Kaleb’s experience illustrates a couple aspects of the reality Paul’s talking about in 2 Corinthians 8. First, he reminds us that God provides for his children, and in fact that everything we have is God’s provision. Yes, none of the extra money they received simply appeared miraculously out of nowhere; it could all be tracked to where it came from and why. But God was in command of all those events; he set each in its proper place and time to meet Kaleb and Ashlea’s needs at that point.
The fact is, God most often works through other people to accomplish his purposes, even when they’re completely unaware of it. As we see in Paul, he provides for our needs through other people, and provides for the needs of others through us. This is simply how he chooses to operate. I don’t know all his reasons for working this way, but at least in part, it’s a matter of taking us seriously and treating us with respect.
When God uses us to take care of other people, it makes our actions and our lives meaningful. He could easily do everything directly, all by himself—but then what would we have to do? What would we matter? He makes us instruments of his blessing so that we can see that our lives are important. He does it in ways that are completely apart from our own plans—like that woman who ended up blessing Kaleb by accident—to help us see that everything we do, even the smallest thing, has consequences which ripple out far beyond and outside anything we could ever predict, or even understand.Read more→
Or as Jedi Master Yoda said, “Do. Or do not. There is no ‘try’.” For anything important, anything that really matters, anything that’s truly a challenge, either you abandon yourself to it and you give it all you have, or you’d best walk away and go somewhere else. Otherwise, “squish like grape.” There’s no three ways about it.
This is truest when it comes to following God. That’s why God is very clear—we see it in Moses, and we see it in Jesus—that either you’re striving to follow him with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength, or else you’re not following him at all. Granted, even at our best, the execution is never entirely there; but the intent and the desire and the commitment have to be. Obedience that wants to make an exception at any point isn’t obedience at all.Read more→
I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge these days, but Switzerland has long been known for its neutrality. It stayed out of both world wars of the last century, neither attacking anyone nor suffering invasion. Its neutrality was established by treaty among the principal military powers of Europe—specifically, the Treaty of Paris of 1815 that ended the Napoleonic Wars.
You also might know that the Pope’s bodyguards are Swiss. I’m not sure if that was widely known in this country or if I just learned it from reading Richard Scarry growing up. I know that’s where my mental image of the Swiss Guard came from (see above). Right along with the Queen’s Guard in their big bearskin hats, you had the Swiss Guard in Rome dressed up like a bunch of clowns. Knowing as I did that Switzerland was neutral, I figured they were a joke.
You can imagine my surprise when I found out that for over two centuries, Swiss mercenaries were the elite soldiers of Europe. The beginning of the end came in 1515 when Swiss troops suffered their first defeat since the 1200s, and the leaders of the Swiss Confederacy realized that there were major downsides to all that warfare. For one thing, after so many battles, other nations were learning to copy their tactics, and some of them were getting pretty good. For another, while exporting their people had brought a lot of money back into Switzerland, it had also put the country at risk. That wasn’t clear as long as they were winning, but once they lost a battle, the risk became obvious. Switzerland declared itself neutral and outlawed mercenary service, allowing only those troops serving in the French army and the Swiss Guard at the Vatican.Read more→
Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. He was also the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them, but I have my suspicions. You see, this was during the Thirty Years’ War, and in 1637 Eilenberg was attacked three different times. When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees. Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkart’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day. Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster. But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinkart wrote these words:
Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in whom his world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms, hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.
During Napoleon’s reign in France,a man named Charnet offended the emperor—unintentionally—and was thrown in jail to rot. As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”
But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight. Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow. Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower. Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he saw that however much we may pound down this earth, the glory and beauty of God still breaks through, and so he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”Read more→
In October, we’re going to be participating in an initiative called Pray31. The men who’ve launched this are hoping to get one million Christians in this country to pray together methodically for the US every day in October. They aren’t asking for a major time commitment; the guide for this initiative is what they’ve called the “US Prayer Atlas,” which gives two simple prayer requests per day. These requests are laid out through the month to get all of us praying for every US state and territory, for our national system and institutions, for the church in this country, and for revival in the land. I’ve ordered copies of the Prayer Atlas for everyone, and I hope everyone in the church will use theirs daily next month as we pray together for our nation.
