The One Who Sets Prisoners Free

                The prophet Isaiah looked forward to the ministry of Jesus Christ as one that would set spiritual prisoners free.  We recall that Jesus applied the words of Isaiah 61:1-2 to himself while preaching on the Sabbath in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4:18-19).  Isaiah 61:1-2 prophetically puts these words in the mouth of the Messiah:

 

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

                because the Lord has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor;

                he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

                and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. . .

 

The reference to setting prisoners free is mainly spiritual.  Jesus Christ-- by the grace of God-- sets gloriously free those who have been held captive and prisoner by their own sin.  These lines from Isaiah 61:1-2 thus make great sense of the marvelous third stanza of Charles Wesley’s great hymn “And Can It Be?”:

 

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,

fastbound in sin and nature’s night.

Thine eye diffused, a quickening ray;

                I woke, the dungeon flamed with light.

My chains fell off; my heart was free!

                I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

Amazing love, how can it be

                that Thou my God shoulds’t die for me?

 

 

Learning from Suffering

                Here is an excerpt from a television interview conducted in 1978 by William F. Buckley, Jr., with the great English Christian leader Malcolm Muggeridge, who looks back on the role of suffering in his walk with Christ.

 

[The cross] worked for centuries and centuries, bringing out all the creativity in people, all the love and disinterestedness in people, this symbol of suffering; and I think that’s the heart of the thing.  Of course, it’s what been lost and why the faith is languishing; because it cannot take in that truth that we can learn nothing—and you know, as an old man, Bill, looking back on one’s life, it’s one of the things that strikes you most forcibly—that the only that that’s taught one anything is suffering, not success, not happiness, not anything like that.  The only thing that rally teaches one what life’s about—the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what it really signifies—is suffering, is affliction.

 

Vintage Muggeridge, ed. Jeffrey Barlow (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans 1985), 114-15.

Two Reflections from the Book of Isaiah

My current devotions are in the book of Isaiah, and the Lord brought these two thoughts to mind as I read:

 

1.       God’s exhaustive foreknowledge (i.e., his complete knowledge of the future, flowing from his sovereignty over the future) is such that he could call Cyrus by name about 120-150 years before the birth of the Persian emperor (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1).  Is it any reason the Lord declares that he alone is God, and there is no other?  (See Isaiah 45:5.)

 

2.       Really bad governments try to set themselves up in the place God alone should have over their citizens.  In Isaiah 47:8, 10, we see that Babylon was so depraved, she declared herself to be I AM, the title God alone bears (Exodus 3:14).

Isaiah 41 on the Comprehensiveness of God's Care for His People

The Lord in Isaiah 41 speaks a word of comfort to his people, who in the short term are going to experience exile at the hands of the Babylonians, but who in the long term will know God’s comfort and restoration.  In v. 10 the Lord declares that he will hold his people up “with my righteous right hand.”  Then in v. 13, God adds that he will also reach down from heaven and take hold of our right hands as well.  God is underneath us his people, holding us up at all times.  And he is beside as well, giving supremely wise guidance and demonstrating at every instant his steadfast love.  Oh how comprehensive is the care of the Lord for those who are his people, by His grace, in the Lord Jesus Christ!

Jonathan Edwards on the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins

                Three Jonathan Edwards scholars have done the church a great service by editing and releasing a series of 15 sermons the great New England pastor preached during the winter of 1737-38 on the topic of Jesus’ Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, recorded in Matthew 25:1-13.  You may be aware that the First Great Awakening, which the Lord used Edwards to lead, occurred in two phases: phase one in 1734-35 and phase two in 1740-41.  The first phase of this great work of revival seemed to end abruptly with the suicide of Edwards’ uncle in May of 1735, along with other events.  By the end of 1737, Edwards was deeply concerned that some of the conversions he thought he had witnessed during 1734-35 were not in fact genuine.  Some of the people of his hometown of Northampton (Massachusetts Bay Colony) were returning to their old ways and attitudes of sin.  Some of the people who had undergone emotional experiences during the first phase of the Awakening now gave every appearance of being unchanged from their prior spiritual lostness.  Edwards preached the series of sermons from Jesus’ Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, among many other reasons, to call these “false professors” to genuine repentance and faith in Christ.  In typical Edwardsian fashion, the pastor held out before his lost hearers the spiritual beauty and excellence of Jesus Christ, suggesting that his glory should draw them to cleave to this Jesus as their spiritual husbands:

 

Consider how worthy and excellent Christ is, and how worthless [are others].  That glorious person that seeks your love is a divine person; he is one that is infinitely above all creatures, above the highest angels. . . . Christ is an heavenly one, yea, he is the king of heaven; he is infinitely above heaven itself. . . . [I]n Christ is real, substantial excellency.  The more acquaintance you have with him, the more excellency you will see in him, to delight and ravish your heart.

 

Jonathan Edwards, “True and False Christians (On the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins),” ed. Kenneth Minkema; Adriaan C. Neele, and Bryan McCarthy (Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2012), 57.  May God grant that you and I, through the glorious word of the Lord, would indeed grow in our “acquaintance” with Jesus Christ, to the end that we would find our souls increasingly delighting in our Savior and Lord!   

