Meditations on Murmuring

As I get older I notice I tend to complain and murmur. I excuse my behavior as just a symptom of getting old. However, I also notice that the bible has some rather strong teachings against murmuring so I decided to do some digging. A linguistic key gives definitions for words as they are found within a biblical passage. Renecker and Rodgers in their linguistic key defines "to murmur" as the following:

to murmur, to complain, to give audible expression to unwarranted dissatisfaction (Lenski). It contains the idea of a judgment and a condemnation of God by man who instead of giving God thanks and showing obedience sets himself up as a judge over God (s. TDNT; CBB) (A Linguistic Key to the Greek New Testament, Renecker and Rodgers)

This definition is in reference to "grumble" as used by the apostle Paul in 1st Corinthians.

We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer. (1 Corinthians 10:9-10, ESV)

Commentators differ on who the "Destroyer" is, but most commentators agree that Paul is referring to Numbers 14. The people Israel just heard the bad report from 10 out the 12 spies who were sent out to assess the land of Canaan as to its defenses and bounty. 12 spies spent 40 days in the land. 10 out of the 12 said the land would be hard to conquer: the current inhabitants of Canaan were large and their cities were well fortified. The people responded to this bad news in the following way.

Then all the congregation raised a loud cry, and the people wept that night. 2 And all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! (Numbers 14:1-2, ESV)

Notice murmuring is second guessing not only the leadership, but God who put those leaders in power. The people were also doubting God's ability to help them conquer the land, God's promises to their forefathers to give them the land, and God's sovereignty over the circumstances. God severely punished the people for murmuring. None of the adult Israelites were allowed to enter the land. Paul in the passage is illustrating for the Corinthians that doubting Paul's God-given authority and second-guessing God's commands and ordinances is wrong. Murmuring is blatant sin.

Paul also encouraged the church at Phillipi to not grumble.

Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, (Philippians 2:14-15, ESV)

The question that needs to be asked is how does "doing all things without grumbling" lead to being blameless and innocent? Paul is probably referring back to Leviticus as he did in 1 Corinthians. The Phillippians were not trusting his leadership or their elders' leadership. The next verse (Phillipians 2:16) encourages the Phillippians to "hold fast to word of life." Paul is pointing out that the purity of a group of Christians who hold fast to their common faith and core doctrines while loving each other would be a shining light in this dark world. Paul again addresses the content of our speech in his letter to the Ephesians.

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. (Ephesians 4:29, ESV)

John Piper in one of his sermons on this passage poses some questions that we should ask ourselves about our speech.

The question for your mouth will not merely be the moral question: Am I avoiding dirty words? But the Christian question: Am I building the faith of others by what I say? Is my mouth a means of grace? Am I frightened and anxious and angry about my life, or am I filled and overflowing with hope that the Spirit of God will keep me safe for the day of redemption?

The apostle James also commands Christians to not grumble against one another.

Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door. (James 5:9, ESV)

The following tables shows how James refers back to Leviticus 19, which lays out the Ten Commandments.

James		Leviticus 19
v. 5:12	“Do not swear”	v. 12	“You shall not swear”
v. 5:4	“Behold, the wages of the laborers…which you kept back from fraud.	v. 13	“The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night”
2:1,9	“My brothers, show no partiality”	v. 15	“You shall not be partial.”
4:11	“Do not speak evil against one another.”	v. 16	“You shall not go around as a slanderer.”
v. 5:9	“Do not grumble against one another.”	v. 18a	“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge.”
2:8	“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”	v. 18b	“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

 

Notice how grumbling is tied with holding a grudge. If we murmur against leadership, are we not holding a grudge? If we grumble against one another, are we not trying to harm one another? Murmuring against leadership secular or ecclesiastical is wrong. It ultimately shows that we are not trusting God and we are handling the mistrust in harmful ways. If you question leadership, do not complain to others, but seek out that leader in a godly manner. We honor God through trusting the leadership. We can disagree with leadership, but complaining and murmuring among ourselves is not the correct means to handle the disagreement.

Our speech reflects our life. If God is giving us hope through Christ, then our speech should edify and give hope to others and not be filled with complaining and murmuring, even when we are suffering. The apostle Paul reflects this attitude we should have in 2 Corinthians.

So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10, ESV)

Ephesians 1:4 -- God Chose Us

Our House Church is studying Ephesians. People dislike the ideas of predestination and election; however, in Ephesians, Paul sees those two ideas as reasons to glorify God.

even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, (Ephesians 1:4-5, ESV)

Charles Hodge, who was president of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878, noted two results of meditating on God's election of us in his commentary on Ephesians 1:4: first, confidence that God will not fail His adopted children, and second, humility that God saved us based on nothing in us or performed by us.

From eternity the whole scheme of redemption with all its details and in all its results lay matured in the divine mind. Hence every thing is certain. There is no possibility either of failure or of any change of purpose. The eternity of God’s purpose is, therefore, a strong ground of confidence and comfort. The other is, to express the sovereignty of the divine purpose. The grace was given to us before we existed, before the world began, and of course before we had done any good or evil. It was, therefore, not for works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us. If the one aspect of the truth that God chose us before the foundation of the world, is adapted to produce confidence; the other aspect is no less adapted to produce humility.

How the Monks Civilized Europe

Mark Noll in his excellent book, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity outlined the expansion of Christianity into Eastern and Western Europe during the Middle Ages. He made the following observation at the end of the summary.

The missionary effectiveness of the monks usually depended as much upon their plain virtues as upon more highly visible exertions in preaching or teaching. For a monastery to be established in a pagan area allowed the local population to see the application of Christianity to daily existence, as monks tilled the soil, welcomed visitors, and carried out the offices of study and daily prayer. So arose the saying that the monks civilized Europe cruce, libro, et atro--with cross, book and plow. (p.100, Turning Points)

May the modern Evangelical Church be characterized in the same way.

Yellowstone National Park, Rudyard Kipling and Me

I was watching National Parks: America's Best Idea by Ken Burns. They had a story about Rudyard Kipling visiting Yellowstone. He was writing journal articles about the United States and poked fun at American culture and the tourists. He kept his cynical outlook throughout his travels through Yellowstone, but he was impressed by the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, especially by the Lower Great Falls. This reminded me of my own experience of the waterfall.

My brother and I were looking for work in the summer after our freshman year in college. A help-wanted ad in the Council Bluffs Nonpareil stated that Hamilton Stores Inc. was looking for grocery store clerks and some other miscellaneous positions I do not remember. The key attraction for the position for us was the fact the job was in Yellowstone National Park. After begging our dad and a few phone calls, my brother and I found ourselves on a greyhound bus headed out of Omaha headed toward Yellowstone.

