Christ Church

A More Excellent Way

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Introduction:
We are continuing to consider the problems posed by desire, envy, competition, and ambition. We have now come to competition, something dear to the heart of most Americans. But because of this we must guard our step. You have heard many times that we must repent of our virtues, and this subject is a good place to start.

The Text:
“Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others” (Phil. 2:3-4).

Overview:
This passage is taken from the chapter in which the perfect humility of Christ was exalted to the highest place. This is not presented to us as a striking anomaly, but rather as being central to what we as Christians are called to imitate. How many things are we allowed to do because of our striving (v. 3)? Nothing. How about vainglory (v. 3)? Nothing again. What should our mindset be toward others? St. Paul replies we should consider them “better,” that is, more important than we do ourselves. This is to be our central disposition. This is to be characteristic of how our mind goes. Paul then says that we are not to look on our own things (v. 4), but also on the things of others (v. 4). This word in the second half of the phrase helps us to understand what is meant in the first half. This is a comparative statement, not an absolute statement. It is similar to when Paul tells each of us to carry our own burden (Gal. 6:5), carry his own weight. This is fully consistent with his exhortation for us to carry one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2). Only the mind of Christ can sort this out.

Devil Take the Hindmost?:
There is a laissez-faire approach to competition that is very important for the civil magistrate to remember when it comes to the question of him restricting, regulating, organizing, or otherwise botching economic activity. But, as you have been reminded many times, there is a difference between sins and crimes. And just because something ought not to be criminal, with penalties attached, does not mean that it is healthy and automatically non-sinful. Lust ought not to be against the law, but that doesn’t make it okay. The civil magistrate is not competent to outlaw greed either, and all messianic attempts to do so have been disastrous. However . . .
There are Christians who see this, and who conclude from it that a “let ‘er rip” attitude should be allowed everywhere. But the civil magistrate is not prohibited from addressing greed because it is an invisible sin. It is not invisible, and other governments are required to deal with it. A family can see and identify what their problem is. “He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house; but he that hateth gifts shall live” (Prov. 15:27). The church is required to exclude from ecclesiastical office men who are greedy. “Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous” (1 Tim. 3:3; cf. 3:8). The civil government must not give way to this sin itself (Ex. 18:21). The Bible requires us not to elect officials unless they hate covetousness. We have taken this to mean that we shouldn’t vote for them unless they are steeped in it. Our political parties taken together constitute a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Money.
Now the fact that even a good civil government is not competent to outlaw greed does not mean that no entity is competent to deal with it. The family and church must deal with it.

Better How?:
In our text, the word “better” is a rendering of hyperecho. What does lowliness of mind require of us in this? Remember we are trying to build the mind of Christ, which cannot be done out of two-by-fours. We tend to read the English here as requiring us to believe that the other person is better at doing whatever it is we might be comparing, which is obviously crazy. Having run into this superficial roadblock, we dismiss the entire problem from our minds. But this is dangerous. The word hyperecho can also be rendered as “to be above, to stand out.”

That does not make the other person automatically right, or superior in his abilities. Remember that the one we are imitating in this is the Lord Jesus—when He became a man, He did so because He believed we were “better” (in this sense) than He was. This obviously has to means the sense of “more important, more valued.” Jesus did not die for us because we were better than He in some moral sense. He died for us because He loved us more than He loved His own life. So the issue is humility and love, and nothing in this requires us to embrace absurdities.

Bearing Burdens:
Now our task is to learn how to bear our own burden (providing for our own family, meeting our own responsibilities) at the same time we are careful to bear one another’s burdens (holding to a true fellowship of goods). The early Christians kept their own property (Acts 5:4) and they held all things in common (Acts 4:32-33). Here are a few basic principles as we pursue the mind of Christ, as we long for “great grace to be upon us all.”
We began this series with desire and envy, which run down the middle of every human heart. Deal with all the big problems there first. And don’t think that thirty seconds reflection or mere intellectual assent is going to do the trick.

