Devotional Grist – Page 7

Notes …. Deuteronomy 28 … Cause & Effect World

Historicsim — The view that history is “the whole show” all there is. Historicism is the view that there is no God outside who is governing and sustaining History. According to Historicism, all History is determined by the immutable laws of some kind of Hegelian Historical fate. The dirty secret of Historicism is that it is the Historian who gets to craft those supposedly immutable laws of Historical fate via his written history and so History is read with the Historian as God and so a History textbook is in point of fact a Theology textbook.

History is best understood, not by spatial metaphors (Rise, Decline and Fall — Gibbon) or organic metaphors (born, growing, decaying and dying — Comte, Spengler). These metaphors hide from us the Historian’s unstated religious standard for what constitutes “Rise, Decline, and Fall” or the unstated religious standard for “birth, growing, decaying, and dying.” As such the pagan Historian can sweep the reader along without the reader realizing that he is not reading a book on History but rather a book on Theology where the Historian is God.

All of Scripture, including Deuteronomy 28, teaches us that History is best understood through the lens of divine judgment unto cursing or blessing. History is not a matter of impersonal time plus chance plus circumstance, as the atheist might suggest. History is not, as Historian Arnold Toynbee said, merely, ‘one damn thing after another.’ Rather History is riven with the actions of a personal God who intimately governs the affairs of men. This God … our God, “changes the times and the epochs; He removes kings and establishes kings; He gives wisdom to wise men And knowledge to men of understanding (Daniel 2:21). This God … our God, “raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor. “For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s; on them he has set the world.” (I Samuel 2:8).

And this God … our God has told us that His rule throughout History, though never completely plumbed and understood by men, is a rule that is rational and has a ethical cause and effect relationship. This is what we read in Deuteronomy 28.

Because God’s people have always understood God’s rule as rational and having a ethical cause and effect relationship they have always read History in just such a way. Now, they perhaps were not always correct regarding how they traced out the hand of God’s movement in History but they nonetheless understood History as matter of God’s personal dealing with men.

Examples,

Habakkuk,
The people of Judah had grown wicked, violent, and corrupt. There was no justice in the land that was supposed to be known by God’s name. Habakkuk couldn’t take it anymore. These people shouldn’t be allowed to disregard God’s law. Surely God would set things right.

So Habakkuk pleads with God, asking Him to save Judah from her own wickedness. God answers, but not in the way Habakkuk expected.

To judge Judah’s wickedness, God says He will hand them over to the Chaldeans: a nation even more wicked, violent, and corrupt.

Positive

1 Samuel 7:6, 10b:

³And Samuel said to all the house of Israel, “If you are returning to the Lordwith all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you and direct your heart to the Lord and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” ⁴So the people of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth, and they served the Lord only….⁶And they gathered together to Mizpeh, and drew water, and poured it out before the LORD, and fasted on that day, and said there, We have sinned against the LORD. And Samuel judged the children of Israel in Mizpeh. ⁷Now when the Philistines heard that the people of Israel had gathered at Mizpah, the lords of the Philistines went up against Israel. And when the people of Israel heard of it, they were afraid of the Philistines.

^10BBut the LORD thundered with a great thunder on that day upon the Philistines, and discomfited them; and they were smitten before Israel.

Because of this observation that God’s judgments were rational and could be traced to cause and effect the Puritans developed doctrines that taught,

The sword of God’s justice lies quiet in the scabbard till sin draws it out. Affliction is good for us: ‘It is good for me that I have been afflicted’ (Psa. 119:71). Affliction causes repentance (II Chron. 33:12). The viper, being stricken, casts up its poison; so, God’s rod striking us, we spit away the poison of sin. Affliction betters our grace. Gold is purest, and juniper sweetest, in the fire. Affliction prevents damnation (I Cor. 11:32). “ – Thomas Brooks

And so if they were afflicted or if that which they thought of as punishment would come into their lives they would examine their lives to see if there was sin that need to be repented of in order that God might bless them again.

This mindset was captured by R. L. Dabney, who could say following our great fratricidal war,

“‘A righteous God, for our sins towards Him, has permitted us to be overthrown by our enemies and His.'”

R. L. Dabney

They inherited this mindset from passages like Deuteronomy 28.

Now we are going to spend a little bit of time looking at Deuteronomy 28 but before we do I want to say that there is also danger lying in this mindset that I’ve just teased out. The danger in this mindset is the potential development of a Health, Wealth, and prosperity theology that teaches that those who prosper are automatically seen as blessed by God while those who don’t prosper or who have calamity visit them are being chastened by God. This is certainly too simplistic of a reading of this theology. God often has reasons for afflicting His people that cannot be definitively traced to His displeasure. There are times God brings His severe mercy into our lives in order to grow us in sanctification.

Oh, what owe I to the file, to the hammer, to the furnace of my Lord Jesus! who hath now let me see how good the wheat of Christ is, that goeth through His mill, and His oven, to be made bread for His own table. Grace tried is better than grace, and it is more than grace; it is glory in its infancy. (Samuel Rutherford)

In such times and with such events God is not displeased with us but is working to take us out into the deeps of His unmerited favor to fashion and shape us according to His good pleasure. Sometimes in our lives — maybe even many times, we, like Job, are never given the definitive reasons why God has wounded us and must remain content that God does all things well.

In other times we may be able to look back and understand God’s severe mercy. An example of this is all the woundedness of Joseph. Beaten by his brothers. Sold as a slave. Unjustly accused of adultery. Thrown into the foulest of prisons but finally lifted up in order to be God’s agent to save the Hebrews. Joseph can finally say to his brothers that all of this was a matter of their intending evil but God intending good.

Having given those qualifiers we do understand though that disobedience has consequences.

