0 At Least the Rastafarians say "I and I"

I won't forget my freshman year of college, learning a little about Rastafarian culture in my Intro to Sociology class - and one of the things we talked about while listening to Bob Marley and The Wailers was the use of "I and I" among Rastafarians to take the place of "we" in conversation. The primary importance of this usage is to emphasize the oneness of their community - that they share a great deal as fellow creatures under God. I'm not endorsing any element at all of their religious beliefs - but I am lamenting, as I recall this phrase, how little we even bother in the church to say "we".

I came upon this thought after listening this morning to one of the recent White Horse Inn broadcasts entitled "The Spirituality of Emerging Adults", in which the WHI guys interviewed the author of "Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults", Dr. Christian Smith of the University of Notre Dame. Part of what struck me in that broadcast was the fact (and this is nothing new at all, but somehow the impact upon me was heavy this morning) that in the American evangelical church, the individual has been raised to terrifying heights in terms of his ability to discern for himself what is true, good and just. No longer is the language "we confess" or "we believe" admissible in much of American churchianity. What "works for you" works for you, and what "works for me" works for me - and any differences or distinctions between those are a) not to be subject of judgment or critique, and b) completely arbitrary and irrelevant when it comes to our standing before God.

Whether this phenomenon of the individual's ultimacy as judge of truth has arisen because of the Enlightenment or because of the influence of the 1960's cultural shifts is not of much importance... what is important, though, is that we recognize that this fundamentally impacts the challenge that we face when discussing the Gospel. Unfortunately because this shift has taken place, many have kowtowed to it (unwittingly) by making personal testimony and "what God has done for me" central in their discussion of their faith with others. We have lost the impetus to keep returning to the historic fact and declarative nature of the good news, and turned "gospel-telling" into a personal "show and tell". Rather than stand for the historicity of the cross and of what God has done to redeem His people in history, we stand on a lot "safer" ground - our own personal lives. It's a lot easier and less risky to share with people what "God did for me" than to stake one's reputation on the unpopular belief that God, in showing His grace toward men, and His wrath toward sin, sent His Son to atone for the sins of His People, and to redeem them to Himself. When we put forth "our testimony", we are giving people things they cannot refute and won't even try to refute... we are talking about ourselves, rather than Another. We are saying things that ultimately carry no Authority, and demand no response.... contrary to what we do when we present simply the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

"We believe"... something we ought to be willing to say, yet something which grates against our natural tendency to want to stand alone and on our own merits. "We believe" says that there is something bigger than me - a truth and a community to which I am accountable. Today this is nearly anathematized - even in the church. Why do the Rastafarians get it, but garden-variety Christians seem so opposed to it?

0 A Scots Athlete Choosing to Serve God rather than Men Regardless of Consequences

There was a brief news story about this Scottish national Rugby player in December, but now there's a more complete article concerning his refusal to play rugby for his nation on the Lord's Day at the Guardian online, here: Story at The Guardian

I have the utmost respect for this man, whose stance on this issue causes him to stand out as a man of honor among international athletes. To see such determination to serve his Lord in an athlete of his stature is rare indeed, and a refreshing and God-glorifying thing. It is pleasing to see the Lord reveal Himself through a servant like Euan Murray.

0 The Prophets of Baal and Lukewarmness

In this morning's reading I came to 1 Kings 18, a familiar chapter, at least in the latter half. In the midst of the chapter, we find this text:

17 When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to him, "Is it you, you troubler of Israel?" 18 And he answered, "I have not troubled Israel, but you have, and your father's house, because you have abandoned the commandments of the LORD and followed the Baals. 19 Now therefore send and gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, and the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel's table." (1 Kings 18:17-19 ESV)

What follows, as you may recall, is the confrontation of Elijah and the prohphets of Baal, where Elijah brings heaps of derision upon the false god Baal to whom the prophets of Baal made pleas to their god to no avail. My focus in contemplating this chapter this morning was not on that episode, however, but on these verses. Ahab, one of the more plainly wicked kings of Israel, is brought to meet Elijah, whose arrival Ahab's house manager Obadiah (not to be confused with the prophet) had announced. "Troubler of Israel" is the moniker with which Ahab addresses Elijah - and Elijah rejects that label in no uncertain terms, turning the tables on the wicked king. How this reminds me of our own times today.

