Thesis 21- We must preach Christ.
The Bible is a big book. It was written by scores of different authors over the course of thousands of years. It contains historical narrative, apocalyptic prophecy, poetry, song, law and more. It is written in three different languages. And yet, it remains one book. It is a unity because in all its myriad forms it tells but one story. This is the story that we are called to preach.
The greatest sermon ever preached was given, in the providence of God, to only two men. These men were walking on their way to Emmaus, when the resurrected Lord walked alongside them. Without revealing His identity, we are told, “And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:27).
Sound preaching is preaching the Word in context. Context, however, isn’t merely the few verses before and after our text, or even the whole book from which we are preaching. Instead Jesus is the context. We preach the text rightly, and preach the whole counsel of God only when we preach Christ. The Bible, though it contains wisdom and law and beauty in teaching us about marriage, isn’t a book of tips on having a happy marriage. Though it tells us a great deal about the sinfulness of man, the grace of God, and how God is about the business of remaking us, isn’t a book of systematic theology. The Bible, though it tells us about the coming of God’s judgment, and the promises of God’s goodness to us into eternity, isn’t a book on eschatology. The Bible, though it contains God’s will for every situation we will ever find ourselves in, isn’t a law book. The Bible is the book of Jesus. He is our husband. He is the Word. He is the returning King. He is the very law of God.
The Bible, in short, has the answer to every question we could ever have. And like the little girl in Sunday School who was asked by her teacher, “What hides nuts for the winter and has a bushy tail?” who said, “I know it sounds like a squirrel you’re talking about, but I’m going to guess ‘Jesus’” the right answer is always Jesus. Our sermons should have as their alpha and omega the Alpha and Omega. We should begin with Christ, and we should end with Christ, and we should stay with Him all the way in between.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (I Corinthians 2:2). Fools that we are, we come with excellence of speech and wisdom. The Puritans, who were known for being rather austere in their worship, who sought to purify out of the church all that God had not explicitly commanded, happily had an inconsistency. Though Scripture no where enjoins us to do this, many of them would have engraved on their pulpits, facing not the congregation, but the pastor, these words, “Sir, we would see Jesus” (John 12:21). They did this to remind themselves of Him whom they were called to remind their congregations of. We would be wise to do the same.
Because he is eminently quotable. Lewis most certainly wouldn’t have seen himself as embracing the same Reformed theology I embrace. Many are quick to pounce on his even more egregious errors, causing us to wonder if Lewis was even within the pale of evangelicalism. There’s a reason for that- Lewis was not a gifted theologian. My father was right on target when he affirmed that everyone is a theologian. CS Lewis happened to be a bad one, no, a terrible one. If I were looking for an explanation of the atonement of Christ, Lewis would be near the bottom of the list of those I would seek help from. If I were seeking a careful examination of the nature of the incarnation, it wouldn’t cross my mind to seek out what Lewis had to say.
No, what he provides is something so much better. Lewis has an uncanny ability to take a biblical truth, whether it be about the atonement, the incarnation or the nature of man, and show us the perfect angle by which we not just understand it better, but are more deeply touched by it. His gift is bringing together heart and mind.
His is a gift so beautiful and potent that I alternate between a raging hunger to acquire some meager semblance of the gift and a disconcerting certainty that I’ll never be able to come close. And there is an irony there. Wouldn’t Lewis say to me, “RC, if you are right about me and the gifts God has given me, can’t you see that your longing is like Simon the Magician’s? He, fool that he was, just like the rest of us, was more interested in receiving the gift of giving the gift of the Spirit than he was in receiving the gift of the Spirit. If you are right about me, and I’m not sure that you are, wouldn’t the wiser thing to be to receive the gift itself?’
The wiser thing as a reader is for me to read more Lewis. The wiser thing as a writer is for me not to try to mimic Lewis more, but to quote Lewis more. My calling isn’t to pick up his mantle. It may be instead to merely point it out, to say to you who read, “I’m glad you’re here. But if you really want the good stuff, you’ll find it here, in Lewis, who said, ‘…….’”.