Here in this passage God is speaking to His people. And here He warns them of the consequences of disobedience to His law.

Note here that God is NOT anti-nomian. He is not against His law. Indeed, so highly does He esteem His law that He places a nexus of cause and effect between the disobedience of His people to His law and their circumstantial demise. This is so true that it should be the case that when we see God’s hand heavy upon us that we should ask ourselves if there is any way in which we have dishonored God and His Law.

Another thing to note here is the corporate and covenantal nature of this chastisement. When God’s people walk contrary to God’s law so that God visits them with calamity it is often the case that there are individuals who are caught up in that covenantal chastisement who were, individually speaking, not direct participants in the corporate covenantal sin. We think here of Daniel and the three faithful Hebrews carried into Babylon as God visited chastisement upon His disobedient people. One can think of Jeremiah, who was faithful to God but carried into exile into Egypt.

Well, as we look at this segment of Scripture particularly we see that,

I.) Cause and Effect Govern God’s people

¹⁵“But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.

As we said at the outset, we do not live in an impersonal time + chance + circumstance world. This world, and our lives are lived before the face of God and so the world is ablaze with the handiwork of God in all our living.

The modern “Christian” man desires to live life as if it is disconnected to this divine cause and effect. We seldom tremble at the notion of sinning against God’s law because we don’t really believe that at a foundational level God governs the universe. We, might believe it at some abstract level, but we don’t really believe, concretely speaking, that God governs the affairs of men in such a way that every wind of sin is responded to by the whirlwind of God. The Scriptures repeatedly remind us that “God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall He also reap.” We have forgotten the basics that this life is both the Theater of God’s grace and the theater of God’s judgment.

When we strip God’s law from this world so that the obedience of it or the disobedience of it has no impact the result is that we lock God out of this world. The world then has no meaning except that which we sovereignly give to it by our own fiat word. If God’s law has no cause and effect impact in this world then we should not be surprised when we see a rash of Ministerial sin which is high handed against God and man. When God’s law is deleted from this world God sovereignty becomes a hollow phrase that nobody really takes seriously.

But here in Deuteronomy we read that God’s cause and effect do govern God’s people. And the ironic thing here is our insistence that God’s law no longer governs us as a Church in all of our living brings upon us the very consequences that we see here.

We note again then that we live in a world of cause and effect. Not man’s cause and effect but Gods. So we see here that the curse is a reality. It cleaves to the sinner, pursues him, chases him down, ruins and and eventually even slays him as we see in ver. 45.

⁵“All these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you till you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that he commanded you.

Now of course some will contend that this is all Christian boogeyman God superstition to which we reply that all of History bears this out and while it might be the case that the wheels of justice grind slowly it also remains true that they grind exceedingly fine. It remains true that we can be sure our sins will find us out.

Mark 7 — The Traditions Of Men … Evil Proceeds from the Heart

³For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders.

⁴And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables.

⁵Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands?

⁶He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

⁷Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

⁸For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do.

⁹And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.

We must realize here that no Old Testament texts call for anyone to wash hands before eating (but see what priests do in Exodus 30:18-21; 40:31). This may be an example of what was called “building a fence around the law.” The idea was that laws would be given that would prevent people from getting near to breaking a law just as a fence insures that no one gets near trespassing on private property.

These “traditions of men” that our Lord Christ keeps referring to here has to do with Jewish source of authority — “the Oral Law” — which would eventually become “The Talmud.” The Talmud is a collection of Rabbinic writings from the first few centuries after Christ, however those Oral Law writings are based upon the kind of Oral traditions mentioned here and reach back long before the time of Christ. In the time of Christ, the Pharisees had already developed a system of Biblical interpretation of the Old Testament that allowed them to violate the letter and spirit of Biblical commandments while fulfilling them in a barely superficial way.

Here Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for adhering to legalistic man-made tradition while neglecting the law of God.

If we examine the Talmud, it becomes obvious that the Jews ignored Christ’s rebuke and continued down the path of wickedness. The Jews have progressed so far down this path that they no longer worship God, but instead worship their own techniques of hairsplitting argumentation. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the following episode from the Talmud (Baba Mezi’a 59b). In this passage, the Rabbi Eliezer is debating with his fellow rabbis about the cleanness of an oven. The other rabbis refuse to accept Eliezer’s argument, even after God himself speaks from heaven on Eliezer’s behalf:

The conviction was that since the Oral Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; they need pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai.

After this debate Rabbi. Nathan met (OT Prophet) Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour (when it was said “pay no attention to a Heavenly voice”)?

Elijah responded, He (God) laughed [with joy], he (God) replied, saying, ‘My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.’

This mindset is codified in the Babylonian Talmud,

“Since God already gave the (Oral) Torah to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai we no longer pay attention to heavenly voices. God must submit to the decisions of a majority vote of rabbis. —

BT Bava Metzia 59b

Rushdoony made it is life’s work to warn about this phenomena,

The self-righteous man makes his own will his law; he replaces the law of God with man-made traditions of his own devising.

~ R. J. Rushdoony

As it pertains to the value of the Oral Traditions, one OT Scholar could say,

The oral traditions of the ignorant rabbis …(give) not the sense of the Mosaic writings. Many of the laws of the Pentateuch would make a strange figure indeed, if we were to interpret them as the Pharisees did, whose exposition, according to Christ’s declaration, in many cases served to inculcate doctrines and precepts directly the reverse of what Moses had taught and commanded… even with regard to Jewish antiquities, prior to the Babylon captivity, the Talmud is … an impure source of information … a book … which appeals only to oral tradition can tell us nothing worthy of credit …”

Johann David Michaelis
Professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages
University of Gottingen
Commentaries on the Laws of Moses

*.) Talmudic Traditions of Men in our Current Laws

God’s law says, as quoted by Christ in Matthew’s Gospel,

Matthew 19:4And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE,5and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH ‘?

