Reflections on Three Passages of Scripture

 

1. Deuteronomy 30:6: the circumcision that really matters

 

            The Lord gave to the Old Testament people of God the rite of circumcision of the flesh as “a sign of the covenant” between the Lord and Israel (Genesis 17:11).  However, God also made it clear that this outward act of cutting the flesh of males was not the kind of circumcision that really matters.  The deeper circumcision that counts most is not physical but spiritual; the deeper circumcision that matters most is of the heart and not of the body.  And whereas a father was to circumcise the flesh of his newborn son, only God can circumcise the human heart.  This is precisely what the Lord promised to do for his people in Deuteronomy 30:6: “And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.” 

            Let us marvel and rejoice in the reality that as Christians, God has circumcised our hearts!  Let us marvel and rejoice that even as God commands us to love him with all our hearts (Deuteronomy 6:5), so he in his wonderful grace gives us the ability to do so, by circumcising our hearts!  This circumcision of the heart is a work of the Lord’s grace that makes us part of the people of God, for “circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter” (Romans 2:28-29). 

But what exactly does it mean that God has circumcised the hearts of Christians?  I think we find the answer to that question in the prophecy of Ezekiel 36:26-27, where the Lord foresees the day when he would take out the hearts of stone of his people and replace them with hearts of flesh.  “And I will put my Spirit in you,” the Lord adds, in a promise that we know God fulfilled in believers beginning with the Day of Pentecost.  In other words, just as physical circumcision of the body involves a cutting open of the skin, so the spiritual circumcision of the heart involves God’s cutting open of the heart, in order to put the Holy Spirit into the hearts of believers.  It should astound us that God himself, in the Person of the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:9), has come to live spiritually in us through the circumcision of the heart!  What a gracious and loving and mighty and glorious God we serve!

 

 

2. Colossians 3:22-24: the case of the rotten boss

 

            I realize Colossians 3:22-24 deals on its face with slaves and masters, but for many reasons I believe we can draw principles from it for application to the Christian’s life in the workplace.  I have in mind in particular those of you who work for bosses like the pointy-haired boss in the comic strip Dilbert.  The pointy-haired boss in Dilbert is a fool who constantly frustrates the employees by managing and leading poorly.  The pointy-haired boss really only cares about himself and his advancement up the corporate ladder, and so he sees the people who work under him only as a means to the ends he desires for himself.  What if the pointy-haired boss is your boss?  How can you as a Christian glorify God in circumstances under which you spend most of your day frustrated, because you have a fool for a boss?  Consider two principles from Colossians 3:22-24.  First, your ultimate boss is not the pointy-haired manager or any other human being; your ultimate boss is always the Lord.  God loves you infinitely, and his plan for your life, including your work life, is infinitely wise.  That is not to say that God in his mercy might not move you to a new position under a far better boss.  But as long as you are working under the pointy-haired manager, work hard and do your best.  God is a hard worker who always does his best too (Genesis 1:31), and when we work that way, acknowledging the Lord as our ultimate boss, not only does God get great glory, but we find peace, even if we are working for a human boss who is a fool.  When God gets glory, joy and peace for us always follow.

            Then second, understand from Colossians 3:22-24 that even if your company does not reward you adequately for your good and faithful work, you have an eternal reward that the Lord is storing up for you in heaven.  Again, that truth does not mean that the Lord is forbidding you from looking for another job where you might be better paid.  What it does mean as that as long as the Lord keeps you where you are, your ultimate reward does not come from your next raise or promotion but from knowing that God has reserved in heaven a great spiritual reward for those who work by his grace and for his glory.

 

 

3. Jeremiah 23:29: God’s word a hammer

 

            Jeremiah 23:9-40 contains a section of prophecy in which the Lord condemns the false prophets living in the day of Jeremiah.  In v. 29 God says the following about the true word that he speaks through men who are his genuine prophets, men like Jeremiah: “’Is not my word like fire?’ declares the Lord, ‘and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?’”  In the context, this statement by God means that his word is like a hammer in that it means judgment for the false prophets in Judah.  The Lord is going to fulfill his word against those false prophets by bringing down the hammer of his judgment against those who speak from their own imaginations, to the great detriment of the people, rather than from the Lord.

