Nielsen’s Nook

I have a feature in my blog engine that alerts me when people cite a post I have written. While that sounds like a cool feature, it was quite strange when I saw today for the first time a citation of an article I wrote, entitled “A Reformed Liturgical Diet,” from October 2006. The article itself is an exegesis of the Westminster Shorter Catechism which was aimed to show that Reformed churches have historically had a much higher view of the Sacraments than present day instances.

As one who deeply loves, cherishes and practices expository preaching, you can imagine my shock when the name of the post citing “A Reformed Liturgical Diet” was entitled “Expository Preaching under attack.” I would have appreciated the opportunity to interact with the post 2 years ago; however, since I didn’t then, I will do so now. So before you go any further, please take a moment to do the following:

1. Read my original post A Reformed Liturgical Diet
2. Read Expository Preaching under attack at the Two-Edged Sword blog including the comments.

A Two-Edged False Dichotomy

First, for the record, I believe deeply that expository preaching is crucial in the churches of Jesus Christ. So I take exception to the way I have been misrepresented. Preaching is “Christian storytelling” and it is every bit as sacramental as the Lord’s Table. God, after all, is not words of any language. He certainly transcends the confines of vocabulary and exegesis. Nevertheless, the Church has been picked up and carried throughout history through the Spirit’s attending to the preaching of the Word of God. In fact, I would say that to the extent we unfold the Word of God to the people is the extent to which God empowers the sermon. The point of my article is to urge readers back toward the balanced liturgical diet given us in the Scripture of Word and Sacrament. To pit the preaching of the Word over against the Sacraments is a false dichotomy, at least in the Christian economy.

Second, historically speaking the Reformers were fighting for an increased frequency of the Lord’s Table in worship. At the time of Luther the Eucharist was celebrated only once a year and then the laity only received the cup. Calvin is fairly clear that he would have preferred a weekly communion but had to settle for quarterly with the council at Geneva. So it is a bit strange to me, historically speaking, to hear modern-day Reformed so dismissive of sacraments for which our tradition gives instances of those who were once willing to give even their lives for them. Calvin’s seminary graduates had a life expectancy post graduation of about six months. Influences on Calvin, perhaps we should call them teachers, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli in turn had great impact on Thomas Cranmer such that the 1552 Book of Common Prayer is dedicated to Vermigli.

Third, when “Mr. Baggins” comments that “These guys don’t know what they’re talking about. They are attacking preaching itself,” I am compelled to remind us all that my piece was an exegesis of the Westminster Shorter Catechism on the subject of the Lord’s Table itself. I have spent a bit of time in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, in particular to study the nature of the Sacraments in the life of the Reformed churches. I do not want to impute such lack of engagement to Lee at Two-Edged Sword; however, Mr. Baggins makes assertions without even hobbit sized amounts of substantive argumentation. Consequently, it is hard to see how he is not dismissing the Westminster Confession and significant influences on its development like John Calvin and other Magisterial Reformers all in one broad stroke.

In short, I would expect that Lee and I have different universes of discourse in approaching the question of the role of the sacraments in the life of the Church. John Chrysostom would never have gone for preaching apart from the sacraments and yet he is held up as substantiating Mr. Baggins assertions. What I leave you is not a gauntlet (for I have no desire to engage in polemics here); but, instead an exhortation to consider how Chrysostom, himself a huge influence on Calvin and other reformers, would approach the balance that has historically always existed between Word and Sacrament.

Vibrant Sanctified Life

God in his mercies gave us in Christ Jesus a new mind a new set of desires that are beyond what we could imagine before. Paul is urging us on here to that greater immeasurable Christian imagination. Now why do I put it like that?

Lewis put it something like this:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[1]

We are far too easily pleased, indeed. We come to worship Christ, the River of Life, on Sundays content to drink of him with eyedroppers and shot glasses, when he bids us to drink of his inexhaustible grace. We come expecting to hear a good sermon that tickles our ears and maybe makes us laugh when Christ is here presenting himself to us boundlessly, strengthening those of us who confess our weakness and sin. We pray that God would make our lives more convenient when He has bound himself to us for the purpose of walking with us through valleys of thick darkness to lift us beyond the mountain tops of our own imaginations.