We were placed by the HR department as clerks at the grocery store in Canyon Village. After a few preliminary orientation talks and a tour of the store, we were shown to our rooms in the dorm. After we were done unpacking, my brother and I were left to our own devices. Just off the parking lot outside the dorm, we saw an asphalt-covered trail that led into the woods so we decided to take it. After a mile or two, we heard a deep rumbling. We decided it had to be the waterfalls we've heard about. Encouraged, we kept going. However, the trail headed in a different direction from where the rumbling came. Being good scouts and Iowa farm boys, we unwisely decided to cut through the woods. After about 15 minutes we were second guessing ourselves. We were in the mountains, the woods were thick, and it was getting dark. However, we still heard the falls so we kept going. After a few more minutes, we saw more light coming through the woods indicating a clearing ahead. Eventually, we stumbled out of the woods and the brush onto a highway. A couple a hundred yards up the road, we saw a bunch of cars and RVs in a small parking lot. We headed toward them. It was the scenic outlook for Upper and Lower Great Falls. A sign indicated this was a trail-head of a path that led down to the top of the Lower Great Falls. The trail was asphalt-covered with a bunch of switch backs. It was less that 2 miles down so my brother and I decided to take it and raced down the trail. We passed old people complaining about their knees going down the path and met young families with fathers carrying their toddlers on the way up the trail. Everybody looked out of breath. When we we arrived at the top of the Lower Falls, a slight mist covered my face. The sound of thunderous, rushing water filled the air. The golden hues of the canyon walls mixed with the greens of the vegetation in the setting sun. My experience matched the scene described by Rudyard Kipling so many years before:

All that I can say is that without warning or preparation I looked into a gulf seventeen hundred feet deep, with eagles and fish-hawks circling far below. And the sides of that gulf were one wild welter of color--crimson, emerald, cobalt, ochre, amber, honey splashed with port wine, snow white, vermilion, lemon, and silver gray in wide washes. The sides did not fall sheer, but were graven by time, and water, and air into monstrous heads of kings, dead chiefs--men and women of the old time. So far below that no sound of its strife could reach us, the Yellowstone River ran a finger-wide strip of jade green. The sunlight took those wondrous walls and gave fresh hues to those that nature had already laid there. Evening crept through the pines that shadowed us, but the full glory of the day flamed in that canyon as we went out very cautiously to a jutting piece of rock--blood-red or pink it was--that overhung the deepest deeps of all.

This was my first and best real experience of Yellowstone. I hiked over two hundred miles that summer on the trails around the canyon. I saw the Lower Great Falls from several angles and it always moved me. Needless to say I am enjoying the Ken Burns DVD series and it pleases me to imagine that Kipling and I covered the same paths around 80 years apart.

March 2014 Haiti Mission Trip Prayer Requests

Ten of us are on the mission team for the March 2014 Haiti Mission trip. We met this morning (01/05/2014) for orientation. It is a Medical Soul Care trip. The mission is to care for the Haitian's body, mind and soul. The trip will be from 02/28/2014-03/07/2014. More information will be posted, but I am nervous about the trip so I thought I would post prayer requests. Here are the team's prayer requests:

• Pray for God to be working in the hearts of the Haitian people in preparation for our trip and the message that He desires for us to deliver.
• Pray for our team that we would be given His heart for the Haitian people and that we'd be able to deliver His message effectively and clearly.
• Pray for God's vision for this team and this overall endeavor to become more clear as a result of this trip.
• Pray that above all God will be glorified.

I don't have medical training so pray the following points for me: 

• I'll be useful to the team. 
• I'll have boldness and wisdom in ministering God's Word.
• God will protect me both physically and spiritually.
• God will help me in preparations for the trip both logistically, physically, and in bible study.

Let me know if you have any questions. 

Thank you,

Jeff

John Owen on Conquering Lust through Meditating on God.

John Owen comments in his essay, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, about how although we do not have the capacity to fully understand His Word, we can compensate for this inability by meditating on God's greatness, limitless power, and holiness.

We are dull and slow of heart to receive the things that are in the word revealed; God, by our infirmity and weakness, keeping us in continual dependence on him for teachings and revelations of himself out of his word, never in this world bringing any soul to the utmost of what is from the word to be made out and discovered--so that although the way of revelation in the gospel be clear and evident, yet we know little of the things themselves that are revealed. Let us, then, revive the use and intention of this consideration: will not a due apprehension of this inconceivable greatness of God, and that infinite distance wherein we stand from him, fill the soul with a holy and awful fear of him, so as to keep it in a frame unsuited to the thriving of flourishing of any lust whatsoever Let the soul be continually wonted to reverential thoughts of God's greatness and omnipresence, and it will be much upon its watch as to any undue deportments. Consider him with whom you have to do--even "our God is a consuming fire" [Heb. 12:29]--and in your greatest abashments at his presence and eye, know that your very nature is too narrow to bear apprehensiins suitable to his essential glory.(pp. 117-118, Overcoming Sin & Temptation)

I have two thoughts about this paragraph. First, God's Word is a wonderful resource. We as evangelicals tend to read books about biblical themes (i.e. biblical counseling, daily living, the spiritual disciplines, etc.) without doing the hard work of studying and meditating on God's Word itself. Although, we have over two thousand years of Church scholarship and books being written every day on the Word, we have not even scratch the surface of understanding God's Word. We need to long for the pure spiritual milk of the Word at a very personal level. Second, our default position in our decision-making process for our day-to-day walk needs to be not "What Would Jesus Do?", but an informed decision about "Does this glorify Christ?"

John Owen on Knowing God

John Owen writes about "knowing" or at least the "not knowing" the being of God.

For the being of God; we are so far from a knowledge of it, so as to be able to instruct one another therein by words and expressions of it, as that to frame any conceptions in our mind, with such species and impressions of things as we receive the knowledge of all other things by, is to make an idol to ourselves, and so to worship a god of our own making, and not the God that made us. We may as well and as lawfully hew him out of wood or stone as form him a being in our minds, suited to our apprehensions. The utmost of the best of our thoughts of the being of God is that we can have no thoughts of it. Our knowledge of a being is but low when it mounts no higher but only to know that we know it not.

There [may] be some things of God which he himself has taught us to speak of, and to regulate our expressions of them; but when we have so done, we see not the things themselves; we know them not. To believe and admire is all that we attain to. We profess, as we are taught, that God is infinite, omnipotent, eternal; and we know what disputes and notions there are about omnipresence, immensity, infiniteness, and eternity. We have, I say, words and notions about these things; but as to the things themselves what do we know? What do we comprehend of them? Can the mind of man do any more but swallow itself up in an infinite abyss, which is as nothing; give itself up to what it cannot conceive, much less express? Is not our understanding "brutish" in the contemplation of such things, and is as if it were not? Yea, the perfection of our understanding is not to understand, and to rest there. They are but the back parts of eternity and infiniteness that we have a glimpse of. What shall I say of the Trinity, or the subsistence of distinct persons in the same individual essence--a mystery by many denied, because by none understood--a mystery whose every letter is mysterious? Who can declare the generation of the Son, the procession of the Spirit, or the difference of the one from the other? But I shall not further instance in particulars. That infinite and inconceivable distance that is between him and us keeps us in the dark as any sight of his face or clear apprehension of his perfections. (pp. 114-115, Overcoming Sin and Temptation)

Again, these paragraphs are taken out of context. Owen goes on and writes how faith is central to our knowing God truly and experientially, but this passage serves us well to contemplate God as Job did when God finally revealed some of His glory to Job at the end of the book.

