It was the writer Arthur C. Clarke who posited this law- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I disagree. The technology need not be advanced at all. The truth is that the sole reason we don’t see the world all around us as magic is that we are jaded, too cool for the school of wonder. A little fire, a little sand, a little care, a little gentle blowing, and presto chango, we have glass. That’s magic that we now watch at Founders’ Days fairs. A little water, a little sluice box, more fire, a hammer and some nuance, and abracadabra, we have a golden ring.
CS Lewis reminded us of the glory of dirt in his account of the creation of Narnia. As Aslan sings his creation song the ground itself begins to bubble up like a toasted cheese sandwich. Soon those bubbles burst and elephants, badgers, platypi shook off their mantle mantles and walked forth into the light. Having been just born they mistake the evil Uncle Andrew, with his wild shock of hair, for a plant. Believing that hair to be roots they plant him upside down, and the coins in his pocket (silver and gold- this was a bygone era) fall to the ground, and up sprouts trees of silver and gold. The fecundity of Eden, I suspect, would have been much the same.
As Jesus is about the business of remaking, redeeming the world, as He, the second Adam succeeds in fulfilling the dominion mandate, our dirt becomes ever more productive and fruitful. Sand was turned into computer chips such that I rub the tips of my fingers across plastic keys (also formulated from liquid dirt, petroleum) and the words in my head become words on the screen in front of me. Sand turned into glass wires, through pushing a few more buttons, will take those same thoughts across the globe to your magic machine. You are reading my mind right now, all because of magic fairy dust.
Technology is indistinguishable from magic, because it is magic. The exercise of dominion flows out of the image of God in us and is empowered by the same Spirit who said “Let there by light” and there was light. God took nothing and made everything. We, reflecting His glory, take dirt and make widgets. The widgets, however, exist ultimately not for our comfort, but for our sanctification. They exist so that we might give thanks, that we might praise the One whose image we bear. To be jaded, to fail to be astonished that hot water pours forth when we twist a knob, that cool air flows into our homes, offices, shops and cars with the push of a button, that sheep become sweaters, that iron, wood, and cat gut become guitars to accompany our praise, is to be bored by magic.
Dust has a greater power still. When it is molded and shaped, then filled with the breath of life, it in turn speaks words of life, just as its Maker did. Words- spoken, written, preached- these bring life from death, conviction from indifference, gratitude from cynicism. Lord, give us wonder.
Unexpected events keep us from meeting tonight. We will also not meet next week.
First, God is deeply concerned about our hearts. We often seem to think that only our thoughts and actions matter and our feelings are out of our control. Orthodoxy, right doctrine, matters. Orthopraxy, right behavior, matters. Orthopathos, right feeling, matters. The opposite error, however, is still error. Our hearts matter, but they are not the only thing that matters.
The spirit of Romanticism, following in the footsteps of gnosticism, has encouraged us to believe that our internal, invisible being is all that matters, that the physical realm does not. This shows up in the church when we dress down for corporate worship, when we build ugly but practical places of worship, when treat the Lord’s Supper as a time consuming ritual of little import. All of which flies directly in the face of the plain teaching of the Bible.
God gave explicit instructions for the clothes that the priests who came before Him were to wear, describing that they were “for beauty and for glory” (Exodus 28:2.) One can certainly argue that this was only for the priest and only for the Old Testament. What one can’t argue, however, is that God doesn’t care, that all that matters to Him is the heart of those who come into His presence. Nor does this mean that a certain level of formality in our clothing is necessary to come into His presence. It does mean, however, that forms matter to God. That Paul instructed husbands to have their wives cover their heads in I Corinthians 11 says the same thing, even if, as some argue, head coverings are no longer required. (See last week’s podcast for a discussion on that question.)
The same basic principle applies to our places of worship. God’s instructions for the tabernacle, and later for the temple were neither vague nor sloppy. Both were ornate works of art. Again one could argue that such is in the Old Testament, remembering Jesus’ answer to the woman at the well, that God seeks those who will worship Him in Spirit and in truth. Fair enough, but again, one can’t argue that God doesn’t care about forms.
