There is, in a rather small subsection of the Reformed world, a rather curious conviction. Some otherwise sound folks take the true and sound notion that because God knows those whom He has not chosen, because it is a great sin against Him to not give thanks to Him, that it is wrong to speak of Him being gracious to those who were not chosen. Every time He sends them the rain, and they fail to give thanks, all that happens for those not chosen is that the thermostat in hell goes up higher still. These folks are right- He does send the rain, knowing they will not give thanks. He will heat up hell all the hotter because of it. But, contra this peculiar view, the rain is in fact grace. In fact, if it’s not grace the very conclusion we have reached, that they will receive greater judgment for their lack of thanksgiving, makes no sense. If God is in fact not being gracious toward them, why should they give thanks? You can’t have it both ways. You can deny that God is giving the reprobate unmerited (or de-merited) favor, or you can affirm the reprobate has a duty to give thanks. But you can’t do both.
There is, on the other hand, in the whole of the Reformed world, a curious lack of conviction. That is somehow we have come to forget that we too are the recipients of His grace, that we receive so much better than what we deserve, and that we have a solemn duty to joyfully give thanks. One of the ways this broader failure manifests itself is in what some might call the objection to “worm theology.” “Worm theology” is that pejorative term given to those of us who are eager to affirm the biblical reality of two things- first, we are by nature children of wrath. We are born the enemies of God. We are totally depraved. We would, in our natural state, if we could, commit deicide. Second, when we are given new hearts, and we embrace the work of Christ, as we grow in grace, moving toward our glorification, we have sin yet remaining in us.
It is true, gloriously true, that when we embrace the work of Christ on our behalf we have peace with God. The Spirit indwells us. We are made knew, and are deemed righteous by the Father who adopts us as His own children. We are promised eternal joy at His right hand, and that one day all the remnants of our sin will be washed away. We are promised that every sin, past, present, future, has already been covered by the blood of Christ. We become saints, beloved of Christ. None of which changes the truth that until our deaths, our glorifications, we still sin, often in the most grievous ways. We are still, in ourselves, worthy of His just wrath, of His displeasure.
The challenge is to keep all these truths in their proper places. Where we are in danger of doubting His tender love for us, we must needs remember that He moves us from grace to grace, that all His promises are yea and amen, that He allows us to be called His children. When, however, we are in danger of believing we deserve all the good that we receive, we need to remember our true nature, what we are apart from His grace. We should never despair of what we are because we are already His, and are being remade. We should never demand what we haven’t been given, because are still sinners, and are always already living in the very lap of His grace.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, “Black Friday is proof that Thanksgiving didn’t stick.” I understand the importance of proper qualifications. One should not hear in that pithy phrase a condemnation either of getting a good deal, or having nice things. I’m in favor of both. No “bah, humbug” from me. What concerns me isn’t the thriftiness of finding the best deals but our propensity to feel dissatisfied, to believe that things can bolster our contentment. It’s one thing to get up early in the morning to go in search of bargains, another thing altogether to go in search of meaning. One you can find almost anywhere. The other, you’d be looking in all the wrong places.
We’re all familiar with the story of John D. Rockefeller when he, who was at the time the richest man in the world, was asked, “How much money is enough?” His response, “Just a little bit more.” If you think this a lesson on how greedy the rich are you’re missing who you are in the story. It is true enough that the rich are greedy. So are, however, the middle class. Even the poor don’t escape. Greed is a human heart problem, not a income bracket problem. We would all answer as Rockefeller did, were we honest. There are always things we’d like to have that seem just out of our reach, a kind of mental shopping list for when our ship comes in, “If somehow I had X dollars, then I’d buy Y.” Perhaps because this isn’t necessarily a look we like to see in the mirror, we may instead tell ourselves, “If somehow I had X dollars, then I’d give Y to Z.” We tell ourselves what great givers we’d be, if we only had more. But here’s the thing. Precious few of us have ever found ourselves in debt because we were donating too much to others. Precious few of us are financially upside down because of what we wanted to give. It is instead what we wanted to get. We fault the Pharisees for making a grand show of their giving, while we hide our merely hypothetical giving in our minds.
