The Psalms

This morning, poor and needy, I crept to the Psalms (my reading for today was Psalm 106-110). It was, in God's providence, a feast for the soul. I was instructed in righteousness, I was reproved for my hard heart, my thinking and affections were corrected, and the true doctrine of God and his Son were expounded more fully and clearly to my mind.

Christ was throughout. In Psalm 106 his mighty deeds for the rebellious children of Israel were recounted. Psalm 107 taught of his mysterious ways in dealing with the children of men, and exhorted his church to to "attend to these things," and to soberly consider his steadfast love described therein. Psalm 108 described the salvation from God's right hand, the salvation of the Christ, the anointed one! Psalm 109 revealed the sufferings of Christ at the hands of evil men: his betrayal by Judas, his cries to God for help, as mentioned in Hebrews 5:7-8, and his anticipation of the victory in which he would praise God in the midst of the throng, the congregation. And finally, Psalm 110 shows Christ's exultation, the reign of the ascended Lord, his being given the mighty scepter by which to rule the nations with a rod of iron, and the promise of his complete conquest when he returns as King.

After reading and seeing all this, I was conquered and subdued. My heart and mind were better aligned with his purposes, rather than my own. I desired to be more prayerful, to seek after and pursue those things during the day that would better incline me to thoughts after his thoughts, rather than baser desires. I was enabled to pray accordingly and with real desire for his ways, more so than in a while.

Will I return to hard-heartedness and carelessness in prayer and thinking? More than likely, after a time. Will I return to the Psalms for reproof, correction, doctrine and instruction in righteousness? By the grace of God, yes. Not every morning in the Psalms brings such a satisfying and heart-softening encounter as this morning's did, but most often (if I am at all attentive) I am corrected and recalibrated and realigned in very real ways. Too often I get up and go about the day, quickly forgetting what I saw, but this just shows that my habits need working on.

I commend the Psalms! All of Scripture is profitable for the kind of training spoken of in 2 Timothy 3:16. But the Psalms are unique in their usefulness in these ways as I believe they are meant for our every day use, our morning and evening use, our use in all the times and circumstances and cares and joy of life. Our Shepherd is very visible throughout, speaking to, leading, and guiding his sheep through all the hills, valleys, travails and joys of this pilgrim life.

Ruminations On Women's Ministries

So, I am thinking about women in the church and in the home, and about how difficult it can be to maintain a biblical view of so many things in the face of the pressures arrayed against us. Nevertheless we must strive to think biblically in all things. What else do we have, after all? Biblical thinking comes from biblical truth, and this truth is our safety (Philippians 3:1) and is for our joy (1 John 1:4); certainly not to keep us down.

Back to thinking about the roles of women, in the church in particular. Women's ministries in the church are such a fact that few question the need for them, or safety of them. So we have women directing other women into biblical truth, into doctrinal teaching, into understanding God's will for their lives. This is largely being done without a careful look at what the apostles have said to regulate women's roles in teaching. So here are a few places in the epistles that address various aspects of women's lives both as learners and teachers in the church. 

1 Timothy 2:11: "Let a woman learn quietly and with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor." 

1 Corinthians 14:33-35: "As in all the churches of the saints, women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church." 

I hope that we desire to submit to, and not judge, the word of God.  The biblical remedy for all our ongoing sin resulting from the fall of our "first parents" is humility and lowliness. So for women in particular, this humility and lowliness calls for us to step back and take a sober look at the teaching of Scripture.

I don't see anywhere in Scripture where women are to serve as official teachers in the church, per se, since the biblical office of teacher is a leadership role. But women do have a job description for teaching, clearly stated in Titus 2:3-5: "Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands that the word of God may not be reviled." You can see that the good teaching from the older women is for the purpose of training young women to love their families, living and serving so as not to bring shame upon the word of God. 

