Old Testament Archives - Page 85 of 144

To Whom Will You Liken God?

Christ Church on June 24, 2018

The Text

Isaiah 40:12-31

Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?

Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his counsellor hath taught him?

With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him, and taught him in the path of judgment, and taught him knowledge, and shewed to him the way of understanding?

Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing.

And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering.

All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.

To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him?

The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains.

He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image, that shall not be moved.

Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?

It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:

That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.

Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown: yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth: and he shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble.

To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One.

Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.

Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God?

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.

Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Building the City of God in a Fallen World

Christ Church on June 10, 2018

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Introduction

In a world gone mad, Christians can become unwitting assistants to the insanity, and therefore, it is incredibly important for Christians to keep the building blocks of civilization straight in their own heads. How are cities built? They are built on the principle of personal responsibility.

Summary of the Text (Genesis 4)

After Adam and Eve sinned, and God spared their lives, Eve bore children to Adam, the first two apparently being Cain and Abel (Gen. 4:1-2). God was pleased with Abel’s worship and displeased with Cain’s, and this made Cain very angry (Gen. 4:3-5, cf. Heb. 11:4). God warned Cain that disobedience and a bad attitude meant more evil was crouching at his door, and he needed to rule wisely, but Cain ignored the warning and murdered his brother (Gen. 4:6-8). When the Lord confronted Cain, he shifted the blame like his parents before him, raising a philosophical question about the nature of responsibility, but the Lord was not distracted and reiterated the curses for Abel’s blood (Gen. 4:9-12). When Cain realized that his actions left him vulnerable to the vengeance of others, he pleaded for mercy and God sent him away with a mark of protection and he started building a family and a city (Gen. 4:13-18). We see the downstream results in his family when Lamech takes two wives and soon admits to murder as well (Gen. 4:19, 23-24), and yet, God also grants his family a measure of cultural dominion over cattle, music, and technology (Gen. 4:20-22). Meanwhile, Eve bore another son to Adam, named Seth, and in those days, men began to call on the name of the Lord (Gen. 4:25-26).

Building Culture in the Ruins

This may seem like a very unlikely passage to discuss Christian culture building. Ultimately, the whole earth was filling with evil, leading to the flood (Gen. 6:5). But there are at least two curious things in this text: First, why did God spare Cain (and later, Lamech)? And why did God bless his family with a measure of cultural success? We know that sometimes God blesses the wicked with success in order to give that wealth to the righteous (e.g. Prov. 13:22), but we do not want to be backed into a corner where we are saying that it’s just inscrutable luck. So, despite the growing disobedience of the human race as a whole, it seems likely that the way God dealt with Cain’s sin was related to his ability to build cities and discover true treasure and glory in the earth. Where did that ability come from? Common grace and the image of God are certainly part of the picture, but the text curiously frames the agricultural, musical, and artistic and technological advances of Cain’s family with the stories of Cain and Lamech (Gen. 4:19-23).

While we may (rightly) note the familial resemblance between Cain and Lamech’s sin, we should not miss the fact that five generations later, Cain’s descendants are still citing God’s dealings with Cain (Gen. 4:24). In fact, Hebrews says, we have come “to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel” (Heb. 12:24). In other words, the murder of Abel was a type of Christ’s sacrifice, and it’s in that context that men are dwelling in tents, raising cattle, making music, and working with metal. The point is that in the midst of the anarchy of sin, God administered a measure of justice, insisting that Cain take responsibility for the bloodshed of his brother, and as he did so, the city of Nod was built, and five generations later, Lamech is also taking responsibility for his sinful actions and his family is cultivating cattle, music, and technology.

Conservative Victim Cultures?

If you have been around here long at all, you have heard and read any number of warnings about the current “sacred victim culture” we live in. This is a false gospel if there ever was one (cf. Gal. 1). It offers justification and holiness to any and all who will claim the status of victim. This is a form of self-justification, since a victim must claim relative innocence, and this is also a form of crowd sourcing your justification – justification by popular vote. But perhaps most importantly, this is a refusal to accept responsibility. There are certain frontal assaults in this war that we must not budge on: insisting on justice for the accused, two and three witnesses, due process, etc. But we must also be aware of certain flanking attempts, where Christians are offered certain victim cards (e.g. religious persecution and discrimination, liberal fascism, the Federal regulations, unjust taxation, Hollywood, porn, etc.), but we must see every offer of victimhood as an offer to join the anarchy, assistants to the insanity.

