cited in Letham, 291]

He was admitting that most Christians do not have a Trinitarian theology except in theory and they don’t think of their daily lives and the outworking of their salvation in terms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I’m sure that is true, far too true. At least I know it has been so for me. This is all so mysterious that it is difficult for us to reduce it to daily life.

In a scene at the Porter’s house, in the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress, Christina’s young sons are catechized – that is, asked doctrinal or spiritual questions – by Prudence, one of the daughters of the house. She asked James, the youngest son: “Canst thou tell me who saves thee?”

And being the well-taught boy that he was, James replied, “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.” Parents, do you think your children would answer the question that way? Would you have answered the question that way? Then Prudence asked Joseph, the next son: “What is supposed by [your] being saved by the Trinity?” To which question Joseph replied: “That sin is so great and mighty a tyrant, that none can pull us out of its clutches, but God; and that God is so good and loving to man, as to pull him indeed out of this miserable estate.”

And that is surely a great lesson we should learn from the fact that all three persons of the Godhead are one in the work of our salvation; that our rescue required and received the full attention of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Your salvation and mine is so great an achievement that only the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit together could accomplish it! What good would the Son be to us if the Father had not sent him on his mission to earth? What could the Son have done if the Spirit had not enabled his human nature to fulfill his calling perfectly and in every way? And what could the Spirit do for us, even by his indwelling, if the Son of God had not first taken our sins away?

Where would you and I be if the Father would not forgive our sins because of the sacrifice of his Son? And what use would that sacrifice be to us if the Holy Spirit did not illuminate our minds and bend our wills to make us believers in Jesus Christ?

But if all of that is true and if the Holy Trinity were gathered at the Jordan that day, then there is something else for us to ponder. In the matter of our salvation, in all that which bears on our future happiness and the fulfillment of our lives, there is a particular place, a particular honor, a particular glory to be given to the Son of God, Jesus Christ, God’s Son incarnate. You know that in the creeds, as we sang the Nicene Creed earlier, the long paragraph is always about the Lord Jesus Christ; a line or two regarding the Father, a line or two regarding the Spirit and line after line regarding the Son and his work.

The Father was there at the Jordan, but what did he say? He said that he loves his Son and that his favor rests upon him. The Holy Spirit was there but what did he do? He descended upon Jesus as a dove. Such a thing as happened that day never happened to anyone else. It happens to us, to be sure, but in a secondary way and only because it happened to Jesus in the first place in a primary way. God loves us and pronounces his favor upon us; the Spirit comes upon us because and only because the Father and the Spirit had first done that for the Son. The same point is made in this way that is made by Luke’s genealogy. Jesus Christ is the man, the fulfillment of human life, the man of all men. Every other human being will be, must be, happy or sad, a success or failure, an heir of salvation or eternal woe entirely as he or she related to this one man, united to him or not by true faith. The father’s good pleasure and the Holy Spirit’s enablement of life come to us only as we come to Christ. His relation to the Father and the Spirit was eternal, perfect, immediate, and essential; our relation to the Father and the Spirit come only through our relationship to him.

For us everything depends upon Jesus Christ and everything we hope for and long for comes from him or it does not come at all. That is surely what the Father and the Spirit want us to carry away from the account of their presence at his baptism. It is Jesus, God’s son, whom the Father adores and it is Son upon whom the Holy Spirit came to accompany him every step of the way from Jordan to Calvary and on through the tomb to endless life. This is how important Jesus, this is the index of his glory as our Savior and our King!

We have yet to read of his miracles, his teaching, his compassion for the needy, his terrible sacrifice for our sins, or his resurrection from the dead, but already we know that the entire world is going to revolve around Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. Already we know that the Father in heaven loves this man, his Son, whom he has sent into the world to save his people from their sins. Already we know that the Holy Spirit, who conceived his human nature in the womb of his virgin mother, will serve him to the end and, at last, raise him from the dead, so that he might save the world.

The Bible has so much to say about many important things. It has so much to teach us about how we should live, about the purpose of our lives, about the way we can give glory to God. But first and foremost the Bible is a revelation of the Son of God. In a way it is not even a revelation of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit as it is a revelation of God the Son and God the Son incarnate, Jesus Christ. This is the way the Father and the Spirit intended it to be. Through the remaining pages of the Word of God, the Father and the Spirit will never be revealed in anything like the clarity and comprehensiveness in which Jesus is revealed to us. Why this is the case, who can say? That it is the case, who can deny?

The Bible, as the old writers used to say, is sermo Christi, a word about Christ to a degree that it is not a word about the Father or the Spirit. We know that even if we cannot explain it. But it is what the Father and the Spirit want us to know and proved that by their presence at the Jordan that day: our greatest concentration must be on the Son, even as we pray to the Father and depend upon the Holy Spirit. This is how they would have it to be.

John Newton, in one of his wonderful letters published in the collection of his letters that bears the title Cardiphonia, that is, the Utterance of the Heart, tells his friend, the celebrated Bible commentator Thomas Scott, what happened to another friend of his, a fellow Anglican minister who had been for years a complete rationalist. For this man Christianity was a system of ethics, a way of life only. He was a Christian minister, but like many other Anglican ministers in his day, he was not a Christian. He was a stranger to the grace and the power of God; he did not understand the gospel as a message of redemption and the forgiveness of sins; and he had no relationship of his own with the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit. For him Christianity was being good and doing good; neither more nor less. He was a faithful minister, as he understood the ministry. He had a large parish and he worked hard to exercise a positive moral effect upon the people of the parish, but he couldn’t lead people to Christ because he didn’t know Christ himself, though, of course, he didn’t realize that.

One day John Newton’s friend was reading in his Bible and he came across the statement of the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 3:8 that Paul had been called to preach “the unsearchable riches of Christ.” He was stopped by that word “unsearchable,” which, of course means both utterly wonderful and impossibly mysterious. For the first time in his life the word of the Lord had come to him as it had come to the great multitudes that heard John the Baptist. He was arrested by that one word “unsearchable.” He had never found anything so unsearchable in the message of the Bible. It had always seemed quite pedestrian and predictable to him. But here was Paul talking about height and depths, the riches of Christ’s glory, and the love of Christ surpassing knowledge. Well the fellow began to think and ponder. Here was Paul using these remarkable expressions, speaking in these remarkable superlatives where I have found everything to be quite sensible and ordinary. Paul found mysteries of love where I have never found a one. And it occurred to him that Paul’s view of things must have been very different from his own. And that led him to a careful examination of Paul’s writings and, at last, to his own faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whose life and whose death – highest conceivable mysteries that they are – can alone restore us to God and take us to heaven.

All of that we find at the Jordan the day of our Lord’s baptism. A voice from heaven that was none other than the voice of God the Father. The descent of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Triune God, upon the Son. Utterly remarkable things that foretold the salvation of the world. No one can view that scene, not with an honest mind and an open heart, and not realize that any life in which Jesus Christ is not the center, any heart that is not full of love for him, any mind that does not trust him for salvation, I say, any person who does not define himself or herself in terms of Jesus Christ must be a person who is lost and has yet to find the way, is a person who does not think about things as God does, does not value what God does, does not trust himself or herself to the provision God has made for the salvation of the world.

Sometimes we can see every truth emanating from a single event. The cross is certainly such an event; so is the Lord’s resurrection from the dead on the third day. But so too is his baptism. Here we find the nature of our problem – sin from which we must be cleansed, the very symbolism of baptism – but here even more we find the meaning of human life, the way to heaven, how to live while we are going there, to whom we must submit our lives, and, supremely, what matters most to the one, living and true God.

Look once more at the scene as Luke paints it for us. You cannot possibly believe, if you have any conviction that this is what happened that day near the Jordan, that there is anything in all the world that would more bring down upon you the favor of Almighty God and the transformation of your heart and life as only the Holy Spirit can bring that to pass; you cannot possibly believe that there is any other way to that life that is worthy to be called life, than that you should make and ever more seek to make the Father’s beloved Son both the foundation and the goal of your life, and help others to do the same.

Money

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Proverbs

As I thought about what subject to cover next in our series of sermons on Proverbs, it occurred to me that having considered its teaching on sex, it would make a natural next step to move on to its teaching about money. Sex and money go together in our modern world both as things greatly desired and as the source of unending problems. We are not, to be sure, unusual in that respect and the attention given to these two subjects in Proverbs, perhaps the subjects that get more attention than any others in Proverbs, is evidence of how people struggled in respect to these matters long ago as we do today. In one summary of the teaching of Proverbs about wealth and poverty, some 84 separate verses were listed as dealing with the theme, a bit less than 10% of the total verses in the book (.092). [Longman, 573] When I began my study of Proverbs in preparation for this series, I went through and underlined proverbs having to do with different subjects, a different color of pencil devoted to each subject. Money was brown and there is a lot of brown underlining through Proverbs in my Bible!

And how true to life that is. Like sex, money matters to human life – everyone knows it does – and, like sex, it can be a source of either great blessing or terrible harm. It is a subject about which a pastor learns quite early in his ministry to take care in speaking of to individuals because, as someone has said, “the most sensitive nerve in the body is the pocket nerve.” But, as we have come to expect from Proverbs, its teaching about money is blunt, realistic, and practically helpful. The teacher here is more concerned to help than he is concerned not to offend. And wise men and women always want the truth much more than they want to defend themselves against criticism of some kind particularly with respect to money.

We begin with certain proverbs that, taken at face value, might seem to suggest that money matters more than Christians have been taught to think it does.

“A rich man’s wealth is his strong city; the poverty of the poor is their ruin.” [10:15]

This is one of those proverbs that we said at the beginning of our study of the book is descriptive rather than prescriptive. That is, it describes people as they are, not necessarily as they ought to be. This is the way rich people think about money, but poor people think about money in the same way. They imagine that money will prove the solution to most if not all of their problems. And superficially and temporarily, it may appear that they are right. Rich people don’t have some of the problems that poor people have. They can pay their bills on time without any concern about having enough in the bank account to cover the check; they can enjoy any number of pleasures that are beyond the means of most people; they needn’t worry about financial emergencies because they have the money to address problems when they arise. We may say that “money can’t buy happiness” but that is not obviously true to a great many people or there wouldn’t be so many who day dream about having more money and who often complain because they have as little of it as they do. This is the kind of practical truth that Proverbs admits and does not deny. Money makes a big difference. That’s why people love it so and want more of it than they have.

