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

Ecclesiastes No. 4

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Ecclesiastes
referring to: Ecclesiastes 12:1-8

As I said at the outset of this series of sermons on Ecclesiastes, I do not intend to preach through the book paragraph by paragraph. We have considered the basic message of the book and have dipped into two paragraphs that confirm and elaborate that interpretation and tonight we take up another. Here is Dr. Max Rogland’s summary of the book as I read it to you last time (ESV Study Bible).

“The theme of Ecclesiastes is the necessity of fearing God in a fallen, and therefore frequently confusing and frustrating world.” [EVS Study Bible, 1193]

“At the same time, however, the Preacher is distinctly original and creative in his thought and manner of expression and is not merely restating what other sages have taught. As a genuine wisdom teacher, he has a gift for penetrating observation and for stating things in a profound and challenging manner that spur the listener on to deeper thought and reflection.” [1194]

“One can see the Preacher’s most distinctive contribution from the way he uses the term “find out”… Every human being wants to find out and understand all the ways of God in the world, but he cannot, because he is not God. And yet the faithful do not despair but cling to God, who deserves their trust; they can leave it to him to make sense of it all, while they seek to learn what it means to ‘fear God and keep his commandments,’ even when they cannot see what God is doing. This is true wisdom.” [1194]

And I should say this is where a great many people flounder. Life does not turn out as they wanted it to, their life does not turn out as they feel it should and they lose confidence in God or lose their interest in trusting and obeying him. Wisdom knows better.

Now this general theme is elaborated in the book in a number of different ways, as we have seen. Whether we are talking about the injustice of things, the psychological irony with which human life is always dripping (e.g. the disappointment we all feel in the very things that ought to satisfy us [e.g. 5:10]), the fact that the wicked very often appear to do as well or better than the righteous, or the seemingly random onslaught of death, life here “under the sun” for a believing man or woman is often surprising, confusing, disturbing, and deeply disappointing.

And yet God has given us many pleasures to enjoy and important things to do. We may not understand what is going on but we are not, for that reason, left with nothing to do or with no purpose to pursue in our lives. We are to fear God and keep his commandments, leaving the times and seasons to him to order, and meantime enjoying the many things there are to enjoy in our heavenly Father’s world: from our families to our work to good food and drink. If you stop and ponder this, I think you will realize how profoundly true this view of life must be: both the limitations of our knowledge and of our lack of control of events on the one hand and what remains for us to do in view of those limitations on the other on the other. A wise man or woman accepts these facts, does not chafe against them, and lives accordingly.

But, along the way, Qohelet gives a great deal of the same sort of practical advice and counsel that we find in other wisdom books, such as Proverbs. The first paragraph of chapter 5, for example, is a straightforward exhortation to be scrupulously careful to keep the promises that you make to God including the promises you make when you are in his house. If you participate in worship here, you are making promises to God every Sunday. It’s very important to keep those promises. In 7:9 we have a warning against the foolishness of giving way to the temptation of getting angry, a warning we find in a number of other places in the Bible, and in our text for this evening we also have the same voice of wisdom that we get in many places in the Bible, but never more memorably than here. What we have in our text is a warning against spiritual procrastination, putting off until tomorrow what ought to be done today.

In Haggai 1:2 we read that the reason that the Jews who had returned from exile in Babylon were once again in the spiritual doldrums was because they had got into the habit of saying to one another, “The time has not yet come for the Lord’s house to be built.” They were putting off what was crucial to their spiritual life: the proper worship of the Lord. The Lord famously sketched all-too-familiar characters in the church, the man who replies to Christ’s summon to “follow me,” by saying, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father,” or the man who replies “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-bye to my family.”

Augustine put his finger on the nature of his resistance to the necessity of submission to the Lord. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe he should surrender his life to Christ. It wasn’t that he didn’t think it necessary to do so. He just didn’t want to do it yet. Or, as he famously put it in his Confessions:

“Give me chastity and continence, but do not give it yet.”

The Apostle Paul also puts his finger on this typical problem in human and believing life. In 2 Cor. 6:1-2 in warning his readers not to delay in faith and repentance, he said, quite strikingly I think:

“Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says, [and now follows a citation from Isa. 49:8]

“In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”

Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”

You can receive God’s grace in vain and one sure way of doing that is by delaying to give answer to it and to obey it and to embrace it when it is given to you. In other words, strike while the iron is hot because it isn’t always hot and may never be again in your case. “Seek the Lord while he may be found and call upon him while he is near,” [55:6] says Isaiah. Why? Because he can’t always be found and isn’t always near in the sense that you sense his presence and are compelled to recognize it.

As you know, this is a frequent theme in the OT prophets. Israel put off repentance until the opportunity to repent was gone, she had passed the point of no return: the Lord’s patience had been exhausted and her heart had become too hard. They could have repented before, but they squandered their opportunity by putting it off again and again. This is the theme of Ecclesiastes 12:1-8 and the lesson is put here in a particularly memorable way.

Text Comment

v.1 Here is the lesson; what follows in vv. 2-8 is the argument that’s proves the point. The author’s point is that without the active practice of faith, of love for God, of obedience, and of serving the kingdom of God, the trials and tribulations of life put increasing distance between the soul and God until unbelief and disobedience are second nature and it is too late. As with so much of biblical wisdom, this is one of those lessons one has only to open one’s eyes to see proved over and over again.

v.2 Think of the sunshine and a starlit night as an image of youth and the darkening skies and the clouds as an image of later life with its increase of problems, its accumulation of sorrows, and its fewer thrills. In the ANE, of course, as in the Middle East today, there was a dry sunny season and a clear night sky in that season, and then there was a rainy season clouds often blocking the moon and stars at night. Here the sun is youth and the rain and clouds are old age.

v.3 Most of these metaphors are wonderfully clear and easily understood. The keepers of the house are the hands that begin to tremble in old age. As we grow older we begin to bend. I remember the last time I saw my brother-in-law. He had been sick with the cancer that took his life for some time but I could scarcely believe how much he had changed in physical appearance. He looked like an old man in large part because of the stoop he now had and with which he walked. The grinders are the teeth which, when lost, make eating a meal a chore for the old. Of course they didn’t have the dental care we have today and often reached old age with few if any teeth left; but even folk today find that teeth become a problem in their old age. Or they find that they can no longer taste their food, which some of you have told me makes eating a much less pleasant exercise.

Carl Henry put it this way: “When one finds the fullness of life only in whatever one can stoke into the pantry, what does the creed ‘eat, drink, and be merry’ amount to if the chore of eating itself becomes high tragedy? The man who knows his Creator will think of a resurrection life to come; the pagan blames God for abandoning him in the only life he has, and of depriving him of sensual enjoyment.” [The Twilight of a Great Civilization, 60]

v.4 Now it is the hearing that is failing as one by one the senses are giving way. One can no longer hear the bustle in the world outside one’s house and increasingly the person is “marooned” in the cramped house of his own body. [J. Stafford Wright, “Ecclesiastes,” The Expositors Bible Commentary, vol. 5, 1193] The “sound of grinding” could refer to the fact that one can no longer hear even his own chewing, or it could refer to the sound of grinding grain that precedes the making of food, or it could refer to the voice of a person, now soft and sometimes indistinguishable as he or she tries to speak without teeth.

“Those looking through the windows” are the eyes. Eyesight fails as well.

The second half of verse 4 is somewhat difficult. It the old person’s hearing has gone it is doubtful that now he sleeps so lightly that the smallest sound disturbs him – though the light sleep of the elderly is a fact of life. Perhaps the point is simply that the elderly can’t sleep as they once could and awake early in the morning, that early hour when the birds begin to sing. Some have translated the line differently and taken it to mean that the old man’s voice now sounds like the voice of a bird.

The “daughters of song” brought low probably refers either to the elderly unable any longer to join in singing or to their inability to enjoy the singing of others because they can’t hear it very well.

v.5 It is not the elderly that you see lining up at the Puyallup Fair to ride the Extreme Scream. Nor do you find them taking late night walks on city streets. They have lost their daring. Though not Laverne Roberts, known to some in this congregation, who went bungee jumping on her 60th birthday! In the ancient world, the narrow streets of a town or city were crammed with camels, donkeys and carts, bustling traders, and people: no place for slow-moving and unsteady older folk. [Wright, 1193]

The almond tree blossoms white. We moderns dye our hair to keep it dark but past a certain age a head full of jet black hair simply looks weird.

The late Dr. Carl F.H. Henry preached on this text years ago here at Faith, if some of you remember, and tall and lanky as he was he made a perfect grasshopper here on the front platform: an old man, bent over, knees stuck out, and elbows back.

“And desire is no longer stirred.” What is there to desire if you can’t taste it, see it, or hear it?

All that remains is to speak “of the inevitable end, the long home of Sheol, inaugurated with the wailing of the professional mourners.” [Wright, 1194]

v.6 The “before” picks up the thread of the original thought in vv. 1 and 2. In fact, the NIV added a second “Remember him,” at the beginning of v. 6, which is not there in the Hebrew text; it’s just pulled down from verse 1.

The metaphors are not entirely clear but they certainly suggest total collapse. We know that ceramic bowls – perhaps in this case a lamp – were hung from chains, so when the chain breaks the bowl falls and is broken into pieces. It cannot be repaired. That’s how archaeologists work as you know. They almost invariably date levels in a tell from the pottery that they find and the pottery was very often kept just in shards because it was so much less expensive as something to write on than paper. So receipts are found on pottery and short little notes are found on pottery, business communications, and so on. Broken pieces of pottery litter the ANE world down many, many feet in any tell or archaeological remains and once broken, of course, it couldn’t be repaired; it had to be either thrown away or used for another purpose. Obviously there is no point going to the well to fetch water if the pitcher to carry it in has been shattered or the wooden wheel that lowers the bucket into the well has been broken.

Others have likened it to the four ways death comes to a human being: the silver cord being broken a severing of the spinal cord, the golden bowl broken the brain ceasing to function, the pitcher is the heart and the wheel the organs of digestion. [Henry, 61; Wright, 1194] There are linguistic reasons for likening them to those things and it is definitely not as much a stretch as it may sound to you.

v.7 “Dust to dust…” as we mentioned two weeks ago recalls the curse pronounced on man for his sin in Genesis 3.

“The spirit returns to God who gave it…” is a thought this author artlessly drops into his argument but does not develop, but it certainly indicates continued existence after death. It has, as well, long been cited as an important proof-text for “creationism;” not the “creationism” of biology and Christian objections to evolution but “creationism” as over against “traducianism.” Creationism and traducianism are the two theological explanations of the origin of the soul. Is the soul inherited from one’s parents as is the body? “Yes,” say the advocates of traducianism. Most Lutheran theologians favor this position. But there are problems with traducianism. The soul is not a material entity that can be divided, some coming from the father and some from the mother and the contribution of each being joined together to make a new thing. Creationism, on the other hand, holds that the soul of every human being is the immediate creation of God. That is, something like what happened to Adam – when God breathed life into his already created body – happens to everyone. Most Reformed theologians are creationists. And Ecclesiastes 12:7 is one of the biblical arguments.

v.8 The recurring statement of the book’s theme is used to close a paragraph. Life is beyond understanding and is a vapor, here today, gone tomorrow. So live accordingly if you would be wise. The phenomenon of death is the supreme example of the nature of life “under the sun,” so this paragraph makes a fitting conclusion to his argument. There remains nothing but a concluding summary which you have in the final verses of the book.

The point that the wise man is making is obvious, or ought to be. The same point is made often enough by others who have no particular religious and certainly no Christian ax to grind. In As You Like It Shakespeare concludes his seven ages of man this way: (the word “sans,” you remember, is French for “without”)

“His big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (2.7)

Or think of Charles Kingsley poem in The Water Babies (chapter 2).

When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen:
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog its day.

When all the world is old, lad,
And the all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.
[Cited by Wright, 1195]

Now, we have learned in our reading of the Bible to accept the fact that it often trades in generalities and does not take time to add to any point all the qualifications that might be made because if it did the point would be lost. It would be drowned in a sea of those qualifications. Abraham, Moses, and Joshua lived very long lives and were in possession of their powers to the end; David was only somewhat so. The apostle Paul did not live into very old age, nor did Peter. John did and suffered the ravages of old age, had to be carried into church as an old man, but was still mentally acute, so far as the evidence goes. Calvin died when he was 54 and was already suffering the ravages of age, Spurgeon died at the age of 57 and he likewise was much older in physical condition than the number of his years would ordinarily suggest. Robert Haldane, on the other hand, published the first volume of his epoch making commentary on Romans when he was seventy and David Brown published his commentary on Revelation when he was eighty-eight! Geoffrey Williams was still running the Evangelical Library in London when he was eighty-five. His secretary retired that year, after many years of working six days a week for the library. She was eighty-one. Everyone doesn’t age the same way. We know that. Evelyn Waugh wrote:

“Old age is a curious thing. It leaves a man crawling like a beetle while his mind is a strong and young as ever.” [Cited in Buckley, Happy Days…, 405]

But, of course, sometimes it isn’t so, either the beetle or the strong mind.

There have been a great host of Christians who have never contemplated a comfortable retirement. Perhaps you remember John Collins’ poem Tomorrow. It begins:

In the downhill of life, when I find I’m declining,
May my fate no less fortunate be
Than a snug elbow-chair will afford for reclining,
And a cot that o’erlooks the wide sea.

Not so for a great many Christians who planned to burn out, not rust out, and serve the Lord with intelligence and vigor to the very end, whether or not they were still making their living from working at a job. What is more, there are some, though the number is very small, who begin their Christian life very late in life. Consider our own Ruth Gursh, whose life came to its end just a few weeks ago. Her epitaph could be like the one in a Cambridge cemetery: “Here lies an old man who lived for seven years.” So take the point. We have a generality here.

But take the author’s point as well, which is true no matter how old age affects us. Particularly for a young person who is born and raised in the church, it is never too soon to heed the Lord’s call to full surrender and to passionate service but it is often too late to do so. Bishop Ryle put it this way:

“Tomorrow is the devil’s day, but today is God’s. Satan cares not how spiritual your intentions may be, and how holy your resolutions, if only they are fixed for tomorrow. Oh, give not place to the devil in this matter! Answer him, ‘No; Satan! It shall be today; today.’” [Ryle, Upper Room, 369]

And C.S. Lewis made the same point in a slightly different way.

“‘Now’ is the only time that touching eternity. The enemy [here he is speaking of the devil] would have our attention fixed on past or future.” [The Screwtape Letters, No. 15]

Don’t wait young people to heed the Lord’s call, to begin to practice your faith, to learn the Word of God, to love the Lord, his church, his people, to make a daily practice of real and earnest talking with God, of sharing your faith, of keeping God’s commandments – all of them, of beginning to fight the good fight and beginning to run the race and keep the faith. It will make your life so much more interesting than it is now. But even more important, it will get you where you need to be by the time you need to be there. Don’t ever assume that you have more time. You don’t know that you have tomorrow, much less the next fifty years in which to do what you should have done already but have not yet done!

And, for the rest of us who are no longer young, don’t wait to do what you still have the wits and the energy to do. The day will come, sooner than you think, when you have neither left in sufficient quantity to do much of anything important. Generally, one ought to get wiser as he or she gets older – especially a Christian – but we are being reminded here that there comes a point at which very often wisdom not only does not increase, what one has begins to leak out of your life. Your powers can no longer hold it in; can no longer make use of what you have learned and what you now know. Long before that day we need to have become all that we can become for the Lord Jesus Christ. And, take this to heart: no one has ever regretted, not one single human being has ever regretted following the Lord as hard and as soon as possible, but vast multitudes will regret in eternity waiting until it was too late.

So Moses prayed and he was a very wise man: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” [Ps. 90:12] It takes many days to get really wise!

Art is long, and time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

There is nothing you can do about that. Wisdom knows that and lives accordingly!

Truth as a Stewardship

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Luke
referring to: Luke 8:16-21

We have two small pieces of the Lord’s teaching before us this morning. We don’t know when they were delivered or if they were often repeated. Luke places them here because they deal with the same point the Lord was making with the parable of the sower or the soils which immediately precedes these two short paragraphs. Just as Luke includes only the parable of the sower and not the other parables the Lord taught to the same point and which we find together with that parable in Matthew 13 and Mark 4, so here Luke includes only these two short paragraphs that in the other two synoptic Gospels are part of much larger blocks of material. We have in Luke an epitome, a summary of teaching that Matthew and Mark give us in greater detail.

Text Comment

v.16 This little proverb about lighting a lamp appears again in an almost identical form in 11:33. It is used in a variety of contexts by the Lord in his teaching; an obvious point, perhaps, but very important to grasp.

v.18 The idea is simply that those who respond to the Lord’s teaching in faith and obedience will continue to get more and more from the Lord; but those who do not embrace the Word, who reject it, must eventually experience even more complete spiritual destitution. Note that Luke doesn’t say that such a person has so much; only that such a person thinks he does! He thinks he has peace with God; he thinks he has God’s favor; he thinks he is safe. But if he rejects Jesus and the light that comes from Jesus, he will eventually learn that he had none of this. Remember, the Lord’s original audience was Jews who thought that God would always have a special place in his heart for them and that they, because they were Jews, already had the light. In a sense, of course, they had. What made the Lord’s teaching so controversial to his original audience was precisely his insistence – and you find it everywhere in his teaching – that they, like their ancestors in the days of the prophets, were, in fact, living in darkness, not in light. They had the truth but they weren’t doing anything with it. They weren’t living by it so they might as well not have had it all.

v.19 The most natural understanding of “brothers” is that they were other children of Joseph and Mary, the Lord’s younger siblings. Roman Catholic theologians, bound to the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, often view these men instead as the children of Joseph by a previous marriage or, perhaps, as the cousins of the Lord. There is little evidence to offer for such an understanding, however, and until the celebration of virginity and celibacy became common in the church and the Catholic dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity was developed, it was understood without controversy that Jesus had other brothers and sisters who were likewise the children of Joseph and Mary.

We know from elsewhere in the Gospels that the Lord’s brothers did not believe in him at this time. Fortunately they all came to believe in him later. In 1 Cor. 15:7 we read of his appearance to Jamesafter his resurrection but we assume that at some point after Easter all of the Lord’s siblings saw him and the sight of him was enough to dispel any doubts that remained. James and Jude were among his brothers and would eventually write books of the New Testament. But the Lord’s point, made even more clearly in Mark, is that belonging to the same family as those who walk in the light isn’t the same as walking in the light oneself. One of the saddest situations in life is that in which a Christian or Christians in the same family do not share their faith in Christ with their own siblings. They belong together to one natural family, but not to the family that really matters.

v.21 The reference to “hearing” the Word of God connects the point to what has gone before in the chapter: the “take heed how you hear” in v. 18 and the several references to hearing the Word of God in the parable of the sower. As always, the kind of hearing that is done is disclosed by whether or not the person does what he hears. Hearing that leads to doing is the mark of true faith in the Gospel of Luke. James, the Lord’s brother would make the same point with different words: “faith without works is dead.” We have the same thing, for example, in 6:46: “Everyone who comes to me and hears my words and does them” is the man who can’t be shaken.

There is nothing very difficult about figuring out what Jesus is talking about in the two short paragraphs that we have read or why Luke has placed these short specimens of his teaching immediately after the parable of the sower. That parable reminds us that people respond to the Word of God in quite different ways but only one kind of response represents true, genuine and saving faith and leads to salvation. That parable ended with an exhortation to hear the Word of God, hold fast to it, and bear fruit from it.

In these next two short paragraphs the theme is the same and the exhortation is the same, though put in a slightly different form. The Lord Jesus is still challenging his audience – as he must have done many times – to respond to the message that he was preaching to them. Jesus was a preacher of the Word of God, the good news, the truth – call his message what you will – and so he was a bearer of light. Light reveals things that otherwise we would not see and Jesus and his Word are that light. Without the Word of God there is a great deal of the greatest conceivable importance we would not know; we could not know. We need the light. But light in and of itself does no one any good. Its purpose is to show the way: one must then walk in that way illuminated by the light. That is what matters! And walking by the light is just another way of describing a faithful response to Jesus’ teaching.

One of the striking features of Holy Scripture, one that very early impresses itself on the attentive reader, is how solemn it is. Anyone who reads the Bible with an honest heart must become a serious man or woman. It is, frankly, what puts a lot of people off the Bible, this relentless seriousness. There is very little fun, very little lightheartedness in the Bible. From the beginning to the end the Bible never lets us forget how much is at stake in the acceptance of its teaching, in our faith in God and Christ, and in our surrendering our lives to the Lord’s rule.

Think of such characteristic passages as those in which we are told that God is angry with the wicked every day, or in which we are urged to gouge out our right eye or cut off our right arm rather than allow ourselves to be cast into hell; or in which we are reminded that broad is the way that leads to death and vast multitudes can be found on it at any moment, but narrow is the way that leads to life and how a comparatively few walk that way; or in which we are warned not to let anything cause us to lose our souls; or in which we are taught that while whoever believes in Jesus is not condemned, whoever does not believe in him is condemned already. There are statements without number as serious as these everywhere in the Bible.

Well here it is as it is everywhere else: solemnity is laid upon solemnity. Why must we receive the Word of God and practice it in our lives? Because the day is coming when the secrets of men’s lives will be revealed: a day of reckoning, a day of judgment. You must respond in faith, you must live in and by the light of Jesus Christ, because someday every life will be judged according to that truth, that one standard. And, lest anyone miss the point, to make sure that everyone grasped how absolutely essential it is that we respond in faith and obedience to Jesus and to his teaching, he uses the occasion of a visit by his family to say that his true family consists only of those who hear in faith and respond in obedience.

And lest anyone still be inclined to miss his point, he puts it in a form so stark as to seem virtually calculated to offend. The one who has will get more; the one who does not have will have even the little he has taken from him. “Take care then how you hear!” BEWARE is written large over these short paragraphs. Beware! Beware! There is only one way to eternal life!

There are secrets in every individual life – you know very well that you have secrets, there are things you would be absolutely mortified for others to know about you – and, to be sure, we can be grateful to God that some things can be kept secret. He shows us great kindness in not exposing all our secrets. But we should never imagine that they will always and forever remain unknown. God knows them all and he has promised to bring them to the light. How they are to be disclosed and to whom the Lord does not here say, but that they will be uncovered he assures us and warns us, therefore, not to base our hope for the future on the possibility of keeping our secrets secret. Salvation requires that even your secret sins be forgiven!

God always knows and a day of reckoning is coming! Your secrets remind you that you need forgiveness more than anything else! The Lord has shown you a way to receive the forgiveness of your sins – including all the sins you know about that no one else does – he has brought that reality of full and free forgiveness into the light. But it will do you no good if you do not live in that light. Not only will those who do not respond to the light not profit from God’s goodness to them, they will suffer the more for having seen the light and chosen to continue to walk in darkness. That is a theme we often find in the Bible’s teaching: to whom much is given, much is required.

You will notice that the Lord talks here and throughout the Gospels about hearing the Word. This was a day in which almost all communication was oral and aural, by mouth and ear. Books (or scrolls) were expensive and owned and read by only a few. It would not always be so. Augustine discovered the light reading from his own copy of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, by that time in book form. By the 18th century books were found in virtually every home. John Wesley discovered the light while listening to someone else reading the preface to Martin Luther’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. From that time on many people found the light of Christ reading books and do so still today. But the word and the light have since come in many other forms as well. Though I haven’t any illustration to provide you, I would be surprised to discover that there wasn’t someone who became a Christian when the good news was communicated to him or her by telegraph. Certainly there have been many through the years who have felt the light shine in their hearts and seen it illuminate their lives at the other end of a telephone conversation. The late Dr. D. James Kennedy, founder of our Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, was converted, that is, he began to walk in the light, as a result of hearing on the radio a sermon of Donald Barnhouse, then pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Nowadays the light sometimes shines on hearts and minds through the internet. We have read and heard of young men and women in the Middle East who have found Christ either reading material on the internet or listening to gospel programs on their computer. As much harm as computers do and have done, they have done immeasurable good as a means of transmitting the good news to those who would be hard to reach in other ways.

Still, no doubt far and away the most effective means of transmitting the light to those who are in darkness, of communicating the truth to those who do not yet know it, of bringing the good news to those who have not yet heard it is as it has always been hearing the Word spoken by someone else. Surely still today the vast majority of people who become followers of Jesus Christ do so because they have heard the truth about him and have believed it and begun to practice it.

My point is that what the Lord Jesus said so solemnly long years ago remains the truth today. We too are responsible for how we hear and what we do with the truth that we hear. “Take care then how you hear” is the summary of all of this teaching from beginning of chapter 8 and that warning is addressed to us as surely as it was addressed to those who first heard the teaching of the Lord Jesus those long ago days in Galilee.

And how does one take care how he or she hears? Well, that is not so difficult question to answer. Someone who is taking care how he or she hears, listens to the truth with attention, with a real desire to understand, with a real appreciation of its importance, and, and this is the point the Lord draws attention to in these verses, with full intention to obey that truth and live in its light. For example, all of you are hearing the truth right now. But do you have in your heart at this moment a living sense of your obligation to take this truth and then do something with it in your life? That is what is required whether a person is reading the Bible, or listening to a sermon in church, encountering the message of Jesus by some other means, or even mulling it over in his or her mind. To hear the truth, to see the light lays us under an obligation to be faithful to that truth and to do that truth. That is the Lord’s point.

