Present Abnormal (10/09/22)

For all that it was something of an aside, with only the most tangential connection to our passage, I do want to revisit some ideas that arose in my first pass notes in regard to the idea of epistrophe.  In the botanical world, it speaks to a return to normal condition from what had been an aberration.  What connection this term has with our passage is, as I say, tangential, but does at least touch on this idea of turning to God, and it does supply some food for thought.  We need to be aware of this aspect of things, I think.  When we turned to God from our idols – and believe me, it was from idols we turned, even if we didn’t have statues and temples involved – we turned from aberration to normal.  It was a returning, even if we had not previously known the Lord, so far as we were aware.

As I noted in those prior thoughts, this abnormal condition is all we have known for however long we have lived prior to coming to Christ.  It bears recognizing that for those around us, this remains the case.  They have known nothing else.  This aberration is normal to them, for it’s all they’ve ever known.  I think this may be more true than ever for younger folks, given that our education system has in large part become a promoter of aberrations.  It’s all they know.  They find it normal because it’s been their experience, their only experience, since birth.  They cannot conceive of another way.  I stress this because it ought to stir compassion in us, allow us to interact with our fallen neighbors with more of understanding, and less a sense of dealing with barbaric heathens.

It puts me in mind of something Martin Luther observed in addressing the question of free will.  Recognize, mind you, that it’s been many years since I read “On the Bondage of the Will”, but one of the main points was that, even supposing we had free will by which to choose as we please, our only knowledge was of sin.  We were aware of no other choice, and so, to the degree we chose freely, we freely chose to sin.  In that light, our will was never truly free until our Savior came and opened our eyes to true holiness, true beauty.  By His work in us, we have come to see that abnormal for what it is:  Abnormal.  And we have come to hunger for what was once our birthright, the proud heritage of those sons and daughters of our God, who walk and live as His image-bearers, in happy accordance with His design. 

This is exactly what comes about in the process of sanctification.  We are turned from our abnormal present to true normal.  We have come to have peace with God, peace from God – that real shalom peace of everything restored to its true and proper form.  For long ages (at least for many of us), all we had known was this abnormality of fallen life.  But now!  Now, our eyes have been opened and we see the beauty of our Lord!  Now, we have within us the Holy Spirit – God Himself! – working upon heart and soul to restore us to that original, splendid condition which was His design of us.

You know, men celebrate restoration, don’t they?  We watch these various shows regarding houses in the UK, and it can be almost painful to see the degree of effort they insist upon to see these ancient dwellings restored to their original condition.  Or, consider how many YouTube channels are dedicated to restoration projects, whether it be bringing restoring unloved furniture to something like its original, unblemished beauty, or restoring antique vehicles to their shining original glory.  Let it be, even, that some old and battered instrument is lovingly reworked and repaired until it is able once more to sound forth its notes as it was intended to do, and with the beauty of its original craftsmanship once more on view.  These things delight us, don’t they?  There is something in a man that rejoices to see these old and battered forms made once again fresh and beautiful.  Well, let me suggest to you that that something in us is the fact that we are created in the image of our God, and in our fallenness, there remains some niggling awareness that this image is not as it should be.

No, I don’t go so far (as I read some small majority of modern Evangelicals do) as to suggest that even our most fallen acquaintances have some seed of good in them, just waiting to be stirred to life by the right message, or by God’s touch.  No, I must abide with Scripture’s diagnosis.  There is nothing good in us.  The aberration has gone too far, the rot too deep.  But God!  He is able to restore, to rebirth in us that true nature, that life worthy and deserving of being called life.  And as He does so, we discover ourselves aware of just how abnormally we have been living.  And hearing His call, we respond.  We take to living in this fallen, abnormal world, as men and women restored to true normal.

Ah, but as we well know, we carry the abnormal with us yet.  The aberrations are still there, but must be suppressed, excised, such that our true normal may become healthy and strong.  That is, in its way, what this process of sanctification is doing, isn’t it?  We are becoming like Him.  We are beginning to see things as He does, to respond as He does, to think and act as He does.  But it’s a process.  It’s not as yet a complete and total revolution of the soul.  I don’t know as we could survive so sudden a transition in ourselves.  Perhaps we could, and what we suffer is in fact an excess of aberrant influences.  Perhaps.  Or perhaps, our God is a gentle and careful Craftsman, working with considered skill to bring out that original splendor without damaging the material.

Paul makes a point not too far from Luther’s in writing to the church in Galatia.  Or perhaps it would be better said that Luther clearly finds his point in that letter.  There, we are reminded that when we did not know God, we were slaves to those which by nature are no gods (Gal 4:8).  Isn’t that exactly it?  For the Galatians, and for many in the Thessalonian church addressed in this letter, this was a particularly literal perspective.  They served idols.  They brought contributions to the temples of those idols.  They made certain to attend to services there, to join in their feasts, and partake of their rituals.  And none of it had done the least bit to improve their lot.  It was payment and service given for no return – none whatsoever.  Yet, they could not stop, and those objects of their worship were, as is pointed out in other places, demons and powers of darkness intent on their subjugation and eventual destruction.  These powers behind the idols had no benevolence towards their followers.  They had no good intentions in regard to their followers.  They sought only misery and destruction for these willing slaves of theirs.

I hope I can be forgiven for observing how closely this is paralleled with what seems to the recent surge of activity in promoting effectively irreversible damage upon our youth, urging them to undergo chemical and surgical ‘treatments’ that will leave them scarred and incapable of full experience of human life for so long as they may live.  This is such an evil.  I could almost say it renders abortion a lesser crime by comparison.  At least with that abhorrent practice, the victim was shot of this life, and for all we know, our Savior swiftly brought them to salvation even there in the womb, ensuring an eternity in heaven in spite of this heinous crime committed against them.  But this rush to destroy the normal body and mind, and leave the poor husk to continue living?  What utter horror.  What sort of perversity does it take for doctors, ostensibly sworn to ‘first do no harm’, to actively pursue this practice, and to do so because, hey!  It’s a profit center for the hospital?  If abortion was cause for God to come in the full fury of His wrath, what, pray tell, can we expect in response to this new atrocity?

Lord, have mercy on us.  But, by all means, Father, though it may sound ever so unloving of me, come in swift vengeance upon those who could wreak such havoc on young and tender souls, who could have such disregard for the true well-being of their fellow humans, as to inflict this life-altering damage on them before they have strength and sense to flee.

But, if I may return to my topic, our mission is to become like our Teacher.  That has ever been the task of the disciple, whether we speak of those who follow after human philosophers or those who follow Christ.  It is our task:  To become, so far as we are able, like Him in thought, act, and character.  This is, after all, what it means to be true sons of True God.  And here’s the great good news for us!  We have come to such a Teacher as has made us His disciples.  Oh, no!  We didn’t choose Him.  We didn’t come with riches to pour out in hopes that maybe, just maybe, He might take us into His school.  No, He chose us, and He did so in spite of our total lack of means.  Not only that, but He has empowered us, who had no power.  He has rendered us capable of that of which we were most utterly incapable.  What a terror it would be to have our eyes opened to the abnormality in which we have been living, and see no means of returning to normal.  And again, I shudder to contemplate the future ahead of these poor children who have been conned into doing irreversible damage to their own bodies, their own psyches.  We read, already, of some – of many, and no doubt there would be far more were it not for the suicide rate – who have awakened from that false dream only to realize that for them, there can be no restoration of their original nature.  What has been done has been done, and barring some truly miraculous intervention from God, it shall remain done.  That which has been cut off cannot somehow be reattached.  The scars will remain, even if they are able, somehow, to alter the chemical process that have been inflicted upon them.  This is sorrow beyond imagining, grief beyond bearing.

And such would be our lot if things had stopped with awareness.  Can I just say, this is to be the case, I think, for those whose final judgment results in condemnation to hell – an eternity now aware of the normal but equally and simultaneously aware of the absolute impossibility of rejoining that normal.  These will be stuck forever in their aberration.  God has said to them, “Your will be done.  As you have wished, so be it.”  And no amount of wishing thereafter will bring it to a different ending.

For us, though, the good news is that things didn’t stop there.  God did not merely open our eyes and walk away, leaving us in our misery.  No!  He brought us to the Teacher.  And He set within us His power.  He did not leave us to wield that power unguided, as if handing a loaded gun to an infant – and that would be pretty near an exact parallel in this case.  Rather, we are told, “It is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Php 2:13).  How much I have loved that marvelous verse through the years of my belief!  And we could add to it, now, that from 2Peter.  “His divine power has granted us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.” (2Pe 1:3).  God is doing it!  He is for us!  Who can be against us?  He is at work.  How can it fail?  He is restoring us to true normal, an artisan at work upon what was, after all, His workmanship to begin with.  Who better to trust with that restoration?