“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you make it known to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:2-6, ESV)

How Augustine Preached Sermons

Peter Brown in his magnificent biography of Augustine of Hippo wrote about Augustine's sermons.

For Augustine did not 'preach' sermons, in the sense of delivering fierce denunciations of the gods. Rather he gave his congregation what we could call a 'teach-in'. In a world where the overwhelming majority of the population was illiterate, Christian doctrine was not primarily communicated through books. It was communicated, in detail, by sermons. The sermons preached by Augustine in 404 were nothing less than a series of master classes on the nature of true relations between God and men. They were preserved as they were spoken by stenographers. In them, we hear the principal themes of the Confessions of De Trinitate and the City of God brought to life for us in the simple Latin of the streets of Carthage and of the small towns of the Medjerda valley. Ordinary congregations were to have their full share of Augustine's magnificent vision of the Christian religion (pp. 457-458)

I want to make a couple of observations. First, obviously being illiterate is not the same as being stupid. Scholars have many of Augustine's sermons and the sermons taught difficult concepts to the ordinary congregation of that day. Sermons went on for over 2 hours at times. The preachers at that time made the sermons cyclical and segmented so the audience could leave and come back and still pick up the sense of the sermon.

The second observation is I am reading 7 Practices of Effective Ministry. The 4th practice is "Teach Less for More." The authors make some good points teaching children, but I do not agree with all their points about teaching adults. The authors want the churches to teach what is helpful (p. 136). However, we as a congregation need to go deep into theology at times to plumb the depths of grace. Paul prays in Ephesians for the Ephesian church to have "strength to comprehend."

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19, ESV)

Knowing God is hard work and difficult. From reading this biography of Augustine, I would think Augustine would agree that Christians need to understand theology so they can understand the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ. Read the Pauline epistles and remember that Paul was not writing to theologians alone. He was writing to ordinary congregations. God wants us to use our hearts, minds and souls to worship him.

John Owen: Greatest Motivation for a Life of Purity

I am still reading John Owen's essay, "Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers." The following quote loses a bit of impact from being out of context, but it is still good.

Consider who and what you are; who the Spirit is that is grieved, what he has done for you, what he comes to your soul about, what he has already done in you; and be ashamed. Among those who walk with God, there is no greater motive and incentive unto universal holiness, and the preserving of their hearts and spirits in all purity and cleanness, than this, that the blessed Spirit, who has undertaken to dwell in them, is continually considering what they give entertainment in their hearts unto, and rejoices when his temple is kept undefiled. (p. 102, Overcoming Sin and Temptation)

Augustine's Views on Predestination

I am finishing up a very good biography called Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown. Brown spent a whole chapter explaining Augustine's view of predestination towards the end of his life. I copied a few of the more striking passages.

For Augustine's doctrine of predestination, as he elaborated it, was a doctrine for fighting men. A monk might waste his leisure worrying about his utlimate identity: to Augustine, such an anxiety was misplaced. A doctrine of predestination divorced from action was inconceivable to him. He has never written to deny freedom, merely to make it more effective in the harsh environment of a fallen world. The world demanded, among other things, unremitting intellectual labour to gain truth, stern rebuke to move men. (p. 406)

The following quote is from an Augustinian commentary on Deuteronomy.

Say not in thy heart: My strength and the power of my hand has wrought this great wonder: but thou shalt remember the Lord thy God, for He it is Who gives the strength to do great deeds.

Augustine consoled the victims of the sack of Rome by using the doctrine of predestination and reminding the victims that their future is secure in heaven with bodies that will be glorified.

What is more, such views made the world readily intelligible. The doctrine of predestination was developed by Augustine mainly as a doctrine, in which every event was charged with a precise meaning as a deliberate act of God, of mercy for the elect, of judgement for the damned...
Similarly, every tribulation of the elect was a calculated mercy. This alone was no small thing: for in the anthology of the works of Augustine, later compiled by Prosper, the opening book of the City of God, with the record of the still-distant news of unburied corpses, of nuns raped, of the enslavement of prisoners of war, will now appear as relevant to the every day experience of a man of the fifth century. (pp. 406-407)

Augustine at the end of his life wrote on perseverance. He tried to answer the question, what keeps a Christian on his walk throughout his life through pain and suffering?

What preoccupied Augustine, therefore, was no longer the mobilization of love that caused a man to act, but the mysterious resilience that would enable some men to maintain this love for the full course of their lives.(p. 408)

The 'gift of perseverance', as he [Augustine] had said , was the greatest of God's gifts to the individual. For it bestowed on frail human beings the same unshakeable stablility as the human nature in Christ had enjoyed: by this gift, a man was joined forever to the Divine, could be confident that the 'hand of God' would stretched above him to shield him, unfailingly, against the world. 'Human nature could not have been raised higher.' (p. 409)

Predestination, an abstract stumbling-block to the sheltered communities of Hadrumetum and Marseilles, as it would be to so many future Christians, had only one meaning for Augustine: it was a doctrine of survival, a fierce insistence that God alone could provide men with an irreducible inner core. (p. 410)

John Owen on the Deceitfulness of Sin

Here are two quotes by John Owen on the deceitfulness of sin. The first observation Owen makes is Christians minimize the full impact of sin.

Solomon tells you of him who was enticed by the lewd woman, that he was "among the simple ones," he was " a young man void of understanding" (Prov. 7:7). And wherein did his folly appear? Why, says he (v. 23), "he knew not that it was for his life," he considered not the guilt of the evil that he was involved in. (p. 97, Overcoming Sin and Temptation)

We should not toy with sin because sin deadens our pursuit and enjoyment of God. The second observation builds on the first observation. Owen solemnly encourages us to be careful and watchful to be not hardened by sin's deceitfulness

This the apostle sorely charges on the Hebrews (3:12-13), "Take heed, brethren, lest there be any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called Today; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin." "Take heed, " says he, "use all means, consider you temptations, watch diligently; there is a treachery, a deceit in sin, that tends to the hardening of your hearts from the fear of God." The hardening here mentioned is to the utmost --utter obduration; sin tends to it, and every distemper and lust will make at least some progress toward it. You that were tender, and used to melt under the word, under afflictions, will grow as some have profanely spoken, "sermon-proof and sickness-proof." You that did tremble at the presence of God, thoughts of death, and appearance before him, when you had more assurance of his love than now you have, shall have a stoutness upon your spirit not to be moved by these things. Your soul and your sin shall be spoken of and spoken to, and you shall not be all concerned, but shall be to pass over duties, praying, hearing, reading, and your heart not in the least affected. Sin will grow a light thing to you; you will pass it by as a thing of naught; this it will grow to. And what will be the end of such a condition? Can a sadder thing befall you? Is it not enough to make any heart to tremble, to think ob being brought into that estate wherein he should slight thoughts of sin? Slight thoughts of grace, of mercy, of the blood of Christ, of the law, heaven, and hell, come all in at the same season. Take heed, this is that [which] your lust is working toward--the hardening of the heart, searing of the conscience, blinding of the mind, stupifying of the affections, and deceiving of the whole soul. (pp. 98-99, Overcoming Sin and Temptation)

Pining for the City of God

Rome was sacked. Augustine's congregation in Hippo was confused and saddened. Augustine decided to preach on the Psalms to encourage his flock by pointing that only one city was eternal and that was the City of God. This series of sermons became the foundation of Augustine's magnus opus, The City of God. The premise was that throughout history there has been two cities represented by Babylon and Jerusalem. Babylon was the city of the people who reject God and His government. The heavenly Jerusalem was the city of God. The citizens of these two cities might be hard to distinguish at times, but in the last days their citizenship will become clear. The following quote was from one of these sermons. It explained how we, the Church, maintain and manifest our citizenship in the present age.

