Tuesday, February 25, 2014

God Laughs: A Meditation on Psalm 2




The pairing of Psalm 2 with Transfiguration Sunday, seemed a good opportunity to meditate on the relative disparity between the glory of God, and the squalor of man.  Of course, most people don’t like to think of themselves as small and insignificant (I know I don’t,) but when we see ourselves in the light of Divine Glory, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion.

It has become an interesting mark of western culture, that our people and leaders, institutions and politicians, have largely discarded Christian traditions.  Whether it is the role and function of people in a family, or the roles and functions of people in society, what used to be based upon the inspiration of Scripture is largely lost.  Consider the traditional roles of fathers as providers and defenders of their families; mothers as nurturers and educators of their children; children as obedient participants in the duties and labors of the family; families as places of safety and respect in the broader culture; the broader culture as a place to protect the sanctity of families; communities as tapestries of mutually respected families; states and nations as tapestries of mutually respected communities; churches as voices of moral authority and virtue, justice and mercy; schools and universities as places to seek ultimate as well as practical truth, with the formation of virtuous and educated citizens their collective goal.  There was a day when this was normative in our land—never pristine and perfect, but normative.  How far we have fallen in our day.

Families have been laid waste by divorce, abuse, and abandonment; fathers have forgotten their duty to provide and protect, seeking rather their own satisfaction; mothers have forgotten to nurture and educate, seeking rather to pretend to be men, and wicked men, at that; children rebel and attack their parents, taught to seek their own fulfilment over that of their family; families are no longer places of safety and respect, but of discord and division; the broader culture no longer relies on the fabric of broken families, but on social and governmental institutions; neighborhoods are no longer safe places where families work together in mutual respect, but places of guarded and irreverent sectarianism; states and nations become reflections of these shattered families, and try to hold together what is falling apart; churches have sought money and members, sacrificing their moral authority and preaching of the Gospel, to preserve tax exemptions and social toleration; schools and universities no longer pursue either virtue or truth, and churn out citizens too uneducated to vote well, and too narcissistic to care.  And what have we received, as an inheritance of our “taking counsel together against the Lord and His Anointed, saying, ‘Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us’”?  What have we gained, from all our human progress?

Meteoric rises in divorce, and parental abandonment; childhood crime, sexual activity, abuse, drug use, depression, and suicide at historic levels; families in debt and despair, with home ownership lower, and government assistance higher; people voting themselves money from the public treasury, as the nation itself speeds toward fiscal insolvency; violent crime rising in neighborhoods across the nation; politicians beholden to their financial backers, rather than the people they are sworn to represent; lobbyists writing public policy on the power of their bribery; mothers and fathers murdering children; children murdering parents; virtue and self-sacrifice waning, as discipline and rigor is exchanged for medication and therapy.  We have become a nation of weak, self-absorbed, ignorant, and vicious people, as our families have likewise become weak, self-absorbed, ignorant, and vicious.  We have taught people that they are no more than animals, having lives without purpose and driven by chemical urge, and so our families, communities, and nation have become a reflection of meaningless animals, driven by chemical urges.

This is the sound of God laughing at us.  The confusion, corruption, division, and destruction of our times, which we have brought upon ourselves by abandoning God, is the sound of the heavens mocking us to scorn.  We have rejected God, and He has given us what we asked for.  We have disregarded the blessing and peace of heaven, and He has allowed us to build a hell of our own making.  We are reaping the fruit of the seeds we have sown, and the poisonous fruit sits rotten in our bellies.

And though we deserve all the scorn and ridicule we have earned, our suffering is both a sign of justice, and of mercy.  Our suffering is a sign of the God we have abandoned, and His Word which we have replaced with our own.  But in our suffering and despair, we find the truth which cuts us to our core:  we are the creature, and God is the Creator.  His glory outshines us in every conceivable way, and in His light, all that we are and all that we do, is small.  We are not God, though we would like to be—and thanks be to God that we are not, for imagine the hell we could create, if He took His providential grace and mercy from us completely?