Now, I think this is an admirable project, and I’m glad to have our church join with churches across America in prayer for this country, but I do have one criticism: I think the vision of the men doing this is too small. Their materials seem primarily concerned with public moral standards and whether the US is being governed according to biblical principles, and I suspect that if suddenly this nation looked a lot more like it did in the ’50s, they’d figure their prayers had been answered. Certainly, back then there were many more people in church, the mainline denominations were still planting lots of churches, and there was public respect for Christian faith which is now going if not gone. On the other hand, I had a colleague in Colorado who pastored one of those 1950s church plants; I remember her saying that when she got there, the church knew nothing about Jesus, because their previous pastors had never talked about him.
Donald Grey Barnhouse, who was then the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia, read the signs of the times clearly. As Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary California tells the story,
Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.
I think he was right. The Devil would as soon damn people through religion as debauchery, through morality as immorality; after all, people who are immoral and debauched are just likely to hit bottom and realize they need God. Moral, upstanding citizens are likely to think they already have him, whether they have any actual relationship with him or not.Read more→
I got this sermon from Solomon Dickey. (Well, from Solomon Dickey and the Holy Spirit.) To many of you, that statement seems strange because you don’t recognize the man’s name; to old Winona hands, it seems even stranger, because Solomon Dickey has been dead for quite a long time. For those who aren’t familiar with the story, the Rev. Dr. Solomon Dickey was the Presbyterian minister who founded the Winona Assembly in 1894; this church developed out of that in 1905, with the town of Winona Lake formally coming into existence in 1913. Dr. Dickey is, in a sense, my ultimate predecessor in this congregation.
Obviously, then, I’ve never spoken to him directly; but the dead do still bear witness, in various ways. In Dr. Dickey’s case, there’s his bust down on Park Avenue across from the Post Office. Beneath the bust is a plaque; on the plaque is Psalm 125:1. One day last year when I was down to the Post Office for something, I saw that and thought, “If you have faith and do not doubt, you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.”
Now, it’s not certain these two verses are talking about the same mountain. Scholars are evenly split, as far as I can tell, between those who think Jesus is talking about Mount Zion, on which Jerusalem and the Temple were built, and those who think he was talking about the Mount of Olives. The Gospels don’t tell us for sure. But even if Jesus and his disciples were walking along the slope of the Mount of Olives at this point, they were on their way to Jerusalem, looking toward Mount Zion. The focus of this whole section of Matthew is on Jerusalem and the Temple. It seems most natural to me, then, that Jesus was referring to the mountain ahead of them, which though not a particularly tall peak, stood at the heart of the nation.
A word on the fig tree here, because it’s easy to read this passage and think Jesus is being wildly unreasonable. The fact is, while it was not yet fig season, Jesus actually had good reason for what he did. Let me quote you here from a couple of the commentators on Matthew. First, here’s R. T. France:
At Passover time in Jerusalem (March-April) fig trees are beginning to come into leaf, but there is not yet a full covering of leaves. Once the leaves are fully developed, it is time to look for the early fruit . . . This “single fig tree” . . . apparently stood out as having an unusually full coverage of leaves for Passover season, which encouraged the hope of early fruit even though, as Mark conscientiously reminds us, “It was not the season for figs.”
At this time of year, such fig trees contained only green early figs . . . which ripen around June but often fall off before that time, leaving only green leaves on the tree. Because of their unpalatable taste, these early figs rarely were eaten; but someone too hungry to care about the taste would eat them anyway, as some do today. A leafy tree lacking such early figs, however, would bear no figs at all that year.
In other words, this fig tree had a fine display of leaves, but the leaves weren’t leading to any fruit and weren’t going to lead to any fruit. The tree was putting all its effort into itself and offering nothing for anyone else. As France concludes, “it offered promise without fulfillment.”