Please don’t send me comments blasting the errors of Lewis. I’m well aware of them. The glory of God is that He is pleased to use men with terrible flaws to bless other men with terrible flaws. Highlighting the flaws doesn’t undo the blessings. It simply highlights God’s glory in using flawed men like Lewis, and like me and like you. “We,” after all, “are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.” And you can quote, not me, but CS Lewis, on that.
We never seem to believe the Word of God. We are told, “Those who hate Me love death” and we pat God on the back for the lovely metaphor. Next we conclude that those green haired kids with the needles in their faces, in the big city, they certainly hate God and so maybe they love death. Or we nod our head that yes indeed those who hate Him will be unhappy in hell for a long time. God did indeed write poetically when He coined those words. But such doesn’t mean He didn’t mean it. Who, first, are those who hate Him? We are, by nature children of wrath. Those who hate Him are not merely the flamboyant sinners, but all those as yet untouched by His redeeming grace. All those who fit in this category not only are due death, not only face death, not only will live in eternal death unless reborn, but, as the text tells us, love death. They love it, embrace it, bath in it and dine on it.
There is an important linguistic connection between culture and dirt, and, not coincidentally, worship. Culture-cultivate-cult. See? It all involves the same thing, the exercise of dominion. Culture, as Henry Van Til noted, is religion, or cultus, externalized. It is taking from the dirt and making gifts for our god, whether that god is our Maker or is made by us, and whether those gifts are the eggs we eat for breakfast, or the bread and wine we consume at His table. The cruel truth, at least to those who hate Him, is that even their labors in turn become His. They build houses that we live in, and tend vineyards whose wine we drink.
Which is why their hatred is so tightly linked to death. They cannot ultimately escape the claims of God on their labor by building Babel. If they build it, He will come, and make it a footstool for His comfort. In the end, all they can do is destroy. In the end they cannot replace life with false life, but must replace it with death. Sartre was dead wrong when he suggested that the only real question left was death. What he meant was that death was the only real answer.
But even suicide isn’t enough. For when our bodies return to the dust, in the economy of God they feed the life around them. So death requires not only that we shed our own lives, but that we destroy the very fecundity of the dirt, that we sterilize reality until it too dies. Consider the vision of science fiction writers. While there are exceptions, isn’t it odd that the future worlds we are treated too often exhibit a sparseness that bespeaks sterility? Men and women dress like one another. Children are neither seen nor heard. But worse still, the ground is the consistency of fine powder, a dust that gives no life. Once we’re inside, everything is polished chrome. The future’s so bright, I must have been spayed.
In what is perhaps the greatest science fiction novel ever written, C.S. Lewis makes much the same point. That Hideous Strength, the final installment of his space trilogy, includes a fascinating conversation about the battle being waged on the moon. The gleeful Filistrato explains to the incredulous Mark,
“‘Oh, si, intelligent life. Under the surface. A great race, further advanced than we…They have cleaned their world, broken free (almost) from the organic…They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord.’
‘Do you mean that all that,’ Mark pointed to the mottled globe of the Moon, ‘is their own doing?’
‘Why not? If you remove all the vegetation, presently you have not atmosphere, no water.’
‘But what was the purpose?’
‘Hygiene. Why should they have their world all crawling with organisms? And specially, they would banish one organism. Her surface is not all you see. There are still surface-dwellers—savages. One great dirty patch on the far side of her where there is still water and air and forests—yes, and germs and death. They are slowly spreading their hygiene over their whole globe. Disinfecting her…This Institute—Dio meo, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing…Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.’”
This love of death drives the world around us to the fruitless madness of sodomy. It causes them to devour their young through abortion. And, even in the evangelical church, it leads us to poison the ground where our own children might have grown. It is why their entertainment traffics in wanton destruction, and why those children who do survive their tour of duty in the womb gun down their enemies, either on their X-box, or in their school hallway. It is why they mar and disfigure their own bodies, their ever-present reminder of the life they hate. It is why they embrace their soma of choice.
