What Were You Given?

Some time ago, I wrote an article called, “God’s Choice or Man’s.” If you have not read it, or you are uncertain about God’s sovereign election unto salvation, I recommend that you pause and follow the link now. (Also see Related Posts below.) If you are ready to consider the ramifications of God’s sovereign dealings with people in all things, let me present an interesting facet of that condition.

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter thirteen, the disciples ask Jesus why He so often speaks in parables. He responds, “Because the secrets of the kingdom of heaven have been given for you to know, but it has not been given to them.” (Italics mine) At first glance, it may seem that God is being unfair or even capricious. That is until you remember that He told Isaiah that he would be sent to people who would see but not see and hear but not hear. It proved true. Despite numerous warnings of what was to come of Israel’s disobedience and idolatry, they were taken captive to Babylon for seventy years. Isaiah warned them; they refused to hear.

Jesus quotes from that context to explain His use of parables. From our perspective, we look back and see that the Jewish leaders had to reject Jesus as Messiah, or they would not have crucified Him which was God’s intended purpose from the beginning. That in itself is a bit hard to understand, but it is exactly what Peter told them after Jesus’ resurrection. A sinless One had to give Himself as the atoning sacrifice for all mankind. In a weird sort of circular irony, it was the very people He came to save who crucified their Savior.

Think again about the concept of God’s sovereignty. Not only does He rule over all, He has the power to accomplish His will without exception. A few of the Jewish religious leaders were given the secrets, as Jesus explained, but not the majority. Remember Nicodemus, Jesus’ night visitor and Joseph of Arimathea who loaned Jesus his tomb for three days; they were two of the elite who got it. Read the Gospels and notice how Jesus could win converts throughout Galilee, but He was driven from His hometown because of their unbelief. The secrets of the kingdom are given as God wills.

Noone who reads the Scriptures carefully can deny that God chooses His people for His own reasons. One may ask how the concept of sovereignty plays out in the lives of those who have been given knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom. Why were James and Stephen martyred early in the church’s establishment, but many other first-generation disciples ministered for many more years? Why was Saul allowed to capture and kill so many followers of the Way before God finally gave him the secrets of the kingdom, after which he suffered numerous trials including being stoned and left for dead? Why was John boiled in oil (so tradition says) and then exiled to the island of Patmos?

Then there is the curious fact that although Jesus told His closest disciples He was going to die and rise again, they didn’t understand. That has always puzzled me until I read Jesus’ words in Luke: “‘Let these words sink in: The Son of Man is about to be betrayed into the hands of men.’ But they did not understand this statement; it was concealed from them (Italics mine) so that they could not grasp it, and they were afraid to ask him about it.” Apparently, there are some secrets that are not given for all to know. God has His reasons.

In the Gospel of Luke, the narrative that follows Jesus’ explanation for the parables is the one about putting your lamp on a stand rather than hiding it. Jesus closes the parable saying, “For nothing is secret that will not become evident, and nothing hidden that will never be known and come to light. Therefore, consider how you listen, for whoever has, to him more will be given, and whoever does not have, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away from him.” That is a frightening thought. Not only does God give to whomever He chooses, He takes away too.

Job knew this; he said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Consider this: maybe that was also the point of the parable of the sower. Jesus said the seed is the Word of God. The Word is sown by God’s grace through human agency. Then the all-knowing, all-powerful God allows some to be taken away by various means: shallow hearts, worldly concerns, and the devil’s schemes. This may also be what the Hebrew writer meant when he said that some would fall away after having, “tasted the good word of God.” It could be that those taste-testers were in one of the categories Jesus mentioned in the parable of the sower.

If you are one to whom it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom – if you have tasted the good word of God, make every effort to see that the soil of your life is deep and kept watered. To do that you must spend time with the written word and commune often with the Living Word. If you fail to do that, you risk having God take back what He has given. That could have disastrous consequences.

Related Posts: Election: God’s Choice; The Hidden Things; Calvinist or Arminian

Moving Mountains

In his popular work, Walden, Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I know he was not a Christian, but he was a keen observer of the human condition. Sadly, what he said about people in general can also be said of many who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ. The desperation Christians feel may be of a different sort than others, but it has the same consequence: turbidity. By that I mean that they seem to be confused or muddled in their thinking and acting. Jesus said that He came to bring abundant life to His disciples, yet too many of them appear to have refused or misplaced that gift.

