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The Covenant Home #6: Common Sins of the Household

Joe Harby on October 11, 2015

INTRODUCTION:

In a message on “common sins” in the household, it would be easy to focus on those common sins which everyone knows and acknowledges to be sins—complaining, fighting, etc. But the point this morning is to take a step or two back, and address some of the problems which set up the temptations for the garden-variety sins. Sins that we know to be sins are not as dangerous as sins that we believe to be virtues.

THE TEXT:

“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, And the heart of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse” (Mal. 4:5–6).

THE CONCERN:

The New Testament teaches us that this prophecy was fulfilled in Christ. John the Baptist came before the Lord came, and the point of his ministry (remember, a ministry of preparation) was to turn the hearts of fathers and children toward one another. Note also the alternative, which is a curse upon the earth. When fathers and mothers are honored, when things are spiritually healthy in the home, the result is blessing in the land. When fathers are harsh with their children, or when mothers are, the results are devastating. When the family breaks down, everything breaks down.

But simply having “traditional family values” in theory does not prevent such breakdowns. In recent years, some of the great moral failures have come from the traditionalist camp. The population of our church is such that thoughtful and biblical consideration of these sorts of temptations is an urgent necessity. How we educate and rear our children is a matter of central concern to us—we are dealing with hundreds of souls. This means that some plain dealing is pastorally necessary, whatever the issue— e.g. whether we are talking about homeschooling or about day schools like Logos, we have to think biblically.

COMMON ROOTS OF PARENTAL SINS:

We often deal with sins only when they bear fruit at the branch’s extremities. A lot of spiritual energy could be spared if we were willing to consider some of the root problems. Spiritual Neglect—those who do not know the condition of their own souls are in no position to shepherd the souls of others. “Now the ones that fell among thorns are those who, when they have heard, go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity” (Luke 8:14). Parents, take care that you do not neglect the state of your own soul. How is it with you and God? Busyness is not holiness.

Defensive Isolationism—“Wives, submit . . . Husbands, love . . . Children, obey . . . Fathers, do not provoke…” (Col. 3:18-21). The point here is not the content of Paul’s exhortations, but rather to note that they are given in the context of the church. We live in community; we are not a club of isolated individuals. This means that we are involved in one another’s lives, which in turn means that we are involved with one another’s children. We all takes vows at the baptisms here, which means something important. It is not a ceremonial ritual.

Many parents falsely assume that they know their children better than anyone else in the church. It would be more accurate to say that parents could know their children better if they studied the Word, and their children, with biblical wisdom. If they did, then they would know that “faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (Prov. 27:6 ). And the way it shakes out is that most parents know their children better in many areas, and complete strangers know them better in others.

Ignorant Isolationism—Just as sin seeks out the darkness (John 3:19), so sin, on the same principle, seeks lack of accountability. But Paul is blunt in his application of this principle. “For we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves. But they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise” (2 Cor. 10:12). This is sadly a common problem among those who homeschool. Consequently, when problems arise, they are not often identified until it is too late to do anything about it.

Presumption—far from neglecting community, this is a sin which relies entirely on “community.” “All we have to do,” it is thought, “is enroll our children in Logos, attend church, make sure that we hang around enough, and everything will turn out all right.” No, it won’t. When parents do not exercise a godly and wise oversight of their children, bad things regularly and routinely happen, regardless of the community in which the children live, and regardless of the school they attend. The best school in the world is no substitute for godly parents.

Chasing after fads—“that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ” (Eph. 4:14-15). These fads we may divide into two categories— those which fit this description from Ephesians exactly, and are necessarily destructive in their effects. All anti-biblical legalisms would fit into this category.

But we must also include those things which could be fruitful and constructive if approached with wisdom—courtship, homeschooling, and the rest of it. But stampedes never bring wisdom. Bad things implemented stupidly do a lot of damage. Good things implemented stupidly do even more damage. Reformation is never brought about by plugging some formula. This includes educational formulae. It includes childrearing

formulae.

When you imitate the wise, you grow from the inside. When you copy the wise, nothing much happens. You wind up copying the wrong things entirely. Instead of imitating a godly father’s patience, you wind up copying what kind of minivan he bought.

Surveying the Text: Malachi

Joe Harby on September 13, 2015

Sermon Notes: Surveying the Text: Malachi

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Coal Fires and Fish (Easter 2015)

Joe Harby on April 5, 2015

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Introduction

The physical presence of the Lord Jesus, alive after the resurrection just as He promised He would be, transforms everything. We can see this very clearly in the fall and restoration of the apostle Peter after the resurrection of Jesus.

