Tonight we continue our study exploring God’s book of Hosea. As always, all are welcome in our home for dinner at 6:15 eastern, and the study begins at 7:00. In addition, we will livestream on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul, and eventually post said livestream right in this cyber space. One way or the other, we hope you’ll join us, as we will feed upon the Word of God.
Symbols can be tricky things. They are often a great help to us, communicating difficult to express truths in difficult to forget ways. They can, however, get a touch uppity from time to time. Sometimes the symbol loses all sense of proportion and thinks itself more important than the thing symbolized. Remember that the children of Israel thought themselves safe, chanting “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord.” The temple should have been a symbolic reminder of God’s presence with His people. But once the people looked to the temple, rather than God Himself, trouble was coming and quick.
The Bible doesn’t tell us who ought to serve communion. Churches have elders serve to connect symbolically their call to guard the table, with the service of the table. The elders are called to determine if the claim to faith made by those under their care is legitimate. If a man is living in gross and unrepentant sin, and claims to be a Christian, it is the job of the elders to say to that man, and to the church, “This man, until he repents, does not look to us to be a Christian. Therefore he is not welcome at the Lord’s Table.”
It is good and appropriate then, to connect the office of the elder with the Table of our Lord. If elders are serving the sacrament, then of course women should not serve the sacrament, not because of the sacrament, but because women are not to be elders. That is, if you are in a church with women elders, the trouble isn’t that a woman is handing you the body and the blood. The problem is that a woman is ruling in the church, something not just symbolically wrong, but forbidden by the plain language of Scripture (I Timothy 2:12).
On the other hand, if a given church is unconcerned about connecting the call of elders to guard the flock with the call of elders to guard the table, it is not such a big issue. God never said, “Though shalt not receive the tray from a woman, unless she is the woman sitting beside you in the pew.” There are some wings of the evangelical church that are just flat uncomfortable with the symbols God Himself gave us. What is so interesting to watch is how man’s symbols always sneak in to fill the void.
Some churches celebrate the sacrament only once a year. Every week, however, they have an altar call. Every week they call on the lost to repent, and the found to repent and recommit. Which is just what is happening when we come forward to the table. The Lord’s Table the Lord commanded. The altar call He did not. These same kinds of churches are often uncomfortable with the clear lines of authority God has established with deacons and elders. So instead they begin worrying about whether so and so’s walk is good enough for him or her to be on the praise team. Or serve as a Sunday School teacher, as if these are offices in the church.
“Serving communion” is neither an office, nor a calling in the church, according to God’s Word. Would the symbolism be more fitting for a man to serve? Perhaps. Would it be more fitting for an elder to serve? Almost certainly. Is it fitting to judge one another on our differing guesses about what is fitting and what is not? Of course not. Instead let us encourage one another to submit to all that God commands. In short, in essentials unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.
This is the thirty-first installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday February 9 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.
Our strategies are often rather far from God’s strategies. Indeed, the simple fact that we sit down to strategize may be a sure sign that we are far from God’s chosen path. We are plotters and planners, who believe that the only way to get to place “z” is to work our way first from “a” through “y.” We want a road map and then a machine to take us where we think we are going. We put one foot in front of the other, and too often find ourselves trodden underfoot.
We have embraced the gradualism of both the Enlightenment and of the Marxists. We think history moves forward with all the speed and deliberation of an amoeba growing into a fish. We think the way to build the kingdom of God is like the Colorado River etching away for age after age until the canyon has become grand. That we make known His reign through the long march through the institutions. But the kingdom of God not only is taken by violence, but can grow in violent paroxysms of His providence. It’s happened before, and it will happen again.
B. K. Kuiper, in his fine work The Church in History, tells us, “Jerome was sitting in his cave in Bethlehem, writing his Commentary on the Prophecies of Ezekiel, when he heard the news [of the fall of Rome to the Goths in 410]. He was overwhelmed with anguish and consternation. He believed that the antichrist was at hand. He said: ‘The world is rushing to ruin. The glorious city, the capital of the Roman Empire, has been swallowed up in one conflagration. Churches once hallowed have sunk into ashes.’ ”
The Goths weren’t the last to tread upon the city of Rome, nor was Rome the lone city to feel the wrath of the barbarians. It was less than one hundred years after Constantine “converted” the Roman Empire, and the glory that was Rome became nothing but rubble. The Goths were joined by Vandals, Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Huns. Barbarian horde after barbarian horde swept over Europe, and began the “Dark Ages.”
Culturally speaking, we had moved into houses we did not build. We had drunk from wells we did not dig. We feasted on vineyards we did not plant. Constantine had led us to a short-cut to the city of God, and God Himself destroyed it all. For what possible reason? For His glory, and for the good of His people.