In chapter 30:8-9 we have the famous prayer of Agur:

“…give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.”

When was the last time you prayed to the Lord that he not give you riches? Agur’s prayer is, as John Bunyan has Christiana say in the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress, “scarce the prayer of one of ten thousand.” That’s because money seems to make a very big difference! Rich people live more comfortably, travel more often to interesting places, eat better, dress better, drive better cars, and worry less about bills. That is the draw of money, is it not?

But Proverbs is far from denying the practical value of money.

“The worker’s appetite works for him; his hunger drives him on.” [NIV]

That’s obvious enough, isn’t it? We need money for food, clothing, and shelter. It is a necessity and so we work for it. Our entire economy is set up so that those who have more money can take advantage of many things. Mortgage interest is deductible on your tax return. You are better off if you own a home than if you rent an apartment. But it takes money to own a home. But money is useful for more than simply the necessities of life.

“The crown of the wise is their wealth…” [14:24]

“The blessing of the Lord makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.” [10:22]

In other words with money the Lord enriches a good man’s life and blesses him. There is that in money that makes life happier and full of entirely proper and pure pleasures. It is not a bad thing to drink better wine or to be able to afford symphony or opera tickets or to travel God’s world and see its fascinating places, or to drink Coca Cola instead of some generic substitute. Believe me; now that I’m not drinking Coca Cola any more, I know very well what a blessing that was! And, as Agur reminds us, having money can be a defense against the temptation to steal or to covet what belongs to our neighbor. There are these good things about money and the Bible never denies this. Indeed, God often blesses his people with the stuff.

But Proverbs is also and even more emphatically determined to remind us of the limitations of money.

Money cannot satisfy man’s deeper, eternal, and spiritual needs which are much more important to satisfy. What lots of money can buy in the final analysis are relatively unimportant things. What it cannot buy are the most critical things of human life and existence.

In Prov. 3:13-14 we read: “Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding, for the gain from her is better than gain from silver and her profit better than gold.” That is, wisdom is much more valuable than money and much more important to obtain.

Similarly, in 8:10-11: “Take my instruction instead of silver, and knowledge rather than choice gold, for wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you may desire cannot compare with her.” Think of Solomon who chose wisdom rather than wealth and was given both. He would not have been given both had he asked first for wealth!

Again, in 19:22 we read: “What is desired in a man is steadfast love, and a poor man is better than a liar.” In other words, character counts for much more than a big house, a nice car, and a healthy bank account.

People know this to some degree. Everyone knows it. At least everyone gives lip service to it. Indeed, much of the teaching of Proverbs about money is utterly uncontroversial. We know that money can’t buy happiness. We see the rich being unhappy or making fools of themselves or destroying themselves by utterly foolish choices; we see this all the time. The desire for money takes people all the time to prison or to public humiliation. Think of Bernie Madoff. But obvious as this may be, it doesn’t change behavior unless this truth is a part of a larger worldview, as it is in Proverbs, a world view that reckons with God, with God’s judgment, with the meaning of human life, and with heaven and hell.

A second limitation of money is that you can’t take it with you.

In Prov. 23:4-5 we read this:

“Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven.”

That is virtually the same proverb found in a collection of Egyptian proverbs from largely the same time in the ancient world. That is proof of how obvious it is to everyone that it is not only “easy come, easy go” with money, but that you can’t take money with you.

Or consider these proverbs.

“Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.” [11:4]

“When the wicked dies his hope will perish, and the expectation of wealth perishes too.” [11:7]

“The wicked earns deceptive wages, but one who sows righteousness gets a sure reward.” [11:18]

And a proverb that makes the point particularly well: “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, but the sinner’s wealth is laid up for the righteous.” [13:22]

In other words, whatever blessings and benefits money secures, they are temporary. It is far better to concern yourself with what lasts than with what you must part with in a short while. There are two things that we read in Holy Scripture are worth buying no matter the cost: the truth (Prov. 23:23) and time (Eph. 2:16). Isn’t it interesting that neither can be bought. Which is to say a wise man, a woman who lives skillfully in this world will be one who knows not only what money can buy but equally what it cannot! And what it cannot buy is anything that has more than simply temporary importance. As the wag has it:

That money talks,
I’ll not deny,
I heard it once –
It said, “Goodbye.”

Another limitation of money is that it exposes you to risks that poor people or people of modest means do not face.

“The ransom of a man’s life is his wealth, but a poor man hears no threat.”

In other words, poor people aren’t kidnapped. There’s no point. Perhaps you followed the story that began two weeks ago when Wilson Ramos, the catcher for the Washington Nationals, was kidnapped from in front of his home in Venezuela. They didn’t go after Ramos because they were fans of some other team (although it is the kind of thing Cubs fans would do); they went after him because as a major-leaguer they knew he had a lot of money and could pay a hefty ransom. Venezuelan big-leaguers nowadays regularly hire bodyguards to accompany them everywhere when they return to their homeland. There are many places in the world where being rich is a very dangerous condition of life.

Another limitation of money is that it tends to surround a person with superficial friends.

“The poor is disliked even by his neighbor, but the rich has many friends.” [14:20]

Elder Skrivan and I some years ago attended the funeral of a wealthy Christian man who had made a business in his later years of investing his wealth in Christian ministries of various kinds. We happened to be standing in the back of the church before the service talking to the man who ran the deceased man’s philanthropy. He surveyed the full church before him and said to us that he thought many of the people there were in attendance because they still hoped to get something from the man’s foundation. We protested; there was no reason to be so cynical. I remember Tim saying something like, “No…, they are here because they loved and admired him and want to pay their respects.” As if to prove us wrong, at that very moment a fellow came up to that man and said, “I’d like to see you after the service to talk about a proposal I have.” I hate to think that the man was correct, but I’m sure those who have money learn soon enough that it is hard to tell who your real friends are.

Take all of this together and consider what is being said. Money is hardly an unqualified blessing. It has some serious drawbacks and anyone who doesn’t face them is, in the language of Proverbs, a fool.

That is even more the case because money comes with a set of very particular temptations that, precisely because of the power of money, are hard to resist.

The first and the worst is that money gives to people a sense of security apart from God. I would say that this is the chief attraction of money to sinners. They would never put it to themselves in this way but money makes a man comfortable in this world without God. It makes him oblivious to the deeper issues of human life. The love of money may lead to all kinds of evil, as Paul says, but this is the greatest: it inoculates a person against any sense of his or her need for God or obligation to God. It seems that the rich can live without God and have no need of God.

As we read earlier: “A rich man’s wealth is his strong city…” [10:15] In other words he thinks himself secure, in need of nothing. But, of course, that is untrue, absurdly untrue. So we read in a similar statement in 18:11: “A rich man’s wealth is his strong city, and like a high wall in his imagination.” The security of a rich person is imaginary, as anyone knows who has faced some disaster: a traffic accident or a terminal disease. [Waltke, ii, 77] The world always falls back into a way of thinking in which the visible and the temporary is taken to be what is real. But, in fact, it is only in the imagination that the unbeliever can rest secure! What would Steve Jobs tell you about his money now? [Kidner, 128-129]

Imagine the wealthy figures who are known to us in western life, the captains of industry, the entertainment figures, the celebrities, the sports heroes: imagine them one by one coming up to the great white throne, but coming up alone and as they are, with none of the trappings of their wealth, none of their fans or associates, nothing to distinguish them from all the other human beings who must face the judgment of the Lord. Hugh Hefner standing there in his pajamas makes the sight only more obviously pathetic. Without his mansion, pajamas are just pajamas, ridiculous clothes to be wearing into the court where his ultimate destiny will be determined according to standards that are oblivious to one’s wealth or celebrity except as those things were used either to honor or to dishonor the Almighty.

But remember, if you are thinking none of this applies to you, poor people are as much in danger from an inordinate desire for money – that too is finding one’s home in this world and seeking our security in money – as are the rich in danger from an inordinate confidence in it.

Read Dante’s Inferno, the 7th Canto, and his description of the fate of the avaricious in hell. It is not pretty.

“Now mayst thou see, my son, how brief, how vain,
The goods committed into Fortune’s hands,
For which the human race keep such a coil!
Not all the gold that is beneath the moon,
Or ever hath been, of these toil-worn souls
Might purchase rest for one.”

But there are other temptations that inevitably accompany wealth. We could list a number without much thought. There are a lot of sins you have been kept from committing against God and man because you can’t afford them. But we have several proverbs, for example, that link money to injustice.

“A bribe is like a magic stone in the eyes of one who gives it; wherever he turns he prospers.” [17:8]

We are perfectly well aware of this too, aren’t we? Financial corruption may be found in every city in the world, in every economy in the world, in every society in the world. There is corruption in government and politics, there is corruption in business. We have been treated to a litany of stories about corruption in sports of late and all of it is in one way or another directly related to money and the lust for it. So much of the corruption in American politics, government, and business is directly related to money and the lust for it. Hard corruption, the kind people can get arrested for, and soft corruption, the sort that makes nowadays for a successful and long-serving American politician. People will bend or break the rules at the drop of a hat if the prospect of lots of money is set before them.

With all of this as background, we can turn then to the wisdom that Proverbs recommends to us, the skillful approach to money that brings the Lord’s blessing and reward and does no harm to the soul. Here are the chief points of a Christian philosophy of money as we find it in Proverbs.

First, don’t make the acquisition of money your goal in life.

“Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to resist.” [23:4]

“The blessing of the Lord makes rich and he adds no sorrow with it.” [10:22]

There is only one safe way to acquire wealth and that is by the blessing of the Lord upon your hard work and faithfulness to him. I once had a young man, who seemed to be interested in the gospel, tell me that it was his goal to become a millionaire. We talked about that. His father had died young and he had asked me to conduct the funeral which I did. But he still wanted to become a millionaire. I don’t know whether he ever accumulated that first million, but I do know that his interest in the gospel didn’t last. It is a fixed law of this world that when a professing Christian begins to make money, a lot of money, the Lord either gains a fortune or loses a man. And so it is with the desire for money.

And to some degree all of us will persevere in that view of money, Proverbs’ view of money, as much less important than other things only by putting money in its place in our hearts and minds from time to time. When a seminarian offered to repay him for a train ticket Bonhoeffer had purchased for him, Bonhoeffer replied, “Money is dirt.” [Mataxas, 284] Not a bad thing for a Christian to say to himself or to others from time to time. Money is of comparative unimportance except as it may be used for godly purposes. Money is dirt! You must from time to time make it clear to yourself and others that in a society that worships money, you are an apostate. Say it once a week to yourself, or, if you must, once a day: “Money is dirt.”