The Text

“And the servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire of coals; for it was cold: and they warmed themselves: and Peter stood with them, and warmed himself” (John 18:18).

“And the other disciples came in a little ship; (for they were not far from land, but as it were two hundred cubits,) dragging the net with fishes. As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread” (John 21:8-9).

Overview

These two verses are just a few pages apart, and the Greek for the charcoal fire is identical (anthrakian). The apostle John is a very careful writer, and the contrast that is built in here is no accident. We are being invited to compare and contrast the two settings.

The first fire was built by the enemies of Christ (18:18), and the second was built by Jesus Himself (21:9). Peter was present in both settings, and he was present because of something that had been said by the apostle John (18:16; 21:7). Jesus was present in both settings. In the first He was on trial for His life (John 18:27; cf. Luke 22:61), and in the second He has conquered death (21:1). In the first, Peter denied the Lord three times, just as Jesus had predicted (18:17, 25, 26), and fell into sin. In the second, he affirmed his love for the Lord three times, more humbly than before, and was reinstated to ministry (21: 15, 16, 17). In the first, Peter received something from wicked men (warmth), and in the second he received something from the Lord (food, and forgiveness). In the first, Peter does not compare favorably with the disciple that Jesus loved—John was more influential “at court,” John didn’t deny the Lord, and John didn’t run away. In the second, Peter has all such comparisons put to rest for him (John 21:21-22). “What is that to you?”

153 Fish and Big Ones Too

Paying attention to the number of fish caught is not a mystical or spooky reading of the text–—it is a literary reading of the text. It is reading with your eyes open. The issues are placement, foreshadowing, parallelism, conventions, and so on. To illustrate the difference, consider another detail from this text—when Jesus called out to His disciples fishing about 100 yards offshore, He told them to put their nets down over the right side of the boat, which they did. When they had done so, the result was a huge haul. This was a way of Jesus identifying Himself. When He had first called them to ministry, He had called them away from their nets (Matt. 4:18-22) so that they could become fishers of men. And when Jesus had done a similar miracle like this one before, the response that Peter had had was that of being overwhelmed with his own sinfulness (Luke 5:8). The first time the miracle had made him aware of his sinfulness; the second time he was living in an awareness of his sinfulness, with the memory of his denials and blasphemies still raw, and this same miracle calls him out of it.

This scene in John has a return to both elements—Jesus deals wonderfully with Peter’s sin and fall, and Jesus recommissions him to ministry as a fisher of men. He tells him three times to “feed the sheep” (21:15, 16, 17). We should also have no trouble seeing the fish as emblematic of the coming haul at Pentecost. The nations were to be brought into the boat, and Jesus indeed made His disciples fishers of men. In this case, Peter had jumped out of the boat, and the others had brought the fish in. But Peter is soon to rejoin them in the work. I like to imagine Peter standing on a wall in order to preach at Pentecost, and to see him cast his gospel net over the right side.

But what is it with the specific number of fish? This is a good place to illustrate the difference between a careful literary reading and mystical reading. This number has had a goodly amount of ingenuity to be spent on it. Some of it has been fanciful, some of it pretty pedestrian, and some of it sober. But the sober reading is still astonishing.

Bear With Me

The pedestrian reading is that 153 is mentioned because that’s how many fish there were, darn it, and John was simply interested in adding an irrelevant little detail. He put that in for “local color.”

A fanciful reading is that when you add the ten of the commandments to the seven of the seven-fold Spirit, as Augustine urged, you get 17, and 153 is the triangular of 17. (Triangularmeans that if you add the numbers 17 to 16 to 15 to 14 and so on down to one, the sum is 153). The problem here is that you can also get 153 from Seventeen magazine, and that doesn’t mean that John is talking about the challenges of adolescence in a secular age. This is the kind of thing that John Calvin called “childish trifling.”

But 666 is the triangular of 36 (and 36 is 6 times 6). It is a number we instantly recognize. The biblical writers often did make some of their points with numbers, and John particularlydid. The fact that it is unusual to us doesn’t make it unusual or odd to them. We already have solid grounds for understanding the fish as representing the Gentile nations. We have that “fishers of men” call that Jesus gives Peter and Andrew, James and John. We have the fact that throughout Scripture, the sea represents the Gentiles and the land the Jews. No one in the Old Testament is shown eating fish, but in the New Testament fishing (and the eating of fish) comes to the front and center.