One might ask what the abundant life should look like. Because Jesus has offered this gift to believers, it would help to know what it means to believe. In the Greek language of the New Testament, there is one word that is translated both belief and faith. In English, we need two words because we don’t have a decent verb form of the word faith. We don’t talk about “faithing” something, but we can believe something. Hence, we believe in Jesus or put our faith in Jesus, and we live a life of faith, or we live as believers.

So, the question becomes what faith/belief is. The tenth through the twelfth chapters of Hebrews are a good place to look for a lesson on faith. In the midst of that lesson there is a stunning statement: “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” At the very least we know that means to place faith in the atoning sacrifice of Christ on our behalf. That is the ringing gong of the Hebrews message: remain faithful to Christ, and don’t turn back to the now empty faith of Judaism. The Cross of Christ brought an end to the temple worship of the Jews, yet some of them were turning back to it. The Hebrew writer was admonishing them to remain faithful to the new order initiated by Christ.

But it is not just being faithful to Christ that the Hebrew writer emphasizes. The examples of faith he gives in chapters eleven and twelve delve into the depths of what it means to live by faith. The exemplars of faith – Noah, Abraham, Moses, et al. – each made critical life decisions grounded in their belief/faith in God. Their lives – and often their deaths – proved their faith was genuine. The Apostle Paul said as much in his lesson on faith in the book of Romans. We are all justified before God by the kind of faith demonstrated by Abraham.

So, to live by faith means to believe God – to believe His Word. But saving faith goes beyond even that; it must show up in the actions of the believer. James says faith without works is dead. Some have tried to say that contradicts Paul’s assertion that we are saved by faith, not by works. But in the sentence after that well-known phrase Paul ties works to saving faith saying that we were “created for good works.” Jesus was striking the same chord when He said that true faith would be revealed by the fruit it produced. The right kind of fruit is that which accomplishes the will of the Father – sharing the gospel, seeking justice, caring for the needy, supporting the work of the kingdom of God. That is the thrust of Jesus’ model prayer that God’s will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.

There is another important way to live by faith: to pray in faith believing that our prayers will be answered. Jesus made the startling claim that if His disciples prayed that way, the results were guaranteed. That assertion needs to be explained though. The Greek in Mark 11:24 literally says, “all things you pray and ask believe you [already] have, and they will come to be.” (πάντα ὅσα προσεύχεσθε καὶ αἰτεῖσθε, πιστεύετε ὅτι ἐλάβετε, καὶ ἔσται ὑμῖν.) Some Christians have tried to make that a sort of magic formula like rubbing the genie’s bottle and getting the answer they want. Nothing could be farther from the truth Jesus taught. He said if you have the assurance by faith that your request has already been granted, it will come to pass. That kind of faith can only be supported by the knowledge that the thing prayed for is completely within God’s will. If you know God has willed something to be, your true prayer is, “Thy will be done.” Which, by the way, goes back to Jesus’ model prayer again.

A.W. Tozer commented on the prayer of faith: “But the man of faith can go alone into the wilderness and get on his knees and command heaven—God is in that! The Christian who is willing to put himself in a place where he must get the answer from God and God alone—the Lord is in that! But there is no use trying to cover up the fact that there is a great deal of praying being done among us that does not amount to anything—it never brings anything back! It is like sending a farmer into the field without a plow. Little wonder that the work of God stands still!” ^[1]

Graham Cooke wrote in Crafted Prayers that we often fail in prayer because we immediately ask for our desires for the situation: heal this disease, fill this need, save this marriage. When those things aren’t forthcoming, we ask why God didn’t do what we want. The problem, Cooke says, is that we didn’t first seek to know what God wanted. There are two ways to learn what that is: pray for God to reveal His will in the situation and look to Scripture for the answer. When we know what God wants, we can pray in faith. When we fall short of that, our prayers fall short of heaven.

One time when the disciples failed to drive out a demon, they asked Jesus why they were unsuccessful. He said, “Because of your little faith… For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” If your prayers aren’t moving mountains, examine your faith.

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^[1] A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Evenings with Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2015), 304.

Built Upon Sand

Jesus’ story of two builders is well known. One built on the solid rock and the other built on sand. When the storm came, the house on the rock stood, but the house on the sand collapsed. There are several interesting ways we can apply the lesson of this story.

The cliché, the sands of time, is meant to picture time like sand flowing through an hourglass. Those who deny God’s singular role in creation have attempted to convince us that over time, a very, very long time, all the complexities of our universe came into being by chance occurrence. All true scientists who have no philosophical axe to grind now realize that explanation of the origin of all things is impossible. They have discovered that the things we see are so incredibly complex and interwoven that no amount of time and chance can explain them. The evolution house built on the sands of time has collapsed.