We must refuse and reject every offer of victimhood, not because real injustice cannot be perpetrated against us, but because we are never totally innocent and we have a better offer. And this is because we have a better victim. Jesus is the better victim because He was completely innocent and willing, and therefore, His sacrifice was an act of taking responsibility in order to present us to God with all glory (Eph. 5:25-26, 1 Pet. 2:24-25). And because Jesus took responsibility for us, we are completely justified by faith. Our sins are washed clean, and the obedience of Jesus is imputed to us (Rom. 4:22-25). This is why Paul says that even when we are victimized, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Rom. 8:36-37).

Personal Responsibility & Culture Building

Satan plied Eve’s moral clarity in order to deceive her: Did God really say? Here, Cain has taken it a step further, asking whether God should really even be asking him about his brother (Gen. 4:9). Moral ambiguity is frequently closely aligned with evading responsibility. People have a bad habit of trying to justify sin with ambiguity and confusion. This can be done by straight- forward evasion and relativism, but this can also be done by claiming that everything is everyone’s responsibility, which means no one is responsible for anyone because you are not infinite, omniscient, omnipotent – in short, you are not God. Be assured that the attempt to do this will always result in various attempts at playing god. But this will ultimately result in apathy and paralysis. Why should anyone do anything? What are you working for? Who are you working for? What are you responsible for?

This is why Christians, in submission to God’s word, have historically insisted that faithfulness means being responsible and sovereign over the sphere(s) that God has assigned to you (and not others). The principle of “sphere sovereignty” comes from God assigning responsibility to particular people in particular relationships: civil magistrate, parent, husband, master, teacher, etc. And God’s law always applies to every sphere: a man may not murder his brother and tell the civil magistrate to stay in his own lane. I suspect that God gave Cain such a light sentence (as well as Lamech) both to display His great mercy (as He had with Adam and Eve) and to lean hard against sphere anarchy. In God’s ordering of things, personal responsibility is the basic building block of culture. Men are tempted to try to trick power out of evasion of responsibility, by blaming others, by claiming to be victims, but that is a black hole of chaos and anarchy.

But the answer to the chaos is the gospel: Jesus has taken personal responsibility for us – for our sin and for our good works – His blood speaks better things than that of Abel, so that one by one, as we call on the name of the Lord, living stones are being built up into the city of God, as we take up the good works that He has prepared beforehand for us to walk in them.

Calvinism 4.0: Chestertonian Calvinism

Christ Church on May 6, 2018

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Introduction:

When these precious doctrines of ours—referring to the sovereignty of God over all things—are twisted in such a way as to perpetuate gloom, severity, introspection, accusations, slander, gnat-strangling, and more, the soul is not safe.

Whenever God delivers His people in a remarkable way, as the years go by, the new wineskin will turn gradually into an old wineskin. Part of this process is that the number of unregenerate people starts to grow, but they are stuck with the vocabulary of the previous great reformation and revival. This gives them new material to work on, new material to distort. Given enough time, distort it they will.

The Text:

“And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever. Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things; Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee” (Deut. 28:46–48).

Summary of the Text:

In the 28^th chapter of Deuteronomy, the people of Israel are being instructed on the nature of the blessings and curses that will come upon them in accordance with their covenantal obedience and disobedience. That whole chapter makes for sobering reading. The blessings are outlined in the first 14 verses. But beginning at verse 15, the bulk of the chapter is dedicated to a description of the curses that will come upon them. Not only will God curse them, but He will rejoice over their destruction (v. 63). But right in the middle of it, in our text, we are told why the people of God veered away from the blessings that follow obedience and into the dark world of insanity and disobedience.

It was because, while they had the blessings, they did not treat them or respond to them as blessings. Responding to blessing with greed or with guilt incurs wrath. The required response was gratitude. The curses will rest upon them for a sign and a wonder, and on their descendants as well (v. 46). The reason is then given. They are cursed because they did not serve God with two attitudes of thanksgiving—with joyfulness and with gladness of heart (v. 47). On top of this, they were not joyful and glad in heart because of all the stuff (v. 47). And that is why they will be turned out, consigned to the cruelties of their enemies, to the point of their final destruction (v. 48).