So, what does this do for us?  Are we left as pawns being moved about by One too powerful to gainsay?  No.  While we must surely acknowledge that He is fully and fitly in control of everything, He who arrays these good works before us in order that we might do them, yet He leaves us moral agents, capable of choice and possessed of will.  Therefore, we must needs follow the example of these Thessalonians before us, willingly subjecting ourselves to that which God is doing in us, willingly setting ourselves to serve Him wholeheartedly, unreservedly, and gladly joining in with that work He is doing.  We must, and being now aware of the possibility of true normal, we doubtless shall, seek with all that is in us to live in harmony with God Who delivers us.

This is our heritage, our inheritance.  This is our present-tense deliverance.  But that, I see, is my topic for tomorrow’s notes.  For today, let us give thanks that it is so.  Our God has loved us, has called us out of our darkness and into His marvelous light.  Let us, then, set ourselves to live as sons of Light, even as our Lord has commanded.  Amen.  So be it.

Update (10/09/22) It seems the thought which I was chasing in this section derived not from a word used in this passage, but from the next entry in the lexicon thereafter.  The term here is epistrepho, whereas the one I was teeing off from was epistrophe, which derives from epistrepho, but has a different meaning.  That said, I think the points valid, even if less directly than ever having connection to our passage.  Let me just add this bit, though.  From Strong’s, our true term combines epi, and strepho, which does have this idea of reversal or reversion, a sense carried onward into epistrophe, with its idea of reversion or moral revolution.  But observing that intensifying epi, with its sense of over or through, we have a thorough reversion, which again, is not how we tend to view either our conversion or our sanctification, and yet, there it is in the terminology.  In turning from our present abnormal, we are reverting to true normal.

Present Deliverance (10/10/22)

This report that Paul hears as he seeks to preach in new regions is something, isn’t it?  It is news of the Thessalonians, but it comes as a ‘report about us’.  For, the Thessalonians, by their ready and fervent turning to serve God alone, have become newsworthy.  Their faith has led to questions, and those questions have led to answers.  The reason for the questions is their clear devotion to Christ, to living according to this faith they have in Christ.  The questions that arise are along the lines of why?  What has happened that you should take this radical step?  And the answer to that question is that this Paul who came with news of God’s gracious gift of life and hope, lived among them in such exemplary fashion, demonstrating by his deeds and habits the reality of the Gospel’s grip on his own life.  And so, when those who had met the Thessalonians met the man of whom they gave so creditable a report, they made note of that report.  Paul is not in any way seeking to burnish his credentials here.  He is reporting how he received news of them.  These whom he now meets speak to him of how those he had met before had so profitably received him and his word to them.

We have in their example both the evidence of the effect of Paul’s ministry, which is to say, of Paul’s God, but also indication of what it was he had taught them during his brief time among them.  Clearly, alongside the necessary explanation of His death and resurrection, as the necessary means by which their burden of debt for sin had been paid to the God Who Is, there was also news of His return.  Jesus, after all, had been rather careful to include that in His training, hadn’t He?  “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself; that where I am, you may be also” (Jn 14:3).  That was, for all intents and purposes, a covenanted promise, the promise sealed and secured by His death, ratified by His resurrection, and source of greatest comfort to those who had been close by His side those last three years, as they saw what, by all appearances, amounted to the destruction of all their dreams.  No!  This is not the end.  This is the assurance of your future hope!

This is the significance of the second aspect of their manifest witness of faith.  There was, as a first evidence, their dedication to serving God.  There was, as a second evidence, their confident, hopeful waiting for Christ’s return.  Recall the joy that was evident in them, a joy transcending present circumstance.  Here, we discover that this joy was rooted not in the bare fact of salvation, but in the confident assurance of His return.  They could be joyous, because like Him, they looked beyond the present.  They knew themselves delivered in the present, but they knew as well, that having been delivered, there was an assured future.  The author of Hebrews clues us in on this powerful shaper of joy, calling upon us to “[Fix] our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2).  He looked beyond.  He looked not at the present means, but the future result.  And we, who follow after His example, must needs do likewise.  We must look beyond this present life to our future reward in Christ.

Calvin observes the need for this, for ‘we will find nothing in the world to bear us up’.  If, then, we would be steady in our faith, and a testimony to God, we must look to Him.  We must wait for Him.  If I might go back to that passage I quoted form John, let us recognize that this was given to those for whom the cross was yet to come.  They would have great need for these words of hope, because it would look truly hopeless to them to witness their Messiah, their Savior, nailed up on the cross and dying.  However much He had explained it, explained the necessity of it, and sought to impart to them the significance and joyous result of it, it simply could not register in the moment.  The horror was too great.  The testimony of the eyes was too clear.  It would take the equally clear evidence of their eyes in witnessing His full, physical resurrection to seal this hope to them.  It still requires that for us.  The cross, for us, is in the past, an established marker that our debt is already paid in full.  The records of heaven’s courts have already been updated to reflect this magnificent news.  Colossians speaks of that record of our debt having been nailed to the cross, and taken out of the way (Col 2:14).  The record has been eradicated.  The nail hole through that page eliminates any possibility of it being chased down and brought against us once more.  In other places, we might find it noted how this record has been wiped from the page, so thoroughly erased and overwritten by other matters as to be thoroughly irrecoverable.  And so, Paul cries his famous cry.  “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect?  God is the one who justifies!” (Ro 8:33).  The record has been removed, and there can be no reinstating of those charges.  It is finished.

That said, this waiting for the Son concerns deliverance from wrath, and that matter, both of the deliverance and the wrath, is addressed in the present tense.  Much like the abnormality of the world that we currently experience, God’s wrath against sin is ongoing, continual, and as such, our need for deliverance remains equally ongoing and continual.  Here is cause both for our confident hope and for our engaged service in seeking to spread this gospel, seeking to ‘go and make disciples’.  Ironside notes it as a wrath to come upon the world, ‘a coming time of trouble’, and I will, hopefully return to his thoughts shortly.  But here, let me suggest that this present tense deliverance from present tense wrath would be best understood by recognizing that just as sin’s aberrations are present reality, so is this wrath, so is our deliverance.  Yes, there is a wrath to come, but there is a wrath already present and ongoing.  Indeed, we might consider that we have evidence of that wrath in the very way that darkness seems to be on the increase around us, and not just because seasons are changing as we head into fall.

That, of course, is the normal order, at least as the world stands.  But the growing darkness of humanity, as I noted in the last portion of this study, is evidence not of God’s losing control of events, but rather, of His giving over of the depraved to their depravity.  Again, as with so much, we can turn to Paul for explanation of what God is doing.  “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Ro 1:18).  They, “exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures” (Ro 1:23).  Be careful!  The green movement, and militant environmentalism is no altruistic good. It is a foul exchange, and it seeks, as so many other things, to devalue mankind, to devalue the image bearer.  But the conclusion:  “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them” (Ro 1:24).  I could observe how very literally we see this in our time, but I am rather more focused, at the moment, on the basis, on the giving over.  God has, in their case, ceased to intervene, other than to mitigate their foul impact upon His chosen.  Wrath has come upon the world, and it has come, at this stage, primarily as a removing of holy restraints.

Oh, yes, man has great cause to dread this wrath.  It is a very real danger, as Barnes observes.  It is also a very present danger for those not united to Christ.  Unsurprisingly, Barnes focuses on the eternal fallout rather than the present manifestation.  For one, he writes in a different time, with different evils to confront.  But more to the point, this wrath, much like the joy we bear, is best understood by looking beyond the present.  This present experience of wrath is hardly exhausting God’s wrath against sin, for sin remains, doesn’t it?  Indeed, if we turn our attention to final judgment, still we do not find God’s wrath exhausted, for God’s wrath is as eternal as He is eternal.  The crimes committed against Him remain eternal, for He is eternal, and as such, the penalty which is due for those crimes is likewise eternal.  This is, I think, the great error of modern man.  He thinks these few meager years on earth constitute the whole of being.  Death, to their thinking, is not some sleep from which we must one day awaken to discover a new dawn.  No, it is the final curtain, the cessation of being, and as such, the cessation of caring.  May as well, then, do as you like today, because, as they say, you only live once.  But of course, they are wrong.  You only die once.  The great question is, what then?