On the day of Pentecost, how many nations are listed? Well, 17 actually (Acts 2:7-11). And we have to remember the practice of encoding numbers in names (called gematria) was common in the ancient world. They could do this in a way that we cannot because they used the same symbols for letters and for numbers. We have Roman letters and Arabic numbers. But in Hebrew, the first nine letters corresponded to 1-9, the next nine were 10-90, and the last five were100-400. So?

Well, as one biblical scholar points out, the prophet Ezekiel promised that the time of the New Covenant would be a time of glorious fishing.

“And it shall come to pass, that the fishers shall stand upon it from Engedi even unto Eneglaim; they shall be a place to spread forth nets; their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great sea, exceeding many” (Eze. 47:10).

The prefix En simply means spring, and so there are two words we should consider here —Gedi and Eglaim. If we look at the numerical value of Gedi in Hebrew, we find that it is 17, and the value of Eglaim is 153. Now try reading through Ezekiel 47, with its living water from the Temple of the Church, and trees on both sides of the river, with leaves for medicine, for the healing of the nations, and see how fishers of men shall stand there, from “the Spring of 17” to “the Spring of 153.”

Ezekiel was talking about the salvation of the Gentiles under the figure of fish, and he uses these numbers. John refers to this, and it has the same meaning as the explicit meaning given to it by Jesus in Luke (fishers of men). This means that 153 is a symbolic number for the Gentile nations who will be brought into the kingdom of God.

Back to the Charcoal Fire

Remember that Peter is being restored. The antithesis is very clear here. The charcoal fire built by the enemies of Christ is not really a good place to warm yourself—and it ends with snarling, cursing, devouring, bitterness, and tears.

The charcoal fire built by Christ is built in order to feed the disciples, and then, as Peter is being restored, he is commanded (in his turn) to feed the Christians who will follow him. Post-resurrection, the Lord who feeds His disciples is as humble as He was in the upper room when He washed their feet. They come to the beach, and He is cooking their breakfast. “How do you want your eggs?”

The resurrected Christ forgives and feeds. Our responsibility is to be forgiven, to be fed, and then to forgive . . . and feed. The first charcoal fire is the fire of betrayal, treason, sin, blasphemies, crashing pride, and humiliation. The second fire is the fire of free and full forgiveness, a fire of complete reconciliation.

After Peter denied the Lord, and went out to weep bitterly over it, how many times do you think he wished he could do everything over? How many times do you think he

lamented his self-confidence and bluster? How many times do you think he wished he could go right back to the beginning of his discipleship, and follow Christ faithfully this time? And what does Jesus give him? In the miracle of the fish, this is exactly what He gives to Peter. He takes him back to the moment he was first called, and is graciously given an unspeakable gift. Here, follow me again. All is forgiven. This really is a do-over.

Come, Follow Me

And what about you? Do any of us need to experience this kind of reconciliation? The answer is yes for all of us. The Lord is not more gracious to Peter than He is to you. Do not ask about Peter what Peter asked about John—you will get the same answer. What is that to you? You follow me—but you follow Him cleansed and forgiven. As though you had never denied Him.

This sermon is modified from a sermon first preached in 2007.

Palm Sunday 2015: The Crowds of Palm Sunday

Joe Harby on March 29, 2015

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Introduction

A commonplace in Christian circles understands the events surrounding the first Palm Sunday to be a clear demonstration of the “fickleness of crowds.” But there are good reasons for questioning this common assumption.

The Text

On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, Took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord (John 12:12-13).

But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. The governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? They said, Barabbas. Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified (Matt. 27:20-23).

Overview

When Jesus entered into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, in fulfillment of prophecy, a great multitude gathered around and received Him as their king, as one who was coming in the name of the Lord. There is nothing in the account to suggest that the acclaim and joy were not genuine.

And yet, a very short time later, a multitude before Pilate was persuaded by the chief priests and elders to clamor for the destruction of Jesus. There is nothing in this to suggest that the composition of the crowd was largely the same as before, or that the crucifixion of Jesus was the result of everybody suddenly changing their minds. Rather, the facts recorded for us appear to suggest that Jerusalem was divided over the identity of Christ, and that those who loved Him were (temporarily) out-maneuvered.

Jesus was arrested at night, and was examined by Annas in a secret proceeding at night, in full contradiction to Jewish law. By the time they showed up before Pilate, it was still early (John 18:28). From the time of the Lord’s arrest to the time when the first nails went in, about nine hours elapsed. The whole thing was an iniquitous rush job. For about half that time, while all this was going on, the godly from the Triumphal Entry, those yearning for the redemption of Israel, were sound asleep in their beds.

