Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Hymn for Advent—more than I knew

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Of the Father’s Love Begotten

Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see, evermore and evermore!

At His Word the worlds were framèd; He commanded; it was done:
Heaven and earth and depths of ocean in their threefold order one;
All that grows beneath the shining
Of the moon and burning sun, evermore and evermore!

He is found in human fashion, death and sorrow here to know,
That the race of Adam’s children doomed by law to endless woe,
May not henceforth die and perish
In the dreadful gulf below, evermore and evermore!

O that birth forever blessèd, when the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bare the Savior of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face, evermore and evermore!

This is He Whom seers in old time chanted of with one accord;
Whom the voices of the prophets promised in their faithful word;
Now He shines, the long expected,
Let creation praise its Lord, evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him; angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him, and extol our God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert sing, evermore and evermore!

Righteous judge of souls departed, righteous King of those alive,
On the Father’s throne exalted none in might with Thee may strive;
Who at last in vengeance coming
Sinners from Thy face shalt drive, evermore and evermore!

Thee let old men, thee let young men, thee let boys in chorus sing;
Matrons, virgins, little maidens, with glad voices answering:
Let their guileless songs re-echo,
And the heart its music bring, evermore and evermore!

Christ, to Thee with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving, and unwearied praises be:
Honor, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory, evermore and evermore!

This text (with one slight alteration on my part to adjust the rhyme scheme for shifting English pronunciation) is courtesy of Dan Clendenin. All I’ve ever seen in hymnals is verses 1, 6, and 9 of the above; it’s interesting how much theology they cut out, and how much deeper is Prudentius’ exploration of the mystery of the Creator becoming the created. I admit, you’re not likely to get most congregations to sing nine verses of a hymn . . . but it’s too bad.

The original of this hymn is a Latin poem from around the turn of the fifth century; I presume the above text is all John Mason Neale’s translation. Of the poet, Aryeh Oron writes,

Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (whose name is some times shown with a prefix of “Marcus”) was a Roman Christian poet. He was born in the Roman province of Tarraconensis (now Northern Spain). The place of his birth is uncertain, but it may have been Caesaraugusta Saragossa, Tarraco Tarragona, or Calagurris Calahorra. He came of a distinguished Christian family and received an excellent education, studied law, became an office-holder and rose rapidly, was twice governor of a province, and finally received high office at the court of Theodosius. Towards the end of his life (possibly around 392) Prudentius retired from public life to become an ascetic, fasting until evening and abstaining entirely from animal food. He decided to devote himself to poetry in the service of religion and the Church. He collected the Christian poems written during this period and added a preface, which he himself dated 405.

Neale set this text to a plainsong melody from the 11th or 12th century; the tune is now usually referred to as DIVINUM MYSTERIUM (Divine Mystery), though the CCEL page identifies it as CORDE NATUS EX PARENTIS, after the first line of Prudentius’ poem.

The pursuit of God

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I would be willing to bet that if you read the Bible much, you have a favorite part. For some, it will be the letters of Paul; others love the gospels best, for their stories of Jesus; and still others are drawn first to the Psalms. For my part, I love all those, and others, but I go first to the prophets, and especially to Isaiah. I’m not sure why that is, but I think our vacation to the canyonlands of Utah and Arizona a few years ago gave me an insight: like standing on the rim of Bryce Canyon or inside Double Arch, in the prophets I am captured by the power of God’s imagination, and the power with which it communicates his love and his beauty.

At the same time, though, reading the prophets can be more than a little frightening. I say this especially as a preacher, for anyone who stands to preach the Word is exercising a small part of the prophetic ministry and calling (which is one reason why preaching is such a dangerous act, at least for the preacher). The prophets are people who have been captured by God to a greater degree than almost anyone else, and in their impassioned calls to the people of God, we see the gulf between our sinfulness and God’s holiness more clearly than almost anywhere else. We also see, just as clearly, God’s absolute determination to cross that gulf with his love and redeem us despite ourselves, a determination which led to the birth of the Son of God, and his death on the cross.

And of all the prophets, I think we see most clearly the lengths to which God will go—and to which he will command his prophets to go—in Hosea. This is a deep and remarkable book, and a remarkable story. It begins with this command: “Go marry an adulterous woman and have children of adultery, for the land has been unfaithful to Yahweh.” So he goes and marries Gomer, and they have a son; and then she has two more children, and while we can’t be sure, the text suggests that maybe they weren’t Hosea’s. Things escalate, and she abandons her husband and children for her lovers; and in all this, God tells Hosea, the pain and hurt of the prophet’s experience, the betrayal he suffers, mirror God’s experience with Israel. Just as Hosea’s wife has gone chasing after other men—pretty much any man she thinks she can get something from, it sounds like—so Israel has gone chasing after other gods.