It seems the course of my thoughts today are a bit jumpy, but I do want to revisit briefly the question of just what Paul has in view with this wrath.  There appears to be some question in the minds of our various commentators as to whether it is final judgment that is in view, or some more imminent visitation of trouble.  We will find plenty of discussion, as well, as to whether this deliverance indicates we get pulled out before that wrath is let loose, or whether we must persevere through the wrath.  Ironside comes out clearly for the former view, saying, “Jesus will come to snatch His own away before this wrath is let loose.”  But I don’t know as I could hold to that unless we are referring specifically to that final, cataclysmic judgment of which the Revelation speaks.  He has promised, Ironside proposes, that He will come for His own before the trumpets sound His wrath and judgment upon the world.  I’m not so sure that this order of events is clear.  Peter observes the horror of that day, ‘in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat; the earth and all its works burned up’ (2Pe 3:10-13), but he doesn’t suggest that we shall be out of here before it comes, only urges us to look for and hasten that day, looking to the new heavens and new earth which these events usher in, a new creation ‘in which righteousness dwells’. 

The Wycliffe Translators Commentary is quite clear that this is indeed final judgment that Paul is considering, “God’s personal retribution against sin in His holiness.”  I give them credit for the observation that as final as this judgment shall be, it shall in no way exhaust His wrath.  The punishment for sin is eternal.  The wrath poured out in that judgment does not cease, but leaves the sinner in that place ‘where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched’ (Mk 9:48).  I should perhaps note Jesus’ words that follow that sentence.  “For everyone will be salted with fire” (Mk 9:49).  This, I have to say, does not seem to indicate a skate save for the elect, only a more satisfactory outcome of the trial.

But I must come back to this:  Deliverance is present tense.  It is continual, ongoing.  And I have to think that this fact, combined with the realities of life we experience, are indicative of continual, ongoing wrath.  We are indeed going to have to go through.  The Thessalonians had experience of it, as their fellow citizens sought their harm.  There is some evidence in this letter that this seeking of harm had turned even more violent than when they dragged Jason and friends to court.  It was having more damaging impact than mere financial loss, and had even led to loss of life amongst these new believers.  Now, you may argue that this has more to do with the sinfulness of sin than the outpouring of God’s wrath, but in that sin is given greater rein to pursue its agenda, it is, in fact, an effect and evidence of God’s wrath.  Let us be clear, it is not wrath against His children, even should His children undergo physical death as a result of His purposes.  No, the wrath remains directed at sin and sin’s proponents.  As to His children, even should they die, yet they will live.  “I am the resurrection and the Life,” says our Lord.  “He who believes in Me shall live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die” (Jn 11:25-26).

This is our reality.  Wrath is their reality.  The two coexist, just as in God, love and wrath coexist, both in full and perfect measure, and both in full and perfect concord.  But, let us consider.  Let us find in ourselves God’s own compassion for these lost souls that must, if current conditions prevail, experience His unending wrath in full.  They stand exposed to this eternal punishment, but so long as physical life persists, there remains hope even for them, that Christ, Who alone can deliver them, may, by the Father’s predetermined and unopposable will, be delivered.  They may yet come to be united to Christ, even as are we.

We are told that this news of coming wrath is no way to spread the gospel.  Nobody wants to listen to preaching that speaks of the assured arrival in hell that is the unbeliever’s only possible future on his present course.  And yet, I must observe that the evidence we have of former periods of true revival suggest something quite different.  Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” may not have quite the place on the Christian bookshelf it once did, but it should.  This was a message that sparked serious and significant revival.  In New England!  Now, I can’t speak to the moral temperature of the region in his day, but I could pretty well guarantee it was tepid at best.  This was a region, after all, being overrun by Unitarians and other perverse mutations of faith.  It was a region with a significant population of non-Christians, and it wasn’t just the native population.  Indeed, by his time, native populations were likely much less of a concern for most folk.  But the Mayflower was not composed entirely of religious refugees.  It had its share of entrepreneurs and profiteers among its number.  New England was a mixed bag at best.  At present, its condition is rather appalling, given its history.  Those colleges established by men of faith for the betterment of man and the spread of Christian preachers have become institutional proponents of sin and depravity.  If one looks at a map of the nation by its religious affiliation, we are the blank spot, as near to 0% participation as I suppose it can get.  I think Pastor Neil quoted something like 2% confession of faith in the region in his prayer yesterday.  And we must further question what proportion of those confessions represented true faith in true God. 

Understand, that confession alone is nothing.  Many confess a faith they do not in fact possess.  Many believe in a God that is not in fact the God of Scripture, even as they turn the pages of the Bible plucking out passages to support their views.  Yet this God they worship is a fabrication, a perversion of the God of Heaven.  And so, their views of this coming wrath prove equally tainted and askew.  I can find plenty at hand who are quite sure that come the last day, none shall be condemned to the fires of hell.  Yet, how can one take this text seriously and reach such a conclusion?  Oh, I know well enough that a verse here and there can be plucked out and held up as evidence that God’s love, in the end, trumps and I guess, suffocates His wrath under a pillow.  But the evidence for punishment.  The necessity of Justice seen to be exercised in full, of wrath and righteous vengeance being satisfied, is too great for these misunderstood snippets to counter.

Man has every cause to dread God’s wrath.  Let me put it bluntly.  If this were not so, then this whole business of Christian religion is a farce.  Christ’s crucifixion is a farce.  If God’s going to save everybody anyhow, then we can just put the Bible away, reclaim our time on Sunday, and go about living as we please.  After all, it apparently doesn’t matter, right?  And Paul, whose instruction composes so much of our Bible, must be dismissed as a charlatan.  After all, considering those who say, “Let us do evil that good may come” is rather direct and to the point:  “Their condemnation is just” (Ro 3:8).  Yes, Peter expresses God’s desire that none may perish, but all come to repentance (2Pe 3:9).  But we are not talking decrees and determined purpose here.  We are talking God’s preferred outcome for these creatures He has made with free will.  Note what immediately follows.  “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief” (2Pe 3:10).  It’s that very notification of final judgment that we were just considering.  What point judgment, if forgiveness for all is already a foregone conclusion?  What point destruction, if everybody wins anyway?

But no.  This wrath of God poured out is a very real and present danger, and only Christ can deliver us from it.  God has, from eternity past, determined the full number of those for whom deliverance shall come.  He has, throughout His dealings with man, made clear that it shall be a remnant, a small portion of the whole, so small as to seem inconsequential in the eyes of those who go by numbers.  It is not the whole.  It was not the whole of Israel.  It was most clearly not the whole of Adam’s offspring, and such we are.  But we have a new federal head, we to whom Christ has come, we whom Christ has delivered.  As to this coming wrath, this present wrath, it is as Barnes says.  It doesn’t really matter in the least whether you believe that wrath is real or whether you don’t.  Truth is like that, isn’t it?  Truth remains true whether you believe it so or not.  Wrath remains real whether you acknowledge it or not.  So, too, does hope.  So, too, does God.  In each case, we can conclude, we must conclude, as Barnes does, that, “The fact of its existence is not affected by our belief or unbelief.”

How many today suffer from this malady of thought, that if we can but cut off the belief, then the power of that which was believed in must die as well?  How many myths and stories propose something of that nature transpiring:  the god who fades away for lack of believers?  But these are tales, not realities.  Reality doesn’t care about your beliefs.  You can propose as many genders as you like, and reality will still be that there are but two.  You can propose as many gods as you like, and reality will still be that there is but One.  You can assign this One God as many attributes as you find to your liking, and the reality will still be that He Is Who He Is.  Let us, then, lean hard upon the God Who Is, and upon that pure gift of full and true knowledge of Him by which He has equipped us for life and godliness.  Let us set ourselves to live as these Thessalonians lived, in the joyful hope of His return and the joyful experience of His deliverance.  Let our lives be living testimony to our True and Living God.

God, Living and True (10/11/22)

There is, as many of our commentaries point out, a tacit contrast being made by Paul when he observes that they have turned to a living and true God.  Indeed, we might do well to stop trying to stuff an indefinite article in there, and see this as having turned to God, living and true.  Paul is setting out a contrast to the idols which used to have their service.  He doesn’t complete the contrast by observing that these idols were dead and false.  He doesn’t need to do so in this case.  His readers are not at risk of returning hence.  Unlike the Corinthians, they are not trying to hold onto past habits alongside this newness of life, not trying to fit in by continuing to head over to the idolatrous temples for dinner and whatever other activities they had on offer on the theory that hey, we know these idols are nothing, so what harm if we participate?  No.  Those to whom Paul is writing had turned.  They had dedicated themselves to serving God, the God, the only God.