The Jewish religious leaders in Jesus’ day had built their hopes for Messiah on the sand of their traditions. Jesus told them they searched the Scriptures but missed Him. He said they valued their traditions above the Word. The same kind of thing happens today. Some people tend to hang on every word some popular preacher speaks while never checking to see if the message agrees with what the Bible teaches. The Bereans were commended because even though they heard from an Apostle, they went home and searched the Scriptures, the rock of truth, to see if he was telling them the truth or throwing sand.

We might be prone to build sandcastles when it comes to our understanding of the Bible. A deep study of the Word can pay rich rewards. For example, there is a curious incident recorded in three of the Gospels about a woman with a chronic ailment who thought if she touched Jesus’ robe, she would be healed. Matthew records the incident: “Just then, a woman who had suffered from bleeding for twelve years approached from behind and touched the end of his robe, for she said to herself, ‘If I can just touch his robe, I’ll be made well.’ Jesus turned and saw her. ‘Have courage, daughter,’ he said. ‘Your faith has saved you.’ And the woman was made well from that moment.”

 We moderns wonder where such a ridiculous idea came from. Because historical context is an essential part of the bedrock of proper biblical interpretation, it must always be considered. In this case, a deeper knowledge of Jewish thought in the first century reveals that devout Jews believed that the holy things of God could literally transmit God’s holiness to others by touching them. This was one of the reasons for the strict regulations regarding temple fixtures and utensils. Noone but the priests were allowed to touch them, and the priests were not allowed to take them from the temple.

Consider what happened to Uzzah when David was taking the ark of the covenant back to Israel. Uzzah touched the holy ark and was instantly stuck dead by God. God had told Moses to make provisions for carrying the ark, and Uzzah violated them. It is obvious that much of the record we have concerning God’s dealing with Israel is meant to stress His holiness – His separateness from His creation. If we build our theology on a foundation made weak by lack of biblical knowledge, our house is bound to collapse at some point. As Uzzah learned, you don’t want to mess with a holy God.

Another example of houses built on sand is friendships built on other than heart-to-heart ties. Paul warns believers not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Here is A.W. Tozer on the subject: “Even though radically different from each other, two persons may enjoy the closest friendship for a lifetime; for it is not a requisite of friendship that the participants be alike in all things; it is enough that they be alike at the points where their personalities touch. Harmony is likeness at points of contact, and friendship is likeness where hearts merge. [Italics mine]

“For this reason, the whole idea of the divine-human friendship is logical enough and entirely credible. The infinite God and the finite man can merge their personalities in the tenderest, most satisfying friendship. In such relationship there is no idea of equality; only of likeness where the heart of man meets the heart of God! This likeness is possible because God at the first made man in His own image and is now remaking men in the image that was lost by sin.”

As Tozer points out, it is not just our human friendships that cry out for heart connections; our relationship with God must be essentially heart-to-heart. Throughout the Old Testament and often in the New, the heart is referred to as the deepest part of our human self.  The Apostle Paul expands our understanding of who we are by explaining that the Spirit of God speaks to our human spirit after it has been reborn or made alive. Heart-to-heart becomes spirit-to-Spirit for Paul. He constantly admonishes believers to walk in, be led by, pray in, sing in the spirit [or Spirit]. Jesus supports this reality telling the Samaritan woman that God desires those who will worship Him “in spirit and in truth.”

When Jesus told the parable of the two builders, His context was centered on hearing His word. He said, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them [italics mine] will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” As James said later, it is the doing, not the hearing only that builds on the right foundation. Paul cautions us that everything pertaining to this world is temporary and will one day be destroyed, whereas things of the spirit – built on the Rock – remain forever. Check your life to see what it is built on.

Related posts: Read This Or Die; Light Shining in Darkness; Through the Bible in Seven Minutes; The Presence of God

Has Your Messiah Come?

The record of the Old Testament flows consistently from the Garden to the Cross. The words of God to the fallen Adam and Eve promised One who would crush the serpent’s head, the serpent who had tempted them to sin, the serpent who would continually tempt God’s people. Knowing what was coming, the serpent, later identified as the devil himself, went to work distorting God’s word as he had in the Garden. From Cain to Caiaphas, God’s sworn enemy set out to darken people’s understanding of who Messiah would be so that they would not recognize Him when He came.

