Christ Church

Barrenness and the Virgin Birth (Advent #2) (King’s Cross Church)

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INTRODUCTION

One of the central historical facts surrounding the birth of Christ is the virgin birth. Isaiah foretold this (Is. 7:14, Mt. 1:23). And Mary conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and apart from the ordinary contribution of a man.

But when this was first announced to Mary, the angel also highlighted the conception of her cousin Elisabeth, who was called barren. This indicates that the virgin birth is in part the culmination of the theme of barrenness and its healing found in the Old Testament.

The Text: “Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee…” (Lk. 1:34-38).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

Having announced that Mary will conceive and bear a son named Jesus, and that He will be the Messiah who will reign on the throne of David forever, Mary askes how this is even possible since she is a virgin (Lk. 1:31-34). The angel says this will happen by the Spirit overshadowing her, since this son will be called the Son of God (Lk. 1:35). The angel also announces that Mary’s elderly cousin Elisabeth is six months pregnant with a son, even though she was well known as barren, proving that with God nothing will be impossible (Lk. 1:36-37). And Mary accepted the assignment from the Lord in obedience to His word (Lk. 1:38).

BARREN WOMBS (AND GROUND)

Barrenness is a theme that goes back to the entrance of sin into the world and the curses pronounced in the Garden: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children… And unto Adam he said… cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee…” (Gen. 3:16-18)

Here we learn that the curse of sin will affect the fruitfulness of the woman’s womb and the ground. And the two things go together: barrenness is complete inability or great difficulty in bearing fruit (Ex. 23:26, Dt. 7:14, 2 Kgs. 2:19-21, Ps. 107:34). And barrenness becomes a common trial in the story of Scripture, beginning with all three patriarchs: Sarah was barren (Gen. 11:30), Rebekah was barren (Gen. 25:21), and Rachel was barren (Gen. 29:31). But also the wife of Manoah was barren (Jdg. 13:2), Ruth was apparently barren (Ruth 1:4), and Hannah was barren (1 Sam. 1:2), culminating with Elisabeth (Lk. 1:7).

But the stories illustrate at least two things. First, the pain and helplessness of barrenness: “There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, It is enough” (Prov. 30:15-16). Barrenness is like a festering wound, a constant ache. But second, in every one of these stories, the helpless emptiness is repeatedly interrupted by the joy of God’s provision: “He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful mother of children. Praise ye the Lord” (Ps. 113:9, cf. 1 Sam. 2:5).

THE BARRENNESS OF SIN

All of this is one of the signs of the barrenness of sin and the fruitfulness of salvation. Sin makes everything fruitless and impossible, and we are powerless to change it. And yet the Prophet Isaiah announced in the midst of Jerusalem’s shameful destruction and powerless exile: “Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord” (Is. 54:1). The prophet instructs those afflicted with the barrenness of sin to fix their eyes on God and break forth with singing, believing that He will make them fruitful.

A little later, the same prophet foretells the salvation of Israel in terms of the barren giving birth: “Shall I bring to birth, and not cause to bring forth, saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? Saith thy God… For thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream…” (Is. 66:9, 12). Like a river suddenly flowing in a desert, the virgin birth is the answer to all our barrenness.

APPLICATIONS

1. As you celebrate Christmas, remember that you are celebrating God breaking into history in order to do what is impossible. The hardest thing, the most impossible thing is reconciling defiant sinners to a holy God. But we often get this backwards in our hearts and minds: we think the barrenness in our material lives is the impossible thing but God just forgives sinners easy-peasy. But it’s actually the other way around: healing is relatively easy, but our sin, our spiritual death and barrenness is the impossible thing.

Justice required the wrath of God to be poured out on a perfect man, but there was no man who was perfect and no man who could survive the wrath of God. Think about that: the impossibility of our salvation. But what was completely impossible for us, God has done for us in His own well-beloved Son. The justice due for our sin was the most impossible thing, and therefore, with God now all things are possible. God can and will make everything fruitful. He is for you.