Now let us hear, brothers, let us hear and sing; let us pine for the City where we are citizens.... By pining we are already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on that coast. I sing of somewhere else, not of here: for I sing with my heart, not my flesh. The citizens of Babylon hear the sound of the flesh, the Founder of Jerusalem hears the tune of our heart. (Augustine as quoted by Peter Brown, p. 314, Augustine of Hippo

The author of Hebrews wrote that even before Jerusalem was an earthly city, Abraham sought the eternal city --the city of promise--during his earthly stay on earth.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. (Hebrews 11:8-10, ESV)

After the role call of faith in chapter 11 of Hebrews, the author of Hebrews point out that all these heroes of the faith were seeking a heavenly city.

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:13-16, ESV)

Finally, at the end of Hebrews, we are to understand that this material world around us is not real, but we should seek the new Jerusalem which is permanent.

For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come. (Hebrews 13:14, ESV)

God Chose the Foolish of the World to Shame the Wise

I am reading Peter Brown's excellent biography of Augustine of Hippo. The author describes the intellectual milieu of Augustine's day just before Augustine started writing his masterpiece, City of God. Peter Brown writes about the neo-paganists, who were growing in number in the decaying Roman Empire and were intellectual opponents of Christianity. The following quote describes how a neo-paganist would have viewed Christianity.

For such men, Christianity appeared, as it appears to many to-day, as a religion out of joint with the natural assumptions of a whole culture. The great Platonists of their age, Plotinus and Porphyry, could provide them with a profoundly religious view of the world, that grew naturally out of an immemorial tradition. The claims of the Christian, by contrast, lacked intellectual foundation. For a man such as Volusianus to accept the Incarnation would have been like a modern European denying the evolution of the species: he would have had to abandon not only the most advanced, rationally based knowledge available to him, but, by implication, the whole culture permeated by such achievements. Quite bluntly, the pagans were the 'wise' men, the 'experts', prudentes; and the Christians were 'stupid'. (pp. 299-300, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography)

This excerpt reminds me of 1 Corinthians 1:26-31.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31, ESV)

Christianity was never the intellectually cool religion throughout the ages. Intellectual non-Christians stumbled over the truths about the necessity of the Cross and the depravity of their sin. God did not choose us because we were smarter than our opponents. We were chosen to shame the wise and embarrass the strong through our stupidity and weakness.

God wants to bring Himself glory through us in spite of us. Consider Augustine who was very sharp intellectually. However, we need to remember he was a country bumpkin from Africa and he was not from Rome: the cultural center of his world.  Also consider that he did not know Greek that well. We can be sure that he felt unequal to the task at times to fight his intellectual battles with the culture. However, we can assume that he knew that God placed him where he would do the most good. We, like Augustine, can know we serve an infinitely wise God.

The Trinity Orchestrates the Symphony of Salvation Together

We talked about the Trinity in Core last Thursday. In the introduction to a collection of essays called, From Heaven He Came and Sought Her, David and Jonathan Gibson wrote about how the Trinity is involved in salvation on page 49. They quoted Fred Sanders.

The Trinity orchestrates the symphony of salvation in all its movements: the Father elects and sends, the Son becomes incarnate and dies, the Spirit draws and vivifies. But while their works are distinct they are not independent: the Father elects in Christ, the incarnate Son offers himself on the cross through the eternal Spirit to the Father, and the Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son to draw and seal the elect. Grounded in the mutual indwelling of their persons, the Father, Son, and Spirit together serve the shared goal of our salvation. "The Spirit serves the Son by applying what he accomplished, and the Son serves the Spirit by making his indwelling possible. Both Son and Spirit, together on their twofold mission from the Father, serve the Father and mister to us." (Fred Sanders, Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, p. 149)

The Choir: God's Commandos

Judah was in trouble. The Moabites, Ammonites, and some Meunites were coming to invade Judah. Jehosophat was a faithful king, but God decided to test Jehosophat and the people of Judah. They passed with flying colors. The first act Jehosophat did was to 'set his face to seek the Lord'. He then called a fast and called the people to gather so that they may seek the Lord together. Here's the passage in 2 Chronicles.

Meanwhile all Judah stood before the Lord, with their little ones, their wives, and their children. And the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jahaziel the son of Zechariah, son of Benaiah, son of Jeiel, son of Mattaniah, a Levite of the sons of Asaph, in the midst of the assembly. And he said, “Listen, all Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem and King Jehoshaphat: Thus says the Lord to you, ‘Do not be afraid and do not be dismayed at this great horde, for the battle is not yours but God's. Tomorrow go down against them. Behold, they will come up by the ascent of Ziz. You will find them at the end of the valley, east of the wilderness of Jeruel. You will not need to fight in this battle. Stand firm, hold your position, and see the salvation of the Lord on your behalf, O Judah and Jerusalem.’ Do not be afraid and do not be dismayed. Tomorrow go out against them, and the Lord will be with you.”

Then Jehoshaphat bowed his head with his face to the ground, and all Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem fell down before the Lord, worshiping the Lord. And the Levites, of the Kohathites and the Korahites, stood up to praise the Lord, the God of Israel, with a very loud voice. And they rose early in the morning and went out into the wilderness of Tekoa. And when they went out, Jehoshaphat stood and said, “Hear me, Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem! Believe in the Lord your God, and you will be established; believe his prophets, and you will succeed.” And when he had taken counsel with the people, he appointed those who were to sing to the Lord and praise him in holy attire, as they went before the army, and say,

“Give thanks to the Lord,
for his steadfast love endures forever.”

And when they began to sing and praise, the Lord set an ambush against the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir, who had come against Judah, so that they were routed. For the men of Ammon and Moab rose against the inhabitants of Mount Seir, devoting them to destruction, and when they had made an end of the inhabitants of Seir, they all helped to destroy one another. (2 Chronicles 20:13-23, ESV)

The front lines in this battle was the choir. God wanted to demonstrate to Judah that God protects those who wait on Him. God will not fail those who trust Him and praise Him. What better way to thank God than through music. One of the main tools God has in his arsenal to fight his battles in this world is corporate worship. It helps the body of Christ to worship God in unison.

Paul and Silas had a similar experience with worship. They were in Philippi. Paul and Silas were captured, dragged through the streets, stripped of their clothes, beaten by rods, imprisoned and placed in stocks. These missionaries set the example for all missionaries that followed them in suffering: they sang hymns and glorified God.