But in too many churches women, often younger women, are conducting Bible studies and instructing each other in sometimes complex doctrinal issues.  We know that teaching is an office of the church and that men in the church are to hold it. So in light of the clear instruction we are given for women's teaching in the church, and in light of the limitations on women's speaking in the church (based on the Law and on Eve's being deceived) we should fear to trespass in this area. 

Young women in the church desperately need mentoring and training in how to love their husbands and children; how to live so as to never bring discredit on the gospel. The sober-minded older women of the church are the designated drivers for this. There could be nothing more challenging and rewarding for a woman than to be part of this exciting ministry. So much is at stake! May the Lord grant us grace to repent of and forsake all lesser pursuits and turn wholeheartedly to the ones he has in his Word called us to. 

Luther's Theology of the Cross: Great Blessings Through Great Suffering

Martin Luther, the 16th century reformer, talked about something called the theology of the cross (as opposed to the theology of glory). The first theology is the good and right one, but harder for our human nature to embrace than the second one. Yet it's the only theology that offers sanity and hope in all the difficult experiences of this life. This excerpt from an article by Carl Trueman tells a little bit about how the theology of the cross is so very meaningful for our lives. I highly recommend following the link to and reading the whole article.

Luther...had a dramatically restrictive view of revelation. God revealed himself as merciful to humanity in the incarnation, when he manifested himself in human flesh, and the supreme moment of that revelation was on the cross at Calvary. Indeed, Luther sometimes referred enigmatically to Christ crucified as "God's backside"—the point at which God appeared to be the very contradiction of all that one might reasonably have anticipated him to be. The "theologians of glory," therefore, are those who build their theology in the light of what they expect God to be like—and, surprise, surprise, they make God to look something like themselves. The "theologians of the cross," however, are those who build their theology in the light of God's own revelation of himself in Christ hanging on the cross.

The cross is [the paradigm] for how God will deal with believers who are united to Christ by faith. In short, great blessing will come through great suffering.

This point is hard for those of us in the affluent West to swallow. For example, once I lectured at a church gathering on this topic and pointed out that the cross was not simply an atonement, but a revelation of how God deals with those whom he loves. I was challenged afterwards by an individual who argued that the cross and resurrection marked the start of the reversal of the curse, and that great blessings should thus be expected; to focus on suffering and weakness was therefore to miss the eschatological significance of Christ's ministry.

Of course, this individual had failed to apply Luther's theology of the cross as thoroughly as he should have done. All that he said was true, but he failed to understand what he was saying in light of the cross. Luther would agree that the curse is being rolled back, but that rollback is demonstrated by the fact that, thanks to the cross, evil is now utterly subverted in the cause of good. If the cross of Christ, the most evil act in human history, can be in line with God's will and be the source of the decisive defeat of the very evil that caused it, then any other evil can also be subverted to the cause of good.

More than that, if the death of Christ is mysteriously a blessing, then any evil that the believer experiences can be a blessing too. Yes, the curse is reversed; yes, blessings will flow; but who said that these blessings will line up with expectations of affluent America? The lesson of the cross for Luther is that the most blessed person upon earth, Jesus Christ himself, was revealed as blessed precisely in his suffering and death. And if that is the way that God deals with his beloved son, do those who are united to him by faith have any right to expect anything different?

This casts the problem of evil in a somewhat different light for Luther than, say, for Harold Kushner, the rabbi who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People. They happen, Luther would say, because that is how God blesses them. God accomplishes his work in the believer by doing his alien work (the opposite of what we expect); he really blesses by apparently cursing.

Indeed, when it is grasped that the death of Christ, the greatest crime in history, was willed in a deep and mysterious way by the triune God—yet without involving God in any kind of moral guilt—we see the solution to the age-old problem of absolving an all-powerful God of responsibility for evil. The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good. Romans 8:28 is true because of the cross of Christ: if God can take the greatest of evils and turn it to the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well.