This is God’s law. It is the only law we know. It is the law that must be the soil out of which any other law must grow.

This is God’s law, but this is not man’s law. No, instead we are having talmudic type law foisted upon us. We are being forced to governed by the very traditions of men that the Lord Christ so severely denounces in this passage.

The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest. With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.

Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges

Now there exists a fundamental right to marry?

And by what standard are we defining “stigma and injury”? Where does our “basic charter” prohibit the stigma and injury that comes with violating God’s eternal law.

The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era. Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here. But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied. Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.

Anthony Kennedy
Obergefell vs. Hodges

1.) “Rights come not from ancient sources alone” — Clearly a swipe at the Christian Scriptures. So, rights do not come from God alone? Well, what other God is there to give rights if not man?

2.) “Better informed understanding” — those poor poor fools of the past who were not bright enough to have the better informed understanding of this brilliant current generation.

3.) We’re not disparaging you or your beliefs as wrong in the least. We are just saying that you did not have the “better informed understanding” that we have. No disparagement at all here.

4.) So, Christian beliefs as enacted law should not be but the religious beliefs of sodomites should be enacted law?

5.) Is it ever proper to stigmatize or disparage any sexual self identity Mad Anthony? Should we stigmatize Bestiality? Should we disparage Pedophilia? Should we consider Necrophilia taboo? Remember Justice Kennedy you have created a right of self identity in this decision.

And we must mention here the connection between Talmudic thinking and the Supreme Courts decision on Abortion (Roe vs. Wade).

Whereas God recognizes life even before it is in the womb,

^{Jeremiah 1:5}Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Our law, based on Talmud takes a different direction.

According to Michael Hoffman in his “Judaism’s Strange Gods”

“Since the 1973 SCOTUS decision, Roe v. Wade, the standard American abortion procedure is considerably Talmudic in nature, since the Talmud specifically states that if the unborn baby is adduced to be ‘rodef’ (one who threatens), the rabbis authorize that it can be chopped up at any time: ‘They chop up the child in her womb.’ (Mishnah Ohalot 7:6)

Rabbi Meir Abulafia decreed, “So long as the fetus is inside the womb, it is not a nefesh, and the Torah has not pity on it.” Judaic legal scholar Rabbi Isaac Schorr stated, “The sense of the Talmud is that a fetus is not a person.” The Talmud contains the expression, “ubar yerech imo” — the fetus is as the thigh of its mother. (That is to say that the Fetus is deemed to be part of the pregnant woman’s body.)

* .) The “Christ Has Delivered Us From The Law Position” (We are ruled by Grace not law)

Old line Dispensationalism

“The law (which) grace writes in our hearts must answer to the law written in God’s Word.”

John Owen

*.) The “Christ Has Delivered From the General Equity Argument”

R2K

Mosaic Covenant as Covenantus Interruptus

Ruled by Nat’l Law.

Claim that at this point in time when Christ is speaking in defense of God’s law He was living between the ages of the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. The New Covenant had not been enforced yet by His death and so these kinds of Law remained in force. (Tithing of Mint, Dill, and Cummin for example)

However with the death of Christ, so this argument goes, we have a “new and better covenant,” that does not include the OT judicial case law, which was only for OT Israel.

*) The Continued Non Judicial Attempt To Press Upon Us The Traditions of Men As Law

We live in a culture, that having denied God’s law, opt for the traditions of men. Today the “Traditions of Men” is typically rephrased as “Political Correctness.” We are given an implicit speech code and we implicitly told that if we violate this speech code law that we are guilty of sin by man’s standard.

And so we have a list of sins that are man created and which we are to be constrained by.

It is against the law of Political correctness to say “illegal alien,” or “anchor-baby,” or “sodomite.” It is against the law of Political correctness to be opposed to homosexuality or transgenderism. Political Correctness has made laws against matters they seldom define. For example there is the modern sin of “racism,” not mentioned in God’s Word and very seldom if ever defined. As such it is impossible to not be accused of breaking this law whenever an enemy of God finds it convenient to accuse someone of “racism.”

The traditions of men live on as law whenever one is accused of not sufficiently loving Jesus because one might be convinced that Scripture defends the idea of “nations,” and so would disallow universal open borders. The traditions of men live on as law whenever anyone condemns someone for saying that women are different then men and that God made them different.

It gets worse than that though. Today, given our Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism, if we insist upon the necessity of a known Lord Christ in order to be saved we are accused of breaking the Traditions of men that demand tolerance and acceptance. If one suggests that one simply cannot inherit the Kingdom of God while still pursuing the deliberate lifestyle of sin one is accused of being insensitive, being bigoted, being intolerant. Even more, given our current climate, if one makes a righteous judgment, consistent with God’s word, but that just judgment hurts someone’s feelings then that person who made the just judgment is uncaring, unloving, and unfeeling.

This is madness. Having traded in the law of God for the traditions of men we have at the same time traded in God’s legislative sovereign authority in exchange of man’s legislative sovereign authority. Having traded in the law of God for the politically correct traditions of men we have exchanged God’s definition of sin for man’s definitions of sin, we have tried to cast off our guilt as God designates guilt and have embraced a false guilt foisted upon us by charlatans, mountebanks, and perverts, and in doing so we are destroying ourselves as we seek to pull down God.

The Westminster confession defines sin as any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God. This is reflective of God’s Word which teaches, “Sin is the transgression of the Law” (I Jn. 3:4). Let the “Traditions of men,” as law therfore be damned. Let Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism as God’s law be cast into the deepest nether regions of hell. Let the false guilt of false sin stemming from a false law from false Messiahs go bugger itself. Christians are free men and Christ and must not be weighed down with the yoke of a law from hell.