God brought the barbarians to the Christians for one great purpose, that they, the barbarians, might hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What we consider calamity was, from a more biblical perspective, the Gentiles coming into the kingdom. What we consider defeat and destruction God meant as bringing His elect in from the four corners of the earth. For while the barbarians conquered the western world, Jesus conquered the barbarians. The good news of the kingdom of Jesus spread through sundry barbarian camps with all the speed of barbarians sacking a city.
Like Augustine and Jerome before us, we are watching yet another twilight of Western civilization. We live amidst a new barbarism. In Europe today once great cathedrals stand nearly empty each Lord’s Day for want of a congregation. Sodomites parade their perversion down our city streets. Entire neighborhoods are controlled by modern barbarians, thugs selling pharmaceutical bread and circuses.
God’s name cannot be mentioned in the lower halls of learning. Our children grow up learning that they are the accidental by-product of time and chance. A bankrupt government sponsors “art” comprised of a crucifix in a jar of urine and dung besmirching the mother of Jesus. And in the midst of our neat and tidy cities, on this day twenty-five hundred mothers will murder their babies, all out in the open.
Does this mean then that we have a long row to hoe? Must we first join forces with the enemies of Christ who share with us a disgust of our cultural decline? Do we work first to build a society of decency? Is it our project to gain control of the institutions of learning or to grasp the engine of political power so that we can begin to turn, inch by inch, this listing ship? Should we boycott and protest our way to a G-rated culture to set the stage for some distant Gospel campaign?
No, the barbarians have been let inside the gate so that we can now tell them about Jesus. The barbarians have toppled and conquered our world so that we might proclaim the Gospel of the kingdom of Christ. The barbarians have come to teach us to toss our petty stratagems and to give up our hope in princes, so that we “the civilized” might rest upon and serve alone our great king.
When trouble comes, it is not difficult to hear the Master’s voice. He is telling us what He is always telling us, “Repent, and believe the Gospel.” Perhaps were we to obey Him, then we might next not only repent and believe, but proclaim the Gospel. And our enemies, the children of darkness, might be brought into His glorious light. Then the violent just might take heaven by storm. This, after all, is what happened with us. We were strangers, foreigners, barbarians, but now we are the people of God, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, as long as we know where our citizenship is.
You know the drill. Small child asks for eggs for breakfast, scrambled, with cheese. You happily prepare just that for the child. Said child sits for a bit looking at the eggs, then gets down from the table. You ask the child to sit down and eat, and the child sits down, not at the table, but on the floor. The child begins to whine, refuses to get up. “I don’t want to sit there. I don’t like scrambled eggs with cheese.”
You are baffled. You not only didn’t start this battle of the wills, you want no part in it. You just wanted to make a good breakfast. But the child is intent on doing the wrong thing, not because it’s fun, not because it tastes good, but because it’s wrong. We’re not talking about a hardened teenager but a little child. Where in the world does this kind of nonsense come from? From us.
One of the problems with our typical misunderstanding of God’s law, that He is testing our loyalty to Him, that He wants to rob us of pleasure, is that it casts a blasphemous shadow on His character. He’s not a stingy narcissist. He is a loving Father. His law is good, good for us, the very pathway to joy. This backward view of the law, however, also misses the pure folly of our own sinful inclinations.
We sin not merely because we lack the self-control to say “no” to whatever pleasure is put before us, but because we’d rather do the wrong thing. Like the child slouched on the floor refusing to eat breakfast, we are empty, and not having any fun. We stubbornly cling to our disobedience as if it were a table laden with delicious delicacies. We trade beauty for ashes.
This reality is captured most poignantly by Augustine in his Confessions. There he waxes eloquent about a time he and his peers raided a man’s pear orchard, loading up on the stolen fruit. The punchline comes when Augustine confesses that he didn’t even like pears.
The good news is that our Father is bigger than our folly. Yes, we are called to acknowledge our sin. We are called to sorrow over our sin. But just as much as He delights to give us His wise law, He delights to give us His good grace for our rebellion against it, when we repent. The good news is not only that He forgives us when we repent, but that He blesses us with the very repentance we need. He makes it all better.
Our childish rebellion may be one reason why we can only enter into the kingdom as children (Matt. 18:3). We have to acknowledge our own inability to fix ourselves, our absolute dependence on Him. We have to hold up our little child arms, asking Him to take us up into His arms. And so He delights to do.
May the Spirit indwelling us lead us to put aside our senseless rebellion. May He teach us to trust our heavenly Father. And may the Holy Spirit continue to show us more each day how to rest in our elder brother.