Secondly, learn how justice fits into grace. Don’t go the other way, trying to fit grace into justice. Grace corrodes when stored in justice. Justices thrives and grows strong in grace. It is better to be taken to the cleaners because you loaned money, expecting nothing back (Luke 6:35) than to have an evil eye, tight fist, and wary heart (Mk. 7:22).
Third, work hard and intelligently, expecting your work to not only provide for your family, but also to be a blessing to any brother who is “competing” for the same customers you are. That’s impossible, you say. Tell it to God, who traffics in impossibilities. Zero-sum thinking is the logic of unbelief—where more for you means less for me.

Living in a Cut-Throat World:
Keeping ourselves free from strife and vainglory seems like an overwhelming task sometimes. What are to do about the outside world, which does not appear to be functioning with this calculus at all? What grasping and ravenous entities are out there? Besides Microsoft, the U.S. Government, assorted televangelists, the Republicrats, the United Nations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and more? What should we do about all that? First, we must not envy them (Prov. 3:29-32; 23:17-18). Second, we must not imitate them or their ways (Matt. 20:25-26). And third, we should live in our communities such that we teach them a more excellent way (1 Cor. 12: 31)

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Heavier Than Wet Sand

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Introduction:
In this series, we are considering the temptations presented to us by desire, envy, competition, and ambition. Last week we looked at desire—the quarry from which many sins are hewn—and is a word which, thankfully for the writers of rock ballads, rhymes with fire. We now turn to the thing that our spirits’ desires naturally run to, which is envy (Jas. 4:1-3, 5-6).

The Text:
“A stone is heavy, and the sand weighty; but the fool’s wrath is heavier than them both. Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; but who is able to stand before envy?” (Prov. 27:3-4).

Overview:
The writer of Proverbs begins with an illustration. A heavy stone is hard to pick up (v. 3), and the same thing is true of sand (v. 3). And when a fool gets angry, that is heavier than both or either of them. You should rather have your pick up filled with wet sand than to encounter an angry fool. Then, building on that first thought, since we are now at the next level, wrath is cruel (v. 4). The synonym anger is outrageous (v. 4), but envy carries everything before it. Envy is therefore a formidable sin.

Definitions:
Jealousy is to be possessive of what is lawfully your own. Because we are sinners, we sometimes give way to jealousy for wrong causes, or in a wrong manner, but Scripture is clear that jealousy is not inherently sinful. Our God is a jealous God; His name is Jealous (Ex. 20:5; 34:14). Simple greed or covetousness wants what it does not have, and wants to have it without reference to God’s conditions for having it. The thing that it wants may have been seen in a store, a catalog, or a neighbor’s driveway. This sin is tantamount to idolatry (Eph. 5:5), putting a created thing in place of the Creator. But envy is more than excessive jealousy, and is far more than simply a lazy or idolatrous desire. Envy is a formidable sin, as our text shows, because it combines its own desires for the object (status, money, women, whatever) with a malicious insistence that the other person lose his possession of it. In two places Paul puts malice and envy cheek by jowl (Rom. 1:28-29; Tit. 3:3), and this is no accident. In the Bible, when envy moves, violence and coercion are not far off (Acts. 7:9; 13:45; 17:5; Matt. 27:18). Envy sharpens its teeth every night. We may therefore define envy as a particular kind of willingness to use coercion to deprive someone of what is lawfully his.

The Natural Condition of Man:
We saw last week that the spirit within us “lusteth to envy” (Jas. 4:5-6). This is our natural tendency; it is a universal problem. We saw also that a recognition of complicity in the sin is the way of escape. That recognition is called repentance, and can only be found in Christ. Outside of Christ, envy is the natural condition of all mankind. Before we were converted, what were we like? “For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Tit. 3:3). That is what we are like. “Being filled with all unrighteousness . . . covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder . . .” (Rom. 1:29).

When we are brought into Christ, this does not grant us automatic immunity to this sin—we must still guard ourselves. We have to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God, and that includes death to this sin. For example, the godly have to be told not to envy sinners (Prov. 3:29-32; 23:17-18). And we have to guard ourselves against sanctimonious envy, the kind Judas tried to display in his false concern for the poor (Mark 14:5,10; John 12:3-6).

The Invisible Vice:
In striking contrast to many other sins, nobody readily admits to being envious. Envy is petty and malicious. Envy is unattractive to just about everybody, and in order to operate openly in the world, it has to sail under false colors. Envy is clandestine; envy is sneaky. To admit to envy is to admit self-consciously to being tiny-souled, beef jerky- hearted, petty, and mean-spirited, and to admit this is dangerously close to repentance. To be out-and-out envious is to be clearly in the wrong.

