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Spiritual Disciplines III: Work

Joe Harby on March 17, 2013

Introduction

God breathed the breath of life in Adam, and he became a living soul (Gen. 2:7). Having created him as a living soul, He gave him an abundance of food to eat (Gen. 1:29). The third thing that happened was that God gave him a task (Gen. 2:15). His immediate task was to tend the Garden, and his long term task was to subdue the entire earth. So there we have the full curriculum of the spiritual disciplines—breathe, eat, work.

The Text

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:27-28).

Summary of the Text

Notice that the creation of man as male and female was essential to the task that was later assigned. First, mankind as male/female is how we bear the image of God (v. 27). Mankind was given dominion over the earth as the vice- gerent of God, and if we are stopped and asked what authority we have for doing this or that, we must show our papers. And what are those papers? The answer is the fact that we bear the image of God. All attempts by evolutionists to deny that we are created in the image of God are either attempts to abdicate the task entirely, or are attempts to usurp the authority from God, and to rule in our own name. It is usually the latter.

The dominion and stewardship that Adam was called to exercise was absolutely dependent upon the wife he was given. Prior to Eve’s formation from the rib, he could have been told to trim a bush, or cut a path, or build a monument. He could have done such things by himself. But the globe was always going to be enormous, and Adam would have remained a solitary guy. The command was to be fruitful and multiply. How could Adam do that by himself ? He could not. If Adam was commanded to dig a hole, he could have figured out a way to do it. But he was commanded to replicate himself.

A True Image

This is why incidentally, the whole debate over homosexual marriage is an instance of high rebellion, and is not just a public indulgence of a petty vice. In response to such follies, our task is to present the image of God accurately, as well as to present a living model of Christ and the Church. We have the privilege, in our marriages, to testify both to creation and redemption. Marriage is high theology.

The Cultural Mandate

Man therefore has a right to tend and supervise what is happening on the earth. Good stewardship is our responsibility, assigned by God. This awesome responsibility was made much more difficult and complicated when our race fell into sin. The task was now far beyond us, but the task was not removed from us. After the judgment of God that fell on the earth with the Flood, this cultural mandate was repeated (Gen. 9:1). Despite our sin, we still have all the same responsibilities. Because this is our house, we are the ones who have to mow the lawn.

But God saw our inabilities and promised a Messiah, one who would enable us to fulfill and discharge the responsibility that He gave to us. Even after the Fall, the psalmist is amazed at the dominion responsibility that God gave to man (Ps. 8:6). And the author of Hebrews notes that it was not until Christ came that the true fulfillment of this was even remotely possible (Heb. 2:8-9). We do not yet see everything subject to man, the way it ought to be, but . . . we see Jesus.

A Caution

Unconverted men do not want to follow God’s order. They want to be saved “by works,” which means ultimately, that they believe the order is work, live, eat. But we are not saved by good works, but rather we are saved to good works (Eph. 2:8-10). God gives life first, strength second, and the task last. To this I labor, Paul says, struggling mightily with the energy He supplies (Col. 1:29). And in another place he says that we are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work in us, to will and to do according to His good pleasure (Phil. 2:12-13). Work out what God works in—that is, life and strength. Lots of good works, but no autonomous good works. It is all grace.

Another Caution

As we exercise stewardship, we have to be extremely careful to pay attention to the boundaries of our stewardship, which are marked out by God in the institution of private property (Ex. 20:15). Just the prohibition of adultery presupposes the institution of marriage, so also the prohibition of stealing presupposes the institution of private property. And the state has no more right to confiscate property willy-nilly than the sultan has the right to gather up his nation’s wives into his harem.

Man in Microcosm

Adam and Eve are the paradigmatic couple. The way they got married sets the pattern for all mankind—a man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and the two become one flesh (Matt. 19:5). Paul applies this to the matter of calling and vocation as well (1 Cor. 11:8-9). The man was made for the task, and the task of the woman was the man. The man tends the garden, and the woman tends the man. These are not watertight categories, obviously, but Scripture does describe this authoritatively as being our foundational orientation.

Baskets of Fruit are Heavy

Now the thing that we are to take away from this pattern of breathe, eat, work is that the task of mankind is that of management. We do not create wealth ex nihilo—we manage it as it comes off the tree. We are stewards of a multiplying world.

This world needs to trimmed, managed, shepherded, replenished, and we are to do it in the name of Jesus and a good amount of sweat. The institution of work is a pre-fall institution, just like marriage is. We are to learn how —in Christ—to resist and overcome the effects of the Fall on our labors. And the more we do, the more it multiplies.