Lifted Out of the Mire:

As we will see later in this series, when we come to describe the sin of man, the heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can understand it (Jer. 17:9)? But part of this desperate wickedness and confusion can be seen in the refusal to get up when God declares an invitation to do so. We must humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God (1 Pet. 5:6). But if we have humbled ourselves in truth, then we won’t kick and squall when He does the next thing, which is to exalt us, lifting us up into gladness. If the humility does not end in gladness and triumph, then the humility did not begin (really) in humility at all.

“Glory and honour are in his presence; Strength and gladness are in his place” (1 Chron. 16:27).

“And the children of Israel that were present at Jerusalem kept the feast of unleavened bread seven days with great gladness: and the Levites and the priests praised the Lord day by day, singing with loud instruments unto the Lord” (2 Chron. 30:21).

“The hope of the righteous shall be gladness: But the expectation of the wicked shall perish” (Prov. 10:28).

“And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart,” (Acts 2:46).

Some Historical Observations:

So we are addressing a biblical concept, but are not using a biblical word for it. Where do we get this word Chestertonian for what we are talking about?

“But there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries” (C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, p. 116, emphasis mine).

As participants in a great and true reformation, this attitude really was characteristic of the early Protestants, for the first century or so. Lewis again: “From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang” (English Lit, p. 33).

And here is the central point—this demeanor, this Spirit-given, Christ-exalting demeanor—is an essential part of the program. It is not an add-on extra.

Leaning Toward Resurrection:

The suspicion that is directed against an exuberant gratitude for stuff is a suspicion that places the things of earth in some kind of a competition with the things of heaven. This world competes with the eternal things, and so what we must do is get a five gallon bucket of dour paint thinner, and pour it over all our material possessions. We try to make Heaven thick by making earth thin. This is wrong-headed, and incurs the latter half of Deuteronomy 28 to boot.

What we must do is receive all God’s covenantal blessings, as thick as we can conceive of them, and then imagine how much thicker Heaven will be. We receive them, in the name of Christ, as hors d’oeuvres, to whet the appetite, to make us long for more. We are not trying to get out of a prison. We are trying to get out of the entry room, and into the mansion.

In George Herbert’s lovely poem, Sunday, he describes the Lord’s Day as “the next world’s bud.” Later in the poem, he calls Sunday “a day of mirth.” This is no incongruity. James, the Lord’s brother, suggested that if someone was merry he should sing psalms (Jas. 5:13).

“Puritan poets . . . knew that part of their work in this world was to wean their affections from the unmixed love of it. But they also knew that this world was God’s metaphor for His communicable glories and that another part of their duty was to see and utter that metaphor, to use the figural value of this world to turn their attentions and affections to the next” (Daly, God’s Altar, p. 81).

Calvinism 4.0: Biblical Absolutes and the Spirit of the Age

Christ Church on April 29, 2018

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Introduction

In the second chapter of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar the king promoted Daniel after he had been able to interpret the troubling dream that the king had had. As a result of Daniel’s influence, Daniel’s three friends were established in the rule of Babylon. Sometime later, Nebuchadnezzar established a giant gold statue of himself in the plain of Dura, and the officialdom of all Babylon was commanded to assemble and do obeisance to that statue when the music commenced.

What we have in this story is an account of what happens when the absolute Word of God collides with the pretended absolute word of man.

The Text

“Then Nebuchadnezzar in his rage and fury commanded to bring Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. Then they brought these men before the king. Nebuchadnezzar spake and said unto them, Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship the golden image which I have set up? Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:13–18).

Summary of the Text

The command was given, and everyone complied (3:7)—well, everyone except for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Certain Chaldeans accused them to the king, saying correctly that they had not complied (vv. 8-12). The three men were consequently summoned before the king (v. 13). “Is this true?” Nebuchadnezzar asked (v. 14). The king then magnanimously offered them a do-over. If they refused, it was the fiery furnace for them, in that same hour (v. 15). The king then uttered the fatal taunt—“who is that God that shall deliver?” The three replied that they had no need to reply (v. 16). God was able to deliver them, and they were confident that He would in fact do so (v. 17). But whether or not He decided to deliver them, they were not going to bow down in any case (v. 18). The rest of the story is well-known—God delivered them from the fire, not to mention delivering the king from his blindness.

Inescapable

The God of the Bible is transcendent, standing outside the created order. He is not contained by the material world, although He is present throughout it. This is the true God, the God who will not share His glory with another. “I am the Lord: that is my name: And my glory will I not give to another, Neither my praise to graven images” (Is. 42:8). This was not a battle between the god of Babylon and the god of Jerusalem. Rather it was a face-off between the God of Heaven and gods of earth.