¹See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. ²Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. ³And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. (1 Jn 3:1-3 NRSV)

You see, Jesus would give us himself, endlessly, and we settle for a diluted version because we don’t, won’t or can’t imagine the full throttled love that God demonstrates for us as he grows us up. The joy of renewing our minds and offering our bodies according to the holy, pleasing and telic purpose of God for us is that we have fellowship with him now as he grows us up in our faith that could not be imagined apart from Jesus Christ.

But what could it be like for us? Would you imagine for a moment what life might be like with a participation in Christ Jesus deeper still? What would it be like in your life, in the life of your church to have a greater purity of fellowship with Jesus as you would participate with him in the purification of your bodies and minds? Not only would there be transformation in this present time - now - but we would participate in the very telic purpose of God for us as human beings.

[1] Lewis, Clive Staples. The Weight of Glory. (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 26.

The Mercies of God as the Basis for Sanctification and Paul’s Urging

Paul had written to the church at Rome. That church had some life in it in its own right. He was hashing out some of the main points of the Gospel for them and he turns to urge these good Christian people towards their created purpose. In the language of the Westminster Confession we might summarize this call or urging the Apostle Paul makes as, “I urge you to be sanctified in body and mind for that is the most human thing you can do!”

But if we’re not careful, if we don’t take the context and what has come before Romans 12:1-2 in to consideration, we might miss the very basis by which Paul expects Christians to grow in grace in demonstrating more clearly the likeness of God in greater fellowship with Him.

There are two indicators in the passage that I want you to recognize. The first and most obvious is the word translated “therefore”. That clues us in that Paul’s assertions about mind-body sanctification are predicated upon or assume more basic building blocks of faith.

The second indicator is the phrase translated “by the mercies of God.” The word here for “mercies” or “compassions” is a word unique to Paul excepting one occurrence in the Epistle to the Hebrews and it points us back to the ideas in the previous chapters of the Epistle. There we find that God was not content to give everyone over to the lusts of their flesh to defile their bodies and demonstrate their minds as failed.

God in his mercies was pleased to change the very desire structure of our hearts. In binding us to Christ by faith alone we have been justified as Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

In my study of Romans 12:1-2, the consideration of sanctification of course is at the fore. I was encouraged by what A. A. Hodge had written in his commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. “Regeneration,” Hodge writes, “is the commencement of sanctification, and sanctification is the completion of the work commenced in regeneration.” Hodge reminds us that sanctification is a “gracious work of God” in which the Holy Spirit applies “the grace secured through the mediation of the Son” by distinctly inward and outward means. ¹

Faith of course is the inward means of sanctification, “the organ of our union with Christ and fellowship with his Spirit.” ²

The outward means of sanctification are four according to Hodge:

1. The revealed truth in the inspired scriptures.
2. The sacraments.
3. Prayer
4. The gracious discipline of God’s providence

Hodge reminds us that sanctification is the believer’s participation with the work of the Holy Spirit to transform her or him. In Hodge’s own words:

It must be remembered that while the subject is passive with respect to that divine act of grace whereby he is regenerated, after he is regenerated he cooperates with the Holy Ghost in the work of sanctification. The Holy Ghost gives the grace, and prompts and directs in its exercise, and the soul exercises it. Thus, while sanctification is a grace, it is also a duty; and the soul is both bound and encouraged to use with diligence, in dependence upon the Holy Spirit, all the means for its spiritual renovation, and to form those habits of resisting evil and of right action in which sanctification so largely consists. ³

One of the most clear pictures of this participation with God in his work with us is seen in the Lord’s Supper. This is in no way to lift the Lord’s Supper over the Word, as I agree with Hodge’s priority in the list above. But it is to say that when Christ presents himself to us in the Bread and Wine, he is with his people in a way that is like no other in this age between the Advents. In partaking of Christ in the Eucharist we do show forth his death we in worthy reception of the elements by faith are “made partakers of his body and blood, with all his benefits, to [our] spiritual nourishment and growth in grace.” ⁴

The word Eucharist, historically used in reference to the Lord’s Supper, is the English cognate from the Greek εὐχαριστία (eucharistia) meaning thanksgiving or thankfulness. The Eucharist then has equity and power today for us as Reformed Christians. The Eucharist is a taste of glory to come, for he who has justified his people, will glorify them and the only way between justification and glorification is through the country of sanctification on the Road Christ. The Eucharist is not merely a picture reminding us of a time in which Jesus died for our sins, but is the resurrected and exalted Christ giving himself to us now to strengthen and walk with us in the midst of our sanctification, our great existential battle with sin. That is immeasurably much to be thankful for.