Spiritual Disciplines II: Eat

Joe Harby on March 10, 2013

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Introduction

So there are three imperatives we are considering as we look at the spiritual disciplines. They are breathe, eat, and work. We have already seen the need for the gift of breath, and we will now look at the charge to eat.

The Text

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17).

Summary of the Text

As we have considered, Adam was shaped from the dust of the ground. Eve was therefore a granddaughter of the soil, taken from the side of Adam, just as Adam had been taken from the side of the earth. After he had been shaped, God breathed into him the breath of life. Once he had become a living soul, it became apparent that this living soul would need ongoing sustenance. Here in our passage, the Lord God gave him all the food in the garden, with one exception. He was not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but every other tree was free and available to him. This included, incidentally, the tree of life (Gen. 2:9). That tree was only shut off to him after the Fall, most probably as an act of mercy. But the simple need for food in an ongoing way is plainly a design feature, unrelated to sin.

God Gives the Increase

The gift of physical life is sustained by the gift of physical food. Man was created an eating creature. So in the same way, spiritual life is sustained by spiritual food. Life seeks out food, and life incorporates food. But how food is able to do what it does is a grand mystery. Although this passage is about a plant being nourished and growing as a result, the principle is the same for all living things. “So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase” (1 Cor. 3:7). You don’t eat a sandwich and then set aside the next half hour for issuing commands down to your digestive system to make sure everything goes where it needs to. That part of it is built in. You just put food in, and life does something with it. How? God gives the increase.

The Menu

So just as a living body needs to import nutrition, so also does the soul. We have already considered the reality of it. But what are we supposed to eat to nourish our spiritual lives? In what ways are we instructed to feed?

Another way of asking this is to wonder what menu God has prepared for us. Here are some of the key items that feed us.

The Word of God feeds us. Man does not live by bread alone (Matt.4:4), but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We are called to eat teaching, eat doctrine—and not sporadically either (Heb. 5:14; 1 Pet. 2:2).
The sacraments feed us. They are explicitly described for us as spiritual food (1 Cor. 10:1-4; 16). We are instructed to take care that we eat in a particular way, but when we do, we are nourished by Christ Himself.
Music feeds us. We are to teach and admonish one another by psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16). This is clearly a combination because the words are the Word of God also, but God wants us to feed on the Word while singing it.
Prayer feeds us. We too often think of prayer as outlay instead of intake. But Jesus said that prayer understood properly strengthens rather than drains (Mark 9:29).
Doing the will of God feeds us. The Lord told His disciples that He had nourishment that they didn’t know about (John 4:31-34). He told them this after He had ministered to the woman at the well.
And fellowship feeds us. We see this as one of the things the new believers on Pentecost naturally sought out (Acts 2:42).

Balanced Diet

We have made the point that healthy life doesn’t need “hungry lessons.” At the same time, if you established all your physical eating habits as a small child, you might now be subsisting on a diet revolving around deep-fried Oreos. This is the way of the libertine. But there is also the legalist, the one who wants to be put right or kept right with God by means of some healthy sounding thing that you can sprinkle on your salad, like pine bark shavings.

Use the dining table to illustrate the point about your Bible reading, or any other form of spiritual grazing. Why do you eat? For most people, you should eat for two basic reasons—first, because you are hungry, and second, because its dinner time. Why do you need other reasons? And if other reasons are front and center, you are probably over-thinking it.

Christ in All of It

So we feed on the Word of God. Christ is the Word (John 1:1). We are nourished by the sacraments—but the Old Testament saints are said to have been nourished by Christ. They drank Christ; they ate Christ, the bread from Heaven (1 Cor. 10:1-4). We are baptized into the death of Christ (Rom. 6:3), and we are made partakers of Christ in the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 10:16). We sing Christ (Col. 3:16). Christ prays for us (Rom. 8:34), and whenever we pray, we are praying in Christ. Because we know it is true that of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, we offer our bodies a living sacrifice, which proves and establishes the will of God (Rom. 12:1-2). This nourishes us. The fellowship we enjoy with one another is fellowship that is grounded in walking in the light as He is in the light (1 John 1:7). In short, it is Jesus everywhere.

Spiritual Disciplines I: Breathe

Joe Harby on March 3, 2013

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Introduction

We are going to be spending this week and the next two on the subject of the spiritual disciplines. I am putting them together as three imperatives—breathe, eat, work. When God put Adam into this world, He gave him the breath of life, He gave him food to eat, and He gave him work to do. This is the pattern we should receive from Him as we seek to order our lives rightly.

