How Do We Make the Huge Decisions in Life?

With Calvinism and courage.

Calvinism says: The God presented to me in the Bible is so massive, so much more life-encompassing than the puny little super-god I could have conceived of on my own, that he determines the roll of the dice in Las Vegas (Prov 16:33) and the choices Obama makes (Prov 21:1) and 9/11 (Amos 3:6) and even human sin (2 Sam 24:1ff)--including the Sin of all sins, the murder of the only person who ever lived without deserving to be murdered (Acts 2:22-23; 4:27-28). This is a God so great, so magnificently in control, that he can tell us Jesus will be betrayed as it has been decreed from heaven and, in the same breath, pronounce woe on the one by whom he is betrayed (Luke 22:22).

Courage says: Game time. Let's go. Not sure what exactly is best here, but I'm going to trust God and take a leap. Life is short. Death is coming. Risk is good. God is big. Failure is likely. But even that can only be for my good. I'm not sure this parachute is going to open: I'm jumping anyway. Enough waiting. Enough pondering. It's time to kill the fierce instinct of self-preservation that keeps whispering to me to play it safe.

At the forks-in-the-road of our lives, these are the two things we need: Calvinism and courage. Calvinism without courage is robot-ism, vacation-ism, paralyzed lethargy. Courage without Calvinism is frantic, scurrying, anguished desperation.

Calvinism says, Relax, he's running the show. Courage says, Just take a risk and do something.

Big theology, big guts.

Do you have a decision to make in life? Trust God and plunge in, one way or the other. Go for it. What honors God more: days and weeks of delayed decision-making as you 'pray about it,' or getting off the couch and taking a risk? It's not a strict either-or, of course. Let's certainly bathe our big decisions in prayer and seek the wisdom of others. But having done this, just do something. Jump. Do it.

Yes, it might be painful. But I would like to lie on a hospital bed, breathing my last, in 50 years (or next week), and not wonder what might have happened had I taken that risk. I would like to have more scars, from taking more risks. Wouldn't you?

After all, he bears scars from taking the ultimate risk for us.

Adding to Our Sins While Repenting of Them

Spurgeon, writing reflectively on Ephesians 2:8-9--

What does faith exclude? Well, I am sure it excludes boasting. 'He that believeth is not condemned' (John 3:18). Oh, if it said, 'He that works is not condemned,' then you and I might boast in unlimited quantity. . . .

No, Lord, if I am not condemned, it is Your free grace, for I have deserved to be condemned a thousand times since I sat down to write this. When I am on my knees and I am not condemned, I am sure it must be sovereign grace, for even when I am praying, I deserve to be condemned. Even when we are repenting, we are sinning, and adding to our sins while we are repenting of them. . . .

Our best performances are so stained with sin that it is hard to know whether they are good works or bad works. . . . Ah, then, we cannot boast! Be gone, pride! Be gone! Quit boasting, Christian. Live humbly before your God, and never let a word of self-congratulation escape your lips.

--Charles Spurgeon, Faith (Whitaker House 1995), 88

The Incarnation

'And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . .'

'Dwelt' here is the verb form of the noun skene, tent or tabernacle. OT-sensitive readers of John’s Gospel would immediately think of the portable temple, the tabernacle, transferred throughout the wilderness in their wanderings between Egypt and the promised land.

What was a tabernacle? What was a temple?

Unlike some other elements of Jewish faith, a temple was not unique to Judaism. Virtually every ancient religion had a temple of some kind. The temple, for Judaism and other religions, was a tangible, physical location where the immortal met the mortal, where the supernatural and the natural collided, where the eternal and the temporal intersected, where the sacred and the profane stood face to face. The temple was where the divine and the fleshly could meet--never to mix, but to come into brief contact with one another.

But at the center of all human history, the divine and the fleshly did mix. 'And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.' Rumbling through the OT was the development of the theme of the presence of God among his people, a presence centered in the most sacred of Jewish places, the tabernacle and then the temple. The tabernacling presence of God is ultimately clinched in a myriad of powerful ways in Revelation.

It was here in this movable temple that God dwelt among his people (Exod 25:8). It was here that glory rested. Fellowship with God briefly resumed. In a sense, the tabernacle was a miniature Garden of Eden—complete with a sky-blue ceiling and a lampstand decorated like a flourishing tree. In fact, the Hebrew word that corresponds to the Greek word skene was shekan, from which we get our language of Shekinah, the glory of God that became so terrifyingly palpable in the temple. Notice then what John says in the rest of verse 14: 'And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory.' And in Isaiah 40:6-8, glory, flesh, and God's word had already been clustered together, but there it was to erect an absolute antithesis between human flesh and God's word.