____________

*.) The real problem

¹⁵There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man. ²⁰And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man.²¹For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, ²²Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: ²³All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.

What Jesus subjects to fiercest criticism in this passage is the human being. Joel Marcus notes the concentration of the word anthrōpos(“human being” or “person”) eleven times in the span of Mark 7:7–23 and says:

“The basic problem Christians should be concerned about, Mark seems to be saying through this striking pileup [of the word anthrōpos], is not how or what one should eat but the internal corruption of the anthrōpos. It is this malignancy that chokes the life out of tradition, turns it into an enemy of God, contorts it into a way of excusing injustice, and blinds those afflicted by it to their own culpability for the evils that trouble the world.”

The teaching here is the necessity to guard one’s heart.

Interesting here that this list of our Lord Christ of what Each of these particular vices is, in some way, a sin of lust. Adultery, theft, avarice, envy, pride — each of these springs from a desire to take, to grasp, to own, to devour.

The corruption of the human heart is rooted in desire to suck the life out of that which is not ours to have. It turns out that our lusts do affect our hearts. If our desire for the satisfactions and the quenching of our lusts is not identified and repented of we become increasingly Demonic.
(Proof for doctrine of total depravity.)

Brief discussion of Heart — (not speaking of non rational self)

Warning against self righteousness.

Odd that in a passage that so clearly warns against hypocrisy finds us in danger of falling into hypocrisy and self righteousness. It is easy to envision ourselves of not being guilty of the Pharisee’s error. We can fall into think that we respect God’s law unlike everyone else. We can fall into thinking that “Ha … we get it right.”

But are we humble enough to search ourselves to see examine where we create our own traditions of men in our own lives. Do we hold people to God’s standard while allowing ourselves to be excused. Do we not see that we break the law every day in word, thought or deed? Can we come before this passage and not shiver and shake in fear that we are the one’s that our Lord Christ is speaking of?

*.) The Cross as only remedy for forgiveness for our creating “The Traditions of Men.”

A Few Thoughts on the Kingdom of God

In its simplest expression “The Kingdom of God” refers to the rule and reign of God consistent with His eschatological and redemptive intent to restore the Cosmos, thus destroying all competitive Kingdoms.

It should be seen as distinct from the general idea of God’s sovereignty though it includes the idea of God’s general sovereignty. The distinctness is found in the fact that this rule and reign of God is in direct connection to His triumphing over all other competing Kingdoms in the globalizing of His Redemption.

The essence of Jesus’ teaching ministry focuses on the theme of the kingdom of God. That this is so is seen in Mark’s Gospel in reference to how the Lord Christ characterized His ministry.

^{Mark 1:14 “}Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, ¹⁵and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

The phrase “Kingdom of God” is found in sixty-one separate sayings in the Synoptic Gospels. Were we to count phraseology that is synonymous with the “Kingdom of God” our count of “Kingdom of God” language would increase to 85 references. Obviously this theme is of major import.

Indeed so important has this concept been that more than a few scholars have labeled it as the theme of the Bible. In other words they will read all of Scriptures with the “Kingdom of God” as the organizing theme by which Scripture is held together and rightly interpreted.

Illustration — Beethoven’s fifth symphony with it’s four note motif. Heard in every movement of the symphony save the 2nd. Not possible to understand Beethoven’s fifth apart from hearing how everything connects to that motif.

The Lord Christ never didactically defines the “Kingdom of God.” He will repeatedly use metaphor and similes to say what it is like. What is going on with the phraseology is that the Lord Christ is taking an already well known concept and is filling it with meaning.

So, our Lord did not invent the phrase, but built upon existing Old Testament teaching. A few examples,

Psalm 145:11 – 13 — ¹¹They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom
    and tell of your power,
¹²to make known to the children of man your^[b] mighty deeds,
    and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.
¹³Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
    and your dominion endures throughout all generations.

Psalm 103:19 — The Lord has established his throne in the heavens,
and his kingdom rules over all.

Isa. 45:23 — “Turn to me and be saved,
    all the ends of the earth!
    For I am God, and there is no other.
²³By myself I have sworn;
    from my mouth has gone out in righteousness
    a word that shall not return:
‘To me every knee shall bow,
    every tongue shall swear allegiance.’

Dan. 4:³How great are his signs,
how mighty his wonders!
His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
and his dominion endures from generation to generation.

Zech. 14:9 — ⁹And the Lord will be king over all the earth. On that day the Lord will be one and his name one.

This is far far from exhaustive. The point is that when the Lord Christ came saying “The Kingdom of God is at hand” the people listening would not have said … “What’s a ‘Kingdom of God.’

The importance of the idea is seen by the its usage at Key junctures

When John the Baptist comes preaching — “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” ( Matt 3:2 );

Likewise, as we mentioned at the outset, the Lord Christ says much the same — Mk. 1:14-15 / Mt. 4:17 / Lk. 4:42-43

“The time has come… The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

When Jesus teaches His disciples to pray He teaches them to ask — “thy kingdom come” ( Matt 6:10 )

In the Sermon on the Mount the Lord Christ in describing his people says of those poor in Spirit, of those persecuted for righteousness sake that “theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” a Jewish circumlocution for “Kingdom of God” — Mt. 5:3, 10.

Just before the Cross our Lord Christ can say during the Lord’s Supper,

“I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day whenI drink it anew in the kingdom of God”

It is used repeatedly in the parables of Jesus as we find it here.

Debate concerning “Kingdom of Heaven” & “Kingdom of God.”