Envy often decks itself out with the feathers of admiration, and tends to praise too loudly or too much. One writer said to “watch the eyes of those who bow lowest.” The praise can come from someone who does not yet know his own heart, or it can come from someone who is trying to position himself to get within striking distance. Guard your heart; don’t become a Uriah Heep.

Envy occupies itself much with matters of justice, and becomes a collector of injustices, both real and imagined. Since envy cannot speak its own name, the closest virtue capable of camouflaging the sin is zeal for justice. And since true Christians should be very much concerned with true justice, be sure to run diagnostics on your heart as you do so.

Envy gets worse as the gifts get greater—when dealing with talent, artistic temperaments, and great intellectual achievements. We sometimes assume that we can “cultivate” our way out of the temptation, which is the reverse of the truth.

Heading It Off:
Because we are naive about this sin, in ourselves and in others, we glibly assume that if God only blesses us a little bit more, that will make it clear that we are nice people and that there is no reason to envy us. But of course, this only makes everything worse. Should the “neighbor” in the tenth commandment assume that if God only gave him a bigger house and faster car that this would somehow resolve the problems of his green-eyed neighbor next door? Is he serious? Many of you are at the beginning of your lives, your careers, your accomplishments. And you need to know that when marked success comes to some of you, the poison will start to flow. Even in the church? Yes, even here, but if we take note of our hearts now, if we internalize these truths now, we are laboring for the peace and purity of our congregation—one of the things we are covenanted to in our membership vows. When James takes aim at conflict in the church, he takes aim at envy. So remember that the love of Christ is forever, and envy is transient. Speaking of the earthbound, Solomon says, “Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun” (Ecc. 9:5-6).

Gore Vidal once said, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” In stark contrast, the apostle Paul said, “Love does not envy” (1 Cor. 13: 4).

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Desire Runs Deep

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Introduction:
One of our central duties—as Christians seeking to live obediently in this fallen world—is to learn the true nature of the temptations before us. The oldest trap in the world for us is to “objectify” sin in a simplistic way, placing certain items on a list of prohibitions, as though it would be so simple. And so we are going to take several weeks to consider the following four subjects—desire, envy, competition, and ambition.

The Text:
“And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou has made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen” (Matt. 20:1-16).

Overview:
We have here in this text an economic illustration of a spiritual and covenantal truth. The point of the parable is the relationship of Jews to Gentiles, the Jews having labored in the vineyard of the Lord for centuries, with the Gentiles breezing in at the last minute for some really good wages. At the same time, this kind of human reaction is a very common one, and it represents the kind of desire we are going to be considering. We respond this way with covenantal privileges, wages for work, bowls of ice cream and more. The kingdom is like a householder who went out to hire workers for his vineyard (v. 1). He hires some to work all day for an agreed upon price (v. 2). At the third hour, he hired some more without an agreed upon price (vv. 3-4). At the sixth and ninth hours, he did the same thing again (v. 5). At the eleventh hour, near the end of the day, he did the same thing again (vv. 6-7). When the day was over, the householder told his steward to pay everyone, starting with the last ones hired (v. 8). When this group was paid, they got what had been promised to the first group hired (v. 9). So when the first group got up to the pay table, they were naturally expecting more, but they got the exact terms of their contract instead (v. 10). Being sinners, they thought this was an injustice and grumbled about it (v. 11), saying that the householder had made the unequal equal (v. 12). The householder defended himself; justice was done (v. 13), and grace was extended (v. 14). What is it to you that I am being gracious to another (v. 15)? The last will be first, and the first last (v. 16).

Institutionalized Sin:
We have not only rejected this biblical way of thinking, we have also as a culture reversed all the values (Is. 5:20). We have institutionalized our sin—if a farmer today tried this stunt, he would immediately be slapped with a class- action lawsuit. Not only so, but he would be accused of injustice when his actions had been preeminently just. And if he took the stand in his own defense, and repeated the Lord’s argument to the plaintiffs—”Take what is yours and go your way”—he would quickly discover that we don’t like how Jesus thought and taught. We don’t like it at the macro level (covenant history) and we don’t like it at the micro level (different rates paid to kids for mowing your lawn). But why don’t we like it? In order to answer the question, we have to distinguish between two different kinds of desire.