To be counter-cultural doesn’t mean wearing the death shroud so that we can fit in. Such merely hides our life under a bushel. Rather let us be a bunch of dirty Christians, a people who are so connected with Him who is the life, that our life shines before men. Let us be a people who have not only succumbed to fecundity, but embraced it, in our homes, in our gardens, at our tables. Let us eat the fat of the land. Let the aroma of our feast drown out the smell of death that surrounds them. Let us cultivate a culture of dirt, of life. This is how we fight our war, by digging our trenches, and there, in faith, planting the seed. We fight death with life, knowing with joy that death will indeed be swallowed up in victory.
I ran headlong into my sin. He ran headlong into my punishment. I denied Him. He affirms me. I cried out, “Crucify Him!” He cried out, “Forgive him.” I claimed to be innocent, knowing I am guilty. He claimed to be guilty, knowing He is innocent. I earned the Father’s wrath. He earned the Father’s favor. I receive the Father’s favor. He received the Father’s wrath. The Father embraced me. The Father forsook Him.
I crucified the Lord of Glory. The Lord of Glory laid down His life for me.
1. Because the Bible commands us not to forsake the gathering together of the saints (Hebrews 10:25). Before you ask if meeting online is really the gathering together of the saints you should know that such a question sounds to me an awful lot like, “And who is my neighbor?” It’s not a good look. I’m happy to concede that our online gatherings are not at all what God designed, that they are woefully lacking when compared with the real deal. I understand as well that there are careful arguments to be had about Romans 13, the 1st Amendment and the relative merits of social distancing. But those arguments are not relevant here. If your church is “gathering” online only, gather with them.
2. Because while the togetherness isn’t the togetherness of physically coming together, it is far greater than merely logging on to an earlier service or listening to a podcast of a sermon. Real time interaction is, however de-humanizing it may be to do it online, far more humanizing than not doing it at all. Your capacity to identify and empathize with your brothers and sisters will grow when you are doing the same thing at the same time, in the same conversation with the same people.
3. To encourage my pastor. As a public speaker it is my habit to always seek out, early on, a smiling face. When I find one I will return to that face time and again along the way. It lifts my spirits, reminds me that I’m communicating something important, and that there is an end goal well beyond hearing my lips flap. My pastor is likely unused to speaking to an empty room. Knowing there are people listening in real time will help him to do better, given him some level of feedback, and help him rest easier in knowing that the sheep he loves and sacrifices for are receiving the food he is laboring to being to them. I am not simply downloading information from his mind to mine, wherein I can do it at any time, or get any information from any other shepherd. I am connecting. That I can’t connect as I used to do, being face to face, is a terrible reason to connect even less than I am still able to do, online.
4. To be fed by my pastor. I need to hear what the pastor God has given to me has to say to me about what God’s Word has to say to me for such a time as this. These are not ordinary days, but God is still pleased to use ordinary means. He expects me to go the shepherd He has given me to look for what He has to give me. And when the pastor says it’s feeding time, a healthy sheep doesn’t say, “Put mine in the oven to keep it warm. I’ll eat it later.”
5. To feel the pain of God’s judgment and respond in repentance. The last thing I want is for us to reach the conclusion that church online works just fine. No need to shower, shave, or even get out of bed. What could be better? What God has designed is better. He has taken away our ability to meet together. He has done this for more reasons than I could imagine. Those reasons, however, would include, to drive us to repentance. When we gather online it should be a comfort to us, that God has allowed us, in the midst of His judgment, this capacity. And when we gather online it should be a heartache to us, that God has taken from us the ability to meet face to face.
No one will notice if I blow-off online church. Except the One who calls me to worship Him, and me, the one called to come. Come and worship Him. Assemble together with the saints. Repent. Give thanks. Sing praises. And resolve that you will never again take for granted all the blessings He has wrapped up in corporate worship.