But our God does not enjoy our destruction, nor does He wish to lose a single one of us.  Rather, in His great love and mercy, He sends His Son to die for the wickedness of this world, that all who would cling to Him in faith, would receive His grace, life and mercy.  He comes to us as both Judge and Savior:  to the one who would despise Him, His rod of iron will smash him to pieces, but to the one who repents and believes, His grace and compassion forgives and heals all.  His Word goes out to every corner under heaven, calling all to hear and believe.  And with the Psalmist we may hear His Spirit call:

Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. 
Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. 
Kiss the Son, lest He be angry,
and ye perish in the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little.
 Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him.
Amen.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Teach me, O Lord: A Meditation on Psalm 119:33-40



 
There is an old maxim sometimes attributed to St. Augustine and St. Anselm, that goes something like this, “I do not understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand.”  It highlights a concept found throughout Holy Scripture, including the Psalmody for this week.  The selection is short, and reads like this from the KJV (emphasis added):

Teach me, O LORD, the way of thy statutes; and I shall keep it unto the end.
Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall observe it with [my] whole heart.
Make me to go in the path of thy commandments; for therein do I delight.
Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, and not to covetousness.
Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken thou me in thy way.
Stablish thy word unto thy servant, who is devoted to thy fear.
Turn away my reproach which I fear: for thy judgments are good.
Behold, I have longed after thy precepts: quicken me in thy righteousness.

What’s repeated over and over again in this Psalm, is the acknowledgment that all we have, from our intellect to our whole lives, begin with the initiative of God.  We affirm with the Psalmist that we are the ones in need of teaching, of understanding, of being sent, and being turned away.  All our thoughts and deeds, without God’s initiative, are wasted efforts and vanity.  Only when He teaches and inclines us toward His will, do we find the heights and depths of beauty, righteousness, purity, and life.  Here we are reminded, that it is not we who teach or motivate God, but He who teaches and motivates us.

This is a remarkably important point for modern people to wrestle with.  In our time as children of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, many are abused of the idea that they are their own masters, and that they are the ones who hold the keys of knowledge, wisdom, and power.  Too many politicians and philosophers, teachers and professors, pastors and laity, delude themselves into thinking that they are the measure of all things.  We are so inclined to pride and hubris, that we measure and judge the world according to our own standards, and become angry with our neighbor when they do not help us accomplish our ends.  We dream up schemes and theories, and then teach them as immutable truth.  We prop up our ignorance for all to see, casting it about on college campuses, radio and television, social media, blogs, and endless outlets.  And when we are shown for the fools we are, we lash out at those who identify our flaws, and demand to be respected and tolerated, no matter how stupid and destructive we may be.  We are quick to make ourselves into gods, and when the universe laughs us to scorn, we shake our tiny fists at the cosmos, demanding that it bow to us.  We call our time an age of reason and science, but it is a time of disbelief, vice, self absorption, and endless prating.  We say much, and mean little; we plan much, and accomplish next to nothing.  In our vanity we have brought forth vanity, making the world reflect our idiocy through violence, waste, abuse, and destruction.  We prefer to understand so that we may believe, and having started our human enterprise from inside our own darkness and corruption, find ourselves so depraved that we are unable to either believe or understand.  Our darkness nears totality, and the best our society can recommend for the despair and desperation of children and adults alike, is more mind altering drugs and vapid social distractions.  Vanity begets vanity, and we are steeped in it.

God calls us to a different path.  Rather than starting from our own darkness and seeking light, He calls us to begin in His Light which banishes our darkness.  He sends His Word to teach us what we were incapable of knowing or finding, so that we might understand not only who God is, but who we are, and His whole creation.  He teaches us that we are fallen, and in need of salvation that comes to us from outside our corrupted selves.  He shows us His ways of beauty, purity, holiness, righteousness, love, mercy, and compassion, which penetrate our hatred, malice, lust, and idolatry.  He inclines our ears to hear Him, rather than the cacophony of wickedness we collectively spew into the air.  He turns us away from evil, that we may be guided to the good.  He pulls us away from our own condemnation, that we may live in Him.