This God, whom we also serve, who are in Christ, is living.  Whatever form our idols had taken, or have taken, they are nothing living.  Even this propensity to worship nature, and to be sure, many today do just that, truly making nature their god, their idol, though it looks to something alive, looks to nothing living, nothing which can say of itself, “I AM the Life.”  They cannot point to the object of their devotion and insist that this has life in itself, of its own doing.  It cannot uphold this object of worship as having power to impart life.  God, the One True God, can and does do all these things.  In Him we live and move and have being (Ac 17:28).  From Him we have life in us.  From Him there is breath in us.  As the Psalmist somewhere observes, were He to turn away for the briefest moment, all would cease.

This is the God we serve.  And over there are your idols – dead, lifeless things, representing, however pleasing the form they take, those who can offer only death, who desire for you only death.  But our God is alive!  Our God is not offering sweet lies to entice, all the while planning something far different for us.  He is True God.  And He is the Living God.  He lives in us, whom He has called His own.  This is not to suggest that were we to die off, or to cease from believing that He would cease.  No.  He has life in and of Himself.  He has no outside dependency.  He does not require our worship, He grants us the privilege, the gift of worshiping in Spirit and in Truth.

But, if we would worship in Spirit and in Truth, we must take care that our understanding of God is of God as He truly is, as He reveals Himself to be.  It begins, perhaps, with recognizing that our God is no absentee landlord.  He has not created and then walked away.  He has not set things in motion and then simply sat back to observe whatever may happen.  He is living.  He is very much present.  And He is ever and always intimately involved in this, His creation.  What we pursue apart from Him, whatever forms our idolatries take from one day to the next, present to us a religion ‘false in all its prospects’, as Clarke writes.  We are daily fed a whole system of falsehoods.  We are told to get excited about this, to love that, to revile some other thing and uphold yet another as the ideal towards which we should strive.  Sex looms large in this system, and power, and wealth as well.  Fundamentally, it seems to me that in all these forms, it is really self that we are encouraged to think we serve.  Even as it was in Eden, when the serpent came to tempt Adam and Eve, so it is with us.  You can be the god you serve.  You should be the god you serve.  Indeed, this God in heaven, should serve you!  You should be having your best life now!

And believe me, that message sells.  It sells so effectively that even we who have set ourselves to serve God alone discover over and over again that in point of fact we have been doing no such thing, but only serving ourselves.  We have to remain ever vigilant, knowing our propensity for refashioning our understanding of God to suit our preferences.  I have touched on one such refashioning in the last section, I believe:  This idea that the God we serve must surely save everybody, and leave none to perish.  That idea, as I said, wells up in spite of so much of Scripture painting a very different picture, and we must, whatever our preferences, stick with that picture which Scripture supplies.  It is not enough to pull out a verse or two and say, see?  It says so in Scripture.  That’s Satan’s game, not the expression of the true knowledge of God Who Is.

We have a similar reaction when it comes to God’s wrath, don’t we?  We’re okay with Justice, at least in the abstract.  Yes, we want God to be One Who does what’s right, Who deals honestly and justly with His creatures.  But then, we have this odd idea of what constitutes honest and just, and we’re pretty sure that must mean mercy and love.  And we just glaze over when God insists that no, He is wrath, as well.  Indeed, He is wrath simultaneously.  He cannot be Just if in fact He shows mercy not only to those whom He has redeemed, but also to those who remain reprobate.  There is no justice in a court that simply decides every case in favor of the defendant, no matter how clear his guilt.  There is no justice, no constancy, certainly, in a court that dismisses the law and just does what feels good in each case.  This is not God.  This is, if anything, the issue we have with the present state of our own legal system, which seems to value the criminal more highly than the victim.  And nobody is looking on that situation with honest eyes and calling it true justice.  So, why would we suppose God, the ultimate Justice, would just give everybody a pass?  And if this were indeed His intent all along, then we must discount His claim of being True, for too much of His message insists things are very much otherwise with us, and that for many, for the majority, the outcome of judgment will by no means be Life.

God is Wrath even as He is love.  The JFB sets us quite a challenge, insisting that when we rightly think upon God’s holy anger against sin, we shall see it gives evidence of His love.  But, but!  Love covers a multitude of sins, right (1Pe 4:8)?  Indeed.  But whose love are we discussing here?  And what exactly is meant by it?  Peter, I suspect, thinks back upon the proverb.  “Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all transgressions” (Pr 10:12).  And there, it is clear that the writer has in mind human relations, human responses to offense.  Hatred will lead us to noise about the crime committed against us, to repeatedly point up the moral failings of the one who has wronged us, or who we at least think has wronged us.  Hatred doesn’t care if this wrong is misperception on our part.  Hatred doesn’t care if, where a wrong has actually been done, it was done by oversight, by accident, with no intention of causing harm.  Hatred doesn’t care if, perhaps, the one who took some food from our garden did so from a true necessity to preserve life.  It will emphasize the crime and demand satisfaction.  Love, on the other hand, might incline to pause, to examine, to consider all aspects of the matter.  Love might choose to forgive, even if no cause for forgiveness presents.  But this is between us primarily.  This is our response to hurt and harm.  What shall we do?  Shall we insist on an eye for an eye?  Shall we take vengeance into our own hands?  But God says, “Vengeance is Mine” (Dt 32:35).  Paul looks to this and recognizes the unstated counterpoint.  “Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God” (Ro 12:19).

We don’t want to leave room for Wrath.  We don’t even want to think there’s room for wrath in God, let alone in Him fully and finally expressing His Wrath.  But His Wrath is Just.  His Wrath is, in point of fact, the expression of His Love for His own, His Love for Holiness, for Righteousness, and He, in His Mercy, has established His Righteousness in us.  He has, as it is written, demonstrated His own Righteousness in having implemented a way in which He might be Just and the Justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Ro 3:26).  And He declares unabashedly that He is Wrath, that He brings calamity.  He speaks to Judah, to Jerusalem – His own chosen – and says, “Behold, I am fashioning calamity against you.  I am devising a plan against you.”  But observe the loving purpose.  “Oh turn back, each of you from his evil way, and reform your ways and your deeds” (Jer 18:11).  Hear it and accept it.  God proclaims Himself, “The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity.  I AM the LORD who does all these” (Isa 45:7).  He is not ashamed to own it.  Why, then, are we ashamed to attribute it to Him?

Why would we, who have been granted, by His own power, the full and true, epignosis, knowledge of Him, thereby handed all that is needful for life and godliness, seek to insist that He is other than Who He says He is?  In Him these passions which we hold in such flawed imperfection are possessed perfectly and in whole.  In Him, these conflicting feelings, as we experience them, are not in conflict, but in perfect balance.  In Him is Truth with no least hint of a lie, no shadow of turning (Jas 1:17).  There is no variation.  There is no multi-tiered system of justice, where what is right and true for thee may not be what is right and true for me.  There is no caste system, where some are granted greater license or privilege, but all are equal in His sight.

Now, there’s a downside to that, for all are equally guilty.  “There is none righteous, not even one.  None of them seek for God.  None understand.  All have turned aside and become utterly useless.  Nobody does good” (Ro 3:10-12).  That’s the summation of humanity.  This is the bit humanism misses, and misses rather purposefully, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.  This is the bit we tend to miss, for we remain entirely too convinced that there is some good in us, some good in the worst reprobate, that just needs a bit of stirring up, a kick in the pants, as it were, to rise up and respond to the goodness of God.  But the sad truth is that none of us has that spark.  None of us has some latent goodness just waiting for the right stimulant to bring it to the fore.  No.  All of us are equal in our abject failure, and in our absolute and desperate need for a Savior to come and rescue us from out of ourselves.  Anything else, whether it takes to itself the label of Christianity or not, whether it purports to present us with God or some other deity, remains a system of religion ‘false in all its prospects’.

But we serve the God Who Is.  We come to the One Who is Perfect in Himself, in Whom all these things come together in perfection, in Whom all these things have ever been together in perfection, and ever shall be.  You and I, if we are in Christ, have not come to a mountain we can touch, but to the city of the living God Who Is, to the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the general assembly of the church of the first-born, enrolled in heaven.  You have come, as the author of Hebrews says, “To God, the Judge of all,” and, “to Jesus, the Mediator of a new covenant” (Heb 12:18-25).  “See to it that you do not refuse Him who is speaking.”  He, unlike these idols we keep coming up with, is Living and True.  He is Holy and Perfect in Himself.  And He holds out to you this gift of salvation, of Life and godliness.  See to it that you do not refuse Him.  Pray that He will indeed guard you against straying off after these lifeless, deadly lies.