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¹ A.A. Hodge et al., The Confession of Faith : With Questions for Theological Students and Bible Classes (With an appendix on Presbyterianism by Charles Hodge. Index created by Christian Classics Foundation.;, electronic ed. based on the 1992 Banner of Truth reprint.; Simpsonville SC: Christian Classics Foundation, 1996), 195.

²Ibid.

³Ibid., 196.

⁴Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 96.

When Paul pens Romans 12:1-2, he has in mind the unspeakable, immeasurable wonder of what is ours in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the man that has already experienced resurrection and brings that life giving purpose from the future into this world here and now.

We who are in Christ, who is himself the image of God in whom the likeness of God dwells with perfect fellowship, are being remade in our whole person to fulfill the purpose of God in all that we are, in both mind and body. We, who have demonstrated ourselves worthy of death, are finding that Christ has transcended death, swallowed it whole and now lives in us to root out the sticky residue that the realm of death has left behind in us.

It is out of this great flood of divine compassion that Paul writes:

¹ Therefore, I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, through the compassions of God to present your bodies as sacrifices living, holy and acceptable to God as your spiritual service. ² Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind in order that you might prove what the will of God is, the good and acceptable and telic. (Rom 12:1-2, author’s translation)

God’s will is good, acceptable and telic. There is really not a great English word to translate what is usually rendered “perfect” from the Greek. Perfection in the biblical sense, has to do with doing everything according to design, according to the purpose for which a thing was created.

These verses are the answering echo, the antithesis of what he wrote in the first chapter of this Epistle. There he gave us a warning and condemnation, that though we were created as the image of God to demonstrate the likeness of God while walking in fellowship with Him, all of humanity without distinction (viz. between Jew and Gentile) has proven itself otherwise.

We have proven ourselves otherwise. Like a Gecko’s tail that has been discharged, humanity - mind and body - writhes twitching, dislocated from our true identity. Knowing God apart from Christ, we too had exchanged the glory of God for images fashioned after our own corrupted imaginations. In lieu of this, Paul writes these very sobering words:

God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts for the purpose of dishonoring their bodies among themselves … since they did not see fit to have a true knowledge of God, he gave them over to a failed mind. (Rom 1:24,28, author’s translation)

So I hope you can see that in both the beginning of the Epistle and here in the beginning of the end of it Paul is concerned with the purpose of humanity as whole persons, body and mind, before God on this earth.

The offering of our bodies to God as spiritual acts of worship stands over against the dishonoring of our bodies.

The renewal of our minds in Christ demonstrates minds that no longer operate in contradiction to the purpose for which they were created, but now in Christ strive to do those things that prove God’s purpose for human beings.

Jesus has redeemed us. He renews us, mind and body, that we as the image of God, grow up in his likeness, demonstrating our fellowship with him, his goodness, pleasure and perfection (telos).

¹ Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, through the compassion [a] of God to present your bodies as sacrifices living, holy and acceptable to God as your spiritual service. ² Do not be conformed [b] to this age, but be transformed [c] by the renewing [d] of the mind in order that you might discern what the will of God is, the good and acceptable and telic. [e]

II. Covenantal Framework

A. Covenantal Implications in a Sacramental World

Broadly speaking we live in a sacramental world that is related to us by means of covenant (WCF 7.1). So if we do not understand Adam and Eve’s relationship as creatures to their Creator and his Creation, these two trees in the midst of the Garden of Eden will not make any sense.

1. Covenantal: divine, personal condescension

Covenant is a word that we use often in the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition. It is a biblical term and one that has been developed theologically for thousands of years. The Westminster Confession of Faith describes covenant as the expression of “voluntary condescension on God’s part” in which he reveals to us something of who he is, what he requires of us, and what the consequences are for obedience and disobedience.