Now, we know how this sort of story ends—in divorce court—and that’s pretty much how it ended in Hosea’s day, too. But that’s not what happens here. Instead, we see Hosea’s determination to woo his wife back, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered, and to rebuild their marriage into what it should have been; and through him, through this acted parable, this enacted prophecy, of the love of God, we see God’s determination to do the same with Israel. And so God tells Hosea, “Go love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as Yahweh loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods”; and so he does.

I have to wonder what Gomer thought of this. Here she’s run away from her husband, she’s living with her lover, and one day her husband shows up on the doorstep and says, “I’d like to buy my wife back.” And what does she hear from the guy? Protestations of love? Demands that Hosea leave and never come back? No, she hears, “Sure—how much?” That can’t have been good for her ego. But on the other hand—she’s left her husband, she’s shamed him before all his people, she’s run off to be with another man—and yet, despite all that, her husband not only still wants her back, he’s willing to pay a steep price to get her back. That had to have made her look at Hosea in a new way.

So what does she make of it all? How does she respond to this costly demonstration of her husband’s love? We don’t know. We know what Hosea tells her, but we don’t know how she responds—we don’t know what becomes of them. We’re given the assurance that at some point in the future, Israel will return to God, that that relationship will be restored; but whether the same applied to Gomer and Hosea, we aren’t told. We’re left hanging, the story unfinished, wondering what happened next.

Now, strange as that is, I think there’s good reason why Hosea’s story stops in the middle; and if you’ve been wondering why we’re talking about this on the first Sunday of Advent, here’s the reason. You see, Jesus does much the same thing in the story of the prodigal son and his brother—we’re left hanging at the end with the father’s appeal to his older son, with no hint given of the older son’s response. The reason for that was that the older son represented the Pharisees and their allies, and it was up to them to make that response. The story—the real story—wasn’t finished. In the same way here, the deeper story wasn’t finished; telling the end of Hosea and Gomer’s story would have given it a false sense of closure. But this way, we’re drawn in to try to finish the story ourselves.

That’s important, because the deeper story here is the story of Advent. Remember, the season of Advent is a season of waiting and preparation for the coming of Christ—preparation to celebrate his first coming, which we do on Christmas, and preparation for the time when he will come again. The cry of Advent is “Come, Lord Jesus! Come, O come, Immanuel! Come and buy us back, come and set us free!” And the message of Advent is that he did come and buy us back, at a far greater cost than just silver, barley, and wine—he bought us back and set us free at the cost of his own life; and having done so, he is coming again to take us home with him.

Now, we all know this, or at least, we’ve all heard it before; but I wonder if we’ve ever thought about what this really means for our lives. I hadn’t, until a colleague of mine gave me a copy of the book Furious Pursuit. I have a number of quibbles with the book, but I still highly recommend it, because the audacious truth at the center of this book is something we desperately need to hear: Christianity isn’t about us chasing God, it’s about God chasing us. It isn’t about us earning his love, it isn’t about us being good enough or obeying hard enough; to pull from another colleague of mine, from a sermon that nearly put me on the floor, “We hear God saying, Obey me, obey me, obey me, but that’s not right. Yes, God wants our obedience, but that comes later. What God is really saying is Trust me, trust me, trust me; and as we learn to trust, we learn to obey.” Christianity isn’t about you straining every muscle to hold on to God, it’s about the fact that God will never let you go—never—and that whether you run to him, run away, or just try to ignore him, he will never stop pursuing you, because he loves you.

That’s what Advent is about. It’s about a God who loves you so much, who loves all of us so much, that even though we had rejected him, he came down to this earth, looked the devil square in the eye, and said, “I’d like to buy my people back.” We were in rebellion, we had set ourselves against him as his enemies; despite all that, at the right time, he died for us, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered. The Son of God traded in his throne and his crown for dirty straw and dirtier diapers; he gave up all the wealth of heaven for the poverty of homelessness; he set aside all the power and honor of deity to accept the powerlessness and shame of a criminal’s execution on a torture device. And he did it all for you.

What will you do?

“All to Jesus I surrender . . .”

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Let us look at our lives in the light of this experience and see whether we gladly glory in weakness, whether we take pleasure, as Paul did, in injuries, in necessities, in distresses. Yes, let us ask whether we have learned to regard a reproof, just or unjust, a reproach from friend or enemy, an injury, or trouble, or difficulty into which others bring us, as above all an opportunity of proving how Jesus is all to us, how our own pleasure or honor are nothing, and how humiliation is in very truth what we take pleasure in. It is indeed blessed, the deep happiness of heaven, to be so free from self that whatever is said of us or done to us is lost and swallowed up in the thought that Jesus is all.