Luther's theology of the cross is too rich to be covered adequately in a single article, but I hope that my brief sketch above will indicate the rich vein of theological reflection which can be mined by those who reflect upon 1 Corinthians 1 and upon the dramatic antitheses between appearance and reality that are scattered throughout Scripture and marshaled with such force by Martin Luther. An antidote to sentimentality, prosperity doctrine, and an excessively worldly eschatology, this is theological gold dust. The cross is not simply the point at which God atones for sin; it is also a profound revelation of who God is and how he acts toward his creation.

Creeds and Confessions

I've been reading a good bit about the historical confessions of the Reformed church. The one most familiar to me has been the Westminster Confession. Three other historic Reformed confessions known as the "Three Forms of Unity" are the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort. Reformed Baptists also have a historic confession, the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, also called the Second London Confession.

The serious use of and adherence to such confessions has fallen out of favor, both among Reformed and Baptist churches. I think this is a problem! Without common beliefs about such weighty doctrines as the inability of man and the sovereignty of God in predestination and election, how can a local church maintain and enjoy the fellowship with one another God means us to maintain and enjoy?

Churches who don't use and adhere to these historic reformed Confessions will have members who disagree on all kinds of doctrinal issues. People who join the church will not have a clear idea on where the church stands on various important doctrines. Lack of commitment to a reformed confession seems to me to be a recipe for disunity. 

Here's an article by Carl Trueman about the importance of creeds and confessions and why we need to return to them. He has also written a book about the subject which can be purchased here.

The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith can be found here.

Romans And Proverbs And The Fear Of The Lord

The book of Romans is both very plain in its meaning and message and filled with puzzles that require meditation and brain work to "solve." Paul is brilliant and logical, and is also the apostle God chose to receive a revelation of grace and of the gospel like no other. Paul truly considered himself to be the least among the apostles because of his past persecution of the church. 

But back to Romans: it's both very plain in meaning and message and in places, "hard to understand" (as Peter famously characterized Paul's writings). But not impossible. As mentioned, those places simply require more thinking, more lingering upon the text and context, more Spirit-helped brainwork. Logic is involved. (Spiritual understanding doesn't preclude logic.) It's all important, both the plain parts and the more difficult ones; all for the sake of seeing Christ as more lovely, and God as greater and more good, than ever. 

That's the way it is not only with Paul's writings but with all of Scripture. The Bible describes itself to contain, in it's wisdom, proverbs and riddles (Proverbs 1:6). To understand it, and thus God, one must "receive," "treasure up," "make your ear attentive to" and "incline your heart to" God's words and commandments. One must call out for insight, raise one's voice for understanding, seek for those things like silver and search for them like hidden treasure (Proverbs 2:1-8). This is all done because of, and in order to learn, the right and proper fear of Yahweh. To behold his beauty. 

All this is true work! God never said that insight and wisdom into his ways would be handed over easily and casually. He has always been a God who has been all about being sought as treasure, as more desirable than the finest silver or gold. That's how truly worthy he is. 

Adoring The God We Behold

God deserves our adoration. He deserves, as Scripture tells us, our highest praises. What exactly does this look like, how is it accomplished, in reality?

I realized some years ago that simply saying "Praise the Lord" or "I praise you Lord" is not praising the Lord! The words "praise the Lord" in the Psalms are actually a command to God's people to open their mouths and say something about God. First of all, it is a command to open our mouths and say true things about God's greatness and goodness. Secondly, speaking these true things must spring from genuine admiration for him and thankfulness to him. And finally, we are to speak these things in this way both to others and to God himself. Praise is telling others about God, and praise is telling God about God, as we see in the Psalms.

Now, understanding that praising God consists of saying true things about his greatness and goodness with admiration and thankfulness, both to others and to God himself, we must remember something else we we learn from Scripture: it is from the abundance of the heart that we speak (Luke 6:45). If our hearts are not really filled with love and admiration for God, words of praise won't come spilling out of our mouths. We'll hardly know what to say about him. If our hearts feel stony and cold toward him, if we're hurt and confused by difficulties in our lives, for example, and we're unfamiliar with God's word and ways, this will stop up our hearts from admiration and thankfulness, and our words (or lack of them) will reflect this.

