Nielsen’s Nook

On the one hand, it is good to see so many people so concerned and thoughtful about the 2008 Election. The desire for strong leadership, for a person and administration that can keep one safe and provide an environment in which a person and their family might indeed thrive is a good and natural desire. But how long will it last? How much can one President in our political expression or a king or Prime Minister in others actually do?

I am reminded of our cosmic need for beneficent rule from Colossians 2:15 this morning. In particular, as our own political process in America continues to be reduced to cesspools of slander. This process serves to tickle our curiosity but not answer the questions, many times, that a citizen needs answered in order to vote well. The political fight employs the weapons that only insure more wounding and political blood-letting continue.

Perhaps, the weapons of warfare, political or otherwise, are all wrong for us, for politicians and for the citizens that elect them. “Having stripped-off the rulers and authorities, He disgraced them openly, having led them as triumphal captives through [the Cross],” Lawrence Farley translates Colossians 2:15.

Most politicians want to sincerely change the world, or at least their world. However, with all the rhetoric about change this term, I wonder about the substantive mechanism to get us there. We elect those who conquer best with the weapons that we think are mighty. The Cross would remind us that might is fleeting and can turn upon its wielder: the sword cuts both ways. The Cross for Christians is in fact the place that we find not only salvation from what would swallow us whole, but the way forward in all spheres of life. Indeed, the Cross is “the invincible trophy, the weapon of peace” as Farley reminds us in the kontakion of the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 174-5.

In commenting on Colossians 2:5, Lawrence Farley writes:

… for in this — in [Paul's] love for [the Colossian Church] and his spiritual agony at the thought of their danger — is his moral authority to exhort them. He has never actually met them. They are Epaphras’ spiritual children. His moral authority to teach them lies in the fact of his suffering for them (see Col 1:24). For it is only insofar as we love and suffer for others that we have the right to teach and direct them. ¹

As I reflected on this verse and commentary, it occurred to me that many of the things that frustrate and even anger me at times are, in fact, opportunities in which God would increase and bless myself and others by teaching us to give and receive a love more authentic. In other words, true rich thick authentic love is most inconvenient - that is, unless you think God had His crucifixion for the life of the world merely scheduled out in His pda. Inconvenience, then, for the Christian, is filled with the immeasurable and redemptive possibilities of divine love.

Lord have mercy that your church, starting with me, would recognize authentic love and would be most industrious in its dispensing in this world.

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 162. Commenting on Colossians 2:5.

In reworking some thoughts on Psalm 70, I translated it from the Septuagint (LXX, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures) and found the exercise helpful and gratifying. Keep in mind the versification varies from what you would find in your English version (or other translation). The LXX counts what the Hebrew regards as an inscription as the first verse and so verse 2 here will correspond to verse 1 in your English version. Likewise it is Psalm 69 in the LXX which corresponds to Psalm 70 in the Hebrew. Here are some notes for you:

¹ For the choirmaster, to David for a memorial offering.

² O Lord, make your purpose to save me!
O God, take heed for my aid!

³ Let those who seek my life be put to utter shame, [a]
Let those who desire evil against me be turned back and be deeply shamed. [b]

⁴ Let the shameful ones, who are saying to me “Well done. Well done,” be turned back immediately.

⁵ Let all who seek you be utterly overjoyed, [a]
and let those who love your salvation say through all circumstances, “God is great!”

⁶ But I am utterly poor, O God, give aid to me!
You are my aid and my deliverer, O Lord, do not delay.

I have a previous post, translating the Hebrew. It might be interesting to compare these with a good version of the Bible like the English Standard Version:

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[ a ] Both vv 3 and 5 (cf. 6) begin with a double idea joined with και for emphasis (merism: “… a single thing is referred to by a conventional phrase that enumerates several of its parts, or which lists several synonyms for the same thing.”). I attempt to render the merism using the emphatic “utterly”.

[ b ] καταισχύνω is a word used to describe the dishonor and violation of raped women. Johan Lust, Erik Eynikel and Katrin Hauspie, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint : Revised Edition (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft: Stuttgart, 2003).