 —Andrew Murray

Amen. May it be so.

HT: Ray Ortlund

One unique incomparable Savior

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 18
Q. And who is this mediator—
true God and at the same time
truly human and truly righteous?

A. Our Lord Jesus Christ,1

who was given us
to set us completely free
and to make us right with God.2

Note: mouse over footnotes for Scripture references (does not work in IE 6).

As Reformed Christians, we affirm that salvation is all of Christ and none of us, because no one but he could have accomplished it. He is unique, and not in any minor way; he is the only one who could encompass the work that needed to be done and the price that needed to be paid so that we might be saved, and no one else could even have begun to approach it. We don’t have to be worthy, we have no claim on pride in our own salvation, we cannot undo or lose this great gift—it is all of Christ, bestowed on us through his Holy Spirit by his incomparable grace and unfathomable love toward us who were his enemies, until he redeemed us despite ourselves and made us his friends.

Exploring The Westing Game

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My eldest daughter’s class is doing a unit on mysteries, and one of the books the class is reading is Ellen Raskin‘s novel The Westing Game. My daughter’s reading a different one, because she’s already read that one—I suggested it to her, because it’s one of those books I loved as a child and still love now. On a whim, I looked Raskin up on Wikipedia, and was interested to find that she had donated the manuscript of The Westing Game to her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin; they have made portions of it available online, accompanied by audio of Raskin talking through the manuscript. I haven’t had time to fully explore this yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

Politics and the Christian tongue

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Above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.

—James 5:12 (ESV)

This isn’t normally thought of as a political text, but I think it is, in a way.  At least, I believe it has significant implications for the way in which we conduct our politics. There are a number of reasons for James’ objection to oaths, but one is that oaths and strong language are an attempt to manipulate our hearers. We use such language to try to get people to believe what we say or to go along with what we want them to do, not because they believe us or trust us, but on some other basis. Oaths are essentially persuasive language, but not an honest or straightfoward form of persuasion; rather than attempting to persuade people with facts and honest argument, they attempt to persuade people by impressing them with our determination, or our anger, or our force of character, or the strength of our words.

This is the same sort of problem we see in our political advertising and argument. Most of the time, most of our politicians are unwilling just to come right out and tell you what they stand for and what they intend to do, and then to let you decide to support or oppose them without any attempt on their part to influence your choice. Equally, most politicians are unwilling to allow their opponents to do the same without their interference. As a consequence, they’re all trying to spin their own positions for maximum votes—trying to convince you that they’re saying what you want to hear—while at the same time doing everything they can to make you believe that the other candidate is a cannibal mass-murderer who apprenticed under the Wicked Witch.

Though sordid, this isn’t really all that surprising (or shouldn’t be). The problem with career politicians is that politics is their career, which means they have to win if they want to continue to have a job; as such, their highest priority usually tends to be winning. Just as the first priority of any business is to stay in business (for after all, none of those other priorities can be realized if you go out of business), so most politicians come to see staying in office as their highest priority. While they may, at least at first, hold that priority for good and noble reasons, over time, it will tend to corrupt them; and in particular, it will tend to lead them to de-emphasize truth. Truth, after all, is uncontrollable, and honest persuasion isn’t the most effective way to win—so if winning is your primary concern, you’re going to find another way to go about it.

For Christians in politics, this is a major problem, and a grievous temptation. James calls us to eschew such manipulation of language for plain, straightforward speech—to speak the truth, say what we mean, and mean what we say. As Christians, we shouldn’t need to add anything to our words to convince people of our honesty and sincerity; we should be known as truthful people whose word can be trusted and whose integrity is obvious. Others may not agree with us, but they should have no doubts that we’re being straight with them; nor should they have any doubt that we’re treating them with respect. We should not seek to manipulate others into doing things our way, nor to pressure or intimidate them into giving way for us. Rather, our practice should be to speak the truth plainly and openly—not that we have to say everything, but that we should not seek to misdirect others by what we say and don’t say, or by how we say it.

This, of course, is not necessarily the optimum course to achieve success as the world defines it; but as Christians, we should understand that success ultimately is not in our hands anyway, but in the hands of the God who is Lord of, in, and through all things. As it is God who determines our success, then, we should devote ourselves to the truth and let him do as he will. This necessarily leads to the countercultural conclusion that the truly Christian politician should not run to win, but rather should run to present the truth, as best as they understand it, and to offer their best judgment for what should be done as clearly, cogently, and fairly (and, yes, persuasively, with integrity) as they possibly can—and leave the vote in God’s hands.