To that Jesus says, in effect, “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way you’re going to get it. You have all these leaves but you’re not bearing any fruit—fine: you’ll never bear fruit again.” And with that, the tree begins to die from the roots up. Don’t take that “immediately” too seriously, by the way—it’s the same word translated “quickly” in verse 20. There’s a Greek word that means “immediately,” and it occurs about four thousand times in the Gospel of Mark, but that’s not the word here. Matthew isn’t saying the tree magically withered before their eyes, or that verses 19-20 happened in the same moment. He puts the story together like this to make it clear that nothing natural killed this tree, but only the word of Christ.
The disciples certainly got that point, because they’re astounded; they want to know how that could possibly have happened. Jesus responds by telling them, “If you have faith and don’t doubt, you’ll do much greater things than this. You see Mount Zion up ahead there? The psalmist said it can’t be shaken but endures forever. Micah said that in the last days, it will be established as the greatest of the mountains. But you, if you have faith and don’t doubt, you can tell it to go throw itself in the sea, and it will be done. What cannot even be shaken, you can uproot, if you pray and believe.”
Now, to our Western minds this seems to say, “You’ll get whatever you want as long as you’re completely convinced God will give it to you”; and unfortunately, that’s how a lot of preachers and teachers present this passage and others like it. Equally unfortunately, a great many others react in the opposite direction and dismiss Jesus’ teaching altogether. Both groups make the same mistake: they think the faith is the point. They think Jesus is saying that the power is in our faith, that it’s our belief that makes things happen. This is completely wrong. There was a song called “Faith” that was big on Christian radio 25 or 30 years ago that declared,
Faith can move the highest mountain,
Turn deserts into fountains,
And part the mighty waters of the deepest sea.
Faith can make a broken heart mend,
Bring the rain from heaven;
Faith can even change the course of history.
That’s popular theology, but it’s pure malarkey, 200 proof. Faithdoes nothing itself; without works, it’s dead. God does everything.
So when Jesus says, “If you have faith and don’t doubt,” or, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer,” if he doesn’t mean that faith lets us call the shots, what does he mean? Well, when the Bible talks about faith, faith is inGod alone, faith is about God alone, faith is from God alone. If your belief comes from you, it doesn’t matter how passionately you hold it or how utterly convinced you are about it, it isn’t faith, it’s just wishful thinking. Biblically, if you have faith and don’t doubt, that can only be because God is calling you and God is commanding you to act. It’s not a matter of dictating to God, but of obeying him.
If Ezekiel had taken it on himself to prophesy to a carpet of dry bones, he could have preached himself hoarse, and they would have just lain there. When the Lord called him to prophesy to those bones that God was going to restore them to life, he went out and preached, and they stood up before his eyes. Jesus was humanly inconceivable, but God told Mary what he was going to do, and she said, “I will obey,” and then she conceived him. Jesus didn’t tell any of his disciples to command Mount Zion to throw itself into the sea, because that wasn’t in his plan; but even that, if they had done it at his word, would have happened. And though it didn’t happen literally, the disciples did see it happen metaphorically in 70 AD, when the Roman army overthrew Jerusalem and tore down the Temple, leaving not one stone on another.
Nothing God commands is impossible, no matter how implausible or unbelievable we might think it to be. Nothing God prevents is possible, no matter how easy or obvious it might seem. The only thing that defines reality and sets the limits of the possible is the will of God. If God calls you to prophesy to a field of bones that he’s going to restore them to life, then go out and preach, and they will stand up before your eyes. If he tells you to command the immovable to move, then give the order, and you will see it done.
One of the key words in our passage from John is the word translated “Advocate.” The Greek word here is parakletos, which has been turned into the English word “paraclete”; some of you may have heard that word at some point. It’s not really a translation, and if you try to use it, people usually think you’re weird. Either that, or they ask, “Didn’t you mean to say ‘parakeet’?” So just trying to use an English version of the Greek word doesn’t work very well, but I understand why some people do it, because this is another one of those words that doesn’t really have a good English translation. Our Bible versions try words like “Helper,” “Advocate,” and “Counselor,” and of course the King James Version used “Comforter,” but none of them really does the job.