In 1 Kings 8:27 Solomon offered a prayer of dedication to the temple, wondering aloud at the notion that an earthly building could contain the God of the heavens. Jonathan Edwards rightly reflected on this verse with a handwritten note in the margin of his Bible:

If it was a thing so very wonderful in Solomon’s eyes, such a marvelous instance of condescension for God to dwell on earth in the manner he did in the tabernacle and temple, how much a greater and more wonderful thing was it for him to dwell with us as our Immanuel in the manner that he did in the human nature of Christ.

In the OT the supernatural collided with the natural in a physical building, where, with severely limited access, humans could meet with God in his glory. In the NT the supernatural collided with the natural in a physical body, where, with unlimited access, humans could meet with God in his glory. The OT temple repelled the sick, deformed and unclean. The NT temple attracted the sick, deformed and unclean.

We no longer enter into a temple of wood and stone to meet with God; God has entered into a temple of flesh and blood to meet with us.

What a Savior.

Resurgence 2010-2011

Justin Holcomb and the good men in Seattle look toward the coming year of ministry at the Resurgence.

A Powerful Magnet (Col. 3:1)

'If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above . . .'

Robert Jamieson, Andrew R. Fausset and David Brown, writing in 1884:

The contrast is between the believer's former state, alive to the world but dead to God, and his present state, dead to the world but alive to God; and between the earthly abode of the unbeliever and the heavenly abode of the believer. We are already seated there in Him as our Head. . . . Of ourselves we can no more ascend than a bar of iron lift itself up from the earth. But the love of Christ is a powerful magnet to draw us up.

--Commentary: Critical, Practical and Explanatory on the Old and New Testaments (Toldeo, Ohio: Jerome B. James, 1884), 136-37

HT: Jim Lane

Showing, Hiding, and the Sermon on the Mount

'. . . let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works . . .' --Matthew 5:16

'Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them . . .' --Matthew 6:1

How do the two fit together?

John Stott quotes A. B. Bruce from 100 years ago:

Bruce sums it up well when he writes that we are to 'show when tempted to hide' and 'hide when tempted to show.'

--A. B. Bruce, Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (London: Hodder, 1897), 116; quoted in John Stott, The Sermon on the Mount (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000), 69

HT: Stacey Ortlund

Our Fatal Love Affair with the Law

Grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralizing is out of the game . . . until our fatal love affair with the law is over--until, finally and for good, our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. As long as we leave, in our dramatizations of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves.

Restore to us, Preacher, the comfort of merit and demerit. Prove for us that there is at least something we can do, that we are still, at whatever dim recess of our nature, the masters of our relationships. Tell us, Prophet, that in spite of all our nights of losing, there will yet be one redeeming card of our very own. . . . But do not preach us grace. It will not do to split the pot evenly at 4 a.m. and break out the Chivas Regal. We insist on being reckoned with. Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance.

Lord, let your servants depart in the peace of their responsibility. If it is not too much to ask, send us to bed with some few shreds of self-respect to congratulate ourselves upon. But if that is too hard, leave us at least the consolation of our self-loathing. Only do not force us free. What have we ever done but try as best we could? How have we so hurt you, even by failing, that you should now turn on us and say that none of it makes any difference, not even our sacred guilt? We have played this game of yours, and it has cost us.

Where do you get off suggesting a drink at a time like this?

--Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace (Eerdmans 1997), 7; italics original

Luther: Why the World is Damned

Let this be your one sure guide: Whatever you have to buy from the pope is neither good nor from God. For what God gives is not only given without charge, but the whole world is punished and damned for not being willing to receive it as a free gift. I mean the gospel and God's work.

--'To the Christian Nobility,' in Luther's Works, 44:189

The Shock of Human History

All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades
when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever. (Isa. 40:6-8)

Isaiah contrasts human 'flesh' with the divine 'word.' Flesh falters, the word abides. Absolute antithesis.

In John 1:14, however, expounding the mystery of the incarnation, the two are overlaid--'The word became flesh and dwelt among us.' (HT: Martin Hengel, p. 269 of this book)

C. S. Lewis called the incarnation 'the humiliation of myth into fact, of God into Man.' He wrote: 'what is everywhere and always, imageless and ineffable, only to be glimpsed in dream and symbol and the acted poetry of ritual becomes small, solid--no bigger than a man who can lie asleep in a rowing boat on the Lake of Galilee.' ('Is Theology Poetry?' in The Weight of Glory, 99-100)

Take Your Pick

We’re not just a bumbling bunch of preachers who can’t talk and all we’re doing is baptizing babies. I deal with the White House. I deal with Tony Blair. I deal with presidents around this world. I pastor a multimillion-dollar congregation.

--'Bishop' Eddie Long, Christian preacher, describing his ministry to a newspaper in 2005

My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

--the Apostle Paul, Christian preacher, describing his ministry in 1 Corinthians 2