(Adapted from “Speaking before God”)

Tamar: A Widow Wronged

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(Genesis 38, Deuteronomy 25:5-10; Matthew 1:1-3)

To many modern eyes, it seems strange that Matthew begins his gospel with a genealogy; but it didn’t seem strange at all to his Jewish audience. For them, genealogies were very important, because they told you who you were, and showed you your place in God’s chosen people. That’s why Matthew goes back to Abraham, because he was the ultimate ancestor of the people of God. The interesting thing, though, is that unlike every other genealogy of his time, Matthew includes women in his genealogy of Jesus, highlighting five women whom God used as part of his plan to redeem the world—and the women he highlights aren’t exactly conventional Jewish heroines. So why does he mention them? Well, thereby hangs a tale; and it all begins with Abraham.

When God told Abraham to move to Canaan, promising him that his descendants would be a great nation, he was 75, his wife Sarah 65. The move wasn’t easy, but they made it, then waited for God to fulfill his promise . . . and waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. A quarter-century passed, and still no son; and then one day, the Lord appeared again and told Abraham, “This will be the year that Sarah has her son.” Sarah laughed at that, but it happened just as God said; they named their baby boy Isaac, which means “laughter.” Isaac in turn had twin sons of his own, Esau and Jacob; and though Jacob was the younger, God chose him over Esau to be the ancestor of his chosen people.

This wasn’t the first time God had chosen the younger over the older—Isaac had an older half-brother, Ishmael, and God had favored Abel’s offering over Cain’s—and it would happen again among Jacob’s twelve sons; his oldest, Reuben, would disgrace himself, and God’s choice would fall on his younger brother Judah. The chosen kings of Israel, David and his descendants, would be from the tribe of Judah, and from David’s line would come Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, the Savior of the World.

Of all the unlikely people God chose to use, though, Judah was perhaps the unlikeliest. Jacob and his family were living in Canaan, but though God had promised them the land, they were a small minority among the idol-worshiping natives; that’s why Abraham had sent a servant back to his homeland to find a wife for Isaac, and why Isaac had sent Jacob back when the time came for him to marry. Judah, though, didn’t care about that; instead, he went out and married a Canaanite woman, and clearly spent more time with his pagan neighbors than he did with his family.

What’s more, he was a cold, selfish man. You see, Jacob fathered twelve sons (and some number of daughters) by four women, but he only loved one of those women—his second wife, Rachel—and he favored her two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, far beyond the others. In Genesis 37, Joseph’s neglected brothers (who despised him) ambushed him and threw him into a pit. They were going to kill him, but Reuben persuaded them not to; Judah took advantage of this while Reuben was away, convincing his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery for twenty pieces of silver. They followed this up by taking Joseph’s fancy robe—a special gift from his father, of course—dipping it in the blood of a goat, and taking it to their father to convince him Joseph had died. This was the kind of man Judah was.

We can see this in our chapter this morning. First, all we’re told about Judah’s wife is that he liked her looks, he had sex with her, and she bore him three sons. Clearly, this is all Judah really cared about, except probably that she put dinner on the table every night. Second, while Judah felt free to choose his own wife, he had no intention of allowing his sons to do so—and when the time came to choose a wife for his oldest son, Er, he simply grabbed another Canaanite woman. Third, he obviously didn’t do much of a job raising his sons. Er was so bad that God killed him off young; after that, his younger brother Onan selfishly refused to do his family duty, so God killed him off too.

In case the nature of his duty is unclear to you, the idea here is the same as Deuteronomy 25. This practice had two purposes. One was to ensure that the widow was remarried and thus provided for—widows were extremely vulnerable in that day and age. The other was to ensure that the dead brother had legal heirs to carry on his name, which otherwise would be forgotten. Of course, in Judah’s version, he doesn’t tell Onan to marry Tamar—he really doesn’t care a whit about providing for her; he just wanted an heir for his dead son. Onan, however, doesn’t want that. As the situation stands, he’s the oldest son and only has one brother to split the inheritance when Judah dies; but if he does his duty and Tamar gets pregnant, his share goes down dramatically. So, Onan sleeps with Tamar—he didn’t seem to mind that part—but practices birth control to ensure that she never gets pregnant. He probably figured he’d get away with it because Tamar would be afraid to expose him. What he doesn’t seem to have known, given the way Judah raised him, was that God was watching and wouldn’t tolerate his behavior. He might get it past Judah, but he wouldn’t, and didn’t, get it past God.

So here we are: Judah’s first two sons are dead—and you notice, he doesn’t mourn them at all? Their deaths are extremely inconvenient, but there’s no sign of grief—the problem is, they’re dead, and he still has no grandchildren; and instead of blaming them for their deaths, he blames Tamar. The way things were normally done, he should have kept her in his house and taken care of her—it was his responsibility, in that culture, as her father-in-law—but instead, he sends her back to her own father’s house, telling her to remain a widow until his third son, Shelah, grows up a little more. That is to say, she’s to consider herself betrothed, not free to marry anyone else, and to wear only the clothes that marked her as a widow in mourning. Unfortunately for her, Judah has no intention of keeping his word. Unfortunately for Judah, she figures that out—and lays a trap for him. Once Judah’s wife dies, she puts her plan into action.