In fact, the King James translation has been rather unhelpful over the years, not because it’s inadequate—like I said, every translation is inadequate—but because it has pointed the mind of the English-speaking church in the wrong direction. When we think of the Holy Spirit as the Comforter, we think of him as being primarily for us, given to us for our benefit. That’s clearly part of the Spirit’s ministry, but it isn’t the main part, as John 14-16 makes clear. First and foremost, the Holy Spirit has come to us to work in and through us for the sake of the world. The Spirit comforts and consoles us because God loves us, but part of that is that he comforts us so that we will be strong to carry out God’s purpose for us, which is: wherever you go, make disciples of Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit is working in us to empower and equip us for outreach—making connections and building relationships with people who don’t believe in Jesus—to lay the groundwork for evangelism—communicating the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God—so that people will come to faith in Christ and become his disciples, who will then begin to do the same thing wherever they go. To that end, the Holy Spirit is our Helper/Counselor/Advocate/Comforter/Encourager/Strengthener/Guide, and so on. If “Inspirer” were a word, we could call him that too. He is the one who is with us to testify to us, and to testify through us to the world, about who Jesus is and what he has done and why it all matters.
Note, one, what this means for our mission as Christians and as the church: our first priority, if we go where Jesus sends us and the Spirit leads us, is out into the world to seek and save the lost. Ahead of worship, and of taking care of each other? Yes. The latter is certainly important, which is why the apostles raised up the first deacons in Acts 6, but even there we see it wasn’t first on the list. As for worship, that isn’t part of our mission, it’s the source of our mission. True worship focuses our eyes, our minds, our hearts, and our trust on God, and thus opens us up to the guidance of the Holy Spirit; and where the Spirit points us first is out into the world. It was easy for the church in America to lose sight of that when the world around us looked pretty Christian, but those days are gone. We have a mission field just beyond our front door.
Two, while the mainstream American church in recent years has tended to think of evangelism in terms of attracting people with a certain sort of church experience and focusing on their felt needs, Jesus is talking about something quite different. This isn’t about being seeker-sensitive; it’s more a matter of challenging people to seek Jesus in the first place. The Holy Spirit bears witness to Jesus by putting the world to shame about sin and justice and judgment. He brings conviction, not as a prosecutor seeking a legal verdict, but but in our minds and hearts. You’ll note, by the way, that the NIV has “righteousness” rather than “justice”; we’ve seen before that while these are two separate words in Hebrew, the Greek has one word for both. This world calls good evil and evil good, and it has sought to redefine justice and corrupt judgment to feed its own desires; the Spirit confronts it with its guilt in a way that cannot simply be ignored.
Jesus in his ministry on Earth drove people to commitment—either for him or against him. No one ever looked at Jesus and said, “Meh. He’s OK, I guess.” With all due apologies to the Doobie Brothers, no one who knew him ever said, “Jesus is just alright with me.” He didn’t intend to allow anyone the safety of that response. He told people the truth so purely and relentlessly that either they threw away their pride, repented of their sin, and gave him their lives, or else they tried to kill him. No other stance was possible, because he presented the human ego with a rival with which it simply could not peacefully coexist. The Holy Spirit speaks to us, and through us, whatever he hears from Jesus, and so he carries on that same work.
As noted a minute ago, Jesus says three specific things. First, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame for its sin in refusing to believe in Jesus. As New Testament scholar D. A. Carson puts it,
The world’s unbelief not only ensures that it will not receive life, it ensures that it cannot perceive that it walks in death and needs life. The Holy Spirit presses home the world’s sin despite the world’s unbelief; he convicts the world of sin becausethey do not believe in Jesus. This convicting work . . . is designed to bring men and women of the world to recognize their need, and so turn to Jesus.
Some listen. Others refuse that recognition, unwilling to admit they’re wrong, and either turn and run from Jesus, or else choose to attack.
Second, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame by revealing that its understanding of what is right and just is false, corrupt, and pitifully inadequate. To quote Carson again, “One of Jesus’ most startling roles . . . was to show up the emptiness of [the world’s] pretensions, to expose by his light the darkness of the world for what it is.” Because Jesus has left this world and is no longer here to do that, the Spirit carries on that work in us, empowering us to live as Jesus lived so that his light shines through us to expose the darkness of the world around us and the emptiness of its claims of justice.