Adam and Eve operated in a context of covenant. God said to Adam, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you do, you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17) God had condescended to Adam, explaining clearly the parameters of the covenant and clearly enunciating the penalty for
disobedience. What is promised implicitly but clearly here is that if Adam were to obey, he would receive the life promised to him in the tree first named, the tree of life.

I had said just a moment ago that “Broadly speaking we live in a sacramental world that is related to us by means of covenant.” I hope you see how the circumstances of how Adam and Eve were related to God were indeed covenantal. Now, I want to help you understand what I mean when I say that we live in a sacramental world.

2. Sacramental: physical means of a spiritual communication

As Protestants we believe that the scriptures teach us that there are only two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist. A sacrament, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is an outward or physical means, whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption.[1]

Now, I am not implying that all of creation communicates to us the benefits of redemption. What I am saying is that God uses physical or outward means to communicate spiritually to us. In psalm 19 we find evidence for this. God uses the heavens to communicate to us something of the spiritual reality of his glory.

B. The Sacramental Nature of the Trees

While all of nature tells us unspeakably much about the Creator, these two trees in the midst of the Garden of Eden were physical symbols being used by God in the context of covenant to communicate a spiritual reality. So in this broad sense of the term, the trees are sacramental.

C. Probation of Humanity in the Garden

Had Adam and Eve obeyed the prohibition God had given not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, there is reason to believe that the tree would have “played a role in a very different sort of transformation.” [2]

D. Destiny

To say that there would have been a “different sort of transformation” is to say that God did not create human beings for failure and fig leaves. Our destiny is not dark knowledge and cheap existence, but bright wisdom and thick life.

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[1] See WSC#88.

[2] William N. Wilder, “Illumination and Investiture: The Royal Significance of the Tree of Wisdom in Genesis 3,” The Westminster Theological Journal 68.1, no. Spring (2006): 52.

Preface

A poem I jotted down today during a break between sessions on a staff retreat. I have been studying Deuteronomy for a sermon series I am preaching at an area church and was overwhelmed at the manifold ways in which my own heart breaks the first commandment to have no other gods before the LORD. I was amazed at oft quoted verses in 2 Chronicles, “If my people, who are called by my name, will turn to me … I will heal their land…”. The problem with preaching that as a call to repentance is that it glosses over the fact that Israel, the original audience, never turned to God and yet salvation from God is bigger than they imagined. Often God takes us into desert places not to punish us but to reveal more of himself to us. Then we become complacent because of the great blessing of his presence and the process starts over again. Ezekiel 8 teaches us that God is one who goes into exile with his people, into Babylon. While Babylon has historically been the symbol of apostasy, it is not so here. It is the desert place of discipline where God reveals himself to his people even in the context of great suffering. If that is where Jesus is, then that is where I want to be. I don’t want to be like those Ezekiel rebukes who remain smug at home in Jerusalem, failing to recognize that the Glory of the LORD had left the temple and gone into Babylon with His people whom He disciplined.

Thank you for silence
a most rare and precious jewel
that fills the room with angst and awe.
A subtle gray light growing hot white.

As it illumines, my heart falls faint,
lunging, longing that the bulb would fuse
and in the darkness still and noisy
might I, in my sin, bemuse
its hiddenness and stealth.

But oh God! would you drag me out to Babylon,
for I, your son, am want to turn.
Burst these bonds of religion-steel cast
that bind my heart in pious farce.

At least in Babylon, hands now free to embrace
you, my Lord - to yourself exile me.
My many gods crushed and hubris rent
from these hands that formed countless idols,
hewn from the quarries of Old Man bent
deep in deviance and divorce.

But you, O Lord! have renewed.
You have become my last and lasting word
that redefines and reforms - even suffering.

Oh that Babylon would be mine
if more of you would be had there.
In humiliation might I find the Humble One.

In suffering the dross is dropped.
In the desert place the God of Abraham
would in my heart and soul and mind
be finally unstopped.

Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai ehad (Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is alone God). This famous sentence from Deuteronomy 6:4 seems to give us a rubric for understanding the book of Deuteronomy, if not our entire lives as those created by the LORD.