Most all of us, at one time or another, have found ourselves embarrassed by God. He Who has all perfections perfectly doesn’t always fit into our scheme of things. He doesn’t always do things the way we who are altogether imperfect think they should be done. We weep with Aaron as God destroys his two sons for merely toying with strange fire. Many of us even shed a tear for the soldiers of Pharaoh as we watch the Red Sea crash down upon them. We nurse a secret grudge as we watch God destroy Uzzah, for touching the Ark of the Covenant.
Nothing, however, assaults our sensibilities more than the execution of God’s holy war against the people of Canaan. We tell our children about Joshua’s march around Jericho. We don’t tell them that every person in the city, men, women, and children, with the exception of Rahab’s family, was put to death. That is the pattern for the taking of the Promised Land, to kill every person there. Joshua made Sherman’s march to the sea look like a walk on the beach.
Our temptation is to focus our attention on the New Testament. There we see no mass executions. There we see Him who would not harm a bruised reed. We find a kinder, gentler vision of the Almighty in the tender grace of Jesus. We find not a list of rules a mile long covering how we are to wash, what we may and may not eat, nor a detailed exposition of just how the stoning of the unfaithful is supposed to look. Instead we find Jesus preaching to the multitudes, casting aside the “You have heard it saids…” and giving in its place an ethic of love.
We see His call that we be not mighty warriors like Joshua or Samson, but those who are poor in spirit. We are to be merciful, peacemakers. We are to be pure in heart. We summarize the message of Joshua as this, that we are to be warmongers, mean spirited and bloodthirsty. Now Jesus tells us we not only may, but must be nice.
If we succeed, He tells us that we shall have the kingdom of heaven. If we stop beating our chests like crazed warriors, and instead mourn, we will be comforted. If we hunger and thirst after righteousness, we will have our desires met. We will be satisfied. If we will stop destroying the wicked, and would instead show them mercy, then we will receive mercy. If we would keep a pure heart, then we will see God. If we become peacemakers we will be called the Sons of God. And if our unconditional love is rejected by men, and we are instead persecuted, again, we inherit the kingdom of heaven.
I skipped one. Jesus also calls us to be meek, hardly the picture we have of Joshua as he leads his troops into battle. But if we are meek, what do we receive? The meek shall inherit the earth. Here is perhaps the biggest change, and the greatest similarity. The similarity is that like the children of Israel, we too have a promise of a promised land. The difference is that our promise is not limited to a small strip of land in the Middle East. We’re going to inherit that entire world. All of it has been promised to us.
Of course this too has changed, that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. The only sword we carry into battle is the sword of the Word, the gospel of the kingdom. But this too is the more shocking. We are not merely cutting down the bodies of pagans; we are, in the Holy Spirit, ripping their hearts of stone out of their chests, and replacing them with hearts of flesh. We are not merely removing the pagans; we are remaking them, just as we have been remade.
What hasn’t changed is that we are at war. It is a constant. The war did not begin with the conquest of Canaan. Nor did it end in 1967. It began in Genesis 3, when God promised that He would put enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. That was the declaration of war, and the institution of God’s regenerative draft- He put the enmity there, moving the woman, and her seed from the forces of darkness to the forces of light, enlisting them with His effectual call. And the war will continue until our Captain, the true Joshua, has put all things under His feet.
That is the greatest change. We are no longer fighting in ourselves. If we were, there would be nothing but defeat. But in Christ we are poor in spirit. In Christ we are rich in the Spirit, who indwells us. In Christ we do mourn. In Christ we rejoice, for He has overcome the world. In Christ we are meek, and in His meekness we inherit His reward, the entire world. In Christ we are bold and strong, for He is with us wherever we go. And when that great and final day comes, in Christ we will be pure in heart, and so we shall see God.
Today He sees us. We live our lives in this context of warfare, coram Deo, before the face of God. He is watching, guiding, directing us. We are not looking for a place at the world’s table, for recognition of our value in the grand scheme of things. We are not looking to merely keep the world from crashing down around us. We are fighting for our God-given right to the world. We are called to total world conquest, beneath His gaze, under His authority, and unto His glory. And we, in Him, shall have it, for the King has come, and He will come again.
Tonight we continue our study exploring God’s book of Hosea. As always, all are welcome in our home for dinner at 6:15, and the study begins at 7:00 eastern. In addition, we will livestream on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul, and eventually post said livestream right in this cyber space. One way or the other, we hope you’ll join us, as we will feed upon the Word of God.
I once worked in an office that was quite caught up in a then well-known book. The E-Myth was a business book, written by Michael Gerber. His thesis was that successful businesses are those that learn to franchise themselves, after turning themselves into turnkey operations. The receptionist, like most people at the office, was reading the book, and she asked my opinion. I opined, “I suspect, as with most business books, that whatever good one may find therein is common sense. Whatever one may find that is not common sense is likely not very good.”