Third, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame by proving that it’s bowing down to a false judge, for the prince of this world is a liar from the beginning. At his command, the world judged God himself, who is perfectly good and perfectly innocent, to be the worst of sinners, and put him to death. By his resurrection, Jesus proved that judgment to be utterly wrong, the maximum possible error. By that error, the prince of this world stands judged and condemned, and the judgment of the world which follows him is shown to be “profoundly wrong and morally perverse.”
When we think about evangelism, then, we need to realize that our good news for the world doesn’t begin with “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The American journalist and cynic H. L. Mencken once said, “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones is alive”; similarly, many modern American approaches to evangelism consist in saying “Jesus died for your sins” to people who never knew they had any, and have no real idea what Jesus dying has to do with anything anyway. The message of Jesus is only good news to people who’ve accepted the bad news. That’s why prostitutes liked him better than Pharisees did—the bad news wasn’t news to them—and it’s why the bad news is where the Spirit begins.
I’ve been encouraging you to be praying for four non-believers, and asking God to open up opportunities for you to share your faith with at least one of them. Sean Johnston has added to that the suggestion that at least one of those four be an enemy of yours. I want you to have an eye toward inviting one of those for whom you’re praying to come with you to our Christmas Eve service. But as you’re praying, be open to the Spirit of God and asking him to tell you what to say, and remember this passage from John; be aware that before you can share the good news of new life in Christ, the Spirit may first call you to be the bearer of bad news about sin and justice and judgment.
We saw last week, looking at Ezekiel 37, that the bones of Israel were dry and lifeless, but they did have one thing going for them: they knew they were dead. This world believes it’s alive and doing just fine, even as it stands under the sway of the prince of death. The work of revival in any of our hearts begins with opening our eyes to see through its illusion of life to recognize our need for true life, which can only be found in Jesus Christ; this is the work the Spirit seeks to do through us for others. May we be people who love others enough to speak this inconvenient truth.
The call of God is a blessing, but it isn’t always anything the world would recognize as a blessing. We see that in the lives of a number of people in the Bible, but perhaps in no one more than the prophet Ezekiel. He was a young Jewish priest dragged off to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar and his armies during the Babylonian conquest of the kingdom of Judah. He’d been trained for a position of spiritual leadership, and he clearly took that responsibility seriously. However, while he may have been fine with being a priest, it seems clear he didn’t want to be a prophet. He fought God and tried to rebel, but the Spirit of God overwhelmed him and drove him to proclaim the word of the Lord to his people.
Looking back, you can’t blame him; maybe he had some sense of what the prophetic ministry would cost him. None of God’s prophets had it easy, for most of them were charged with proclaiming the grief and wrath of God at the unfaithfulness of his people, but Ezekiel bore that far more heavily than most of them. As the Old Testament scholar Daniel Block writes, “While prophets were known often to act and speak erratically for rhetorical purposes, Ezekiel is in a class of his own. The concentration of so many bizarre features in one individual is without precedent: his muteness; lying bound and naked; digging holes in the walls of houses; emotional paralysis in the face of his wife’s death; ‘spiritual’ travels; images of strange creatures, of eyes, and of creeping things; hearing voices and the sounds of water; . . . and the list goes on. . . . What other prophets spoke of, Ezekiel suffers. . . . [He carries] in his body the oracles he proclaims and [redefines] the adage, ‘The medium is the message.’”
Chapter 37 is all of a piece with that. The Lord reaches down and abruptly pulls Ezekiel into a vision—a horrible vision. He’s set down in the middle of a valley he appears to know well, though he doesn’t name it, and sees the ground covered with dry bones, bleached white by the Mediterranean sun. Clearly, the valley has been the site of a vast human slaughter; to make matters worse, the bodies had been denied proper burial and left out for the buzzards. That was the sort of treatment given to the cursed, to traitors and false allies and those who broke their covenant oaths—such as faithless Israel, whom God had sent into exile for their evil deeds. The prophet is amazed at the vast number of bones, and astonished at how dry they are. There’s no life in them at all, and hasn’t been for a very long time.