            As I read Jeremiah 23:29, however, I also wonder if in the lives of Christians, the word of God as a hammer might not be a positive metaphor?  For example, I can use a hammer for a negative purpose like destroying a clay pot in anger, or I can use a hammer for a positive purpose, like helping my son to build a pine car for the Awana Grand Prix this coming Sunday evening.  In the same way, I think, God’s word was destructive to the false prophets, but it is like a hammer in the souls of Christians in that God uses the Bible to build something very good—Christ-likeness—in our hearts.  The Lord also uses the hammer of his word to “knock away” the sin that weighs us down and keeps us from running the spiritual race he has set before us (Hebrews 12:1-2).  Let us therefore rejoice in the Lord for great gift his word is to us, and knowing that Scripture is a good hammer in our souls, let us take up God’s word and read and meditate on it.

 

How the Gospel Severs the Root of Pride

 

                Pride is a complex sin phenomenon in the human heart.  Sometimes pride manifests itself in the form of arrogance and self-centeredness.  Sometimes pride causes us to lash out at those who discredit our abilities.  Sometimes pride ironically shows itself through displays of false humility designed to impress others with how humble or pious we are!  Is it any wonder Jesus lists pride as one of the sins that spiritually pollutes the human heart (Mark 7:22)?

 

                The gospel has the power to sever the root of pride, as God causes the good news of God’s salvation in Jesus, and the truths that flow from that good news, to bear fruit and grow in the soul of the Christians (Colossians 1:5-6).  How does the gospel do this work?  The gospel speaks to our minds the crucial truth that “by grace you have been saved through faith.  And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).  There is no ground for pride at the foot of the cross, because God saved us from sin by his sheer grace and steadfast love (Ephesians 1:4-5), not because of any good thing or special talent he saw in us (Romans 9:10-13).  Because of our sin, we were by nature the enemies of God (Romans 5:10), and we were “dead in the trespasses and sins in which [we] once walked” (Ephesians 2:1-2).  Salvation is thus by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, to the glory of God alone.  While Christians certainly boast in the cross of Christ (Galatians 6:14), we are humbled by the abounding grace the Lord has shown us in the salvation of sinners.

 

The gospel also reminds us that just as our salvation is by God’s grace alone, so our position in the church (1 Corinthians 15:10), our spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:11), and all other spiritual attainments (1 Corinthians 4:7) are the product of God’s grace at work in us.

 

                The gospel severs the root of pride by telling us the truth: there is nothing good and God-glorifying in us apart from God’s grace.  Yet to keep balance in our lives, the Bible also reminds us that for the sake of Christ, God loves Christians with an infinite and steadfast love (John 17:23), and he rejoices over us with the greatest joy imaginable (Zephaniah 3:17).  Thus our identity is found fundamentally in who were are in Jesus Christ, and so our identity includes the humility of Jesus (Philippians 2:8). 

Challenging Comments from Francis Chan

 

                Over the weekend I devoured Francis Chan’s highly readable book Erasing Hell, which is a profoundly biblical and compassionate response to the universalism the well-know Pastor Rob Bell seemingly advocated in his book Love Wins, which was published with great publicity and fanfare late last spring.  Pastor Chan systematically sets out the biblical arguments against universalism and for the reality of hell in a thoroughly convincing fashion, all with the great compassion necessary for proclaiming such hard truths.  Where Pastor Chan challenged me the most personally, however, was in some of his observations concerning the Apostle Paul’s teaching on the final judgment in 2 Thessalonians 1:6-9:

 

As I read these verses, I am struck by how allergic I am to repeating the very words that Paul wrote.  Affliction, vengeance, punishment, destruction—for all who don’t follow Jesus.  I’m not sure if I have ever used the term vengeance in describing the fate of unbelievers.  In my desire to distance myself from sadistic Christians who revel in the idea of wrath and punishment, I may have crossed a line.  Refusing to teach a passage of Scripture is just as wrong as abusing it.  I really believe it’s time for some of us to stop apologizing for God and start apologizing to Him for being embarrassed by the ways He has chosen to reveal Himself.