Who is regarded as the troublemaker? Who does the church (writ large) view as the ones who are most troublesome? Is it not the one who follows in Elijah's footsteps and plainly speaks and expounds the Word of the Lord, the full counsel of God? When denominations go downhill as many have who is it that, in the end, is made out to be the bad guy? Who is it that is called "pharisaical" and "persnickety"? Is it not the one who rejects the morphing of the church into the world and the appeasement of worldly opinions, the taking up of humanistic perspectives, and the adoption of practices borrowed from secular entertainment? "Oh, you troublemaker - can't you see we need to change with the times?" "Don't you realize that the Pharisees were just like you, insisting on a strict reading of Scripture?"

As Solomon wrote so frequently in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun.

Following this passage, we find in 1 Kings 18:20-21,

20 So Ahab sent to all the people of Israel and gathered the prophets together at Mount Carmel. 21 And Elijah came near to all the people and said, "How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him." And the people did not answer him a word. (1 Kings 18:20-21 ESV)

In thinking over this and reading the next few verses of 1 Kings 18, I am reminded of Christ's words to the luke-warm church of Laodicea in Revelation 3:15-18.

15 "'I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. 17 For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. (Revelation 3:15-18 ESV)

"If God be God, then zealously cling to and follow Him and heed His Word!" If you do not believe that, then eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you shall die - and stop pretending a commitment to the God of Scripture! DThe message from Elijah and from Christ is the same. Toss the world aside with its opinions, perspectives and practices, and follow the Lord Jesus Christ and seek to be conformed to His image. Cast off the shackles of expectation that the world places on you, and live simply in His grace, committed fully to His ways and eschewing the priorities the world demands that we uphold. The world looks often at Scripture as a source of bondage, and wholesale commitment to the Lord and His commands as imprisonment and suppression of self.

In Truth, it IS suppression of self. Self-denial is the destruction of the fleshly desires that we carry in us thanks to the first Adam. True liberation of self, unto a holy and Christlike walk, however, is far from bondage - it is freedom, and the only freedom we need or ought to desire or pursue. I'm quite content to be seen as a 'troubler of Israel' if commitment to that true freedom brings such comments.

13 Today's Egalitarianism vs. the Bride of Christ

I was thinking this morning, having seen a quotation from James Durham's Exposition of the Song of Solomon, about the picture of the church as the Bride of Christ. This word-picture that God has used in His Word is rich with application and can serve as a very helpful illustration of who Christ is for the church and how we relate to Him. Today, however, with egalitarianism running rampant, and exact equivalence postulated between men and women, much of the understanding of the brideship of the church with respect to her Husband is lost, or at least hard to extricate. Our culture is so far gone away from a good understanding of male-female relationships and marriage in particular that I suspect understanding the images God gives to us in this regard are obscured at best.

A couple of things struck me as I meditated upon this this morning on my walk to work. First, Christ is Head and Protector of His Bride. We are covenantally bound and have duties and responsibilities as well as blessings and benefits as the Bride of Christ. The relationship is sealed in covenant and eternally binding. As our covenant Head, Christ leads us -and we are to listen, to honor and to obey, and to love our Husband. Our Husband, at the same time, only commands what is good and right for us. There is NO inappropriateness, NO impropriety, NO command that Christ gives His Bride that does not benefit fully the Bride herself. As Head of His Bride, Christ leads perfectly - and it is Hers to obey Him in all things.

The modern view of marriage is nothing like this, for various reasons. Marriage has gone so far off its moorings that it's even hard to picture what the ideal marriage as taught in Scripture looks like... and I think we often import our wrong understanding of marriage into our understanding of Christ's role as Head and Husband of the church, much to our detriment.

The bride and husband in marriage, today we say, are perfectly equal partners, with neither leading and neither following. They marry and stay married as long as love lasts. Each is seen as independent, and the chiefest virtue often seems to be that each one feels individually satisfied and affirmed, and "their own person". If these skewed views of marriage get imported into the picture of Christ as Husband and the church as Bride, then how FAR away from a Biblical understanding of the relationship between Christ and church will ensue!

Second, and this is the idea that surprised me somewhat - but I think it's valid - let's think a little about how Middle Eastern marriages functioned. In such marriages, brides didn't propose to their potential husbands, or pursue them as often they do today. It wasn't even an equal pursuit. one of another. Rather 1) the marriage was likely to be arranged by the father of the bridegroom and 2) the initiation and proposal was made by the groom.