³²And they went to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” ³³And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. ³⁴And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” ³⁵And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. ³⁶And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” ³⁷And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? ³⁸Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” ³⁹And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. ⁴⁰And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy, and they did not know what to answer him. ⁴¹And he came the third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough; the hour has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. ⁴²Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.” (Mark 14:32-42)

I was talking with my friend Pastor Jeff Hatton of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Waco, Texas this evening at a Southwest Church Planting Network dinner. In an amazing pastoral moment, Jeff listened to far more of my story than I probably should have encumbered him with. I was telling him about how the Lord had burdened me to preach to myself in the midst of a year long fiery trial. In addition, I shared with Jeff that one of the initial passages that the Lord used to teach me about preaching first to myself was Mark 14:32-42, where our Lord suffers the agony of anticipation on the precipice of his execution. Our conversation was cut short as the events of the evening progressed and I did not have the opportunity to clarify what I had in mind by saying that I believed that Jesus seems to “redeem even suffering", which is what I am attempting to do here.

Most of us would very much like to know the future or at least certain parts of it if, we’re the types who enjoy a little suspense. We want to know about the hurricanes and tsunamis that would come and wash us out, hoping that we might avoid them. What we find in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:32-42) is the one who designed the future, the one upon whom the future is predicated, embracing the uncertainty, the angst of suffering. We ourselves would never do such things – or at least most of us wouldn’t. We have come across people with terminal diseases that talk about gracious contentment in their dire state. Those kind of people used to make me very uncomfortable. I always wondered if it was merely an opiate that they had swallowed to help them cope with the unbearable.

What we find in the Garden of Gethsemane is immeasurably far from being an opiate. Just after the institution of the Lord’s Supper in the Upper Room, (i.e., Jesus’ celebration of Passover with his disciples), Jesus predicts Peter’s threefold denial of him. “Even though they fall away, I will not.” Peter echoed with an emphatic hollowness. Jesus then invites three of the disciples, the so-called ‘inner circle’, to join him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Where the first man, Adam, began in a garden and brought suffering upon the race through disobedience, Jesus the fulfillment of humanness would turn suffering inside out through his obedience as he moved from suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross, then from the grave to resurrection glory.

Glory has never come through any other road than the the one that runs through Cross. Earlier James and John had sought glory apart from suffering: “Grant us to sit one at your left hand and one on your right hand in glory” (Mark 10:37). Jesus asks them if they can bear the cup of suffering that he would bear. “We are able,” they naively answered. “The failure to understand what it means to share in Jesus’ destiny and to be identified with his sufferings, rather than privileged status, appears to be the occasion for the isolation of the three from the others.” (Lane, 515) So we find that the three who had thought themselves able to circumvent the Cross – Peter, James and John – now found themselves invited to an object lesson on suffering. Jesus anticipated not only the nine-inch nails measured to inflict acute pain, but also the immeasurable wrath of God that would be poured out upon him for the sins of His people.

Two invitations are given in this passage. There is one to join Jesus in his suffering, to “sit here while I pray” and “remain here and watch” (Mark 14:32,34). The other is the one the disciples chose. It is the invitation to merely cope with a situation out of their ability to control. Three times Jesus asks them to join him by watching and praying for an hour (v 37,38). Three times we find that this ‘inner circle’ denied him, proving that indeed their spirit was willing but their flesh weak (v 38).

The disciples got through this hour in which Jesus was being overwhelmed. His soul was exceedingly sorrowful (v 34). Luke records that even after the Lord had been strengthened by an angel from heaven, "being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground." (Luke 22:44). Only the God-Man could be anxious to the point of sweating drops of blood for only the God-Man could understand what it meant to bear the infinite wrath of God for the sins of his people.

In Jesus we find one who demonstrates an ability to cry out to his God in the midst of great pain and anxiety. In the disciples we find those who merely cope. Coping is that invitation to skate around the outside of pain, to numb oneself and look for deliverance in something other than Christ. The disciples slept. Some of us will turn to the bottle, or television, or entertainment or over scheduling ourselves. These help us get by, so we think. All the while, in circumventing suffering, we fail to see that it is in Christ that suffering itself is redeemed. We fail to see that Christ is not waiting for us on the other side of our suffering in some kind of ethereal platonic heaven. No. He meets us in the midst of suffering in this world, even now.