As the season of Epiphany, or the season of light and illumination, moves ever closer to Lent, it behooves us to remember where light and life come from.  There is only one Light of the World, which no darkness could overcome.  There is only one source of purity and truth, whose Word become flesh and dwelt among us, and whose glory we behold as the only Son of the Father.  May the Light of Christ illumine our darkness, teach us His ways, give us His faith, draw us to repentance, and keep us from condemnation.  And with the host of saints and martyrs who have come before us, and the saints and martyrs yet to come, may we believe the Eternal Word of God, that we may understand what a great salvation we have in our Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Today I set before you life and death: Meditations on Deuteronomy 30



Of the many theological errors prevalent in the Church over the centuries, two come to mind in regard to this passage of Scripture.  The first is the error of Pelagius, who thought that we could reach out to God on our own terms, and at least make a beginning of meriting what God gives to us as grace.  This is condemned by St. Paul as “works-righteousness,” and as the heresy of Pelagianism in the early Church—something St. Augustine worked hard to combat in his day, and Lutheran Reformers in their day.  The other error is a kind of fatalism or despair which seeks to shift human fault to God, while either excusing or condemning ourselves as too weak to please God.  This emerges as Antinomianism (the Law doesn’t matter, so I can do whatever I want, which is an idea condemned by St. Paul emphatically in his letter to the Romans,) and a kind of hyper-legalism that in the end attributes all our evil actions to God omnipotence (since God either could have preempted our evil, or is too powerful to resist if made us for evil—an unfortunate consequence of the Calvinistic doctrine of double predestination, also condemned in Holy Scripture.)  These, and their various shades of errors, either seek to add honor and glory to man (earning something from God, and taking from His glory,) or evading man’s responsibility for his life and actions (shifting man’s fault to God.)

Against these errors, Scripture presents a very clear and simple orthodoxy.  God creates only good.  It is man who corrupts the world and himself through the Fall.  Fallen man continues to seek after the corrupted desires of his heart.  God alone remains holy and perfect, while man flails about in his corruption and wickedness.  If the holy and immortal God had not reached out to save wicked and fallen men, there would be no salvation of man at all.  To this end, God sends the Word of His Law, to show man how far he has fallen from the holiness he was created to be, and his desperate need of salvation in the face of certain death and condemnation.  To the repentant and faithful sinner, God sends His Word of Gospel, His own Son, Jesus Christ, who suffers for the sins of the whole world, to be the Vicarious Atonement and grace that saves from death and hell.  All those who find themselves at peace with God, absolved of their sins, find themselves reconciled by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, simultaneously sinner and saint.  The Christian awaits, in faith, hope, and love, the final victory over death, which is the resurrection of the dead at Christ’s Second Coming.  In all of this, the Christian finds nothing to brag about, save Christ alone.  They own the guilt for all their sins, and cling to the grace of God which pays for them in Christ alone.

In such a state, the Christian recognizes that even their decision, their choice, to cling to Christ and His grace, is itself a gift from God.  This principle is shown not only in the New Testament, but the Old, as well.  In Deuteronomy 30, we have these famous words of Moses, very near the end of his 120 year life, as a servant of God and of His people:

See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil, in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His statutes, and His judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you go to possess.  But if your heart turns away so that you do not hear, and are drawn away, and worship other gods and serve them, I announce to you today that you shall surely perish; you shall not prolong your days in the land which you cross over the Jordan to go in and possess.

I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live

For us, as for the ancient Israelites, there is an inescapable reality.  For all our philosophy and politics, our games and our theology, two paths always lay before us:  Life and Death.  We can play mental gymnastics and try to convince ourselves that we are strong or clever enough to live forever on our own, but the icy grip of the grave shatters that delusion for everyone.  We can try to shift blame to God for our own inadequacy and evil, but in the end, it is still we who go down into the grave, and it is our breath that is stripped away from us as we die.  God is not mocked, and we shall reap what we have sown.  Our first parents, all the way down to us, have sown wickedness and evil, and each of us shall taste death.