If we look at marriage with 21st century postmodern eyes, as thoroughly egalitarian affairs, in which each of the marriage partners pursues the other, and, if love seems to last during ups and downs of intimate relationship building, then marriage might ensue... we won't understand what picture God draws in His word. Christ calls us - we don't call Him. Christ the Bridegroom calls to His Bride and beseeches her to be His. This isn't today's view of salvation. Can the world rightly understand the initiator in salvation if the world has rejected this view of marriage? How far do egalitarian social principles go to foment egalitarian principles of salvation, and thus destroy the understanding of the relationship of the believer to Christ?

The Father arranges the marriage by election. The ultimate cause of the marriage is the Father's election, not the whim of the bride. With the old picture of marriage abhorred and abominated by the world, how can the world understand the church's relationship to Christ, when that is the understanding of marriage that Christ and His Apostles were working with when illustrating the relationship by using the picture of marriage?

These aren't conclusive thoughts, I don't think, but I do wonder what our egalitarian view of the male-female relationship in the home (in marriage, really, but let's be realistic in today's society) has done to our understanding of who we are in Christ. It cannot be a net good impact.

0 William Gurnall Resonating with Recovering the Reformed Confession

Okay, so it's a little anachronistic - but I came across something in my reading of Gurnall's The Christian in Complete Armor that reminded me distinctly of some of the points Scott Clark is trying to get our post-modern church to listen to in his Recovering the Reformed Confession (RRC), which I am still reading with much delight and edification.

Much of the first half of RRC involves a discussion of what Clark describes as the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience - something one might describe in terms of the desire in our everyday church experience for "wow" moments that are reminiscent of the Great Awakenings. Today's Christians are dissatisfied with the blessings God has given His church through the ordinary means of the preaching of His Holy Word and the Sacraments. The cause of the historic practice of Reformed piety is not helped by today's societal dependence on immediate delivery of visceral satisfactions, whether they be gastronomic, visual or sensual. Everyone wants to "feel" their faith, and to worship with immediate feedback and physical enjoyment. People don't want to sit for 45 minutes and listen to a man plainly exposit the Scriptures. If it doesn't come at them with the "wowza" bam, bam, bam rapidity of Holywood big-budget action dramas, or ESPN's Sports Center, people leave bored and unimpressed. If it doesn't have the postmodern gloss, it isn't seen as useful for their lives. The ordinary means of grace are not seen by so many today as THE means of standing firm in the faith! Yet God has ordained these for just that purpose! Where are people who reject these blessings left when the enemy attacks? What defense against the wiles of the devil (Eph. 6:10) have they? They are as Jerusalem was in Nehemiah's day prior to the rebuilding of the wall: open for conquest, defenseless. And we wonder why the American church is in such a shambles.

All of this is hard to compare to Gurnall's situation in the 17th century, but he faced the same problems of people looking to satisfy their craving for religious experience and equipping in all the wrong places and by all the wrong means. We are no different today. Listen to Gurnall, and see if you can hear him resonate with Clark's ideas. He has been describing the kind of armor necessary for the Christian, as found in Ephesians 6:11 - "the whole armor of God." His first observation (on p. 50 for those following along with my reading) is that the armor used by the Christian for defense against the enemy and for spiritual growth "must be of God's appointment":

"The Christian's armor which he wears must be of divine institution and appointment. The soldier comes into the field with no arms but what his general commands. It is not left to every one's fancy to bring what weapons he please; this will breed confusion. The Christian soldier is bound up to God's order; though the army be on earth, yet the council of war sits in heaven; this duty ye shall do; these means ye shall use. And those who do more, or use other, than God commands, though with some seeming success against sin, shall surely be called to account for this boldness....

God is very precise in this point; he will say to such as invent ways to worship him of their own, coin means to mortify corruption, obtain comfort in their own mint: 'Who hath required this at your hands?'....

And what is the gospel of all this -- for surely God hath an eye in that to our marching to heaven, and our fighting with these cursed spirits and lusts that stand in our way -- but that we should fight lawfully, using those means which we have from his mouth in his Word?" (pp. 50-51, William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armor)

So far are we in today's church from considering the mortification of sin as a daily responsibility that some of Gurnall's concerns, I'm sure, would fall flat. However, for those who are in fact concerned with their own sanctification, and walking a Christlike walk in their daily lives, but who desire a "worship experience" that rivals the best of Hollywood entertainment, what recourse have they when they are hit with a debilitating temptation? To what will they resort who do not have a regular diet of clear, plainspoken exposition of God's Holy Word? Will the strains of "Shine, Jesus Shine" help them when they are overtaken by an unmortified lust? Will remembrance of the worship band's awesome riffs in the instrumental break between praise Choruses help them when trying to overcome their fleshly desires? I have grave concerns about the helpfulness of much of today's churchly practices when it comes to the possibility of raising up a new generation of Christians bold to stand forth for Christ in the world we live in today...