It is the Cross that makes sense of suffering, giving us hope that suffering is not at the last analysis arbitrary. It often does not make sense and drives us to our wits end. What we find is that Christ is there too, redeeming the madness of suffering, bidding us to walk with him on the road to glory that at every point runs through the Cross.

Suffering will come. There is no avoiding it in this fallen world, for suffering is the reflux of sin’s corruption. For some it comes like the dripping of a leaky faucet, slowly eroding our strength and minds. For others it comes suddenly, unexpectedly, all at once, tragic. The Gospel of Jesus Christ does not lessen the pain or the grief, but it recasts it. And in recasting it, we find that suffering and its cousin death do no longer have the last word. “For if we have been united with [Christ] in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:5, ESV)

We go where our Lord has gone. We walk the trail that our Lord has blazed to glory. This is not some kind of positivistic mantra of which Christians attempt to iteratively convince themselves. It is the fact of this life that suffering has been recast, that while the sharp edges do in fact cut and we do indeed bleed, we are reshaped and reformed into the likeness of Christ. The one who bled the ground red at Calvary for us, did not bleed to leave us to our own devices, coping our way through this life. Rather he, who has trampled down death by his own death, has sent the Comforter, the Spirit of Christ, to walk with us in victorious union.

Whether you are one who suffers much or little, you will suffer. Jesus, our High Priest at the right hand of God the Father Almighty intercedes for us. He does not intercede as a priest who empathizes through a distant imagination of what suffering must be like, but as one who knows what it is to suffer infinitely the wrath of God for our sins. It is this crucified and risen Christ who is himself our Eucharist, our thanksgiving and hope in suffering.

“Crown him with many crowns,” up our voices ring.
The resplendent gold and gems circumscribed
The regal head eternally divine.

Preembodied hands, willfully took up
The majestic glory of divine right,
Laying down, his golden crown, to become.

To enter into time and space, walking
Grace among his created-own he moved
With kindred care, emptied of heav’nly wealth.

He came low to raise us high. We replied
By circumscribing Adam’s thorny curse
Around his perfect head, hanging him dead.

The God who became man now bled the ground,
With red compassion true. His curséd crown
Pressing our God-unlikeness to the grave.

Alone this curséd crown of thorn and brier
remains entombed where Perfection once laid
His regal head, no longer dead, but raised.

Will Nielsen
Februrary 8, 2006

J. Alan Groves (b. December 17, 1952) met his Savior face to face on February 5 at the age of 54.� He is survived by his wife of 28 years, Elizabeth W. Davis Groves; by his four children, Alasdair and wife Lauren, Rebeckah, Eowyn, and Alden; and by his parents James and Jacqueline Groves and his siblings Warren, Jill, and Bryan.

Born in 1952, Al received his B.A. in 1975 and B.E. in 1976 from Dartmouth College, and an M.A.R. in 1981 and a Th.M. in 1983 from Westminster Theological Seminary.� He also pursued graduate studies at Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning and was a Ph.D. candidate at Vrije Universiteit, working on a doctoral thesis entitled “A Textlinguistic Analysis of Exodus 1-14.”� He was a ruling elder at New Life Presbyterian Church (PCA), Glenside, Pennsylvania.� [Read the complete WTS article]

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I am sad to share with you that a dear brother has passed on.� I sat under Alan Groves for Deuteronomic History and was blown away that when I missed the one class discussion time we had, he called me on a vacation to speak with me about all that we were learning.� I know him to be amazingly charitable and irenic, committed to the discipleship of his students’ minds.� Any time you read the Old Testament in really any modern language that takes the BHS Hebrew Text into account, you are indebted to Alan Groves and those who worked with him to bring God’s Word to His people.

A dear brother, who was a Teaching Elder in the North Texas Presbytery and served as the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) director at Texas Christian University before taking a position as RUF minister at Furman in South Carolina, has had a most difficult and, for me at least, an incomprehensible providence. Dustin was riding his bicycle on November 8 with his two sons and fell off injuring his head. He has been in a coma for sometime. The prognosis is not good presently.

Dustin’s family needs our prayers as should we pray for him. May the Lord heal him, facilitate a full recovery and restore him to the faithful and joyous service to his church and family now in South Carolina.