If we find ourselves in continuing (not temporary) difficulty with the biblical command to adore and praise God, the first thing to do is to realize that this is our lack; there is no lack in God's worth. If our knowledge of God through the Scriptures has not resulted in the assurance that we know him well, that we are on accepted and intimate terms with him, that he is our constant friend and ally, and that we may trust him completely with all our sorrows as well as all our joys, then our journey of faith may have gone amiss. We need to realize that it's possible to belong to him yet not know him well, if our knowledge of him has been gained through other means than a much-opened Bible and a Scripture-saturated life of prayer. If our hearts remain dull toward him, and words of praise and thanks are hard to find, then we must re-examine what we think we know of him.

The apostle Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthian church, exhorts the people to pay close attention to the message of the apostles because they, the apostles, have been made the ministers of the new testament wherein God's glory has been most fully revealed and made known. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:4-11 that the apostle's teaching is in fact the ministry of the Spirit, revealing the glory of God through Christ in a way that far surpasses what was seen through Moses. The message of the apostles "portrays Christ" in this way (Galatians 3:1), as do the rest of the Scriptures. This is why Paul says that when the Spirit of God removes the veil that blinds, we are set free to behold the glory of the Lord (2 Corinthians 3:16-17). And it is as we behold, as we see and gaze upon this glory, that we are transformed into the same image. We become, by degrees of glory, like that which we are gazing upon (2 Corinthians 3:18).

But how do we see and gaze upon the glory of the Lord? We can put all the above paragraph in very simple terms. Paul is speaking metaphorically, but what he means is simply this: it is by the Spirit's work of opening our spiritual eyes to the Christ of the Scriptures that we come to know and admire and thank God for what he has done. We behold the glory of the Lord when we hear or read, with spiritual understanding, the Bible's testimony about Christ and him crucified.

There in the written word we "see" the glory of Christ revealed through the various narratives, the explanations, and the teaching; this sight causes our admiration to blossom and swell and grow for all that God has done through the sending of his Son for our sin. There we see the hope for the resurrection of the body and the final restoration of all things. There we find the strength for going on, for how and why we are to hold on to hope in God (for how he holds us!). We need both the Old and New Testament Scriptures, for both paint the epic and tragic portrait of man, and of God's dealings with man; there we learn man's true story and nature, and the greatness of God's plan of the ages for our rescue.

It is our wide and faithful reading of Scripture that enables us to obey the command of God through the Psalmist to truly praise him. Unless we have studied the portrait of Christ in this way both in the OT and the NT, unless we have gazed upon the glory we see building steadily from Genesis to Malachi, and then bursting into full view from Matthew to Revelation, we won't know the true things to say about God.

If we're only used to praising God for what we have temporally—our good health, our nice cars and homes, our healthy loved ones—then we will be at a loss when those things are taken away. We should always be thankful for our health and for what God has provided. But we very much need to set to work cultivating a taste for the things of eternity, don't we. This taste is only truly gained when we comprehend the message of Scripture as explained by his appointed ministers of the good news. We can only adore and praise the God whose glory we now behold.

Open your Bible. Go to Ephesians 2:15-23 and pray along with Paul, for yourself and for all Christ's church, that "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your understanding enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe..."

And keep reading the Scripture, fastening your gaze on the glory of God revealed there.

The Way To God

"Years ago, two cousins were visiting near the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. Although they were told by their parents not to venture into the swamp, they disobeyed. As the sun was setting, they decided to head home in hopes that their absence would not be detected. Neither boy made it back. When they were found dead a few days later, a note was attached to one of the boys. It read, 'I thought I knew the way, but I was wrong'.

"Do you know the way to God? Are you sure you are right?"

I appreciate Jim Elliff and his organization, Christian Communicators Worldwide. Here is a wonderful article to share with seekers: The Way To God