The important thing to realize as we consider her plan is that under the laws of her society, it was probably perfectly ethical. Deuteronomy just says, if a man dies and he has an unmarried brother, he has to marry the widow and give his dead brother an heir; that responsibility doesn’t extend to their father. In the law codes of other cultures in that part of the world, however, it did, if the father were no longer married. Tamar is probably doing something perfectly acceptable by the ethical standards by which she was raised, whether Judah would have considered it so or not. Certainly, the fact that she waits for the death of her mother-in-law to carry out her plan indicates that she is trying to act rightly and morally, as best as she understands it.

In order to make her plan work, of course, she needs good information, and so she has an informer somewhere in Judah’s household. When the time is ripe, the informer tells her that Judah will be going up to Timnah to oversee the shearing of his sheep (and, probably, to enjoy the partying that always went along with it). Tamar takes off her widow’s garments, dresses up, puts on a veil (to ensure that Judah won’t recognize her), and sets herself up where he’ll be sure to see her. He does, and likes what he sees—and once again, that seems to be all that matters; taking Tamar for a prostitute, he goes over and asks to have sex with her. She plays along and asks him, “How much will you pay me?”

At least he makes her a good offer: a young goat from his flock. She accepts, on one condition: he has to leave a pledge with her to ensure that he’ll actually bring the goat—and the pledge she demands is steep. The seal was a disk or cylinder worn on a cord around the neck; on letters or official documents, it would be pressed or rolled into a piece of soft clay, and that would serve, in our terms, as an authorized signature. The staff was Judah’s symbol of authority, and had the mark of his seal carved into the head. These were things he could not afford to lose; in our terms, it’s as if he’d given her his driver’s license, passport and Social Security card. Still, Judah accepts her terms, takes what he wants, then goes on his way; and unbeknownst to him, she does the same, returning to her father’s house and going back undercover, so to speak.

We may imagine that Judah sent that goat as quickly as he could; notice, though, that he doesn’t take it himself, but sends it with his friend Hirah. Hirah gets to the place Judah described, and—no one there. So he asks around; only to keep Judah (or himself) from looking bad, he dresses things up a bit: “Where is the temple prostitute who was sitting by the road here?” After all, sleeping with a temple prostitute was an act of worship, nothing to be embarrassed about. However, putting things that way made the question rather ridiculous, because temple prostitutes worked in the temples, not along the roadside; and so the people Hirah asks look at him like he has a screw loose and say, “There haven’t been any here.” So Hirah goes back to Judah and says, “I couldn’t find her, and no one I talked to had seen her.” This is a problem for Judah—but as he sees it, the biggest problem isn’t the loss of his ID, but the fact that if this gets out, if people hear that he was played for a mark, he’ll be a laughingstock; so he tells Hirah to give up the search. Keeping this quiet is more important than getting the seal and staff back.

Now, Tamar had to know that if her plan worked, her pregnancy couldn’t stay hidden for long; and since she was carrying twins, she had even less time than she might have expected. About three months later, someone figured it out and took the news to Judah. Does Judah react with grace? What do you think? She’s betrothed to his son Shelah (whether or not he ever actually intended to let them marry), and so she’s guilty of adultery—and worse, of making his family look bad. These are not crimes he’s prepared to take lightly. Little does he know, of course; and so, as she’s being dragged out to be burned alive—rather an extreme punishment, that—she sends a message to her father-in-law: “The man who owns this seal, cord and staff is the man who got me pregnant. Rec-ognize them?”

And here comes the pivot point of the story, because this obviously hits Judah right between the eyes. NIV softens this, unfortunately, because what he actually says is, “She’s in the right, not I.” In other words, she acted rightly, and I’m the one at fault here; she was justified in her actions, and I wasn’t. This is completely out of character for Judah as he’s been to this point in Genesis. For the first time, he takes stock of himself and recognizes—and admits!—his fault; for the first time, he lets considerations of right and wrong guide his actions. For the first time, he really pays attention to someone besides himself. It’s the beginning of a critical character shift in Judah. Six chapters later, in Genesis 44, the man who callously sold his brother into slavery will do everything in his power to keep his youngest half-brother, Rachel’s son Benjamin, from suffering a similar fate, even offering himself as a slave in Benjamin’s place.