J. G. McConville, in his commentary on Deuteronomy, sees Deuteronomy chapters five and six as a single literary unit.¹ I find this resonates with my own thinking more globally about the meta-narrative found in the scriptures and is not disharmonious with approaches like that found in the IVP Dictionary of Biblical Imagery in which Deuteronomy five is said to be “a miniature version of the book as a whole”.²

The thought that impresses me is how easily we drive a wedge between the content of the two chapters. In chapter five we find the reiteration and reapplication of the Ten Commandments to the Israelites at the end of their 40 years of wandering in the desert. In chapter six we find the concern to be the worldview of covenant keeping as a means of true life.

The Ten Commandments are unfortunately left in the realm of abstract moral principles for most of us. Certainly do not covet is a bit abstract. Do not covet Jim’s wife is more concrete, but we still do not have a handle on what exactly coveting looks like. Certainly we would recognize the results of coveting if Sam were to engage in an adulterous relationship with Jim’s wife; however, the adultery is an effect of a more intimate and sinful disposition.

The Ten Commandments find their concreteness in the person of the LORD, our God. They describe One who is perfectly content in Himself and thus never covets, for example. They implicate us because we are created in the image of this One LORD, to live in the likeness of Him described in the Ten Commandments, thus living in consequent fellowship with Him. Concretely, breaking the Law of God is a direct and personal affront to the most holy LORD, exercising a desire to distance ourselves from God.

In this way, we can find that some kinds of obedience serve actually to distance ourselves from the LORD. We go to church on Sundays, perhaps the exceptionally spiritual go Wednesday evenings. But do we go to get God off our backs or do we go because we can’t help but worship the one our soul loves? When I see a police officer on the highway, one of my immediate reactions is to press the brakes a bit to slow down. This is a sort of obedience, making sure I am under the speed limit. However, it is obedience for the sake of avoiding a relationship with the lawgiver, which is in this case the State.

God has not made a covenant with his people so that we can do enough to call ourselves his. He has made and fulfilled a covenant with us in the person of Jesus that we might live out the likeness of God in fellowship with him from the heart. We are not more justified when we obey the Lord as Christians, but we do grow in grace and the appropriation of the Spirit of the LORD at work in us to will and to act (Philippians 2:12-13). Consequently, if we find our dispositions to the LORD different on Monday than they are on Sunday, we should be alarmed and we must ask the LORD to dilate our hearts that we would love loving him all the more.

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¹ J. G. McConville, Deuteronomy, Apollos Old Testament Commentary; 5 (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 139.
² Leland Ryken, Jim Wilhoit, Tremper Longman et al., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, electronic ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000, c1998), 205.

In preparation for the continuation of a series on Deuteronomy at Bethel PCA in Dallas, I continue to notice a rhetorical theme recurring throughout the opening chapters of Deuteronomy. As chapter 4 transitions into Deuteronomy 5, which some see as the key section of the entire book, and consequently the entire Deuteronomic History, we find that it begins and ends with this rhetoric on life:

¹“And now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the rules that I am teaching you, and do them, that you may live, and go in and take possession of the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you. (Deuteronomy 4:1, ESV)

³³Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? (Deuteronomy 4:33, ESV)

The reapplication of the Law to this new generation at the conclusion of the 40 years of wilderness wanderings, has everything to do with life (c.f., Deuteronomy 5:3). Chapter 5 continues to ask this question:

²⁴And you said, ‘Behold, the Lord our God has shown us his glory and greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire. This day we have seen God speak with man and man still live. ²⁵Now therefore why should we die? For this great fire will consume us. If we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, we shall die. ²⁶For who is there of all flesh, that has heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of fire as we have, and has still lived? (Deuteronomy 5:24-26, ESV)

³³You shall walk in all the way that the Lord your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you shall possess. (Deuteronomy 5:33, ESV)

The holiness of God is perhaps shown to be analogous to combustion.� If left in raw contact with unbridled sinfulness it consumes it.� However, the purpose of holiness here and especially as it is fulfilled and demonstrated in the person of Christ and the sending of the Spirit of Holiness is to empower and cleanse God’s people, imparting life to them.

The sad thing is that until the return of Christ where the defeat of sin is completed, humanity lives in a sort of functional psychosis.� We want holiness and rightness and yet we hate it.� We want order and lawfulness and yet we covet and steal.� As I reflect on this contradiction in my own life, I am compelled to cry out, “Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner!”� And I must believe that the one who said, “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest”; that one who is unequivocally holy, will make good on his promise.