Morning and Evening: Daily Readings
by C. H. Spurgeon
Monday Morning, August 29
Have mercy upon me, O God.
Psalm 51:1
When Dr. Carey was suffering from a dangerous illness, the enquiry was made, If this sickness should prove fatal, what passage would you select as the text for your funeral sermon? He replied, Oh, I feel that such a poor sinful creature is unworthy to have anything said about him; but if a funeral sermon must be preached, let it be from the words, 'Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.' In the same spirit of humility he directed in his will that the following inscription and nothing more should be cut on his gravestone:--
William Carey, Born August 17th, 1761: Died - - A wretched, poor, and helpless worm On thy kind arms I fall.
Only on the footing of free grace can the most experienced and most honoured of the saints approach their God. The best of men are conscious above all others that they are men at the best. Empty boats float high, but heavily laden vessels are low in the water; mere professors can boast, but true children of God cry for mercy upon their unprofitableness. We have need that the Lord should have mercy upon our good works, our prayers, our preachings, our alms-givings, and our holiest things. The blood was not only sprinkled upon the doorposts of Israel's dwelling houses, but upon the sanctuary, the mercy-seat, and the altar, because as sin intrudes into our holiest things, the blood of Jesus is needed to purify them from defilement. If mercy be needed to be exercised towards our duties, what shall be said of our sins? How sweet the remembrance that inexhaustible mercy is waiting to be gracious to us, to restore our backslidings, and make our broken bones rejoice!
Evening, August 29
All the days of his separation shall he eat nothing that is made of the vine tree, from the kernels even to the husk.
Numbers 6:4
Nazarites had taken, among other vows, one which debarred them from the use of wine. In order that they might not violate the obligation, they were forbidden to drink the vinegar of wine or strong liquors, and to make the rule still more clear, they were not to touch the unfermented juice of grapes, nor even to eat the fruit either fresh or dried. In order, altogether, to secure the integrity of the vow, they were not even allowed anything that had to do with the vine; they were, in fact, to avoid the appearance of evil. Surely this is a lesson to the Lord's separated ones, teaching them to come away from sin in every form, to avoid not merely its grosser shapes, but even its spirit and similitude. Strict walking is much despised in these days, but rest assured, dear reader, it is both the safest and the happiest. He who yields a point or two to the world is in fearful peril; he who eats the grapes of Sodom will soon drink the wine of Gomorrah. A little crevice in the sea-bank in Holland lets in the sea, and the gap speedily swells till a province is drowned. Worldly conformity, in any degree, is a snare to the soul, and makes it more and more liable to presumptuous sins. Moreover, as the Nazarite who drank grape juice could not be quite sure whether it might not have endured a degree of fermentation, and consequently could not be clear in heart that his vow was intact, so the yielding, temporizing Christian cannot wear a conscience void of offence, but must feel that the inward monitor is in doubt of him. Things doubtful we need not doubt about; they are wrong to us. Things tempting we must not dally with, but flee from them with speed. Better be sneered at as a Puritan than be despised as a hypocrite. Careful walking may involve much self-denial, but it has pleasures of its own which are more than a sufficient recompense.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
continued ........
A Sovereign and Personal God
by D. A. Carson
Genesis 50:19-20
After the death of their father, Jacob's sons approach Joseph and beg him not to take revenge on them for having sold him into slavery. Joseph's response is instructive: "Don't be afraid. Am 1 in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives."
We shall best understand what Joseph says if we carefully observe what he does not say. Joseph does not say, "Look, miserable sinners, you hatched and executed this wicked plot, and if it hadn't been for God coming in at the last moment, it would have gone far worse for me than it did." Nor does he say, "God's intention was to send me down to Egypt with first-class treatment, but you wretched reprobates threw a wrench into his plans and caused me a lot of suffering."
What Joseph says is that in one and the same event the brothers intended evil and God intended good. God's sovereignty in the event, issuing in the plan to save millions of people from starvation during the famine years, does not reduce the brothers' evil; their evil plot does not make God contingent. Both God's sovereignty and human responsibility are assumed to be true.
2 Samuel 24
We have already mentioned that God in his anger incites David to number the people, and then when David performs this proÂhibited action David is conscience-stricken and must ultimately choose one of three severe judgments that God metes out. The result is that seventy thousand people die.
It is important to remember that the Bible insists that God is good, perfectly good. "He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he" (Deut. 32:4). "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). Heaven echoes with the praise, "Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy" (Rev. 15:3-4).