All of that sounds unobjectionable, but the fact is, it is an attitude that is becoming increasingly rare even in Bible-believing communities in our day. Over the past generation and a half there has been a huge shift in view point that has occurred in the culture as a whole, you know it as post-modernism and so on, but a shift that has also made itself felt in the life of the church. Over the past generation and a half a great change has come over Christian society in regard to truth and the importance of the truth. Some years ago, David Wells, a South African by birth, formerly a protégé of John Stott, now a professor of theology at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, father of one of the ruling elders in our presbytery, and a man who preached in this pulpit some fourteen years ago, published a book entitled No Time for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology. It was a very important book about which many people pursed their brow for about two weeks and then promptly forgot. Wells, I fear, is a voice crying in the wilderness. In that great and important book, Prof. Wells demonstrated that a real interest in discovering the truth so that one can live by the truth and practice the truth has been replaced in the evangelical Christian mind by an interest in one’s own present well-being and happiness. The truth is not denied, but by means of an epoch-making change in our culture, the truth has now become our servant and we are no longer its servant as we were before. In that book Prof. Wells provided massive illustration and demonstration of this shift: from the books that evangelical publishers publish, to the way seminarians are trained for the ministry, to his own experience as a professor of theology finding it difficult to get his colleagues to be interested in questions of truth.

But perhaps the most obvious evidence of this shift is that Christian congregations nowadays much less often ever hear such texts as the one we have before us this morning. They are not hearing about the exposure of their secrets on the judgment day; they are not hearing in their pastors’ sermons about the broad way and the narrow way; they are not hearing about the terrible consequences that must befall those who hear the truth but who do not do it. They are hearing comparatively few such sermons and many, a great many Christians today, virtually never hear a sermon that warns them to Beware! Beware!

There is a great deal in the Bible that is meant to worry us, to frighten us, to make us shudder. But you would never know that listening to the contemporary Christian pulpit. There is virtually no beware left in Christian preaching. And that, surely, is a recipe for spiritual disaster, all the more in a culture and a time like ours. The Jews of the OT and of Jesus’ day are the great illustration of a fact that has been proved with dismal regularity in the Christian ages since: it is very easy to hear the truth, even to know it on a certain level, and never respond with faith, never hold fast to the truth, never bear fruit from it, and never do it! That is what the Jews did: they squandered the truth and, as a result, what they thought they had was taken from them and given to somebody else.

And the same thing has happened countless times to generations of the church in the two-thousand years since. People read the Bible in church, they sang the good news in their hymns, they nodded their agreement with the platitudinous sermons they heard, they would have said that they had the light and been offended, as the Jews were, by any suggestion that they did not, but they never held the truth fast in an honest heart, they never bore fruit with that truth, they never took the light they had been given and lived by it helping others to do so as well, and they never did the word of God, that is lived by it, practiced it, worked it out in their own lives and the lives of their families.

I am a minister, which historically meant I am a preacher of the word of God. In colonial America ministers were the first men in a town. No office or calling commanded greater prestige. Why? Because people were of a mind to think that what the minister taught them from the pulpit on Sunday was the most important thing for them to know. What he told them were the things they absolutely had to believe and had to do if they were to be SAVED. To know and do the truth of the word of God was essential to life both now and forever and ministers were the principal agents of that truth and so were considered the most important people in the community. But times have changed.

One recent survey ranked Christian ministers – in what is ostensibly still a Christian country (at least most Americans, more than 90%, still call themselves Christians) – at 52nd place on a one hundred point scale of social prestige, right next to factory foremen and operators of power stations. [Wells, 113] Another study revealed that the most desired quality in a minister – what would you say in answer to that question; would you not say that the most desired quality in a minister is that he knows the truth and can communicate it to me? – well, what the people surveyed said was the most important quality in a minister was “an open, affirming style” and that what people least like in a minister is “legalism in matters of truth and ethics” or a domineering personality. You see, people no longer see ministers as first and foremost purveyors, brokers, revealers, teachers of truth, bearers of the light. Now, more and more, a minister’s job is to make us happy, make us feel good about ourselves and life. What is this but the demonstration of the fact that “Beware! or Take care how you hear the word of God!” is no longer an interesting message to most Christians. If it were, the one thing, the only thing congregations would demand from their minister is that he bring them the truth of God and help them to understand it, grasp it, hold it fast, and practice it in their lives. They are no longer thinking much about the day when secrets will be disclosed or when what many church people think they have will be taken from them and given to somebody else.

In a more recent publication, Prof. Wells describes what he calls the “crumbling of our theological character.” He doesn’t mean that theological beliefs are being denied – though there is surely some of that – but that they have little of what he calls “cash value.” They just don’t matter to people. He likens the situation to that of a child who is neglected in his home. He isn’t abducted and taken away; he is still there. But he is ignored. No one really cares for him. The great doctrines of the Bible are not denied, but neither are they very interesting to people. God, the Majesty who created the heavens and the earth, our Maker, the judge of all men, and the only hope of our salvation in the Day of Judgment; even God does not interest Christians as he used to. And there are hardly any words that better describe our modern age, even this modern age in the church, than these: “there is no fear of God before their eyes.” [The Bleeding of the Evangelical Church, 8]

That God will take away from people who neglect his word what they think they have is a commonplace biblical doctrine, but you would never know it from listening in on the modern American church. The secrets of men’s lives are going to be exposed, but you would never know it by attending to the modern Christian pulpit. And that one must obey the light to be counted among those who have the light, again one of the Bible’s most emphatic themes, might as well be a secret so far as many American Christians are concerned. In one recent survey of American evangelical Christians, 91% said that God is very important to them – what else is a Christian going to say to a survey taker? – but 66% of them went on to say that they do not believe in moral absolutes and 67% that they do not believe in absolute truth! In other words, God is important to them as a vague idea, some avuncular and kindly presence who can be counted on to do him or her good, but not as the owner of their lives, not as a lawgiver whose will must be obeyed or else, and not as the source of truth by which alone we can live forever, truth that all must believe, hold fast, and do. [Ibid]

The seriousness, the solemnity, the relentless urgency conveyed on every page of the Word of God is somehow being missed in our day. It is perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the sentimentality of the modern world. Everywhere we look there is death, everywhere we look there is judgment, but we are acting as if such things hardly exist. Multitudes of people nowadays have been trained to read the Bible as if it were a self-help book instead of what it is: a rope thrown to drowning men and women by which they may be saved if, but only if, they hang on for dear life! The Lord did not say that those who are happy, well-adjusted, and comfortable in life are his mother and brothers; he said that those who receive the light and walk by the light, that those who hear the word of God, hold it fast, and do it, those and those only are his mother and his brothers. Every time you hear the truth of God, every time you hear the word of God, every time you hear the good news of Christ’s kingdom an obligation has been laid upon you to do something with that truth, that word, that news.

In these short texts the Lord doesn’t elaborate the various things we are to do with the truth we hear or how we are to do the word of God. But one doesn’t have to read very far in the Word of God to learn how to do the Word of God.

Take, for example, the proverb the Lord began with: “No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a jar or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light.” There are people around you every day who are living in darkness. They don’t think they are. They have no sense that they are in the dark because they’ve never seen the world or themselves or God in the light! They are constantly tripping over all sorts of things but have no idea that they could miss them if only they had the light. How many people have become Christians and have said “I never realized who or what God was. All those years I never realized that I was a sinner before God. I never realized what a human life was supposed to be. I never imagined that I could have such high purpose in my life, or that I could know such love, or that I could find such pleasure and help in prayer, in worship, in obedience. I never knew, until I saw the light and I first saw everything I hadn’t been able to see before.”

Well, if you are a Christian you have that light and it’s now your responsibility to put it on a stand and bring others into its circle of illumination. Only a very selfish man or woman is content to go to heaven alone! To do the word of God is certainly first and foremost to share it with others.

Let me finish with a beautiful illustration of how one holds fast to the Word of God, bears fruit from it, and does it. Here is what a man does who realizes that the word of God is not only a surpassingly great gift; it is as well a solemn stewardship, a responsibility.

I read some years ago a monograph on the life and theology of Alexander Comrie, an 18th century Dutch theologian. [A.G. Honig, Alexander Comrie, Leiden, 1991] Comrie was actually a Scot, a contemporary of Thomas Boston. As a boy he contemplated becoming a minister but his father thought he ought to go instead into business and sent him to Holland to apprentice with a merchant. Those were, as you might imagine, lonely years for the young man. He had to find his way in foreign country, learn a new language, make new friends, and learn a trade all at once. One Sunday in church he met an old man who fell to talking with him about the work the Spirit of God was doing in some of the villages along the Rhine River. At his first holiday, Comrie set out to see for himself. He went at first by barge which sank in a storm; Comrie had to swim ashore losing all his possessions in the process. Being the determined young man he was, he walked onward toward his destination until it was dark and, attracted by a light came up to the house of a Dutch farmer.

The farmer saw him coming and somewhat suspicious came out to greet him and ask him what he was doing and where he was going so late in the evening. Comrie replied that he needed a place to sleep and was hoping the farmer might allow him to spend the night in his barn. His accent awakened the farmer’s suspicions but he didn’t feel he could refuse the request so he showed Comrie to a granary that adjoined the house. Actually, he put him there because he could watch him through a small hole in his bedroom wall. He left him some bread and milk, bid him good night and retired to his bedroom to keep his eye on his guest.

But as he peered through the hole what did he hear and see but the young man on his knees, pouring out his soul in a touching prayer to God, giving thanks for the Lord’s having guided him to a kind farmer and asking the Lord to bless the farmer for the kindness he had shown. In fact, he prayed that if the farmer was not yet a Christian in earnest, he might be shown the light and be saved together with his family.

All this was enough for the farmer. Still peering through the hole in his wall, it seemed to him that he had been given a vision of heaven. Was this man an angel he was entertaining unawares? Comrie’s prayer had shone such light in his heart that he went to his own bed, to his own knees, and surrendered himself to God and to the Word of God just as Comrie had prayed he would. That moment he found light flooding into his heart and his life. Comrie had carried the light to this man’s farm; he had with his prayer hung up the lamp, so that when the farmer “entered” by peering through is peep hole, he saw by the light.

The next morning the farmer told his young guest what had happened and how before he had mistrusted God and been uninterested in the word of God and also how wonderful the word of God seemed to him now. I haven’t time to tell you the rest of the story: how Alexander Comrie eventually received his theological training and came back to this same place to be this same farmer’s pastor.

That is the kind of thing that happens, this is the kind of thing someone does who hears the word of God, holds it fast in his heart, bears fruit from it, and does it. Which is to say that is how a real Christian hears the Word of God and what a real Christian does with the light he has been given.

The Catalog of Time

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Ecclesiastes
referring to: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Before we begin to read, a few more interesting details about the book we are studying. Ecclesiastes is an interesting title for such a book. What does that word mean? Well, the term is an English form of the Greek and Latin words that were used to translate the Hebrew term that is translated “the preacher” in the ESV. We’ve rendered that word, as is common nowadays, as Qohelet, which is the sound of the Hebrew word in English letters. The Hebrew word is related to the term for assembly (qahal) and so may be – no one can say for sure – a term that refers to someone who addresses the assembly of God’s people or, as we would say today, a preacher or teacher of the church. It seems likely that Qohelet refers to an office rather than some particular person, but even that is not certain. Odd, in a way, that a book of the Bible should have a title the meaning of which nobody knows for sure. [Max Rogland, “Notes to Ecclesiastes,” ESV Study Bible, 1193] The Hebrew title of the book is simply the opening words: “The Words of Qohelet.” But it is precisely what Qohelet means that is the question. The word occurs seven times in Ecclesiastes but nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible.

I know a number of you own copies of the very fine ESV Study Bible. Some of you will have noticed that the notes on Ecclesiastes were written by our own Dr. Max Rogland, son of Bob and Sharon, who holds a PhD from Leiden University in Holland and is now professor of Old Testament at Erskine Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. Max is a formidable scholar and, for that reason, I’m happy to report that he understands the book in the way in which I have explained it to you so far. As he summarizes the message of Ecclesiastes:

“The theme of Ecclesiastes is the necessity of fearing God in a fallen, and therefore frequently confusing and frustrating world.” [1193]

“According to the basic interpretative approach adopted here, the Preacher is not to be viewed as some kind of skeptical iconoclast but rather as a teacher of orthodoxy, whose musings on God and human existence present a consistent message that is to be viewed as standing within the broad stream of biblical wisdom. …

We noticed last time, in reading chapter 2, that a strikingly dark description of life – its complexities and its disappointments – suddenly is dropped and replaced by a much sunnier outlook. These rapid changes of perspective – from light to shadow and back again – are typical of Ecclesiastes and sometimes tend to leave the reader’s head spinning. But, then, so does life itself, does it not? In the first eight verses of chapter 3 we have an account of this general reality of the complexity of life, its contradictions, its opposites that we encounter as we live. The paragraph has been called “The Catalog of Times.” [Fox, 193 in R.L. Schultz, “Ecclesiastes,” The Baker Illustrated Bible Commentary, 587]

Chapter 3:1-8 is undoubtedly the best known text in the book. I recalled in our introduction to Ecclesiastes the famous pop song of the 1960s by The Byrds, the text of which is virtually the KJV text of these eight verses with a refrain added.

As we read you will notice that the couplets are found in pairs, the first and the second having a similar theme. There are fourteen lines all told, so seven pairs; seven, as you remember, is the number of completeness in the Bible. In other words, life in all of its varied states is being described. In each case the terms used amount to polar opposites. All the circumstances of life are described by reference to the polarities, the contrasts, the opposite conditions or states or actions lying at each end of a particular continuum of human experience. What we are being given, then, is a comprehensive portrait of life “under the sun.”

Read: 3:1-8

v.1 The first verse provides a summary of the point now to be elaborated in detail. But, though not explicitly said, in context the statement means that God has a purpose for everything that happens in our lives and so for the interweaving of the happy and the sad, both the difficult trial and the time of peaceful prosperity. As we read elsewhere in the book, God made the one as well as the other. [7:14]

v.4 Now we are contrasting emotions.

v.5 There is much debate and little certainty as to the meaning of “cast away stones” and “gather stones.” It seems obvious that “cast away stones” has a negative meaning, but we don’t know what that meaning is. Some have thought of throwing stones on the fields of an enemy to destroy his agricultural capacity while gathering stones would be to reverse that process. Possible, but no one knows for sure. [cf. Delitzsch, 257-258]

v.7 You can think of any number of modern applications. “A time to tear, and a time to sew.” Kids need to run and play even if that means that mothers may need to sew from time to time. A mother who won’t repair clothes has kids who can’t play! And a child who is afraid of a scraped knee will never have the fun of playing tag!

v.8 Not only love and hate, but their public expressions in war and peace.

It seemed to me right to continue our examination of Ecclesiastes on Easter evening, when I often do other things, because the history of redemption we have been celebrating over these last few days so perfectly corresponds to the text we have read and, indeed, to the great message of this book, which is summarized to some significant extent in these same verses. There is a time to die and a time to rise again. There is a time for suffering and death and, as well, a time for the conquest of death. The public ministry of the Lord Jesus with all of its excitement, its stupendous works of power, its public influence was one thing, the passion week another, the crucifixion still another, and, of course, Easter Sunday still another. They were very different times producing very different states of mind in the disciples. But each had to have its own day and each had to have its own experience and the disciples had to feel the weight of each one for the cumulative effect of them all to be what God intended. Easter wouldn’t be Easter without Good Friday and vice versa. You cannot remove a single one of these times or matters without ruining the whole.

Think, for example, of what is called Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter. The Son of God had just been put to death for sin and had been buried. He was dead and so far as the disciples were concerned he was gone. For the disciples this, of course, was a crushing blow, the ruin of all their hopes. And the next day dawned to that same desolation. I’m sure many of you have awakened of a morning to some sad reality, the same sad reality to which you had gone to sleep the previous night. They were afraid. It was no secret that they were Jesus’ followers and that the Lord’s enemies had triumphed over him. Were they next? They huddled together out of sight, sharing their grief and their fears and wondering aloud what to do next. Knowing those men it would not surprise us if a sharp word or two were exchanged as one suggested this course of action and another poured scorn on his idea. No word came from heaven; there were no miracles on Saturday to cheer them or to replenish their faith. Silence! They were, or so it seemed, left to themselves and to their own devices after three years of relying on Jesus for the direction of their lives. Can anyone deny that our lives often seem like that? We find ourselves discouraged, afraid, fighting unsuccessfully against a creeping hopelessness, and all the while we seem to be getting nothing from the Lord. We may know that the Lord died for us yesterday, but what of today? We trust – though sometimes faintly – that there will be miracles for us tomorrow, but what of today? Where is the Lord today?

Ecclesiastes may be said to be a lengthy meditation on such “Saturdays” in our lives. But not just Saturdays; there are plenty of Easter Sundays here as well. It is the presence in our lives of both the cross and the empty tomb that we have in this memorable text that we have read. Such is our life in the world as the children of God: chiaroscuro, that beautiful Italian word that art historians use to describe the alternations of light and shadow in a painting. And out of such varied experiences, so different in character, out of the days of light and the days of shadow, God weaves together the fabric of our lives.

Not till each loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly,
Shall God reveal the pattern
And explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand,
As the threads of gold and silver
For the pattern he had planned.

The problem for us is that we can’t see ahead of time either that one such time or another is about to befall us or how the Lord is going to make use of our experiences in the total story of our lives. As we said before, the great limitation of human life is the very limited knowledge we have and must have while we live “under the sun.” We don’t know what things mean. We don’t know how things are going to turn out. For us it seems, as we read in 9:11-12:

“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.”

We have said that the perspective of this author is indicated by his use of hebel, “vanity, meaninglessness, or absurdity” and his use, also more than thirty times in the book, of the phrase “under the sun.” From the vantage point of this world and our knowledge, life often seems pointless. But another clue to the book’s meaning is the author’s use of the verb םצא , masah, “to find” or “find out.” Max drew our attention to that in the opening remarks that I made.

“[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” [3:11]

“Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things – which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found.” [7:27-28]

“…then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much many may toil in seeking, he will not find it out. Even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out.” [8:16-17]

We do not understand what is happening in the world or in our lives; and we cannot no matter how hard we try. The one thing we do know is that we should fear God and keep his commandments because the judgment is coming and because God can be counted on to put everything right eventually. And is this not true and is it not a part of true wisdom to embrace those facts and accept life as it must be in this world instead of spending one’s life protesting what he cannot understand, cannot change, being embittered by his disappointments, and failing to enjoy the blessings God has given him because they are mixed with trouble and sorrow.

Think, for example, of the moment described for us in Nehemiah 8. You remember the situation. The Jews had returned to the Holy Land from exile in Babylon and had gathered in Jerusalem to hear Ezra the priest read to them from the Word of God. They gathered on the first day of the seventh month, which is to say on the Feast of Trumpets, one of the Israel’s ancient feast days as appointed in the Law of Moses. From daybreak until noon Ezra read, probably making explanatory comments along the way. Other Levites then instructed the people from the Word that had been read. Perhaps we should think of them as preaching sermons on the texts. But the effect on the people had been discouraging. They were weeping as they heard the Bible being read. No doubt they were upset because the more Ezra read the more obvious it had become to them not only why they had been sent into exile in the first place but as well how much more had to change before they had reformed their lives to make them agreeable to God’s Word. The Word had exposed their sin and that had been very discouraging. But Nehemiah stopped them in their tracks.

“Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” And the Levites added their two cents: “Be still, for this is a sacred day. Do not grieve.” [Neh. 8:10-11]

And, amazingly, that is just what the people did. They stopped mourning and began to rejoice. They went home to the finest meals they could prepare and shared their food and drink with others and had a memorably happy day. There is a time for weeping, but this wasn’t the time. It was a feast day, not a fast day. And so they were instructed to act accordingly and in obedience to the Lord they did so. There was nothing wrong and there is nothing wrong with weeping over our sins. We ought to weep over our sins. But for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven! It is a fact of life, but it is also a fact we are to reckon with and order our lives by.

I remember reading an anecdote of Martyn Lloyd Jones’ early ministry in Wales. After an evening service he and his assistant had been called to a home to deal with a problem in a family. It was something hard and difficult and required both some sympathy and some straight talking. After a long day in the pulpit it was an exhausting end to the Sabbath. But his assistant, E.T. Rees, remembers that, as they left the house, Lloyd Jones clapped his hands together and said, “Now, some ham and eggs!” It isn’t always that easy, of course, but there is something in that picture that has always seemed very right to me. No Christian can or should live only in gloom; but then no Christian can or should live only in the sunshine either. There is a time for both and wisdom directs us to live accordingly, finding time both for a wearying late night conversation and for ham and eggs!

A wedding day is not the time to resolve some offense that stands between you and the mother of the bride, or between you and the groom! A wedding shower is not the time to talk to others about how messy your divorce was. A funeral or graveside is not the time for practical jokes. A school lecture is not the time for a nap. But all of those things can and should be done. You get the picture.

But, the emphasis here in Ecclesiastes, I think, falls less on what we do to put both mourning and dancing into our lives and more on the fact that the Lord himself orders the events of our lives and upon the fact that he has seen fit to include times and matters of all kinds. And there is nothing wrong, therefore, with the fact that we must experience very different kinds of circumstances, feel very different emotions, and do very different things in life. Our life is made up of extremes and we are people of extremes. God has made it so. Accepting this is liberating!

And so it is with respect to every aspect of life. When I read vv. 3 and 6 I think, for example, of all the great institutions into which Christians poured their heart and their treasure, only later to have to abandon them because they had fallen into the hands of unbelievers. No one loved Princeton Theological Seminary as much as J. Gresham Machen and no one had done any more than he to adorn its reputation with his scholarship. Princeton was not only his place of work, it was his home. In a very real sense, as a Christian, and as a scholar, it had given him his life. It was his second mother. And yet the time came when he had to leave Princeton to establish another school that, in comparison, seemed at the time in every way so much less than Princeton. It hadn’t the ivy-covered walls, the beautiful buildings in which great men had taught for a century, the magnificent library, the international reputation. It met in rented quarters with a few faculty members and a small student body. But there is a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to keep and a time to cast away. Christians who know that are wise and much better prepared for what a godly life will require of them.

I know that some of you will remember Ian Tait, the gifted and godly English pastor who preached here years ago on several occasions; once in his retirement, he filled this pulpit for a month while I was away teaching at Covenant Seminary. Mr. Tait was a natural intellectual, he never had formal theological training, but you would never have known it – a friend of Martyn Lloyd Jones, and a lover of the Puritans before most of us knew anything about the Puritans. He collected their books when no one else wanted them and amassed an impressive library of Puritan works, some of which is now housed in the Ian Tait collection at the Buswell Library at Covenant Theological Seminary. He was a Bunyan expert, living as he did so near Bedfordshire and the places Bunyan made famous in his Pilgrim’s Progress. A substantial portion of his vast collection of works by and about John Bunyan is now housed in the Kresge Library at Covenant College. He was a fascinating preacher, his sermons full of interesting illustrations and details and often interrupted by his going off on some tangent suggested to his mind while he preached, what he would describe as “an aside.” “But that was an aside,” he would say calling himself back to the main point. I remember loving his “asides.”

Mr. Tait was a friend of my family and so I had known him when I was a boy. I visited his home in England for the first time the summer after my graduation from college. And what a home! It was an old English country manor, set within the beautiful Hertfordshire countryside. And when I say it was an old country manor, I mean old. Parts of the house were built in the 14th century. There was a great Cedar of Lebanon in the back garden that is mentioned in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson! The house was once owned by the 17th and 18th century English poet Edward Young, best known for a line in one of his poems, “Procrastination is the thief of time.” It was one of those English “piles” that was added to again and again through the centuries until it was a substantial manor. It was owned by Mr. Tait’s church and used not only as the manse but for ministry. They offered living space to young professional men, most of whom worked in London – engineers, accountants, and the like – and arranged matters so that approximately half of their tenants were Christians and half not at any one time. Through the years a number of those unbelieving men found Christ at Guessens. It was a house designed to be a place of salvation and so it proved to be. Every large English home has a name and the name of this manor was “Guessens.” Laurie O’Ban, when she was still Laurie Payne, lived for a year at Guessens.

Presiding over this great place, over the dining room where dinner was served at night to the men who lived at Guessens and over that large table where the most fascinating conversations took place, was Mr. Tait’s wife Mae. She was a woman of considerable substance herself. Some of you may remember Mr. Tait telling the story of their romance during the dark early days of the Second World War – he was in the RAF – and how they would steal time away to be together. He was a Baptist, she an Anglican and though she became the pastor’s wife, she would never consent to be baptized according to the Baptist practice. She had been baptized as an infant and that was that. Perhaps there was a reason why Mr. Tait so often made his way among Presbyterians!

Upon their retirement they moved to another house, this one gifted to them by an elderly woman of Mr. Tait’s congregation who had been greatly helped by his ministry. It was a Tudor home. I don’t mean that it was built in the Tudor style; I mean it was built when the Tudors were kings of England, that is in the late 15th or early 16th century! Florence and I visited them there once. The hallways were very narrow, the doorways low – people were shorter in those days – the oak darkened through age, a beautiful rose garden in the rear. It was, we thought, exactly where the Taits ought to live! Ian and Mae were a couple that represented to me and Florence the true glory of old England and the very finest of old English Christianity.

But then Mae died and Ian’s companion of so many years was gone. Her death took the stuffing out of him. Florence and my daughter Evangeline visited him not so long after her death on one of Covenant High School’s Great Britain trips and could literally see and feel his despondency. A gaping hole had been opened in his life, a raw wound that wouldn’t close. It was during that time and in that state of mind that Mr. Tait began to make preparations for his own death and one part of that preparation was the disposal of what remained of his magnificent library. And to my surprise and delight, he had decided to give it to me. I suppose he thought he might have given it to my father, but he had died some years before; so it was to come to me. I was talking to him by phone periodically in those days as arrangements had to be made to ship the books and so on. On the phone I could hear the listlessness in his voice and virtually feel his depression across the distance. I did my best to cheer him up, but nothing seemed to work. Mike Simpson was brought into these plans as he was to fly to England to help box the books and bring them home. Believe me these books were well worth the price of a round trip air ticket to England just to ensure that they made the trip safely!

Then one morning I called Mr. Tait to confirm some of the arrangements and was met at the other end of the line by a completely different man. I could tell by the sound of his voice that something had happened. The man was not depressed; he was positively giddy. And something had happened. He had fallen in love. He had met a woman at a church meeting, a woman who had never married and had just retired from a lifetime of missionary work in Europe. Her name was Patricia. It had been love at first sight. Two seventy year olds falling in love at first sight! He told me that they were spending hours at night on the telephone. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “I’ll only be sending half of the books I was intending to send. I think I should keep the rest to use myself for a while.” Life had meaning again and he didn’t want to part from some of his finest books. Her name was Patricia. I’ve never met her; but I don’t like her! She stole my books and there were some fabulous volumes in that part of the library that were virtually on their way to me before she ruined everything!

There is a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance! His grief over the death of Mae was the price of his love for her. Does anyone think that grief was inappropriate? I certainly don’t. Doesn’t everyone want a marriage so fine, so full of love, that the death of one of you must break the other’s heart? Of course you do. And you can’t have the one without the other.

I remember reading a piece in The Atlantic some time ago by one Joyce Carol Oates describing the devastation of her soul in the aftermath of the death of Raymond, her husband of 48 years. Others of her friends tried to console her and lift her spirits, but the advice that helped her most was that which came from another heart-broken widow. Says Joyce Oates, “Who but Gail Godwin would tell me, “Suffer, Joyce, Ray was worth it.” [Supplement Fiction, 2010, 82] Good advice I think; don’t you? We are not to suffer as those who have no hope, but we must suffer and for what better than for the loss of someone worth suffering for!

But then, who can fault him for the happiness of new love that came flooding into his soul when least expected and most needed. Was that not the Lord doing precisely what we are taught he will do in Ecclesiastes and throughout the Bible? This is life as God has ordered it. There is nothing we can do about this and nothing we should want to do about it, God being all-wise and all-loving as he is, and our perspective being as limited as it must be. Let God be God and take the good and the bad as it comes. You work at being faithful; God will arrange the circumstances of your life according to his goodness and wisdom. Simple wisdom, but very hard for many to accept and still harder to practice. Hence the strong, relentless argument of Ecclesiastes.

We think of medieval nuns as ascetics, women devoted to self-denial, to eschewing all the pleasures of life, and to beating their bodies and making them their slaves so that they might be wholly and only devoted to Christ. But not every nun took such a severe view of things. One of the most attractive figures of the later medieval period is Teresa of Avila, the Spanish nun and founder of an order of religious women. Teresa was a remarkably gifted woman. Like Luther her writings not only wielded a great religious influence but shaped the development of her country’s literature. She was a combination of furious opposites. She practiced self-denial to a degree far beyond what any of us has attempted, but she was by no means the perfect image of the female saint of the medieval church. Saint Lucy is said to have gouged out her eyes because a suitor admired them. Catherine of Sienna cut off her beautiful long hair. Teresa took a different tack. When a gentleman admired her shapely foot, she simply told him, “Take a good look – this is the last time you’ll ever see it.”

But more to our point, she knew that there was a time for self-denial but there was also a time for good food and drink. Or, as she put it, “There is a time for penance and a time for partridge.” Good, sound, and eminently biblical advice and, whether or not Teresa realized it, pretty much the message of Ecclesiastes. “There is a time for penance and a time for partridge.” [Medwick, Teresa of Avila, xii]

The Point of the Spear (Easter)

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Seasonal Sermons
referring to: Acts 2:22-24

I want to direct your attention to some verses from the early chapters of the Book of Acts. Acts comes right after the four gospels, each of which tells the story of the Lord’s birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection. Acts carries that story forward. We are reading just a few verses in chapter 2, then a few more in chapter 4. The first two come from the middle of a sermon that the Apostle Peter preached in Jerusalem on a great feast day when there were thousands of people from all over the world in the city for the celebration of the Feast of Pentecost.

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We have read a few verses from the early chapters of the Book of Acts, a book that relates the history of those first days, weeks, and years that followed the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. It doesn’t give us the whole history, to be sure; it would have to have been a very large book to have done that. But it relates the key events and introduces us to the principal figures by whom the message about Jesus Christ was spread to the rest of the world. In a remarkably short time the news about Jesus was spreading everywhere. Within a few years there were thousands of Christians in virtually every city of the Greco-Roman world and the news continued to spread as Christians proclaimed the good news about Jesus in the city streets, in private conversations, and as merchants and missionaries carried it to faraway lands. Christians had news to tell and they told it to everyone who would listen!

What the few verses we have read indicate is that first and foremost that news concerned the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It was not so only at the very beginning. As we read onward in Acts we learn that the resurrection continued to be the centerpiece of the message. When the Apostle Paul, for example, made his famous address to the philosophers in Athens in Acts 17, the one thing we know that he told them about Jesus was that he had risen from the dead.

“Every sermon preached by every Christian in the New Testament centers on the resurrection. The gospel or ‘good news’ means essentially the news of Christ’s resurrection. The message that flashed across the ancient world, set hearts on fire, changed lives and turned the world upside down was not ‘love your neighbor.’ Every morally sane person already knew that; it was not news. The news was that a man who claimed to be the Son of God and the Savior of the world had risen from the dead.” [P. Kreeft and R.K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, 176]

Why was that? Why was it the resurrection that the first Christians were always talking about? After all, there were many other important things to say about Jesus. They could have talked about his miraculous birth, or his great miracles, or his wonderful teaching that was unlike anything anyone had heard before, or about his death on the cross for our sins. All of that was extraordinarily important and, of course, all of that eventually was told. But the resurrection was first and foremost. Why the resurrection?

Well, no doubt one very important reason was that the resurrection was the event that had created the good news in their own experience. Jesus had been executed in the most horrible and humiliating way, crucified among other criminals as if he had been one himself. His disciples had been utterly devastated by this sudden and catastrophic defeat. They had been riding the crest of the wave just a few days before, certain that Jesus was about to claim his rightful place as the king of Israel, and now he was dead. Their high hopes lay in ruins. And then suddenly, a few days later, reports reached them that Jesus was alive again and then they saw him themselves, spoke to him, walked and talked with him. Stunning news! And exhilarating! Thrilling! They had never been so low those few days before and now they had never been so happy. No wonder they talked about it to everyone who would listen. It was the greatest thing that had ever happened to any of them. And when marvelous things happen to you, you can’t help talking about them.

And, I suspect, when they talked to others about Jesus, they majored on the resurrection as well because it was their strong suit. The good news had enemies in those days as it does today. There were many people who did not want it to be true, who were heavily invested in believing that Jesus was a false teacher, a charlatan, and a dangerous man. They were the ones who had arranged to put him to death. They were hardly friends of the announcement that Jesus has risen from the dead. They had wanted him dead. And now they were helpless before the onslaught of all this eyewitness testimony. Scores of people had seen him alive again. Excited as they understandably were, they were telling everyone what they had seen, what Jesus looked like, what he had said to them, what he had done. One report, or two, or three might be discredited, but the news was coming from all sides. And the religious leadership could do nothing to contradict it. They couldn’t produce the body, they couldn’t explain what had happened or why Jesus’ followers, so dispirited upon their leader’s death, were now shouting the news of his resurrection from the housetops.

The accounts that we have read from the Book of Acts, like the rest of the New Testament, were written at a time when many of the eyewitnesses were still alive. Plenty of people would have known if what was being said were not true. The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem just a few weeks after the Lord’s crucifixion – and the rapid spread of the Christian faith through the world in the first century – according to Roman historians Christianity was already a significant movement just a few decades later – is virtual proof that Jesus had in fact risen, because they could never have got away with that story had it not been true. They would have been laughed at and that would have been that! No Jews in those days had the expectation that the Messiah would die and rise again. That was not part of their understanding of the Messiah and his work and life. His own disciples hadn’t expected this and yet here were the Christians proclaiming that Jesus had died and risen from the dead. Many thoughtful people have examined the biblical record and have concluded that the idea that this was somehow concocted is psychologically and historically impossible. There is but one explanation for the history that you read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the rest of the NT and that is that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified on Friday was alive again on Sunday morning.

Some to be sure have argued that it was all made up, a conspiracy, a plot to foist a new religion upon the world. But even many unbelievers have admitted that such a theory is absurd. Those men hadn’t the means to deceive Jerusalem. People would have seen through the outrageous claims they were making: a dead man rising from the dead. Preposterous. Where is the proof? Charles Colson, one of the Watergate conspirators, has compared his own experience as somebody actually involved in a conspiracy to what would have to have been true of those early Christians trying to convince people of something that wasn’t true, trying to persuade people that something had happened that in fact had not happened. He recounts the desperate efforts made by himself and President Nixon’s inner circle to try to cover-up the Watergate break-in.

“With the most powerful office in the world at stake, a small band of hand-picked loyalists, no more than ten of us, could not hold a conspiracy together for more than two weeks. … After just a few weeks the natural human instinct for self-preservation was so overwhelming that the conspirators one by one, deserted their leader.” [Loving God, 67]

And all those men had to prove to the world was that the President hadn’t known anything about the break-in beforehand and hadn’t done anything to cover it up. The disciples had to prove that a man had come back from the dead! Fat chance, unless, in fact, a man had come back from the dead! Colson goes on:

“Take it from one who was inside the Watergate web looking out, who saw firsthand how vulnerable a cover-up is: Nothing less than a witness as awesome as the resurrected Christ could have caused those men to maintain to their dying whispers that Jesus is alive and Lord.” [69]

You will sometimes hear people say that folk in those days were more credulous, more easily duped. They were unscientific; not like us today who have horoscopes in our newspapers. C.S. Lewis once described that viewpoint as chronological snobbery. The fact is people knew then as they know now that people do not return from the dead. It is precisely because they knew that that it took them by such surprise and became something they had to tell others. People do not come back from the dead, but Jesus did!

Imagine if that had happened to you, and you had been an eyewitness of such a thing. You couldn’t have kept it to yourself either. Happiness is not complete until it is shared. And something so amazing simply must be talked about. Everyone gossips. Why? Because when you know something others don’t you find it very difficult not to talk about it.

People began to believe the message they were hearing in large numbers. They had a message that people couldn’t help but believe. People who had days before joined in calling for Jesus’ death were now believing that he had risen from the dead; even more startling people among the religious leadership had also believed their report of the Lord’s resurrection. The good news was a tidal wave sweeping through Jerusalem. No group was less likely to receive with acceptance the news of Christ’s resurrection than the priests. They had felt the Lord’s lash more than once as he condemned them for their false teaching and their false living. They resented his criticism as we ordinarily resent criticism of ourselves. What is more they were jealous of the Lord’s popularity. Human nature being what it is, they were not about to become followers of Jesus, but we read in Acts 6:7 that “a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.” They couldn’t help it. It had happened. Astonishing!

I can influence you in some ways. Others can as well. I can tell a funny joke and make you laugh. Or I can tell an emotionally wrenching story and make you cry. I’ve been married to my wife long enough that, if the movie is sad enough or if in the story happiness has come after great sadness, I can tell when to turn to look and find tears on her cheeks. I suspect we can all be moved in such ways.

But to change your whole life, to make you change your mind about fundamental things – what you think about yourself, about your life – to make you love and hate a completely different set of things, to make you care about different things than you cared about before, to make you committed to living in a different way; I say to do that takes much more; it takes an earthquake. And that is precisely what the resurrection was, an earthquake that shook men and women by the thousands, by the millions to the core. It was an event that changed their world. Of course the Christians were going to keep talking about the resurrection!

But I think there was another reason why the resurrection figured so largely in the proclamation of the gospel or the good news in those early days and years when the Christian faith was spreading outward from Jerusalem all over the known world.

The existential consequences, that is, the consequences of the resurrection for you, for your life, and for the meaning of your life were immense and undeniable. The resurrection was in itself the message. It was the truth that sets men free!

Think about this with me. What does your life mean? As you sit here this morning, who and what are you? Well the answer to that question depends entirely on what your life is. Are you a cosmic orphan, as our modern secular philosophies of life maintain. Are you nothing but a highly organized piece of matter, a chemical/biological accident, with no connections before or after; here today, gone tomorrow? Are you just a thing; a carbon-based life-form? Is that all you are? Or have you been made in the image of the eternal God who has stamped his nature on you? Is your life, your existence something that continues after you die? It makes all the difference in the world if the answer to that question is “yes”.

We are creatures of a day, a few years, and then we die. And what then? Is there life beyond the grave? This is the great question of human existence because the answer we give to it changes everything. If the answer is “no,” the Bible itself candidly admits that the only thing that makes any sense is to eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. Make the most of this short and little existence that somehow or another you find yourself to have because that’s all there is. But if the answer is “yes” it changes everything. We are here for a reason; our lives are just getting started in this world. Life here is preparation for life in the next world. We are here for a reason. Our life finds it meaning and purpose in the life that will continue after we have died.

Our lives here are short, passing as an arrow flashing through the air. But if life continues then we need to know one thing and one thing only: the way to heaven; how to land safely on that happy shore. And that there is a heaven, that there is such a happy shore, and that men and women can land there when their days on earth are done as they so soon will be: all of that is what the resurrection of Jesus Christ means and must mean.

For it is perfectly obvious that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead as a stunt. He didn’t come out of the tomb Easter Sunday morning long ago for his own sake. Nor, once having risen, did he die again. He rose to eternal life. He did all of that for us. As he died for our sins so he rose again for our eternal life. The resurrection happened in his life so that it could happen in ours! There is nothing like this anywhere else in the world’s religions or philosophies of life. Only here do we find an event in history that defines the meaning of our history.

Jesus didn’t come back as a ghost. That is what his disciples thought in the terrified moments when he first appeared to them. But they soon realized that he was not a ghost. All the witnesses who saw him alive again in the forty days after his resurrection bore testimony that they saw him as a true, living human being. His body still bore the marks of the nails that were driven through his hands and feet when he was crucified. He ate food in their presence; he walked and talked with them. He was a living man!

Nor was this resurrection some form of resuscitation like someone nowadays who has what we call a “near-death experience.” Jesus came back with the same body he had before but his body was in a different condition, fit for everlasting life. Nor was this resurrection reincarnation. He was not a different creature after his resurrection than before. He was the same person, his was the same body, but now fit for immortality.

And all through the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament we are told that what happened to Jesus will happen as well to all who trust in him. He did it for us. He rose from the dead so that we might rise from the dead. He conquered death on our behalf.

I suspect many of you have had an experience – something like what Katrina just described to us – and experience like this. You have felt for a moment or for a time that some intense reality is on the point of breaking through the surface of things and revealing itself to you. There is something more to life, something or someone out there you should know. You have felt a shiver, or have caught on the edge of a thought something that makes you think you are not alone, we are not alone. That there is something very great about your life. You need to know what it is.

Well, the resurrection is the proof of that greater reality. You are living in this world. You will die, not so many years from now. But your life will not be over. What is clear from these reports of the resurrection of Jesus and from the many explanations of it we are given in the Bible is that the resurrection opens to our view the life of heaven, the life of eternity. But that life, the resurrection of Jesus also proves is not for everyone, but is for those who are the followers of the Jesus Christ, those who trust in him, those who understand that their lives must be bound up with his. No one else rose from the dead; no one else made this promise of everlasting life – body and soul together – except he; only Jesus. He’s the one who has the power to give eternal life to our mortal bodies.

What did the resurrection do for the Lords’ followers? Read the Book of Acts and you will find out that though they lived on for years afterward, their lives were utterly different. Simple fisherman now traveled the world telling others about Jesus. Their lives had become bound up with Jesus. As the risen Lord he was with them and they knew that he was with them. They did all manner of exploits in the confidence of his blessing, his help and his power. They lived for him because of all that he had done for them. He was alive for them to love, to worship, and to serve. He was alive to trust in times of need, he was alive to hear their prayers, he was alive to provide for them in time of need. And so he did and so they lived their lives loving him and trusting him and serving him. Christ always makes people better, their lives more important to others.

And that is what Christians do still today. If Jesus Christ rose from the dead and opened the way to eternal life for those who trust in him, then I want to be among those who trust in him, and I want to serve him with my life, If he went to the cross for my sins and rose from the dead for my everlasting life, I want to love him and thank him with my life. You don’t follow Jesus to eternal life without realizing that something extraordinarily great has been done for you. The Apostle Paul said about his coming to faith in Jesus Christ and the life that he lived after, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” In some ways, serving Christ proved a hard life for them, but no matter; because, as Jesus himself once said, what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? How do you lose your soul? You don’t follow Jesus through death to eternal life; that’s how you lose your soul!

Let’s be practical here; let’s get real, as they say. Why am I a Christian? I am a Christian because I am convinced – absolutely convinced, as sure as that I am standing here before you today – that Jesus came out of that tomb on that long ago Sunday, alive and brimming with eternal life. I am a Christian because I know that because he rose from the dead, I will rise from dead. I know that I am going to die. I can’t deny that. My father has died; my sister has died; my brother-in-law has died. I’m going to die. I can do nothing to prevent that.

I’m a minister and so I am in cemeteries a lot. I’ve been in every cemetery in the City of Tacoma and most of the cemeteries round about. One of the things I always say to the group gathered around the casket at the grave before the burial – I think it helps them to cope with their loss – I say that one of the most important things for all of you to realize while you stand here, before you go home and return to your ordinary affairs, is that you are going to be here yourselves before too much longer. You’re going to be lying in a box like this. Your friends and loved ones are going to be in a circle gathered around this hole in the ground to give their last respects to you. And what then?

But I know that I will live after I die. No one else, no other religion, no other philosophy of life can give me that confidence. No one else has ever done it except Jesus of Nazareth. No one else actually died and then came back in immortal, human life except him. That’s why we follow Jesus Christ. No one else ever did it: live a human life before others after having died. No one ever actually conquered death but Jesus and he said that he did that for me and for all those who will trust and love and follow him.

I am a Christian because I want to live. Not for just a few years in this world. I don’t want simply to exist; I want to live! I want to live in happiness and wholeness of life; I want to live in love; I want to live in that way I think every human beings knows full well we are supposed to live. I want to live forever. In fact, everything about my life bears witness to the fact that I was made to live forever. We were not made to exist for a few years and then decompose into nothing. Our entire being cries out, protests against such an idea. Our lives mean something – we know that they do – and that can only be because they are not confined to a few years of this earthly existence, and then nothing more. I want to live and you do too. I’m sure of it. That is why I am a Christian. Jesus Christ and he alone has conquered death and opened the way to eternal life; he alone went before us into death and came out alive, fully and wonderfully alive, on the other side. I’m going to follow him. Who else would I follow knowing that I must die?

But there is more. I am a Christian because I want to live now! I don’t want simply to exist in this world, pass through the ordinary round of days and nights, do the things that all human beings do and then kick the bucket. I want to live. I want to live like the Lord’s disciples lived after he rose from the dead. What lives they lived! What lions they became! They had purpose; they had power; they had love. They lived for others and others loved them for it. They found fellowship with others, the kind of friendship and love that is so rare among human beings was commonplace among the Christians. They shared this high purpose of living for Jesus and of loving him by loving others.

Their lives were not the ordinary round of life lived by so many people today. They were lives full of hope, of goodness, of usefulness to others, of love, of high drama as they served the Lord Jesus in the Devil’s world. I want my life to matter. When it is over I want to know that I lived my life to some important purpose. And all of that is made possible by the resurrection.

The resurrection teaches me that because my life is going somewhere surpassingly wonderful – because death will take me to Jesus and to heaven and to perfect humanity – my life matters now. There is someone and something for me to live for now. These men didn’t see Jesus alive again and heave a sigh of relief and slide back into their former lives, doing nothing more than what they had done before. The resurrection for them was a summons to live for Jesus’ sake and to make him and his salvation known to others. If my life is going to last forever, I want to start living it now the way it ought to be lived. If my life is going to last forever, then it is my calling to make it the best and most important life it can be. And Jesus is alive to help me make it so.

You don’t want to waste your life. You want, I know you want, to live an important life, a valuable life. No one who knows that he or she is going to live forever can be content with the ordinary, uninteresting, and unimportant life that so many people live. Life is too precious for that! Jesus proved that by coming out of the tomb!

A wise man once wrote that “The church is like an arrow sent out into the world to point to the future.” [J. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 328] When was the last time anyone sat you down and talked to you about the future? The reason they don’t is because they don’t know what the future will be. But we Christians do. We don’t know the details. I don’t know what the stock market will do next week or if there will be a war this year in the Middle East or when we are going to die. But we know the main points. I’m going to die and then I’m going to rise, just as Jesus did, to new and everlasting life. And the future explains the present. My life must be the kind of life that fits such a future as I have stretching before me. I need have no fear of death. And because the reason I am going to live forever is that Jesus Christ loved me, died on the cross for my sins, and rose again from the dead, I want to live my life right now for him. As the Apostle Paul once put it, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” He made my death an entrance into life and so I want my life to be lived for him,

That is the way Christians think and the way they live and it is all because Jesus rose from the dead. Only a risen Christ is worth living for. Only the conqueror of death is worth your complete confidence and trust. And only the one who lived, died, and rose again for you is worth your truest love. Give it to him. Give your life to him, your confidence, your assurance, your trust, your love and then watch him give your life back to you so much better than you had it before. If Jesus rose from the dead for you and me – and he did! – then he is worth all that we can give him and much more. Give him your life now and then, in due time, watch him take you through the grave to heaven. What a great day that will be! Since Jesus rose from the dead, I want to follow him!

Introduction to Ecclesiastes No. 2

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Ecclesiastes
referring to: Ecclesiastes 2:1-26

Last time, in introducing the book of Ecclesiastes, we noted that biblical interpreters understand Ecclesiastes in dramatically different ways making it one of the most difficult books of the Bible to understand. On the one hand, in the opinion of many interpreters the book contains the ruminations of a man who, for whatever reason, does not look upon the world from the vantage point of true faith in God. For some it is because he lived in the epoch before Jesus Christ and was understandably plagued by the ignorance of the full gospel that would come only with the appearance of Jesus Christ. For others it was because he was simply a man who had been battered by the disappointments of life into either a very weak faith in God or no faith at all. On the other hand, other interpreters hear in Ecclesiastes nothing but the voice of truth, relentlessly realistic as so much of the Bible, but helpfully practical in reminding us of the limitations of our understanding so long as we live “under the sun.” Some will even say that, setting us free from the need to explain and understand what we cannot explain and cannot understand, Ecclesiastes shows us the path to true happiness in life. While Prof. Tremper Longman argues that there is much in Ecclesiastes that can’t be squared with the teaching of the rest of the Bible, I argued and will argue tonight that in fact virtually everything you find in this book you can find taught elsewhere in the Bible, OT and NT alike.

We considered hebel, the key term in the book, the Hebrew word translated variously as “vanity,” “meaninglessness,” “absurdity,” or “senselessness.” We pointed out that again and again throughout the book the author uses the term to describe life as it so often seems to observers, even men and women of faith. So much in life seems genuinely senseless, and, in a world ordered and controlled by God, genuinely absurd. While there is much in human experience to justify man’s universal standards of morality, the actual life of the world often makes a mockery of those standards. While we naturally expect God to act justly, the one who rules over all in fact permits the grossest forms of injustice and often seems indifferent to the evil that men do. While God has put it in the human heart, and even more in a mother’s heart, passionately to love little children, throughout the ages and still today they die like flies. The whole panoply of human experience drips with irony, the incongruity between the actual result and what was expected. Why do people everywhere act so obviously and with such determination against their own best interests? There is something profoundly ridiculous about human existence. Take for example the fact that no matter how poorly or well a person lives, death overtakes everyone in the same way. And on and on it goes.

But, at the same time, we pointed out how much this same man trusts the Lord, counts on his goodness and even his justice; however long it may be in coming. There is some bracing, hard-hitting realism in Ecclesiastes, to be sure, but there is a sturdy faith as well.

Tonight we take up a characteristic passage of the book, 2:1-6, or, at least characteristic among those passages that have troubled many readers by seeming to fail to describe life as we expect a biblical writer to describe it. Where is heaven in his account? Where is the love of God for his people? Where is the promise of eventual resolution according to the justice of God?

But before we read our text let me draw your attention to another highly interesting and important fact about Ecclesiastes. The personal name of the Lord does not appear in the book. God in Ecclesiastes is Elohim not Yahweh. He is God, not the Lord. He is the creator, not the redeemer. He is the sovereign Judge, not his people’s protector. As we noted last time there is no mention of God’s covenant with Israel, though the man is obviously an Israelite. There is no mention of the exodus, the great act of redemption at the foundation of Israel’s history. This is not, by itself, somehow unbiblical. Biblical writers can talk about life without reference to these things. Esther doesn’t make mention of God at all, by any name. But it is unusual. Proverbs doesn’t mention God’s covenant but it uses God’s covenant name, Yahweh, throughout. On the other hand, when Paul addresses the philosophers in Athens in Acts 17, he likewise refers to a common belief in God that he shared with those Gentiles. He doesn’t mention Jesus by name anywhere in his speech, says nothing about his birth in Bethlehem to a virgin or his death on the cross, and refers, and only at the end of his address, to his resurrection from the dead. Otherwise his argument is about God as creator, as judge, and as lord of time. We have something similar here in Ecclesiastes. The argument being made is not based on the facts of redemption but on the facts of creation and providence, facts that at a certain level would not have been contested even by pagans in the ANE world. Atheism as we know it in the modern west was virtually unknown in that time and place. This man, as Paul in Acts 17, takes it as a given that men know that God is their creator and that he rules over this world. In writing to Israelites especially as he was, he could take a great deal of theological knowledge for granted and he does.

Again, as we have pointed out already, James in the New Testament takes a somewhat similar tack, basing much of his exhortation on the facts of experience rather than the story of redemption. It is wise us for us to remember, especially in our world, that those facts, the facts anyone can see, the facts that every honest person knows, are an unassailable argument for our faith and that that the bleak reality of life in this world is a foundation for our message to a dying world. It is the Christian who should never cease to draw people’s attention to the hopelessness of their situation apart from Christ. Any honest person should be able to see it.

What is more, it is certainly interesting, and striking enough to have been noticed by many commentators, that the part of the Bible to which Ecclesiastes shows the most affinity is the early chapters of Genesis and especially its account of the creation and the fall. In fact, it is not too much to say that Ecclesiastes is something of a commentary on the meaning of the fall as it is reported in Genesis 3. There we read that because of his sin man has been separated from the life-sustaining presence of God (3:22-24), that the earth has been made subject to a curse (3:17-18), that man’s work, before a wonderfully satisfying part of his life, has now become toil (3:19), and that looming over all his life will be the shadow of death (3:19-20). All of these themes reappear with emphasis in Ecclesiastes.

Here too we read of the world standing under judgment (3:17), that death is the inevitable destiny of every human being – indeed, as in Genesis 3 his fate is linked to the fate of animals – (3:19-20), indeed we even have in 3:20 a citation of Genesis 3:19 in the statement that “All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.” We have that phrase – “and the dust returns to the earth” – again in 12:7. In 9:3 we have a remark about the hearts of men being full of evil that is very like what the Lord said in Genesis 6:5-6 in explaining why he was going to destroy mankind with a flood. In fact, we learn a good bit about the comprehensive sinfulness of the human race in Ecclesiastes.

“Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” [7:20]

But even more interesting, again confirming that the Genesis creation/fall narrative lies beneath the reflections of this author,

“See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” [7:29]

In other words, look at the world and what do you see? You see man with a moral nature, a nature he cannot escape and to which he bears witness every moment of every day, whether in his own guilty conscience or in his constant passing judgment on the behavior of others. He has within himself the knowledge of right and wrong, but you find him doing what he knows is wrong: he plans to do wrong, he does wrong again after his sins have risen up and bitten him; he can’t stop doing wrong. What we have in Ecclesiastes is an extended meditation on the creation and on the fall. Indeed, just before that statement about God having made man upright but he is now a sinner we have this:

“And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.”

It is hard to imagine that this author did not have Eve in the Garden in his mind when he wrote those words. So read the book in light of the author’s perspective: the universal experience of life and what can be learned by observation of this life “under the sun.” There is a great deal more to say about everything than Ecclesiastes teaches us, or for that matter than we read in James or in Paul’s address to the Athenians, but what we read in those books and in that passage is not for that reason any less true or any less important. Sometimes a truth needs to be expounded by itself, with all the bark on, and no effort made to soften it by qualifying it with truth from elsewhere in the Word of God.

Text Comment

v.3 All people want to be happy. The Bible often trades on this fact. The Lord Jesus began his Sermon on the Mount with an appeal to that fact. But very few people are always happy and a great many even very good people are often, if not usually, sad about one thing or another and sometimes about a number of things. They seek happiness, no, they crave it; but either do not find it or not much of it, or what they find does not last. Remember, if you are one of those fortunate folk who are usually enjoying the pleasures of life, the Bible speaks not primarily about the exception but the rule. There is a lot of woe in this vale of tears we call our world. What is more, even our pleasures often turn out to be the cause of pain and hardship. It is the paradox of hedonism that the more you seek pleasure and the more you find certain sorts of pleasure, the less pleasure you enjoy. How many souls have been damaged or destroyed by things that ought to be and might have been perfectly wonderful and immensely satisfying: sex, food, wine, medication to eliminate pain, power, fame, success, and all the rest. What is stranger still – senseless, absurd really – is that the evidence that this is true is all around us but we continue to crave what will not make us happy. Isn’t there something absurd about that? Listen to two wise men reflecting on these facts of life. First, Malcolm Muggeridge.

“Human beings, as Pascal points out, are peculiar in that they avidly pursue ends they know will bring them no satisfaction; gorge themselves with food which cannot nourish and with pleasures which cannot please. I am a prime example.” [Chronicles of Wasted Time, 81]

This next voice is that of the great Thomas Boston.

“The world hath all along been a stepdame to me; and wheresoever I would have attempted to nestle in it, there was a thorn of uneasiness laid for me. Man is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed from that quarter.” [Memoirs, 476]

So long as one’s perspective remains that of living “under the sun,” there remains something deeply absurd and confusing about the perfectly obvious delights of human life and their failure to satisfy the needs of human life. This is true even for men and women of faith. Do you understand why even the wisest and holiest of men find their pleasures mocking them in life? I confess I don’t.

v.11 The description of vv. 4-11 certainly seems to be of Solomon though it seems a little strange that he refers to all those who came before him in Jerusalem when there were but two kings before him. Whether the author of the book is Solomon remains a question. He may or may have not been the author. The reference to him may be a literary device on the author’s part. As we said last time, the rest of the book does not read as if written by Solomon and there are some statements that don’t seem to fit Solomon at all. Perhaps he is simply citing Solomon as an example of his thesis. But perhaps it is Solomon who wrote the book after all.

v.14 The word the ESV rightly translates as “event” occurs seven times in Ecclesiastes. The associated verb occurs three more times. The NIV had “fate,” but that implies something this word does not. It is neutral and has no sinister nuance. [Eaton, 69] It simply means “what happens” or “something that happens.” According to Ecclesiastes there are a great many things that “happen” in the world, many of them bad. In the book the word usually refers to the event of death. From all appearances that is the nature of death; it just happens!

v.16 He does not deny that it is better to be wise than a fool. But from man’s perspective “under the sun” wisdom doesn’t solve the problem of death. Death and disappearance from the memory of others happens as well to the wise as it does to the foolish. It doesn’t seem as if that should be so – it might seem, certainly we wish there would be a great difference between the death of the wise and the death of the foolish – but usually death treats the both pretty much the same. If wisdom is so much better, why don’t worldly people recognize that? And the answer is that they can’t see the difference clearly enough because so much in life happens as well to one as to the other. Fools get rich and the wise suffer troubles and they both die from the same accidents, illnesses, and old age. There are some Reformed authors, Meredith Kline for example, who have argued that there is no evidence at all, at least empirical evidence, no evidence we can see, to suggest that God blesses the righteous more than the wicked. To believe that he does is an act of faith pure and simple because there isn’t any evidence for that conclusion. I don’t believe that to be the case at all, but the fact remains that there isn’t so much of that evidence that the unbelieving world is forced to admit as it were, against its better judgment, that Christians do much better in life than unbelievers do.

You have a contrary perspective in Proverbs 10: “The memory of the righteous will be a blessing, but the name of the wicked will not.” But both perspectives are true and obviously true. That is so typical of biblical teaching, as we have learned through the years: something is true in one sense, it is not true in another. In one sense this; in another sense that.

v.23 One of the most remarkable features of the life of man, the demonstration of his god-like nature, is his remarkable capacity for accomplishment. When man puts his mind to it and works hard he can do the most amazing things. It has always been this way. He can build the most wonderful things (from the great pyramids to modern skyscrapers), discover the most astonishing things (from how to write a language to the inner workings of the atom), and make the most beautiful things (from the hanging gardens of Babylon to the Taj Mahal to Michelangelo’s Pieta). From Homer’s epic poetry to the Roman aqueducts; from the astronomy of the ancients to the artistry of the renaissance painters; from steam engines to airplanes to quantum mechanics and space travel, man is a marvel. But after all that achievement the world is effectively the same mess it has always been, great achievement is typically squandered, and personal achievement in particular is hardly any guarantee that the next generation will profit as we might have expected. Rehoboam managed to lose virtually all that his father Solomon acquired in the first few years of his reign. The best educated population in Europe elected Adolph Hitler and the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of mankind is, as we speak, coming apart morally and spiritually, seemingly unable to deal successfully with its mounting problems. Pastor Krulish showed me an article this past week from the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of a great many articles on this theme that are being written these days, regarding the state of young manhood in the United States, the disgust with men that is increasingly being voiced by the women of our country, and the rootlessness, foolishness, and laziness of the rising generation of American males. The men of my generation are finding, as Qohelet warned them long ago, that they may well have to leave what they spent their lives to acquire to someone who neither knows how to work nor appreciates the satisfaction of real accomplishment or how to appreciate the accomplishment of those who went before him.

v.26 We hardly expect the turn that the final verses of the chapter represent. This doesn’t sound like great misfortune (v. 21), despair (v. 20), or the hatred of life (v. 17) of which the author had been speaking. Now it is the pleasure of good food and drink, the satisfaction of work, wisdom, knowledge, and even joy, and all of it from God. We said that there is much about the Fall in Ecclesiastes; but there is much about the goodness of creation as well.

What is more, v. 26 seems to be virtually a contradiction of v. 21. In the latter verse what a sinner acquires in life, God will see is eventually given to someone who is godly. In the former the godly’s achievements are left behind to someone who is unlikely to appreciate it. There will be much more of this stark dialectic – this juxtaposition of opposites – in Ecclesiastes. We find a great deal of it elsewhere in the Bible as you know. Think, for example, of the two proverbs side by side in Proverbs 26:4-5 that tell us first not to answer a fool and then to answer him. Or think of Paul in Romans 6 and 7: first the triumphant declaration that in Christ man is no longer a slave of sin but has been set free to live to God; but soon after the sad confession that Paul himself remains a bond-slave of sin, unable to loose his chains.

As we will read in the opening verses of chapter 3, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to mourn and a time to dance.” Truer words were never spoken!

Another way of describing this good man’s literary style, with such rapid changes of tone and subject, is this.

“[Qohelet’s] natural habitat, so to speak, is among the wise men who teach us to use our eyes as well as our ears to learn the ways of God and man. Some of his sayings could have come straight out of Proverbs, and he has a way of pausing to steady us and give us our bearings by this homely wisdom, at intervals between our more unsettling excursions with him.

“His probing is so relentless that he can easily be mistaken for a skeptic or a pessimist…but there is more to him than can be captured in a phrase… So much more, in fact, that at one time there were scholars ready to suggest that two, or three, or even as many as nine different minds had been at work on the book. Such are its cross-currents and swift changes, but they can all be seen as the insights of a single mind, approaching the facts of life and death from a variety of angles.” [Kidner, A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance, 13-14]

So far Ecclesiastes chapter two. I want to reflect with you on the way the author of Ecclesiastes uses words. I think some of the misunderstanding of the book originates here. This man was a Hebrew and so he was a product of ancient near eastern culture. The thought in the way people thought in those days and spoke and wrote in ways characteristic of those times. These people spoke and acted in extremes. This explains, for example, why there is so much of what we call hyperbole in the Bible. It was not enough for the Hebrew to say that the Lord will save vast multitudes of people or that it was a large army or even a very large army that Israel faced in a battle. No the Lord will save a multitude in number or the army the Israelites faced was in number the same as the grains of sand on the seashore and the stars in the heavens.

Well in matters of emotion middle easterners were – as they are today! – given to very strong displays of emotion. Few of us tear our clothes or walk about with ashes on our head or wail in public but the ancients found it very natural to do all those things. And their language is the same. It is full of extremes. We are likely to call this feature of Hebrew style (actually ANE style) hyperbole. But to refer to these extreme ways of saying things as simply a figure of speech does not do it justice. Hyperbole is our perspective: they are exaggerating for effect, we think . But what was their perspective, these men who wrote Holy Scripture? Here is one scholar commenting on this feature of Hebrew writing.

“Hyperbole or overstatement is a figure of speech common to all languages. But among the Semitic peoples its frequent use arises out of a habitual cast of mind, which I have called absoluteness – a tendency to think in extremes without qualification, in black and white without intervening shades of gray.” [G.B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, 110] Elsewhere this same scholar says, “Hebrews inherited superlatives by choice.” [121]

T.E. Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia, observed this as he lived among the Arab peoples of the middle east.

“Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colors, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour.” [Cited by Caird from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ch. 3]

We are familiar with some classic illustrations of this way of thinking and writing, such as the use of “love” and “hate” to describe greater or lesser affection, as when the Lord told us we would have to hate our parents and our own lives if we wanted to be his disciples, or the prayers for terrible judgments to be brought against the king’s enemies that we find in the imprecatory psalms: “let the teeth be broken in their mouths,” “drag them off like sheep to be butchered” (Jer. 12:3), and so on. Expressions of sadness and of joy are typically cast in such extreme forms in the Bible. It isn’t enough for the psalm writer to say that he was sad. Rather we have “My tears have been my food day and night.” [42:3] “My eye wastes away because of grief.” [6:7] There are virtually on every page of the Bible innumerable examples of this extravagant form of speech. In a similar way, David doesn’t simply have to deal with opposition from his enemies. He says that “…men trample upon me...my enemies trample upon me all day long.” [56:1-2]

Well, we have a lot of this in the passage we have read. It isn’t enough for the writer to say in v. 2 that laughter can be out of place in a world like ours. No, “it is mad” and “it is useless.” It is not only that work can be difficult; it caused him to “hate his toil” and to “give up his heart to despair.” It is not that he found himself disappointed with many things about life; no, “he hated his life.”

We need to be careful not to read this language without regard to Hebrew and Semitic style. Think, for example, of Jeremiah expressing his despair over the situation he found himself in as a prophet of judgment to an unwilling and spiritually disinterested people.

“Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him glad, saying, ‘A child is born to you – a son!’ May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave…” [20:14-17]

Whew! That’s a bit much, we think. Jeremiah said he hated his life, but he certainly didn’t all the time. We know that. He knew of the Lord’s goodness to him and often speaks of it in his great book. Paul reminds us in his great 8th chapter of Romans that the whole creation groans waiting for the day of the Lord. But, of course, for both unbelievers and for the people of God there is much happiness along the way, as Paul himself often says. In Revelation 6:10 – Revelation is a very Hebrew form of writing, every book in the Bible except Luke-Acts is written by a Jew with this Semitic background – we read of saints in heaven crying out to the Lord, “How long, Sovereign Lord, until your judge the inhabitants of the world and avenge our blood?” It makes it sound as if they are still unhappy in heaven! You get the point. We are not to press this language beyond its fair meaning. It is typical Hebrew absoluteness or overstatement and when juxtaposed with much more positive statements we recognize that hatred and despair are hardly the whole picture. Indeed, even taken by themselves hatred and despair are descriptions that would be put in more qualified language if Ecclesiastes were being written in the modern West instead of the ancient near east.

But then we also have what is called parataxis, this setting side by side of different thoughts with no effort to harmonize them or relate the one to the other, another typical feature of Hebrew thinking and writing. So after all this despair we have the happy thoughts of vv. 24, where instead of hating our toil we are to find enjoyment in it, as we do in good food and drink, as we do in living wisely, in the knowledge of God, and the joy of salvation. Where is the connection between the two these two dramatically different outlooks on life in chapter 2? You won’t find it in Ecclesiastes. They are both true; that is all. So where does that leave us? Let me personalize chapter 2.

I have lived a very happy life. The Lord has, I fear, reflecting on the insight of Helen Roseveare I mentioned in last Sunday morning’s sermon – you remember her saying that the Lord entrusts great suffering to his most faithful disciples and to those he wishes to bless most greatly and to use most fruitfully – I say, I fear the Lord has not trusted me with as much as he might have if I had greater faith in him and a greater love for him. I’ve have lived without great suffering and all in all a very pleasant and comfortable life.

I have enjoyed a wonderfully happy marriage that has been the source of great pleasure to me now for many years. I have greatly enjoyed being the father of my children. In a similar way, I have found deep satisfaction in my work as the pastor of this church – this congregation has through the years been very good to me, very generous, very kind – and I have found immense satisfaction in my work as a preacher of the Word of God. I have been given the opportunities and resources with which to study the Word at a deeper level, to study with gifted and learned men in other parts of the world, and to accumulate a sizeable library. These are privileges, I know very well, of which other ministers can only dream. It has been my privilege to see a great deal of the world and to enjoy its beautiful sights, sounds, and tastes. I have met wonderful people from virtually everywhere. I have enjoyed the friendship of many men and women who have greatly enriched my life. My life as a churchman has, in comparison to many others, been fulfilling and largely without acrimony or ill-will. I have lived in a country that has provided a very comfortable existence for me and my family. I’ve never experienced war first hand, never come anywhere near famine or pestilence. In thirty-four years of ministry here I have never missed a single Sunday service because of ill-health. The Lord gave me a healthy body. It was my inheritance to grow up in a godly and happy home and from the beginning of my life I have lived under the blessing of my heavenly Father, have known Christ as my savior, have always had in my heart the hope of everlasting life and have always known that my life had high purpose and great dignity because I am a child of God and a servant of the King of Kings. Truthfully I can say, I must say,

“The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.” [Ps. 16:6]

I certainly know the truth of 2:24-26, that more cheerful final paragraph, very well! I resonate with this wise man’s more positive observations about life as we have them throughout his book.

But, let me tell you, there have been times without number in my life when I have been so ready to leave this world behind me and to escape from its frustrations, disappointments, its heartbreak, and its confusions that had an angel offered me an immediate exit I would have been sorely tempted to take it. This life under the sun can be a bitch! You know it and I know it.

Sometimes for me it has been the sadness of others, people here or people elsewhere; sadness that I have shared and that has weighed me down and made me feel that life was no pleasure at all. When my loved ones and especially my children are sad my life becomes very sad as well. Sometimes it has been some genuine injustice that has frustrated me, made me angry, and depressed me about life. I have also experienced the desolation of the death of loved ones and friends: my brother-in-law at 42 years of age, my sister at 49, and my first and second grandchildren before they were born, who now lie in a tiny grave in a cemetery in Minneapolis.

It has been sometimes for me real bitterness to observe a world in which evil is called good, in which the most abject foolishness is called wisdom, and in which the devil seems to have his way in making life difficult especially for those who wish to live godly lives and serve the Lord. I have seen plenty of the debilitating effects of sin and the closer I am to those who lives are blighted by sin the uglier this world has often seemed to me. But, for me, most of all, it is my own moral and spiritual failure, my inexcusable incompetence as a Christian man, in all the various roles of my life, my great failures of omission and commission, disgustingly repeated through the years of my life. It is all the utterly stupid, immoral, ridiculous things I have said or done, the shame I felt in the aftermath – and no burden is heavier than shame – the innumerable ways in which I knew myself to have acted badly. I know all too well what it is to think one’s toil a waste, one’s laughter high irony given everything else that is true of my life and the life of others; I know very well what it is even to hate my life.

I have loved this life and I have hated it. I have enjoyed it and found it disgusting. I have wanted more of it and no more of it. That, brothers and sisters, is my testimony and I’m sure it is yours as well, especially those of you who are older. It is wisdom to understand this to be the nature of believing life; it is wisdom to face it, to anticipate it, and not to be undone by it: not to rejoice as if the misery were not at hand, and not to despair as if God’s good things were not ours in abundance. That is the great lesson of this book and it is a very important lesson to learn. When it is not learned Christians either become bitter or dishonest with themselves and one another or they live inauthentic lives, as if life were only rosy or only miserable frustration. Life is both in this wonderful world that our Father made for us but which now lies under his curse. It must be and will be both. Accept it and take the one with the other as you must. Enjoy what can be enjoyed, and do not deny the heartbreak when it comes as it will. Jesus Christ was the man of sorrows acquainted with grief and yet he was accused of being a drunk and a glutton. So He obviously knew how to enjoy a good meal and a good glass of wine. We are to follow in his footsteps, you and I, in that way too!

The Secret of the Kingdom (Palm Sunday)

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Luke
referring to: Luke 8:1-15

It is Palm Sunday and I thought of interrupting our series of sermons on Luke to provide a sermon apropos this particular Sunday of the year – which is what I usually do – but then I realized that the text before us was perfectly suited for a Palm Sunday sermon. So we continue on in Luke.

Text Comment

v.1 We must never forget that first and foremost Jesus was a preacher of the good news of the kingdom of God. Because he wanted everyone to hear he went to them, moving from place to place, preaching both in the larger towns and the smaller villages because he didn’t want to miss anyone! [Bock, i, 712]

v.3 Mary Magdalene was so called because she came from Magdala, a town in Galilee. She had been demon possessed and was, no doubt, deeply devoted to Jesus for the deliverance he had granted her from what must have been a miserable existence. The Christian imagination has thought of her as a particularly beautiful woman who had been a prostitute, but there is no evidence for any of that.

Joanna is mentioned again as one of the women present in the garden on Easter Sunday morning. Otherwise we know little about her. The fact that her husband was an official in Herod’s court has led to the perfectly plausible speculation that Joanna may have become first a disciple of John the Baptist and through John and after his execution transferred her loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ. Others have suggested this Chuza might have been the official whose son Jesus healed, of which healing we read in John 4:46-53, in which case there was still more reason for Joanna to serve the Lord. Of Susanna we know nothing more than her name. Some of these women had means and contributed to the expenses of the Lord’s itinerant ministry. Everyone in the group had to eat, perhaps occasionally to spend a night in an inn, and these women helped defray those costs. It is interesting, by the way, that no woman is ever identified in the Gospels as an enemy of Jesus. Those are all men. You can do with that fact what you will.

v.4 It is generally accepted in Gospels scholarship that this parable, given pride of place in the three synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – represents something of a turning point in the Lord’s ministry. He was gathering huge crowds to be sure; there was immense enthusiasm, but he was looking for more than superficial interest and so at this point he intensified his use of parables, short little stories that yielded their meaning only to those who were prepared to think carefully about what they had heard and to seek and find the truth. The parables served to separate the sincere seeker from the superficial enthusiast. [Morris, 170] Interestingly, the word “crowds” is found much more commonly in this earlier part of Luke and much less often in Luke’s account of the Lord’s later ministry. Later the Lord concentrated his attention on his real disciples: those who were actually committed to him and to his message. The crowds were interested but only superficially so. [Bock, i, 723]

By the way, his use of parables, little stories that have left their mark on the consciousness of the world ever since, was a mark of his unique genius. There is no other teaching quite like this from the period.

v.8 The Palestinian sower sowed first and plowed afterwards. It is this fact that explains why seed might be wasted. It was thrown over the stubble that remained from last year’s harvest and would then be plowed into the field. The path may be simply the path over the field that the villagers had worn since the time of the last harvest. So, before the plowing began birds could eat the seed, or it could fall on shallow soil that wouldn’t hold moisture and wouldn’t be known to be so until the plow struck the underlying limestone, or the seed might fall upon soil where seeds of thorns were also present which would grow and later choke the life out of the grain. The description Jesus gives here is very true to agricultural life and every one of his hearers would have known that it was. [cf. Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, 11-12]

v.10 “Secrets” or “mysteries” in the New Testament are truths that we would never have discovered for ourselves but which God has revealed. For example, in Paul, such a mystery is the epoch of the Gentiles: the rejection of the Jews and the gathering of an almost universally Gentile church from all over the world in the weeks and month and years and decades and centuries that would follow Pentecost. No one was expecting that. But there is a different secret here. We’ll return to that momentarily.

Parables both reveal and conceal truth. To the one with ears to hear, to whom Jesus made reference in v. 8, they explain fabulously important things in wonderfully memorable ways; but to others they are simply cute stories. That was not only the result of the parables Jesus taught; it was their purpose: to reveal to some, to conceal from others. “Parables are a mine of information to those who are in earnest, but they are a judgment on the casual and careless.” [Morris, 171] And so it is predictable that the Lord’s disciples should be the ones to ask what the parable meant. They were curious in the right way; they wanted to know what he was teaching them because they intended to believe whatever truth he revealed. The rest were not interested in the Word of God; they were fascinated by Jesus’ power, but not his message. Indifference to the Gospel brings consequences and one of the worst and weightiest consequence is that the message may not be brought to you again in a form in which you can understand it!

v.15 We have here a definition of true faith: hearing the word, holding fast to it in the heart, and bearing fruit from it, no matter the obstacles the devil, the flesh, and the world may place in the way.

Think back to that first Palm Sunday. You can picture the scene: the excited disciples ranged around the Lord and walking beside him as he rode down the Mount of Olives on the donkey colt along the road that leads to the gate of the city. The city and the magnificent temple fill their eyes as they draw nearer. It had been only days since the Lord had raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, a miracle that set the whole city and its environs astir. And to make matters even more auspicious, it was almost Passover and the population of Jerusalem had swelled with pilgrims and was perhaps three times its normal size. There was excitement in the air. Everyone had heard of Jesus of Nazareth, many knew people who had been healed by him. The Jews had been longing for the promised Messiah to arrive and for a great many people, what they had heard of Jesus of Nazareth was enough to make them think he might be the one! A man who had divine power at his beck and call, a prophet who had done the very same things Elijah and Elisha had done long before: feeding great multitudes with a little bit of food and, even more, raising the dead. What was not to like about Jesus as a candidate for the Messiah. God had visited his people again; the long night was nearly over! That’s what thousands of people had begun to believe.

No wonder then the growing excitement as news of the Lord’s arrival began to spread throughout the city and as the road, already crowded with Passover pilgrims making their way to Jerusalem who could travel now that the Sabbath was past, was further jammed with people – men, women, and children – coming out of city to hail the coming king. The enthusiasm was contagious. We know from our recent experience how a little demonstration can suddenly become a very big demonstration. A great multitude was swept up in the prospect that great events were unfolding that would change the fortunes of Israel forever.

And for the ordinary Jew there was no doubt about what the Messiah’s coming would mean. The Jews were then a small, insignificant people, living under the boot of Roman power, ruled locally by a combination of foreign kings and Roman governors, their glorious past as the kingdom of David and Solomon long forgotten. No one else thought of them as the people of God. No one thought that the Jews were of any consequence whatsoever except the Jews. The Messiah would change all that. He would lead the Jews in conquest of their enemies, restore the greatness of Israel, and force the whole world to reckon with the fact that they were indeed the favored people of the one true and living God. No wonder the “Hosannas” of the crowd, no wonder the palm branches laid before him as he rode toward the city gate. He was going to restore their pride and their place in the world. At the most patriotic time of year, a great leader had suddenly appeared and the people were welcoming their new king!

No one, I mean no one – no one in the crowd, no one among the Lord’s truest and most sincere and loyal disciples – had the vaguest idea of what would actually come to pass over the next five days.

And that takes us back to our text and the parable of the sower or, as it is sometimes called, the parable of the soils. I have heard, over the years of my life, a number of powerful and searching sermons on this famous text. I remember when I was in college there was a cassette tape – many of you younger folk don’t know what a cassette tape is, but at one time it was a really neat thing – I say such a cassette tape was circulating among the students of my college containing a sermon on the parable of the sower by a prominent reformed Baptist pastor, Al Martin. It is a parable that preaches itself in many ways, all the more as the text includes an authoritative interpretation from the Lord himself. What is more, what the parable describes we who have eyes to see can ourselves see happening every day. Truer words were never spoken that this charming but searching parable. The four groups of people identified in it we can identify as easily in our day as Jesus identified them in his. In fact those of us who have been in this church for any length of time have met all these people here through the years.

Usually the point of sermons on this parable is self-examination, the preacher pressing us to consider how we are hearing the Word of God, or which of the four situations best describes ourselves. Are we people who heard the word, as if it were seed fallen on the hardened path, and in whose hearts the Word of God never took root? It was picked up, carried away. Or are we better described as the shallow soil where the rock comes so near to the surface and the ground dries so quickly after the rain that the seed does not get enough water to germinate and become a health plant. We seem to have believed for a short time, but very quickly lost our interest. Or are we the soil secretly inhabited by last year’s thorn bushes which, once the growing season has begun in interest, will choke the wheat? That is, are we going to think ourselves Christians and be taken to be Christians by others but only until true faith in Christ begins to pinch our bank account, or until we face some real disappointment or temptation, or until it becomes clear that if we are to follow Christ we are going to have to give up some favorite pleasure? Or are we the true Christians likened here to soil in which the Word takes root and bears a great harvest? Sermons on this parable are usually a summons not to be found in the first three categories but to be in the last.

I know people, you probably do as well, who fit to a “T” each of these descriptions. I could tell you their stories. You see so much practical truth here: that faith is known by its fruit, that the devil cares for nothing so much as that the first motions of faith in a human soul be quashed, that there are a number who begin but who do not continue in the Christian faith, that the cares of life, money and pleasure are great enemies of real faith in Christ, and so on. A preacher could preach a hundred sermons on this text and not exhaust its applications.

There was a time some years ago when it became the consensus in biblical scholarship that a parable should be understood to have but one point, one lesson. Everything else in the parable was taken to be simply local color. Thankfully, that position has been largely abandoned. The Lord taught a number of truths at the same time in his parables. So let me assure you that the sermons you have heard on the parable, as the sermons I have heard, the sermons that emphasize the different ways people receive the word about Christ and salvation and how only the faith that bears fruit is true and living faith are entirely appropriate. These are important lessons and we need to learn them and remember them.

But having said that, it is clear that distinguishing the various responses to the gospel in this homely way is not the main point of the Lord’s famous parable. That is not the great application of the parable as the Lord Jesus taught it to his disciples and to the crowds. We are alerted to that fact by his statement in v. 10:

“To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables…”

In other words, there is a secret, a mystery about the kingdom of God that is revealed in this parable, something we now know but which people didn’t know back then; nobody anticipated the kingdom of God being like this; nobody had the faintest idea that the kingdom of God would come in this way. Afterwards it became perfectly obvious, but at the time, it was a secret, pure and simple.

Take, for example, another of those secrets or mysteries of the kingdom of God: the epoch of the Gentiles. Nobody who read the OT expected that the Messiah would come twice and that between his comings the good news would be preached throughout the world for thousands of years, the Gentiles would become the lion’s share of the people of God, the Jews would be grafted out of the olive tree for a time, and that only after the times of the Gentiles had been fulfilled would Jesus come again and bring history to its consummation. No one was expecting the Messiah to come twice. No one was expecting that to be how the kingdom of God would come. They expected the Messiah to come, to conquer the enemies of Israel, to restore the kingdom of David to its rightful place in the world, and to bring in the golden age of peace. Even those – however few of them there were – who understood that a sacrifice had to be made for sin and that the Messiah would also be the suffering servant prophesied by Isaiah, I say even they did not expect two comings with thousands of years between. We take it all for granted now, but it was a complete secret beforehand.

And so too this secret of the kingdom of God disclosed in the parable of the sower and the soils. We are so familiar with the words that we never feel the jolt to the gut that those opening words must have been to the Lord’s more thoughtful disciples when he explained to them later that in the parable he was talking about the kingdom of God. In other words he was describing to them how the kingdom of God would advance in the world. And obviously he was saying something surprising, something unexpected, something that was up to this time a secret. Why, otherwise, would Jesus imagine that this parable actually hid its meaning from the crowds? Things aren’t as simple as they seem. The kingdom of God is like a farmer sowing his seed in the field.

What?! The kingdom of God is like a farmer sowing seed, and some of it is eaten by the birds and some falls in this soil or that and only some of the seed falls in fertile ground and grows up to bear fruit? That isn’t the way anyone thought the kingdom of God would come, would advance, or would grow. Far from it!

The kingdom of God was supposed to come in a rush. The king was to arrive, he was to gather a great army and lead Israel in conquest of her enemies. The kingdom of God was supposed to advance behind a great leader astride a white charger at the head of a great host. The kingdom of God was to come with lightning and thunder and earthquake. Think of how the kingdom of God came at the time of the exodus? The great plagues brought mighty Egypt to her knees, the parted waters of the Sea of Reeds gave Israel her highway to freedom and then, coming back together, destroyed the vaunted army of Pharaoh, the cloud and pillar of fire led Israel through the wilderness, the trumpets of God brought down the walls of Jericho, and on and on. Now that is how the kingdom of God advances! And, understandably, they were expecting that again. They thought of Messiah’s coming in the same way we think of his second coming, as a sudden catastrophe for the enemies of God and as a triumphal procession for the people of God.

Throughout the Gospels we find and will continue to find people unable or unwilling to credit Jesus as the Messiah precisely because he did not fit the profile of the Messiah they had in their minds. His kingdom didn’t come like the Messiah’s kingdom was supposed to come. The last thing they imagined the Messiah to be like was a farmer! There was, we will learn, much that confused and even discouraged his disciples. The people tried to make them their king and he refused. He came among his own people and did the most remarkable things for them and the result was deepening opposition on the part of the religious leadership. The crowds showed real enthusiasm for him but were ready to turn on him at a moment’s notice.

Jesus was that farmer who went out to sow his seed! And then he came to Jerusalem that Palm Sunday and finally all seemed to them to have come clear. He was the great king after all and the people were recognizing him for whom and what he was. That was a happy day! But then five days later he was dead, humiliated on the cross, his movement crushed and come to nothing. How could that have happened to the Messiah? They were devastated. As often as the Lord had told them that he was going to Jerusalem to die, as clearly as Isaiah had foretold the life and death of the Man of Sorrows for the sins of his people, this was a secret to them, a mystery that their minds had never penetrated. And then came the resurrection and all the fog began to clear.

But still the truth of the parable of the sower and the soils had to be faced. True enough, in those heady days after Pentecost it seemed as if the gospel were sweeping all before it, but as the new church grew so did the opposition of the unbelieving old church. Persecution increased with every new expansion. The apostles were imprisoned, and then one was executed, Stephen was stoned to death even before James. And then came the sad realization that just as there had been a Judas among the Twelve, so there would be among the company of those who claimed to believe in Jesus. Ananias and Sapphira and Simon Magus are mentioned in the early chapters of Acts, but no doubt there were many others. Just as the Lord had foretold in his parable some would hear the word but never really respond; others would receive it with some enthusiasm but very soon lose interest, and others would not only confess Jesus Christ as Lord but live for him for some time only to have their commitment choked out of them by the pleasures and temptations of this world. As the work of the Spirit advanced in human hearts, the Devil came right behind to ruin what he could.

But, as the Lord promised there were also multitudes in whose hearts the seed of the Word of God was sown, grew, and bore much fruit. The church grew by the thousands and, when a champion was needed, the Lord would supply an Apostle Paul. And so it has continued ever since. No one at the time of the Lord’s ministry, no one at the time of his resurrection, no one at the time of his ascension, no one on the day of Pentecost imagined that we would be here, two thousand years later, with a church that was only partly believing, that in many ways was thoroughly compromised by worldliness and unbelief. This was a secret. No one then thought that after the Messiah came the kingdom would pass through long years of setback and stagnation, then to be renewed again, only to slide once more into stillness, before being roused again.

And, of course, this was not the only secret. After all, the idea of seed growing up and bearing fruit suggests a slower progress, the passage of time, all the ups and downs of a growing season, of greater and lesser harvests, and the rest. You know that in Matthew and Mark we read that the Lord had said that among those who bore fruit some would bear 30 fold, some 60 fold, and some a hundred fold. Who among those who saw the Lord’s miracles, saw him alive again after he was put to death on the cross, and felt the power of the Spirit on Pentecost then imagined the Christian life as it has actually been lived all these years since?

You know very well the fits and the starts of the ordinary Christian life. How much sin remains, how many stumbles, how much moral failure, how weak our faith so often is, how it seems we take a step backward for every forward step we manage. This is not what we would have predicted. When the kingdom comes to a human heart, the reign and rule of God Almighty, and transforms a human life, we expect that heart to be transformed root and branch; we expect great things, we expect consistent, steady progress in holiness, we expect great usefulness in the lives of others.

And, indeed, that is to a degree what we find – we do bear fruit and the world must give its own testimony to the hundred fold – how different this world is and the life of mankind because of all the followers of Jesus serving him in it. But the hundred fold is still the way of the farmer sowing seed, the seed growing over time, weeks and months passing with almost nothing seeming to have happened, it’s all under the ground, and then the first indications of growth and then the months as the plant grows higher and higher and then as the fruit begins to appear. Divine grace has not often made leaps through these thousands of years; it has gone the way of the farmer and the seasons and the slow growth of a plant.

What we are to see, brothers and sisters, is that the kingdom of God came and grew exactly as the Lord Jesus said it would, even though that was utterly the reverse of everyone’s expectation at the time. The kingdom is growing; much fruit is being added to the harvest, though in this way of the farmer in his field. Did you notice those last two words: “and patience.”

Why patience? Because still today we want the kingdom of God to come faster, to come more powerfully, more obviously; we want it to sweep its enemies from the field. But it is not to be until Jesus comes again; it was never to be. Our Savior said that it would not be so. Why? I confess I do not know. I can see so many good reasons for it being otherwise, but God’s ways are far above our ways and past finding out. We are to take comfort from the fact that the kingdom of God is growing in the world, has grown mightily over these past millennia, but as our Savior said always in the way of a farmer in the field. The Lord said it would be so and it is ours to see that it has been so and to live with patience. Everything has happened as he said it would: from the cross, to the empty tomb, to Pentecost, to the gospel’s spread to the four corners of the earth. There is nothing more unlikely in human history than that the Christian message born in Jerusalem and believed at the outset by a few hundred Jews should now be the most common faith in the world today. But everywhere it has come to be so like a farmer sowing his seed. It should be easy for us to believe that the Lord will come again when everything else he has told us, and told us ahead of time, about his kingdom has proved to be exactly the case. It is, therefore, the easiest thing to believe that he will come again as he said he would when the gospel has been preached to everyone and the times of the Gentiles have been fulfilled. He has been right about everything; even about the most utterly unexpected things.

When will the kingdom come in that other way, the sudden, final, world-shattering way? We do not know. That it will come in that way we are absolutely sure. So we are to be patient. Bear your fruit in patience in the sure and certain hope that the final harvest is drawing near.

Introduction to Ecclesiastes

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Ecclesiastes
referring to: Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

There are few books of the Bible that are still today actually understood in diametrically different ways. I mean, there are only a few books that some interpret to be about one thing and others about something altogether different. That is, interpreters don’t even agree about the subject of the book. But two such books – perhaps, besides Revelation, the only two such books in the Bible – are found in the “wisdom” section of the Old Testament: Ecclesiastes and The Song of Songs. Having finished Proverbs, I thought I should give some attention to the other principal volumes that belong to the wisdom literature of the ancient Scriptures: Ecclesiastes, The Song of Songs, and Job. I won’t be preaching through the books, but considering their argument as a whole and dipping into the specifics of their teaching. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and the Song of Songs are all very obviously books of wisdom – books that train us in the skill of living rightly and well – and, as we shall see, they overlap each other’s teaching in significant ways. But two of them in particular pose long-standing problems of interpretation.
I don’t suppose any of us today would be tempted to agree with Origen’s third century suggestion that Proverbs was for children, Ecclesiastes for adults, and the Song for the elderly, but it is an exercise in the history of interpretation of those books to consider how a man as well versed in the Scripture as Origen was ever came up with such an idea. [J.N.D. Kelly, Jerome, 150] Obviously he saw the books in a very different way than we see them today. The fact that some Jewish rabbis and theologians of the New Testament era entertained doubts about the rightful place of both Ecclesiastes and the Song in the canon of Holy Scripture certainly proves that the teaching of these books has been a matter of confusion and controversy for a long time. What are they about? How they are to be understood? What is their purpose in the Bible? What good are we to get from them? Very different answers to those questions have been given through the ages and are given still today. Even in our Presbyterian Church in America today you will find utterly different sermons preached on these books by our ministers.
As wisdom books – the Hebrew noun “wisdom” is found some eighteen times in the twelve chapters of Ecclesiastes – it would seem obvious that they were intended to provide life-instruction for the people of God. More and more of believing biblical scholarship accepts that conclusion, so the question becomes: what instruction? As you know, both Ecclesiastes and The Song of Songs have through the Christian ages been understood allegorically. That is, one must find the true meaning of the sentences we read in those books lurking beneath the surface not on the surface. That meaning was invariably found to concern Jesus Christ and the future Christian church. Jerome’s 4th century commentary on Ecclesiastes and George Burrowes 19th century commentary on the Song are both commentaries of this type. I think it is fair to say that both of them are worse than useless as guides to understanding the author’s actual meaning, but both of them are beautiful essays on Christian faith and life because they import into these books the teaching of the New Testament about Jesus and the Christian life. The fact that the biblical books themselves aren’t about Jesus in that way was lost on those good men but, our knowledge of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible and of these books in particular having advanced as it has, we can no longer read them in such a way. Both books are wisdom; not prophecy or law or history; nor are they essays about the way of salvation. They are wisdom: instruction in living life according to the will of God. They concern the “how-to” of living in the same way Proverbs does. But each has its own particular subject or theme; each has to do with how to live life in a particular respect and they are both very important and very valuable for that reason. We can find the same message that we find in Ecclesiastes or Job or The Song of Songs elsewhere in the Bible, but here, in these books, that message gets its own day in the sun and is expounded in a particularly comprehensive, beautiful, powerful, thought provoking, and persuasive way.
We begin then with Ecclesiastes. As I said this book is understood in very different ways, so different that it is hard to believe that commentators are looking at the same text. And it remains so today.
One modern scholar I read thinks it’s obvious that the book was written in the 3rd or 2nd century B.C. by “a pessimistic nationalist…whose belief in a personal God had grown dim.” [Kelly, Jerome, 151] Another describes the author as an embittered cynic, “a selfish and callous old man of the world who found at the end nothing but a dire disillusionment.” [W.H. Elliot in Packer, Knowing God, 104] As I read Ecclesiastes I can’t imagine anyone thinking of the book in that way. The author isn’t pessimistic, he isn’t a nationalist with disappointed hopes – that has absolutely nothing to do with the argument of the book – and there is nothing in the book that justifies a date so late in Israel’s history.
The influential notes of the Schofield Reference Bible, notes that shaped the way two generations of believers thought about the Word of God, explained Ecclesiastes as an account of the best man can do in reasoning about life apart from the gospel. The author of the book knows there is a God and that man must face divine judgment, but his conclusion based on those facts is legal – “fear God and keep the commandments – and, according to the notes of the Schofield Reference Bible, Ecclesiastes “does not anticipate the gospel.” In other words, the book teaches us where we would be left if we didn’t know Jesus Christ; its message is something like the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, “If Christ be not raised, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die.” It is, in other words, the dark backdrop against which light of later revelation shines the more brightly. One immediate problem with that interpretation is that Proverbs also teaches us to fear God and keep the commandments and, for that matter, so does the NT. Are those books also legal? Would we say of Proverbs, James, or 2 Corinthians, that its teaching is “apart from the Gospel”? Would we say that any of those books was written in a legal frame of mind and apart from the gospel? Of course not.
But there are many versions of that interpretation of the book, viz. that it gives us an account of a man trying to find meaning in life and failing because he doesn’t yet know the good news. In such a view the speaker, styled as the “Teacher” in the NIV and the “Preacher” in the ESV, and often referred to in the scholarship of Ecclesiastes as Qohelet, which is the Hebrew word lying beneath both translations, is a skeptic. He can find no answers to the great questions of life. Of course, as you know, many have identified Qohelet with King Solomon, mostly because of the fact that Qohelet identifies himself as “the son of David, king in Jerusalem,” because Solomon had a reputation for being very wise, and because the first section of the book can be read as virtually an autobiography of Solomon. But it is never said in the book that the Preacher was Solomon and many evangelical scholars have thought it unlikely, even such a staunch defender of the inerrancy of the Bible as the late E.J. Young of Westminster Seminary.
Why, for example, it is asked would Solomon use a pseudonym? If he were Solomon, why didn’t he say so? We have his proverbs identified with his name in the book of Proverbs. The first part of the book, through 2:26, indeed could easily be taken as an account of Solomon’s life, but in the rest of the book there is nothing more like that and later the author even speaks of the throne as if he were an outsider (8:2-6). 2:12 may suggest that the author is using Solomon’s life as an example of his thesis, for, as he says, what more can Solomon’s successor do than the great king himself did? Verse 12 of chapter 1 also does not seem to fit Solomon because there was never a time when he had been king but was no longer. [Young in Dillard and Longman, An Introduction to the Old Testament, 250] Taken in this way the conclusion of the book indicates that Solomon or whoever Qohelet was had recovered his footing and finished a believer again. His period of skepticism had at last been overcome by his return to faith. If so, then we cannot take most of the book as true or orthodox teaching. It is an account of what not to believe and do, not of true biblical wisdom. Most of the book on this view trades in the viewpoint of a person who either has no faith or has lost it for a time. To believe the teaching we get in Ecclesiastes would be like trying to learn our theology from Job’s comforters who obviously didn’t know what they were talking about either since at the end of the book the Lord rebukes them for what they said to Job! Taken this way Ecclesiastes is a lengthy specimen of mostly bad theology. It isn’t wisdom; it is un-wisdom!
A new form of this interpretation – viz. that Qohelet was a skeptic who didn’t know what he was talking about – has been provided by Tremper Longman, until recently professor of OT at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and who now holds an endowed chair in the biblical studies department at Westmont College in California. Longman is a formidable OT scholar and has written a number of important books on the teaching of the OT and on the wisdom literature of the OT. I found his commentary on the book of Proverbs very valuable as I preached on that book. Longman points out that the structure of the book has three parts: a short prologue (1:1-11, a long monologue by the Preacher (1:12-12:8), and a brief epilogue (12:8-14). The prologue and epilogue are differentiated from the body of the book by the fact that the Preacher is there and only there represented in the third person. Everywhere else Qohelet speaks in the first person.
Longman proposes that we see the book as a “framed autobiography” – a frame on the outside, the autobiography in the inside – with Qohelet’s comments on God, man, and human life being evaluated by the author of the book, the unnamed speaker in the prologue and epilogue, the narrator who is the only source of positive teaching in the book. So, according to this interpretation of Ecclesiastes as well we are not to believe what we read in the body of the book but are rather to accept the critique of Qohelet’s outlook that we are given in the frame, that is the beginning and especially the end of the book. So, Longman suggests, in 12:8 the narrator is giving us a final summary of the Preacher’s teaching: “Meaningless, Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” He then compliments the Preacher as having been a wise man who worked hard at his task trying to teach others about life. But he offers faint praise when he says of the preacher that “he searched to find just the right words.” The fact is, he didn’t find the right words and the narrator counsels us to be wary of speculative, skeptical teaching. Rather, we are to stick with what we know, and what we know is what is said in the last two verses of the book, what Longman calls “the gospel in a nutshell.” [Intro to OT, 253-254] Again, in this interpretation, most of the book is false teaching, not true, something to be rejected not accepted, like the teaching of Job’s friends.
That is certainly not the way I take the book, or the way many others take the book, and in my view the objections to Longman’s approach are insurmountable. It is not the view of the book that our Prof. Jack Collins takes whose judgments of such matters I regard as virtually infallible – we’ll find that it’s not completely infallible when we come to The Song of Songs, but it is almost infallible – it is not the view of the book you find in J.I. Packer’s masterpiece, Knowing God (104-107), and it is not the view you find in a number of new studies of the book. But, as you see, one’s general view of the argument of the book is the main issue. You can’t interpret any particular statement in the book until you know the overall purpose and nature of the book. You can’t take any statement as teaching until you know whether you are supposed to consider the statement true or false, orthodox teaching or false teaching! As we make our way through Ecclesiastes are we reading true and helpful observations about life that will help us to live skillfully, or are we reading the mistaken impressions of a foolish and unbelieving man?
Longman’s basic argument for his view of Ecclesiastes is that there is so much in the book that cannot be harmonized with the teaching of the rest of the OT. He finds in the book a radical skepticism and pessimism that is incompatible with OT faith. To be sure, I suppose those of us who have read the book with some care and attention have wondered if that were not the case. What are we to do with “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” Or, as the NIV has it, “Meaningless, meaningless; all is meaningless.” Can a man or woman of faith say that? Don’t we believe that everything has meaning in God’s world? And what are we to do with many statements in the book that seem to reflect something considerably less than the joy of our salvation? Think, for example, of all the proverbs we read when we were considering the book of Proverbs in which the fate of the fool and the wise person were contrasted. The fool would get this punishment and the wise would get this reward. Again and again we read such statements in Proverbs. But then consider Ecclesiastes 2:15-17:
“Then I said in my heart, ‘What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?’ And I said in my heart that this also is vanity. For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool! So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and striving after wind.”
Wow! That’s depressing. Is there no purpose to our lives, is there no reward in trusting the Lord. That doesn’t sound like Proverbs! It is not so difficult to understand where Prof. Longman is coming from. He says that if we read what this man actually says we will find him someone who has lost touch with the gospel. And so the narrator shows us his depressing worldview and then corrects it for us at the end.
But there are huge problems with this take on the book. First and foremost the lion’s share of the Qohelet’s teaching is not only perfectly true but obviously true. The wise man and the fool both die and they are both forgotten. How many people in the world still remember your great-grandfather by name? Whether he was a fool or righteous, how many are there who have any remembrance whatsoever that he was ever even in the world? That is a fact we must come to terms with. Righteous people are often poor, wicked people often rich. Is that not so? Is there not a great deal in this life that defies our explanation even as believers in God? Of course there is. Is it not also true, as first Pete Seeger and then The Byrds reminded us in the sixties, with their musical versions of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, that “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven”? Ought we not, as we are warned to do in 5:1-7, “guard our steps when we go into the house of God,” “pay what we vow,” and “fear God”? And who has read the account of old age in the chapter 12 and not appreciated the candor of that description of the trials of later life and its moral: viz. “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth…”? That is, make the most of your powers while you still have them!
More than this, throughout the book Qohelet often expresses a sturdy, even beautiful faith in God, in both God’s justice and goodness, and celebrates the blessing that God grants to those who trust in him. Think of texts such as these of which there are a great many in Ecclesiastes:

“A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment.” [2:24-25]
“I perceive that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him.” [3:14]
“Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. Though a sinner does evil a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God…but it will not be well with the wicked…because he does not fear God.” [8:11-13]
“I said in my heart, ‘God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work.’” [3:17]
“In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other…” [7:14]

None of that sounds like skepticism or unbelief; it sounds rather like a robust and biblically realistic faith in God!
As one PCA OT professor points out, to find Longman’s interpretation of Ecclesiastes persuasive you must accept that the Preacher’s beautiful orthodox statements – and the book is full of them – are only so many slips in his reasoning, not the heartfelt confessions of faith they seem to be. We must also accept that all of Qohelet’s confusion and misunderstanding of life was thought worthy of massive citation by some frame narrator. [Dan Fredericks, JETS 43/2 (June 2000) 322.] After all, we get chapter after chapter of what Longman says is heresy, and, even according to his understanding of the epilogue, just two verses of correction at the end. And if those verses are in fact a corrective to the message of the whole book, they are a very tepid and understated corrective. They are hardly a ringing contradiction of all that has been said so far. In fact, few readers of the Bible have ever thought of those verses in such terms, as the undoing of everything that had been said so far. Reading them over again this evening I confess that I simply don’t hear in those verses what Prof. Longman hears in them.
But if the book is orthodox and if it teaches us true wisdom, if what we read is true and so to be believed and obeyed by us, what are we to do with “vanity” and “meaninglessness.” This is obviously the key thought of the book. It opens with it in 1:2 and closes with it in 12:8. It is a classic instance of inclusio, the repetition of a thought at the beginning and end of a piece of writing by which the theme of the entire piece – all the material in between – is identified. But what is the author saying when he says that everything is vanity or meaningless?
Two insights will help us here. The Hebrew word translated “vanity” or “meaningless” is hebel (הבל ). It is obviously the key term of the book, not only because of its place in the inclusio, but because it occurs some 32 times in the 12 chapters. Its basic meaning is “vapor” or “breath” but it is obviously being used figuratively in Ecclesiastes. Different translations have been proposed: vanity is retained in the ESV from the KJV; the NIV has “meaningless,” and scholars have suggested “absurd” or “senseless.” But that still doesn’t answer the question: what does this author mean by his use of the term? Well consider what he actually says and then says over and over again in different ways. In Ecclesiastes the term seems to be used to mean one of two things: either that something is vacuous or insubstantial like a breath (elsewhere in the OT idols are described as hebel)or senseless, that is, beyond figuring out. In the first instance we have a text such as this one:
“I also thought, ‘As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: as one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is hebel.” That is man’s life is but a breath. Here today; gone tomorrow. The Bible says that more than once.

But much more often the term hebel seems to refer to senselessness or meaninglessness in the sense of the impenetrable mystery of life. That is things are meaningless not objectively, but subjectively. They may have a meaning, but we cannot discover what that meaning is. Our perspective is too limited. We do not see what God sees.

Consider these texts and this theme that runs throughout the book:

“What does the worker gain from his toil? [i.e. this is another of those meaningless statements] I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” [3:9-11]
“So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him? [3:22]
“Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things – which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found.” [7:27]
“When times are good be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore, a man cannot discover anything about his future. In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these…” [8:14-15]
There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. … When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man’s labor on earth…then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.” [8:14-17]
“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.” [11:5]

That is what Qohelet means primarily by “vanity” or “absurdity” or “meaninglessness” or “senselessness.” Ecclesiastes is virtually a commentary on two texts from Isaiah.

“Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God and Savior of Israel.” [45:15]
“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” [55:9]

What we know about life and about the meaning of things is, in fact, very little. What we do not know is immense. This is a caution hardly unique to Ecclesiastes. In fact a number of writers have pointed out the connection between, the similarities between Ecclesiastes and the argument of the Apostle Paul in Romans 8 and then in Romans 9-11. If you remember Paul says the same thing in a different way at the end of Romans 11:
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out.”
Paul had been talking about the deep mysteries of life and the mysteries of the history of redemption and of salvation in the world in these chapters of Romans 8-11, and that was his conclusion too: God’s ways are far beyond, high above our ways and we can’t figure them out. None of us knows what God is doing in the world except in the most general way.
Ecclesiastes is making the same point in greater detail and with respect to more life issues. At this point and at that everything seems so senseless: a few years back the little boy of a devout Christian family I know was accidently backed over and killed by his father in the driveway of his own home! We heard a few weeks ago of the teen-aged daughter of one of our RUF campus ministers being killed in a traffic accident on a snowy street in Calgary and not so long before that of an MTW missionary killed in an accident as he rode his motorbike in Haiti (or was it some other Caribbean country?). Young people as well as old find they have cancer. A righteous man dies young of a heart attack leaving a grieving widow and young children behind to pick up the pieces, but a genuinely evil man lives a long life doing harm to others for many years. Fire or famine wipes out the hard-won gains of responsible people and some lay-about wins the lottery. And on and on it goes. There is a great deal in life that seems utterly senseless. We think to ourselves a hundred times: If we were God, we wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. Surely you have thought this. Much as life can be indescribably wonderful as Ecclesiastes reminds us it can be, so it can be equally as dark, forbidding, hopeless, and crushing. Remember C.S. Lewis’ comment in his Letters:
“Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.”
So how are we to consider all of this from the vantage point of faith? That is the lesson of Ecclesiastes and an important lesson it is!
This insight is confirmed, I think, by the repetition throughout the book of the phrase “under the sun.” You have it first in 1:3:
“What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?”
This key phrase occurs thirty times in the book! It identifies the perspective of the author as earth-bound, temporal, and limited to the present. He’s looking at the way things appear from the perspective of time not eternity, this world not the world to come. As we saw was the case in the book of Proverbs, there is here too virtually no reference in the book to God’s covenant with Israel, to the Law of God (apart from 12:13), to the forgiveness of sins, or to communion with God. This author, as do the authors of Proverbs, takes his standpoint – as Paul did in Acts 17 speaking to the philosophers in Athens – not on the truths of divine revelation but on the universals of human experience.
Christian believers are not supposed to be Pollyannas, the sort of Norman Vincent Peale/Robert Schuller style positive-thinking types. Still less are they to be people who can have no true sympathy for others because they don’t face in any seriously honest way the disappointments, tragedies, and dark mysteries of human life. The Bible everywhere teaches us to be realists – it is the Bible that calls this world a “vale of tears” – and reminds us in a hundred ways how little we understand of what God is doing and the meaning of what is happening in the world. You will hear evangelicals tell you all the time what God is doing. It is utterly unwittingly and unintentional on their part, I know that, but it comes very near to blasphemy because they don’t have the foggiest idea what God is doing. They don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow or the next day and they don’t know why what happened today happened as it did. Ecclesiastes is a summons to take off our rose-colored glasses and take a close hard look at what we see when we observe this world. We will elaborate the message of the book as we consider it over the next several Lord’s Day evenings. But we are going to say that there is nothing in Ecclesiastes that you cannot find elsewhere in the teaching of the Bible and there is nothing in the book of Ecclesiastes that you haven’t thought yourself if you are old enough to have had some measure of the experiences of human life. The fact that this teaching is given in the stark, unqualified manner characteristic of Hebrew thinking and writing, is, I think, what confuses us; not the teaching itself, which is true and obviously true.
Tonight let me finish this introduction to Ecclesiastes with two citations that together provide something of a summary of the book. They come from a study of Ecclesiastes in the earlier part of the twentieth century by the British scholar G. Stafford Wright.
“Events happen to us from time to time, but God has given us a longing to know the eternity of things, the whole scheme [That’s the meaning of the statement in chapter 3 that God has put eternity in our hearts, we can’t help but want to know the scheme of things.]; but, try as we will, we cannot see it, though we can declare by faith that each event plays its part in the beauty of the plan.”
“The world is not weighted in our favor [at least so far as we can see things from the perspective of “under the sun”]. But the same things which break the man of the world, can make the Christian, if he takes them from the hand of God. Go looking for the key that will unify the whole of life. You must look for it; God has made you like that, sore travail though it be. But you will not find it in the world; you will not find it in life; in revelation you will find the outskirts of God’s ways; in Christ your fingertips touch the key, but no one has closed his fingers on it yet. No philosophy of life can satisfy if it leaves out Christ. Yet even the finest Christian philosophy must [admit] itself baffled. But do not despair. There is a life to be lived day by day. And in the succession of apparently unrelated events God may be served and God may be glorified. And in this daily service of God, we may find pleasure, because we are fulfilling the purpose for which God made us. That was Koheleth’s philosophy of life. Was he wrong? [“The Interpretation of Ecclesiastes,” in Classical Evangelical Essays in OT Interpretation, 141, 149-150]
It is a crucial part of true biblical wisdom to know how little you know; it was the great lesson that Job had learn: to live your life modestly, without assuming that you understand more than you do, without pretending to an understanding you do not have, and cheerfully to embrace your limitations as one of God’s creatures, a mere human being, a tiny piece of a very great puzzle. Ecclesiastes will help you do that.

The Religion of Love

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Luke
referring to: Luke 7:36-50

Text Comment

v.36 We know from elsewhere in the Gospels that not all the Pharisees were overtly hostile to the Lord. In fact to the very end there would be a few who would be among his followers. At this point some were still curious if not positively drawn to him on account of his teaching and his miracles. And the Lord was always willing to respond to invitations from those who might be thought his enemies.

v.37 As you might imagine, there has been through the ages all manner of speculation about this woman’s identity. Many have thought she was Mary Magdalene. But the text doesn’t say and we don’t know. To call such a woman “a sinner” probably means she was a prostitute. And the fact that Simon knew who she was – his was not a large town after all – indicates that she had, as we say, “a reputation.” She had obviously had some previous contact with Jesus – whether personal contact or simply as a member of the crowds that heard his teaching – and she obviously felt she owed some great debt to him. Had he healed her or one of her loved ones or had his teaching liberated her and set her conscience free? As we will see, forgiveness of sins seems to have been for her the great gift he had given her.

Don’t think of “ointment” as some application with healing properties. This was liquid perfume, contained in a globe fitted with a long neck that was broken off when the contents were needed. [Morris, 166]

v.38 As you remember, formal meals were taken with the host and guests reclining on low couches, leaning on the left arm, with the head toward the table and the body stretched out away from it. Sandals were removed beforehand, so the Lord’s feet were accessible to her.

The description of her behavior is meant to indicate that she was utterly oblivious to decorum or to anyone else in the room. Jewish women did not unbind their hair in public, much less use it as a towel in front of other people. Kissing feet was not unheard of, but it was hardly common.

v.39 Now we know why the Pharisee was so interested in having Jesus in his home. He thought he might be a prophet of God, which, we have learned earlier in the chapter (7:16), is what many were saying he was. After all, he had done what Elijah and Elisha had done: raised the dead! And he preached like a prophet with the authority of a prophet. But according to Simon’s lights, a true prophet would not receive the ministrations of this woman as Jesus was receiving them. He certainly didn’t get that idea from the Bible; Elijah and Elisha were always ministering to outsiders and to the sort of people Israelites in their day as well would have considered unwashed. This is a subtle but powerful indication of how different the worldview of the Pharisee was from the worldview actually taught in the Word of God.

v.40 Jesus knew his man. He had only to watch the man’s face to know what he was thinking.

v.41 Remember, the denarius was the daily wage of a laborer.

v.42 Get the point: the reason the debt was cancelled was that the debtor couldn’t pay. He was facing prison for non-payment and the lender simply cancelled the debt. Lenders don’t usually do that! Unless they’ve loaned money to Greece and don’t have any choice!

v.43 Simon’s “I suppose” is somewhat grudging. Some commentators think that Simon’s reply indicates that he realizes he has been caught in the Lord’s trap. But the Lord simply gives him credit for the right answer. [Bock, i, 700]

v.46 There is some debate as to whether Jesus is actually calling Simon rude for his failure to do such things for his guest or, as seems to me much more likely, these were things that might have been done but were by no means expected to be done for a guest. In which case the contrast is between Simon’s ordinary courtesy in inviting Jesus to dinner and the actions of this woman who went far beyond the norm to demonstrate her devotion to Jesus.

v.47 Now it takes some sophistication to get the Lord’s point right. He doesn’t minimize her sins – “they are many” he says – but says that they are forgiven. He doesn’t mean that they are forgiven because she loved much, but, following the point of his little parable, her love demonstrates that she knows her many sins had been forgiven. Her great debt had been cancelled. She was loving much because she had been forgiven much. The perfect tense of the verb “forgiven” also indicates that she was already in a state of forgiveness. It is a point of Greek grammar, but an uncontroversial one.

Then, again, “he who is forgiven little…” should not be pressed to mean that there are people so righteous that there is little for which they need forgiveness. It belongs to that class of texts, actually a quite large class of texts in the Gospels, in which the Lord distinguishes between two classes of people according to their own conception of themselves. Just as Simon was among those who didn’t need a physician – that is, didn’t think he needed a physician –, just as he was among the 99 sheep that weren’t lost – that is, didn’t think himself lost – so Simon didn’t imagine he needed much in the way of forgiveness either.

v.48 Again, the perfect tense of the Greek verb translated “are forgiven” again indicates that the woman is not receiving forgiveness for the first time, but has it already. That the state of forgiveness began for at some point in the past and continues into the present is the idea.

v.49 As was usually the case, so here the incident is drawn to a close with people marveling, not over the woman but over Jesus and wondering: “Who is this man?” If you remember his claiming authority to forgive sins brought accusations of blasphemy from the Pharisees at the time of the healing of the paralyzed man in chapter 5. Here, he doesn’t explicitly say that he forgave the woman’s sins, but she obviously thought that he was the source of her blessing.

v.50 The verb “has saved” is again a perfect: it is not at this moment that she was saved; she was saved before. He is reassuring her.

None of the Gospel writers, even Luke, who was an associate of the Apostle Paul, puts the message of the forgiveness of sins in the very same terms we find in Paul’s letters. But to say that this woman was forgiven or saved by her faith and to say that she was justified by faith, as Paul might have put it, is to say the same thing with different words and any reader of the Bible soon learns that the same thing can be said, and perhaps needs to be said, in many different ways. “Faith,” of course, means confidence in another; trust in or reliance upon another. The woman’s faith was her confidence that Jesus could forgive her debt when she could not discharge it herself.

The beautiful text we have read fairly bristles with great truth and fabulously important implications. It confirms that faith in Jesus Christ is the way of salvation. It beautifully reminds us that no human being can sin himself or herself past the forgiveness of God, if only he or she will believe. It reminds us of how difficult it is for people to accept that they really are great sinners , that they too have a debt that they cannot pay and are in desperate need of a great forgiveness. The whole great story of human life – its tragedy and the hope of its salvation – is found here. But, surely, for most of us, as we read this famous passage, the greatest impression – drawn to our attention by the Lord’s parable – is made by this dear woman’s love and devotion to the Lord.

She is here very obviously a role model. We are to see ourselves in her; she serves here as an exemplar of the true disciple of Jesus Christ. When the Lord compliments a person, draws attention to what she has done, and then tells us at the end of the paragraph that she is saved, we should want to be like that person. Obviously she is modeling for us first and foremost the love and the devotion that ought to mark the life of anyone who has received forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ.

It is impossible to know for sure, of course, but careful students of the Gospels have long noticed that this passage in Luke – which is not found in the other Gospels – comes after the account of the question sent to Jesus by John the Baptist and the Lord’s remarks about John. That same account – John’s question and the Lord’s reply – is found in Matthew 11. But Matthew 11 ends with that grandest of all gospel invitations:

“Come to me all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” [Matt. 11:28-29]

Had this woman been present when Jesus spoke those words and had it been in hearing them that her heart had been drawn to the savior and her heart had found peace? If there is anything to be said for the chronological arrangement we find in Matthew and Luke, dinner at Simon’s house might have followed soon after the Lord had uttered that gospel invitation. But if it were not those words, it was words like them that she heard Jesus say and that had brought light and peace and love into her heart. She knew she was a sinner, everybody else did too, and now she knew God had forgiven her. Her life had begun again. She faced the day an utterly new person with an utterly different future. And, understandably, her heart was full!

She simply had to tell the Lord what had happened to her and how much he now meant to her and how grateful she was. So, throwing caution to the wind, she entered a rich man’s house uninvited – we would say today that she crashed the party – and perhaps lost herself among the servants until she could make her way to the dinner table and find Jesus. We wonder how she knew he was to be there that night. Had she overheard someone talking about the soiree that night at Simon’s home? Perhaps the better heeled members of the town were all going. At any rate, she learned that Jesus would be there and determined to take advantage of the opportunity.

And boy did she! She walked into that dining room, found Jesus among the guests, and began to weep – perhaps the depth of her emotion at the sight of the Lord caught even her by surprise – and, forgetting that this was not what decent women do, began wiping her tears from his feet with her hair. And while the guests looked on in various states of horror and disgust at this unseemly display of emotion, she poured the perfume she had brought for the purpose over the Lord’s feet. See her there, still weeping, her head down, tending to the Lord’s feet, surrounded by strangers she must have known despised her – perhaps by an embarrassed former customer or two – and see Simon looking upon the scene appalled.

In his reply to Simon, as he often did in such situations, the Lord exposed the timeless truth revealed in what was happening. Simon had utterly missed the point. He didn’t understand sin, especially the full measure of his own sin; he didn’t understand God’s grace and mercy; he didn’t understand who Jesus was or what he had come to do; and the proof of it was that his affections, his emotions were untouched. What Simon lacked was what this woman had in spades: the love and devotion that is the inevitable fruit of the grace of God in a sinner’s heart and life.

When Jesus said that this woman’s sins were forgiven for she loved much, he was as much as saying that Simon’s sins were not forgiven because he hadn’t loved Jesus at all. The reason we know Simon had no faith is that he had no love. As Paul would later write, “faith works through love.” If he had faith, he would have love, and having love he would have seen himself in that woman that night at his house. He would have understood exactly what she was doing, he would have run to her and thanked her for coming without an invitation, and he would have loved her for the devotion she was showing to the Savior. He would have introduced her to his friends as his spiritual sister and asked her to give her testimony in hopes that others at his table that night might be drawn to Jesus as he and she had been.

The Christian faith, in other words, is not a message that can be understood and accepted with nonchalance, composure, or indifference. The human condition is high tragedy – sin is ugly and its penalty is eternal death and judgment –, God’s intervention to save us is the most thrilling adventure in the history of the world, and lying behind it all is a mighty love willing to endure terrible suffering for our sakes. Someone who gets this, someone who knows himself or herself the beneficiary of all of this, someone who knows himself or herself a sinner before God and knows that his great debt has been cancelled because he couldn’t pay it, I say such people know how great, how marvelous, how heart-breaking, how stunning all of this is. For such people the forgiveness of their sins is almost beyond belief.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!

It was not so for Simon. Salvation was a calculation, something predictable. You did what you had to do and, to be honest, even for a Pharisee, it wasn’t that much. There was no savior in Pharisaism. There was no mighty love, no divine sacrifice, no terrible self-giving on God’s part. And so they didn’t greet Jesus with tears and with expensive gifts somehow, in some way to express their gratitude.

In the Bible and throughout church history believers are found to be people whose faith in God and Christ was certainly a matter of knowledge, conviction, and obedience, but it was also and always as well a deep inner experience, tender feeling, and powerful emotion. As Augustine famously put it, they came to God; Christians have always come to God, as this woman did not on their feet but upon their affections.

Whenever the Christian faith has been revived in an individual heart or in the whole church this emotional element has always been a prominent feature of that renewal. Why? Because love is involved! A great love has brought us salvation and with a great love in our hearts we have received it. And love as you know from your own experience is always mixed up together with other strong emotions; it never comes by itself. There is always joy, always peace, always a certain kind of sorrow as well, a very pure kind of sorrow.

From Augustine to Bernard of Clairvaux, from Francis of Assisi to Teresa of Avila, from Luther and Calvin to John Owen and John Bunyan, from Wesley and Whitefield to Jonathan Edwards this woman’s heartbreaking love has been the mark of real Christian faith and the deeper the love the stronger the faith. You will never understand a life like that of St. Francis, for example, if you don’t understand that Francis loved Jesus Christ. He really loved him. He thought of himself as a troubadour, a singer of love songs, and the love of which he sang was his love for Christ. That love, like this woman’s love for Jesus, defined his life and made it what it was. The greatness of his life stemmed from the greatness of his love.

Don’t take this for granted, brothers and sisters. There is nothing like this in the other religions and philosophies of life. God’s love and our love for him in return do not play great roles in Islam, they are not key features of Hinduism or Buddhism, and, of course, more secular philosophies of life have no such divine love to offer and cannot produce such love in the hearts of their adherents. Without the triune God of loving persons, without the cross – the supreme self-giving of God in love to needy human beings – without a personal and immediate love on God’s part for individual human lives, there can be no such love as lies at the center of salvation in our Christian faith. There is no “For God so loved the world…” anywhere else in the world. Nor is there any “we love him because he first loved us.” No other religious system knows the love that the Christian Scriptures affirm: God’s love has been poured into our hearts…For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly (Rom. 5:5-6). Only in the Word of God is faith in God and love for God the same thing! And only in Holy Scripture is love, deep and heart-felt love for God, the primary motivation for obedience to God’s commandments.

I had occasion recently to think again of Helen Roseveare. Perhaps you remember something about her. I have mentioned her to you before, though it was years ago now and I didn’t know then as much as I know now. She is still alive; Someone from the 8:15 service came up to me after the service with her “smart” phone and showed me her list of contacts. She scrolled down to Helen Rosevearse. She is now in her upper 80s and still sharp and quite spry. In fact, last year she gave an extensive interview to a Scottish pastor by the name of David Meredith. If you have time this Sunday afternoon, google that interview and listen to it. You will be glad that you did, I promise you. Dr. Roseveare has through the years spoken three times at the famous Urbana Missions Conference sponsored by Inter-Varsity and has written a number of books including her autobiography.

Helen grew up in England as a determined and disciplined girl. She was a teenager during the Second World War and then after the war a medical student at Cambridge University. A church-going girl, like so many of her peers she had no living faith in Christ when she went to university; but she found Christ there. Through the witness of Christian girls, fellow students, she heard that Jesus Christ had died for her sins and, as she puts it still today, she “fell in love with Jesus.” Medical school at Cambridge was no easy road for a young woman in those days. There were twenty-five women among the two-hundred-fifty med students and both the lecturers and many of the male students patronized the girls and did their best to make them feel foolish or out of place. Of the twenty-five, thirteen eventually withdrew from the course. Helen remembers sitting in lectures among the Christian fellows as a kind of defense mechanism.

She was so enamored of Jesus after her conversion that rather than do what most freshly-minted doctors do – viz. accumulate experience in a fellowship or hospital assignment – she went directly to missionary training school. She wanted to tell others about Christ and use her medical training to create the opportunity. But she was something of a pistol. A Cambridge grad, she was more self-assured than many of her fellow missionary candidates, tended to speak her mind in ways that seemed arrogant to others, didn’t take criticism too well, and almost washed out of the program.

But, upon graduation, she headed to what was then called the Belgian Congo under World Evangelistic Crusade as a missionary doctor-evangelist. She built first one hospital and then, transferred to another place, built another. Both were the first hospitals to be built in their respective areas. With little in the way of modern equipment, she practiced medicine, performed minor surgeries, and delivered thousands of babies. She was the only doctor for an enormous region and handled everything from obstetrics to geriatrics. She remained single through it all, saying that once she had met the Lord he seemed enough for her and that had she had a family she would not have been able to devote herself to her work as she did. Like many western missionaries, she learned to love the people among whom she lived and eventually to respect their abilities, though the latter, she confesses to her shame, came only with time. Throughout those years of productive labor, she was also working on her autobiography, what she hoped would be the great testament of her life.

In the early and mid-1960s the Congo was embroiled in a deadly civil war, referred to nowadays as the Congo Crisis – one of those proxy wars fought between the West and the Soviet Union – a brutal conflict that would eventually cost some 100,000 lives. Eventually the rebels came to her hospital. She and her assistants were beaten – three of her teeth knocked out by the blow of a rubber truncheon – and then she was kept a captive for five months. She was frequently beaten, repeatedly raped, and the only copy of her journal, her autobiography-to-be, was burned before her eyes.

She says that what became clear to her during those dark and terrifying times was that the Lord, who loved her, was trusting her. She realized that, loving her as he did, he could have removed her from the conflict, spared her the indignity, the terror, the physical pain, the psychological trauma of physical and sexual assault, the despair of seeing so much of what she had created reduced to ruins. But as she had trusted him, he was now trusting her to endure something very great for his sake. She was being granted the privilege of sharing in his sufferings, which is simply another way of saying sharing in his love for her and for others. She says now to people who are undergoing great trials, who have sorrows that are very hard to bear, “The Lord must trust you greatly to entrust you with the privilege of suffering for his sake, of sharing in his sufferings.”

How does a woman come through an experience of devastating trauma like that so healthy, so spiritually whole, cheerful and happy, and still in a condition to be a great blessing to countless others for the rest of her life? Love is what saved her. Her confidence in Christ’s great love for her and her love for Jesus in return. Love is more powerful than anything in life; it will enable you to do things you would never imagine yourself able to do. Love is more pure and purifying than anything in life, and God’s pure love, poured into our hearts, literally makes anything possible and anything endurable. There was a great love in this woman’s life. She had felt it first as a college student and then gave her life over to that love and the one from whom it came. Still today she talks about how much Jesus loved her and loves her and how she loves him and still today the question she asks of others is always this: “Do you love Jesus?” She says that she was overwhelmed by his love. It sent her to Africa and to great suffering, that love did, just as it sent this woman in Luke 7 to Simon’s house to risk the contempt of others if only she might show the Lord Jesus how much she loved him.

This is our Christian faith, brothers and sisters: so beautiful, so noble, so pure in its deep emotion and deathless devotion. Sometimes the Bible tells us what it means to believe in Jesus. Sometimes it shows us, as it does here. It means to love the Lord with a great love because he has cancelled the debt we could not pay.

The Apostle Paul didn’t include narratives like these in his letters. He was more of the theologian in his explanation of the faith. But it was Paul who said at the end of one of his great letters:

“Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.”

Which is the same thing as saying, if you are a Christian, you will love the Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love. That must be, surely, that is true of all of us! Give yourselves over to that great love with which you have been loved and let your love for him in return control your daily life. If you do, I guarantee you that you will do remarkable things. The greater your love for him, the more the Lord will entrust you with opportunities to serve him. Then you will become, I promise you, you will become more and more always what you are now when you are at your very best!

Jesus Christ in Proverbs

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Proverbs
referring to: Proverbs 8:1-23

I am going to read the text and see if you can identify which verse as one of the most controversial verses in the history of the Christian church.

Tonight we come to the end of our series of sermons in the Book of Proverbs. We began with an account of the book in general and a study of “wisdom” in the Bible, which we defined as the skill of living well, the practical know-how that enables a person to live a godly life in a world of sin and temptation, the capacity to bring to life the ideal of biblical godliness. Then we considered a number of the principal subjects of the book: guarding the heart, the principle of obedience and reward, the sexual life, marriage, handling money, governing the tongue, the importance of hard work, the managing of controversy, the raising of children, how to make decisions, dealing with pride and with anger, and the valiant woman. Last time we picked up some loose ends (matters mentioned in the book but not treated at length): the treatment of animals, the keeping of secrets, and the importance of cultivating joy in our daily life.

We noted, at the beginning of our study, that for some in our circles today, the Book of Proverbs has fallen on hard times, at least so far as the subject of Christian preaching is concerned, in some large part because the focus of the book is on our behavior, not on the redeeming work of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is something of a modern movement in both the Reformed church and some segments of evangelicalism that has come to abominate the preaching of ethics, of right behavior. The fear is that any concentration on our behavior inevitably undermines the believer’s reliance on the work of Christ. Attention to our behavior, or so it is thought, must undermine our conviction that our salvation rests alone on Christ’s behavior, his work, his accomplishment. The point is put in various ways, to be sure, but however put the result is that many Christians today are getting much less preaching instructing them in how they are to live their lives day by day than they used to. One of your elders recently drew my attention to a sermon of Charles Spurgeon, the great London preacher of the 19th century, on the good Samaritan in Luke 15. It is a typically fine Spurgeon sermon. But it caught Mr. Pfefferle’s attention and mine for the way in which it begins.

“Our text is the whole story of the Samaritan, but as that is very long [Spurgeon was not an expositor of texts; like Alexander Whyte his contemporary and many preachers of his time he usually used a verse or two to introduce a subject or theme and preached on the subject], let us, for our memories’ sake, consider the exhoration in the 37th verse to be our text. ‘Go, and do you likewise.’ There are certain persons in the world who will not allow the preacher to speak upon anything but those doctrinal statements concerning the way of salvation which are known as ‘the Gospel.’ If the preacher shall insist on some virtue or practical Grace, they straightway say that he is not preaching the Gospel, that he has become legal and is a mere moral teacher. We do not stand in any awe of such criticism, for we clearly perceive that our Lord Jesus Christ, Himself, would very frequently have come under it.

“Read the Sermon on the Mount and judge whether certain people would be content to hear the likes of it preached to them on the Sabbath. They would condemn it as containing very little Gospel and too much about good works. Our Lord was a great practical Preacher. He frequently delivered addresses in which He made answer to questioners, or gave direction to seekers, or upbraided offenders – and He gave a prominence to practical truth such as some of His ministers dare not imitate! Jesus tells us over and over again the manner in which we are to live towards our fellow men and He lays great stress upon the love which should shine throughout the Christian character.” [MTP No. 1360; June 17, 1877]

That sermon was preached in June 1877 but you will see that it addresses a way of preaching that has become very popular in some circles again in our own day. There truly is nothing new under the sun and Goethe was right: “Everything has been thought of before; but the difficulty is to think of it again!” Spurgeon was right to protest that point of view in his day and we are right to protest it in ours because it does not faithfully represent the teaching of the Bible itself. The Bible has much to say about Christ and his redeeming work, but it devotes large tracts of its teaching to the nuts and bolts of Christian living, to both the commandments of God – the law – and to the teaching of wisdom, those finer points of right living necessary for a believer to master if he or she is to live an obedient, fruitful, and successful life in this sinful world.

There is nothing about redemption in Proverbs; nothing about the cross; nothing about the sacrifical ritual of the Mosaic law, nothing about God’s covenant with his people. The book is part of the wisdom literature of the Bible and concerns the practice of life. We mistake the book if we try to make it about something else than right behavior, which, as you might expect, a number of preachers and expositors throughout the ages have tried to do. In the New Testament, the book of James is also a specimen of wisdom literature and, as you know, it too concentrates on the Chrisitian’s behavior. Even more striking for a book of the New Testament and for a book written by the brother of the Lord Jesus, there is in James no mention of the cross, of the Lord’s resurrection, or of his coming again. All of that is assumed to be sure, but it is not the subject of James’ letter. He is concerned rather to address the behavior of his fellow Christians and, as with Proverbs, is determined to help them in the cultivation of skillful, which is to say godly living. Proverbs and James, precisely because they are books of wisdom, are about character and are writings intended to form or inculcate character.

It is significant that most of the citations of Proverbs in the New Testament (there are some 60 citations, allusions, or literary parallels from Proverbs found in the New Testament according to the editors of the principal editions of the Greek New Testament), I say most of the citations of Proverbs used by New Testament writers are employed to teach godly living to the church. Examples include: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him” (25:21-22 in Rom. 12:20), “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble,” (3:34 cited twice in the NT: Jas. 4:5; 1 Pet. 5:5), and “Fear God and the King” (24:21 in 1 Pet. 2:17). [cf. Waltke, i, 126-127]

But that is not to say that there is nothing in the book of Proverbs that concerns the Lord Jesus Christ. James mentions the Lord and speaks of faith in him in his book; we know that. But if Christ is in Proverbs,where and how is he there? Scholars have disagreed for a long time and preachers have found him there in different ways and different places. Sometimes they have thought to find him where, I think, he cannot be found. Take, for example, 1 Corinthians 1:30 where we read:

“And because of him [i.e. God] you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption….”

Paul doesn’t there explain what he means by “wisdom from God,” but in the context he is contrasting God’s wisdom with the wisdom of the world and the statement we read is very likely to mean that God’s wisdom is different in just this way: that the great needs of the human soul are furnished by Christ and are received as his gifts by faith. In all likelihood, the term “wisdom” is employed by Paul because it was being used by the Corinthians who had become enamored of some elitist ideas of spirituality that were commonplace in the Greco-Roman world of that time. In context it appears that Paul used the word in a different way than it is used in Proverbs or James. He wasn’t speaking of wisdom in its Hebrew sense of the skill of living well. Rather, for Paul the wisdom of the world is its arrogant pride, its presumption that it can answer the questions of life without recourse to God and master its environment without God’s help. In contrast the wisdom of God in 1 Corinthians 1, we read earlier in the chapter, is the foolishness of the cross, not the practice of living skillfully. Neither Jews nor Gentiles could accommodate the foolishness of the cross, but the cross is the wisdom of God. [cf. Thiselton, NIGTC, 190-193] In other words, Paul does not seem to be referring to the same thing that Proverbs means by wisdom when he says that Christ has become to us wisdom from God.

But, the context of 1 Corinthians notwithstanding, historically texts like this one in the NT have often been thought to depend upon the personification of wisdom in Proverbs, especially in a concentrated form in chapter 8. You remember how in those early chapters of Proverbs wisdom is represented as a woman who thinks and speaks and calls to people, who grants her gifts to those who seek them from her, who is a person God’s people should love, and so on. It is the same sort of device in literature that you find in sculpture when justice is represented as blindfolded woman holding scales in one hand or when liberty is represented as a woman holding high a torch in New York harbor. From virtually the beginning, at least as early as Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century, the church fathers identified Jesus with the personification of wisdom, with Lady Wisdom, in the Book of Proverbs. There, in chapter 8, we read of wisdom as a woman who calls in the street to everyone to come to her and gain wisdom for himself or herself. She has what we all need. Certainly Jesus also has what we all need and he calls men and women to come to him. You can see where the identification came from. Listen to wisdom speak.

“I have counsel and sound wisdom; I have insight; I have strength.”

“I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me. Riches and honor are with me, enduring wealth and righteousness.” And so on. [vv. 14, 17-18]

We can easily think of Jesus Christ saying all of those things to us. Since the New Testament, as in 1 Cor. 1:30, seemed to suggest that Jesus Christ is as well the embodiment of wisdom, the early church fathers took to thinking of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8 as Jesus Christ. But that identification was not without its problems. In our ESVs we read 8:22-23 this way:

“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.”

But that was not the translation the early church had before it. In Proverbs 8:22 the text was translated in the LXX (the Greek translation of the OT that was the standard Old Testament for the Greek speaking church in first centuries of her life after Pentecost): “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work…” The verb can be translated that way and that is how the LXX translators did translate it: “created.” The Arians, in the fourth century, took this text as proof that the Son of God had a beginning in time; that he was a creature and so was not equal with the Father. God made him at some point. If Jesus Christ is Lady Wisdom and Lady Wisdom was created by God, then the Son was created by the Father. He might have been the first of the creatures, but he was still a creature. He might be a god, but he wasn’t the God.

As one scholar put it, “‘The Lord created me,’ reverberated in every street and alleyway in Alexandria and everywhere else that favored Arius’ notion.” [Clayton in Waltke, i, 127] Hard to believe it, but Proverbs 8:22 – that seemingly innocent statement – is one of the most controversial texts in the history of Christianity! As controversial as the statement of the Lord Jesus during the institution of the Lord’s Supper: “This is my Body.”

Athanasius, the great defender of the orthodox doctrine of the deity of Jesus Christ, was stuck with the same translation of Proverbs 8:22. He wasn’t a Hebraist, he didn’t have a real grasp of the Hewbrew text; he assumed that what the LXX translators had given him was the meaning of the verse and so he argued in his work against the Ariansthat 8:22 was referring only to the Lord’s human nature. [cf. Letham, The Holy Trinity, 130] But, of course, the Lord’s human nature wasn’t created at the beginning, it wasn’t “the first of his acts of old” as we read in 8:22. According to the Bible, Christ’s human nature, his humanity, did not begin to be until he was conceived by the Holy Spirit in his mother’s womb. In any case, with both sides assuming that Prov. 8:22 was, in fact, a statement about Jesus Christ and arguing about what that statement meant, the idea that Lady Wisdom was Jesus Christ became the fixed dogma of the church. But, however important for the development of the theology of the person of Christ that interpretation of Proverbs 8:22-23 was, it wasn’t a particularly good translation that lay beneath that interpretation. It was a theological argument created by a bad translation. As one church historian described the debate in the early centuries, it resembled “two blindfolded men trying to hit each other.” All because they were debating what a statement meant before they understood what the statement was.

The ESV, the NIV and other English translations of the Bible do not translate the Hebrew verb in 8:22 “created,” but “possessed.” The translation “create” is certainly possible, but the verb has other meanings and there are strong arguments to be made for the ESV’s translation, arguments the details of which I won’t trouble you with tonight. But with wisdom as its subject you find the same verb in 4:5, 7 and there “possess,” in the sense of “have” or “get” makes perfect sense. The translation “create” there makes no sense at all. What is more, foolishness or folly is also personified in the book of Proverbs as a woman calling in the streets (cf. 9:13). But no one ever imagined that she was an actual person. To personify a virtue or a vice is an ancient literary device. It should not be pressed unless there is very good reason to do so.

In 8:22, then, translating the word with “possess” or “had” the statement would mean only that the Lord was wise when he made the world and, therefore, that his wisdom enabled God to make the world as perfectly and magnificently as he did. As the following verses go on to say the world is suffused with God’s wisdom. We see it everywhere we look. But, of course, that creates still another problem for the identification of wisdom with Jesus because Jesus is God, not simply a characteristic of God, something God has, not God himself. Wisdom, we read in Prov. 8, witnessed the creation but Jesus Christ created the heavens and the earth!

In other words, a great deal of folderol was created for Christology by the wrong translation of Prov. 8:22 and a more contextual understanding of the passage and a more sensitive translation do not favor an identification between Lady Wisdom and the Second Person of the Godhead, either Jesus Christ as the eternal Son or as the incarnate Son. In any case, here is a classic example of how important the correct translation of a biblical text can be. Proverbs 8:22 became the focus of a great theological dispute only because it was translated into Greek as it was. People got used to that translation, it was in their Bibles, and they couldn’t imagine that it was meant something else. And so the dispute.

But it is doubtful, more than doubtful, that Proverbs 8 can really be made a basis for teaching about the Lord Jesus. As the ESV and NIV have translated the text, the connection is much less clear and far from obvious. All in all, it is entirely simpler to say that Proverbs is about wisdom itself – about which more is said in the eighth chapter and much more the rest of the book – and that the wisdom we are to seek is like that skill with which God made the world. See how wonderfully he created everything. How beautifully he made everything? How wonderfuly everything works together? With that sort of wisdom we’re to live our lives in the world; not the same wisdom, of course, not God’s wisdom, but wisdom as much like it as ours can be.

In Proverbs 8 to make wisdom refer directly to the person of Jesus would require the term to be used in a very different way than it is used everywhere else in the book. In Proverbs wisdom concerns human behavior. The statements in the New Testament that employ the term (apart from James) – use the term in a different way. There is, in other words, a small and imprecise thematic and verbal overlap between Prov. 8 and some NT statements about Jesus, but it is a stretch to take the remarks in Prov. 8 as themselves a declaration about the Lord Jesus.

So far I would then say that these sorts of efforts to find the Lord Jesus in the book of Proverbs have been proved a failure. That is not their meaning and that’s not the way to find the Lord Jesus in Proverbs.

But if there is nothing in Proverbs that could be fairly regarded as a depiction of God the Son or as a prophecy of his life and work, are we then to conclude that the book has nothing specific to say about the Lord Jesus Christ? My answer to that question is a definite “No!” The book is suffused with the Son of God. He is everywhere in Proverbs. How do we know this? In this way. The book’s principle theme, its thesis statement as we saw at the outset of our study is that “the fear of the Lord” is the beginning of wisdom. The book is suffused with “the fear of the Lord.” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is, according to Proverbs, the foundation of all skillful living. The phrase itself occurs fifteen times in the book and the phrase “fear the Lord” twice more. What is more, several times we are told in Proverbs to trust the Lord.

But who is the Lord whom we are to fear, whose fear is the foundation of all true godly living, and who is the Lord we are to trust? Interrogate the Bible and the answer to that question comes back: the Lord of Proverbs, as of the rest of the Old Testament, is Jesus Christ, God the Son who later became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. In all these instances of “fear of the Lord” “Lord” is, in fact, a translation of Yahweh, the personal name of the God of Israel, or at least Yahweh is the rendering that most scholars now most approve of. It’s a guess. Nobody knows precisely how that name was pronounced. You remember “Jehovah” from the King James version. Jehovah was a guess as to the pronunciation of the name of the Lord, but few defend it nowadays. Yahweh is the best guess of contemporary biblical scholarship as to the pronunciation of the Lord’s personal name. And again and again the NT teaches us to think of the Lord Jesus as the Yahweh, or Lord, of the Old Testament. Perhaps you remember the evidence. There is so much of it in the NT it always amazes me that this comes as such a surprise to people and that they struggle so to grasp the implications of it.

In a number of NT texts the history of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, at Sinai, and in the wilderness is specifically said to be a history of Israel’s relationship with Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the most dramatic of them is Jude 5 where we read that “Jesus saved a people from the land of Egypt.” A statement the more interesting and compelling because it was written by the Lord’s own brother, Jude. Some English translations of the Bible read “Lord” there because there are some manuscripts that read “Lord” not “Jesus,” but by every principle of the textual criticism of the NT – that is the science of determing the most likely reading from the various possibilities represented in the manuscripts – the reading in Jude 5 should be “Jesus.” And the ESV reads “Jesus” for that reason. It is the reading of the best manuscripts and it is the most difficult reading, which is always far more likely to be the original reading as scribes often attempted to smooth out difficulties but they rarely created them. But stop and think about that. “Jesus” delivered Israel from Egypt. That remark is surely striking! Jesus, the son of Mary, delivered Israel from Egypt? We do not know the name Jesus until Joseph and Mary named their son. The only way that could be said is if Jude is identifying Jesus with Yahweh, who brought Israel out of Egypt according to the book of Exodus. To say that Jesus brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt is to say that he is Yahweh – at least in his Godhead – and that, therefore, the Yahweh of the exodus was God the Son, not God the Father or the Holy Spirit.
We are confirmed in that conclusion by the fact that there are so many other texts that also relate the person of the Lord Jesus to that part of Israel’s history.
Think of the observation in Hebrews 11:26 that Moses considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt…” Again, it is certainly a striking way of speaking The author of that letter to the Hebrews obviously intended his readers to get the point! Put Jesus back in Egypt. Put Jesus back in the personal history of Moses. But, of course, in Exodus you will not find the name “Jesus” or the title “Christ.” You find Yahweh everywhere. But in the NT we are taught to read “Jesus” or “Christ” where we find Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible as we do thousands of times.
Or think of Paul’s famous remark in I Corinthians 10 that in the wilderness Israel “drank from the spiritual rock that followed them and the Rock was Christ. [v. 4] That again is a striking assertion that the Lord Jesus was in the wilderness and, therefore, that he was there as God the Son. The same Jesus of whom we read in the gospels was in the wilderness leading Israel to the promised land. We are discovering a theme here, are we not? Jesus was the God with whom Israel had to do.
I won’t belabor this point but there are other texts to the same effect. A careful reading of 2 Cor. 3 indicates that the glory that shone on Moses’ face when he met with God in the tent of meeting was the glory of Jesus Christ. A similarly careful reading of Hebrews 12 demonstrates that the God whose glory was revealed at Mt. Sinai was none other than Jesus Christ. You remember the famous Christmas hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel. Of that Emmanuel, we read “in ancient times didst give the law in cloud and majesty and awe.” In the eighth century when that hymn was written, they were reading their Bible carefully. It was Jesus at Mt. Sinai in the thunder and the lightening when the law was given to Israel. He is the consuming fire that sinful Israel feared and drew back from. Again Jesus is Yahweh. This is the argument to use when you sit down and talk with Jehovah Witnesses. Don’t go to John 1:1, they’re all ready for you there.He led Israel out of Egypt. They are not prepared for that! Again Jesus is Yahweh, because the Exodus narrative is all about Yahweh. It never mentions the name Jesus, but the NT says that it was Jesus all the while at Sinai.
But it is not only Israel’s history at Sinai that is said to have been the work of Jesus Christ. Think, for example, of the statement in John 12:41 to the effect that the glory of God that Isaiah was given to see in his vision of Yahweh (of which vision we read in the opening verses of Isaiah 6), was, in fact, the glory of Jesus Christ. John says that. Now we have the identification of Jesus and Yahweh from a much later period of Israel’s history, not the 15th century B.C., but the late 8th century B.C. Again the high and holy God whom Isaiah saw surrounded by seraphim singing his glory, was none other than the God who would later become the baby and then the man, Jesus of Nazareth.
Or, consider a text such as Romans 10:11, where Paul cinches his argument that salvation comes as it has always come – he’s already quoted Deuteronomy – from believing in Jesus and confessing him Lord, by citing an OT text from Isaiah: “Everyone who believes on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” But, of course, in that OT text the “Lord” being referred to is Yahweh. In other words, to call upon Jesus is the same thing as calling upon Yahweh. In fact, in Isaiah believe in Yahweh means believe in Jesus. In Proverbs we are also taught to trust the Lord or to believe in him. We have, in other words, the very words of the New Testament Gospel in the book of Proverbs: trust in the Lord Jesus. Call him Jesus or call him Yahweh; it’s the same person. We can say that because Jesus is the Lord mentioned in Proverbs as the object of our trust. They didn’t know him as Jesus centuries before the incarnation, but it is the same person.
Add to this the NT’s teaching that Jesus is the creator of heaven and earth, and so the God we meet in the Garden of Eden, that he is the Judge of all men, and so the God we meet not only again and again exercising his judgment in the punishment of Israel and of the other nations, but as well at the Last Judgment, and we are left with the very clear impression that wherever we find God in the first 39 books of the Bible we are encountering Jesus Christ; not specifically God the Father and not the Holy Spirit, but God the Son who would later be incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. The person of God with whom mankind has always had most directly to do is first and foremost God the Son. The reason it was he who was made man was because he was already – for whatever reason, we know not what – because he was the person of the Triune God who was already at work in the salvation of the world and had made himself known to his people. This is a mystery, but don’t you think this must be true: the reason it was the Son who became incarnate and not the Father or the Holy Spirit, the reason it was the Son who was born a baby in Bethlehem is because it was the Son who all along had been the Savior of God’s people. It was the Son who all along was the person of the Godhead with whom his people had had to do.

There is more of this kind of evidence but take the point. In the NT there is a repeated identification of Jesus Christ of the Gospels with Yahweh of the OT. To refer to the one is to refer to the other. If there is a person of the Godhead less well known from the OT and this I think contradicts the unstudied opinion of most evangelical Christians, if there is a person of the Godhead less well known from the OT, it is not the Son or the Holy Spirit; it is the Father. And that makes sense, doesn’t it. It was by the revelation of the Son that we were prepared to understand that there was a God the Father. The Israelites may not have known Jesus by his incarnate name, the name he was given by his parents as a baby boy, by which he was known as a man, and the name by which he has been known to his people ever since the incarnation, but the person was the same. Yahweh in the OT had no human nature, but he was the same God the Son, the same divine and eternal person who came into the world as Jesus of Nazareth. Again and again that point is made in ways too clear and too emphatic to mistake. Jesus brought Israel out of Egypt!

But now consider the implications of this. If the God who struck down the Egyptian firstborn was Jesus, if the Almighty at Sinai was Jesus, if the God who led Israel through the wilderness by the cloud and the pillar of fire was Jesus, if the God of glory whom Isaiah saw high and lifted up in the temple, if the God upon whom Israel called and in whom she believed was Jesus, and if it was Jesus who in his wrath sent Israel to destruction and Judah into exile, then when Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we must believe – however true it may be that the authors of Proverbs did not yet know of the incarnation or of how Yahweh would someday take on flesh and blood and an authentic human nature – we must believe that when the authors of Proverbs spoke of the fear of the Lord, they were speaking of the fear of the Son of God, whom we would someday know as Jesus of Nazareth.