The same is true with respect to the Lord’s Supper. The instructions of Jesus were not merely that from time to time we ought to meditate on His work for us. Rather He said, “This do in remembrance of me” (Luke 22: 19). “This” is actual eating and drinking, actual bread and wine. Here one cannot slip away on the basis of this being in the Old Testament. One cannot argue that this is in our past.
It is a good thing to be gracious to those who have been influenced by romanticism. It is a bad thing to, thinking of it as graciousness, practice romanticism. God has made us not souls in bodies but souls and bodies. Jesus didn’t die for just our souls but for our souls and our bodies. God’s commands do not touch on just our souls but on our souls and our bodies. Anytime we are tempted to facilely dismiss any of God’s commands we are in a dangerous place. God cares about all that we are, and commands that all that we are be in submission to all He has commanded.
It was Augustine who argued that every sin is a failure to love ordinately. Sin is the result of either loving something more than we ought or the result of loving something less than we ought. We are to love, in order. Eve, for instance, found the fruit pleasing to the eye and desirable to make one wise. Nothing wrong there. She would have had to be blind to miss it. But she loved that fruit more than she should have, and she loved the law of God less than she should have.
Our temptation, because we are the children of our parents who fell into sin, is often to defend our sin on the basis that it is grounded in love. That we steal our neighbor’s reputation because we “love truth” is one form of love justifying a multitude of sins. That we steal our neighbor’s wife because we “love her” is another attempt to defend sin. To love ordinately is to love as God loves, in due measure. It is to love what we love as we ought to love it.
This sin operates in both directions. All of us fail to love the Lord as we ought. We are commanded to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. We are commanded to have no other gods before Him. He is to be our singular holy passion, and every other passion ought only to serve this one passion. We fail, however, not only in loving too little, but in loving too much. The love of money, for instance, is the root of all kinds of evil. We should not be surprised to discover that these two kinds of failure to love ordinately, sins of omission and commission, are often tightly related. That is, we love one thing too lightly because we love the other thing too heavily, and vice versa.
Jesus makes much the same point when He commands us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matt. 6:33). He gives us this command right after encouraging us to cease from our worries over things of little import. He reminds us that we ought not to be anxious about what we will eat, what we will drink, or what we will wear. Then He commands that we focus our minds on that which truly matters.
This does not mean, of course, that food, drink, or clothing is sinful. Jesus is no gnostic, suggesting that salvation means escaping the dirty, grubby, earthly things for the ethereal, spiritual, heavenly things. In the same chapter, after all, He commanded that we should pray to our Father in heaven for the provision of our daily bread. Our food is, in itself, adiaphora. Our drink is adiaphora. This is why Paul later commands us not to judge one another on these matters (Rom. 14:13). We fall into sin, however, when our love for these things, which are in themselves adiaphora, becomes misguided.
Jesus’ wisdom here in the Sermon on the Mount, however, isn’t to unduly separate food or drink from the kingdom. Having told us not to worry about these things — having warned us against the folly of the Gentiles who lust after these things, as He prepares to give us a more kingdom minded perspective, calling us to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness — He reminds us that our Father knows that we need these things. And He promises in the end that as we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, all these things will be added unto us.
Our calling, then, is neither to obsess about these things nor to look down our noses at them. Instead, we are called to give thanks to our Father in heaven for every good gift. We must never allow our passion for the gift to obscure our view of the Giver. Instead, we should look through every good gift to see and to praise the Giver.
This is our Father’s world. While His law may give us liberty, we are never free not to give thanks. While God does not see vanilla ice cream as sin and strawberry as righteousness, He does require that we thank Him, that we remember with joy that He is our Father who gives us these things. Indeed, both the kingdom we are called to seek and the righteousness we are called to seek are built from our gratitude. Remember, again, that He rules over all things. His kingdom is not only forever, it is everywhere. What distinguishes us from the world isn’t that He reigns over us but not them. Instead, it is that we are grateful for His reign while they bristle under it.