Or, better still, this anecdote from Bonaventure’s Life of St. Francis (242-243).

Francis and a companion were walking along the road one day and came across a sack lying in the middle of the road bulging with money. His companion advised Francis to pick it up and give the money to the poor. He refused, saying that the friar was proposing something sinful rather than righteous and didn’t reckon with the devil. After all, however that money found its way to that spot in the road, it belonged to someone else. But as they walked on the friar continued to pester Francis about how much good the money could do. So eventually Francis returned with his companion, found the money where it had been before, and commanded the friar to pick it up. But when he did a large snake jumped out of the sack and disappeared with the sack and the money. It was the devil after all.

You don’t have to take the account to be serious history to get the point. Our temptation is always to think of money as more important than it is as well as to make excuses for our wanting more of it. “These are things that the Lord wants me to have. With more money I can do this and do that good thing.” The devil knows this and tempts us accordingly. The Lord knows this too, which is why he doesn’t give very many of us lots of money. He knows very well it would ruin us.

It is with respect to money perhaps most of all that we must practice a real an outward, a purposeful, and a determined dependence upon the Lord and a willingness to remain content with whatever measure of this world’s goods he chooses to give us. This view of things will demonstrate itself in very practical ways.

Second, take care that your use of the money the Lord gives you is made subject in every way to the demands of righteousness and the honor of God.

You can’t be grateful for a gift that God has given you which you are misusing. Proverbs has much to say about this and it is here that its teaching concerning wisdom in regard to money descends to the particulars and the details of our daily life.

You must care more for righteousness than money when you are filling out your income tax returns. Do you realize how much the tax return depends on your honesty and your willingness to acknowledge things that the government would otherwise never know? You must care more for righteousness than money when you are crossing the border and are asked if you have anything to declare, and you must care more for righteousness than money when you make decisions about borrowing money in order to afford things you couldn’t otherwise afford.

After describing the ruin that comes to those who steal to acquire wealth, we read in 1:19: “Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain; it takes away the life of its possessors.”

It shows up in a commitment to diligence and hard work – a subject we will consider later in this series of sermons – and in a refusal to complain about one’s lack of money. I suspect most of us admit this is a sin that we commit far too frequently. We behave and whine as if the Lord has not supplied us with enough money.

It also shows up in wise and prudent management of one’s money. For example, a wise person does not loan his hard-earned money unless he is willing to risk losing it. And if he finds himself in debt he does everything he can to get out of it as soon as possible.

“Whoever puts up security for a stranger will surely suffer harm, but he who hates striking hands in pledge is secure.” [11:15]

“My son, if you have put up security for your neighbor, have given your pledge for a stranger…then do this my son, and save yourself, for you have come into the hand of your neighbor: go, hasten, and plead urgently with your neighbor. Give your eyes no sleep and your eyelids no slumber; save yourself like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the hand of the fowler.” [6:1-5]

In other words, the right use of money requires the good sense not to throw money away on some perhaps kindly intended but really risky effort to help someone else when you don’t have enough money to lose it in the effort. People are always asking the deacons if they would loan them the money they need. The deacons always refuse. They give money, but they won’t loan money and they are absolutely right and wise not to do so because of all the problems that would then come to pass when the money is not repaid. We will see in a moment that liberality and generosity with one’s money are good things, but not undertakings that place in jeopardy one’s responsibilities by loaning money or cosigning loans when one cannot be sure that the money will be repaid. Liberality and gullibility are two very different things and wisdom knows the difference between the two.

Generally in Proverbs the wise are advised not to give loans or to secure debts with their own promise to pay. Remember, Israelites could not loan money at interest to other Israelites – at least not when a brother was in need – so we are not talking about investment here but charity. But giving someone a gift is one thing; loaning money with the expectation that the money will be repaid is quite another. Too often the unwise give loans when they cannot afford to lose the money. Like our banks did recently which was pure foolishness that hurt millions of people. It isn’t kindness to put someone in a home he cannot afford; its foolishness. In this particular case it also happened to be greed for the quick buck and indifference to the obligations of honesty and responsibility. If an otherwise wise person has allowed himself to get into such a situation, he is advised in these verses to get out of it as quickly as he can. Money is too hard won for it to be thrown away out of some foolhardy sentimentality.

May I say simply, if you are not to loan money or cosign loans when there is real risk of a failure to be repaid, then by the same principle you definitely should not try the lottery. If the Lord has given you your money and if he who is faithful in little will be faithful in much, then no Christian should give a dime to the Washington State lottery. You can’t play the lottery without hoping for easy money (that is, money you didn’t work for), without thinking it wise to throw away some of the money you have in the infinitesimally small chance of hitting the jackpot, and without in effect saying that the Lord hasn’t given you enough money the old-fashioned way so it is time for you to take matters into your own hands. The lottery is worldliness, irresponsibility, bad stewardship, greed, and foolishness all compact!

A right view of money, a real dependence upon the Lord will also show itself in self-control: that is, not from indulging appetites, but from curbing them.

“Whoever loves pleasure will be a poor man; he who loves wine and oil will not be rich.” [21:17]

A right view of money shows up supremely in the practice of using one’s money not only responsibly, but generously, with the intention to reflect the generous heart of God and to serve God and his kingdom.

“Whoever multiplies his wealth by interest and profit gathers it for him who is generous to the poor.” [28:8]

“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.” [11:24-25] And supremely this from 3:9-10:

“Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the first fruits of all you produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.” This is the promise of the tithe. It’s the promise of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians where he says, “the Lord loves a generous giver.” And how often has the Lord generously repaid the generous givers among his people!

The story is told of John Eliot, the missionary to the Indians in early colonial America, that, his salary being given to him in coin in those days, by the time he got home much of it would have been given away to needy folks. So the deacons one time wrapped up his pay very tightly in a sack and knotted it in hopes that his entire salary would make it home with him. Eliot visited a widow on the way and after struggling unsuccessfully to get the money unwrapped, said to her, “Sister, I think the Lord wants you to have it all!”
Well, we are never commanded to give all our money to the poor, but there ought to be evidence easy to find that we sit lightly on our money and rejoice to use it for the help of others, to be generous as the Lord has been generous to us.

I know full well that you knew already everything that I have said to you this evening. Any Christian would. But the temptation of money, our tendency to love it, is so unrelenting and so powerful, and so strengthened by the influence of American media and advertising that we need constant reminders of what money is and isn’t, what it can and cannot do, and how it is rightly and wrongly used. We all need to be reminded, from time to time, that money is a genuine threat to our souls. Here is Robert Murray McCheyne, a man who could be as solemn and direct as any preacher ever was, speaking to his congregation in Dundee in the 1830s.

“I fear there are many hearing me who now know well that they are not Christians because they do not love to give. To give largely and liberally, not grudging at all, requires a new heart; an old heart would rather part with its lifeblood than its money. Oh my friends! You better enjoy your money; make the most of it; give none of it away; enjoy it quickly, for I can tell you will be beggars throughout eternity.”

If that seems hard to you, remember the Lord’s own remarks about how it is more difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle and about how you cannot love God and money at the same time. “Money is dirt.” Say it with me now, “Money is dirt.”

The Gospel of Repentence

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Luke
referring to: Luke 3:1-14

All the Gospels make clear that the ministry of Jesus was preceded by and prepared for by the ministry of John, who is known in Christian history as John the Baptist. They all indicate that the nature of John’s ministry was the proclamation of the necessity of repentance in prospect of the appearance of the Lord. “Prepare to meet thy God.” That was John’s message as it had been Amos’ before him. But only Luke gives us so much detail as to the precise form of that message and, in particular, how John tailored his message to the members of his audience.

Text Comment

v.1 Luke is writing for Gentiles, citizens of the Greco-Roman world whose supreme difficulty with the Christian message was in believing that the ultimate truth for all mankind was to be found in a member of a despised race who lived in a distant province of the empire and who was executed as a criminal by the imperial authorities. So Luke begins boldly proclaiming that the events he is about to narrate are, in fact, a part of world history.

Augustus died in August of the year 14, so it would seem that the 15th year of Tiberius would be the year between August A.D. 28 and August 29. However, there are other factors that bear on the calculation of the date Tiberius began his reign and it could be as early as the year 27 that John the Baptist began his ministry and Jesus began his. Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea between A.D. 26 and 36. Herod Antipas, the son of Herod of the Great of the Christmas story, was tetrarch of Galilee from 4 B.C. to A.D. 39. We know almost nothing of this Lysanias of Abilene. All of these dates fit well with the best estimation of the date of the Lord’s crucifixion some three years after the beginning of his public ministry.

v.2 Now Luke adds some dates important to the Jews. And Luke is very precise here. There was but one high priest at any time, but Annas was deposed by the Romans in A.D. 15. Caiaphas was his son-in-law, but the Jews regarded Annas as the true high priest and perhaps it was still Annas that exercised the real power of the office. You may remember that when Jesus was arrested he was taken first to Annas. [John 18:13] This is one of those many instances in which Luke proves to be a highly accurate historian. We don’t expect to find two names given when the high priest is identified, but that was precisely the situation de facto at the beginning of John’s ministry.

v.3 “Baptism of repentance” refers to a baptism that follows repentance and is a sign of it. And repentance was preached as the indispensible prerequisite of forgiveness.

v.6 All four Gospels associate Isaiah 40:3 with John’s message, but only Luke adds vv. 4 and 5 from that same Isaiah passage. The imagery of valleys being filled and mountains being leveled describes a road being prepared for the coming king and “all flesh” fits with Luke’s emphasis, already seen, on Jesus as bringing salvation not only to the Jews but to the entire world.

v.9 These words are virtually identical to what we read in Matthew 3:7-10. There is a clear revelation here of the burden of both John’s and Jesus’ message: the necessity of a changed life to demonstrate the reality of repentance, the prospect of divine judgment that makes that repentance so essential, and the Jews’ tendency to assume that their descent from Abraham would render them immune to God’s judgment. Now, like any good preacher, John applies his message to the variety of situations before him. Each calling in life has its own temptations and it is the mark of the truly penitent to resist them. [Morris, 110] And the genuinely repentant want to know: what should I do to please God?

v.13 The Romans collected taxes by farming out the responsibility for taxation in any area to the highest bidder. He would have to pay Rome what he had bid but he made his money by collecting as much more than that as he could. No wonder the tax collector has such a bad reputation in the Gospels. It was a legalized form of theft.

v.14 The occupying Roman force in Judea was not composed of legionaries but local auxiliaries (Syrians, Samaritans, Idumeans, but never Jews). Only the senior officers were Roman. Poorly disciplined, the soldiers were on the lookout for loot and could be savage in dealing with the locals whom they despised anyway. They operated what we would call nowadays a protection racket: if you don’t want your inn, or if you don’t want your shop to have trouble, give us money and we’ll make sure that you remain safe. So John’s counsel was very apt. [Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 20-21]

An entirely new chapter of world history commenced at the moment John the Baptist, that strange, other-worldly, titan of a man came out of the desert and began to preach in the Jordan Valley that men everywhere should repent because the day of the Lord was near. John appeared, we read, because the word of the Lord came to him. That is, after 400 years of silence, since the days of Malachi, a prophet of the Lord had appeared in Israel. “The word of the Lord came…” is a typical way of identifying how the prophets of ancient Israel received their message. In 1 Kings 18:1 we read that Elijah’s ministry began when the word of the Lord came to him. John is the second Elijah and the word of the Lord came to him as well.