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone's bonds were unfastened. (Acts 16:25-26, ESV)

God again responded to their praise of His commandos (missionaries); he set them free. The following passages exhort us to sing corporately to celebrate God's work in our lives, to teach one another about Christ, to admonish one another, and to give thanks in our hearts to God.

Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)

John Owen on the Nature of Sin

Here's a few quotes from the book Overcoming Sin and Temptation by John Owen. It is a tough read, but here are some nuggets from Owen, with some general observations.

Without sincerity and diligence in a universality of obedience, there is no mortification of any one perplexing lust to be obtained. (p. 86)

Owen is pointing out that one may conquer one sin, but like a hydra, it might grow another head in some other sin. The only way to kill sin off (the mortification is never totally accomplished during our stay on earth) is total obedience to the Gospel.

Hatred of sin as sin, not only as galling or disquieting, a sense of the love Christ in the cross, lies at the bottom of all true spiritual mortification.(p. 87)

We may hate how a sin (gambling or pornography addiction) may affect our lives and our family, but unless we kill off sin because we love Christ and what he did on the cross to pay for our sin; we will not have any real progress in the mortification of our sin.

Lust, as I showed in general, lies in the heart of everyone, even the best, while he lives; and think not that the Scripture speaks in vain, that it is subtle, cunning, crafty--that it seduces, entices, fights, rebels. (p. 88)

Sin or lust is a formidable enemy and it takes constant vigilance to mortify lust in all its forms.

Augustine on Preaching

Peter Brown wrote an excellent biography of Augustine named, Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was a bishop: an elder of the town of Hippo who was in charge of the local church and some priests in the surrounding area. He had some very wise insights about the Bible, preaching and training leaders.

The first quote is about Augustine's desire to immediately feed his flock from the bounty of the Word of God. The rest of the quotes are self-explanatory.

Augustine was certain of his basic role. It was not to stir up emotion: it was to distribute food. The Scriptural idea of 'breaking bread', of 'feeding the multitude', by expounding the Bible, an idea already rich with complex associations, is central to Augustine's view of himself as a preacher. (p. 249)

As he told Jerome, he could never be a 'disinterested' Biblical scholar: "If I do gain any stock of knowledge (in the Scriptures), I pay it out immediately to the people of God' (p. 249)

Nothing can be better, nothing more sweet for me than to gaze upon the Divine treasure without noise and hustle: this is what is sweet and good. To have to preach, to inveigh, to admonish, to edify, to feel responsible for every one of you--this is a great burden, a heavy weight upon me, a hard labour. (Augustine as quoted by Brown, pp. 252-253)

Augustine never faced the problem of replacing classical education throughout the Roman world. He merely wished to create for the devotees of true 'Wisdom' an oasis of literary culture, that was distinguished by being unselfconscious, unacademic, uncompetitve, and devoted to the understanding of the Bible alone. (p. 264)

Ephesians, Prayer and the Cosmic Battle

We were reading Ephesians 6:10-20 in the Wednesday Morning Men's Group. I noticed in Ephesians that prayer was central to our struggle against the cosmic powers. In Ephesians, prayer did not have a metaphor of a piece of armor tied to it. Paul wrote that prayer was our primary weapon and our main defense in our struggle. In the following passage, I put in bold the part of the passage that dealt with prayer.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. (Ephesians 6:10-20, ESV)

In Peter T. O'Brien's commentary: The Letter to the Ephesians, he states the following about the importance of prayer in our struggle with the present darkness.

Prayer is given greater prominence within the context of the battle with the powers of darkness than any of the weapons listed in vv. 14-17... Paul wants his readers to understand that prayer is 'foundational for the deployment of all the other weapons', and is therefore crucial if they are to stand firm in their spiritual struggle. He has already shown his concern for them by praying that they might know the greatness of God's power (1:15-23), and be strengthened by it so as to grasp the dimensions of Christ's love for them and be filled with all the fulness of God (3:14-21). The apostle wants them to realize that a life of dependence on God in prayer is essential if they are to engage successfully in their warfare with the powers of darkness. (p. 483-484, Peter. T. O'Brien)

We are in a battle of cosmic proportions. We are commanded to pray continually. (xref. 1 Thess. 5:17). To pray continually, we need to keep alert as for what we need to pray. Here's O'Brien again,

Believers are to pray continually because their struggle with the powers of darkness is never ending. And their prayers are to be 'in or by the Spirit', that is, inspired and guided by the same Holy Spirit through whom they have confident access to the Father (2:18). As those who have been built into God's dwelling place in the Spirit (2:22) and who are being filled by the Spirit (5:18), they are to pray to the Father, prompted and guided by the Spirit. This is not a reference to praying in tongues, since not all christians are expected to engage in such prayer, but has to do with specific requests offered through the Spirit by every believer involved in spiritual warfare. Even when we do know what pray as we ought, the Spirit comes to our assistance and intercedes for us with unspoken groanings that are perfectly in line with the will of God (lit. 'according to God', Rom. 8:26-27). (pp. 484-485)

C. S. Lewis and Others on the Nature of Sin

Psalm 51:3-5

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Sin is described as "the plague of his own heart."

Matthew Henry comments on I Kings 8:38

Sin is the plague of our own heart; our indwelling corruptions are our spiritual diseases.

I Kings 8:38-39 NKJV

whatever prayer, whatever supplication is made by anyone, or by all Your people Israel, when each one knows the plague of his own heart, and spreads out his hands toward this temple: 39 then hear in heaven Your dwelling place, and forgive, and act, and give to everyone according to all his ways, whose heart You know (for You alone know the hearts of all the sons of men),

C. S. Lewis through Screwtape, the senior demon in the Screwtape Letters, points out the effectiveness of the smaller sins.

“You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” (p. 56, Screwtape Letters)

Westminster Shorter Catechism

Q. 14. What is sin? A. Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.

Scriptural Support for the Catechism Answer:

“If anyone sins, doing any of the things that by the Lord's commandments ought not to be done, though he did not know it, then realizes his guilt, he shall bear his iniquity. (Leviticus 5:17, ESV)

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. (James 4:17, ESV)

Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. (1 John 3:4, ESV)

Jonathan Edwards on Sin

“Divines are generally agreed that sin radically and fundamentally consists in what is negative, or privative, having its root and foundation in a privation or want of holiness. And therefore undoubtedly, if it be so that sin does very much consist in hardness of heart, and so in the want of pious affections of heart, holiness does consist very much in those pious affections.” (Religious Affections)

A Dust-Covered Man on a Dust-Covered Horse

In the Civil War, U. S. Grant was stuck. He needed to capture Vicksburg, but he could not get through the swamp on the east side of the river. Grant made a risky move. He had his men march down river through the swamp on the western side so he could attack Vicksburg from behind. The maneuver was risky because he cut himself off from his supply line. Shelby Foote related why the men followed him with such a risky plan.

