Thesis 62- We must exercise dominion, ruling over all things well.
I’m not in the habit of citing Karl Barth favorably, but when you’re right you’re right. Counter-intuitively, but insightfully Barth considers the sin of sloth to be on par with the sin of pride. We are prone to it, and our embrace of it is profoundly destructive. It is our habit, when speaking of the imago dei, the image of God in man, to see it principally in terms of our capabilities. We are like God, we bear His image because He thinks and we think; He feels and we feel; He wills and we will. It’s all true, of course, but there is so much more. We reflect His image not just in our capabilities, but in our calling.
The first command of God, the one Eve was made a helper suitable to Adam for, is what we call “the dominion mandate.” They were to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, to rule over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea and everything that creeps upon the ground (Genesis 1:28). Lest you think the fall set this command aside note two things. First, one of the curses Eve was given was pain in child-bearing. The call to be fruitful abides. One of the curses Adam received was thorns and thistles that would multiply. The call to exercise dominion abides. Secondly, the same command is given by God to Noah after departing the ark.
That command, the dominion mandate (sometimes called the cultural mandate) is still with us, and we, because we are given to sloth, are prone to falling down on the job. Reformation demands that we pick up the calling we have never lost. The first Reformation, in fact, understood this. In the Middle Ages Roman Catholicism had come to divide reality into the sacred and the secular, seeing the first as good and the second not so good. If you wanted to be godly you needed to work, live, operate in the sacred realm alone. The Reformers understood that the reign of Jesus is over all things. Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch Prime Minister, theologian, publisher followed in that pattern when he said “There is not one square inch in all of reality over which Jesus does not cry, ‘MINE!’”
Jesus is succeeding where the first Adam failed, bringing all things under subjection. Under His reign every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord. And Jesus, the last Adam, has been given a help suitable to Him in fulfilling that calling, the last Eve, the church. Of course we are to be about the business of proclaiming the good news to all men, to be witnesses of His work on the cross. We are also, however, to make known the beauty, the glory and the power of His reign over all things, ruling with Him, under the Father. We are indeed to make disciples of the nations, which means in part, teaching them to obey all that He has commanded.
Reformation is not for the faint of heart, for the slothful of spirit. We are kings and queens with the King of Kings. May we rule well.
It is counter-intuitive, but nevertheless, there it is. We all, from time to time, take offense when grace is offered to us. We all, even more of the time, take offense when grace is offered to others. Two different circumstances, one reason to rule them both.
It is not, strictly speaking, receiving grace that offends us. Rather we take offense at the notion that we are in need of it. When it is offered, either by the God whom we offend daily, or another person that we offend less frequently, we recognize that to accept it is to acknowledge that we have done wrong, that we have failed. We don’t want grace, pity, charity because such means we cannot do what needs to be done on our own. And that hits right in our most vulnerable spot, our pride. We prefer to live in the most dangerous delusion, that we got this. We are not just waving off the lifeguard in the midst of our second drop below the surface, we wave off the Live Giver while dead at the bottom of the sea.
Why though do we resent the offering of grace to others? Such says nothing whatsoever about our own need or lack of need. Yet we grumble, complain, even respond in bitterness when we see others receive grace. Jesus even gave us the parable of the vineyard workers to show us this (see Matthew 20:1- 16). The root of this, despite the different circumstances, is the same as above- it hits us in the pride. Here the issue isn’t our need to be self-sufficient, but our felt need to be treated as special, inviolable. When others receive grace it leaves us open to be mistreated. If people aren’t punished for treating others poorly, I will end up being treated poorly. And surely I’m too important, valuable, precious to have anyone get away with harming me.
The solution in both instances should not surprise us. What we need is humility. We need, in the first instance, to give up the barking at the moon lunacy of thinking we don’t need God’s grace. The pride that says, “I got this” is the equivalent, and just as embarrassing at the emperor’s pride in his new set of clothes. I don’t need a little grace. I need all the grace there is. I’m not dependent on God to get me through the last twenty yards of the marathon. I need Him to carry me. When the unbeliever accuses us of using God as a crutch let us denounce such nonsense with vigor. A crutch? A crutch? Of what use is a crutch to a dead man? I don’t need a crutch. I need life itself, given to me by the Lord of Life.
As for the second circumstance, humility acknowledges that we are not special. We are not true special treatment of special protections. We are not the priceless china in the shop but the bull. We are not God, but God is. Though we can be and have been wronged, no wrong we have ever received is worthy to be compared to the daily wrong we do to our Redeemer. We have been forgiven much. Surely we should rejoice in forgiving others little.
The church is not the fellowship of those fighting over a small serving of grace. We are those celebrating being invited to feast upon that grace that covers not only us, but every one of our brothers and sisters, and all who are afar off. Let us acknowledge our need and proclaim His provision, putting pride on the run.
It may be a sign that we are in a technological age that we tend to equate technology with machines. Technology, however, is not just about machines. Technology includes in its range of meaning the entire idea of techniques. Human technology need not refer to mechanical pacemakers, but instead can refer to the systems by which we bring about changes in humans. Both a ten-ton bottle-capping machine and an insightful question are tools. One keeps a bottle of soda from spilling and going flat on the way to market; the other, one hopes, provides insights toward spiritual growth. The difficulty is when we begin to see our friends, families and our churches as an assembly line of bottles, in need of the right cap.
Much of the wise criticism that has been made against the church over the last thirty years falls into one of two jeremiads. Sometimes we chasten the church for succumbing to that spirit of the age that we call the therapeutic revolution. Other times we chasten the church for bedding down a different spirit of the age that we call the managerial revolution. In the former the church exists to soothe the tender spirits of the congregants, to keep the pop from losing its fizz, with a dose of pop-psychology. In the latter the spiritual CEO organizes the troops and motivates them until they become an efficient ministry, what else- machine. These two models for the church share two things in common. First, they are utterly unbiblical. Second, they are both technologically minded. They see the church, and its members, as products to be manipulated to bring about a desired end.
The Bible never describes the church in these technological terms. Never is the church called that which guides the psyche toward completeness, nor that which provides the greatest efficiency for the building of the kingdom. The Bible has all sorts of analogies for the church, none of them technological. Instead each of them is organic. The church is not a set of gears and levers, a clockwork orange. Rather it is a set of limbs and appendages, or as Paul describes it in I Corinthians, a body. Of course that might not steer us completely clear of our problem. We’re so technological that we have come even to think of God’s great gift of our own bodies as yet another machine to be tweaked to maximize efficiency. We see our parts as parts, and miss the holiness of the whole.
Paul has another image for us, however, that is hard to reduce to something made down at the machine shop. Paul says that we are, the church as a whole, the bride of Christ. Brides are not given to technology. I’m not saying that tools are a man thing, and ladies should stand clear. Rather I’m saying that when we think bride, we necessarily think in organic and not in machine terms. No one says as the bride walks the aisle, “Mercy, look at the torque she’s able to handle with her medial collateral ligaments.” No one says to the bride, “You know, that veil of yours is not ergonomically designed for the giving of a kiss. Why not leave it off?” No one brings a stopwatch to measure the bride’s time in getting up the aisle. A bride is not meant to be efficient, but to be beautiful.
We will not, however, ever read a church bulletin that reads, “First Community Church By the Freeway’s purpose is to look really, really nice for Jesus.” Or, “Our first priority here at Our Lady of the Perpetual Committee Non-Denominational International Family Center is to clean ourselves up good for the wedding day.” That, however, is the health and the business of the church. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be proclaiming the good news, or that we must cease and desist from visiting the sick. I’m not saying we can never have a church picnic for the sake of fellowship, or never deliver turkeys to the poor. Instead we do these things, all that we do, in order to make us more beautiful as a bride. We are not a machine that needs to be honed, but a bride that needs to be beautified. That’s what the Groom has not only called us to do, but what He is doing in us.
That’s not all though. Brides do far more, though never less, than look their best. The first of which is to love and to honor the Groom. The problem with machines is that they lack heart, something the church must cultivate. We are to grow in our love of Christ, to love Him more daily not with our gears and our levers, but with our hearts and souls, minds and strengths. That’s why we study Him and His Word, why we meet Him at His table. That is why our preachers preach His glory, to fill our hearts with sincere affections.
That we are a bride is a given. We were made for such. And so when we take a technological approach to our calling, we turn our Groom into a machine. He is not a machine. He is not a tool by which, if we punch in the right code, we can have happy, successful, well-ordered lives. He is not a means, which is all tools are, to some other end. Instead our Groom is the end. He is our delight and our joy, not just because of what He has done, what He now does, or because of what He will do, but because of what He is.
He will succeed. He will, because our Groom is altogether sovereign in authority and in power, get us to see what He has already told us, that we are His spotless bride. When we see it, maybe then we will be spotless, besmirched with neither grease, nor sin.
In two days two things will happen. First, it will be, for everyone around the world, Valentine’s Day. Second, it will be for me and my Valentine, and all those who join us, our first day of worshipping as Sovereign Grace Fellowship. My bride and I will be hosting in our home a meeting with our Groom. These two events, however, are far more tightly bound together than we might think.
It is a good and right thing, a biblical thing, for husband and wife to be equally yoked. It is not a good way to share a life together if you don’t share the same new life together. There is, however, more to Christian marriage than walking side by side on the way to the Celestial City. There is the encouragement along the way.
The whole of the internet cannot contain all the reasons that I love my wife. The best one, however, the one that outshines them all is this- she helps me to love Jesus more. Nine out of nine marriage books for women insist on the importance of wives encouraging their husbands. The question is, encourage them toward what? Lisa has no patience with the idea of encouraging me to be more me. She isn’t diligent to be sure I believe in myself. No, she encourages me to run to, cling to, cry out for, walk with, listen to Jesus. She encourages me to believe in Him.
Lisa found me lying in the grave I had dug for myself. She found me projecting an image, dressing for success while hiding in the folds of the Grim Reaper’s robe. God used her to call me out, to inspire me to live again. He, and she, however, didn’t stop there. When my shame brought me down, she stuck with me. Why? Because she trusted Jesus to carry me. Which helps me trust Jesus to carry me. For more than four years now she has prayed over me, with me, for me, never stopping, wavering or doubting.
Sunday, when we open those doors and welcome our guests, when I break open God’s Word and preach the Good News, it will be because He gave her to me as a help suitable, a blessing, because she is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She has not only encouraged me, but encouraged Sovereign Grace Fellowship- setting deadlines, getting the word out, preparing and opening our home.
It is not typically my habit to preach most holidays, but instead to preach the next text. Sunday our text, our first text, will be II Kings 7:1-16, about the four lepers who discovered the feast that their enemies had left behind. My sermon title is “Beggars All,” reminding us that we are no heroes, but beggars telling other beggars where to find bread. That is why Lisa is my Valentine, the love of my life. She has been, from our very beginning, a beggar telling this beggar where to find bread. And so we feast together on the Feast Day of Saint Valentine. And feast together with our Lord at His table of peace.