As Ezekiel already knew, these bones do indeed represent the people of Israel. As we saw some weeks ago, they’re a dead nation; they’ve been wiped off the map, and by all the normal rules, they’ll never be seen or heard from again. There were many individuals alive, but as a people, they had no present and even less future. And then the Lord turned to his prophet and asked, “Son of man”—mortal, human being, Earthling—“can these bones live?” Well, are yougoing to tell the Lord of the universe no? And yet, no other answer is conceivable. So Ezekiel does the reasonable thing: he ducks the question. “Lord, only you can answer that one.”
God doesn’t let him get away with it; if Ezekiel won’t give an answer, he will become the answer. “Prophesy to the bones,” the Lord commands—just as if dry bones could hear and understand. “Tell them, ‘Listen to the word of the Lord. The Lord God declares, “Look! I will put breath into you and bring you back to life. I will reconnect you with tendons and ligaments, I will restore your flesh, and I will cover you with skin; I will put breath into you and bring you back to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.”’” Ezekiel does as he’s told, and the response is so rapid and so strong that while he’s still speaking, the bones rearrange themselves—so quickly that they knock against each other on the way—and bodies regrow around them.
And yet, despite God’s promise, they’re still dead. In fact, verse 9—the NIV softens this a bit—refers to them as “slain corpses,” the dead fallen in some enormous battle. The Lord again commands Ezekiel to prophesy, and at this point we need to step back for just a moment. In Hebrew, “breath,” “spirit,” and “wind” are all the same word, ruaḥ. The Spirit of the Lord, the breath God promises to restore to the bones, the four winds from which the breath is to come, are all the same word. This wordplay running through this passage emphasizes the point that all life is from God, and that he does what he will. For him, to carry off Ezekiel in a vision and bring human beings back to life when there’s nothing left of them but dead, dry bones is as simple as making the wind blow.
And so Ezekiel prophesies, and so the Lord does, breathing the breath of life—breathing the spirit of life—into this vast field of the dead just as he did into the first human being back in Genesis 2. Then beginning in verse 11, God gives his prophet the interpretation of his vision. The bones represent the entire nation of Israel—not just the southern part, the kingdom of Judah, recently conquered by the Babylonians, but also the northern part, which Assyria had conquered and hauled into exile over 130 years before. They had been conquered, everything that had made them a nation among the nations was gone, and they had no hope. A house had fallen on them, and they were really most sincerely dead; as Miracle Max would put it, there was nothing left to do but go through their clothes and look for loose change. They were in despair, feeling themselves even beyond God’s power to save them.
To this, the Lord says, “No. I will raise you from your graves, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. I will fill you with my Spirit and you will come to life. You will stand on your own ground, and you will know that I am the Lord. I have spoken, and I will do it.” And he does, and he did. He brought in the Persians to conquer Babylon, and inspired their king to send the people of Israel back to their homeland; and then, at the right time, he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to fill them with his Spirit and bring them fully to life. When Jesus came, their leaders forgot all the lessons of their history and treated him just like the prophets whom God had sent them throughout the years before—but they couldn’t overcome him. In fact, their efforts to destroy him only fulfilled his plan to save the whole world.
Jesus allowed his own people to kill him. Though he was perfectly innocent, he let them execute him as the worst of criminals, and by his death, he fulfilled the sentence due to all of us for all our sin. And then he proved that the Jewish leaders hadn’t been reading Ezekiel, because on the third day, he got up from the dead, fully alive again. He spent some time preparing his disciples, and then he left, returning in the body to the throne room of God. In his place, he sent his Holy Spirit to fill all of his people with his life and power—to make us his living body on this planet. With his Spirit, he gave us his ministry: the ministry of revival.