The same holds true for the church, and her sundry strategies pouring forth from the program factory. Consider the altar call. Precious few of us would want to defend the clichéd, “the busses will wait while we play fifteen more verses of Just as I Am.”
A case, however, might be made for calling on the congregation to repent and believe. For giving opportunity for people to come into the kingdom publicly, and for others to recommit their lives. Or for coming forward for prayer. When you look at it this way, suddenly it looks both like Sovereign Grace Fellowship where I serve, and like the ancient church. We have an “altar call” every week, and everyone comes forward. We call it celebrating the Lord’s Supper.
I had a similar experience in a church I was a part of decades ago. I was heading for the sanctuary, only to have an earnest young man, caught up in the grip of some evangelical program, ask me an odd question. “Do you,” he asked, “have an accountability group?” I smiled and said, “Well, I have friends, if that’s what you mean.” There is no idea so simple and straightforward that we evangelicals can’t build a program out of it.
Mega-churches, of course, didn’t invent friendships. They didn’t invent the plain biblical notion that we are to encourage one another on to good works. They didn’t invent the idea that we are to confess our sins one to another. They didn’t invent the idea that we are called to love our neighbors. From my perspective these things come together not in this or that program, but in local churches that are small enough for genuine relationships.
In like manner, we have no need for “small group ministries.” What we need is a joyful commitment to the practice of hospitality. We should invite folks into our homes, and visit the homes of others. There should be no rules for this, no “dinner coordinator” that makes each family play musical chairs with each other family, all while carrying around a casserole if your last name begins with A through G, and a dessert if R through Z. Instead we ought to share table fellowship freely and happily.
I suspect that when mega-churches build these programs what they are trying to do is undo their own nature. To in some way stop being a mega-church. I am sympathetic to that sentiment. My suggestion, however, would be not to build more programs, but to build fewer mega-churches. When we simply obey what God has revealed to us, we have no need to make up programs along the way. And we find blessing.
This is the thirtieth installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday February 1 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.
In the last seventy-five years the United States waged war in Korea, Viet Nam, Libya, Panama, Grenada, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again. These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. None of these involved a congressional declaration of war. In each, military weapons have been fired against other nations by our military. We do not have black-out curtains and rationing as they did in the last World War. Nor an active civil defense, young ladies wrapping bandages for the war effort. It seems like a time of peace, but it is not.
Each of these wars, however, are fought in the context of the one, great war. No, it’s not the cold war between capitalism and communism. No, it isn’t militant Islam against American consumerism. The great war transcends these wars and finds its beginning in the garden. The serpent launched his surprise attack when he asked Eve: “Has God indeed said?” And there he secured a victory. Both Adam and Eve, and all who would be born of them, determined to embrace the serpent’s view of reality, rather than to embrace the truth.
Praise to our Father He did not take this lying down. His solemn declaration of war followed, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). This war, declared by God, begins in the garden and ends only when the great garden city, the New Jerusalem, descends from on high. This great war is the context of each of our lives, and all our lives together. We all live in times of war.
Paul was acutely aware of this hard truth. He told us, “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete” (2 Cor. 10:4–6). The devil wins too many skirmishes here. We are wont to believe since our weapons are not carnal, that the war itself isn’t real. We’re at war with principalities and powers, something Paul never forgot.
Recognizing this overarching war, however, won’t equip us to fight. We need to recognize that the war is fought on at least two fronts. The first is within ourselves. We war against our own flesh. Paul calls us to put to death that which is earthly in us, “For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:22–25a).
The other front is much like the first. In the first, we have a battle within the seed of the woman. In the second, we have a battle within the seed of the serpent. Those outside the kingdom, their war is between the remnants of the image of God yet in them and their fallen nature. They, Paul tells us in Romans 1, worship the creature rather than the Creator. That they worship at all is because of their being fashioned in the image of God. Man as man is made to worship. But because man in his fallen nature hates God, he determines to worship a false god, a creature.
In the here and now, these three battles will continue. When we are better salt and light, even those outside the kingdom better reflect their Maker’s image. When we lose our savor, however, we become more and more like walking zombies. We fight the big central battle best by fighting the internal battle well. That is, we will succeed in better having His kingdom come, His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, as we become more like we will be in heaven, as we put to death the old man, and put on Christ.
In eternity there will be no more war. Not only will the seed of the serpent be utterly vanquished, but they will be given over to their sin. Not only will the seed of the woman be victorious, but all those who are in Him will be made new. With the death of death will come the death of our old man. And we will live on forever in peace, under the eternal reign of the Prince of Peace. Paul longed for it, and so ought we.