Our Help Is Supremely in God, not Man

                Crisis came to the Hebrew nation of Judah during the ministry of the prophet Isaiah.  The Assyrians, the overwhelming military power in the Middle East of the day (late 700’s A.D.), were threatening little Judah and Jerusalem.  In one of the weaker moments of his otherwise godly kingship, Hezekiah turned to the Egyptians for help, seeking a military alliance against Assyria with the Jewish people’s ancient foe.  However, the Lord reminded Hezekiah, through the prophet Isaiah, that the king was not to trust in human help but rather in the Lord alone.  As recorded in Isaiah 31, God warned Hezekiah that the Egyptians and their horses were mere flesh, whereas he is the Ruler of the universe.  The Egyptians would completely fail Judah as an ally, but the Lord would come himself to fight on behalf of the Jews.  The miraculous story of what God did to keep this promise is told in Isaiah 37.

                How does Isaiah 31 apply to our lives?  If we are sick, we do well to seek out doctors to treat us in whom we are able to repose the utmost trust.  However, no matter how gifted our physicians may be, our ultimate trust should be in the Lord.  Even the most eminent surgeon is utterly incapable of helping us, absent the Lord’s empowerment.  No medicine can work to heal our bodies unless God gives that medicine the power to cure us.  Indeed, whenever we find ourselves in a difficult situation, Isaiah 31 reminds us to trust ultimately in the Lord and never supremely in other people, no matter how talented or powerful those other human beings may be.     

Some of the Biblical Teaching on Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage in Outline Form

 

1. The most important biblical passages touching on the question of marriage, divorce, and remarriage include Genesis 2:18-24; Deuteronomy 24:1-4; Malachi 2:13-16; Matthew 5:31-32; 19:1-12; Mark 10:1-12; 1 Corinthians 7:12-16; Ephesians 5:22-33; and 1 Peter 3:1-7.  Scholars and pastors who love Scripture and hold fast to its supreme authority disagree to some extent about the interpretation of these passages, so what I am setting forth in this handout is a discussion of my own personal conviction, based on my own grappling over many years with the texts above.

 

2. Most importantly, the Bible affirms that marriage from the beginning, even before there was sin in the world, has been established by God the Creator as a covenant relationship between one man and one woman that includes the fundamental promises that, by God’s grace, the husband and wife 1) will love one another with a steadfast love, and 2) will keep themselves only unto one another so long as they both shall live (Genesis 2:24).  God thus wants the “default setting” of all married couples to be complete sexual and emotional faithfulness, until they are parted by death.  “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:6).  God created marriage to bring joy to human beings and, more deeply, to be a glorious picture to the world of nothing less than the loving, covenantal relationship between Jesus and the church (Ephesians 5:25-32).

 

3. However, because of our human sin (Mark 10:5), God allows divorce in a certain limited number of cases.

 

4. My belief is that the Bible clearly allows for (but does not require) divorce by the offended spouse in cases of sexual immorality like adultery and homosexual acts (Matthew 19:9) and in cases of abandonment (1 Corinthians 7:15).  This appears to be the historic position of most Protestant churches concerning the grounds for divorce.  For example, The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) says regarding this issue: “Although the corruption of man be such as . . . to put asunder those whom God hath joined together in marriage, yet nothing but adultery, or such willful desertion as can no way be remedied by the Church or civil magistrate, is cause sufficient for dissolving the bond of marriage” Westminster Confession, Chapter 24, art. 6. 

 

5. Are there other cases in which divorce might be scripturally permissible?  That is a hard question to answer, and I think the Bible always wants us to err on the side of trying to save marriages, but there may be some cases.  For example, many years ago I counseled with a wife who had discovered that her husband was literally the not the person he had represented himself to be prior to the marriage.  In other words, he had fraudulently induced her into marrying him.  Because in this case the whole marriage was an act of fraud by the husband, I concluded that the Bible would allow that wife to divorce that husband.

 

6. My personal opinion is that Matthew 19:9, which is admittedly a difficult text to interpret, allows for remarriage by the person sinned against in all cases where the Bible allowed the prior divorce.  I also believe that Scripture allows remarriage by a person whose former spouse has divorced him or her unbiblically.  I do not believe that the Bible allows remarriage by a person whose sin caused a divorce or by a person who divorced his or her spouse unbiblically. 

 

7.  All of us know that divorce, even where biblically allowed, is always a tragedy that causes deep pain and lasting consequences in the lives of the divorced parties and in the lives of their children.  Virtually every divorced person I have ever talked to describes going through a divorce as being something like walking through the aftermath of the death of a close loved one.  The church must seek to minister the grace and love of Christ to families caught up in the tragedy of divorce. 

 

8. If you are the one whose sin caused your former spouse to divorce you, or if you divorced your spouse for unbiblical reasons, understand that divorce is not the unforgivable sin.  God loves you and wants to supply you with his grace and mercy, especially through his people, to help you deal with your sin and experience his healing grace.  If you confess your sin to the Lord, he will be faithful not only to forgive your sin but also to cleanse you from it (1 John 1:9).

 

9. If your former spouse was guilty of sin that led to your divorce, or if your former spouse divorced you unbiblically, only the Lord can give you the grace you need truly to forgive that former spouse and to experience the fullness of spiritual and emotional healing God has for you.        

 

10. If you divorced someone unbiblically some years ago, or if someone divorced you unbiblically some years ago, and neither one of you has remarried, please consider before the Lord whether it is possible for you to seek reconciliation and remarriage to your former spouse.