2. Barrenness is a curse, not a lifestyle choice. We reject all voluntary barrenness, even as we sometimes must accept it from the Lord. At the same time, remember the apostolic injunction to “mind thine own business.” Don’t be nosy, and don’t assume the worst. This can apply to marriage, bearing children, and other personal matters.

Also closely related, remember that fruitfulness is to be defined biblically not materialistically. Eight kids that are poorly cared for and hate Jesus is not more fruitful than three kids well-loved and walking in the Light. And sometimes the hard assignment of fruitfulness is no kids and loving your community well, and sometimes there are seasons of different assignments. And we must learn to say, “Let it be according to Thy word.”

3. Finally, singing is required. Right after this scene in Luke’s gospel, Mary visits Elisabeth and breaks into song: “My soul magnifies the Lord!” She is of course singing because she has seen the reversal of the curse. But Isaiah urged the Jews to sing while they were still in exile, while they were still experiencing the effects of the curse because God will surely make all things new. Whether now in this life, or in the life to come, He will wipe away every tear, and He will make everything fruitful. So you must sing, which is to say, you must rejoice. In the midst of pain and suffering and disappointment, sing louder in faith.

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State of the Church 2024

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INTRODUCTION

As you might know by now, the tone coming out of Moscow has gained a little bit of notoriety. For good or ill, this reputation shows no signs of going away, and because you are likely to be fielding questions about it, I thought that it would be good to use our annual “state of the church” message to help you sort through the relevant issues. 

THE TEXTS

“And sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village” (Luke 9:52–56). 

SUMMARY OF THE TEXTS

The basic lesson we should take from our text is this. Just because it is biblical . . . doesn’t make it biblical. As I learned from my father, there is always a deeper right than being right. James and John were nicknamed “sons of thunder” by the Lord (Mark 3:17), meaning that they were almost certainly hot-blooded. When a Samaritan village denied lodging because they were Jews on the way to Jerusalem, the two brothers appealed to the example of Elijah. When he had sent a message to King Ahaziah that he was not going to recover from a fall, the king sent an armed guard of fifty men to arrest Elijah, and Elijah called down fire from heaven and consumed them all (2 Kings 1:10). The king dispatched a second troop, and the same thing happened (2 Kings 1:12). The third captain was a great deal more polite—having seen what happened to the first two bands. This is the same Elijah who had summoned fire from heaven to consume the sacrificial altar on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:38), followed up by executing all the priests of Baal. So the prophet Elijah was no buttercup, and James and John had a biblical example to point to. But Jesus said that they had wildly misjudged the two circumstances—and they had particularly misjudged the nature of the mission that Christ was on. Christ had come to save, not destroy. It is not enough to “have a verse.” 

THIS KNIFE CUTS BOTH WAYS

If there is always a deeper right than being right, then this must apply to every kind of “right.” Not just the right that has hard lines and straight edges. This also applies to the right of being kind, or generous, or sacrificial. C.S. Lewis once commented on a woman who was the sort of woman who lived for others, and you could tell the others by their hunted expression. Maybe he was afflicted by this sort of thing himself because he even wrote a poem in the form of an epitaph about it:

Erected by her sorrowing brothers

In memory of Martha Clay.

Here lies one who lived for others;

Now she has peace. And so have they.

Is it possible to bestow all your worldly goods to feed the poor, and have no love, no charity (1 Cor. 13:3)? It certainly is, and that profits nothing. Was Judas concerned about the poor when Mary anointed the Lord’s feet with spikenard? Judas was the treasurer, and was concerned about the extravagance (John 13:29). And he said that it was for the poor (John 12:5), but his motives were clearly mixed (John 12:6). It is the White Witch who is concerned about conspicuous consumption, remember. “What is the meaning of all this gluttony, this waste, this self-indulgence? Where did you get all these things?”