When Dispensationalism came upon the scene, for years they tried to argue that there was a difference between the “Kingdom of Heaven,” and the “Kingdom of God.” In order to satisfy the demands of their system which require that the Jews get their own Kingdom the Dispensationalists said that the “Kingdom of God was here now in Spiritual form, but “the Kingdom of Heaven” is going to come after once the Millennium begins in our future. This future Kingdom would be physical and would include Christ having a throne in Jerusalem to rule from. However, they have had to retool this thinking since it has become clear that “Kingdom of Heaven” is used interchangeably with “Kingdom of God.”

The account of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19 includes Jesus’ words saying, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:23). In the very next verse, Jesus exchanged the term “Kingdom of God” for “Kingdom of Heaven”, and said this, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Matthew’s Gospel uses “Kingdom of Heaven” as opposed to “Kingdom of God” because it was written to a Jewish audience. Such an audience avoided using the word “God” out of a sense of such usage being inappropriate. In desiring to protect the name of God from all possible violation they used circumlocutions.

Now having laid this much out and having noted that the Kingdom of God in its essence is the rule and reign of God consistent with His eschatological and redemptive intent to restore the Cosmos we would note that the idea of the “Kingdom of God” remains a hotly debated subject in the Church in terms of how it should be exactly understood.

Some want to contend that the Kingdom of God is a political entity. Some want to contend that the Kingdom of God is only a Spiritual reality with its manifestation primarily identified with the Church. Some want to contend that God’s Kingdom is only a Future prospect. Some want to contend that the Kingdom of God is not future but is already present. While others will just say that Jesus was mistaken and wrong in His idea of a Kingdom of God.

We will spend our time this evening considering these various understandings.

As we consider the text this morning we see two points emphasized

I.) In the Parable of the Growing Seed what is Emphasized is God’s Intent and Ability To Grow His Kingdom apart from our Meddling

As we come to this we must keep in mind that this is a parable. A parable is different from an allegory. In a allegory there is a great deal of busyness where we seek to identify all the varied characters with their corresponding meaning.

An allegory is what the prophet Nathan gave to King David when rebuking him for the Bathsheba affair. Nathan, comes to David and tells him about a rich man with many flocks who takes a poor man’s only lamb to serve to his guests. Of course in Nathan’s allegory Bathsheba is the ‘lamb,” Uriah, her husband, represented the poor family with that one lamb. David was the rich villain who owned scads of sheep but decided to steal the one loved lamb of the poor man in order to satisfy his desire. Allegory.

Here we have a parable. The parable doesn’t work the way a allegory does though it may have allegorical elements. What a parable is trying to do is to establish one main overarching point. And the point here in Mark 4 — a parable unlike many others inasmuch as Jesus doesn’t explain it — is that God grows the Kingdom absent of our involvement apart from sowing the word.

Taking the seed to be the Word of God, as in Mark 4:14, we can interpret the growth of the plants as the working of God’s Word to extend His reign and rule over men. By the growth of God’s Kingdom men are swept in. The fact that the crop grows without the sower’s intervention means that can God accomplish His purposes even when the sower is absent or unaware of what God is doing. The goal is the ripened grain. At the proper time, the Word will bring forth its fruit, and the Lord of the harvest (Luke 10:2) will be glorified.

The truth of this parable is well illustrated in the growth of the early church: “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow” (1 Corinthians 3:6). Just like a farmer cannot force a crop to grow, an evangelist cannot force spiritual life or growth on others.

2oth Century Dutch Theologian — —Herman Ridderbos, The Coming of the Kingdom

[The] absolutely theocentric character of the kingdom of God in Jesus’ preaching…implies that its coming consists entirely in God’s own action and is perfectly dependent on his activity. The kingdom of God is not a state or condition, not a society created and promoted by men (the doctrine of the ‘social gospel’). It will not come through an immanent earthly evolution, nor through moral action; it is not men who prepare it for God. All such thoughts mean a hopelessly superficial interpretation of the tremendous thought of the fullness and finality of God’s coming as king to redeem and to judge.

Now, this does not mean that we as God’s Kingdom people work contrary to God’s Kingdom expansion. We do labor has God’s workman in God’s Kingdom but we do so realizing that God Kingdom expands because of God’s initiative, action and activity. When the Kingdom grain has ripened it will be God who gets all the glory.

The point of the Parable of the Growing Seed: “The way God establishes His Word authority in the heart of His people is mysterious and is accomplished by Divine appointment apart from human agency.” Ours is to be faithful in what God has called to in His Kingdom remaining confident that God’s already present Kingdom will come.

Actually, this ought to encourage us. It sometimes seems that the redemptive rule and reign of God is so diminished. It seems as if there is so much working against God’s rule and reign. Yet this parable reminds us that God will reap a harvest of His Kingdom expansion and He will do so simply because that is His intent. Nothing can stand in His way. The Kings of the earth may conspire against Him but God will have His Kingdom Harvest. No weapon formed against Him can overcome Him and His intent. No conspiracy can overcome His divine conspiracy to redeem the Cosmos. The inevitable growth of God’s Kingdom is as certain and as natural as a seed giving up its fruit once planted.

So … we should not despair, be discouraged, or despondent. God is growing His victory garden and we are part of that Kingdom garden and He has made us farmer citizens in His Kingdom.

II,) In the Parable of the Mustard Seed the Emphasis is on the inevitable vast expanse of the Kingdom

This likely has a couple OT referent points.

In Ezekiel 17:22-24, God plants a tiny cedar twig on a high mountain of Israel and that twig becomes a large and fruitful tree under whose branches every kind of bird will find shelter.¹ The birds there symbolize the nations that flock to Israel’s God on the glorious day of the Lord. This word-picture in both Ezekiel and Mark envisions the day when God’s sovereign and life-giving power will embrace the whole world–good news indeed!