Two Kinds of Desire:
A certain kind of desire is a creational, biological given. It is not social or corporate. You desire to breathe, for example. In the middle of a desert, you would want a drink of water, even if, especially if, the nearest town was a hundred miles away. An itch exactly halfway between your shoulder blades creates a desire that has nothing to do with anybody else. Let us call this simple desire, and let us thank God for it. “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (Gen. 2:9). No sin anywhere, and a world full of things to desire. God is good, and the created world is good to want, provided we know how to want it.

But we don’t. Sin entered the world at the Fall, and right along with it, a completely different kind of desire. This kind of desire shapes far more of your life than you probably recognize. This kind of desire is the driving engine of our text. We can see it appear just a few pages into our Bibles: “And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell” (Gen. 4:5). This is the seed bed of envy, but we are not to envy yet. “Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? But he giveth more grace” (Jas. 4:5-6).

Interwoven Desire:
This kind of desire runs far deeper than you probably recognize. Trying to see it is like trying to see the air we breathe. Trying to see it is like trying to see your own eyeball. This kind of desire is the kind of thing we use to look with, instead of learning how (by the grace of God) to look at it. This kind of desire— interwoven desire, metaphysical desire—is not something we tend to bring to the bar of God’s justice; rather, we use it idolatrously as the bar of justice. We want, and therefore we know what all others should want on our behalf (if only they had a sense of “justice”).

Step out of your desires for a moment. Learn to look at your life as though you were watching a movie, and “you” were a character up on the screen there. View your wants dispassionately, with a sense of justice that is not fed by the simple fact of your desiring. This is the heart of what Jesus provided for us in the profound ethic of the Golden Rule. “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets” (Matt. 7:12). Note what obedience to this requires—it requires you to step out of yourself. The Golden Rule is not a fancy way of telling you to “be nice.” Nice people are often vicious when their niceness is not appropriately recognized. The Lord’s words require you to treat your desires as authoritative, but not authoritative in the treatment others give to you.

If you are “caught up” in this kind of desire, this means that you are wanting things because others want them, or because others have them, or because you believe that others want them, or you believe that others have them. Moreover, when you are caught up this way, there is no reasoning with you. And when God gives “more grace,” it is this problem that He is giving the grace to address. What are the sorts of things that we desire when we are desiring wrongly this way? Our desires include, but are not limited to: the favor and blessing of God, the birth status of your older brother, her looks, his wife’s looks, her education, his height, her body, his paycheck, his self- confidence . . . him being hired for easy money at the eleventh hour. If desire is authoritative in the mere fact of wanting, such irrational desires don’t seem irrational to the person in the grip of them. And this is why desire of this kind must be addressed by grace, and not by a logical argument.

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The New Ordinary

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Introduction:
The first Easter occurred at the time of Passover, which is when the first fruits of the barley crop were presented to the Lord. Pentecost, soon to follow, is when the first fruits of the wheat harvest were presented. As we consider the importance of the resurrection, we need to think of it in the right fashion, which means that we have to reflect on the meaning of first fruits.

The Text:
“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:20-26).

Overview:
Christ came back from the grave, and He did so in a glorified, physical body, the same (but transformed) body that had been laid in the tomb. (v. 20). He did this as the firstfruits (v. 20), meaning that His resurrection was one small, tiny part of the general resurrection. Adam introduced death into the world, and the last Adam introduced resurrection life into the world (v. 21). All shall die in the world because of Adam, and so all shall live in the world because of Christ (v. 22). But get the order right—the fruitfruits come first, and then the general harvest which occurs at Christ’s coming (v. 23). When Christ comes again, the kingdom which He has established (with all rule and all authority and all power) will be delivered up to the Father (v. 24). For Christ must reign (at the right hand of the Father) until all His enemies are subdued (v. 25). The last enemy in this process to be subdued will be death (v. 26), after which Christ will come again and render all things back to His Father.