Yet on the other hand, there are numerous passages, like this one in 2 Samuel 24, where God is presented as in some way behind the evil. The evil does not just happen, leaving God to splutter, "Whoops! I missed that one; it sort of slipped by. Sorry about that." Thus God sends certain people a "strong delusion" so that they will believe the great lie (2 Thess. 2:11); he seduces Ahab's prophets, so that their prophecies are rubbish (1 Kings 22:21ff.); ultimately he stands behind Job's sufferings. The story of Job is important when we reflect on 2 Samuel 24 and God's incitement of David to sin by taking a census. The reason is that in 1 ChroniÂcles 21, where the story is retold in a slightly different way, it is Satan and not God who incites David to number the people. Some readers think this is an intolerable contradiction. Certainly the emphasis is different, but it is not a contradiction. Similarly in Job, one could either say that Satan afflicts Job, or that God afflicts Job: the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Of course, this introduces all sorts of difficult questions about secondary causality and the like. My sole point at the moment, however, is that God is presented as sovereign over David's life, including this particular sin in his life, while David himself is not thereby excused: David is still responsible for his actions. Both propositions are assumed to be true.
Isaiah 10:5-19
This passage is typical of many in the Prophets. God addresses the crudest superpower of Isaiah's day: "Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath! I send him against a godless nation, I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets" (10:5-6). The context makes clear that the people against whom God is sending the Assyrians is none other than his own covenant community. God is angry with his people for their sin, and so he is sending the Assyrians against them. Even so, God here pronounces a woe on the Assyrians in connection with this mission. Why? Because they think they are doing this all by themselves. They think Samaria and Jerusalem are just like the capital cities of the pagan nations they have already overthrown. Therefore when the Lord has finished his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem (that is, when he has finished punishing them by using the Assyrians), he will say, "I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes" (10:12). "Does the ax raise itself above him who swings it, or the saw boast against him who uses it?... Therefore, the Lord, the LORD Almighty, will send a wasting disease upon his sturdy warriors; under his pomp a fire will be kindled like a blazing flame" (10:15-16).
Here we find God using a military superpower as if it were nothing more than a tool –an ax or a saw – to accomplish his purposes of bitter judgment. But that does not mean the Assyrians are not responsible for their actions. Their "willful pride" and their "haughty look" and above all their arrogance in thinking they have made themselves strong are all deeply offensive to the Almighty, and he holds them to account. They may be tools in his hands, but that does not absolve them of responsibility.
John 6:37-40
In the context of the "Bread of Life" discourse, Jesus declares, "All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away" (6:37). This means, on the one hand, that all of the elect, all of God's chosen people, are viewed as a gift the Father presents to the Son, and, on the other, that once they have been given to Jesus, Jesus for his part will certainly keep them in: he will never drive them away. That this is the meaning of the last part of verse 37 becomes especially clear when we follow the argument into the next few verses. "I will never drive [them] away," Jesus says, "for I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day" (6:37-39).
Thus God is seen as so sovereign in the process of salvation that the people of God are said to be given as a gift by the Father to the Son, while the Son preserves them to the last day when (he promises) he will raise them up. Nevertheless, this does not make these privileged people automata. The next verse can describe these same people in terms of what they do: "For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day" (6:40).
Both of our propositions are assumed to be true, and neither is allowed to diminish the other.
Philippians 2:12-13
After powerfully presenting the unique example of Jesus Christ (2:6-11), Paul writes, "Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose" (2:12-13). The meaning of these verses has been disputed, and this is not the place to engage the disputants. On the face of it, however, Paul's meaning may become a little clearer if we recognize what he does not say.
Paul does not tell his readers to work out their own salvation, since God has done his bit and now it is all up to them. Still less does he tell them that God does everything, so that all they need is to become supremely passive: "Let go and let God" or some equivalent slogan. Rather, he tells them to work out their own salvation precisely because it is God working in them, both at the level of their will and at the level of their actions ("to will and to act according to his good purpose").
Not only is the truth of our two propositions assumed, but God's sovereignty, extending so far that it includes our will and our action, functions as an incentive to our own industry in the spiritual arena.
Acts 18:9-10
A similar argument is displayed in Acts 18, where God's election becomes an incentive to evangelism. Paul arrives in Corinth, doubtless a little discouraged from the rough treatment he has sufÂfered as he has made his way south through Macedonia into Achaia. Now, in a night vision, the Lord speaks to him: "Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city" (18:9-10). The prospect of the conversion of many people, a prospect ensured by God's purposes in election, is what gives Paul stamina and perseverance as he settles down in Corinth for extended ministry.