The Text

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7).

Summary of the Text

Although we were created and fashioned in the image of God, it remains a fact that we are utterly dependent creatures. The Lord God shaped and fashioned man out of the dust of the ground. When He was done “sculpting,” He had a very fine statue, but still lifeless. God then breathed the breath of life into His work. At that moment Adam became a living soul. And ever since that first breath, if God ever takes His breath away, all creatures, man and animal alike, return necessarily to the dust of the ground (Ps. 104:29-30).

The Meaning of Death

Our physical life is a spiritual reality, but we all recognize that there is more to our spiritual lives than just physical breathing. But we know that non-Christians have souls, for example. What do we have that they do not?

In the Bible, death refers to separation more than it refers to simple cessation. In the Garden, God told Adam that the day they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they would die (Gen. 2:17). But what happened when they did? They were exiled from the garden, separated from the communion with God that they had enjoyed before (Gen. 3:24). And when Adam died physically, 70 years shy of a millennium later, what happened was that his soul and his body were then separated (Gen. 5:5). The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23), which means that because we are sinners, we are separated from God, estranged from Him (Col. 1:21).

This is why is says in Ephesians that when we were non-Christians we were dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1), in which trespasses we used to walk (Eph. 2:2). That is the biblical picture—dead but walking around. So the death cannot refer to a condition of being like stone, or like nothing. It refers to separation.

And when we are quickened in regeneration, we are made alive spiritually. Now the soul and spirit can be very hard to distinguish (Heb. 4:12), but there is a difference. Someone who is truly regenerate is quickened in the inner man (2 Cor. 4:16). “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses” (Col. 2:13).

The Word for Spirit

The word for spirit in Greek is pneuma. Interestingly, that is also the word for wind, and it is also the word for breath.

“The wind [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit [pneuma]” (John 3:8).

The Lord’s whole point here is designed to make us aware of how utterly sovereign the Holy Spirit is. We cannot whistle Him up. On a windy day, you cannot capture some in a paper bag to take home and show everybody. We cannot manufacture aerosol cans that will spray someone with the breath of life. This is outside of our control.

Gotta Be Alive

The spiritual disciplines all work within an assumed context of life.

But an entire religious industry has sprung up trying to make food attractive to corpses, and trying to get dead bodies to contribute more than they do.

One of the most remarkable things about life is that it incorporates, naturally and readily, the things around it that are conducive to its well-being.

But think for a moment about this. “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Pet. 2:2). Healthy babies are born hungry—you don’t have to teach them to be hungry. Their hunger is a sign of life. They have been given the breath of life. “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42, ESV). There it is again—born hungry.

Impressive Activity, But . . .

People who are separated from God, who are not in fellowship with Him, can do an impressive number of things that have a religious nature. They can give their bodies to be burned, and they can help the poor (1 Cor. 13:3). They can speak with the tongues of men and angels (1 Cor. 13:1). But, despite all of this activity, the whole enterprise amounts to a bunch of nothing.

In fact, climbing the highest mountain and swimming the deepest sea is what the unregenerate (but religious) man wants to do. It is an impulse that makes good sense to him, and doing anything else doesn’t make sense to him. When Naaman came to Elisha to be healed, the simplicity of the assigned task infuriated him. But his servants wisely observed that if he had been told to do some great thing, he would have done it (2 Kings 5:13). And why? Because great deeds flatter us. Receiving grace as beggar supplicants does not flatter us.

Where It Begins

There are no spiritual disciplines for creating life. Only the gospel creates life. Once given, life incorporates nutrients. Life seeks out nutrients. Life bends its entire nature toward that end.

So the first spiritual discipline is checking for a pulse. The first spiritual discipline is making sure you are alive. Breathe.

And to be alive, the God of Heaven must breathe His Holy Spirit into you.

Wisdom from Above V

Joe Harby on February 17, 2013

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Introduction

The fact that this prophetic warning is located just on the threshold of God’s judgment of Israel in 70 A.D. does not prevent it from providing us with a number of useful warnings. They were told to look back at similar times of affliction in the Old Testament, and so we have two sets of such historical warnings. Locating this in the first century, therefore, does not make this irrelevant to us, but rather doubly relevant.

The Text

“Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten . . .” (Jas. 5:1-20).