Getting the Image Right:
One of the things we have to resist is a false image of human history, however orthodox we might believe we are on the historicity of Christ’s resurrection. This false image works this way—we think that human history is basically the same, at least from the Fall to the Second Coming. Things go on pretty much as they have always done. In the middle of this grim history, God placed the cross and resurrection, that resurrection being a completely anomalous event in an unchanged world. This cross and resurrection are “the gospel,” which means we can be “saved,” which means in turn that we will go to heaven when we die.
Try this image instead. At the Fall, human history became a movie we are watching in grainy and scratchy black and white. When Christ rose from the grave, a point of blinding light appeared at that place, and from that place, odd things started to happen—not in the plot lines of the story necessarily, but rather in the nature of the story itself. Color started to slowly spread out from that resurrection point, and the graininess started to slowly disappear and is gradually transformed into some kind of HDTV. Of course, over time, the story itself is affected. You have seen this kind of thing numerous times. When Aslan breathes on the stone statues and they all begin coming back to life, that is the kind of image we should have. And when that kind of thing starts to happen, we look at the screen intently, staring expectantly.

This means that the resurrection was not an odd event in the first century, with all “normal” things staying the same. The resurrection was the central event of all history, but we have to take this as the central event for all history. It defines history; it establishes the trajectory of the remaining story.

Distracted by the Interim State:
We have missed this, in part, because we have been distracted by a conclusion drawn from our individualistic premises. Because we start with “our own stalk of wheat,” we find ourselves leaving out the story of the harvest. If we started with the harvest, our own stalk would not be left out. Here is how it works.
When we die, before the harvest of all history, what happens to us? We go to be with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8). But over time, this intermediate state, this very temporary state of affairs, has somehow become for us our central hope, something we call “going to heaven.” We have drifted into a very Hellenistic idea of the immortality of the soul, up in another heavenly dimension somewhere, and we have lost the Hebraic truth of the resurrection of the dead.
The Bible doesn’t generally speak in our popular way of “going to heaven when we die”—not that it is technically wrong. The problem is that the interim state has become the overarching paradigm, replacing the biblical hope. The biblical hope is heaven coming here. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5). We look to heaven, not so much because that is where we are going in order to be saved, but because that is where our salvation is coming from (Phil. 3:20-21).

The New Ordinary:
So the resurrection is not simply a peculiar event in an old and decaying world. It is rather the defining event of the new creation, the new heavens and the new earth. It is harbinger of all things made new. We therefore cannot know the resurrection with an unresurrected epistemology (way of knowing). Resurrection life is the new ordinary.

This is why the materialism that came from the Enlightenment was a concerted way to get us back to the old way of knowing, the old way of relating to the authorities, the old way of dying. But Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not. This new order been established in the resurrection. If the dead are not raised, then rulers can rule in the old- fashioned way—“off with his head,” which is an argument that (as it seemed for a time) that had no proper answer. But the dead are raised, and moreover, the dead are raised in the middle of human history. The harvest has begun, and the firstfruits have been presented. What could be more unsettling to tyrants? Marx was right about a certain kind of religion—pie in the sky when we die religion is an opiate for the masses. But resurrection life is a nightmare for the principalities and powers, and their only device is to persuade the churches to stop talking about it. But we believe, and therefore we speak.

Now this means that if the firstfruits happened two thousand years ago, and the general harvest is sometime in the future, this historical interim is not a time in which “nothing is happening.” Rather, to return to our text, it is the time in which we, through the authority of the resurrection gospel, put down all rule and authority and power, bringing every thought captive.

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Penitential Seasons

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Introduction:
We are nearing the conclusion of the historic season of Lent, the preparation season for the celebration of Easter. This is Palm Sunday, the day in which we mark and celebrate the Lord’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. As we are trying to orient ourselves by and with a Christian year, instead of the secularized civic year, we are certainly taking a step in the right direction. But this does not mean that there are no pitfalls as we move in this direction. We have to remember that the Church has been here before, and we have stumbled before.

The Text:
“And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation. Ye shall do no servile work therein: but ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD. And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement: it shall be an holy convocation unto you; and ye shall afflict your souls, and offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD” (Leviticus 23:23-27).