You can find updates on Dustin at the website of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in South Carolina.

Sources on Suffering and Evil

Buttrick, George Arthur. God, Pain and Evil. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966.

Calvin, John. Commentaries on the First Epistle of Peter. Vol. 22 of Calvin’s Commentaries; Repr., Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999.

Carson, D. A. How Long O Lord? Grand Rapids: Inter-Varsity, 1990.

Clowney, Edmund. The Message of 1 Peter: The Way of the Cross. Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1988.

Kreeft, Peter. Making Sense out of Suffering. Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1986.

Monod, Adolphe. Living in the Hope of Glory. Edited and Translated by Constance K. Walker. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2002.

Schaeffer, Edith. Affliction. Old Tappan: Revell, 1978.

Sproul, Robert Charles. Surprised by Suffering. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1989.

Sources Theology Proper

Bavinck, Herman. The Doctrine of God. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vol. Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.

Frame, John. The Doctrine of God. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2002.

The Hope in Suffering–A Pastoral Response
Dear Mr. Wiesel has in fact rejected the very person who causes suffering to have meaning, the very medium, in the Cross, through which the Lord gives those who suffer hope, and the only one who has promised to ultimately deliver from suffering and evil. It is that Israeli of ancient time, Jesus of Nazareth, who Himself caused time to be, who is the watershed between despair and hope in the midst of agonizing suffering. Wiesel had rejected the very cornerstone of hope, the Messiah who had borne the stripes of the whip ages before him, who hung upon a cross, who died a tortuous death exiled from His own people, to die alone outside the camp.

To hold and weep with the young Wiesel is certainly a loving thing to do; however, to stop with only tears, sentiment and embrace is to empathize with a pauper-child who has not eaten for two weeks and not give him the bread that he so desperately needs. There is no counsel man can offer apart from the Cross. There is no comfort, apart from the Cross, for those who suffer. It is at the Cross that we ourselves must wrestle with the pain we do not understand; it is the God-Man Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, which we must liberally extend from one pauper to another in times of affliction and suffering.

The Apostle John writes that it is Christ who is the exegesis of God, it is Christ who explains the most transcendent and mysterious in terms of immanence and personality. “No one has at any time seen God. The One who is in the bosom of the Father, the only begotten God, that one interpreted [the Father to us]” (Jn 1:18, writer’s translation). How can a man, perhaps a pastor, comfort anyone who has suffered as Elie Wiesel has suffered? He confesses despair which cannot be healed by human hands. At root he has made an interpretation of the Lord, borne from the depths of the darkest desolation. Only the Light of the Gospel of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, which can penetrate to those who suffer as Wiesel, it is only divine glory which is able shine in the catacombs of consternation.

The question is then, for the pastor or anyone else who would find themselves with the charge entrusted them to comfort the suffering: What interpretation of God will I offer the one writhing in pain? What sustenance will I offer to the one whose gut bellows with deafening howls of agony? Will I offer them the Christ and all that He is and promised, or shall I offer them something less?

When we pray for the suffering, the sick and the afflicted it is often the case that we pray for their healing, betterment and deliverance from their arduous situation. The Lord is concerned with our immanent needs:

6Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies ? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. 7Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Lk 12:6-7 NIV)

So we must pray according to the immanent concerns of God – the pain, agony, despair; however, we must also be faithful to pray according to the transcendent concerns of God – His glory, His will, His purposes in history. If we pray only according to the immanent then we run the risk of implying that God will, and intends to deliver the person from their dire straits. The problem is that this is not always the case, and in our presumption we attempt to speak authoritatively about the purpose of God. Who are we to presume upon the will of our Maker!?

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “Far be it from you, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” 23But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.” (Mt 16:21-23 ESV)

The Lord Jesus makes plain to all who will hear that there are times in which the Lord’s will and purpose is confusing and takes those involved through pain, agony, and suffering – and in the case of some torture and death. The Lord is concerned about the “things of men” but He is first concerned about His glorious purposes and plans which transcend the finite realm of humanity and confound even the wisest mortals.

So when we pray only in an immanent fashion, and it comes to pass that the husband dies of cancer or the father is sent to the gas chamber, we subject the faith of those for whom we pray to the furnace of despair which has burned belief out of many souls, shriveling their hearts, as it were, so that there is nothing left for God at all. We must pray with both the transcendence and immanence of God in mind.