[During the Vicksburg campaign] the men knew they were cut loose from their base of supplies, but Grant himself gave them confidence. They believed Grant knew what he was doing, and one great encouragement for their believing that was that quite often on the march, whether at night or in the daytime, they’d be moving along a road or over a bridge and right beside the road would be Grant on his horse—a dust-covered man on a dust-covered horse—saying, “Move on, close up.” So they felt very much that he personally was in charge of their movement and it gave them added confidence.

This story showed Grant shepherding his men. He made sure they were going in the right direction and they were not going astray. I thought this was a vivid illustration of what an elder does for a church. Grant was covered with dust like his men. An elder should be involved with his flock and the church's daily battles. Grant had two commands. First he told them to move on so they would reach their goal. Second Grant told them to close up. This command meant close up the ranks: Stay together as a unit and don't fall behind. An elder should encourage his flock to move on toward knowing Christ, and helping others to know Christ. An elder should make sure the members of the flock should close up: shepherd the flock so no one goes astray through false teaching. The ministry of the ministers of the Word, according to Ephesians, should be maturity of the body and unity of faith. An elder should teach the Word in such a manner so the congregation can "Move on, close up." Here are some of the verses about elders preserving unity through the ministry of the word.

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, (Ephesians 4:11-13, ESV)

He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. (Titus 1:9, ESV)

C. S. Lewis on Greed

In the The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace was unwillingly transported to Narnia and taken aboard a ship that was on an adventure. As this adventure progressed, Eustace went on an expedition on a mysterious island. He got lost, found a treasure, and he fell asleep on the treasure. C. S. Lewis described the following event when Eustace awoke from his charmed sleep.

He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon. (p. 75, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,)

C. S. Lewis's commentary on Ephesians 4:28.

In the passage where the New Testament says that every one must work, it gives as a reason "in order that he may have something to give to those in need." Charity--giving to the poor--is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce that kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality. I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them. I am speaking now of "charities" in the common way. Particular cases of distress among your own relatives, friends, neighbours or employees, which God, as it were, forces upon your notice, may demand much more: even to the crippling and endangering of your own position. For many of us the great obstacle to charity lies not in our luxurious living or desire for money, but in fear--fear of insecurity. This must often be recognised as a temptation. Sometimes our pride also also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more that we ought on the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and less than we ought on those who really need our help. (p. 67, Mere Christianity)

Here's the verse in Ephesians:

Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. (Ephesians 4:28, ESV)

The relationship between Greed and Pride.

That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices the other vices are not. ... Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.

Take it with money. Greed will certainly make a man want money, for the sake of a better house, better holidays, better things to eat and drink. But only up to point. What is it that makes a man with 10,000 pounds a year anxious to get 20,000 pounds a year? It is not the greed for more pleasure. 10,000 pounds will give all the luxuries that any man can really enjoy. It is Pride--the wish to be richer than some other rich man, and (still more) the wish for power. For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys ... (p. 95, Mere Christianity)

C. S. Lewis ends Mere Christianity with this summary of the fundamental principle of the Christian world view.

The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and the death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.(p. 175)

C. S. Lewis on Anger

Here are some miscellaneous quotes by C. S. Lewis on Anger and Wrath.

This first quote points out the effect of our anger on others is not the measure of the impact of the unrighteous anger on our souls.

One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.” (p. 72,Mere Christianity)

In the following quote, Lewis is trying to convince Malcolm that depersonalizing God's anger with unemotional analogies of anger (i.e. "The live wire doesn't feel angry with us, but if we blunder against it we get a shocked") doesn't really help us at all.

All the liberalising and "civilising" analogies only lead us astray. Turn God's wrath into mere enlightened disapproval, and you also turn His love into mere humanitarianism. The "consuming fire" and the "perfect beauty" both vanish. We have, instead, a judicious headmistress or a conscientious magistrate. (p. 97, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer)

C. S. Lewis commenting on James 1:20

I know that "the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God." That is not because wrath is wrath but because man is (fallen) man.(p. 97, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer)

Here's the passage in James.

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. (James 1:19-20, ESV)

The first sonnet of the poem the Five Sonnets by C. S. Lewis. Notice the line "Anger's the anesthetic of the mind."

You think that we who do not shout and shake
Our first at God when youth or bravery die
Have colder blood or hearts less apt to ache
Than yours who rail. I know you do. Yet why?
You have what sorrow always longs to find,
Someone to blame, some enemy in chief;
Anger's the anesthetic of the mind,
It does men good, it fumes away their grief.
We feel the stroke like you; so far our fate
Is equal. After that, for us begin
Half-hopeless labours, learning not to hate,
And then to want, and then (perhaps) to win
A high, unearthly comfort, angel's food,
That seems at first mockery to flesh and blood.

C. S. Lewis (and Friend) on Sloth

This is how Dorothy L. Sayers, a contemporary and friend of C. S. Lewis, defines sloth.

It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing. lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for. (Dorothy L. Sayer)

In C. S. Lewis's book, The Screwtape Letters, a senior demon, Screwtape, writes a series of letters to his nephew, Wormwood. The purpose of the letters is to advise Wormwood in the finer points of temptation in order to keep his patient, John, from finishing the course as a Christian. The following passage is part of a letter where Screwtape advises Wormwood how to keep his patient from doing spiritual disciplines, especially prayer.

You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." The Christians describe the enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong.” And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years, not in sweet sins but in dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, .... It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing.” (Letter XII, Screwtape Letters)

The following quote from C. S. Lewis's most famous sermon summarizes well the missed opportunities that we have when we give into sloth.

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staqgering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." (pp. 2-3, The Weight of Glory)

C. S. Lewis on Pride

Here are some of my favorites quotes by C. S. Lewis on Pride.

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. (p. 109, Mere Christianity)

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound’s worth of Pride towards their fellow-men
(p. 111, Mere Christianity)

Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says "Well done," are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, "I have pleased him; all is well," to thinking, "What a fine person I must be to have done it." The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. (p. 112, Mere Christianity)

This sin has been described by Saint Augustine as the result of Pride, of the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being whose principle of existence lies not in itself but in another) tries to set up on its own, to exist for itself. Such a sin requires no complex social conditions, no extended experience, no great intellectual development. From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself a self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it. This sin is committed daily by young children and ignorant peasants as well as by sophisticated persons, by solitaries no less than by those who live in society: it is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit, or repenting it.(p. 79, The Problem of Pain)

I can hardly imagine a more deadly spiritual condition than that of the man who can read that passage [Sermon on the Mount] with tranquil pleasure. (p. 182, God in the Dock)

It is Faust, not he, who really exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of hell. (Preface to The Screwtape Letters)

Pride is the primary sin, so C. S. Lewis wrote a lot about Pride. The following chapters have great insights on the sin of Pride.

• Mere Christianity: Book 3: Beyond Personality: Chapter 8, "The Greatest Sin," 
• The Problem of Pain: Chapter 5, "The Fall of Man", 

C. S. Lewis (and friends) on Envy

I have a quote from The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis, but I want to set it up first with other quotes on envy and some explanation of the context of the quote in the narrative. I will then finish the blog with a cure for envy advocated by Charles Spurgeon.