The ordinary things of this world — the mundane — are not mere artifacts of culture. They are not merely the tools of the natural realm. They are instead precious gifts from our heavenly Father. They are given to us for His glory. And our gratitude will redound for eternity. Everything, adiaphora or not, connects with our Father above. Nothing is merely human. How we handle His gifts therefore matters. That is why we would be wise to remember that right now counts forever.
If the Bible is extraordinary in its sources, extraordinary in its message, in what sense can we rightly say that the Bible is also an ordinary book? Because the Bible is a book that speaks to us as we speak to each other. Some ancient holy books come to us less as revelations and more as riddles. The ancient Gnostic gospels as well as some eastern texts are designed not to reveal but to conceal. Indeed the very term “Gnostic” references its promise to slowly, carefully, make you one who is “in the know.” These religions thrive by promising to unpack the secret knowledge hidden in their sacred texts, knowledge ordinary people, the uninitiated, could not understand.
The Bible, on the other hand, contains a broad range of literary forms that are to be read in accordance with their form. Many, both inside and outside the church, complain that Bible believing Christians are guilty of reading the Bible “literally.” Sound biblical interpretation, like any interpretation is “literal” interpretation. This doesn’t mean that we ignore literary forms, but that we read in light of them. To read the Bible rightly, like any other book, we read poetry according to the rules of poetry. We read history according to the rules of history. We read similes and metaphors as similes and metaphors. What we do not do, however, is read history as poetry, and therefore deny its accuracy, nor read poetry as history, thereby accusing it of being off. One is not reading the Bible literally if, when Jesus said, “I am the door” (John 10:9) they wondered how many hinges Jesus had, or whether He came with curtains.
Too many want to argue that the Bible is a delightful collection of ancient men’s thoughts of matters of great import. The great lay apologist CS Lewis would object on two counts. First, borrowing from His apologetic on Jesus, based on the Bible’s own claims about itself, the last thing we can conclude is that it is a helpful, if flawed book. It is either lies, lunacy or the Lord’s abiding Word. For no erroneous book, no merely man created book can claim to be God-breathed, can claim to equip us for every good work. A patronizing perspective on the Word of God is as sensible as a patronizing perspective on God Himself. You can hate the Word for its alleged errors. You can disdain it for its purported outdated perspective. Or you can submit to it.
Finally, we would do well to confess that the Bible in one sense is ordinary in its history. That is, the Bible is not alone in affirming a worldwide flood. It is not alone in telling a story about a Son of God that comes to earth, dies, and then rises again. Liberal theologians and unbelieving historians delight to point out the similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh of other ancient near eastern texts and the Bible. Some Christians, perhaps threatened and skittish, labor to affirm the differences between those stories and the story. These brothers seem to suggest if we can put enough distance between what the Bible says and what these other ancient holy books say we can hold on to the claim of the Bible as the one true holy book.
Lewis, in his marvelous essay “Myth Became Fact,” suggests that we have nothing to fear from these overlapping stories, not because we would expect multiple garbled versions of one story once it goes through history’s “telephone game.” Rather Lewis argues that because the whole of creation is the manifestation of the grace and glory of God, we should expect to see these themes cropping up anywhere we find those who bear His image. The dying and rising God is not just some scheme our heavenly Father came up with to rescue us, but is the very reason for the universe. These “myths” are the meta-narratives, the over-arching story that explains who we are, for all of humanity.
The difference, however, with our story brings us back to its ordinariness. The Incarnation is a myth, not in the sense of a lie, but in the sense of a transcendent, identity shaping story, that became fact. Our story became also reality. It happened in space and time. Thus Luke explains to his original intended audience, Theopholis, “There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judea (Luke 1:5) and later, “And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This census first took place while Quirinuis was governing Syria (2:1-2). It is for this reason that our most ancient creed, a brief summary of the most salient affirmations of our faith says of Jesus that He “suffered under Pontius Pilate.”