Summary of the Text

The rich are instructed to weep for the coming miseries (v. 1). The wealth they have, and the luxuries they possess, are all coming apart (v. 2). Their gold and silver is corroded, and will both testify against them and devour them (v. 3). They have made piles of treasure for the last days (v. 3). The next judgment tells us what kind of rich men we are talking about (v. 4). They can hire roomfuls of lawyers to keep the working man in bondage to the fine print. They are sensualists, fattening themselves for God’s charnel house (v. 5). They are rich men who kill just men (v. 6).

So the brothers ought to be patient in waiting for the coming of the Lord, just like a farmer waits (v. 7). They should strengthen their hearts as the coming of the Lord approaches (v. 8). Don’t break out into squabbles . . . the judge is at the door (v. 9). Christians in the first century should take a page from the Old Testament prophets (v. 10). We consider men happy who endure misery through to the end (v. 11). Count Job a happy man therefore.

Whatever you do, don’t swear by created things. Let your yes be yes (v. 12). The afflicted should pray (v. 13). The merry should sing psalms (v. 13). The sick should ask for the elders to come (v. 14). The prayer of faith will raise up the sick, and sickness is more closely related to sin issues than we might want to think (v. 15). Confess your faults and failings to one another, so that you might be healed (v. 16). In this humbled, honest context, fervent prayer avails much. Elijah was a man with problems like we have, and look how God answered his prayers (vv. 17- 18). Go after those who wander off (v. 19). Let the one you are chasing know that he is being pulled back from death, and that a multitude of sins is being covered (v. 20) . . . which is the task of love.

Injustice on the Threshold of Judgment

The Bible describes the run-up to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. in terms that should make us think of the denouement of The Odyssey. We see rich and insolent suitors devouring what is not theirs, while justice is right at the door. This chapter describes this kind of scene for us well.

The rich here are the same ones in chapter two, those who mistreat the saints (Jas. 2:6). Their wealth is not like that of Abraham or Solomon, but rather was wickedly obtained (v. 3). They rob their laborers of wages that were promised to them, keeping the wages back by fraud (v. 4). They live in wanton luxury (v. 5). They use their wealth to murder just people (v. 6). Foolish saints are tempted to flatter such men, but what is required is for us to stand against them with a prophetic courage.

For all their wisdom (the kind of wisdom that is from below), these rich people do not know they are on the precipice of disaster. They have heaped up piles of loot for the last days (v. 3). A mound of gold at your feet in Hell will just melt and run away. Those afflicted by these people are told to be patient to the coming of the Lord (v. 7). The coming of the Lord is drawing near (v. 8). The judge is standing right at the door (v. 9). From these descriptions, this had to have happened in the first century. But this does not make such warnings irrelevant to us —all of us will meet God within one lifetime . . . our own.

Sickness and Sin

We know from the teaching of Scripture that sin and suffering are not automatically connected. James mentions Job here as a patient and happy man (v. 11), and not the sinner that his three counselors thought he was. And of course, Jesus effectively countered His disciples who thought a man was born blind because of his or his parents’ sin (John 9:3).

But the fact that there is not an automatic connection does not mean there is no connection. When the elders pray, it says, healing and forgiveness are closely connected (v. 15). This is why we should be honest with each other (v. 16). Being honest means that we will not treat the whole thing as a cosmic karma machine, but neither will we shuffle off all responsibility as though there could not be a connection.

Merriment and the Psalms

The psalms are like the blues. One of the striking things about the blues is that singing them makes you feel better. Even though the subject of many blues songs is pretty grim (“nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too”), the overall effect of the blues is pretty upbeat.

The same thing is true of the psalms. Notice that James says that if someone is merry, he should “sing psalms.” He does not say that the merry one should sing Psalms 148, 149, and 150. The book of psalms is full of affliction, and yet God tells us that it provides us with our vocabulary of joy and godly mirth. Psalms of distress, psalms of war, psalms of fear, psalms of imprecation, psalms of penitence . . . into the hopper.

Confession and Accusation

Remember that the world runs on envy and accusation. Remember that God gives more grace. But what sense does it make to confess my faults to others when anything I say can and will be used against me? We are not to confess anything in an attempt manipulate God, or as we try to get Him to do our bidding. We are to confess our sins in Christ, and we are to be lifted up in Christ. Confession must not be a “work.” It must be all of grace.

Wisdom from Above IV

Joe Harby on February 10, 2013

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Introduction

The devil is a moralist. The devil is self-righteous. The devil is an angel of light. The name Lucifer means light- bearer. Who could be against that? The devil is censorious. The devil disapproves of us, and likes it when we disapprove of one another. The devil is a Pharisee. The devil is the accuser of the brethren, accusing them day and night before the throne. And this means we should be more far more concerned than we usually are about the danger of becoming like the devil.