Traditionally envy was regarded as the second worst and second most prevalent of the seven deadly sins. Like pride, it is a sin of the spirit, not of the flesh, and thus a “cold” and highly “respectable” sin, in contrast to the “warm” and openly “disreputable” sins of the flesh, such as gluttony. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it is the one vice that its perpetrators never enjoy and rarely confess. (The Call, Os Guinness)

"But Envy always brings the truest charge, or the charge nearest to the truth, that she can think up; it hurts more." (The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis ).

Envy enters when, seeing someone else’s happiness or success, we feel ourselves called into question. Then, out of the hurt of our wounded self-esteem, we seek to bring the other person down to our level by word or deed. They belittle us by their success, we feel; we should bring them down to their deserved level, envy helps us feel. Full-blown envy, in short, is dejection plus disparagement plus destruction. (The Call, Os Guiness)

“Envy begins by asking plausibly: ‘Why should I not enjoy what others enjoy?’ and it ends by demanding: ‘Why should others enjoy what I may not?’” (Dorothy Sayers)

The following dialog occurs in The Great Divorce. The protagonist John witnesses an exchange of a resident of heaven with her husband. The husband is visiting from hell. The wife tries to persuade him to stay and pleads with him to forget his pride and self-importance so he can then join her in heaven. At the end of the conversation, he refuses heaven and happiness, and demands that the wife leave her Joy(Christ) and follow him back to hell. She flatly refuses. The protagonist, John, asks his tour guide is it really necessary that wife should be so untouched by her husband's self-inflicted misery. The tour guide, George MacDonald, responds as follows:

Would ye rather he still had the power of tormenting her? He did it many a day and many a year in their earthy life."
"Well, no. I suppose I don't want that."
"What then?"
"I hardly know, Sir. What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved."
"Ye see it does not."
"I feel in a way that it ought to."
"That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it."
"What?"
"The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven."
"I don't know what I want, Sir."
"Son, son, it must be one way or the other. Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in other the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye'll accept no salvation which leaves even one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye'll make a Dog in a Manger the tyrant of the universe." (pp. 120-121)

Here is a couple notes of explanation. First, Sophistry is an argument based on cleverness and not truth. Second, "Dog in a Manger" means some one who prevents other people from getting what they want when the person can't get what he wants. The fable goes "There was a dog lying in a manger who did not eat the grain but who nevertheless prevented the horse from being able to eat anything either."

Here's a quote by Charles Spurgeon on the cure for envy. I stole it from a website listed below.

The cure for envy lies in living under a constant sense of the divine presence, worshiping God and communing with Him all the day long, however long the day may seem. True religion lifts the soul into a higher region, where the judgment becomes more clear and the desires are more elevated. The more of heaven there is in our lives, the less of earth we shall covet. The fear of God casts out envy of men. ( http://www.challies.com/personal-reflections/the-cure-for-envy)

C. S. Lewis on Lust

This is my favorite passage of C. S. Lewis on lust. The Great Divorce is written as a dream. Some of the residents of hell take a bus trip to heaven. The protagonist meets up with a guide, George MacDonald, who explains the various encounters of the residents of heaven with the tourists from hell. The residents of heaven try to convince the tourists to stay. In the following dialog, George MacDonald explains the vignette just witnessed where an angel-like being convinces a tourist to let the angel kill the tourist's pet lizard. The pet lizard is a whispering, whimpering creature that represents lust.

"Do ye understand all this, my Son"? said the Teacher.

"I don't know about all, Sir," said I. "Am I right in thinking the Lizard really turned into the Horse?

"Aye. But it was killed first. Ye'll not forget that part of the story?"

"I'll try not to, Sir. But does it mean that everything--everything--that is in us can go on to the Mountains?"

"Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed." (pp. 103-104)

The verses MacDonald is referencing is

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15:42-44, ESV)

C. S. Lewis on Gluttony

A friend at work and I were discussing the sin of gluttony and he reminded me of this passage by C. S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters. In the book, a senior demon Screwtape was explaining to a junior demon, Wormwood, the efficacy of promoting the sin of gluttony in their clients. A fellow demon, Glubose, had Wormwood's client's mother well in hand through the sin of gluttony. This passage rang so true. I had a coworker just like this. However, we all could fall into this sin either from excess side or delicacy side.

My dear Wormwood,
The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls, in your last letter, shows only your ignorance. One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a conscience troubled about it in the whole length and breadth of Europe. This has largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess. Your patient's mother, as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned from Glubose, is a good example. She would be astonished--one day, I hope, will be--to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern? Glubose has this old woman well in hand. She is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and smile, "Oh, please, please... all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast." You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practising temperance. In a crowded restaurant she gives a little scream at the plate which some overworked waitress has set before her and says: "Oh, that's far, far too much! Take it away and bring me about a quarter of it." If challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want.

The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which Glubose has been doing for years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her belly now dominates her whole life. The woman is in what may be called the "All-I-want" state of mind. All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted. But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things "properly"--because her "properly" conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures which she imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her as the "The days when you could get good servants" but known to us as the days when her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds which made her less dependent on those of the table. Meanwhile, the daily disappointment produces daily ill temper: cooks give notice and friendships are cooled. If ever the Enemy introduces into her mind a faint suspicion that she is too interested in food, Glubose counters it by suggesting to her that she doesn't mind what she eats herself but "does like to have things nice for her boy." In fact of course, her greed has been one of the chief sources of his domestic discomfort for many years. (pp. 77-78)

Mortification of Sin

I have been reading the "Mortification of Sin" by John Owen. Owen refers to some verses over and over again. I thought it would be handy to write the verses down somewhere. After meditating on these verses, I realize that I tend to dismiss how much sin impacts my life. As I talk to fellow Christians, the battle with our own sin does not seem to concern us: Christ died for us, right? Owen points out that it is a life and death battle. As the following verses point out, God has given us the provision to fight sin through Christ living in us, but it takes a God-commanded effort on our part to win the battle.

For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. (Romans 8:13, ESV)

Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. (Romans 13:13-14, ESV)

Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. (2 Corinthians 7:1, ESV)

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. (Galatians 5:19-21, ESV)

to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:22-24, ESV)

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. (Colossians 3:5, ESV)

Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. (1 Peter 2:11, ESV)

No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God. (1 John 3:9, ESV)

Joseph, Free Will, and God's Sovereignty

Our faith family is studying Genesis, and this week we are studying one of the more famous and clear statements of God's sovereignty in the Bible.

So Joseph said to his brothers, “Come near to me, please.” And they came near. And he said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are yet five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. (Genesis 45:4-8, ESV)

When I read this passage not only do I marvel on what a mature believer Joseph is, but several questions about free will come to mind. Did God entice Joseph's brothers to sell Joseph into slavery? Did God orchestrate the caravan of Ishmaelites's arrival to coincide with the brothers' dispute about what to do with Joseph? How did God bring this about? Could Joseph's brothers have decided otherwise? If they decided otherwise, how would God have brought Israel's family to Egypt? If the brothers acted godly or even honorably, how might their lives been better?

