Morning and Evening: Daily Readings
by C. H. Spurgeon
Tuesday Morning, August 30
Wait on the Lord.
Psalm 27:14
It may seem an easy thing to wait, but it is one of the postures which a Christian soldier learns not without years of teaching. Marching and quick-marching are much easier to God's warriors than standing still. There are hours of perplexity when the most willing spirit, anxiously desirous to serve the Lord, knows not what part to take. Then what shall it do? Vex itself by despair? Fly back in cowardice, turn to the right hand in fear, or rush forward in presumption? No, but simply wait. Wait in prayer, however. Call upon God, and spread the case before him; tell him your difficulty, and plead his promise of aid. In dilemmas between one duty and another, it is sweet to be humble as a child, and wait with simplicity of soul upon the Lord. It is sure to be well with us when we feel and know our own folly, and are heartily willing to be guided by the will of God. But wait in faith. Express your unstaggering confidence in him; for unfaithful, untrusting waiting, is but an insult to the Lord. Believe that if he keep you tarrying even till midnight, yet he will come at the right time; the vision shall come and shall not tarry. Wait in quiet patience, not rebelling because you are under the affliction, but blessing your God for it. Never murmur against the second cause, as the children of Israel did against Moses; never wish you could go back to the world again, but accept the case as it is, and put it as it stands, simply and with your whole heart, without any self-will, into the hand of your covenant God, saying, Now, Lord, not my will, but thine be done. I know not what to do; I am brought to extremities, but I will wait until thou shalt cleave the floods, or drive back my foes. I will wait, if thou keep me many a day, for my heart is fixed upon thee alone, O God, and my spirit waiteth for thee in the full conviction that thou wilt yet be my joy and my salvation, my refuge and my strong tower.
Evening, August 30
Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed.
Jeremiah 17:14
I have seen his ways, and will heal him.
Isaiah 57:18
It is the sole prerogative of God to remove spiritual disease. Natural disease may be instrumentally healed by men, but even then the honour is to be given to God who giveth virtue unto medicine, and bestoweth power unto the human frame to cast off disease. As for spiritual sicknesses, these remain with the great Physician alone; he claims it as his prerogative, I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal; and one of the Lord's choice titles is Jehovah-Rophi, the Lord that healeth thee. I will heal thee of thy wounds, is a promise which could not come from the lip of man, but only from the mouth of the eternal God. On this account the psalmist cried unto the Lord, O Lord, heal me, for my bones are sore vexed, and again, Heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee. For this, also, the godly praise the name of the Lord, saying, He healeth all our diseases. He who made man can restore man; he who was at first the creator of our nature can new create it. What a transcendent comfort it is that in the person of Jesus dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily! My soul, whatever thy disease may be, this great Physician can heal thee. If he be God, there can be no limit to his power. Come then with the blind eye of darkened understanding, come with the limping foot of wasted energy, come with the maimed hand of weak faith, the fever of an angry temper, or the ague of shivering despondency, come just as thou art, for he who is God can certainly restore thee of thy plague. None shall restrain the healing virtue which proceeds from Jesus our Lord. Legions of devils have been made to own the power of the beloved Physician, and never once has he been baffled. All his patients have been cured in the past and shall be in the future, and thou shalt be one among them, my friend, if thou wilt but rest thyself in him this night.
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A Sovereign and Personal God
by D. A. Carson
Mystery and the Nature of God
If we agree, then, that the Bible frequently affirms or exemplifies the truth of these two statements, where do we go from there?
First, we refuse to think of these two statements as embracing a deep contradiction. Granted there is mystery in them, and we shall have to explore just where that mystery lies. But if we are careful about semantics, we can avoid setting up these two statements as if they were mutually exclusive. Christianity is not interested in tempting you to believe contradictory nonsense. It invokes mystery now and then; it does not invoke nonsense.
That means, for instance, that we must be careful with the notion of freedom. Many Christians today think that if human beings are to be thought of as morally responsible creatures, they must be free to choose, to believe, to disobey, and so forth. But what does "freedom" mean? Sometimes without thinking about it, we assume that such freedom must entail the power to work outside God's sovereignty. Freedom, we think, involves absolute power to be contrary that is, the power to break any constraint, so that there is no necessity in the choice we make. If we are constrained to choose a certain option, if what we decide is in fact utterly inevitable, then how could it be ours? And if not truly ours, how can we be held morally accountable?