Sentient creatures are finite, but because they are also fallen creatures they don’t want to be finite. This means that whenever the true God is denied, or when some aspect of His absolute attributes are denied, sinful men always see a job opening. They don’t want a foreordaining God because they want to make room for foreordaining man. Their problem is not that there is a throne over the cosmos; their problem is that they aren’t sitting in it.

And, not so incidentally, this is precisely why the nations which have the deepest legacy of Calvinistic truth are also the nations that have the deepest legacy of personal liberty for man. When God is God, man is free. Whenever man is god, men are enslaved. Foreordination is an inescapable concept—not whether, but which. It is not whether the future will be planned, but rather who will attempt the planning. God the Father? Or man as the sorcerer’s apprentice?

Creator and Redeemer

We must distinguish the question of God as Creator being sovereign, and God as Redeemer being sovereign. We are going to delve into the question of redemption later in this series, but we need to make this distinction early on. The free agency of man as creature is entirely consistent with the sovereignty of God as Creator—but there is true mystery involved in it. This is a subject where we can’t do the math. How can God sovereignly ordain (before all worlds) that I will in fact place this watch on the pulpit right now, and that I will do so freely? What does it mean when a preacher places a watch on the pulpit? Some wiseacres might be tempted to say that it doesn’t mean anything, but I have a larger point. There is a true creaturely freedom here, but the basis of it is mysterious.

But when we are talking about redemption of men as sinners, we do not try to defend man’s freedom, and we do not try because men as sinners are not in fact free. They are slaves. They have no freedom. They are dead in their sins, and have no liberty. There is no mystery to this part of it.

Hostility to Graven Images

The Reformed tradition has long been hostile to the use of any kind of image in worship. This is based on two things. The first is the plain Word of God (Ex. 20:4-6). Such worship is prohibited in the Ten Commandments, and we have the glorious example of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego here. This is sufficient.

But there is also a deep theological structure to our resistance to images. We have been given a vision of a transcendent God, and the only way the Creator/creature divide could be bridged is if God Himself does it in an Incarnation. When we make an attempt at such a bridge, our attempts may seem glorious to us, but they are infinitely lame.

This statue of Nebuchadnezzar was about 90 feet tall. We look up at such a thing, but we are just ants on the ground. This is a cheap knock-off imitation transcendence. This is a scratch n’ sniff transcendence. Instead of the ultimate vertical, all we do is try to make the horizontal impressive. It succeeds . . . with idolaters.

Anchored in Eternity

We do not start with a premise that assumes an all-controlling God. Such a premise would in fact be quite true, but our arms are not sufficient to get around it. We can’t hold it, so we cannot start there. And so we come first to Christ. Christ was sent to us from the Father. If we have seen Him, we have seen the Father. He is the way—no one comes to the Father but through Him. God has set eternity in our hearts (Ecc. 3:11), and in Christ all things hold together (Col. 1:17-18)—including that eternity.

We are not fatalists, worshiping an inscrutable Force. We are Christians, and because we have come to Christ we have been escorted into a true friendship with the mysteries.

Psalm 22

Christ Church on April 8, 2018

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The Text

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?. . . “ (Psalm 22)

The Song of His Father David

“We shall not be able to ‘explain’ the content of the fourth utterance from the cross, at least, not the essence of it … A well known saying has it that those who would understand the poet must go to the poet’s country. And now the poet par excellence is appearing on Golgotha. Be quiet, for Jesus is speaking. The creative spirit. The sensitive soul. And the Author of the psalms. Now He will sing, will recite his severest hymn – and no longer endure his own verses. You all remember that the fourth utterance, to put it that way, is a ‘quotation.’ It is literally the overture of Psalm 22. The Son of David is repeating the song of his father David.” Klaas Schilder.

The Forsaken Messiah (vv, 1-2, 12-18)

The Faithful Messiah (vv, 1-2, 3-5, 9-11, 19-21)

The Victorious Messiah (vv. 21-31)

Dr. Michael McClenahan is an Irish Presbyterian minister and Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological College. He has degrees in Jurisprudence, Theology, and Ecclesiastical History from the University of Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the theology of Jonathan Edwards. He is the author of Jonathan Edwards and Justification by Faith (Ashgate, 2012). This academic year he is the holder of the New Saint Andrews Lectureship.