John had been living in the wilderness, apparently alone and apart. And in all probability he would have continued to live alone and apart in the desert, wearing, as Matthew tells us, his strange clothes and eating his strange food until he died had not the word of the Lord come to him. But when it came John could do nothing else but give himself to that word with everything that he had. And with the authority of the divine word in his mouth, at least for some months, his preaching of repentance and the coming of the Lord led to a meteoric rise to fame and influence. Josephus refers to this in his history of the Jews. It was not to last, of course. As we will read later in chapter 3, John’s preaching offended Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, and so John was arrested and then some time later he was beheaded in Herod’s jail to satisfy the cruel bloodlust of Herodias, whom John had condemned for divorcing her first husband to marry Herod, who had likewise divorced his wife so as to marry Herodias. John had the temerity to say publicly that the whole seamy mess was an offense to God. John’s fearless preaching of the word of the Lord got him killed, as it had some other prophets before him.

But such is what happens when the word of the Lord comes: one must be true to that word come wind, come weather. He cannot, she cannot help it. We don’t know precisely how the word of the Lord came to John only that it did and brought him out of the desert with a message that was to change the world. Now, to be sure, John had known the word of the Lord in one sense, since he was a little boy. His parents had taught him the word of God and taught him to revere it. But this phrase “the word of the Lord came” means more than that. Here it means not only that a particular message from God was communicated to John to communicate to others, but that this message came with the power of the Holy Spirit, the force of its truth was felt in a way that compelled obedience.

In that sense, there is not a believer here this morning to whom the word of the Lord has not come, even if not as uniquely or as supernaturally as it came to John in the desert. In fact, in this chapter 3 of the Gospel of Luke and then throughout the Gospel we see the word of the Lord coming to others besides John. When the crowds gathered around him – why after all did people suddenly feel compelled to listen to this strange man, multitudes making the trip from Jerusalem down to the Jordan River expressly to hear John – they heard a message, after all, that was hardly likely to appeal to the masses.

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to fell from the wrath to come?”

Not an opening calculated to make a preacher popular. But they hung on every word! Many would say today that John should have taken a course from Dale Carnegie before he began to preach. And then, to make matters worse, when he descended to particulars, he demanded of people the most draconian changes in their behavior. It was not enough that they think more kind and loving thoughts toward God and man. They had to make sacrifices, sharing what little they had with others; they had to refuse to take advantage of opportunities upon which their hope of financial success depended; and they had to abandon behavior that was not only expected of them but by abandoning it would set them at odds with their fellows. It is not easy to be the one soldier in a unit who refuses to participate with the others in what they take to be normal and even essential activity. To become a traitor to one’s peers is a sacrifice indeed!

But huge congregations of the most unlikely hearers not only heard John speak of the wrath of God, heard him demand of them to prove their repentance by their deeds, and heard him directly condemn the religious viewpoint in which most of them had been raised and in which most of them had lived comfortably for years, I say they not only heard this message from John, but were shattered by it. All their characteristic complacency vanished as they listened to the preacher and they saw themselves, for the first time, stripped of all pretense and self-righteousness, for what they actually were: inveterate sinners standing helpless before a holy God. The word of God that had come to John had now come to them through John and left their tidy, comfortable lives in shambles.

“What must we do?” they cried to John, as they would cry out to Jesus and then on Pentecost a great crowd would cry out to Peter. “What must we do?” And John hit them between the eyes: telling each group before him to forsake the sins which were most characteristic of that group. In other words, manifest genuine repentance toward God by striking at those sins which are most natural to you and for which you have the most affection and which cannot be forsaken without others being aware of it. This is how you make yourself ready for the Messiah who is about to appear. This is how you can share in his salvation and how you can escape the wrath to come.

We know how controversial that message was because, though many were mesmerized by it, many others were deeply offended by it, scorned John and his preaching, and eventually welcomed news of his murder. But no matter: multitudes were inexplicably drawn to John’s preaching because they found that the word of the Lord came to them through him. John worked no miracles as Jesus would (John 10:41). He never calmed a storm, he never healed the sick, and he never raised the dead. There was a need to distinguish the greater ministry of the Lord from that of his predecessor. All John did was preach and baptize. But no matter; people couldn’t stay away and many couldn’t help but believe and obey. The word of the Lord had come to them through John! When the word of the Lord comes the bare words leave the pages of Holy Scripture or jump out from the voice of the preacher and penetrate the soul, carrying all before it. The Bible often speaks of the word of God in this way.

“Let all the earth fear the Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him; for he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded and it stood firm.” [Ps. 33:9]

“As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth…so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” [Isa. 55:11]

As Martin Luther beautifully put it: “…the words of God’s mouth are not so many merely grammatical vocables. The words of God’s mouth are true, and actual, and essential things. The sun and the moon; the heavens and the earth; Peter and Paul; you and I are all so many words of God.” When God sends out his word, when he accompanies it with divine power to accomplish his bidding, it carries all obstacles and impediments and objections before it. It does this whether it is a word such as “Let there be light” as on the first day of creation; or a word such as “Jerusalem shall be destroyed for her many sins,” that came to Jeremiah the prophet; or such a word as came through John that sinners could find forgiveness with God if only they would believe in God and repent of their sins. It is for this reason that Jesus Christ is called “the word” in the Bible. He is the ultimate word from God, the most powerful and effective communication ever dispatched from heaven to earth. And so it is that the word of the Lord has often come to people on earth and does so still today.

I could give you unending illustrations of this reality as you yourselves very well know: the word of the Lord coming to a man or a woman for the very first time, as it did to many who heard John, or the word of the Lord coming to a believer time and again throughout his life. I often think of my father’s experience of this when, contrary to all the assurances he had been given when he remained in the army reserves after the Second World War, he found himself uprooted from his Wheaton, Illinois pastorate in 1950 and transported to the war zone in Korea. When he arrived in a group of eight replacement chaplains – since North Korea was not a signatory of the Geneva Convention it did not observe the rules regarding non-combatants (chaplains, medics, and the like) that were observed by other nations and chaplains were being killed at an alarming rate in the early months of the Korean war – it was announced to them that there was a need for a Protestant volunteer to be the chaplain of a parachute regiment. Five of the eight were Roman Catholics and the regiment already had a Catholic chaplain. The other two Protestants were disqualified for other reasons so he was the only possibility. He asked for time to think and pray, collected his Bible, and made his way to a nearby chapel to pray. You can imagine the prayer he prayed. He had his own fears of jumping out of airplanes in combat, he had concern for his wife and children at home and wondered if he dared assume a greater risk; but in the midst of that prayer the words of the 91st Psalm came unbidden to his mind:

“Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place – the Most High, who is my refuge – no evil shall be allowed to befall you…. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.” [Ps. 91:9-12]

What a word for a reluctant paratrooper! But the word of the Lord had come to him and he volunteered for the position. He made his way to his new unit with the assurance of his superiors that he would be given adequate training before ever being asked to make a jump in combat, but when he arrived his regiment was readying for a jump behind enemy lines in two days time (a jump, by the way, that still today is remembered as one of the great combat performances of that airborne regiment, a formation that still exists and is today stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky). He protested that he had no idea how to jump out of airplane but the Roman Catholic chaplain assured him there was nothing to it and that he really needed to go for the men’s sake. Good Friday, 1951, he marched with his unit to the air strip, his assistant helped him get into his gear, the first time he had worn a parachute in his life, and into the plane he went. He was sitting next to a sergeant who was trying to remember whether this was his 99th or 100th jump. Shortly after take-off he began to pray that, as a Christian minister, he wouldn’t be paralyzed by fear and bring disgrace to the Lord’s name before the men. He was beginning to get very afraid. It was near the beginning of that prayer that this word from the familiar 23rd Psalm shot up into his heart:

“I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

The word of the Lord had come again and he was flooded with so much peace that he was the only man of one hundred in the plane who slept the rest of the two hours to the drop zone and had to be awakened for the jump. The report of that quickly spread throughout the regiment and became a great opportunity to bear witness to the reality of God’s presence. There were men on that plane who would later become followers of Christ themselves because the word of the Lord came to my father.

And you can remember when the word of the Lord came to you and what a tremendous difference it made to you and how it lifted you up or cast you down or set you on a course you had not planned to walk before. It is what distinguishes Christians from all others. The word of the Lord has come to them. It may remain lifeless on the page or held captive in the voice of the minister for many others, but in the case of Christians, time and time again, that powerful, life-changing word, that word that commands belief and obedience, has come to them. Irresistible, full of divine authority the word of the Lord came like a thunderbolt in some cases, like a still small voice in others, but always it could not be denied or ignored. It was the voice of the Almighty in your soul!