Fidelity and the Appearances

We have a marked tendency to go on the basis of appearances. Even Elijah once fell victim to this mistake. “God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew. Wot ye not what the scripture saith of Elias? how he maketh intercession to God against Israel, saying, Lord, they have killed thy prophets, and digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life. But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of Baal. Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of
grace” (Rom. 11:2-5).

Momentum is truly a mysterious thing. Ability to speak and to be heard is also mysterious, and often has little to do with actual numbers. This means that it is often the case that things can look far worse than they actually are.

The Good Purposes of God

The crowds on Palm Sunday were not silent in their reception of Christ. They dutifully responded just as they ought to have done, and if they had not, the stones would have cried out. But their joy was short-lived and was replaced by black despair when Jesus was arrested, tried and executed. But their faithfulness was still a seed which bore fruit soon enough.

God gave to His faithful a moment of great glory when they received Christ in His triumphal entry. But this glory was still early, and not near glorious enough. It was premature by design, a proleptic glory. Hopes were raised high, just to be dashed to earth again. But this was a necessary part of God’s good purposes. “For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done” (Acts 4:27-28).

The plan of God involved far more than a parade into Jerusalem, a parade to warm the heart. God’s purpose was the redemption of the cosmos, the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. This means that sometimes the ungodly appear to outnumber the godly because God wants to make it apparent that the power is His, and not ours. We serve a God who raises the dead.

Sins of Silence

At the same time, 6,999 faithful but silent ones can indicate a separate set of problems. It may not be utter and complete faithlessness—as it appeared to be to Elijah—but among the faithful we still might find a distinct range of problems. One of the most common is ungodly silence. As with all things, this sin can be used by the hand of God, but we are still responsible for it.

Remember the antithesis—there were two crowds in the Jerusalem of that day. Because of God’s purposes in the world, there are always two crowds—the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Where is your allegiance?

Remember your loyalties—the saints received Christ into Jerusalem loudly. Have you ever stood by silent when others were not being shy about their allegiances at all?

Remember God’s priorities—the general consensus was that the Messiah would come to Jerusalem and kick out the Romans. What He actually did was come to Jerusalem and kick out the moneychangers. Sometimes we are “silent” because we showed up at the wrong place.

Conclusion

Jesus set His face in order to go to Jerusalem. He did this because He set His mind on the joy that was set before Him. His entry into Jerusalem was an early step—and we have yet come close to completely the journey that He began. We are still in the shallows of that joy.

Word Made Flesh

Joe Harby on December 7, 2014

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Introduction

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14

The Word

In John 1:1-5, we learn that the Word was with God and was God. The Word comes to us to reveal what God is like ( John 14:9, Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3). This is how the Word has worked from the very beginning, working to show us what God is like. He is like light and life ( John 1:4-5, Gen. 1, Prov. 8). Both light and life are images that show us what God is like. And both are things that we are accustomed to wait for (Ps. 130:5-6). This waiting is what Advent is all about, waiting for the coming of Jesus, the light and life of the world (Lk. 2:25, 29, 36).

Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us

Flesh can sometimes be used to describe the sinful desires that we wrestle with. But here it is used to describe human mortality (Ps. 78:39, Is. 40:6). God the Son, who is life itself, took on the nature of a man, a man’s body and a man’s soul (Phi. 2:7, Heb. 2:17).

And We Beheld His Glory

The face of God, which could not be seen by Moses or Elijah (Ex. 24:9-122, 33:18-23, 1 Kings 19:11-12), was finally shown to us in Jesus. The Word came to reveal the Father (John 1:18).

The Glory as of the Only-Begotten Son of the Father

Although we are all children of God, there is only one only begotten Son, the eternal Son, who has been generated of the Father from all eternity. So think for a moment of the irony of waiting for something to happen, which has eternally been the case.

Full of Grace and Truth

If you think about this for a moment, grace and truth are two things that do not naturally go together. We can either have both the truth and war, or grace and lies. But to hold grace and truth together is to try and hold together two identically charged magnets (Ecc. 7:21-22, Ps. 130:3).

But the Word came to reveal God to this world. The Son came to show us his Father, to show us what had always been the case, but what we could not grasp. And that was that grace and truth can come together, righteousness and peace can kiss (Ps. 85:10), and the Just one can be the one who justifies (Rom. 3:26).