Faith, Living and True (10/12/22-10/13/22)

If God, to whom they had turned, is living and true, the same can be said of their faith.  Their faith, being established in Christ and resting wholly upon Him, was living and true, and this demonstrated again the false and lifeless nature of those idols which had been so much a part of their former life.  Indeed, the depth of their conversion, the depth of their devotion to God was plainly evident to one and all.  This is not Timothy’s report that Paul is relating at the moment, although his report was equally positive as to the state of their faith.  No, this is the testimony of strangers, of those only tangentially connected to the Thessalonians, and having no prior connection to Paul.  And what did this random encounters have to report?  These Thessalonians, they have devoted themselves to serving this new God of theirs.  And they wait for some future event, when they say God’s Son will return from heaven.

Paul had spoken earlier of the joy that held them constant even in much tribulation (1Th 1:6), and we observed that this joy must arise from the Holy Spirit, knowing that nothing in this world could ever prove sufficient to thus uphold us when trouble comes.  This was deep-seated, confident joy, and here we see why.  This joy was at their core because they waited, and they waited in utmost confidence.  Whatever the present, the future yet comes, and the future, for them, held this assured promise.  Our Lord will return and take us to Himself that we may be with Him where He is.  And where He is, He has prepared already a place for us.

Our hope, dear ones, is not in length of days.  How could it be?  What sort of blessing can it be to live long in the sort of place we find ourselves now?  Is it your joy to live in the midst of such torment of soul?  I think back to Peter’s observation in regard to Lot.  He was oppressed by the sensual conduct of those among whom he lived, for he was righteous yet, and what he saw and heard while living among them tormented his soul day after day (2Pe 2:7-8).  Surely, this must resonate with us today, who live in a society gone rancid.  And you would lengthen your stay?  It’s one thing to pursue such a course because God has work for you to do.  It is quite another to do so simply because one has grown too comfortable with this life and lost sight of eternity.  These Thessalonians had not.  They waited, and while they waited, they served. 

These two activities, Ironside suggests, encompass the whole of Christian life.  How does that strike you?  Does it seem correct, that while we are here, we serve God and wait for His return?  More painfully, perhaps, does this describe you or me?  If Ironside is right, surely it should.  If the example of these Thessalonians is held up as so powerfully effective and true a faith, surely we ought earnestly to desire that the same might be said of us.  So, might it?  Do I live as wholly subjected to God, living and true, entirely given over to serving as He commands, and in such manner as makes plain that my focus is not on this life but on His Life?  There was a time I might have suggested that it was so, perhaps.  But I don’t think so, not so fully as it should be said.  And as to my present state, well, honesty requires that I confess I have indeed grown rather attached to my little fiefdom here.  But I dare say, not so attached as to have lost sight of my Lord and His promises.  Indeed, but for Him, I seriously doubt I should be here at all, let alone in such surroundings.

Oh, to be sure, I could hunger for more pleasant surroundings, more serene, less of traffic outside, more of nature, perhaps.  I could yearn for a life of ease in which to pursue my music without concern for employments or the necessary activities of maintaining a home.  And, while I have no particular need for more, yet I could see my way to dwelling in a larger home, more finely appointed.  But apart from relatively rare occasions, these are not concerns that envelop me, that drive me.  Have I learned the secret of being content in any and all circumstances?  I hope so, but time and circumstance will surely tell.  And through it all, I pray my testimony shall remain that my God shall see me through.

If it suits His plan and purpose that this present stage of life, in which I want for nothing, really, certainly nothing of true worth or even comfort, should come to an end, and undergo radical shift back towards earlier periods of my life when we were just scraping by, so be it.  The Truth remains.  And the Truth remains that He works all things for the good of those who love Him and are called by Him (Ro 8:28).  He knows what is best, what is most needful for our best.  We are too enamored of this life, too familiar with it and too little acquainted with life beyond this present experience, to choose wisely, other than that we choose to set ourselves at His service, and await Him. 

We await His return, yes.  We also await His lead.  This is not to say that we sit idly, passively by until we have His explicit command on every little aspect of daily life.  That would leave us all but useless.  What parent, after all, wants their children to continually pester them with requests for next task?  Even at earliest ages, we instruct our children not so that they will abandon all self-direction and come to us for orders as to every last little task.  No.  We instruct them in order that they will learn, and having learned, will apply what they have learned such that they already know the right thing to do, and do it, as it were, by nature.

It's been a while since I turned to a musical example, so why not?  It’s been on my mind somewhat of late, as I watch this young saxophonist starting to find his way, hopefully finding his way, at any rate.  Another acquaintance of mine informs me that this youngster – shocking, I know – doesn’t practice as he ought.  No!  Alors!  What ever shall become of him?  Well, he’ll grow up, as did we.  He may or may not find himself desirous of improving.  He may do well enough with his lessons to gain the basics, or he may truly excel, for he does appear to have something of a natural gift for the instrument, which to my thinking is far more critical than all the lessons.  But practice is needful.  And why?  Because by practice we learn these fundamentals to a degree that they become second nature to us.  If we desire our fingers to find the right notes at the speed of thought, such that what we hear in our heads can be what comes out of our instruments, practice is needful.

For myself at present, this is far more a challenge in regard to keyboards than to saxophone.  Although, even with that instrument, if I have not played for some time, things slip.  My fingers are no longer quite so ready to find the note I hear in my head.  Never mind matters of embouchure, or for the guitarist, calloused fingertips.  The muscle memory weakens.  And it is spiritual muscle memory I have in mind here.  They served, say the Wycliffe Commentary authors, as wholly subjected to God.  They waited, and while they waited they served.  We are too ready, I think, to stop at the waiting.  We have our ticket, after all.  We know He is coming, and we can gladly just sit back and wait for Him to come.

But God is not satisfied that we be so.  “Who is the faithful, sensible slave whom his Master put in charge of His household, to give them their food at the proper time?  Blessed is that slave whom his Master finds so doing when He comes” (Mt 24:45-46).  This is the model.  Jesus did not come to be served, but to serve (Mt 20:28).  He certainly didn’t just sit back and wait for the Father to act.  Yes, He spent long hours in prayerful communion with His Father, but He also functioned.  He also set His course according to the knowledge of God that was in Him.  He didn’t need to stop and ask direction of the Father as each new event of the day arose, because He had already trained Himself up in the way He should go.  Father had trained Son.  And it is His example, as Paul makes clear here, that we follow.  He has trained us up in turn.  And so, we don’t just wait for Him to come back.  We serve.  We serve in the guidance and instruction and discipline that He has provided, and we serve, yes, with a sound backing of prayerful communion.  But I think perhaps that prayerful communion has less to do with seeking of direction and far more to do of availing ourselves of the strength and power which God supplies that we may indeed live lives of godliness before Him.

I just finished watching my way through a British series based reasonably well on the books of Bernard Cornwell, pursuing the course of one Richard Sharpe as he lives through the Napoleonic wars.  We can argue another day as to the fitness of such material for the believer, and to be sure, there are aspects of that life, as there are bound to be in an earnest presentation of military life, which are unsavory in the extreme.  There are aspects of Sharpe’s example which we must accept are far less than exemplary, however honorable we may find the hero.  But this is not what I would consider here.  What I would consider is the nature of that military in which he serves, as applies to their training and experience.  They trained hard.  And they trained to be so well familiar with the chaos of the battlefield and with their duties in battle that those actions were practically automatic.  And they were fast.  This comes out over and over again, that their rate of fire, in spite of having to apply powder and shot between every pull of the trigger, was well in excess of that which their best-trained enemies could achieve.  And set as a double line, they could so function as a team as to effectively double, or in some cases, even triple that rate of fire.  And though a seemingly endless column of men come against them, yet so rapid was their firing from that thin red line that the column withered away.

Where am I going with this?  They served as they were trained, and at least in the case of those followed in this set of stories, they trained under one who had experience, knew what was needful to fight and survive.  Okay, this analogy isn’t going to hold up terribly well for us, I fear.  We don’t concern ourselves overmuch with fighting, for we prefer to be at peace with all men, so far as it lies with us to do so.  Why?  Because this is the training, the example, that has been set us.  We do fight, but against principalities and powers of darkness.  We do stand in our thin line, and we do so in the strength of our Lord.  And we do so as under His orders.  Unless He directs otherwise, we do what we know to do.  We live as we see Him live.  We serve and we wait.