And the proof of that is that we cannot control this word; rather it controls us. We cannot summon it whenever we wish; nor can we make it depart when we would rather be without the voice of God sounding in our hearts. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wisely observed:

“If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me.” [Mataxas, 137]

And that is precisely what we find here in the word of the Lord that came through John. All the gospels indicate that repentance was front and center in the ministry of both John and Jesus. In Mark 1, for example, we read that

“…after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’”

And later, in Acts, we read Paul’s own summary of the message that he preached around the Greco-Roman world:

“[I preached that men] should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with repentance.” [Acts 26:20]

And in Acts 20 we read his summary of his preaching during the three years he spent in Ephesus: “repentance toward God and…faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” [Acts 20:21]

That sounds very much like John the Baptist doesn’t it? But nowadays we are likely to think that repentance is not a winning message. That’s why there is so little of the call to repentance in Christian preaching today. Preachers don’t think people will like it or come back a second time. They don’t want to hear that they need to perform deeds and bear fruit in keeping with real repentance. Certainly in modern sermons we don't find too much of repentance as a way of fleeing the wrath to come. Indeed, this tendency to relax the Bible’s demand for repentance has been typical of Christian preaching and thinking about Christian faith and life. In the Bible repentance is primarily a change of behavior. But you’ll notice that in many ways, no doubt unwittingly but perhaps predictably, that message is over and over and over again softened into a message about a change in thinking. To change one’s thinking isn’t nearly as costly as changing one’s behavior. I notice, for example, that virtually every hymn in the “Repentance” section of Trinity Hymnal is not actually about repentance at all, but about conviction of sin and sorrow for sin and the desire to be forgiven of our sins. True enough, conviction is a presupposition of repentance – you are unlikely to turn from behaviors until you recognize them as sinful, wrong, unworthy, and offensive to God – but conviction is not biblical repentance. Remorse for sins past is not biblical repentance; it may be a part of it, a presupposition of it, but it is not repentance itself. There must be the change of behavior; there must be the deeds that are in keeping with repentance. And so here, when John is asked what repentance would look like for this group of his hearers or that, he responds by telling them not how they should feel, or what they should think, but what they should do differently from what they have done before.

But when the word of the Lord came, that is what people wanted to know: what should I do differently? They now knew of God’s coming wrath, they knew that they were sinners and naked before the judgment of God, they knew God’s holiness and God’s grace made forgiveness possible for them, but they also knew that it would be granted only to those who repented, who changed their ways. And with the force of truth pummeling them, they had to know: what must I do? “If I must bear fruits in keeping with repentance, what are those fruits, because I now know that bearing them must be the great business of my life; God has so spoken to me!”

And for those of us to whom the word of the Lord has come, it should be, it must be the same. And I know it often has been the same. You have heard the word of the Lord and your life has changed, your behavior has changed. In light of God’s wrath, in light of God’s mercy in Christ, what must I do differently; how must my life change? It matters not if I have just now become a Christian or have been a Christian for years. Repentance is the lifeblood of true faith, the characteristic mark of the genuine child of God. It isn’t once for all, it is a grace that must accompany our lives to the end.

If you remember, the very first of Martin Luther’s 95 theses, the posting of which unwittingly ignited the Protestant Reformation in 1517, read this way:

“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”

Or as Samuel Rutherford put it in a more homely way: It is the Savior’s will that we “break off a sin or a piece of a sin every day.” And so it becomes our duty and our calling to ask the same sort of questions that John’s hearers asked. “What about me; what shall I do?” There is obviously something for me to do. What is it? As our Westminster Confession of Faith sums up: “it is every man’s duty to endeavour to repent of his particular sins, particularly.” [XV, v]

The gospel of Jesus Christ begins here – it does in John’s case, it does in the case of the Lord Jesus himself and his preaching – with a call to repentance in view of the divine wrath to come and the coming of the Lord, but it does not ever move beyond this message. The main thing, the principal thing, the essential thing was repentance and those to whom the word of the Lord came through John’s preaching wanted to know nothing so much as precisely how they must repent and of what they must repent and of what changes in their ordinary behavior true repentance would consist of. It is that kind of holy curiosity that is produced when the word of the Lord comes upon a soul.

Brothers and sisters, how is the way prepared for the coming of the Lord? We need him to come in power and effect, do we not? We need him for ourselves, our families, our society and our country. We need the word of the Lord to come to us and to multitudes of Americans in our day more than we need anything else on earth or in heaven. And how is the way prepared for that? We are not in control of the word of the Lord, we know that. But is it not right that by doing what men and women do when the word of the Lord comes to them, we honor that word and, as it were, our actions are themselves an enacted prayer, a powerful prayer for the coming of the word of the Lord. By men and women heeding the call to repentance and bearing fruit in keeping with repentance we best seek the word of the Lord, which when it comes will put us to doing just that still more! I suspect most of you know very well at least one or two or three things which in your case must change. You know how repentance would be practiced in your case; this John-like kind of repentance; a change in behavior, public, dramatic; the changes that concern those temptations most endemic in your life. If you don’t, pray that the Lord will show your sin to you and then make you want nothing so much as to kill it dead and to live instead in obedience to God and in the love of Jesus Christ.

Death

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Proverbs

We are taking the teaching of the book of Proverbs not by chapter but by subject. As we said, while there may be in certain cases some principle of organization that explains why one proverb dealing with one subject should sit next to another dealing with a quite different subject, most of the time it is by no means apparent why one proverb follows another as it does. The proverbs seem to be arranged in a jumble. There is no particular order to them or organization around a theme and so there is no need for us to consider the various themes in the book in any particular order. And so it seemed to me right that following last Lord’s Day evening’s service, which was Vic Pol’s funeral service, we should take up what Proverbs has to teach us about death.

In 1 Tim. 4:8, the Apostle Paul wrote these famous words:

“…train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.”

Another way to describe the teaching of the book of Proverbs is that it amounts to training in godliness. Wisdom and godliness are very similar ideas in the Bible and godliness as a way of life is very similar to that life of wisdom or that morally and spiritually skillful life described in detail in the book of Proverbs. There is no question – there never has been – that Proverbs teaches that wisdom “holds promise for the present life,” but there has long been a question as to whether Proverbs also teaches that it holds promise “for the life to come.”

As you are no doubt well aware, the Old Testament does not teach about the life to come with anything like the explicit detail that we are given in the New Testament. There is nowhere in the Old Testament anything quite like the Lord’s dying remark to the thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise,” or like the remarks of the Apostle that “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord,” or that “death is better by far,” or that death amounts to going “home.” There is nothing like the Lord’s never-to-be-forgotten words that he is going ahead of us to prepare a place for us so that where he is we may be also. There are intimations of resurrection in the Old Testament but nothing like the explicit teaching about rising from the dead on the last day that we find illustrated in the ministry of the Lord Jesus in the raising of the son of the widow of Nain, or the raising of Lazarus, or, supremely, in the Lord’s own resurrection or that we find taught in such memorable passages as 1 Thessalonians 4 and 5 and 1 Corinthians 15.

Consequently there have been a number of scholars, both Bible-believing and not, who have argued that the Hebrews of the ancient epoch had no doctrine of the afterlife and that the view of death, of the intermediate state, of the resurrection, and of heaven that all Christians share today was an innovation of Second Temple Judaism and of the New Testament.

But there was always a strongly argued dissent to that conclusion. Many scholars pointed out that there are at least some statements in the Old Testament that only a mind determined to deny the obvious could conclude did not refer to life after death. For example, in the great Psalm 73, a psalm all about the obvious fact that God’s justice cannot be clearly seen in the outcome of wicked lives and righteous lives if their fortunes in this world are all that are taken into account – the wicked often prosper and the righteous sometimes suffer greatly – we read not only that the psalmist’s doubts were put to rest when he remembered “the end” of the wicked,” but when he also remembered that the blessing of righteousness likewise cannot be measured only by what it brings in this life.

“I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast before you. Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.”

So when the psalmist goes on to say,

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever”

it takes a perverse prejudice to deny that he is talking about the world to come and the reward that the righteous will receive after death. What else would he mean? How else would the existential problem he was facing – the problem of the prosperity of the wicked – be resolved if it is not resolved in the next life. The psalmist certainly doesn’t mean that the solution of the problem is that the righteous will prosper in this life after all and the wicked will not prosper after all. That isn’t true and everyone knows it isn’t true. He knew it wasn’t true! It was precisely the fact that such is not always the case that prompted his doubts in the first place. The problem was not resolved by realizing that he had made a mistake in thinking that the wicked prosper in this life. The psalm doesn’t say that. The problem was resolved by his recognition that the wicked’s prosperity here on earth will be forgotten as soon as they face the music of God’s justice in the world to come. And in like manner the struggles of the righteous will be quickly forgotten when they begin to enjoy the blessings of the Promised Land.

What is more, as through the ANE scholarship of the last century and a half it has become clear that all ANE cultures had a doctrine of the afterlife, it has become more and more difficult to think that the Hebrews, virtually alone among ancient peoples, did not. There is something inevitable, inescapably human about belief in a world and life to come. It is found among every people of every culture. Why would the Hebrews be any different? Indeed, would they not have had a supremely clear view of the life and world to come?

All of that leads us to Proverbs 10:2:

“Ill-gotten treasures are of no value, but righteousness delivers from death.”

In what sense does righteousness deliver a man or woman from death? The rabbis wrestled with this problem and in the Talmud we read that they concluded that this means that the righteous are delivered from evil death, violent death, unjust death. That is, everyone is going to die, the righteous and the wicked alike. We know that. But the righteous are much more likely to die in their beds and not suffer violent death. But, of course, that isn’t necessarily true either. It’s not even widely true. A great many evil men have died in their beds and many godly and righteous people have died young, or in car accidents caused by a drunk driver, or have perished in war or in famine or have died as martyrs suffering death precisely because of their righteousness. The Lord Jesus’ perfect righteousness did not spare him an evil and violent death! It is patronizing to believe that the Hebrews wouldn’t have realized this; that they didn’t know very well that righteousness did not necessarily protect a person from an evil death and that wickedness did not guarantee an evil death. It usually does not in fact, as any observer of human life then or now can easily see. Indeed the book of Ecclesiastes is all about the problem created for faith by the fact that in many ways in this life the wicked and the righteous fare the same. To argue that the OT teaches only retribution and reward in this life, one commentator points out, is to make the sages seem incredibly naïve. [Longman, 87] And we know they were the furthest thing from naïve; they were the keenest observers of human life. Indeed, there are a number of proverbs that teach us that the wicked often prosper and the innocent often suffer. Think of Prov. 13:23:

“The fallow ground of the poor would yield much food, but it is swept away through injustice.”