In Daniel 4:21 the metaphor found here of “birds of the air may nest under its shade” is used to describe how the nations will find shade under a metaphorical Tree which stands for Nebuchadnezzar. In both Daniel and here thre is more than a hint of world wide dominion. “The birds of the air may nest under its shade,” likely is pointing here to the fact that the Nations will come under the dominion of god’s Kingdom.

Don’t miss though the emphasis found in the idea that what becomes dominant starts out as minuscule.

It is easy to see this as the life of Christ. Christ is the Kingdom mustard seed that starts out tiny and then expands so that the Nations come it and find rest under His shade.

Application

1.) Whatever may appear to us now, we needs know that Christ’s Kingdom has the inevitability of victory.

Marxism taught and teaches,

“the victory of the proletariat [is] inevitable.

Meaning that Marxism will win out. S0me have opined that this plank of Marxism more than any other plank is what accounts for the success of Marxism’s spread.

But this was stolen from Biblical Christianity. It simply is the case instead that the victory of Christ and His Kingdom is inevitable.

The truth of this can sustain us in dark times … in persecution … in trial. Tears may last for the night but joy cometh in the morning.

The Good Shepherd

Contextual BackgroundThe context for the text this morning grows out of the sustained and continued conflict of the Lord Christ with His enemies, the Pharisees. This particular conflict starts in John 9 with Jesus healing the man born blind. Much of what is said in this passage this morning reaches back to that conflict. That this is intense verbal conflict can be seen by the fact that this incident is sandwiched between attempts to stone the Lord Christ (John 8:59; 10:31).

^{John 8:59}Then took they up stones to cast at him, but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the Temple: And he passed through the midst of them, and so went his way.

^{John 10:31}Then the Jews again took up stones, to stone him.

It would do well to remember that the Pharisees were the ruling religious and cultural elite at the time. They were what we today would call “the Establishment.” This Establishment was a ruling order whose goal was to operate in the name of the Law to destroy the law in order to justify and cloak their own twisting and violation of the law.

At this point of the conflict the Lord Christ has just engaged the formerly blind man who He had healed and who had been excommunicated by those who opposed Christ. The Lord Christ receives this outcast “sheep” as His own and talks about the blind who can see and the seeing who are blind (9:38f). This outrages His enemies who see the insult in Christ’s words.

The Lord Christ then illustrates this whole particular conflict with the Pharisees that takes place in John 9, with the words we find in John 10 as He contrasts images of the true, good shepherd (Himself), on the one hand, and the thieves and bandits who oppose him on the other; the false shepherds, who do not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climb in by another way, who do not have the best interests of the sheep at heart; they steal, kill, and destroy, while Jesus, who is metaphorically both the door to the sheepfold and the shepherd of the sheep, offers abundant life.

This is then the context of the text before us.

We should say at the outset that the Lord Christ has put on display for us here a couple realities already. The Lord Christ in this passage is

Judgmental — He has assessed the situation and has determined that those who are opposing Him are false shepherds. Every time the Lord Christ speaks of Himself as “The good Shepherd” the Pharisees would have understood instantly the implication of themselves as being false shepherds. The comparison of this idea of false Shepherds had a long OT History.

In Ezekiel 34 God complained of false shepherds

Woe be unto the shepherds of Israel, that feed themselves: should not the shepherds feed the flocks? ³Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool: ye kill them that are fed, but ye feed not the sheep. ⁴The weak have ye not strengthened: the sick have ye not healed, neither have ye bound up the broken, nor brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost, but with cruelty, and with rigor have ye ruled them. ⁵And they were scattered without a shepherd: and when they were dispersed, they were devoured of all the beasts of the field.

Because of the false shepherds God promises a time when a Good shepherd will come

^{Ezekiel 34:22}Therefore will I help my sheep, and they shall no more be spoiled, and I will judge between sheep and sheep. 2³And I will set up a shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David, he shall feed them, and he shall be their shepherd.

So, the Lord Christ, in positing that He is the promised Good shepherd. He is, at the same time, given the immediate context, adjudicating that the Pharisees are false shepherds, or merely Hirelings. I point this judgmental disposition of the Lord Christ out in order to place a counter weight to the constant sniping one will often hear that Christians shouldn’t judge.

This idea of the absolute necessity to judge is all over this passage. It is not only Christ who is judging His false shepherd enemies here but the idea of judging is contained in the truth of vs. 5

⁵And they (Christ’s sheep) will not follow a stranger, but they flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.

You see. The sheep judges the voices that it hears. It knows the voice of the Good Shepherd and follows. The sheep judges between voices.

Fellow Christians — My fellow Sheep — we have to judge. All through our lives we have to judge. Now our judgments are to be made with charity and are not to be self-righteous. Further, we should gather all the facts so that we do not make “unrighteous judgments,” but we have to judge.

Isn’t our lack of judging rightly a great fault of the Church today? Our problem is not that we are too judgmental but that we aren’t judicious in the slightest. The sheep who comprise the visible Church today seem to have very little discernment at all for they follow almost any voice that is raised.

And yet our Lord Christ says here that sheep will not follow the voice of the stranger. The Lord Christ says here that the Sheep know His voice and follow Him. This perhaps suggests how vast the necessity is within the Church to do Evangelism and Apologetics. If it is really the case that sheep of Christ will not follow the voice of a stranger and yet so many sheep in the visible Church are following voices of strangers then the only thing we can conclude, it seems, is that those sheep who are following the voices of strangers are not sheep and so need to be evangelized.

As we consider vs. 11-18 we note a clear theme here. The theme here is that the goodness of the Noble Shepherd is demonstrated by the cost that He bears. The “good Shepherd lays down His life.” This phrase is repeated 5 times between vs. 11-18 and suggests that this is the theme of these verses.