Now, from an Israelite perspective, Tamar isn’t an obvious hero. She was a woman, for one thing, and the heroes of the stories were more often men, though not as much more often as you might think. More importantly, she was a Canaanite—a foreigner, and a member of a people who were a real threat to the faith of the people of God. Finally, however defensible her actions might have been by her own standards, there’s no denying that they were, at the least, irregular by the standards of God’s law. And yet, she’s clearly the hero of this story, and just as clearly deserves to be. Despite her religious background, despite her decidedly problematic marital history, she is clearly the one person in this entire story who is faithful to God’s plan, and the one through whom God acts to bring that plan about.

There are a couple of reasons for that, I think. One is that she stays faithful to Judah’s family even when he is faithless to her. Why this is, we can’t say for sure, but the standard interpretation makes sense: even though Judah wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the God of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, Tamar could see the hand of God on him and his family, and had made a decision to cast her lot with them. That’s a plausible explanation because it makes sense of her clear determination to be a part of this family despite the ill-treatment she had received from them; while she had few if any legal options herself, her father and the rest of her family could have put considerable pressure on Judah, had she wanted to get free of her sham “betrothal.” Instead, all she seems to want is what she was promised: to bear a child to continue Er’s line.

This is a big thing, because for all Judah’s disregard of his family’s faith, his family was nevertheless identified with a God alien to Canaan; for her so decisively to choose Judah’s family over remarriage into another Canaanite family—to choose these outsiders over her own culture—was to choose their God over those of her own people. As such, though her deception is problematic in some ways, she was acting out of faith in the one true God, however imperfectly she knew and understood him. Yes, her act of faith was impure, tainted by her deceit, and her ethics didn’t come up to God’s standards; but are we any better? None of our motives are unmixed, after all, nor are any of our actions completely pure, and we have more reason to get it right than Tamar did.

There are a couple of lessons we might draw from this story. First, in a very real way, this marks the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promise that in Abraham, all the nations of the world would be blessed. The fulness of that promise would come in Jesus Christ, of course, who would draw people from all nations into the family of God; but it begins here, with this Canaanite woman who chooses to stay with the people of God rather than take a place among her own people.

Second, we see the power of the transforming grace of God, who can use anybody to accomplish his purposes. At the beginning of the story, Judah is about as ungodly as a socially respectable man can be; he fails as a son, as a brother, as a father, as a father-in-law, and above all as a follower of God, acting with complete disregard for anyone but himself. Tamar, meanwhile, is an alien to the family, both ethnically and religiously. Neither of them is a faithful servant of the God of Abraham. Yet at the end, God uses just this improbable couple to carry out his will. Perez and Zerah are born, and through Perez, the line continues which will lead ultimately to the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Judah has been changed by this encounter, his incorrigible selfishness broken, beginning the movement toward his act of utter selflessness in chapter 44 on behalf of his father and youngest brother. And Tamar has earned herself a place in the litany of the heroes of faith—and a place of honor among the ancestors of Christ.

We might look at people like Judah and despair, for in this world, hate, and selfishness, and pride, and many other evil things are strong and mock the Christmas message; yet for all that, the message of the Christmas bells is true: God is not dead, nor is he sleeping, and his purpose will not fail. Judah’s position seemed impregnable, his hard, cold heart incorrigible, yet God worked through Tamar to shatter both. However powerful and clever the wrong might seem now, it is neither strong enough to overpower God, nor shrewd enough to outsmart him. In the end, no matter what anyone might do, God’s will shall be done.

On this blog in history: May 1-13, 2008

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The Gospel in the Ascension
God’s love goes farther than our sin

.Why lawyers shouldn’t teach history
Those who misunderstand history will never learn its lessons . . .

The problem with historical parallels
. . . and as a consequence, will misapply them to current events

.In defense of the church, part III: Doctrine
On why the attack on doctrine is incoherent and unfounded.

Belated thoughts on prayer
Power isn’t in prayer, power is in God.

Speaking Before God

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(1 Kings 17:1-7; James 1:5-8, James 5:12-20)

As we’ve been working our way through James the last couple months, we’ve seen a consistent concern with our speech, both the ways we talk and the things we say. That concern is most clearly expressed in the first part of chapter 3, as James laments the damage our tongues can do and our inability to control them, but it finds its beginning in chapter 1 in his command that we are to be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger, and recurs throughout the letter as he issues commands against various forms of negative speech. His concern is well-founded, since the things we say can do great harm—but for most of the letter, there’s nothing positive to balance that concern. If you stopped the book with last week’s passage, you might come away thinking there’s nothing for it but to join the monks and take a vow of silence.