When God's ordained means of grace are rejected as old-fashioned and boring, ineffective and irrelevant, the church is in a world of hurt. God promises results, indeed, when His people study His word, when the gospel is purely preached, and the sacraments rightly administered. This is indeed "boring" when compared to the glitzy entertainment provided by many churches today... but where should our desires be? What should be pursued? God-ordained means, or man's playthings?

0 John Owen: The Abomination of Murdering One's Children

There are times at which one is astounded at the clarity of a Puritan's thought as applied to modern circumstances. Witness the following from John Owen in Indwelling Sin in Believers, quoted from a recent republication of Owen's invaluable works on sin and temptation, (Overcoming Sin and Temptation, Kelly Kapic and Justin Taylor, eds., Crossway Books):

First, There is nothing that is more deeply inlaid in the principles of the natures of all living creatures, and so of man himself, than a love unto, and a care for, the preservation and nourishing of their young : many brute creatures will die for them, some feed them with their own flesh and blood; all deprive themselves of that food which nature directs them to as their best, to impart it to them; and acting in their behalf to the utmost of their power.

Now such is the efficacy, power, and force of indwelling sin in man, an infection that the nature of other creatures knows nothing of, that in many it prevails to stop this fountain, to beat back the stream of natural affections, to root up the principles of the law of nature, and to drive them unto a neglect, a destruction of the fruit of their own loins. Paul tells us of the old Gentiles, that they were Asorgoi, Rom. i. 31, "without natural affection :" that which he aims at is that barbarous custom among the Romans, who oft-times, to spare the trouble in the education of their children, and to be at liberty to satisfy their lusts, destroyed their own children from the womb. So far did the strength of sin prevail to obliterate the law of nature, and to repel the force and power of it.

Examples of this nature are common in all nations; amongst ourselves, of women murdering their own children through the deceitful reasoning of sin. And herein sin turns the strong current of nature, darkens all the light of God in the soul, controuls all natural principles, influenced with the power of the command and will of God. But yet this evil hath, through the efficacy of sin, received a fearful aggravation. Men have not only slain, but cruelly sacrificed their children to satisfy their lusts. The apostle reckons idolatry, and so consequently all superstition, among the works of the flesh, Gal. v. 20; that is, the fruil and product of indwelling sin. Now from hence it is that men have offered that horrid and unspeakable violence to the law of nature mentioned. So the Psalmist tells us, Psal. cvi. 37, 38. The same is again mentioned, in sundry other places of Scripture. The whole manner of that abomination I have elsewhere declared. For the present it may suffice to intimate, that they took their children and burnt them to ashes in a soft fire: the wicked priests that assisted in the sacrifice affording them this relief, that they made a noise and clamour, that the vile wretches might not hear the woful moans and cries of the poor dying tormented infants. I suppose in this case we need no farther evidence. Naturalists can give no rational account: they can only admire the secret force of that little fish, which, they say, stop a ship in full sail in the midst of the sea. And we must acknowledge, that it is beyond our power to give an account of the secret force and unsearchable deceit that is in this inbred traitor sin, that cannot only stop the course of nature, when all the sails of it that carry it forward are so filled, as they are in that of affections to children, but also drive it back with such a violence and force, as to cause men so to deal with their own children, as a good man would not be hired with any reward to deal with his dog. And it may not be to the disadvantage of the best to know and consider, that they carry that about them and in them, which in others hath produced these effects. (Overcoming Sin and Temptation, Kelly Kapic and Justin Taylor, eds., Crossway Books)

So clearly spoken that you might be convinced this was written today. Abortion is the holocaust to beat all holocausts, and the root of the problem is exactly as Owen has highlighted it: indwelling sin, and the captivity of the human mind to its own selfish purposes. It can be that the sin is so ingrained that a woman is able to set aside the natural concern any creature has for its young, and murder it, even in the womb! Wicked is the only word for such a grievous sin, and it is rampant today - it is characteristic of the day - rather, it is trumpeted from the highest hills that THIS act is today what we are to celebrate as a sign of true freedom for women. What a wretched situation. What is the most evil of injustices is celebrated as a necessary condition for true justice to be present. Our society calls what is black white and what is evil good. Is there any other indicator needed to tell us that our nation is inundated with sin and evil?