But God does not leave us, to suffer our just fate alone.  Instead, wicked and condemned though we be, He sends His Son into our flesh, to bear our sin, and to be our Savior.  Jesus descends into our wickedness and misery, and with His perfect and immortal Life, suffers death and condemnation for us, that His Life might overcome death for all who will be found in Him.  Jesus becomes the Way, the Truth, and the Life promised to Adam and Eve at the Fall, and the One in whom all are saved from the way of death.  Even as He dies for the sins of all mankind, of all time and place, once and for all at Calvary, those who looked forward to Him and those who look back, are all saved by grace through faith in Him.  His is the great Work that saves, and His timeless Life is the light that penetrates every moment and corner of history.

And so, to the end of time, when the Lord of Glory returns to culminate history, these same two paths remain before every man, woman, and child.  There is the way of death which we know so well, and upon which our feet are so pleased to tread.  And there is the way of Jesus, which is Life forevermore—a life that begins in this world through imitation of His sacrificial Cross, and that erupts in imitation of His Easter Resurrection glory.  By Jesus’ Word, His servants continue to point the way to Life, to clear the brush and clutter that our world so often uses to confuse the junction of the paths.  From the earliest days of the Creation, to the earliest days of the Church, and down to our very day, when pastors and theologians have done their best, they have cleared away the humanly devised junk that clouds, obfuscates, or points away from Christ, so that all might hear precisely what God has said to the people.

Behold, I show you two ways this day; a path of Life, and a path of Death.  The way of Death you already know.  It is strewn with sour and bitter fruit of selfishness and wickedness, whose poison leads inexorably to death and hell.  But the path of Life is laid before you, as well.  This path is ever and always lighted by the selfless love and mercy of Jesus, who has given His life as a ransom for all who will believe in Him.  He calls to you, to walk with Him on the path of Life, and in Him, to live forgiven and free forever.  Turn from the path of death, and by the power of the Spirit of the Living God working through His Word, rise up to a new life in Jesus.

God created you for life.  Jesus came to give you His Life, for the life you lost.  The Spirit calls you through His Word to live forever by grace through faith in Jesus.  Choose Life.  Amen.

Monday, February 3, 2014

The link between Repentance and Faith: Meditations on Isaiah 58




The prophet Isaiah lives and writes at a peculiar time in the history of ancient Israel.  For all the various calamities that have divided the once united Kingdom under Saul, David, and Solomon, and the scourge of the Assyrians who carried away the 10 northern tribes, the southern kingdom was relatively at peace.  There had been a conversion back to God, which saved the southern kingdom from the same fate of the north, but that conversion did not last well in the following generations.  By the time Isaiah is given the Word of the Lord, the people have fallen back into idolatry, materialism, pride, and disdain for their neighbors in need.  As the people’s hearts turned away from God, their lack of faith was manifested in their lives and their actions—what was true in their inmost thoughts, bore physical fruit in their bodies.

In chapter 58, Isaiah sounds a warning that is found in other Biblical prophets, as well.  Though the people called out to God, had grand ceremonies, feasts, festivals, and even fastings and self-depravations, God was not responding to them.  Because the people’s hearts were still far from God and His Word, their idolatry and mistreatment of their neighbors continued without repentance, even as they sought to have fellowship with Him.  The people desired to keep both their sin, and their relationship to God.  Isaiah spoke to them in shocking words, that God had no regard for their prayers, their petitions, their feasts and their fasts, without their repentance from their wickedness.  Isaiah’s warning, is that it is impossible to have fellowship with God, while willfully repudiating His Word.  Of course, the people of Israel did not heed Isaiah’s warning, and they were invaded and enslaved by the Babylonians, until just a remnant remained.  A generation of abasement in slavery to another nation was what ensued from Israel’s unbelief and unrepentance, until by faith and repentance their nation was restored.