Here at the close, though, James winds up his letter by laying out a positive vision for our words and our speech. This section is usually read as a section on prayer, and certainly prayer figures largely in it, but his concern is broader than that. He’s talking more generally about our speech together as the people of God—and in the process, he highlights the fact that everything we say, we say in God’s presence; God is involved in everything we say, and thus our words are more significant than we tend to assume. In a sense, one of the subtle lessons of this passage is that prayer isn’t just specific things we say to God; we are standing in his presence every moment, and he’s involved in every conversation we have and every statement we make, and so we need to think and speak accordingly.

This, I believe, is the connection between verse 12 and the rest of this passage. At first glance, this verse doesn’t seem to connect to anything around it, until you stop and consider what oaths are. When you swear an oath, you call a power greater than yourself to witness that you’re telling the truth. People don’t do this seriously very much anymore—though our legal system and public ceremonies still require people to swear on the Bible, which is to call the word of God to witness to our truthfulness—but the remnants of it are all over our speech. That is, among other things, where the casual use of the names of God comes from, as people used to swear by God the Father or by Jesus Christ; the meaning has dropped out, but the pattern remains. In each case, whether the oath was sworn in the name of God, by some aspect of his creation, or even by one of the pagan gods of the old myths, the point was the same—to invoke some greater power than myself to support my own assertion that I’m telling the truth.

There are several problems with this. First, this kind of thing ultimately raises real questions about our credibility. As the New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, using oaths to support our speech becomes, paradoxically, an admission that we can’t be trusted to tell the truth on our own; the harder we work to convince people, the stronger the language we use, the more suspect our own honesty becomes. Second, implicitly, oaths are a form of manipulation of God, as we try to use his name—or the name of something he has made—for our own purposes, to get people to believe what we’re trying to tell them. That, as James well knows and indeed as the whole Bible makes clear, is nothing God is going to tolerate.

And third, oaths and strong language are an attempt to manipulate our hearers as well, to try to force people to believe what we say or to go along with what we want them to do, not because they believe us or trust us, but on some other basis. Oaths are essentially persuasive language, but not in an honest or straightfoward way; rather than attempting to persuade people with facts and honest argument, they attempt to persuade people by impressing them in some other way. It’s the same sort of problem we see in our political advertising and argument, where our politicians are unwilling to come right out and tell you what they stand for and what they intend to do, much less to allow their opponents to do the same. They’re all trying to spin their own positions for maximum votes, while at the same time doing everything they can to convince you that the other candidate is a cannibal mass-murderer who apprenticed under the Wicked Witch. Truth is uncontrollable, and honest persuasion isn’t the most effective way to win—so if winning is your primary concern, you’re going to find another way to go about it.

By contrast, James calls us to plain, straightforward speech—to speak the truth, say what we mean, and mean what we say. As Christians, we shouldn’t need to add anything to our words to convince people of our honesty and sincerity; we should be known as truthful people whose word can be trusted and whose integrity is obvious. Others may not agree with us, but they should have no doubts that we’re being straight with them; nor should they have any doubt that we’re treating them with respect. We should not seek to manipulate others into doing things our way, nor to pressure or intimidate them into giving way for us; our practice should be to speak the truth plainly and openly—not that we have to say everything, but that we should not seek to misdirect others by what we say and don’t say, or by how we say it. As it is God who determines our success, we should devote ourselves to the truth and let him do as he will.

James continues by encouraging us to pray in all kinds of circumstances—for songs of praise are a form of prayer in their own right. If we’re in trouble, we should pray; but just as well, we should also pray when we’re happy and all seems right with the world, because God deserves the credit and thanks—and because we need to remind ourselves of that fact. And in cases of serious illness, James says, call the leaders of the church to pray for you. This is something that tends to be ignored outside Pentecostal and charismatic churches, which is too bad. Partly, this is an aspect of the pastoral responsibility of the leaders of the church—pastors, elders, and deacons alike—and partly it’s an indication of the kind of people church leaders ought to be: people of sufficient maturity and faith to lead such a prayer and seek God’s will in the faith that he can and will bring healing. As part of that prayer, James says they should anoint the sick one with oil, symbolizing that that person is being set apart for God’s special attention in the prayers of the church.

Now, James says, “the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well”; does that mean that he’s guaranteeing physical healing if we just pray hard enough and have enough faith? There are those who believe so, but this runs counter to the rest of the New Testament; such an understanding makes the work of God dependent on us rather than on his love and grace, and it turns prayer into just another attempt to manipulate God and make him do what we want. How then do we understand this promise, since we know that God does not in fact bring physical healing to everyone for whom we pray?