 

(Francis Chan, Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Way We’ve Made Things Up (Colorado Springs, Colo.: David C. Cook, 2011), 102, emphasis in original).  The reason those sentences convicted my heart is that while I as a preacher and teacher of God’s word do not avoid altogether the difficult truths and hard passages in the Bible, I can have a tendency to soften the sharper edges of those texts, in a misguided effort to make them more palatable to 21^st century Western sensibilities.  So I am praying today: “Lord, please forgive me for shrinking back from declaring the harder edges of the ‘whole counsel of God’ (Acts 20:27), and grant me the grace to proclaim fearlessly your word, both when it instantly delights our hearts and when it challenges us to the core of our beings.  Amen.”

Grace in Deuteronomy 30

 

                Jesus Christ said that the greatest of all the commandments was that human beings must love the Lord our God with all our hearts and souls and minds and strength (Mark 12:28-30; Deuteronomy 6:5).  But how is it possible for human beings to love God?  After all, we are conceived in our mothers’ wombs with hearts that love sin instead of God, so that by nature “no one seeks God,” and “no one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:11, 12).  How can our hearts undergo total transformation, so that instead of rebelling against and running away from the Lord, we instead begin to love him and to seek him with all our hearts?   God gives us the answer to this question in Deuteronomy 30:6, where he promises his people that “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, that you may live.”  Do you see the amazing grace in that passage?  What God commands of us—full-hearted love to himself—is the very thing he gives to us in his grace.  God commands us to love him with all our hearts, and he himself, when he gives us the new spiritual birth, circumcises our hearts so that we are able to love him.  Jesus Christ proclaims the identical truth in John 17:26, where he declares that when God saves a sinner, he puts into the heart of that sinner nothing less than the intratrinitarian love God has enjoyed within himself from all eternity.  Given the immensity of the Lord’s grace, whereby he circumcises sinners’ hearts to put his own love in them, how can we not respond with wonder and praise?

Waiting on the Lord

 

                The biblical concept of waiting on the Lord (e.g., Psalms 27:14; 62:5; 130:5; Isaiah 40:31) can look different in particular situations.  Often, however, waiting on the Lord means waiting with patience for God to accomplish his perfect (Romans 12:2) will for our lives.  A beautiful example of the Bible’s call to wait for God to unfold his perfect will appears in Exodus 23.  God in that passage promises that he will most surely give the Promised Land into the hands of the children of Israel, destroying before their eyes the Canaanites who now possess the land (Exodus 23:20-28).  However, the Lord is not going to act as quickly in this work as many Israelites might hope.  Why is he not going to destroy the Canaanites in a single day or month or year?  The Lord gives the answer in Exodus 23:29: “I will not drive them [i.e., the Canaanites] out before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you.”

 

                Do you see the wisdom of the Lord in this instance, and do you see why he called his people to wait on him?  If God acted too quickly in destroying the Canaanites, the problem would be that the Israelites lacked the capacity to occupy the land fully in such a short period of time.  Their failure to occupy the whole land would give the wild beast time to multiply and spread out, to the point that the beasts would become a threat to the Israelites.  So the Lord will take his time in dispossessing the Canaanites from the land, and as his people wait on him, they will see the unfolding of his wise plan.

 

                Perhaps the Lord is calling you right now to wait on the unfolding of his perfect will in your life.  Maybe you are single and sense he does want you to be married, but there is no mate on the horizon, and you are in the position of waiting on the Lord.  Perhaps you are beset with difficulties all around you, and while you feel certain the Lord intends to remove at least some of them, he has not yet moved his hand to do so, at least so far as you can tell.  In these times of waiting on the Lord, he calls us, by his grace, to trust that his will for us really is good, loving, and perfect.  And from Exodus 23 we can learn that as God (to our estimation) delays the fulfillment of his will for us, he is doing so for reasons that are for our good, even if we cannot see those reasons right now.  “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Psalm 27:14).