There are two potent signposts that show us what we value, rather than what we like to think we value, what do we spend our time on, and what do we spend our money on? On Black Friday the two come together as we give up time sleeping in order to purchase more stuff.
Please do not hear me scolding anyone. Rather hear me confessing. I have confidence in my assessment of your heart simply because of the ugliness I see in my own. That said, here’s something we all ought to be thinking about as we wake from our feast-induced coma. Maybe we should be thinking about what we can give rather than what we can get. Maybe we should be looking for bargains, those organizations that provide great bang for your buck. Maybe we should put the gratitude we expressed yesterday to work today.
Without question the most vexing challenge faced by the early church was understanding how believing Jews and believing Gentiles ought to relate to one another. The theme gets major play in Galatians, Hebrews, Acts, and is even the root of the issue that led to Paul’s stern and public rebuke of Peter. That so much time and attention was paid to this issue might incline us to believe it was settled. Or it just may prove how deep runs the temptation to botch this up.
Let’s start here- we have peace with God by trusting in the finished work of Christ alone. Add anything to that and you have fallen into a false gospel. You do not have peace with God by trusting in Christ and by being circumcised, or by trusting in Christ and keeping the Feast of Weeks. Add anything to the work of Christ, and you lose the work of Christ.
God gave the feasts to point our spiritual fathers toward Christ. They were shadows and He the real thing. The author of Hebrews warns his audience, professing believers who were tempted to go back to the Temple and the Old Covenant shadows, that to go back is to deny that Christ has come.
If we grasp that these were types, shadows that pointed to Christ we will reach two conclusions. First, they were not bad things. Too often some treat the Old Covenant like it was flawed, something to be thrown aside. But God Himself ordained these feasts, for the good of His people. Second, however, Christ is greater than the shadows. We do not keep the feasts by keeping the feast. Instead we keep the feasts by clinging to Christ. He is our feast.
So should we celebrate these feasts? Not if by “should” we mean we have an obligation to do so. May we? Well, that certainly depends on where our hearts are. The Bible prescribes liberty, Paul telling us: One person esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind. He who observes the day, observes it to the Lord; and he who does not observe the day, to the Lord he does not observe it. He who eats, eats to the Lord, for he gives God thanks; and he who does not eat, to the Lord he does not eat, and gives God thanks (Romans 14:5-6).
I have no quarrel with a person celebrating these feasts. Instead I have a caution. My concern about some who celebrate these feasts is that while they profess their dependence on the finished work of Christ alone, some seem to believe that feast keeping somehow elevates their Christian walk. All of our sub-culture convictions within the church carry this danger. Whether it be speaking in tongues, observing feasts, modesty, or reciting the prayer of Jabez we are inveterate second blessing seekers. We want to be superior Christians who have glommed on to the secret way. Then we go out with all the zeal of an Amway salesman trying to get our friends all on board.
Paul, however, is far more easy-going. He described his Hebrew roots as dung (Philippians 3:1-8). What matters is that we know Him, and the power of His resurrection.
You didn’t think I was going to leave you bereft of a podcast on this day of thanks did you?
Or, Postmodern Pharisees
The appeal of ethical relativism is rather plain to see. If there is no right and wrong then I can’t be convicted of any wrong. Ethical relativism allows me to write my own law, to edit on the fly, to finish “I may do this…” with an unassailable “…because I want to.” Desire becomes its own justification. My will becomes my law.
This appeal, however, soon enough begins to dissipate if we have any interest at all in being coherent, consistent in our thinking. We quickly turn, “I may do this, because I want to” into “You may not do that, because I want to do this.” Consider, just as an example, sexual perversion. The problem, morally speaking, with sexual perversion is that it is an abomination to God. Ethical relativism, of course, bars God from the conversation. Therefore there is no reason by which we might condemn the practice. There is, to these folks, no transcendent moral standard by which we are all bound. We can do what we want, no matter how perverse. Which means, doesn’t it, that I can call sexual perversion an abomination to God? What, after all, is to stop me? If all things are permissible, saying some things are impermissible, must be permissible.