Of course, how we view free will and God's sovereignty affects our missionary strategy. How does a strong view of God's sovereignty in everyday events affect our evangelism? If God has chosen His elect since before the beginning of creation, why evangelize? What about the believer's free will?

J. I. Packer proposes an intellectual framework that does not answer the question, but gives us a way to approach these kind of issues in scripture. Packer proposes that the free will versus God's sovereignty issue is an antinomy. J.I. Packer's book, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God is a small, but very useful book about how to view evangelism within the confines of God's Sovereignty. Packer defines antinomy as

What is an antinomy? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines it as 'a contradiction between conclusions which seem equally logical, reasonable or necessary'. For our purposes, however, this definition is not quite accurate; the opening words should read 'an appearance of contradiction'. For the whole point of an antinomy--in theology, at any rate--is that it is not a real contradiction, though it looks like one. It is an apparent incompatibility between two apparent truths. An antinomy exists when a pair of principles stand side by side, seemingly irreconcilable, yet both undeniable. There are cogent reasons for believing each of them; each rests on clear and solid evidence; but it is a mystery to you how they can be squared with each other. You see that each can be squared with each other. You see that each must be true on its own, but you do not see how they can both be true together. Let me give an example. Modern physics faces an antinomy, in this sense, in its study of light. There is cogent evidence to show that light consists of waves, and equally cogent evidence to show that it consists of particles. It is not apparent how light can be both waves and particles, but the evidence is there, and so neither view can be ruled out in favour of the other. Neither, however, can be reduced to the other or explained in terms of the other; the two seemingly incompatible positions must be held together, and both must be treated as true. Such a necessity scandalizes our tidy minds, no doubt but there is no help for it if we are to be loyal to the facts. (pp. 18-19, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God

Just to clarify Packer's example, all subatomic particles exhibit this Wave Particle Duality. You can go to a physics lab and ask a physicist to demonstrate the Wave Particle duality. The physicists would show you particles or photons exchanging momentum. Exchanging momentum would be in our day-to-day lives billiard balls bouncing off each other on a billiard table. Subatomic particles can collide too. This same physicist would then show you experiments where subatomic particles reflect, diffract, and show interference just like a wave. Through sophisticated experiments, physicists can demonstrate that even one particle exhibits the characteristics of a wave. This is one of the basic principle of quantum mechanics and this duality is not even close to being the strangest concept that quantum theory provides us.

To use a more theological example, I would say that the Hypostatic Union (Christ is fully God and fully Man) is an another example of an antinomy. Scripture argues both that Jesus Christ is fully man and he is fully God. If you deny His humanity, you start moving into heresies like Docetism and Gnosticism. If you deny that Christ is fully God you fall into Arianism or Adoptionism or even Mormonism. We must assert both Jesus's full humanity and full divinity to understand the full truths and promises of scripture.

Packer emphasizes that an antinomy is not a figure of speech like a paradox. Jesus uses paradoxes all the time to illustrates truths about what life in the Kingdom of God is like. For example, Matthew 10:39, "Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Although at first glance it seems contradictory, we understand what the paradox means and we can explain how the saying works. It is comprehensible. However, an antinomy is impossible to understand. Both opposing concepts are completely true.

Packer then asks the question, "What should one do, then, with an antinomy?" Packer simply encourages the reader to just accept it. Other theologians like R. C. Sproul think this is a cop out. Sproul claims that we can understand how God works through man's free will. However, Packer's concept of the antinomy is a great concept to move pass some sticking points people have about God's justice. We can them move to have discussions on how God's sovereignty is a great comfort to those who wait upon the Lord.

This idea of comfort brings us back to the Joseph passage. Joseph could comfort his brothers because he trusted in God's sovereignty and forgave them. Joseph had the brothers totally at his mercy, but Joseph saw God's hand in bringing Joseph down to Egypt and saw God's hand in the maturing of his brothers. Joseph forgave them because he understood God's sovereignty. As Allen P. Ross wrote in his commentary on this passage,

Reconciliation comes through forgiveness, and forgiveness through the recognition of God's sovereignty. (p. 675, Creation and Blessing: A Guide to the Study and Exposition of the Book of Genesis, Allen P. Ross)

The Ministry of the Word

Jehosaphat became a great king in Judah. He bravely removed pagan worship sites (high places and Asherim). He fortified the cities. He followed God courageously. Early in his career he organized the priests and sent them out to the cities of Judah.

And they taught in Judah, having the Book of the Law of the Lord with them. They went about through all the cities of Judah and taught among the people. (2 Chronicles 17:9, ESV)

Jehosaphat did this because it is commanded in the Law.

You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean, and you are to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the Lord has spoken to them by Moses.” (Leviticus 10:10-11, ESV)

They shall teach Jacob your rules and Israel your law; they shall put incense before you and whole burnt offerings on your altar. (Deut. 33:20)

Why did God put teaching the Word of God to all His people as the primary task of the priests? Why did a godly king like Jehosaphat insisted that God's people hear God's Word? What was even more curious, why did a pagan king, Artaxerxes send Ezra, an expert on the God's Word, to Jerusalem to teach the Israelites God's Word and enforce it?

“And you, Ezra, according to the wisdom of your God that is in your hand, appoint magistrates and judges who may judge all the people in the province Beyond the River, all such as know the laws of your God. And those who do not know them, you shall teach. Whoever will not obey the law of your God and the law of the king, let judgment be strictly executed on him, whether for death or for banishment or for confiscation of his goods or for imprisonment.” (Ezra 7:25-26)

I don't know Artaxerxes's motives for having the Word taught to the Israelites, but one of the reasons had to be with maintaining order and unity. If the Israelites were obeying their law, they would be good subjects. The Word brings unity to a people. Charles Hodge, the great Princeton theologian, noted in his Systematic Theology about the impact the Word of God had in world history.

The Bible ever has been and still is, a power in the world. It has determined the course of history. It has overthrown false religion wherever it is known. It is the parent of modern civilization. It is the only guarantee of social order, of virtue, and of human rights and liberty. Its effect cannot be rationally accounted for upon any other hypothesis than that it is what it claims to be, "The Word of God." (p. 89, Systematic Theology Volume 1

Jotham, a godly king of Judah, is referenced in 2 Chronicles about how the Word of God ordered his kingdom.

So Jotham became mighty, because he ordered his ways before the Lord his God. (2 Chronicles 27:6, ESV)

Jotham was a king so not only did he order his personal life; he ordered his kingdom before the ways of the Lord. God's Word has a ordering and unifying effect on God's people. In Ephesians 4, Paul wrote about how God uses God's Word to mature His people into Christ.

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:11-16, ESV)

"Speaking the truth in love" does not mean giving people a painful truth in a "loving" way. Speaking the truth in love is speaking the gospel into lives because you love them. Every member of the body of Christ has the ministry of the Word. The teachers and shepherds are needed to equip us with the tools to minister the Word, but it is up to each of us to speak the Gospel in word and song to one another (Ephesians 5:19). This will protect the body of Christ in sound doctrine and unify us in love and truth to each another.