Well, that was an unexpected direction of thought this morning.  Let me try and come back a bit.  These Thessalonians lived, Barnes observes, as those waiting, fully believing and expecting His return.  Their lives, their habits, their demeanor towards others, all of this reflected that they perceived that He could come at any moment.  They had taken to heart, it seems, that message about the slave left in charge, and so, as they waited, they did so as those dead to the world and ‘animated with an earnest desire to do good’. 

Too many of us, I fear, stop short.  We’re okay with that dead to the world part, but we’re not all that animated about doing good, unless it’s a matter of doing good for ourselves, and perhaps our loved ones.  We’re ready enough to pursue what profits us.  We’re ready enough to act on behalf of family, perhaps, and maybe even for those who are of our church family.  But I suspect for many of us that’s about where the desire to do good stops.  Get more distant, get more tangled up in the fallen world, and we become more inclined to leave them to their own devices.  This is a problem.  It isn’t a problem that demands of us that we all go out and become in your face street preaching evangelists or some such.  It doesn’t demand that we beat them over the head with our biblical message, force-feeding them on the Gospel.  They’d just spit it back up anyway.  But it does mean that love remains active in us, that love of God which wells up in us to overflowing.  It does mean that our compassion does not prove to be but a skim-coat over the rottenness of our soul.

Jesus came not to be served, but to serve, and those He served were not the most receptive of His service, were they?  He didn’t come to hang out with friends.  He didn’t come to lend a hand to His boon companions, nor even to serve His country.  He came and served those who were for the most part His enemies.  This is the stunning testimony of God’s work among us.  He does not come in response to some outpouring of love on our part.  He comes and pours out His love upon us while we are yet His enemies.  He starts it.  He finishes it as well, but let us focus on the other end.  He starts it.  He pours out His love, showering one and all with His grace, the good and the evil alike.  And face it, go back to starting points, and there’s really only the evil to consider anyway.  But in accordance with His will and purpose, some upon whom His grace pours out awaken to awareness of Who He Is, and what He has done for them.  And love finds a place in them.  The Gospel takes root in them.   They look upon His works with eyes now open, and rejoice at what they see.  God delivered us!  How do you come to this shocking awareness and not have a reaction of, “my God, what have I done?”  What have I been doing?  Each one of us resonates to that parable of the prodigal son, because we have all, without exception, been in that place.

I know a brother who will insistently remind me that he’s loved Jesus so far back as he can remember, even as a tyke.  Let that be as it may.  He is still a prodigal son come back to the loving arms of the Father.  He is still one whose eyes had to opened to what God was working around him.  And in many ways, as with every one of us, he remains so.  We all have our moments.  That doesn’t make those moments right.  But it reminds us of our steadfast hope, which accompanies our equally steadfast need.  Our hope isn’t in our compliance, it’s in our Lord.  Our need is not more effective ministry, more fervent prayer, more anything really.  Our need is Christ.  And He is fully supplied us.  We have every reason to be content, whatever our circumstance, for He has given us of His own power and by His own choosing, everything needful for life and godliness.  That seems to be a thought I cannot move away from lately, a theme of sorts.  He has supplied everything, including the will to work in accordance with His purpose, including this desire to serve, and this willingness to wait.  And while we wait, we serve, and we serve by doing good.  And we do good indiscriminately, not in expectation of reward or even of response, but simply because it is right and it is what our Lord and Savior expects of us.

Calvin observes that many stop short of full conversion, which is to say of genuine conversion.  They may set aside the falsehoods of their past, but they don’t progress.  They don’t continue as developing true piety.  At the same time, it must be recognized that when God has truly delivered us, remaining simply is not an option.  Remaining in our former, sinful and idolatrous habits is not an option.  Remaining as we were is not an option.  If He has come, if He has delivered us, then I dare say there must indeed be progress into true piety.  There must be in us this sense of subjection to Him, of devoting ourselves to serving Him.  We could state this in the opposite order, I should think.  If we are not subjected to Him and devoted to serving Him, we have great cause to wonder whether in fact we are delivered by Him.  If there is no fruit, can there have been any seed?

Calvin further says, “No one, therefore, is properly converted to God, but the man who has learned to place himself wholly under subjection to Him.”  It does seem to me that there is something to this.  We have all, I suspect, heard sermons or teachings to the effect that we either give God all or we haven’t actually given Him anything.  Yet we all simultaneously feel in ourselves that there is something less than all that we have given.  There are those corners, those aspects of our person, that we are rather fond of, and would just as soon retain.  I could probably set music in that category.  I enjoy music, in many and varied forms.  I enjoy the listening to it, and I enjoy the creating of it.  I enjoy, though not quite as I used to, the adventure of discovering new things and of hunting down recordings from some particular favorite artist.  I could, I suspect, devote myself quite happily to such pursuits given leave to do so.  It is a caution, honestly.  It should be.  It cannot be granted leave to supplant my love for God.  It can, I note, be used in service to my God, and it can celebrate, at least in the creative aspect, the gifts He has given, even if it comes with no words.  But it could just as readily become an idol, a thing of no proper and lasting value that I allow to supplant God’s rightful place in my heart and mind.

I am thankful, then, that God does not leave such things to chance.  As if chance had any power in itself to begin with!  But while He may permit me, as a being possessed of will and of moral responsibility for my actions, to become too involved with this or that for a season, He will not leave me there.  He will stir the embers of faith.  He will speak the needful reminders of Whose I am.  He it is, after all, who is at work in me both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Php 2:13).  That doesn’t let me off the hook, so far as my own responsibility, for it comes fast on the heels of that reminder to work out my salvation with fear and trembling in the preceding verse.  But it gives assurance, a needful assurance, that faith, living and true, may flourish in joyful, confident hope.  Our hope is not in our perfection of obedience, but in Him.  Our joy is amplified, certainly, when we find ourselves caught up in the love of Him and are granted the pleasure of serving Him.  And I dare say, though that service may bring significant hardship, yet it remains a pleasure.  After all, if He has sought our service in some regard, He has also supplied our service, giving us of His own power to thus fulfill His command.

We labor, after all, not to satisfy our own preferences, and not as somehow earning His love.  He already loves us.  If He did not, there would be no consideration at all of serving.  We would yet have nothing to do with Him.  But He has loved us, and He continues to do so.  And He loves us perfectly, for He has no other operating mode.  He is perfect, and He does all things perfectly.  He delivers us.  Let me remind you, if indeed it is a reminder, that this deliverance is a present tense action.  It is a state, a constant in our lives if indeed He has called us, if indeed, we have turned to God from our idols.

I must reiterate, this is no guarantee that we shall never in any way suffer relapse to our old ways.  Any honest assessment must surely recognize that this is so.  If we suppose we have come so far in our faith as to no longer have any dealings with sin, then I must insist that sin has blinded us to our sin.  Our deceitful and wicked hearts have convinced us we are far, far better than we truly are.  It remains as it has, it seems, ever been, or at least sins Adam’s expulsion from Eden.  “All of us have become like one unclean.  Our righteous deeds are like filthy rags, and we wither like a leaf.  Our iniquities, like the wind, take us away” (Isa 64:6).  It is telling, isn’t it, that Isaiah includes himself in the scope of this.  And yet, we so often think to exclude ourselves.  Oh, he’s talking about them, not me.  He’s talking about Israel, not the church.  No.  The scope and the judgment remain as they have ever been.  Your deeds of righteousness, so long as you remain in this life, and so long as they are things worked up in yourself, remain utterly, fatally marred by sin.  If there is good in our being, it is because of one thing, and one thing only:  It is because of Christ living in us.  He has bought us.  He has delivered us.  His is at work in us.  He is living in us.  This, this only, is our hope, our guarantee, not that we shall never relapse, but that our relapse shall not prove full and final.

God is, as the JFB observers, “‘our Deliverer’ ALWAYS.”  And as He delivers always, so we wait always.  We wait in faith reassured and made firm by past experience of His deliverance.  We wait in the confidence of present experience of His deliverance now, today, this very hour.  We wait in joyful anticipation of His future deliverance, His return.  This is, as the JFB observes, not merely coming back for a rerun, or a second season.  When He comes, His coming will have ‘features altogether new’.  We are redeemed once for all, but the impact, the ongoing progressive work continues.  It is ever in the present.  It is our continual state, that He has redeemed, is redeeming, and will in due course fully and finally redeem us.

When Paul writes to the Philippians, neighbors of this Thessalonian church, he writes to a city proud of its place as a Roman city, and their status as Roman citizens.  Here, too, was an idol, that of citizenship and its proffer of sundry privileges and protections.  Oh, they were proud of this.  Some would suggest you get a hint of that in Luke’s coverage of events regarding Philippi and this mission trip in general.  He certainly demonstrates familiarity with the variations in governance between these two cities.  But Paul, knowing the mindset in Philippi, addresses it head on.  He reminds them of the change, the deliverance.  “Our citizenship is in heaven, from which we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Php 3:20).  But, Paul!  If we are already saved, already delivered, why a Savior?  The Philippians in particular might well have asked, we are Roman citizens!  From what, then need we be saved?  We have rights.  We have some of that pride of citizenship in our own right, don’t we?  We’re Americans, by God.  Our Lord would never allow us to fall.  Well, Israel thought the same, and fell hard.  Britain thought the same, declared herself the New Jerusalem.  And what remains of her empire?  What, for all that, remains of her godliness?  There is almost no trace of either.

Beloved, you are not primarily citizens of this country or that.  Oh, to be sure, citizenship remains, and you have a duty – a God-given duty, I might add – to not merely tolerate your government, but to be model citizens.  And more, you are commanded by your God to pray for those whom He has set in governance over you, whether they be benevolent men of faith, or more akin to Nero and those others who set themselves to destroy the Church.  We are not given leave to choose whether or not we pray for a given leader, and so long as the dictates of government do not directly demand a breach of divine Law, our instruction, or command from our only General, is to obey them, to obey them as His representatives.

Well do I know how hard it can be to perceive those in government as representing God in any way shape or form.  But they do.  They serve, however our politics may function, at His will, and they serve only so long as He wills.  This is not to suggest that He must therefore condone their every dictate.  Can it really be supposed that God condoned Nero burning His children at the stake, and that, primarily for entertainment and to shift attention off of his own failures?  Heavens no!  Can it really be supposed that God condoned the myriad evils committed by Hitler, by Mao, by Stalin?  By no means!  And yet, their time in authority could only come about by His authorization, however violently they may have gone about gaining their position, and however vile they may have proved while in position.  This is hard to take.  It cannot help but lead to questions, can it?  How could a good God permit this?  And I know, there is the fully accurate if somewhat trite counter-question as to how God could permit any good to exist at all in this fallen world.  But that hardly satisfies, does it?

How can God expect us to comply with the likes of these murderous chiefs?  How can He accept them as His representatives in governance?  Well, now we really must have a bit of reality check, as we should just as rightly wonder how He can accept us, in all our sinful, half-hearted condition, as His spiritual representatives?  And yet, He does.  And yet, seeing the good and perfect result that shall in due course pertain in us, He delivers us, constantly, for our need is constant.  And He works in and on us, constantly, for we are a real piece of work, aren’t we?  And He assures us that in due course, the work will be finished.  He will return and raise us in body as He has been raising us in spirit, not in bolstering the old, but in a full refashioning, a rebirth.  And our final state, like His return, will not be a rerun, but have ‘features altogether new’.

Beloved, if you are in Christ, by all means, you ought to be assured that you are no Christian in name only.  As I say, we shall, we must see fruit in keeping with the faith that is in us.  It may not be as bounteous as we would like.  It may not be as ripe as we had hoped.  But it will be there.  If we look back along the trendline of our life since He called us, we will see the evidence of His working.  We shall observe that, however much the work we recognize remains, yet a great change has been made in our lives.  Our devotion to His service may still be a fitful thing, but it is a thing.  Our commitment to living out this faith He has so graciously brought into being in us may have its ups and downs, but the trendline remains upward, heaven bound.  It must, for it is God Himself Who is at work in us, and He, dear ones, doesn’t fail.  Our flesh may be weak, but He is strong.  And He has overcome the world, to which our fallible flesh yet belongs.  No. When God delivers, remaining is not an option.  When God has once called you His own, then you are as real and genuine in your faith as He is in His godhead.  Why?  Because both your faith and His godhead have their being in Him.

In Him you live.  In Him you move.  In Him you have being.  I have touched on that passage repeatedly.  But we need to hear it repeatedly.  And we need to realize the implications, the confident hope that is to be found in that truth.  Isn’t it something that Paul, when he made this great proclamation, he brought forth a pagan poet to support the claim?  “For your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His offspring’” (Ac 17:28).  God has not shut off the unbeliever entirely from truth.  We cannot simply reject every statement of every unbeliever out of hand.  They, too, are image bearers, however poorly the image shows at present.  They, too, have conscience, however hardened.  And God is greater than that hardness.  He was able to speak through our hardness, after all.  He can do so for them.  And I dare say, if we could go back and review our thoughts prior to knowing Him, we should find glimpses of true knowledge there, even if we failed to pursue the implications and come to Christ in those times.

Certainly, I can find moments in my pre-converted life when apart from God’s intervention I should not have survived long enough to enjoy a post-converted life.  I little doubt that there were whispers of conscience even then, though I don’t recall them as I do some of those more visceral interventions.  God delivers – past, present, and future.  We rest in Him, and we look forward to that altogether new aspect of the life to come.  And knowing it must come, for He has determined it shall, we know joy in the present.  We abide in faith, living in true, firmly founded upon God, living and true.

The Witness (10/14/22)

I see that much of what I have pulled out for comment in this study has come from previous notes of mine.  I suppose, that being the case, I should strike for brevity here.  We’ll see how that goes.  The thing I want to consider in this last portion is why or how the Thessalonians were so impactful on those who encountered them.  And here in these last two verses of Chapter 1, it’s not clear to me that we’re still talking about how other believers perceived them.  If Paul is considering that he doesn’t need to tell others about how the gospel had done its work among them, it strikes me as far more likely he has in mind his own efforts at ministering the gospel among those who had as yet not heard it.  As such, the impression these Thessalonians made was not on believers alone, but on all who met them.

If I may take up a thread of thought from those earlier notes, they believed and it showed.  This wasn’t about programs.  This wasn’t about mission trips, although it is entirely possible that some among them did go abroad, because that is what their livelihood required of them.  This was a port city, and on a major trade route to boot.  Some would travel.  They would have traveled were they not saved by Christ.  Others would remain in the city, at those jobs they had before they came to Christ.  It wasn’t about a great change in lifestyle, but a great change in character.  It wasn’t that the church in that place had got everybody onboard to go out and preach in the streets.  Their very presence, particularly among those who had known them before, was already a sermon.  I say it would hold particularly with those who knew them, for they couldn’t but notice the change in character, the shift in mindset and habit.  But it was also noticeable to strangers, it would seem.  They may not have known these believers when.  But they could recognize something distinct in their actions, in their hospitality, in their graciousness, and in their honesty.

You can readily imagine some among these observing, “There’s something different about you.”  Some of us, I think, have experienced that when encountering other believers.  It may not immediately register with us, but there’s something that marks out a certain kinship.  Or it may be that before we came to faith, we were encountering believers in our circle of acquaintances, and something about them – something, I should stress, other than posters, bumper stickers, and tee shirts with pop-culture, Christian sayings – was clearly different from the norm, and, given a bit of thought and a lot of the Spirit speaking, clearly superior in quality.  And perhaps, just perhaps, we found ourselves moved to make that same observation in regard to them.  “There’s something different about you.”  Perhaps you’ve even heard that said of yourself.

Here’s the deal:  If asked, or if on the receiving end of such an observation, these Thessalonians no doubt gladly took opportunity to explain the difference.  Here’s what it is, friend.  There came a preacher, and he spoke to us of one called the Son of God, sent down to live among us as one of us, put to death on a Roman cross in spite of having done no wrong.  And get this!  He didn’t stay dead.  They pulled His body down and laid it in one of those Jewish graves, a great stone rolled across the hole that lead to His burial spot.  They even mounted a guard to watch, lest somebody come to disturb that grave.  And still, three days later, the tomb was empty, only His grave-clothes remaining.  And those with whom He had traveled the prior three years saw Him, spoke with Him, ate with Him subsequently.  He lived!  And further, He was taken up into heaven before their very eyes.  And all of this, you see, was God’s doing, done that we, in spite of our ages of idolatrous and sinful practices, might come to know Him, might be forgiven our crimes against Him and welcomed into His family.  Indeed, He has even assured us of a place in heaven in the fulness of time!  In the meantime, He has left us here, to serve His kingdom here, to spread news of Him here, and to wait in confidence for His return.  And so we do.  There is the difference in us!  We have come to know God, the One True God, Who has come to us.