Remember, Proverbs is about the issue of things, the result of our conduct, the end of the matter. This is a book about outcomes. We’ve seen this already. The wise man judges that a few minutes of physical pleasure in sexual sin is hardly to be compared to the shame and the ruin that will ensue upon the discovery of the sin. Well, in a book about outcomes, “righteousness delivers from death” seems very clearly to refer to the fact that there is a death for the righteous that is different from the death of the wicked; there is a kind of death that amounts to deliverance from death precisely because it ushers the righteous into another condition of life so much happier and better. Is that not the obvious meaning of the words? People knew then as we know now that everyone must die, even the righteous. But they also knew that death was different for the righteous than for the wicked. The fact of the matter is that the problem created for faith by the fact that the wicked often prosper in this world and the righteous often suffer is often raised in the Bible and again and again the answer to this dilemma is said to be faith in God, which is simply a way of saying that this will all eventually be sorted out and the justice of God’s ways made evident to everyone.

We could say all of this equally about a statement such as that in 23:17-18:

“Let not your heart envy sinners, but continue in the fear of the Lord all the day. Surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.”

Or equally of this statement in 23:13-14:

“Don’t withhold discipline from young people. If you strike them with a rod, they will not die. If you strike him with a rod, you will save his soul from Sheol.”

Surely that is a confession of life after death and of reward in the world to come for faithfulness to God in the present life. How else can that be read, found as it is in a collection of discerning observations of human life and in a book whose purpose is to teach the righteous to commit all their ways to the Lord? This is all the more the case when we realize that “life” in Proverbs, as generally in the Bible, is hardly merely clinical life, a beating heart. Life is usually in Proverbs a condition of existence, not bare existence. So professor Bruce Waltke concludes, [cf. Waltke, i, 104-105]

“In sum, “life” in the majority of Proverbs texts refers to abundant life in fellowship with God, a living relationship that is never envisioned as ending in clinical death in contrast to the wicked’s eternal death… As Jesus said, ‘He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is the God of the living, not the dead (Matt. 22:32).’”

And once we are ready to read Proverbs in this sensible way, we find that again and again we are reminded that the present confusion of life – the fact that that in this life we cannot see the clear connection between wickedness, righteousness, and their respective outcomes – will be resolved by the ultimate issue of things. So, for example, we read in 24:13-14:

“My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul; if you find it, there will be a future, and your hope will not be cut off.”

Surely we are right to read that in terms of the life to come. We read in 24:19-20

“Fret not yourself because of evildoers, and be not envious of the wicked, for the evil man has no future; the lamp of the wicked will be put out.”

It is only sensible to assume that the proverb is intended to teach us that judgment awaits the wicked in the next life because everyone knows he doesn’t necessarily suffer that judgment here.

We read in 11:31:

“If the righteous is repaid on earth, how much more the wicked and the sinner”

Surely the implication is that the righteous is not always repaid in this life nor is the sinner. Biblical writers thought a great deal about the fact that God’s providence did not always leave the moral equation clear in this life. If it were only here in this life that the righteous prosper, well then perhaps there isn’t enough reason after all to go to the trouble, and it requires great trouble, to live righteously. That logic is faced squarely in the OT and always denied precisely because faith knows that the Lord will put things right in the end. Hugh Hefner has contributed to the blighting of a great many lives, but he seems happy enough as he gets older; he still has crowds of people wanting to see him and be with him at his mansion; he can still surround himself with a bevy of beautiful young women; and he still enjoys the pleasures money can buy. How has he been repaid for his sin? And how is the convert from Islam who is disowned by his or her family or murdered upon the discovery of his or her faith in Christ, how are such people repaid for their righteousness? Very often only in the next world.

To be sure, there is a great deal of death for the wicked already in this life – as there has been in the life of Hugh Hefner, so addicted to pornography that ordinary pleasures are beyond him as is true love – and Proverbs does not hesitate to say so; just as there are many benefits to wisdom that are enjoyed in this life. Some of the time sin does pay a wage immediately and some of the time righteousness leads directly to reward, but that is hardly always the case. In fact it is simply not the case that modern people fear to disobey God because of the consequences they will face in this life. Medicine has made sexually transmitted diseases less fearful, modern forms of contraception have made promiscuity much less likely to produce a pregnancy, and the widespread acceptance of promiscuity and pornography have considerably lessened the stigma of getting caught. Ask President Clinton if you don’t think so. Observation of life has not convinced multitudes of modern people that if they sin against God they will suffer for it. Proverbs is too full of honest dealing and worldly wisdom to leave its readers thinking that somehow the wicked will never prosper and the righteous always will. If there is no resolution after death, the moral universe of Proverbs collapses.

It is hard to be poor in this world, no matter if one is righteous; it is hard to be the victim of an oppressor and even the wise can suffer that fate. If righteousness has its reward only in this life, the righteous among the poor and the weak would rightly wonder where their reward is. How can it be true, as we read in 11:21 that “an evil person will not go unpunished” when people in this life have always and still today literally get away with murder? There was a murder on the campus of Covenant Theological Seminary some years ago; the victim was a 50 year old single woman, a student at the seminary. Her killer has never been brought to justice and, in all likelihood, never will be in this life. On this Sunday for the Persecuted Church ask Christians who have suffered terribly for their loyalty to Christ and who may well continue to suffer until the end of their short lives what they would think if they were to learn that it is only in this world that the righteous receive their reward. Of course there is a next world; the biblical logic is unassailable: there must be reward in the hereafter and judgment in the world to come, else there will be many cases in which righteousness will not be rewarded and sin not punished and God will have been proved to be unjust and unfaithful to his word. The logic of that statement is one the Bible faces again and again. It is preposterous to image that Proverbs does not grasp the obvious point: if death is the end, period, then wickedness and righteousness do not have different outcomes!

But death is not the end for the wicked or the righteous and that makes death the end of only some things, by no means all things. And so it is, as we read in 14:32:

“The wicked is overthrown through his evildoing, but the righteous finds refuge in his death.” The NIV reads “…even in death the righteous find a refuge.”

The contrast, as everywhere else in the Bible, is between final ruin and final refuge. [Kidner, 56]

Now, I want to conclude this evening by thinking with you about what that means: “The righteous finds refuge in his death.” For most people most of the time death is not a refuge. It is a fearful enemy and, no matter what their supposed theology or philosophy of life, they do not want to die. Roman Caesars were supposed to become gods upon their deaths, but Vespasion’s last joke on his deathbed was, “How depressing! I think I’m turning into a god.” He would much rather have stayed a human being; death was no refuge for him. [Cited in Seward, Jerusalem’s Traitor, 263] Winston Churchill didn’t believe in life after death. His view was that in dying “we simply go out like candles.” No refuge in that. If that is one’s view or if one is unsure, death can be no refuge.

Now, to be sure, there are many unbelieving people who come at last to think of death as a refuge. They are dying of some painful disease and life has become abject misery for them. They want release and death is that release. Or so they think. But is it? In the Bible death is only transition to another dimension of human existence; death is never extinction! What if that life on the other side is worse, not better? Why would we deny that? People are making choices all the time thinking to make things better for themselves and in fact they make them worse! What is truer to human life than the reality of people thinking things are going to get better when in fact they will get worse? What if after death they wish for nothing so much as to return to the pain of that dying life that made them so foolishly wish for death, unaware of into what kind of existence death would bring them. Remember the Lord’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus and the reversal of fortunes into which death brought each of those two men, one now in heaven and one now in hell. Or think of the Lord’s many statements about being cast into outer darkness or being refused entrance into the wedding banquet on the great day. It is all very well to entertain the sentimental notion that it will be better for everyone in the next life, but there is precious little reason to believe that. There are certainly many anticipations of heaven in this life but are there not just as many anticipations of hell? In a universe ruled by the living God who made this world to be what it is, why would anyone conclude so glibly that things cannot be worse in the world to come? The Bible is the source of the most rigorously and relentlessly logical thinking about life and death to be found anywhere in the world. It holds out the hope of heaven, but it does so with hell in the background. That is what the Bible and Proverbs means when it speaks of the wicked being “cut off” in death: not extinguished but judged; made to face the consequences of their life choices which they never fully faced before; made to experience the true outcome of unbelief in and disobedience to God. If God is just, there is a hell; it is as simple as that. And the standard of judgment will be God’s standard, not ours; that should be obvious as well. Is there anything clearer about human life than that we cannot trust human beings to erect a fair and righteous standard against which to judge their own behavior? People may not like this and may wish it weren’t so, but in a moral universe like ours there is something inevitable about all of this.

But for us who are Christians, if death is our refuge, then it is something wonderful; a refuge is a good thing, not a bad thing. Death is something to await for with anticipation; it is something to welcome when it comes. In his old age John Newton described himself cheerfully as “packed and sealed and waiting for the post.” And Bonhoeffer who was staring cruel and unjust death in the face could write that death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.

“Why are we so afraid when we think about death?” Bonhoeffer once asked his congregation. … Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. … How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world?

“That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up – that is for young and old alike to think about. [Metaxas, 486, 531]

Do you remember John Donne’s wonderful poem?

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st thou does overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

And on it goes until the last two lines:

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Christina Rossetti has a lovely poem on the death of a child, such a death as has touched a number of us in this sanctuary this evening and is among the cruelest experiences of life for those so bereaved.

They scarcely waked before they slept,
They scarcely wept before they laughed;
They drank indeed death’s bitter draught,
But all its bitterest dregs were kept
And drained by mothers while they wept.

From heaven the speechless infants speak:
Weep not (they say), our mothers dear,
For swords nor sorrows come not here.
Now we are strong who were so weak,
And all is ours we could not seek.

We bloom among the blooming flowers,
We sing among the singing birds;
Wisdom we have who wanted words:
Here morning knows not evening hours,
All’s rainbow here without the showers.

And softer than our mother’s breast,
And closer than our mother’s arm,
Is here the love that keeps us warm
And broods above our happy nest.
Dear mothers, come: for heaven is best.

Is that not our faith? Is that not what our Savior taught us to think of what death does for those who are in him? “Today you shall be with me in Paradise.” So he spoke to one who was about to die. Is this not the meaning of the Lord’s resurrection itself, which was the pattern for our own eventual resurrection: the beginning of a new and perfect life perfectly designed for eternity and for life with God? And is that not what Proverbs means when it refers to death as the refuge of the righteous?

Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his famous poem, describes death as a putting out to sea:

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.