Therefore, where the immanence of God is concerned with the smallest concerns of this world, the transcendence of God is concerned with God himself – his ways, his purposes, his will. These are unlike their human counterparts altogether. It is this transcendence that gives the man dying a painful death the hope that though he may not be healed, he may die well, believing, trusting that his death and suffering will glorify the Lover of his soul, with whom he will soon be face to face. And this is what we have in Christ, the one who endured more than any other person with perfect belief that his suffering and death would bring his Father the greatest glory. Indeed, this was the case.

It is the Lord who demonstrates His love for His people through pain. Certainly the Divine One is impassable, incapable of suffering, being wholly removed from the mess of sin and death that constitutes this world; yet, He came down and in all of the finitude of His humanity, He felt every piece of bone that ripped the flesh from off His back. He felt every nick in the cold metal of each of the spikes that impaled His lovely limbs. And when he gasped for his last breath, piked upon the Tree, He alone experienced the Father abandon him to torturous death, receiving the infinite wrath of the Almighty.

It is this Christ that we proclaim to those in dire straits. It is this interpretation of the Father that we must give to those who suffer, both in word and in deed. Anything else we might offer in His place is mere trite counterfeit, a mockery of unbelief erupting from our own hearts. Adolphe Monod, a French pastor who was well acquainted with suffering himself, writes:

Yet in order for us to understand God’s love in all of its fullness and reality, it was necessary for God to present himself to us in such a way as to prove his love to us through pain. Mankind could never have been persuaded – or rather won – in any other way. Therefore Jesus Christ, the Son of God and God himself, became the Son of man that he might suffer and thus show God’s love through acts capable of breaking the hardest hearts…¹

It is therefore imperative that all who would counsel the bereaved would point them to the interpretation of the Father, which is given by God in Christ. “It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.”² To rightly understand their own suffering the bereaved must have the right interpretation and must contemplate the mysterious depths of their very real pain from the face of God down to themselves, to possess the hope which transcends all understanding, being alone the incomprehensible Lord who still comes down today.

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¹ Adolphe Monod. Living in the Hope of Glory. (Ed. and trans. by Constance K. Walker. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 2002), 113-114.
² John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion. (Ed. by John T. McNeill. Trans. by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vol. LCC. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 37.

Resolution in The Cross of Christ

In the introduction to Wiesel’s Night, François Mauriac contemplates the day in which the young Wiesel had questioned him about God and evil. He writes:

What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him – the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished?…This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.¹

I do not know that I would have had the wherewithal to know how to pastorally apply the truth of Mauriac’s affirmation had I been in his place. No doubt the necessity to apply the truth of scripture to those crushed and struck down by this world is paramount. The immensity of immanent evil that Wiesel had suffered is in itself overwhelming. However, there is no peace in the face of any amount of suffering apart from the Cross of Christ. It is through the Cross that the transcendence of Eternal God of heaven and earth, comes down through suffering to apprehend our hearts for hope, giving meaning to all suffering and pain.

Calvary is judo. The enemy’s own power is used to defeat him. Satan’s craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents Judas, Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, culminated in the [torturous] death of God. And this very event, Satan’s conclusion, was God’s premise. Satan’s end was God’s means. It saved the world.²

Our hope as Christian people, which is universally offered to all people, is that the transcendent God of all Heaven and Earth has come down and bound himself by way of covenant to His people. He has proven ever faithful, decreeing the immutable and infallible means to securing His covenant with us. It is Christ who is the Man of Sorrows, who is familiar with suffering, despised and rejected by men. It is Christ who was crushed for our transgressions, a spotless lamb led to slaughter. It was He who came and made his dwelling in the ghettoes of humanity. It was He who was assigned with the wicked, though He Himself was purer innocence than the gentlest of babes. Yet it was the Lord’s purposed-will to crush Him, to cause Him to suffer, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring us to the Lord (c.f., Acts 2:23).

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¹ François Mauriac, introduction to “Night”, in The Night Trilogy, by Elie Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 11.
² Peter Kreeft. Making Sense out of Suffering. (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1986), 132-33.