When Moses Tragically Failed to Hallow God's Name

                The Lord has been working deeply in my heart so far in 2012 the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples: “Hallowed by your name” (Matthew 6:9).  When we pray that prayer, we are asking the Lord to work in our hearts, and in the hearts of the people around us, in such a way that we will honor him as the holy God he is.  This prayer acknowledges that in order for sinful human beings to hallow God’s name, the Lord must first work his grace in our hearts, so that we do see and love his glory and thus set him apart as holy.

                The Bible, however, regularly sets forth a tension between God’s sovereign work in the human heart on the one hand and human responsibility on the other.  So while we are not surprised to read in Matthew 6:9 that we need to ask God in his grace to enable us to hallow his name, neither are we surprised to read in 1 Peter 3:15 this command to Christians: “[I]n your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy.” 

Honoring Christ as holy involves loving God and obeying his commands, but today I want to observe a prominent case from the Bible when one of the great saints of the Lord failed to honor God as holy.  I am speaking of Moses, the great man of God the Lord used to lead the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt into the freedom of the Promised Land.  Numbers 20:2-13 tells the sad story.  The event occurs toward the end of the Israelites’ forty years of wandering in the desert, and once again they are running low on water and complaining about it to Moses.  They are accusing their poor leader of bringing them out into the desert simply to kill them.  This whole scenario had occurred about 40 years earlier, at the beginning of the exodus, and at that time God had instructed Moses to strike a nearby rock, and miraculously the Lord caused water to gush forth from that rock (Exodus 17:1-7).  This time, however, the Lord specifically instructs Moses to speak to the rock, and God promises the water will come forth once again (Numbers 20:8).  However, apparently out of total exasperation with the stubbornness of the Israelites, Moses strikes the rock twice with his staff (Numbers 20:10-11).  And though the rock gives forth water once again, God becomes angry with Moses and disciplines that great man of God.  Moses is now 120 years old, and he has been leading Israel for 40 years.  His greatest desire is to enter into the Promised Land.  Because of his disobedience in the matter of the rock, however, God informs Moses that “you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them” (Numbers 20:12).

                At first glance this punishment by the Lord seems in our human estimation to be a massive overreaction on his part to Moses’ disobedience.  Yes, we acknowledge, Moses did clearly disobey an unambiguous the Lord.  He clearly sinned.  But is striking a rock rather than speaking to it all that serious of a matter?  Why does God get so upset with a man who has been forced to endure so much grief at the hands of his  people for 40 years?

                The Lord gives the reason for his discipline of Moses in Numbers 20:12: “[Y]ou did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people.”  In other words, Moses failed to hallow God’s name.  He failed to set apart the Lord as holy in his heart.  He did not uphold the holiness of God before the eyes of the tens of thousands of Israelites who were watching him.

                Perhaps there is more going on in Numbers 20:2-13 than meets our eyes at first.  The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10:4 that in some mysterious way, the rock from which the Israelites drank in the desert was no less than Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4).  How this is the case is not clear, and this statement of Paul is fraught with mystery.  However, we also know from Hebrews 11:26 that by special revelation from God, Moses had at least some understanding of Jesus who was to come.  If we put all these thoughts together, the Christian writer Edmund Clowney suggests that Moses’ act of striking the rock not only failed to hallow God’s name but in fact deeply dishonored the name of Jesus:

 

                When Moses struck the rock, a stream of life-giving water poured out into the desert.  When Jesus was crucified, John tells us that blood and water poured from his side (John 19:34). . . . We do not wonder that Moses was judged severely for striking the rock a second time, when he had been told to speak to it (Numbers 20:7-13).  Only once, at the appointed time, does God bear the stroke of our doom.  (Edmund Clowney, The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament (Philipsburg, Penn.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1988), 126, emphasis added).