The Text

“From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not . . .” (Jas. 4:1-17).

Summary of the Text

Where do our fights come from (v. 1)? They come, not from outside us, but from inside us. You want something, but don’t get it (v. 2). You kill but don’t get it. You fight and go to war, but you won’t humble yourself and ask for it (v. 2). You want it by conquest, not as a gift of grace. And, when you do ask, your motives for asking are all messed up (v. 3). Friendship with the world and friendship with God cannot coexist together (v. 4). The spirit in us veers toward envy (v. 5). But God gives more grace. He resists the proud and gives grace to the humble (v. 6). Submit, resist, and watch the devil flee (v. 7). Approach God and He will approach you (v. 8). To approach God, you must purify yourself. You must afflict your soul (v. 9), and not on the surface of it either. Humble yourself so that God might lift you up (v. 10).

Don’t speak evil of one another. To judge your brother is tantamount to judging the law (v. 11), which is bad. There is one lawgiver, and it isn’t you (v. 12). Come now, ye big movers and shakers (v. 13)—you don’t know that your entire life is a little wisp of fog at 7 am that will be gone in 45 minutes (v. 14), as soon as the sun gets over the trees. Your plans for the future therefore ought to take the Lord’s will into account (v. 15). If you don’t, you are boasting, which is an evil self-sufficiency (v. 16). So if you know what is right, you had better do it (v. 17).

We might not really want to, but let’s unpack this further.

What Desire Does

The first and most obvious thing is that desire collides with other desires. Two men want the same job, the same honor, the same girl, the same reputation, the same birthright. Where does conflict come from? James answers the question bluntly—from the desires of your members. Instead of praying to God for the desire of your heart (Ps. 37:4), you pray with the desire of your heart, and so you are turned down flat. This blind desire (which amounts to the desire to be friends with the world) is a desire that is enmity toward God (v. 4). Our front end needs to be aligned—left to ourselves we always veer toward the envy ditch. This is because we desire things in a world where others are usually there first. In fact, given your luck, they are always there first.

How Desire Awakens

Desire awakens because of the presence of the other. This is why desire (and the desire of others) leads to conflict, war, grabbing, accusations, and judging. Using the law that way makes you exegete Scripture like the devil. The name Satan means accuser; the word devil refers to slanderous accusation. But who wants to be like that? Well, more people want to be like that than know they want to be like that. When you boast about what you will do tomorrow, such boasting has others in the rear view mirror (vv. 11, 16). Watch my dust, chump. So remember what we learned in the previous chapter about the wisdom from above and the wisdom from below.

And He Will Flee . . .

Now consider the wonderful promise of v. 7. Submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. But if we have superficial views of the nature of our relationships, and the nature of our conflicts, and the nature of our desires, then we can apply this verse until we turn blue, and the devil will not flee at all. He will just sit there, leering at you. And he will make comments from time to time, because he likes to watch you twitch.

If you view the “world of desire” as simple, then it will not be surprising that you are easily confounded. God says not to take that chocolate chip cookie, and so all you have to do is submit to God on the point of law, recognize that the cookie belongs to another, and poof! the devil vanishes. So if it is so simple, why doesn’t he vanish?

Submit to God means to submit to His entire evaluation, as described in this extended passage, of the tangled web of conflicting desires that makes up your world, and it means to break off your adulterous friendship with the world entirely. To resist the devil means to resist the spirit of accusation that whispers to you every day about how right you are. Who is that who tells you every morning that you are “quite right”? Do you really need to ask? If you want the devil to flee and your right to accuse others to stay, then you are a double-minded man, not knowing what on earth you are asking for.

Gracious Vindication

When we are delivered from envy (and from the envious), we are delivered by grace. God gives more grace (v. 6). He gives grace to the humble (v. 6). He will lift up the one who has humbled himself (v. 10), not the one who has vaunted himself. God draws near to such a person (v. 8). If the Lord blesses, we will do what we do—otherwise not (v. 15). Please note that there is such a thing as vindication. There is a rear view mirror, but you had better not be looking in it the wrong way. Remember the contextual flow. The one who is boasting in his great business plans is someone who clearly has an eye on the competition.

One Last Thing

Is James an accuser? Look again at verse 4, and ask if James is a devil. Is any minister who preaches these words a pulpit devil? Well, it has been done before, but there is a key distinction. The cross comes down to one point, and one point only. The cross judges the judgmental.