The answer is to be found, I think, in the fact that the Greek verb which the NIV translates “make . . . well,” sozō, doesn’t only mean “heal”—it’s also the standard New Testament word for “save.” Some, in fact, take this and try to give this passage a purely spiritual meaning, though that doesn’t really work here. It does, however, point us to an important reality: sometimes it isn’t physical healing that God is most concerned about in our lives. Everything he allows to happen to us, he allows for a purpose—and sometimes he allows illness or other physical problems so that he may demonstrate his power by healing them, and we need to believe that, and pray accordingly. But at other times, he has other purposes in our physical afflictions. He may use them to humble us, to teach us to rely on him rather than to trust in our own strength; he may allow them as a way to force us to deal with emotional or spiritual issues in our lives. Or, to take the case James highlights, he may send them to discipline us for our sin and push us to repentance; in which case, the primary problem is the sin, not the illness.

This is why he says, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” It’s not that every sickness is the result of sin; but sin which we have not confessed or of which we refuse to repent blocks the healing work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The obvious reason for this is that God does not honor disobedience or reward rebellion, but there’s more to it than that; sin is itself a sickness, a spiritual illness, a defect that blights the health and goodness of creation. If we would truly be healed, if we truly want to be whole, we need to confess our sin, lay it aside, and turn our back on it—whether our sin is the direct cause of any bad circumstances in our life or not. This isn’t a disconnected precondition God imposes on healing us, nor is it reason to complain that he has unreasonable expectations; it is, rather, something which is simply necessary for its own sake.

But if we will confess our sins to one another and lay them aside, if we will pray for one another in God-given faith, there’s no telling what may happen. The prayer of the righteous, James declares—and here, he’s not referring to super-saints, but to anyone who has found salvation in Jesus Christ and is not harboring unconfessed sin—the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. That power isn’t inherent in us, nor is it anything magical about prayer; it is, rather, the power of God made available through us. When we seek God’s will, he guides us to pray according to his will, and his power goes to work through us to accomplish his purposes. To illustrate this, James offers the example of Elijah—a great prophet, yes, a worker of miracles, yes, a holy man of God, yes, but someone fundamentally different from us? No. At bottom, he was just another human being, really no different from us. He didn’t have some special magic power, he was simply a man of prayer who devoted his life to following and serving God; as a prophet, he was filled with the Holy Spirit, and as followers of Jesus Christ, so are we. There was no power available to him that isn’t also available to us, if we will walk by faith in God rather than by sight and our own strength.

Now, none of this comes easily, for we all struggle against the sin that’s rooted deep in our hearts; God is at work by his Spirit patiently rooting it out, but sometimes we don’t want it rooted out—sometimes we want to hang on to it. Sometimes our sinful desires distort our vision, and we come to mistake the evil for the good. And sometimes we just get tired, or distracted, and wander away from the truth. When that happens, sometimes we can put things right ourselves, but more often, we need help. We need each other, people to come alongside us and speak truth into our lives—the kind of truth Dr. Larry Crabb talks about in his book Real Church, that I hope you’ve been reading with us. We need people to tell us, gently and humbly, that we’re a mess, that we’re off the rails, that we really need to face up to the sin in our heart—and that however great our problems may be, however dark the darkness in our heart may be, the love of God is greater, and the grace of God shines brighter, and there is nothing wrong in us that he does not have the power and the desire to put right. There is no evil we can do out of which he cannot bring good, and no part of our lives that he cannot redeem. This is a great and profound truth; but it’s a truth we need to hear from others before we can tell it to ourselves.

This is why James tells his hearers, “Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way”—whoever sees someone wandering down a path that leads away from God, and corrects that person and brings them back to the true way—“will save a soul from death and cover over a multitude of sins.” Sin leads to death, sooner or later, as inevitably as falling leads to a sudden stop at the end, and believing things which are not true about God will inevitably result in doing things which are not true to his character; none of us gets everything right, of course, but a serious departure from the gospel of Jesus Christ has very serious consequences. When we see people going astray from the core truth of the gospel and the holiness of God, wandering into significant sin, it’s nothing less than an act of love to reach out to them gently and seek to correct them, to bring them back to the truth. They may not want to hear it, they may resist, they may not perceive it as loving—but it is; for in so doing, if they do ultimately respond, we prevent a great many sins they would otherwise have committed, and save them from making shipwreck of their lives. Such can be the power of godly speech, of speech that is filled with the power of God—for when God speaks, even when he speaks through us, his word never fails to accomplish the purpose for which he sent it.

And on that note, James concludes, leaving us with a word of hope. We cannot control the tongue, and in failing to do so we can do great damage; but God can, and as we speak to him and he speaks through us, we can also do great good with our words. The way of friendship with the world is what sets our tongue ablaze with the fire of Hell, but the way of friendship with God opens us up to the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives, which puts out that fire and fills our mouths instead with the word of the gospel of the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ, that we may speak words of life instead of death, blessing instead of cursing, peace instead of destruction.