Read in light of the cross this emphasis thus has a soteriological emphasis to it. The Good Shepherd demonstrates His love for the Sheep by doing all to keep the flock. Unlike the hireling or false shepherds the Noble Shepherd consistent with His calling (cmp. vs. 18) prioritizes the flock. When we deal with the accusations of old slewfoot … when we are burdened by our Sin … we need to keep in mind that the Good Shepherd gave His life for the flock. In the giving of His life for the flock there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are resting in the offices of the Good shepherd.

We might also employ here a greater to lesser argument. If the Noble Shepherd will do the greater work of laying down His life for the Sheep will He not also do all the lesser works that a Shepherd does with respect to the Sheep? If the True Shepherd will lay down His life for the Sheep, will He not also provide for, care for, and protect the Sheep?

This is an important point to note because Sheep are notoriously frightful and skittish beasts. And so we are. When we are tempted to be frightful and skittish we must remind ourselves of the Good Shepherd and how He keeps His own. He is the Good Shepherd. He will not abandon us nor leave us defenseless. Because we are His flock He will continue to care for us come what may.

This good Shepherd who lays down His life is more than merely a Shepherd though. This good Shepherd is divine. The divinity of the good Shepherd is already hinted at by the fact that Christ is the Divine Shepherd spoken of in Isaiah 40:11. There we find the promise of the Divine King

¹⁰Behold, the Lord God will come with power, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him. He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall guide them with young.

This note of the Divinity of Christ as the Good Shepherd is sounded throughout this passage with the 4 “I am statements in 7, 9, 11, and 14 and made most explicit in 10:30.

³⁰I and my Father are one.

So this good Shepherd who lays down His life for the Sheep is a Divine Good Shepherd. This is a passage then I would go to in order to set forth the fact that the Lord Christ was very God of very God were I dealing with someone like a JW or a Muslim.

We should note the echoes that we find here of the truth of the particularity of the Atonement. Christ is going out of His way to insist that there are sheep that hear His voice and follow Him and sheep who do not hear His voice and do not follow Him (cmp. 26-27). Further, the Lord Christ says here that He lays down His life for those sheep who know Him (10:15). This pushes us to observe that the death of Christ was particular only to those Sheep that have belonged to the Shepherd from all eternity. Christ did not die for those who were not, nor ever were, nor ever would be His Sheep.

To insist that the Lord Christ died for those who were not His sheep, and never would be His Sheep would be to insist that the death of Christ failed in its intent, and in its design to protect His sheep. It is to insist that God had an intent and design that failed. But if God had an intent and design that failed then that would require someone or something that caused God to fail in His intent and design. Whatever or whoever caused God’s intent and design to fail then would at that point be greater than God and so God would be no God. The good Shepherd who lays down His life for the Sheep gathers only the Sheep that for whom He died.

What else might we say here concerning Sheep and Shepherd?

Well, He knows his own (and loves them, 13:1). And they know him (10:14) ( see also 10:4). This is a statement that was put on display by the man born blind who at the end embraces Christ (9:38). This reciprocal knowing is placed in parallel with the knowing intimacy between the Father and the Son (15). What is being communicated is that just as there is this harmony of interpersonal knowing between the Father and the Son so there is a interpersonal harmony of knowing between the Sheep and the Shepherd.

Of course this knowing here, though never less then a mental understanding, is more then that. This knowing implies a fondness and a relational standing. I might say “I know my accountant.” This is more of a mental understanding. I can also say “I know my Son.” In that knowing there is more then mental understanding. In God’s knowing of us there is a intimate knowing that includes a commitment of Redemption, and the preserving of us on His part.

Now, don’t miss here an important fact. If the sheep know the Shepherd and if the Shepherd knows the Father then by necessity the Sheep know the Father. Here is the great truth that the only way to know the Father is through the Son. There is no knowing God naked. If God is to be known by the believer it is only as mediated by Christ. The knowing of the Father is only done by the knowing of the Shepherd.

Considering the other sheep of 10:16

Not of this fold — This fold doubtless refers to the fold of Israel.

What is being communicated here is the intent of the Gospel to go to the Nations.

They will hear my voice — Irresistible Grace

One Flock …. One Shepherd —

Unity and diversity here.

The diversity is found in the reality that the sheep who are to be gathered in the future are from other folds. There are distinctions between folds. Israel and the Nations are distinct.

The unity is found in the fact that these diverse folds will form one flock with one Shepherd.

The way I read this unity in diversity is that in the flock of Christ (Unity) will be many folds comprised of different nations (Diversity). There will be a Spiritual Unity comprised of Nations that are diverse by God’s creative work. The One and the Many is thus satisfied and we avoid both a Unity that gives a amalgamated Unitarianism and a diversity that would yield the war of all against all.

There is thus a Missionary impulse here. We are to be aware that the Gospel is to go to the Nations. Woe be to the person who suggests that Christ is not available for some people or nation.

Jonah & The Charge Of “Racism”

The post below was inspired by this sermon though I have collected other information and it is in my own words.

http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=419151036335

Many in the Evangelical world (those who write commentaries and those who preach) insist that Jonah’s sin for not wanting to go to the Ninevehites is a early world example of the Racism that God hates. For example, John Piper does just that in this quote from one of his sermons. Piper here has imagined God speaking to the prophet Jonah ,

“Jonah, forsake your racism. Forsake your nationalism and follow me.”

Earlier, in the same sermon, Piper had explicitly said,

“Jonah was a racist, a hyper-nationalist. He did not want to go to Nineveh because he knew God would have mercy on his enemies.”

Now, Piper isn’t alone in this error of reading the 20th century sin du jour back into the ancient world and on to the Prophet Jonah but he is a glaring example of it.