My ethical relativist friends, of course, do not take my bigoted, narrow, hateful position lying down. In fact, they will insist that since there is no right or wrong, it is, oops, wrong for me to say otherwise. They will chasten me, rebuke me, come down on me with all the grace and love of a Pharisee. And in so doing expose the lie of their own foundational premise. They don’t deny the existence of law, just any law that would stop them.
In like manner if instead of condemning sexual perversion I club baby seals, or question global warming (oops again, climate change), or argue that government schools ought to be forbidden to teach evolution, suddenly my friends embrace a transcendent moral standard- one I am guilty of violating. Sadly, it doesn’t do much good to be more thoughtful, or more radical. You still run into the same problem. Nietzsche, you’ll remember, castigated Christianity for its “herd morality.” He grumbled that we believers were all the time going about doing what we were told. If we wanted to be authentic, right thinking, if we wanted to be Super men, he reasoned, we ought to throw off all morality and each of us create our own. But, oops, there’s that pesky “ought” again. Did you miss it? It’s there. Why “ought” we to throw off the herd morality? Where did that moral imperative come from? We ought not to listen to other people, according to Nietzsche, unless, of course, the other person is Nietzsche. Even Nietzsche could not escape the unbearable oughtness of being.
Lawlessness does not fail because bad things will happen without law. Lawlessness fails because if it succeeds it becomes law. If moral law requires there be no moral law, then it’s a rather nasty pickle. Law is inescapable, and all those who insist that we not follow any law ultimately want us to submit to their law. Nietzsche and his heirs are not liberators, but slave traders, slave traitors. They do not throw off law but impose it. The only difference is their yoke is not easy, their burden not light.
Thesis 50- We must ask God for wisdom, believing He will give it.
God’s promises are shocking. Our sin, in turn, is shocking. These two intersect when we in our sin refuse to believe the promises of God. He, because He is abounding in grace, makes some kind of stunning promise. We, because we are cynics, skeptics, sophisticates, refuse to believe Him. We may try to masquerade our unbelief as something praise worthy, arguing perhaps that contextual understanding of the Bible diminishes what at first blush looks like an extravagant promise. Truth be told, our faith is just too anemic.
Consider this straightforward promise from God, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him” (James 1:5). Now if we take a too light look at this text it seems to be saying that if anyone will ask God for wisdom that God will give it to him. If, however, we take a more deep look at the text, if we consider the vagueries of the original Greek, if we consider the context of James’ original audience, we find that the text actually says that if anyone will ask God for wisdom that God will give it to him. The scholars who gave us our English Bibles are not stupid men. They did well here. And James himself was no fool. He spoke not just wisdom here, but God’s own wisdom. This is God’s promise.
Our calling isn’t to seek to mitigate its extravagance. Were we to try, we would find only this. “But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind” (verse 6). It’s true enough that James says that doubt will undo this promise. Which ought not to cause us to doubt the promise, but to believe it. This caveat is designed to encourage us to believe the promise. Indeed, failure to believe the promise makes one like a wave that is driven and tossed by the wind.
So how do we get this wisdom? The answer is still right there in the text- we ask for it. We don’t do anything else. We just ask. And He will give it to us. He will give us wisdom if we will but ask Him for it. Wisdom, you’ll remember, He said, is more to be valued than silver and gold, yes than much fine gold (Psalm 19). How often do we ask Him for a better (higher paying) job, or a raise? How many ways do we find to ask God for silver and gold? But we are told that if we will ask for that which is better than silver and gold, He will give it to us.
Wisdom begins with fearing God. It moves on to fearing God. It ends with fearing God. If we fear Him, we will heed Him. As we heed Him we will value what He values, and we will believe His promises. Ask Him first for the wisdom to ask Him for wisdom. And then do not stop until Wisdom welcomes you into His eternal kingdom.