 

In other words, the act of Moses in striking the rock this second time was such a great offense because he already had struck the rock one time, 40 years earlier, and since the rock represented Jesus, it was to be struck once and only once.  Only one time would Jesus endure the blow for the sins of sinners—at the cross of Calvary.  After his sacrificial death at the cross, Jesus’ work of atonement would be finished (John 19:30), and he would not be struck a second time.  It is at this level that it appears we are to understand the seriousness of Moses’ failure to hallow God’s name in Numbers 20:2-13.

The Love of God in the Heart of the Christian

                Jesus Christ in John 17:26 makes the stunning announcement that the love which God has eternally enjoyed within himself is the same love that he has poured into the hearts of Christians.  From all eternity past, within the one God, the Father has loved the Son and the Spirit with a steadfast, infinite, perfect love; the Son has love the Father and the Spirit with a steadfast, infinite, perfect love; and the Spirit has loved the Father with a steadfast, infinite, perfect love (John 3:35; 5:20; 14:31; 15:9; 17:23, 26).  Jesus proclaims in John 17:26 that it is this same steadfast, infinite, and perfect love that God pours into the hearts of Christians when he makes us his children in Jesus Christ.  To be sure, we will not love perfectly in this world, because sin blocks the full experience of God’s love in our hearts; however, because that love is vitally present in the hearts of Christians, we are able to begin truly to love the Lord our God with all our hearts (Deuteronomy 6:5) and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Leviticus 19:18). 

                Jonathan Edwards, the great 18^th century American pastor, theologian, and revival leader, preached a sermon in the mid to late 1730’s on the work of this divine love in the hearts of Christians.  Based on 1 John 4:16, the sermon bears the title “The Spirit of True Saints is a Spirit of Divine Love.”  The sermon is typical of Edwards, a man in whose mind and heart the Lord brought together a surpassingly sharp intellect with deeply passionate love to God.  Edwards lived and breathed and preached and wrote so that all people would know the majesty and beauty of God and would find the deepest longings of their souls quenched in God’s glory alone.  The sermon on 1 John 4:16 is quite lengthy, so I want here to excerpt just a handful of quotes, along with a word of explanation concerning the context of each quote:

 

(The love of God in the heart of the Christian produces deep longing for the Lord.) “A true saint in his esteem exalts God above all.  He is in his account the most excellent, the most glorious being.  The saint esteems God so great and excellent as to be worthy of all that he requires.  He accounts him worthy of all obedience, of all praise and glory.  He accounts him worthy of the most humble addresses and worthy that he should give himself to him.”

 

(The love of God in the heart of the Christian produces esteem and honor for his or her neighbors.)  “It is the tendency of this divine principle to honor natural men for that natural image of God that is in them and for their natural excellencies, their natural knowledge, wisdom, and the like.  And to honor them for their outward dignities.”

 

(The love of God in the heart of the Christian produces a love for the attributes of God, even those attributes with which we as human beings sometimes struggle, like God’s sovereignty.)  “But owning the sovereignty of God is what the saints take delight in.  They see that God is worthy to be sovereign, that he is worthy to have the absolute domination over all creatures and disposes all things according to his own please and to make himself his end.  A godly man can rest and be pleased in it.  He loves to have God sovereign.”

 

(The love of God in the heart of the Christian produces a love for God for his own sake and not first for what the Lord does for us.)  “True divine love is not so much because of the kindness that we have received of him as for himself, not so much for our sakes as for his own sake. . . . [A] true Christian loves God for himself because he sees him to be worthy of all love, not that he does and ought to love God for his benefits, but that this is not the only foundation of his love, but he loves him for his own excellency, for his own glorious nature whereby he esteems him worthy of the highest love.”  

 

Jonathan Edwards, “The Spirit of the True Saints is a Spirit of Divine Love,” in The Glory and Honor of God: Previously Unpublished Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, Michael D.  McMullen, ed. (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman & Holman, 2004), 301-02, 320-21, 323.