Take all of this evidence together and the conclusion is that in Proverbs as elsewhere in the Old Testament we find Jesus in every mention of the “Lord.” So the fear of Jesus is the beginning of wisdom; the fear of Jesus is what we need to build a truly skillful, useful, and fruitful life in this world. “Trusting in Jesus with all our hearts and not leaning on our own understanding” (3:5) is the path to true wisdom. Our life will be as our relationship to Jesus Christ. That is true in every way, of course, but especially in the matter of wisdom, and the teaching is made the more emphatic by the fact that this has been true and has been taught to be true from the very beginning. There is nothing new about this in what we call the New Testament! Only more detail!

But let me finish then with this. If that’s true, what are we to do with the fact that hardly any Christians in America nowadays thinks of Jesus as someone to fear, to regard with awe, before whom we are to bow in total, unqualified submission. There is very little fear of the Lord Jesus among American Christians. Do you think there is? More to the point: do you fear Jesus?

And don’t do what many do and empty the fear out of the fear of the Lord by thinking it means only some vague kind of reverence or respect. In Paul and in Hebrews – where Jesus is identified with Yahweh, that identification is made as part of a solemn warning to Christians. Don’t trifle with Jesus. Don’t suppose that Jesus, the holy judge, is not someone to fear. He is, in fact, a consuming fire and you must take heed lest that fire consume you. And, much as we love him, much as we trust in him, much as we may desire his company and fellowship, he is no one to take for granted, to treat lightly.

He is the holy judge; he is the God of wrath. He will call you to account on the great day. It was the Lord Jesus who leveled Jerusalem by the hand of the Babylonians and virtually wiped his people off the face of the earth because of their unbelief and disobedience to him. There should be in your heart, with the love and the trust, a hesitation, a carefulness, a circumspection in the face of Jesus Christ. This is the same Jesus who will consign the unbelieving world to hell, who will tell multitudes, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” The picture of Jesus in his terrible glory, from whom the nations shrink in horror, that we find in Revelation is enough to disabuse us of the notion of “gentle Jesus meek and mild.” The fact is, you and I will never know Jesus as his disciples knew him, a man upon whom they could look and not see the glory of God, a man so much like other men that most people mistook him for only a man. Since his exaltation to the right hand Jesus now and forever is the God/Man and his divine glory will cause all human beings, the saved and the unsaved alike, to cast themselves down before him and confess him Lord of Lords and King of Kings. This God of insurmountable glory and indescribale majesty is our Lord Jesus and Savior. He is to be loved with all our hearts but at the same time he is to be feared as the great and terrible God that he is and always has been.

The average American evangelical Christian thinks of the God of the OT as more fierce, more threatening, less accessible than Jesus. But the teaching of the NT is that the God of the OT – Yahweh – is Jesus! Don’t worry! You will love him more if you fear him more! If you fear him as you ought to fear him, his love for you will become still more amazing to you.

This Jesus Christ is the Lord in Proverbs. And to fear him is the beginning of wisdom. We don’t have to twist or mistranslate some text to find him in the book; his Majesty and glory as the Lord is everywhere in Proverbs the foundation of that wisdom, that skillful living, that Proverbs teaches us. He is the Lord and fearing him is the beginning of wisdom. Becoming wise, living wisely is hard work, and the first and last thing you are going to hear from the book of Proverbs is that the only person who is going to do that hard work is the one who fears the Lord Jesus Christ.

Miscellany

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 18:00:00 GMT

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

This, the 19th, is our penultimate sermon on Proverbs, the last but one. And it is unusual in that it does not have a single subject. I used to say about my pastor in Aberdeen, Scotland, William Still, that he could have been a preacher of much greater influence, more like his contemporary Martyn Lloyd-Jones, if he had only followed the rules. But he was a unique individual and preached in his own very distinctive way. And one feature of that way was that, when preaching through books of the Bible, as he almost invariably did, he would take a chapter or more at a time. (My first Sunday evening at Gilcomston South Church in Aberdeen, Scotland, he went through thirteen chapters of Jeremiah and the service lasted two and one-half hours. You people are wimps compared to me in my twenties.) But if there were two or three pericopes in, say, a particular chapter of the Gospel of Luke, three quite separate narratives having to do with different subjects, he would preach them all in a single Sunday morning sermon. In effect, we got three sermons, because he would carefully respect the burden of each paragraph. Sometimes he would end the first section of the text and of his sermon with a mighty peroration and we would be terrifically moved; but then immediately he would launch into the next part of the text and a completely new subject and before long the effect of the first had been lost. This approach was all the more significant because each part of the sermon was as long as most sermons you would be typically accustomed to hearing nowadays. I learned from him not to preach in the same way he did though I very much wish I had some of the wonderful gifts he had as a preacher and expositor of the Word of God.

But tonight I’m going to do something akin to what he did over and over again. I’m going to take a few subjects that have very little to do with one another and cobble together a sermon out of them all. I have chosen to do that simply because there were a few subjects that I didn’t want to fail to address in our examination of Proverbs, but these were not themes often enough addressed in Proverbs to warrant a full sermon. Indeed, as you will see, in some cases there is but one brief proverb devoted to the subject in the entire book. So, what we are doing tonight is cleaning up some loose ends. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that with these few subjects we have covered all the subjects treated in this wonderful book. Hardly. There are, for example, a number of verses devoted to the good and bad uses of wine, wine as a blessing and wine as a curse. I could have preached a sermon on those, or on those proverbs dealing with the king or government, or on those that teach business ethics, and so on. Literally, this series could have expanded far beyond its present size. But we’ll stop with tonight’s miscellany and next Sunday evening’s subject: “Jesus Christ in the Book of Proverbs.”
The first subject I want to consider with you this evening has a single proverb devoted to it in the book: 12:10.
“Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.”
One of the great virtues of the Bible is its size! It is a book so large that along the way it can cover virtually every dimension of human life and experience. Or, as Charles Bridges puts it in his much loved 19th century commentary on Proverbs:
“The minuteness of Scripture is one of its most valuable properties. It shows the mind of God on many points apparently trivial. Here it tests our profession by our treatment of the brutes. They were given to man, as the Lord of creation, for his use, comfort, and food…but not for his wantonness.” [136]
The kind treatment of animals is assuredly not a major subject of biblical ethics, but it is found in the Bible in several places. And, frankly, I love the fact, I hope you do as well, that the Bible gives us, however briefly, a theology of animals and an ethic of their proper treatment.
The gist of the proverb 12:10 is to describe the “opposite sensibilities of the righteous and the wicked.” [Longman, 273] Truly righteous people have the sort of sympathy, have the kind of sympathetic hearts that make them unable not to care for and have regard for their animals. On the other hand even the kinder acts of the wicked often turn out to be cruel in their effects. That is, even their best-intended actions often have harmful effects. We are surely aware of how this can be, of course, all the more in modern America, in which one social policy after another, intended to “help” people has instead benighted their lives. With our efforts to do good to poorer communities we managaed to destroy the inner city home and family which has had an effect on people so terrible that no amount of government provided financial assistance can make up for it.
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his insight honed by the Holocaust, says that the bad deeds of a good person are better than the good deeds of the wicked.” [cited in Waltke, i, 527]
To be sure, the argument of the proverb is probably a fortiori, and so is not only about the treatment of animals or perhaps not even chiefly about their treatment. If one is kind to animals, how much more will he be kind and have regard to his fellow human beings, even his servants or slaves. That may be the thought. But nevertheless it rests on the assumption that you can count on the righteous to be caring of their animals. And it is an assumption that is found throughout the Bible.
The Lord made these animals and made them with the wonderful characteristics that make them so useful to human beings in one sense and that endear them to us in another. In that beautiful passage in Job 39 we learn that the Lord takes delight in the unique abilities that he has given to the animals he created. Indeed, sometimes in passages of the Word of God men and animals are listed together as the objects of God’s care and provision.
“Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mountains of God; your judgments are like the great deep; man and beast you save, O Lord.” [Ps. 36:5-6]
In Psalm 104, which is a poetic reflex on the account of the creation in Genesis 1 and 2, we read: an account of God as the creator of heaven and earth, we read:
“You cause the grass to grow for the livestock…” [Ps. 104:14]
“The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly, the cedars of Levanon that he planted. In them the birds built their nests; the stork has her home in the fir trees. The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.” [104:16-18]
You remember the very last words of the little book of Jonah. In rebuking his prophet, the Lord reminded him that he had every right to be merciful to the Ninevites because there were so many people in that great city. The Lord, after all, as we read repeatedly in the Bible, does not desire the death of the wicked and takes no pleasure in their judgment. But he went on to say of Nineveh that there was in the city as well, “much cattle.” Who has seen pictures of battlefields strewn with the carcasses of dead animals and not felt a pang for those innocent beasts who were caught up in the savagery of human life? The Lord doesn’t like to see animals killed either. The Lord spreads his loving wings over his whole creation and, made in his image as we are, we ought to as well.
In other words, as Charles Bridges described the mistreatment of animals common in his day:
“The brutal habits, therefore, the coarse words, inhuman blows…, and hard tyranny on the public roads, are disgraceful to our nature.” [136-137]
Remember our Savior’s remark, to be sure apropos a different point, that our Father oversees the death of every sparrow. Little and seemingly inconsequential as those birds may be, they are not beyond the loving care of our heavenly Father. That fact, he said, should assure us that we, all the more, are the objects of our heavenly Father’s care. [Matt. 10:29]
Or think, for example, of the fact that in the fourth commandment, in the midst of the Bible’s greatest summary of true human goodness, we find the assertion that the Sabbath is for working animals as it is for working human beings.
“On [the Sabbath] you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.”
That is how it reads in Exodus 20. In Deuteronomy 5 it is more explicit: “On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock…”
And similarly consider the commandment we find in Deut. 25:4: “You shall not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain.” This is a more striking commandment than you might at first suppose. The Lord considers it not only the farmer’s obligation to feed his stock adequately, but that while the ox is trampling the grain and so threshing it or pulling a threshing sledge – that is, to separate the grain from the husk – it should be given some share of the produce he is creating by its work. This commandment is not so far removed from the Lord’s commandment that allowed the poor to consume what they needed from the crops of the landowners. The point is that “the animal should not be grudged sustenance when it was working on behalf of man.” [Craigie, Deuteronomy, 313] As one commentator has remarked on Deut. 25:4: “The wholeness of the covenant society extends even to its livestock.” A related provision in the law – requiring the land to lie fallow every seventh year – extends the obligation to wild animals. [McConville, Deuteronomy, 368-369]
“…you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the beasts of the field may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.” [Ex. 23:11]
Again and again and again in the law of God the Lord orders our lives to insure that animals will be treated well. There is a consistent witness borne in the law of God to the Lord’s interest in the welfare of animals and, therefore, to our obligation to be interested in their welfare as well. The rabbis actually deduced from this material the regulation that man must first feed his animals before feeding himself. [Waltke, i, 527n]
Take, for instance, the interesting case of animals in India. Marc Mailloux, in the wonderful memoir of his conversion, Discovery on the Katmandu Trail, observes that while animals are considered holy in India and so are not killed – even the rats who eat far too much precious food – “[the animals] are treated worse than any place that I’d ever seen. In my whole time in the country, I never saw a dog that wasn’t completely mangy, eaten alive by flies and worms.” He observes that it wasn’t that because they were holy the animals were elevated to the ranks of people as you might expect; but that the people, especially the lower castes, were lowered to the level of animals. [88]
But in the Bible we are treated to an account of an animal – a ewe lamb in this case – who was loved as a member of the family and often slept in the father’s arms. So much was this kind of relationship understood and appreciated in Israel that when Nathan finished his story about that pet sheep being taken and killed and eaten by a stranger, King David was ready to string the offender up! [2 Sam. 12:1-6]
I do not mean to suggest by all of this that the Bible teaches that animals have “rights” in the sense imagined in the animal rights movement. I’m not sure an intelligent case can be made for any “rights” that are not accompanied by duties; the one is invariably the mirror of the other. A man can only have a right to life if he has a duty to life, to the sustaining and nourishing of his own life and that of others. I think the animal rights movement is morally incoherent and perhaps that is why it has so quickly turned to violence against human beings in many cases. I do not see how animals can have rights if they have no consciousness of duties. But if animals do not have “rights,” human beings have duties toward animals. That the Bible makes very clear.
We are to respect animals as God’s creatures, we have a duty to care for them, to the extent that they are at all sentient, we are to be kind to them and treat them with the dignity they have as God’s creatures for whom he himself has a real concern. We are probably all outraged at cruelty to dogs and cats and horses. Thomas Jefferson had a reputation for being merciless with his horse, whipping it for the slightest failure to please its master. And, of course, we were rightly repelled by Michael Vick and his enjoyment of dog-fighting and dog-killing. But it is not a question without biblical weight behind it, in my opinion, to wonder about the ethics of veal production in which a calf is never allowed to gambol, or, for that matter, virtually to move, which its creator obviously made it to do. You think about it and then ask yourself whether you should have that breaded veal cutlet the next time you see it on the menu.
There are implications, many implications of the fact that whatever we do, whether in word or in deed, we are to do to the glory of God. And one of those implications is that we have an obligation to treat with some reverence the creatures that our heavenly Father made and for which he cares. And if we have such an obligation, all the more if it is treated in Proverbs, as it is at least once, we are likewise obliged to teach the same to our children. The burden of this proverb in 12:10 is precisely that the treatment of animals is preparation for the treatment of other people. Let me just say, young ladies, if you meet a young man who is in many ways attractive to you, but he is cruel to his dog, run in the opposite direction as fast as you can.
The second theme to which I want to direct your attention in this miscellany this evening is found in three proverbs: 15:13 and 15 and 17:22.
“A glad heart makes a cheerful face, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is crushed.”
“All the days of the afflicted are evil, but the cheerful of heart has a continual feast.”
“A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”
Now sometimes these statements have been taken to mean that we should all cultivate a sense of humor. And there is certainly truth to the observation that a readiness to laugh is a tonic in life. But in Proverbs very clearly such a proverb is recommending that we live in a way that cultivates and nourishes joy! We were made to be happy; we were saved to be happy. It is a Christian’s duty to be as happy as he or she can be for the right reasons.
For example, the proverb immediately before 17:22 reads:
“He who sires a fool gets himself sorrow, and the father of a fool has no joy.” [17:21]
There is no happiness in being an irresponsible parent. It sucks the joy out of life because of the consequences bad parenting produces in our children whom we love and for whom we have great hopes. A parent can’t be happy if his children are doing badly. But the language used in 15:15 is used elsewhere in the Bible of the joy that is produced by celebrations and feasts, food and wine, and company such as might be enjoyed at a wedding, a birthday celebration, the signing of a treaty or the end of a war, or the arrival of special guests, all of which celebrations are specifically mentioned in the Bible as occasions of good cheer. [Waltke, i, 626]
What is being said is simply that Christians ought to be and need to be happy people. Life has a great deal of pain in this world of sin and death. There are innumerable reasons for sorrow. You can’t escape sorrow. But there is much for God’s children to rejoice in as well and if we must sorrow, we must as well be happy. “Sorrowful,” yes, says Paul in describing the authentic Christian, “but always rejoicing.” If unmixed joy is not for this earth, unmixed sorrow isn’t either, at least not for a Christian! Indeed, as G.K. Chesterton observed: “For the Christian joy is the central thing in life, sorrow is peripheral.” He meant that for the Christian the great questions of life have been answered and answered happily. For the Christian it is only a matter of time until there is nothing but joy and that fact must make a difference in the present.
Now there is no doubt that some find a cheerful heart easier to come by than others. But, as I heard Dr. Packer once say, that is “bone-structure” not godliness or wisdom. If you are inclined to the sad or morose or phlegmatic side of life, then hear the Word of God here and realize that you have an obligation to nourish cheerfulness. You need it, as you need medicine when you are sick, and your loved ones need your cheerfulness as well and so does the rest of the Body of Christ. What is more, gloomy Christians are no recommendation of the gospel! It was right of Charles Simeon, a superb pastor of the people of God, to introduce himself on pastoral visits by announcing as he walked in the home or apartment: “I am come to inquire after your welfare. Are you happy?” Christians ought to be happy.
Now this is the kind of fact of life that Christians should think about more deeply, all the more in our day dominated as it is by the theory of evolution. How much longer that theory will continue to maintain its grip on the academy and the elite culture no one can say – signs of its weariness and tottering old age are appearing more regularly nowadays – but so long as it does, Christians should be thinking and talking about things like the remarkable power that human beings have to be happy and to make others happy. Where did that come from? It has nothing to do with survival of the fittest. It concerns a realm of life wholly of the spirit. Pittsburg Steelers’ quarterback, Terry Bradshaw, could win Super Bowls though he was profoundly depressed virtually every day of his life in those days. People with little good cheer live long lives as regularly as do the cheerful.
The ability, capacity to laugh, the pleasure we get in humor, in good tidings, if you stop to think about it, is utterly remarkable and obviously a sign of our being creatures, people whom God has made! There is somethig about the image of God that fits us for laughter and for joy! There is nothing like this in the animal kingdom. It’s a huge leap from no happiness to happiness. From no laughter to laughter. The Lord Jesus had a sense of humor and capacity for great happiness. We we can tell that not only from some of his illustrations, but from the fact that he should say such a thing as:
“Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.” [Luke 6:21]
If laughter is part of the perfect human life – and the Lord is describing the perfection of life in those beatitudes – and the Lord Jesus lived a perfect human life, then he was a man who laughed. The Man of Sorrows knew how to smile, and to laugh, and to rejoice in the good things of life. They accused him of being glutton and a drunk which at least means that he was a man who knew how to enjoy a good meal. Twice in the Gospels we read of the Lord rejoicing (Luke10:21; John 17:13), but no doubt there were many more occasions with his friends in which he was happy and gave expression to his happiness.
What is even more remarkable, in some ways, is that we have the power to cultivate joy. It’s not something you either have or you don’t have. You can get more of it if you go looking for it. Eric Metaxas, when he was here and in his speech recently at the National Prayer Breakfast, made people laugh. He lightened their hearts. I have personal knowledge of this power and capacity because years ago Florence didn’t think my jokes were funny – obviously she had no sense of humor – but she has grown so much through the years! Good humor is a thing we can learn.
And not simply good humor in the sense of laughing at a joke. We all know what pleasure we get from good company, from a good meal – what the proverbs here call a feast –, from beautiful things such as natural beauty, magnificent art and music, an uplifting film, and from good news. Our hearts are lifted and we feel so much more ready to face the world. Joy is a serious thing, an important aspect to human life, God has made it that way; it is a driver of human endeavor. It is not enough for us to have sufficient calories to sustain our bodily life. We need to be happy. God made us that way because he is happy. He is also sad, but there is in him a deep, constant, imperishable happiness and it has overspread his own life and flooded our world.
What these proverbs teach us, then, is that if we are to be wise, if we are to live skillfully, if we are to navigate our environment in a truly successful way, a godly way, a fruitful way, we need to be happy and to make those around us happy. If we find that more difficult than others as many of us do, then we still need to be happy, need to work at it, need to think about it and consider what ought to be done. We are not in heaven. We cannot succeed at this all the time, but we need to be happy as much as we can, our children need to grow up in happy homes, they need to laugh, they need to learn to enjoy life for all the wonderful things their Heavenly Father has placed in it for them: from good friends and warm fellowship, to fascinating and wonderful experiences, to the taste of good food and drink, to laughter around the family table and everywhere else their family is together. Fathers and mothers, your marching orders. If you children are not happy, if you have not filled their lives with fun and cheer, you have important work to do. They need to know that the Christian life is where true happiness is to be found because every human being craves happiness: the world’s kind of happiness and the explicitly Christian kind that makes the first kind better by far! We have so much more reason to be happy than anyone else. But if that is so, then we have a duty to be as happy as we can be. It is simple gratitude not to waste God’s good gifts.
And the promise of these proverbs is that your children will be blessed in every way to have learned the practice of joy; to have learned how it is to be cultivated and to be enjoyed. In a sick world, that good cheer will inoculate them from the harm that so much sorrow can otherwise cause in a human heart and a human life.
The third and last subject in this miscellany is furnished in Proverbs 19:11.
“Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.”
I’m particularly interested in the second phrase, as we devoted an entire sermon to Proverbs’ teaching about anger some weeks ago. “…and it is his glory to overlook an offense.” There is a summons for your life and mine!
I suppose almost all of us and all of us sooner or later from time to time learn something to the discredit of someone else. We observe them doing something or we are told that they have done something. We now have some dirt on another person. And the terrible temptation facing us at that moment is to spread that news, to gossip in other words. What do they say? “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” It is such a fact of life. So much harm is done because we find such delicious pleasure in telling what we know to the discredit of others. It is worth asking ourselves why we do this? Why we have such a compulsion to do this! You’ve heard something about somebody else. You can hardly wait to tell it to somebody else. It is our pride, of course. We seem to elevate ourselves by lowering others and dishing dirt is a time-honored way of lowering others. We look better in comparison. There is also the attention we attract from others to whom we divulge these secrets because, alas, people are always interested in dirt.
But here is the proverb telling us that it is the glory of a man or woman to overlook an offense, which is to say, to have something to say to the discredit of another and to keep it entirely to oneself, to do nothing with the information we have except perhaps to be kind toward him or her in our thoughts to and pray for the individual.
Here is something for all of us at least once or twice in our lives to stop and consider. Keeping someone else’s secrets, especially those secrets that would reflect poorly on them, is a triumph of human conduct and a mark of unusual godliness. Indeed, when you are given to know something significant to another’s discredit and you carry that knowledge with you to the grave, no one else ever hearing it from you, the Bible says you are covered in glory. Almost no one keeps juicy secrets, which is why newspaper reporters and bloggers have so much to write about every day. But it ought to be a truism that Christians do. You may remember Mark Twain’s wonderful simile, it’s my favorite Twain simile: “The man was as confident as a Presbyterian with four aces.” Well, let’s invent one of our own: “That person is as tight-lipped as a Christian with someone else’s secret!”
Next Saturday is St. Patrick’s Day. If you remember the story of his life, you will remember that when he had been bishop of Ireland for some time he ran afoul of the bishops of Britain who were the very men who commissioned him to his work in Ireland, a country that before Patrick was only a missionary field and a particularly hard and dangerous one at that. Indeed, if you remember, as a teenager Patrick had been captured by Irish raiders, sold into servitude, and spent some years doing hard labor as a slave in Ireland. The trouble began when an English warlord by the name of Coroticus, undoubtedly a Christian in name himself, raided Ireland and attacked a group of Patrick’s converts who were returning home after Easter celebrations in which they had been baptized with their wives and children. Many of them were still wearing the white robes in which they had been baptized. The men the raiders didn’t kill and their wives and children were taken back to Britain to be sold as slaves. Enraged, Patrick sent to Britain many copies of a letter to Coroticus and his subjects, excommunicating the general, threatening damnation to his soldiers, exhorting the the British church to have nothing to do with these men, and ordering the captives released and sent home with their property. This letter, however, angered the British bishops because they saw it as an interference in their affairs. If anyone was to discipline Coroticus, it should be they; though Patrick understood rightly that they would do nothing of the kind. For Patrick the gospel itself and the future of the fledgling Irish church was at stake and there was no time to lose.
The British church replied with formal accusations against Patrick and a summons for him to return to Britain, which summons he wisely refused. But, in the spirit of thinly disguised revenge, the charges the British bishops listed against him began with a sin he had committed many years before, when a teenager – we don’t know what the sin was – and which he had confessed to a friend before he was ordained to the Christian ministry. The confession of his sin at that time, when he was still a younger man, was no doubt to clear his conscience before he should take up the office of minister. Patrick’s friend had kept the secret for years, but now, for some reason – we don’t know what it was (he was known as Patrick’s friend, perhaps he had been pressured by the bishops; perhaps he was jealous of Patrick’s growing international reputation) – he chose to disclose Patrick’s ancient sin to others. That sin became the pretext for a long list of accusations, all of which others were untrue. His reply to those accusations is today known as his Confession, one of two great works from St. Patrick’s hand that are in existence today.
Still, how sad that a man who had kept a secret for a long time couldn’t keep it when it mattered most. How sad and how typical. No, brothers and sisters, when God’s providence entrusts you with someoone else’s secret, as it will, give thanks to God that you have been given the opportunity to overlook a fault and to get glory for yourself and give glory to God, the keeper of your secrets, by never telling it to anyone, ever! More Christians should relish the opportunity to do this and it should be our reputation together that we are a community in which the worst secrets of other brothers and sisters are safe and sound.
A miscellany of interesting pieces of wisdom from the great book of Proverbs. What is true wisdom? What is the skillful living that Proverbs is training us in? Well, among many other things, and among many still greater things, it is kindness to animals, it is the cultivation of a happy heart, and it is a tight-lipped concern for the secrets of others.