The Gospel of John proves that this undermining tactic worked. John says in the opening of his gospel: “He came to His own [things], but His own [people] did not receive Him.” How could the very people to whom Messiah came after years of expectant waiting and hundreds of prophecies miss the One when He came? The explanation is found in Paul’s words to the Ephesians. He said people were: “Darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart.” God’s enemy, the enemy of our souls, had done his job masterfully; the ones who should have known Him best missed His coming because they had been deceived just like their first parents had.

The Herodians and the Sadducees cherry-picked the Scriptures to find a military leader who would put Israel back on the political map. The Pharisees read the prophets differently; they longed for the ultimate law giver – the prophet like Moses who would congratulate them for their artificial obedience. The Zealots elevated anyone who would raise a sword against Rome as their Messiah. Of course, there were a few Jews who studied the Scriptures and waited patiently for God to reveal His Messiah to them. Among these were John’s parents, Mary (of course), Simeon, and Anna who are named in Luke’s Gospel.

Doubtless there were others as evidenced by the willingness of some to drop everything and follow Jesus when He began preaching the Kingdom of Heaven come. However, even these misunderstood what the Messiah had come to do. Judas Iscariot, who may have had Zealot sympathies, perhaps hoped to goad Jesus into action by bringing an armed group to arrest Him. James and John, the Sons of Thunder, wanted Jesus to exact immediate justice on an unbelieving town. Even after His sacrificial death and miraculous resurrection, His closest followers asked Him if He was now going to institute the Kingdom He had been preaching about. Jesus might have replied that He had already, that they misunderstood Him, but He simply told them to wait.

It is not hard to understand why people steeped in Old Testament prophecy would expect a conquering Messiah riding a war horse and wielding the sword of the Lord. There are pictures like that scattered throughout the scrolls of ancient Scripture. There are also images of a lawgiver who would reign in righteousness. Likewise, there are pictures of a Suffering Servant who appears to endure disgraceful treatment. This last picture was ignored in favor of the more exciting, more encouraging one of the conquering hero. What those ancients missed was the fact that both pictures were accurate; they didn’t see that they were separated by a period of time yet to be measured. It is as if they raised their prophetic telescope above the nearer image to focus on the farther one.

There are Christians today who may be suffering from a similar mistaken focus. They see the Suffering Messiah who bore their sin, but they raise the prophetic telescope above what happened within a generation after His resurrection. They may be placing too much emphasis on their own personal escape from judgment and ignoring the judgment God brought on His people Israel. The consistent warning to Israel throughout the prophets was that God would execute judgment against them if they persisted in their disobedience. This judgment was to be followed by the institution of God’s kingdom ruled by His righteous Servant. Few people will argue that what the Romans did in 70 A.D. was not God’s judgment. As He had in the past, God used a secular government to accomplish His will for His people.

The visions of Daniel clearly portray the tromping of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome through the future of the “beautiful land.” The prophets never pulled any punches when describing what the invading nations would do to Israel. Although the apocalyptic language is poetic with mountains tumbling and stars falling, it names the players and starts the game clock which runs right up until Rome makes God’s final statement against apostasy: the final destruction of His physical temple on earth. Those with improperly aimed prophetic telescopes scan right past this obvious culmination of biblical history and look for a messianic coming that is already past.

Does any of this matter? It certainly mattered to the Jews who crucified their Messiah. It mattered to scores of people in the past who declared that Jesus had returned when, apparently, He hadn’t. It matters to believers today who treat Christ’s saving grace as if it was their personal ticket to a future millennial kingdom without considering their responsibilities in the already-not-yet Kingdom of Heaven Jesus announced. It has been said some people are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good. I would say some people are so millennial kingdom minded they are no good in the present kingdom.

It is no surprise that the vast majority of people who are waiting for a millennial kingdom are Americans. The spirit of rugged individualism and a sense entitlement are so ingrained in our thinking that we imagine God’s cosmic plan is focused on us. In our pampered state, it is easy to forget that the majority of people outside our borders live in extreme poverty. Remember Jesus’ words about the difficulty the rich face entering the Kingdom of Heaven. Remember that it is the poor who inherit the earth. We may miss the real meaning of Messiah’s message that resonates so clearly with the rest of the world. If your Messiah has come, and His kingdom is now-not-later, you should be begging to know what service your King requires. Here! Now!

Related posts: It’s Not All About You; Bringing the Kingdom; Why Heaven Matters; Binding Satan