Overview:
In Leviticus 23, the Lord revealed the festivals of Israel to Moses. The weekly sabbath was first (v. 3). The other feasts (Passover/Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, and Tabernacles) were all celebratory in nature—they were feasts. And in our text, we come to the singular Day of Atonement. On this day, the Israelites were commanded to “afflict their souls.” God required this of Moses (v. 23). The day was set aside as a holy convocation, as a high sabbath, and was marked on a particular day (v. 24). Work was proscribed, as on a regular sabbath, and an offering of fire was required (v. 25). The Lord speaks again (v. 26), and He required the Israelites to afflict their souls (v. 27). There were other times of fasting, obviously, but these appear to have been occasional or individual. In the liturgical calendar of Israel, before the advent of the Messiah, one day out of 365 was set apart for the nation to afflict their souls. The rest of the commemorations were gratitude-soaked and celebratory.

A Weekly Resurrection Day:
In the early Church, celebration of the resurrection was instantaneous. From the very beginning, Christians celebrated and worshipped God on a weekly basis, and they did so moving their observance from the seventh day sabbath of the Jews to the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day. This was done because this was the day on which the Lord rose from the dead. “Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first . . .” (Mark 16:9; cf. Matt. 28:1; Luke 24:1; John 20:19). From the pages of the New Testament down to the present, Christians have been observing the first day of the week as a weekly “Easter.” “And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them . . .” (Acts 20: 7). “Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come” (1 Cor. 16:2). “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet” (Rev. 1:10).

There are two striking meanings of this new day, this Day that the Lord has made. The first is the obvious meaning, which is that it marks the day of the resurrection. The Lord came back from the dead on the first day of the week (Mk. 16:9), appeared to His disciples on that same day (John 20:19), and then appeared to them again on the following Sunday (John 20:26). But what is the second meaning? This meaning is that God has recreated the heavens and earth. In the old covenant, the seventh-day sabbath was anchored to the old creation in an everlasting way. That seventh-day observance was clearly going to last as long as that created order did. Nothing would suffice to change that day unless it were a change of the created order, unless it were the establishment of a new created order. And this is just what we find. “There remaineth therefore a [sabbath] rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his” (Heb. 4:9-10).

Penitential Seasons?:
Lent began as a period of preparation for Christian baptism—many of the baptisms in the early Church were performed on Easter Day. Over time, as a system of work-righteousness began to establish a deeper hold on the minds and hearts of many professing Christians, the church calendar began to reflect a false understanding of the nature of the gospel. Now we want to return to an explicitly Christian understanding of our days and years, which they certainly had, but we want to do this without making the same mistakes they did.

Traditionally, both Lent and Advent are penitential seasons—not times of overflowing celebrations. This is not something we have sought to cultivate at all, even though we do observe a basic church calendar, made up of what the Reformers called the five evangelical feast days. Our reluctance to adopt the penitential approach to these seasons of the year is not caused by ignorance of the practice. I want to present three arguments here for a rejection of this practice.

First, if we were to adopt this practice, we would be in worse shape than our Old Covenant brethren, who had to afflict their souls only one day out of the year. Why would the time of anticipation of salvation be so liturgically celebratory, while the times of fulfilled salvation be so liturgically glum? Instead of establishing a sense of longing, it will tend to do the reverse.

Second, each penitential season keeps getting interrupted with our weekly Easters. Many who relate exciting movies they have seen to others are careful to avoid “spoilers.” Well, these feasts we have, according to God’s ordinance every seven days, spoil the penitential mood.

And last, what gospel is implicitly preached by the practice of drawing out the process of repentance and forgiveness? It is a false gospel. Now I am not saying that fellow Christians who observe their church year in this way are preaching a false gospel, but I am saying that lex orandi lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of faith, and over time, this liturgical practice will speak very loudly to our descendants. If we have the opportunity to speak to our descendants, and we do, then I want to tell them that the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Christmas and Easter:
So as we prepare our hearts and minds, along with our families, for the annual celebration of our Lord’s resurrection next Lord’s Day, one other comment should be made. The Incarnation was a glorious event, and we don’t want any diminution of that celebration. But the resurrection of the Lord was what remade the cosmos, and we should strive over time to have our celebration of Easter far surpass the glory of Christmas. We are currently more than a little lopsided—and we shouldn’t try to fix this by reducing what we do at Christmas.

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