We should note here that “Racism” has become the sin that most preachers love to hammer. It is a politically correct sin to hate and it makes for great points among the Politically Correct indoctrination crowd. It’s become so bad that I have in my memory a ordination from years ago where the candidate up for ordination, though knowing literally nothing regarding the doctrine of the Christian faith, passed the exam because he could impressively denounce racism.

Now, the points for calling Jonah Racist that many of the commentaries give are as follows,

1.) Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh.

This by itself proves that Jonah was a Racist. If Jonah hadn’t been a Racist he automatically would have had no problem in going to Nineveh.

2.) Jonah did not want the Ninevehites to Repent.

This is construed to mean that Jonah did not want them to repent because he was an evil racist.

3.) Jonah was disappointed and angry when Nineveh did Repent.

This clinches the “Jonah was a Racist” argument.

However, when examining matters more closely it may be that modern commentaries and modern preachers like Piper are wrong.

There are ways of understanding that allow us to not call Jonah a “Racist.”

Jonah’s sin is not found in his putative “racism” but in his falling into the sin of Rationalism. Jonah lifted his well intended reasoning above God’s Revelation. God had told Jonah to go to Nineveh. That is all Jonah needed in order to go. Instead Jonah reasoned that God would be dishonored by his going to Nineveh and by the Assyrians repentance. Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh because he knew that God would give repentance to Assyria (Nineveh) and Jonah reasoned that would detract from God’s glory if the God haters who were not God’s people repented while the Northern Kingdom who Jonah labored in calling to repentance did not repent. Jonah understandably believed that if those who were not God’s people repented it would blacken God’s glory because those who were God’s people (Northern Kingdom) did not repent. Jonah had labored all his life in Samaria among his own people calling for repentance with no fruit. Those of the Northern Kingdom were God’s people. It was there that repentance should have been expected.

Secondly, Jonah did not want “to be the instrument that God would use to bring Nineveh to repentance, because such a action would make Jonah look like a traitor to his own people. The rabbis held a similar position. According to M. Avrum Ehrlich, many rabbis concluded that “their actions (Nineveh’s repentance) would show the Hebrews to be stiffnecked and stubborn.” Another Midrash explains that “Jonah… chose to disobey God so as to save his own people.”

So, contrary to modern evangelicalism’s knee jerk insistence that Jonah was a racist, we might instead see Jonah, whose sin was not Racism, as committing a sin of a rationalism that found Jonah lifting his own ratiocination above God’s explicit command. Jonah’s sin was born of two instincts gone wrong,

1.) A wrong headed desire to protect God’s glory that defied God’s explicit command
2.) A desire to protect his own people, born of love now misguided, from being shamed

This great affection of Jonah’s for his people is something that was shared by others in God’s Revelation. Paul could say in Romans 9,

¹I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing me witness in the holy Ghost, ²That I have great heaviness, and continual sorrow in mine heart. ³For I would wish myself to be separate from Christ, for my brethren that are my kinsmen according to the flesh,

And Moses uttered this same desire, that somehow his death may be the propitiation for his people when he said in Exodus 32:32, “Therefore now if thou pardon their sin, thy mercy shall appear: but if thou wilt not, I pray thee, raise me out of thy book, which thou hast written.”

So if we are going to fault Jonah, let us fault him for the proper reason. Jonah’s fault was found not in some kind of 21st century version of racism. Jonah’s fault was that he loved his conception of God and God’s glory above the God of the Bible. Jonah was zealous for God’s glory according to his fallen human reason as opposed to being zealous for God’s glory according to God’s command. Secondarily, Jonah’s fault was that he loved his own people, just as Paul and Moses had done, above loving God’s command. Jonah’s sin was the sin of a wrongly directed love. Jonah’s sin was not the sin of a wrongly directed hate. Not wanting to go to Nineveh had to do with Jonah’s falling into the same kind of Rationalism that Adam and Eve fell into when they lifted their reason above God’s command.

In God’s economy the repentance of Nineveh was a delay to the upcoming judgment on Israel by the Assyrians. Jonah should have known the prophecies of Amos (3:11) and Isaiah (7:17) concerning the upcoming Assyrian invasion.

^{Amos 3:11}Therefore thus saith the Lord God, An adversary shall come even round about the country, and shall bring down thy strength from thee, and thy palaces shall be spoiled.

^{Isaiah 7:17}The Lord shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people, and upon thy Father’s house (the days that are not come from the day that Ephraim departed from Judah) even the King of Assyria.

Jonah knew that these Ninevehites would repent as a result of this missionary trip (Jonah 4:2).

^{Jonah 4:2}And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? therefore I prevented it to flee unto Tarshish: for I knew, that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.

Jonah should have been keenly aware that the generation which would invade Israel would be a generation who would have returned to its wickedness (Isaiah 14:25).

^{Isaiah 14:25}That I will break to pieces Assyria in my land, and upon my mountains will I tread him under foot, so that his yoke shall depart from them, and his burden shall be taken from off their shoulder.

This would mean that the same generation which heard Jonah’s message would not be the generation which would invade Israel, because Israel was not invaded by a righteous nation, but rather by an evil nation. This means that the Assyrian invasion would happen, at its earliest with the succeeding generation. As such God’s grace to Nineveh was God’s grace to the Northern Kingdom as Ninevah’s repentance would therefore buy Jonah and the Northern Kingdom some time and would give his own people, Israel, perhaps another 40 – 100 years (the time of a generation) to repent before God.

Jonah should have trusted to God’s reasoning and not his own fallen reason.

Jonah’s sin was not racism. Jonah’s sin was rationalism. Before we try to out think God we should remember Jonah’s attempt to do so. We should remember that obedience to God’s explicit command is our charge above our thinking that obeying God would lead to bad consequences. We should remember that God’s ways are higher than our ways and that God uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.