I first understood something of that argument when I was growing up and beginning to ask difficult questions. My father was a church-planter in Quebec. At the time, there was very little fruit. An exceedingly prosperous French-speaking evangelical church in Quebec during that period might have had twenty or thirty core people. Many is the time my father preached to a crowd of twenty. At one point, several Americans who had proved remarkably effective in ministry in French West Africa came to Quebec to look the situation over. One or two managed to convey the subtle message (without, of course, being so crass as to articulate it), "Shove over, you guys, and we'll show you how it's done."
Not one of those missionaries stayed. All left within months. I was old enough to ask my father why none of them remained to help. He quietly explained that they had served in areas where they had known great blessing, and it was hard for them to envisage working in an area where there seemed to be such dearth. I pressed my father further: why then did he stay? Why shouldn't he go some place where the power of the Lord was abundant? Why commit yourself to working where there is so much to discourage, and so little fruit? He gently rounded on me: "I stay," he said, "because I believe with all my heart that God has many people in this place."2
Of course Dad could have gone to his grave without seeing any of this fruit. But in the Lord's mercy, the harvest began in 1972. From a base of fewer than fifty evangelical churches, many hundreds sprang up. Where a major evangelistic effort in a metropolitan area might have drawn a few hundred people to hear the gospel, thousands began to attend. But the point is that this is merely another illustration of what Paul understood in Acts 18:9-10: God's sovereignty in election, far from discouraging evangelism, becomes an incentive to get on with the task. Once again, both of our propositions are assumed to be true.
Acts 4:23-30
This passage in Acts is the most revealing of the seven I have briefly discussed.
As it opens, Peter and John, freshly released from arrestâ€"an arrest that is an omen of worse persecution to come report on their experiences to "their own people" (4:23), that is, to Christians living in Jerusalem. Their response is to pray. They begin their prayers with an affirmation of God's sovereignty: "Sovereign Lord . . . you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them" (4:24). Not only do they confess God as the Creator of the universe, they quote a psalm that affirms God's continuing sovereignty over the nations, even when those nations rebel against him: "The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One" (4:26, citing Ps. 2:2). In this psalm, God is not flummoxed by such opposition: "The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them" (Ps. 2:4).
The Christians praying in Jerusalem doubtless remember that context. Even so, they do not quote the entire psalm. Having mentioned the kings of the earth and the rulers gathering together to oppose the Lord and his Anointed One, they think of the most shocking instance of this rebellion against the God who created them: "Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed" (Acts 4:27). The early Christians understood that the most wretched fulfillment of Psalm 2 lies in the events leading up to the cross. An ugly conspiracy to pervert justice and gain political advantage was nothing other than a conspiracy against God himself, and against his "anointed one," his Messiah.
But the prayer of these Christians does not stop there. They realistically outline the blame to be laid at the feet of Herod, Pontius Pilate, and various Gentile and Jewish authorities, and then they add, "They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen" (4:28).
Even brief reflection demonstrates that any other alternative destroys the fabric of the Christian faith. Suppose God had not been sovereign over the conspiracy that brought Jesus to Calvary. Would we not have to conclude that the cross was a kind of after thought in the mind of God? Are we to think that God's intenÂtion was to do something quite different, but then, because these rebels fouled up his plan, he did the best he could, and the result was Jesus' atoning death on the cross? All of Scripture cries against the suggestion. Then should we conclude, with some modern theÂologians, that if God is as sovereign as the early Christians manifestly believed him to be so sovereign in fact that the conspirators merely did what God's "power and will had decided beforehand should happen" then the conspirators cannot reasonably be blamed? But that too destroys Christianity. The reason Jesus goes to the cross is to pay the penalty due to sinners; the assumption is that these sinners bear real moral accountability, real moral guilt for which a penalty has been pronounced. If human beings are not held responsible for this act, why should they be held responsible for any act? And if they are not held responsible, then why should God have sent his Anointed One to die in their place?
God is absolutely sovereign, yet his sovereignty does not diminÂish human responsibility and accountability; human beings are morally responsible creatures, yet this fact in no way jeopardizes the sovereignty of God. At Calvary, all Christians have to conÂcede the truth of these two statements, or they give up their claim to be Christians.
........ continued ........
| You are currently subscribed to daily-devotional as: bnb@applelodge.com Add chs.m-e@juno.com to your email address book to ensure delivery. Forward to a Friend | Manage Subscription | Subscribe | Unsubscribe |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment