Old Testament Archives - Page 115 of 141

Gospel Presence V: Taste and See

Joe Harby on April 28, 2013

Introduction

We worship God the Father through Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. But in order for this to work, He cannot be a distant Christ. Remember that in Christ God came near, God became our neighbor. We worship God through a close Christ, a near Christ, an indwelling Christ. The point of the message today—taste and see— requires that we serve God through an experienced Christ.

The Text

“The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them. O taste and see that the Lord is good: Blessed is the man that trusteth in him” (Ps. 34:7-8).

Summary of the Text

A wonderful theme of this psalm is that God is the great Deliverer. God is the one who saves those who have faith in Him, and whose lives are living indications of that faith. That theme is very much present in the two verses that constitute our text. The angel of the Lord places the one who fears God in the midst of the camp, and entirely surrounds him. He delivers him (v. 7). This is a glorious promise, and anybody is invited to come in order to participate in it. The invitation is to taste and see (v. 8). What do we taste? The goodness of the Lord. We taste the blessedness of trusting in Him.

Notice also the parallel between fearing Him and tasting His goodness. And notice too that being delivered is the blessing that results from trusting Him. Tasting is fearing and blessedness is being delivered.

An Experienced Christ

We identify ourselves as evangelicals, but by this we mean historic evangelicals, or confessional evangelicals. This is to be distinguished from that pop evangelicalism that has commodified the whole thing in order to be able to print it on a T-shirt, available at a Jesus junk store near you. Jesus Himself said that the experience (which is absolutely necessary) is not an experience that we can successfully manipulate. We cannot bottle the wind of the Spirit. We cannot manufacture this because we are talking about the sovereign motions of the sovereign God.

At the same time, we insist that a man must be born again if he is to see the kingdom of God. As I have taught before, you don’t have to know what instant the sun rose in order to know that it is up. And neither may be conclude from the fact that we know that it is up that we have the authority to command it to rise.

God is Good

We serve the God who invites. We serve the God who summons, and who goes out of His way to summon. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, And he that hath no money; Come ye, buy, and eat; Yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? And your labour for that which satisfieth not?” (Is. 55:1-2).

Apart from Christ, we feed on little bits of refuse. We bake bread made out of sawdust. We mix our drinks with used dishwater, and we sneer at those pitiful believers who do not know what it means to live the good life. We turn everything into gruel. We clutch at driveway pebbles, calling them diamonds. We collect wisps of straw to make an arrangement for the middle of the table. When God pronounces a woe on those who call evil good and good evil (Is. 5:20), more is involved than simply a mistake in ethics. It all comes down to what you have to eat, what you have to chew, and what you must swallow. And if you consume the meager pickings of self, you are in dietary training for the outer darkness.

Consistency and Variation

God is not locked into the same kind of tight strictures that we are. A vineyard in France, and one in California, and another in Louisiana, can all produce a bottle of Cabernet, and this is completely different than the effect you get when it is a diet soda bottling plant in all those same locations. But no one remarks on the terroir of the Diet Dr. Pepper. No one stands at the drink dispenser, swirling the plastic cup under his nose.

It is the same with the fruit of the Spirit—fantastic variation and remarkable consistency. Legalists want the experienced Christ to taste like it all came from one bottling plant. Antinomians want to pretend that there is no difference between a fine wine and stump water. Never forget that the triune God, who is growing us all up, is holy. And never forget that the triune God, who is growing us all up into a splendid array—of different kinds of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control—is not a ball-bearing manufacturer.

A White Stone

A commonplace in Christian circles is the phrase “a personal relationship” with Jesus. However clichéd it may have become, there is an important reality there that we must preserve. We preserve it because it is precious.

“He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Rev. 2:17).

God the Father, through the Lord Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, has a relationship with you that only He and you know. This is for the one who overcomes, and what is it that overcomes? Is it not our faith? The one who tastes, the one who sees—which can only be done by faith—is the one who knows the goodness of God as it has been evidenced in their relationship. Just the two.

Now this does not eliminate the need for the body of Christ. Every cell, every member, being alive is the prerequisite for living participation in the living body. You want to be a living finger, not a dead fingernail. Don’t be covenantal keratin.

A Face Like Flint (Palm Sunday 2013)

Joe Harby on March 24, 2013

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Introduction

As believers in the Lord Jesus, we have to learn how to see Him as our substitute in all things, and not just in His death on the cross. Jesus did not just die in our place (although He did do that), He also lived in our place. The sacrifice of Jesus was for us, but so was the obedience of Jesus for us. The blood of Jesus was for us, but so was His courage.

The Texts

“And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51).

“I gave My back to those who struck Me, And My cheeks to those who plucked out the beard; I did not hide My face from shame and spitting. For the Lord God will help Me; Therefore I will not be disgraced; Therefore I have set My face like a flint, and I know that I will not be ashamed” (Is. 50:6-7).

Summary of the Text

As we consider this text, and the courage of the Lord Jesus, there are four events we should keep in mind together. The first occurred earlier in this chapter (Luke 9:31), when the Lord was transfigured and met with Moses and Elijah. One of the things they discussed on that mountain was the “exodus” that Jesus was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. The second event is this one—the Lord, when it was time for Him to be “received up,” set His face steadfastly in the direction of Jerusalem, which was to be the place of His passion. The third event is His triumphal entry to Jerusalem, the event that we are marking on the church calendar today (John 12:13). The fourth event was His agonized prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:32). The Lord knew what the Scriptures had prophesied, He knew the Father’s will, He had set His face already to do that will, and He was willing to go. Our passage from Isaiah concerns the suffering servant, who is the Lord Jesus. He knew the abuse He would receive from the authorities in Jerusalem. His face would be abused—beard plucked out. But He refused to hide His face, and in His courage He set His face like flint in order to pay the price for your salvation and mine.

A True Man

The Lord Jesus had a sense of His calling from the time He was twelve (at least). This was confirmed to Him at His baptism, when God spoke from Heaven, and the Spirit descended upon Him like a dove. But remember that we confess that He was not only fully God but also a true man. Indeed, He was the true man. This meant that He felt and fully experienced the gradual approach of a day of dread. He knew what was coming, but when it was a week away instead of years away the burden was much greater. The Lord Jesus required courage, which He displayed, and the Lord Jesus had to carry the burden, which He did.

He spoke with Elijah and Moses about the great exodus He would accomplish. He resolved to do it, setting His face toward the cross at Jerusalem. He empathized with the rejoicing at His triumphal entry—He supported it and did not think it out of place. Incidentally, it always bears repeating that we have no biblical basis for supposing that the crowd with the palms and the crowd crying out crucify Him! were the same crowds. This was not about the fickleness of the masses.

Active Obedience

Christ is everything to us. He lived His entire life as a public person, as the last and final Adam. Everything He did was for us and to us, and God imputes to us all of His obedience, and not just His obedience of suffering on the cross. Theologians distinguish this by calling one His passive obedience (His suffering obedience on the cross) and His active obedience (His entire life of faithfulness to God). All of this is imputed to us, credited to us.

It was not just necessary for the people of God to pay for their sins. It was equally necessary for them to fulfill the vocation that God assigned to us. This is why Jesus identified with us from the first moment of His ministry (in His baptism). This is why He fasted forty days in the wilderness (remember forty years in the wilderness?). This is why He was tempted there. Who else was tempted there? This is why He invaded Canaan as the greater Joshua, and undertook a great warfare there, expelling demons. Christ is Israel, and Christ is Israel, finally doing it right. Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.

When Courage is Called For

Let us bring this down to particulars. Every Christian is called to take up the cross daily (Luke 9:23). But this is not a solitary cross (although it will often feel solitary enough). It is not solitary because Jesus invites us to take up the cross in order to follow Him with it. He promises, in the next breath, that whoever loses his life for the sake of Christ will save it (Luke 9:24).

If we are believers, we are in Christ. If we are in Christ, then our crosses are within His cross. We are never alone in what God has apportioned to us. If we are called upon to show courage, then our courage is located where it must be located—inside His courage.

Courage is needed when you don’t think you can do the work anymore. Courage is required when the pain continues to go on and on, and you don’t know what to do with it, or where to put it. Courage is required in the face of uncertainty—perhaps you are threatened by a diagnosed illness, or financial troubles. Courage is required when your reputation is threatened by those who would slander you—not because your work is deficient, or because you have been dishonest in any way, but because you identify with Jesus Christ. Now identifying with Jesus does bring this kind of hostility. But identifying with Him also brings a great and glorious blessing. Why is that? Because His courage is given as a gift to you. The one who gives you this blessing of high-heartedness is the one who set His face like flint in order to go to Jerusalem to purchase you out of the slave market of sin.

Spiritual Disciplines III: Work

Joe Harby on March 17, 2013

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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.