And there have eras when the saints were prone to miss the deeper right through a zeal to be hard line. That really is true. But to assume that this is the error of our age is to waver on the threshold of a serious delusion.

BUT WE MUST RESIST OUR OWN TEMPTATIONS, NOT THOSE OF OTHERS

Godly satire should come from within a worshiping community of orthodox and faithful Christians, only some of whom are called to it (Eph. 5:21). The satire should arise from the language and categories of Scripture (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Those exercising these gifts should warm and affectionate relationships with family. No close member of his family should flinch when he walks into the room (Col. 3:19, 21). The practice should continue a long and worthy tradition, and there should be broad acquaintance with that literature. There needs to be an instinctive knowledge of the quantitative difference between satire and scurrility. There may not seem to be a logical difference between 37 lashes and 42 lashes, but Scriptures say there is (Dt. 25:1-3).

There is a qualitative difference between the two also. This is a matter of timbre and tone. No mechanical rules can be set down for it, but it is a very important distinction to make (Heb. 5:14). These weapons should not be entrusted to anyone too young (1 Tim. 3:6). The whole point is to target lack of proportion, not to exhibit lack of proportion (Matt. 23:24). What effect is all of this having on those who aspire to fighting Amalekites with a chain saw (2 Cor. 11:1)? Is the satire coming from a community that has long experience in letting love cover a multitude of sins (1 Pet. 4:8). 

This requires a courageous disposition, not a bullying one. Lawful satire is leveled at targets that know how to defend themselves, and that will defend themselves. As King Lune of Archenland put it, “Never taunt a man save when he is stronger than you: then, as you please.” And if a man is too proud to humble himself when he has sinned (Jas. 5:16), then he is too proud for this calling. Man’s anger does not advance God’s righteousness (Jas. 1:20). Anger, even when it is righteous (Eph. 4:26), is like manna and goes bad overnight (Eph. 4:27). This should never proceed from “little man syndrome,” where a man has something deep inside to prove, usually to his father. We must be free, completely free, of envy (Jas. 4:1-6). Envious satire is brittle satire, and not very effective.

The target should always be arrogance, not weakness, and, as far as possible, reserve his arrows for the former. There must be a general knowledge of church history, which will dislodge the very provincial notion that the current rules of academic etiquette are somehow binding on all generations of the Church. Scripture is the norm, not our current traditions. We must love to sing all the psalms that God has given us (Eph. 5:19). Nothing serves like the psalms if the goal is to nurture and restore a vertebrate church. We must never get stuck on one speed (Ecc. 3:1-8). All satire, all the time, would be tolerable for about forty-five minutes. We must learn as a community to really hate what is evil. The fear of God is not only the beginning of knowledge, but it is also defined as the hatred of evil. “The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate” (Prov. 8:14). And last, we must all grow in our love for what is good (Tit. 2:14), motivated by a love that yearns to defend what is noble and right, or weak and defenseless, and never be motivated by a bitterness that seeks to bite and tear (Gal. 5:13-15).

A BODY LIFE THING

Some people assume that if you move to Moscow, you are committing yourself to making fun of everybody, all the time. Not a bit of it. We are the body of Christ, and here, as with everything, each part of the body does what it was fashioned to do. So the eye doesn’t have to do what the ear does. But the eye needs to be committed to the ear, and should expect the ear to have a completely different outlook. But the whole body is Christ.

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Have Yourself a Merry Little Postmill – Christmas Eve Service (Doug Wilson)

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The point this evening is not to load your Christmas down with any exegetical postmill work, which has been done elsewhere. This is just intended as a simple word of Christmas encouragement—I do not seek to persuade you in these few minutes, but rather to embolden you.

It may well be that you even call yourself postmill and are happy to say that it is your doctrinal stance. You certainly live in a community that is characterized by postmill teaching and expectations. Well and good, but it may still be possible that this goon show of a century has gotten you down a time or two.

Your eschatology may say that the name of the Lord will be great among the Gentiles, from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same (Mal. 1:11). Your doctrinal commitments may well affirm that the earth is going to be filled up with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Hab. 2:14). The books on your shelf may well argue that the root of Jesse will be raised up as a standard, and all the Gentiles shall seek Him (Is. 11:10). Yes, certainly.

But the last time you checked, dudes could marry dudes, teens were being legally mutilated in the name of pronoun madness, and half the population believes that if we raise our taxes and give more power to the EPA, the government promises to fix the weather.

It is easy, in other words, to come to feel like a thick fog can somehow erase the sun, moon and stars. This is a possible discouragement even in our postmill circles. And so this message of Christmas grace is that our sovereign God has stooped down to us in order to remind us how transient evil is, and how permanent His goodness is. Christmas is a stiff breeze that demonstrates that a fog is a lot easier to scrub than the sun, moon and stars are.

But when you look for God to move, remember that He doesn’t do things the way we would have predicted. Take, for example, how He established the first beachhead of His everlasting kingdom in an animal’s food trough. Who among us would have called that move beforehand?

“Of the increase of his government there will be no end.” But we should know by now that we do not define increase the same way that He does. John the Baptist said that he was going to decrease, while the Lord was going to increase. But then what did that increase look like? It looked like agony in the Garden, and a flogging, and spittle in the face, and a crown of thorns. He will increase, but you must read all the way through to the end.

After God had spoken all His raw materials into existence, speaking to a darkness that was nothing at all, that created matter was still shrouded in darkness. And so at that point, what was the first thing God ever said in this world? “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). He simply said light, and there it was. And so when the earth was an inchoate and shapeless mass of dark matter, when darkness was over the face of the deep (Gen. 1:2), all He did was simply speak.

This created darkness was His raw material, and it provided the apostle Paul with a marvelous illustration for God’s power over a different sort of darkness—the darkness of our rebellious iniquity.

“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”

2 Corinthians 4:6–7 (KJV)

The created darkness of the shapeless void and the rebellious darkness of mankind’s sin and rebellion have this one thing in common. Neither one can resist the voice of God’s authority when that authority says anything like, “Let there be light.”

Tiglath-pileser, Caesar Augustus, Herod, Pilate, Sanballat, Shalmaneser, Pharaoh, Bismarck, Napoleon, Attila the Hun, Woodrow Wilson, Genghis Khan, what are they? They are all of them principalities and powers who breath through the nose. Let there be light.

Pornography, propaganda, pandemics, police states, what are they? Let there be light.

Darwinism, socialism, feminism, egalitarianism, fascism, environmentalism, mysticism, what are they? Let there be light.

The God who spoke the cosmos out of nothing is certainly capable of speaking a new cosmos out of the old one. He can make sons of Abraham out of rocks, remember.

So when you look around at all the black rock of man’s iniquitous folly, you should certainly look straight at it without flinching. You should confess that it is in fact an enormous amount of iniquitous folly, all of it dark, bent, and twisted rock. But never forget that you are also looking at God’s own quarry, from which He is going to speak into existence a cathedral of light, built entirely out of living stones, and the pavers all made from transparent gold.

So the Christmas message is much more than the fact that God conquers and overcomes evil. He does do that, but there is a greater mystery involved. The Christmas message is that God is in the process of creating something marvelous, using evil as His raw material. All the laws, and conspiracies, and plans, and movements, and resolutions, and plots . . . all the things that have us so worried . . . are nothing but scraps on His workshop floor.

“Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Luke 12:32 (KJV)

And what a glorious kingdom that will be. That kingdom of light, inhabited by children of light (Eph. 5:8) . . . where did it start? That kingdom of light began in those pitch-black nights that enveloped Bethlehem, and the shepherds, and the sheep, and the wise men.

It was truly dark. But the star wasn’t.

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