Tennyson wasn’t an evangelical Christian and that isn’t the Bible’s view; the Christian conception of death is not a putting out to sea. Death is not for us a setting out upon some uncharted ocean. [Lloyd Jones, Second Peter, 50] Far better is Charles Wesley:

Safe into the haven guide,
O receive my soul at last.

Death is not putting out to sea but coming into port! There is much that is mysterious about death and Paradise to be sure. So many questions for which we have no answers. What is life like for a soul without a body? How do we relate to Christ and to one another in heaven before the resurrection? But of this we can be absolutely sure, Vic Pol is wondering why on earth he ever, to any degree, clung to life on earth when death has proved such a wonderful refuge for him.

I do not doubt that the whole matter of death and heaven has been made wonderfully clearer for us since the ministry of the Lord Jesus and especially since his resurrection. But that hope and conviction about death – about its being a refuge for us – was as surely the hope and conviction of believing men and women in the ancient epoch as it is for us. And so the proverbs that address this hope and strengthen this conviction.

“The wicked is overthrown through his evildoing, but the righteous finds refuge in his death.”

We conclude with this from Victor Hugo.

Let us learn like a bird for a moment to take
Sweet rest on a branch that is ready to break;
She feels the branch tremble, yet gaily she sings,
What is it to her? She has wings, she has wings!

You and I should live as those who have wings and in this dying world as those who will never die. Let the world say of us, “They have wings; that’s why they live as they do. That’s why they don’t tremble when the branch begins to shake.” This too is part and parcel of “wisdom,” of that skillful living, that living well that is the theme of Proverbs. To live with this view of death is what wise people do. And it makes a huge difference to live out from under the shadow of death, to live in the expectation and anticipation of what death is going to usher us into; what kind of life and what sort of people will be there to welcome us on the other side. If you don’t have a living view of death as a refuge, everything will change at least somewhat for you and many things will change a great deal. The world will be a different place to you; temptations will pull harder than they really should. Your joys will be less and your sorrows will be more, and the Lord Jesus Christ will not be so much of a presence in your life. Our Savior’s conquest of death, his transformation of death into our great friend hurrying us along to the world of everlasting joy, should loom over our lives as nothing else. We should be a happy people, confident people, a grateful people, a people who are determined to make the very most of this very short time throughout all eternity in which we are given to live by faith before we join the great company that lives by sight.

The Messiah as a Boy

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Luke
referring to: Luke 2:39-52

Text Comment

v.39 Luke makes no mention of the holy family’s flight to Egypt to escape the murderous intentions of Herod. We read of that in Matthew 2. If we ask why he omitted that episode in the Lord’s early life, a period of time that may have been quite brief, we might just as well ask why the Gospel writers didn’t tell us so much more about the Lord’s life from his boyhood to his adulthood. John provides the explanation at the end of his Gospel (21:25). If they had told everything they might have, the world wouldn’t have been big enough to contain the books that would have had to have been written.

v.41 It was not required in the Law of Moses that women attend the three great feasts at Jerusalem every year: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. To require the women would have required the entire family to make the trip, more difficult and certainly more expensive for the ordinary Israelite family. The commandments of God have never been a burden for the people of God. That Joseph and Mary went to Jerusalem every year, at least at Passover, the greatest of the three feasts, says something of their piety. We have already read of their faithfulness in keeping the law. Here they go beyond the law for the sake of the love of God. Don’t you wonder if they ever wondered if in Jerusalem an angel might appear to them again?

v.42 Whether there is any significance to his being twelve and whether this was the first time he had gone to Passover in Jerusalem we have no way of knowing. It was at 13 that a boy became a full member of the synagogue and evidence for the Jewish rite of bar mitzvah is much later. So far as anyone knows bar mitzvah was not a feature of Jewish life in biblical times.

v.45 We may find it passing strange that parents would not know that they were missing one of their children when they set off on a journey and, even more, that they wouldn’t realize that he was not with them through a full day of traveling. I have to confess that I once reached home on a Sunday night without all of my children in tow and had to return to the church to pick one of them up. But if the family were larger, if other children had gone along as seems likely if both mother and father were present on the trip, if they were, part of a caravan returning to Galilee, it may well be that the women and men walked in separate groups as they often do today on the near east. It is possible that both Joseph and Mary assumed that Jesus was with the other. [Morris, 108] In any case, the children would be running around playing as children will do. These parents had certainly come to trust their son to do the right thing and be in the right place and so it was that they got that far away without realizing they were absent their oldest son.

v.46 In all likelihood the three days are not the length of time his parents searched for him in Jerusalem. The first day was the day of travel homeward, the second day was the day it took them to return to Jerusalem, and the third day they found him in the temple. [Bock, i, 266]

We know that Jesus was sinless so the fact that he had been separated from his parents for three days cannot be laid upon him as a fault. How many times during your travels have you been separated from members of your party, especially before the advent of cell phones, and thought it best to remain where you were so that they could be sure to find you eventually, rather than to begin looking for them you know not where. As we will read in v. 49 Jesus assumed that his parents would know where to find him.

The words “among the teachers” are the mathematical center of this 170 word paragraph. I’m not sure whether we ought to make anything of that, but if it is intentional – and biblical writers certainly sometimes did send signals in this way – the place of Jesus among the teachers would thus be indicated to be one of Luke’s emphases in the episode. [Green, 155]

v.47 You will sometimes see works of art which depict the boy Jesus in the temple and the title given to such works is often something like Christ Disputing with the Doctors. Several Italian Renaissance painters as well as Rembrandt have paintings with that name. The image conveyed both by the painting and the title is that of the boy Jesus putting these rabbis in their place and correcting their theological errors. In some of the apocryphal accounts Jesus was even teaching the rabbis about such subjects as medicine and astronomy! [Plummer, 76] But that isn’t what Luke says happened. Luke says that he listened and asked questions. He didn’t know enough yet to lecture a rabbi and, in any case, was a boy who had been taught by his parents to show deference to his elders. The rabbis apparently asked him some questions because they were amazed at the quality of his questions, but we should not think of this as some kind of theological debate.

v.48 With the previous history of their boy, we can well imagine that Joseph and Mary grew frantic as the hours and then days passed without their finding Jesus. Have we misplaced the savior of the world?

v.49 Their son’s reply does not amount to a rebuke of his parents for looking for him but surprise that they didn’t know where he was. Perhaps we might take his words to mean, “I assumed you would look first for me in the temple.”

v.50 There is, as we will see, something remarkable in the boy’s statement and Joseph and Mary did not grasp it.

v.51 A good, a righteous boy will be obedient to his parents, as we know from the Ten Commandments and a good many other statements of Holy Scripture. And so Jesus was.

This is Luke’s last reference to Joseph. We do not know when he died; we know only that he lived long enough to beget a sizeable family. Mary may not have understood, but she didn’t forget; and she thought long and hard about the things she saw and the things she heard. She knew her son was someone very special, but not yet how special.

v.52 “Stature” is probably a reference to his physical development.

Now the question that faces any reader of the Gospels and the Gospel of Luke at this point is why this one anecdote from the boyhood and youth and young adulthood of the Lord Jesus. Apart from this one episode in the early life of Jesus we know absolutely nothing. Nothing is said in the Gospels about his early childhood, about his life as a teenager, or even of his life as a young man. He doesn’t appear again in the narrative until he is almost 30 years of age. Obviously he received some form of education but we don’t know what it was.

It is quite possible, indeed, that one of the attractions of the temple for the twelve-year-old Jesus was that there would have been few really good teachers in a small village like Nazareth and here he could make the most of his opportunity to listen and talk to learned men. Like many precocious children the teachers he had couldn’t satisfy his curiosity and when he encountered men who could he was enraptured.

Presumably at some point he began to work in his father’s trade, he formed friendships with others in the town his own age, he related every day to his brothers and sisters, but we are told nothing about any of that. What did others think of him, morally perfect as he was? Did they resent his goodness the way people will? How did he handle the death of his father? What was said about the fact that he was apparently not interested in marriage? These and many other questions must remain unanswered. We simply do not know because we are not told.

I can well imagine that James and Jude, the Lord’s brothers who became prominent leaders of the church after Pentecost, were constantly fielding questions about what life was like in their home in Nazareth as their elder brother Jesus was growing up. The subject is so fascinating that it was perhaps inevitable that later writers would attempt to fill in the gaps and in what is called the New Testament Apocrypha – that collection of non-biblical, non-authoritative writings about the Lord Jesus often passed off as though they had been written by some apostle – we have a collection of amazing and obviously fanciful stories about the Lord’s boyhood. But we have only one reliable account of a single episode in the Lord’s boyhood, that when he was 12 years of age.

So what are we to do with this single episode in the Lord’s early life? Why this one? What is the great lesson of this text? What does the Holy Spirit intend to teach us from it?

Well, we have learned through the years that in the Bible an author’s theme is often disclosed by one of several literary techniques that were commonly employed in the literature of the ancient world. This was a day before chapter headings or tables of contents, before indices, before italic print, before the development of footnotes, before any of the techniques employed today to identify an author’s theme or subject. So author’s signaled their intentions by other means. One of those techniques was inclusio, sometimes called “an envelope.”An inclusio is a statement at the beginning of a section that is repeated at the end of the section and so identifies the theme of the material in between. An inclusio, to be sure, doesn’t necessarily mean that the material in between the opening and closing statement has only one theme and only one emphasis. For example, earlier in this chapter v. 39 makes an inclusio with vv. 21-24, thus emphasizing the fidelity to the law of God on the part Jesus’ parents. By this we know that v. 39 actually concludes a section and v. 40 begins another. But there is more in the section between 2:21-24 and 2:39 than simply Joseph and Mary’s scrupulous obedience to the law of God. We have the prophecy of Simeon and the thanksgiving of Anna. Still, the inclusio provides a framework for the material and a thematic summary. A principal theme of that material in between those two statements is that Jesus was raised in a home where the law of God was revered and obeyed.

We have such an inclusio here. Perhaps you noticed it. In both v. 40 and v. 52 we read that the child Jesus grew in wisdom and that the favor of God was upon him. Favor is the Greek charis, the word for grace. This statement is like the one that Gabriel made to Mary when he told her that she had found favor with God. God was blessing his son, showing him his favor as he grew up. So at the beginning of the paragraph and at the end we read the same thing: Jesus grew physically, mentally, and spiritually and increased in wisdom and in the favor of God. It is much the same thing that we read of John the Baptist as a boy and young man in 1:80, though these statements about Jesus’ growth are more extensive and emphatic.