But it was more than just words memorized by which to field the question.  It was beyond the popcorn testimony, as we call it.  I suppose there’s a place for such, and I don’t know as it hurts to be prepared, but I don’t know as it’s really the idea.  I think anybody listening would know the difference between a canned speech and an earnest response to the present moment.  Maybe I’m wrong.  I do know we are called to be ready ‘in season and out’, although that phrase comes up in the setting of pastoral work, of reproving, rebuking, exhorting, and instructing among the faithful (2Ti 4:2).  But it’s not just for them.  We, too, are to be ‘always ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you’ (1Pe 3:15).  Again, a different setting, but there is that instruction not to be anxious about what to say.  “When they arrest you and deliver you up, don’t be anxious beforehand about what you are to say.  Say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit” (Mk 13:11).  Is it so unreasonable to suppose that the same Spirit who informs our speech under such duress, would do so in more clement settings?

Now, the thing is, if we are to answer when folks ask, then first, it’s not about aggressive proselytizing, is it?  It’s not about accosting folks with the Gospel.  It’s about being living examples of faith.  It’s about laying out before them the evidence for God, not by pronouncements, but by lives lived out.  After all, if our lives are continually speaking something quite foreign to what we would profess to believe, then any such profession will be pointless, won’t it?  Who needs another politician, another shill?  But when our lives are such as give cause for others to ponder what it is about us that leads to such calm joy, particularly given the circumstances of life are hard and downright depressing, then opportunity comes to give answers.  And those answers are given as seed into fields prepared, the fields having been prepared by our lives.

Amongst the things that marked out these believers, a chief consideration must be their hospitality.  This is, in itself, a feature of faith put into practice.  And it was particularly needful, I suspect, in such a place.  Again, they were a port city and a stop on the Via Ignatia.  Many strangers passed through, and many among those strangers may have exhausted much of their means to procure a place in whatever caravan they were with, or passage on whatever ship bore them across the sea.  Yet, they arrived in this city, and they would need accommodation, and food, and the means that remained to them simply would not get them much.  To find, then, a people ready and willing to invite them into their own homes, to enjoy a meal with the family, and be put up in decent beds in a warm place?  What a blessing it would be!

We don’t know if this was a hospitality reserved to other believers who passed through, or whether it was a general tendency to welcome on their part.  But either way, it was making a mark.  It stood out in the memory of those who came to that city, and when they went elsewhere, it was the stuff of their conversations.  You wouldn’t believe how welcome we were made in that place!  These folks went out of their way for us.  It was truly marvelous.  What wonderful folk, nothing like the usual types one meets in the city.

So, let’s try and draw this towards an application.  We, too, have been left to serve as we await our Lord’s return.  And, blessed the one He finds serving as instructed when He comes; giving food to his fellow servants at the appropriate times, seeing to the needs of God’s household, and fulfilling their purpose as His ambassadors.  Blessed that one who has not been cause for shame to his Lord.

Now, we may have our programs and our outreaches, but while these may have their value, they are never going to suffice in themselves.  If you think it enough to participate in these special events, and then get on with life, then you have missed the message.  You’re still effectively hiding away, keeping to yourself in your faith.  But if you are here, and if you are indeed held in God’s mighty hands, you are here to shine out His glory.  You do so by living what you have professed to believe.  You do so by committing yourself, as best you may, to walk worthy of this Lord Who has redeemed you, following His example by following those who more visibly follow His example before you.  It’s hard, after all, to follow the example of one we haven’t actually seen.  But He has seen to that problem, having always a sound witness, an exemplary model for us to follow in each and every age.

That is not to say that whoever comes claiming to represent Christ, we can just blindly follow whatever example they happen to set.  That’s going to make a mess of things.  No, the Puritans and Pilgrims had the right idea.  Follow no man farther than he follows Christ.  This is all Paul advised in regard to himself and his compatriots.  It’s the most we owe to any man, even the best of pastors.  For even the best of pastors remains, like ourselves, a work in progress, simultaneously saint and sinner.  And we must, if we would take our example from such, learn to sift the saintly from the sinful.  Take the meat, and leave the bones, as we say.  And we must expect that the same shall hold true of any who would take their example from us.  We do well to remain quite thoroughly mindful that we, too, are a mixed bag.  We don’t have it all together, and we don’t have, the only one among so many millions, the Truth held perfectly in mind and practice.  But we do our best, and we know where to turn when we fail yet again.

This is no cause for us to hide away.  It mustn’t be.  If we all hide away until we are perfected, then there is no gospel being spread.  Paul could not have ministered, nor Peter, nor any other, and the great good news would have been lost to history almost as soon as it began.  But it wasn’t lost.  God didn’t demand perfection for His message to go forth.  The perfection, after all, is not in the messenger, but in the message, for the message is of God, and God is True.  So, go forth!  By all means, do your utmost to live a life true to your faith.  And by all means, confess to your shortcomings.  Confess to God, and where necessary confess to those who have been impacted by your failings.  Then, get up, and walk in the forgiveness of Christ.  Return to your duties, and serve Him.  Serve Him by living subjected to Him, by following the example He sets you both through these Scriptures and through those whom He sends to serve among you, those like Paul, like Timothy, like Spurgeon, like Sproul.  If they fail or falter, let us recognize that they are but men, and if Christ can forgive them, surely we ought as well.  But where they succeed, let us follow.

And when our following leads to questions, let us answer.  Whether it is, at least at first, some canned response we have prepared for ourselves, or whether it is the spontaneous, contemporaneous outflow of words the Spirit gives us in the moment, give answer.  Explain where the opportunity of explanation has arisen.  If the field is there before you, cast your seed.  If it takes, praise God!  If it does not, praise God!  You have done as you ought.  The result, dear one, is up to Him.

Clarke has made observations not so different from mine, here.  And as much as I find I must take Mr. Clarke with a bit of caution, yet I find this resonates.  He writes, “The mere preaching of the Gospel has done much to convince and convert sinners, but the lives of the sincere followers of Christ, as illustrative of the truth of these doctrines, have done much more.”  It’s true, isn’t it?  Actions speak louder than words, as the old saying goes.  And the world at large is watching for hypocrisy, and most particularly so when they encounter those of professed faith in Christ.  The world looks for an excuse not to believe, and nothing will more readily suit the purpose than lives that give the lie, or appear to give the lie to professions of faith.  Oh sure, you believe in God.  And you live like that?  You treat people like that?

Look, we get that response quite readily when in fact we are walking fully in accord with holiness.  There are plenty who will be offended by the necessary conclusions of accepting God’s determinations, such as that life is sacred and to be preserved.  Oh, they will say.  Look at the injustices that arise.  There has been much made, for example, of the case – down in Texas, I believe – of some young girl raped and impregnated, and what?  You won’t grant her an abortion?  You know what?  It is admittedly a hard situation to consider, and harder still, to be sure, to be going through.  But there’s more than one life involved, like it or not.  It’s a moral dilemma no person should wish to face, but at the end of it, unless one is truly being faced with a situation where preserving one life must necessarily imperil the other, it shouldn’t be that hard.  We seek to preserve life.  Do we insist this young child now take on the role of mother?  No, although I don’t know as we rule it out any more readily.  But she is not alone.  She is in a family, one hopes.  And that family will or should come alongside in the raising of this new life.  Is life less precious because its path to existence isn’t according to our preferences?  No.  That little being, even unborn in the womb, is every bit as much, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’.  That is the part these blithe proponents of mercy killing miss entirely.  It’s not just the young girl, it’s the younger life now developed inside her.

Let me return to my point, and hope to close this study out.  We aren’t left to hide away, but to shine both by our example, and, when asked for it, our testimony.  We ought to live in such a way as makes it evident that something is different, and even that the something which is different is that, whatever our mundane occupations day by day, we serve Jesus.  I don’t just work for my employer.  I work for Jesus.  I don’t just serve and honor my wife.  I serve and honor Jesus – in the doing of that.  I don’t just love my children, I love them in Christ, seek to set before them a model of godly living to follow, and to warn them away from such aspects of my example as may fail of that goal.

Clarke, whom I quoted a few paragraphs back, continues to observe that where preaching is not accompanied by lived example, it has little or no impact.  So, too, our lives.  If our lives are not examples of the faith we claim, we, too, will have little or no impact.  And that, dear ones, is not as it should be.  Don’t be such as pay lip service to this faith and then return to the same life they always lived.  Be the light you were purposed to be.  Shine forth the Spirit within you.  Walk worthy.  Live the change that He has made.  He is in that change.  He has given you all that is needful for this duty.  Let us, then, set ourselves steadfastly along the course of our duty.

So be it, Father.  Let it be done in us as You would.  Let it be done in me as You would.  By Your power and Your leading, let me be such as walks in a manner suited to raise questions, and let me be ready, in season and out, willing and even excited to give answer to any who might ask after this joyful confidence You establish in me.