Yet the passages we have just surveyed cry out in protest. To go no further than the last example: Herod and Pontius Pilate and the rest conspired together; they did what they wanted to do, even though they did what God's power and will had determined beforeÂhand should be done. That is why many theologians have refused to tie "freedom" to absolute power to act contrary to God's will. They tie it, rather, to desire, to what human beings voluntarily choose. Joseph's brothers did what they wanted to do; Herod and Pilate and the rulers of the Jews did what they wanted to do; the Assyrians did what they wanted to do. In each case, God's sovereignty was operating behind the scenes: the human participants, to use the language of the early Christians, did what God's power and will had decided beforehand should happen. But that did not excuse them. They did what they wanted to do.
The only reason for bringing this up is to insist that our two propositions, as difficult and mysterious as they are, can be made to look silly, even flatly contradictory, if we begin with questionable assumptions and definitions that are not borne out by the Scriptures.
Second, it is vital to see that God does not stand behind good and evil in exactly the same way. There are two positions to avoid: (1) Some suppose that God does not stand in any sense behind evil and (2) others think that God stands behind good and evil in exactly the same way.
In the first case, the thinking is that certain things take place in the universe, namely, every evil event, that are entirely outside God's control. That would mean there is another power, apart from God and outside the domain of God's sovereignty, that challenges him. In philosophy, such a viewpoint is called dualism. In such a universe, it is hard to be sure which side, good or evil, will ultimately win. We have already taken notice of enough texts to be certain that the Bible does not sanction this view of God.
The second view maintains that what God ordains takes place; what he does not ordain does not take place. If both good and evil take place, it can only be because God ordains them both. But if he stands behind good and evil in exactly the same way, that is, if he stands behind them symmetrically, he is entirely amoral. He may be powerful, but he is not good.
The Bible's witness will not let us accept either of these positions. The Bible insists God is sovereign, so sovereign that nothing that takes place in the universe can escape the outermost boundary of his control; yet the Bible insists God is good, unreservedly good, the very standard of goodness. We are driven to conclude that God does not stand behind good and evil in exactly the same way. In other words, he stands behind good and evil asymmetrically. He stands behind good in such a way that the good can ultimately be credited to him; he stands behind evil in such a way that what is evil is inevitably credited to secondary agents and all their malignant effects. They cannot escape his sway, in exactly the same way that Satan has no power over Job without God's sanction; yet God remains mysteriously distant from the evil itself.
I say "mysteriously" because how he does this is mysterious, for reasons still to be explored. In fact, it is the very mysteriousness of his control that prompts not a few biblical writers to wrestle in agony over the problem of evil not only the writer of Job, but Habakkuk, some of the psalmists, and others.
Third, and most importantly, our two propositions concerning God's sovereignty and human responsibility are directly tied to the nature of God. If God were sovereign and nothing more, we might all become Christian fatalists, but it would be hard to carve out a place for human interaction with Deity, a place for human responsibility. If God were personal and no moreâ€"talking with us, responding to us, asking and answering questions it would be easy to understand how human beings are responsible to him, but it would be harder to grasp just how this sort of God could be transcendent, sovereign, omnipotent.
The wonderful truth is that God is both transcendent and personal. He is transcendent: he exists above or beyond time and space, since he existed before the universe was created. From this exalted and scarcely imaginable reach he sovereignly rules over the works of his hands. Yet he is personal: he presents himself to us not as raw power or irresistible force, but as Father, as Lord. When he speaks and issues a command, if I obey I am obeying him; if I disobey, I am disobeying him. All of my most meaningful relationships with God are bound up with the fact that God has disclosed himself to be a person.
Part of our problem is that virtually all that we understand by "personal" is shaped by our experience within time and space. We find it hard to imagine how God can be both transcendent and personal, even though we clearly see that the Bible presents him in just such categories.
So whatever mystery is locked up in our initial pair of statements, it is no more and no less than the mystery of God himself. Christians are prepared to accept certain mysteries. We confess that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God yet there is but one God. Christian thinkers across the ages have taken pains to show how there is no necessary contradiction in such an understanding of the trinitarian character of God, even if there are huge swaths of mystery involved. So also here: God is sovereign and transcendent, and he is personal.
Perhaps it is the way God apparently stands outside time and space that enables him to handle secondary causes the way he does. I do not know. What does time look like to a transcendent God? I do not know. I only know that the Bible speaks of his predestinating power and his foreordination of events, even though these are categories of time. I suppose that if he is to communicate effectively with us, he must graciously stoop to use categories that we can understand. But despite all the mysteries bound up with the nature of God, I perceive, on the basis of Scripture, that he is simultaneously personal and transcendent. He is utterly sovereign over his created order, yet he is nothing less than personal as he deals with me. Sometimes it is more important to worship such a God than to understand him.
............ continued ............
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