Another literary technique common to biblical literature, because common to ancient literature, we have learned to call the author’s evaluative viewpoint. No one wants or needs to listen to a pointless story so the author, in often subtle but no less powerful ways, indicates his point in telling that story. He has ways of letting his audience know why he is telling this story. He stops the action and focuses our attention on some aspect in order to bring out the point he wishes to make and to identify the meaning of the history he is relating. Sometimes the narrator himself will simply offer his own evaluation. It is Luke himself who gives us the summary statements in vv. 40 and 52. But often in the Bible , in fact, very often in the Bible, an author will reveal his particular interest in a body of material by the use of selective quotation, the words of one of the principals in an episode revealing the particular concern of the author or the point he wants to make. In this particular case we have not only a citation of the spoken word of Jesus, it is the very first words that he speaks in the Gospels and in the Gospel of Luke in particular. In fact it is the first time we see Jesus in an active role and not as a baby in arms.

“Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

There are several important lessons hidden in those words.

1. First, already at twelve years of age Jesus was aware of a special relationship that he had with his heavenly Father. Already at that young age he had a strong sense of identity with the Father and is committed to the mission of his life. “My Father,” was not a customary way in that time for Jews to speak of God and here it forms a striking contrast with Mary’s reference to Joseph as Jesus’ father in the previous verse. There is a relationship he recognizes already that takes precedence over that relationship he has with his parents; the relationship with God his father.

2. Second, the “must be” or “it is necessary,” the translation of a single Greek word, is used throughout the Gospel and Acts to refer to what was necessary for the outworking of salvation or necessary for the building of the kingdom of God. For example, in 4:43, the next time Jesus uses the word, we read:

“I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose.”

And in 9:22 we hear him saying:

“The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”

“It is necessary” or “must” is a term used strategically in the Gospel and Acts to set forth elements of Jesus’ mission. [Bock, i, 269] So its use here. It was necessary for our salvation, his mission demanded that Jesus be in his Father’s house.

The Gospels are narratives, an account of what happened. We see the life of Jesus unfolding before our eyes. We see him growing up, entering upon his ministry, healing the sick, teaching his disciples, preaching to the crowds, and all the rest. We see him in action. We witness his life. We grasp more of Jesus by observing him in action than we ever could through more abstract theological or philosophical categories or terms. What does it mean that Jesus was God the Son incarnate, in other words now also a human being? Well watch and learn. Like other holy books the Bible has laws and commandments, but unlike most holy books, the Bible is chock full of narrative. We learn of God and of his salvation and of the life we have been summoned to live by reading of the life and actions of others and especially of the Lord Jesus. Stories are a very effective form of communication and instruction. That is why there are so many of them in the Bible!

So what we have here is a revelation of Jesus Christ in narrative, in a story. We learn here of his growth, physically and spiritually, and of his precocity, already at 12 amazing the Jewish doctors by his curiosity and his knowledge. We learn of his conviction, already as a boy, that his relationship with his Father in heaven was to be the great business of his life.

But I want to pay particular attention to the matter of his growing up. We have that theme identified in the inclusio and perhaps as well in the choice of terms to describe him. In v. 16, much earlier in the chapter, Jesus is a “baby.” The term, the Greek word brephos, refers to a nursing infant. In v. 40 he is referred to as a child. The word is paidion, which can refer to an infant but can also refer to a little child. It is in fact the diminutive form of the word used to describe Jesus in v. 43, where the ESV translates the term “boy.” So, “little boy.” So note the progress through the chapter: baby, little boy or child, and finally boy. Jesus is growing up.

Now there is any number of fascinating and important implications of this growth that is emphasized in the narrative. For example, this paragraph reveals something to be sure about the nurture Jesus received in his home. Joseph and Mary have been presented to us throughout as faithful people, devoted to God and to his law, and, without doubt, we are to come away from this paragraph aware of how faithfully they had raised their firstborn son. He may have been precocious, even a prodigy, but most of what he knew his parents had taught him, and his sense of calling – formed so early in his life – was as well no doubt shaped by their instruction and their example. See him here in the temple and then imagine him sitting as a boy at his father’s knee and hearing of the exploits of Israel and of David the king, or sitting as a boy in the synagogue on the Lord’s Day concentrating on every word read from the Torah and every prayer that was prayed.

This is one of the great values of narrative. So much reality is compressed in stories that they can serve many purposes at once. This paragraph is a revelation of Jesus Christ, to be sure, but it is also a paragraph about Christian parents and a paragraph about Christian children.

In a famous passage in his great work Against Heresies, the early church father, Irenaeus, wrote this: [II, xxii, 4]

“[Jesus Christ did not evade]…but sanctified every age, by that period corresponding to it which belonged to himself. For he came to save all through means of himself – all, I say, who through Him are born again to God – infants, and children, and boys, and youths, and [the old]. He therefore passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants; a child for children, thus sanctifying those who are of this age, being at the same time made to them an example of piety, righteousness, and submission; a youth for youths, becoming an example to youths, and thus sanctifying them for the Lord.”

You parents are to see here what you ought to aspire to in every one of your children: their curiosity about the truth of God, their sense of intimate relationship with their heavenly Father, their sense of calling to be the Lord’s and to serve him as first and foremost. Jesus is showing us the calling of a Christian child, the life of a Christian child as it ought to be. And obviously, you Christian young people are to see yourselves in the Lord Jesus at twelve years of age and realize that he has, as the Apostle Peter put it, set you an example that you should follow in his steps. It is not enough to plan to be a serious Christian when you are older; it is never too early to be God’s boy or God’s girl and to learn, learn, learn what that means, to learn more of God’s greatness and love, and to grow in your love for him. If you are old enough to be interested in television or a story book, old enough to listen to the Narnia stories, or to read Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, or the Call of the Wild or Jane Eyre, you are old enough to read the Bible with interest and enthusiasm. Jesus did. And you are old enough to begin speaking to God yourself and walking with your heavenly Father and serving him. Jesus did that also when he was just twelve.

As the children’s hymn has it, the prayer of Christian children should be:

Teach me how to grow in goodness
Daily as I grow;
Thou hast been a child, and surely
Thou dost know.

And parents when your children express curiosity about spiritual things, the last thing you should ever do is to snuff it out or squelch it. Too busy, too little interested, when your children come to you with a great question, like Jesus did in the temple, don’t brush it aside with a few ill-chosen and inadequate words. I fear that if Jesus had been raised by many Christian parents he would have, by the time he was twelve, been full of questions about the bazaar or the Roman legions, but empty of interest in the temple or the Word of God. He would have learned from their example how relatively unimportant the house of God really was; how lightly to take the teaching of God’s Word and the authority of God’s law.

All of that is certainly in this paragraph. But there is something more fundamental still. I want us to concentrate on the inclusio and the emphasis on the Lord’s growing up. What is this but a magnificent demonstration of the Lord’s true humanity! We struggle with this; to come to terms with how genuinely the Lord lived the life of a human being. It is such a mystery, the divine nature and the human nature in a single person, and yet those natures remaining separate and distinct and undisturbed by the other, so much a mystery that without even thinking we are always collapsing the two in such a way as to make the Lord Jesus more comprehensible to us. But in doing so we imagine a Lord Jesus much less than what he actually was and is. But get used to this. This paragraph is a stern reminder at the very beginning of the story of what we are to expect throughout the rest of the Gospel. Throughout the Gospel we are going to see Jesus the man, living a human life with those resources and only those resources that are available to us as human beings. He was sinless to be sure. And that must itself have made a tremendous difference. But otherwise he was a man. He was God but somehow, in some way, he was able to live his life not as God but as a man. He wasn’t omniscient or omnipotent in his human nature: he grew tired, he experienced fear, there were many things he didn’t know. His life as our Savior was the life of a human being. And great emphasis falls on that fact in the very first story we are told of his independent life.

He was growing up. Omnipotence never increases; omniscience never grows, eternity does not know the passage of time. The Lord’s divine nature was no different at 30 years than it had been at 12 or 2. But not so his human nature and his human life. As a baby he knew virtually nothing at all. As a child we read he knew more. As a boy he had learned much. And, as we read in both v. 40 and v. 52, he continued to grow, physically, mentally, and spiritually. What is even more remarkable and mysterious is that the Scripture teaches us here that Jesus increased in favor with God!

How could that be? How could the Son of God be more in God’s favor as the years of his life passed by, as he learned more and put his faith more and more into practice? A man can grow in the favor of God, but God the Son is already in infinite favor with his Father. So we are and must be talking about Jesus in his humanity as we will be throughout the rest of the Gospel. We will see Jesus in his deity but once in the Gospel of Luke. In every other part he is a man living as a man, thinking as a man, feeling as a man, and learning as a man. In Hebrews as well we read of his spiritual maturing through the experiences of his life. He learned obedience, we read there, through what he suffered. Remarkable! How could a sinless child be more obedient later in his life than he was early in his life? Only in the way of a man who is constantly learning, growing, and maturing.

Remember, as we are taught in Holy Scripture, to be our Savior he had to be made like us in every way. His life had to be like ours. And it was! Mystery of mysteries, Jesus’ life was like yours and mine. He grew up; he learned more and more from his parents and from his experiences, and perhaps from his teachers. Whether he knew of his special relationship with his Father intuitively at twelve, or whether he had learned it by hearing from his parents about the extraordinary events that accompanied his birth we do not know. We cannot say. But he learned it and as the years past he figured out more and more of what that calling would mean for him, just as we must learn more and more of what our calling as his followers must mean for us.

What a remarkable Savior we have. His life is so utterly mysterious that we cannot fathom it or explain it. Which is why the Bible makes no effort to explain it to us. But we know this: it was a life like ours, lived in all the limitations of our humanity. A boy growing up in a Galilean town learning more and more every day of what it meant to be his Father’s child. Extraordinary; because this same boy of 12 was at one and the same time also the Maker of Heaven and Earth. But the boy we see in the temple did not know that! He was a real boy, like you 12 year old boys here in the sanctuary this morning. He wanted to know more because there was so much he didn’t know. And so he peppered the rabbis with questions. He still had a lot to learn. God never learns. He knows all. But human beings have to learn and Jesus was a human being and he was committed to learning everything he could. He had to grow up; and he did.

What a Savior we have got in Jesus Christ!