The Bible, unlike all its rivals old and new, is an astonishing book that clearly and straightforwardly claims to be the Word of God, that defends that astonishing claim, that reveals the very character of God, that shows how we might have peace with God, all through telling us, in a rather ordinary manner, the extraordinary events that actually happened in space and in time. As the beloved disciple reminds us, “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:31).
The Bible is an extraordinary book, and it is an ordinary book. It is not, of course, the only book to cross history’s stage to come with a claim to being the very Word of God. In some instances it is the extraordinary nature of the Bible that sets it apart from other claimants, in other instances it is its ordinariness.
Consider first two rather distinct books that claim to be the Word of God- the Koran, the holy book of Islam and the Book of Mormon, the holy book of the Latter-Day Saints. In both instances these faiths seek to affirm some level of respect for either the Old Testament (Islam) or both the Old and New Testaments (Latter Day Saints). In both instances the accounts of these books tell us that God sent a messenger to one man, that no one else was able to see. Mohammed and Joseph Smith wrote, or translated their messages essentially on their own, before revealing them to the known world. Both books recorded events outside the stream of history and distant from the time of the events covered. Both books contain no predictions future to the book’s writing and past to us who are its readers.
The Bible, on the other hand, was written by dozens of different authors over the space of thousands of years, living and ministering in different countries, speaking different languages. The Bible was given to men who lived among those to whom they spoke. Better still, the Bible was written by men who not only performed miracles to attest to their truthfulness, but performed miracles which could be tested by those who first received God’s Word. Remember that even Nicodemus rightly understood this, “This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him” (John 3:2).
Jesus Himself not only does not correct Nicodemus, but in another circumstance makes essentially the same argument. In Mark 2, in Capernaum, a paralytic is lowered through the roof in order to get to Jesus. Seeing such faith Jesus said, “Son, your sins are forgiven you” (v.5). Because we know they are the bad guys we are put out by the skepticism of the scribes. These reasoned in their hearts that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy. Only God, after all, has the authority to forgive sins. They, however, reasoned rightly. Jesus next, however, demonstrates why He has the authority to forgive sins, but doing that which only God, or a messenger sent by God, could do- But immediately, when Jesus perceived in His spirit that they reasoned thus within themselves, He said to them, “Why do you reason about these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Arise, take up your bed and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins”—He said to the paralytic, “I say to you, arise, take up your bed, and go to your house” (8-11). Jesus demonstrates His authority, He authenticates His message, by healing this man of his paralysis.
In addition, the Bible includes in it multiple prophecies that were fulfilled after they were given, but before today. That the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem was promised five hundred years before it happened (Micah 5:1-2). The rise and fall of the Medo-Persian empire, the coming of the Greek empire, and the coming of the Roman empire were all foretold by the prophet Daniel during the height of the Babylonian empire. Some scholars have argued that the Bible contains over three hundred prophecies that have already been fulfilled.
The Bible contains miraculous predictions of future events which have since come to pass. The Bible contains miracles, verifiable miracles in their day, that authenticate the authority of the writers of the Bible to reveal the truth of God. One miracle, however, stands above all the rest. As He predicted, three days after His brutal death by crucifixion, Jesus Christ walked out of His tomb alive. The Bible isn’t a book telling the story of how men might go and find God, but is the true story of how God came to be reconciled with men, through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of His Son.
These miracles, just like the books of the Bible which recount them, are not the work of men, but rather the Holy Spirit. The Bible alone is that book by which God the Holy Spirit determined to reveal the fullness of the godhead working in and through mere men. Not merely “a good book” but the Word of God.
Tonight we continue our look at the monumental, towering book of Romans. All are welcome to our home at 7 est, or you may join us for dinner at 6:15. We will also stream the study at Facebook, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