It strikes me how right King Solomon was, when he observed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that there is nothing new under the sun—what has been before, shall be again.  Many of us watched the Super Bowl last Sunday evening, and near the beginning of that secular festival, was a remembrance (actually, a re-reading on the air) of the US Declaration of Independence, with some popular personalities giving commentary on the values which shape our nation.  It is impossible to read that historic document, and avoid the numerous references to God, His judgment, His work in creation, and Him as the source of the freedoms and rights every American claims.  While the Founding Fathers were not of unanimous mind in matters of religion, they did range from staunch to vaguely Christian—and even those less shaped by Christian Orthodoxy, still respected the Creator’s Natural Law which protected the rights and freedoms of mankind.  They appealed to God in faith and repentance for the preservation of their cause, and God preserved them and this nation as a beacon of justice in the world.

Through its history of a mere two centuries, it has fought wars at home and abroad, commending its causes and very existence to the God who blessed it at the beginning.  Often in times of great conflict, the people would turn from their selfishness, and return to God in faith and repentance, even as they called upon God to save them from Fascists, Communists, and brutal dictators.  And with much blood spilt, and much sacrifice made, this nation once begun by the grace of God in faith and repentance, continued to shine forth upon the earth.

In our day, threats rise, too.  We are assailed by terrorists at home and abroad; foreign governments devise plans and strategies to imperil our economy and military; corrupt politicians and corporate leaders plunder the weak and helpless, while making themselves fat on their ill gotten gains; our government is for sale of influence by the bribery and extortion of lobbyists; we forget justice and mercy, seeking profit and plunder; we destabilize governments and pour our taxes into the sands of other nations, while our own people suffer in hunger and homelessness.

And to these threats, we often lift up our communal voices in National Days of Prayer, or ecumenical, polytheistic services meant to ask God (or various gods) for help.  Yet we ask, even as we disregard His Word.  We ask God for His protection, as we lay waste to countless millions of babies, snuffing out their lives for our own convenience.  We ask God for His blessing, as we bless sexual sin of every debauched stripe and kind.  We pray God for His help, as we destroy the Christian institutions that feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and shelter the orphan.  We beg God’s favor on our military, as we use those in command to persecute Christians, from soldiers to chaplains, catering to the atheist lobbyists in high places who drive unceasingly for a “freedom from religion.”  We pray for God to protect us and our liberties, as we use our freedom to choose evil rather than good, corrupt families, oppress the poor, and destroy His Church.

To us, in our social insanity, the words of Isaiah should ring a loud and ominous warning.  While we are not ancient Israel, and we do not live under the Mosaic covenant, the eternal truth of the vanity of calling upon God without repentance, still applies to us today.  For without faith there can be no repentance, and without repentance, there can be no saving faith.  Faith turns from the selfish and demonic ways of death, to the Word of the Author of Life.  And while it is true that no one can come to faith and repentance without the Spirit of God working through His preached Word, God’s Word continues to bear witness all around us.  God speaks to us through His Eternal Law, showing us what is good, and what is evil.  And God speaks to us through His Eternal Gospel, that His Son Jesus Christ has died for the sins of the whole world, so that all who turn to Him in faith and repentance may live forever, forgiven and free from the tyranny of death.

It is high time that we hear the Word of the Lord again, and stop resisting the Holy Spirit who works for our conversion.  The God who set us forth upon the world stage, is the same God who calls to us through His Son Jesus Christ, to repent of our evil, and cling to Him in faith.  This same God, who poured out His grace upon us at the beginning, stands by His eternal promise to pour out grace upon all who will repent and believe the Gospel.

Let the Church of Christ rise again in this age, and bear that same witness of the prophets of yore.  Let the Law be preached in all its severity, that the hard harts of the unrepentant may be broken and contrite.  Let the Gospel be preached in all its beauty, that the broken hearted may be healed, and raised up unto life everlasting.  As it goes with the people, so it goes with the nation:  he who repents and believes the Gospel shall live, while those who neither believe nor repent shall go unto everlasting destruction.  Nations, communities, families, and individuals rise and fall, but the Word of the Lord endures forever.  May we hear Him once again, believe, repent, and live.  Amen.