Don’t take that as a metaphor, either, because it isn’t. Jesus came to this world, and he filled us with his Holy Spirit, to raise the dead—and not just the merely dead, either, where you can still see a glimmer of life and hope. He came to make even the dry bones dance for joy in his life. Dead people—spiritually, and even physically—dead relationships—even dead churches and denominations; for all that has gone wrong with the PC(USA), and is only going wronger, he’s fully capable of bringing them back to their first love if he should choose to do so. Shame on us if we look at any challenge and decide it’s impossible. We dismiss things as inconceivable, and God just looks at us and says, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” No, we shouldn’t try to do the impossible just because it’s impossible; that by itself is far from a guarantee of God’s calling. But we should remember this: what human beings call impossible or even inconceivable is merely an opportunity for God to show his power and glory and goodness, that all may know that he is the Lord.
It’s a proverb among pastors that the Seven Last Words of the Church are “We’ve never done it that way before.” The corollary is: the only truly universal creed of the church is “This is the way we’ve always done it.” A similar idea was expressed more sardonically by Montana pastor Chuck Westermann, writing under the pseudonym Karl Beck: “At your average church, it’s easier to introduce a fourth person into the Trinity than to introduce a new carpet pattern into the nave.” These are the sort of jokes pastors tell each other.
Obviously, this isn’t equally true of every church—but believe it or not, to some degree, it’s true of every church. I learned that in Bellingham. The church where I interned was only seven years old when we started attending; we were 25 and 23 at the time, and we weren’t the youngest couple there. You’d assume from those facts that it was flexible and open to change, but it was actually quite the opposite. When the founding pastor started experimenting with some different ways of doing things, “the way we’ve always done it” fought back with a vengeance, never mind that “always” covered less than a decade. One group of people, including some of the leaders, drew up sides; nobody else was choosing sides, but as far as they were concerned, anyone who disagreed with them was against them. Not long after we left there, the pastor chose to jump ship; in his hurry to jump before he was pushed, he and his wife didn’t look before they leaped. Five years later, that church was dead; five years after that, so was he.
Every church has this attitude to one degree or another, because this mindset comes from running the church according to the principles and practices of this world—and every church does that in its day-to-day operations. We’re human beings and the church is a human organization; it’s inevitable. We see ourselves doing the work of the church, we see our work producing or failing to produce the growth of the church, and so we understand the church as the product of our work, and thus as something that belongs to us. The people who don’t support the way things are done, leave; the ones who stay are the ones who do. When you find something you like, something you’re comfortable with, of course you want to keep it going, and not let it end.
The more we think this way, the more we believe (whatever we might say) that we’re the ones who build the church, and we have the right to decide how we build it and what we want to build it into. The more we think this way, the more wedded we become to the way we’ve been doing things, both because that way is familiar and comfortable to us, and because it’s proven. We can put our faith in it and feel confident that we’ll get results that we like. What we end up with is a church that may talk about God, but that has no real place for him in its decision-making or its day-to-day life, and no sense that it actually needs him for anything.
What about living by faith in God? Well, we pay lip service to the idea. We’re all for it, until it gets to the point of actually living by faith. Suggest anything that drastic, and we start talking about this person we knew who refused any medical treatment because they were sure that if they had enough faith, God would heal their cancer. Around here, folks will bring up the Glory Barn. Clearly, since these people claimed to be living by faith in God and they were wrong, the whole idea is ridiculous, right? Well, maybe not. Actually, what examples like that show us is the importance of living by faith in Godrather than in our ability to make God do what we want. It’s an easy mistake to make, because we tend to associate faith with results—we have faith that God will do something, and our faith is validated or not by whether or not God does it. To have faith in God whether he does what we want or not—to be able to say with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I praise him”—that’s a much harder thing.
To do that, each of us has to set aside the natural idea that the church is here for me, to meet my needs and give me what I want and be what I want it to be. Yes, the church is here for you and for me and for each of us, but not for any of us in particular; it’s here for each of us the same way it’s here for everybody else, including a whole lot of people who aren’t here yet. It isn’t aboutany of us, it doesn’t belong to any of us, and it doesn’t exist to serve our purposes; it belongs to God alone, it’s about him alone, and it exists for his purposes alone. That includes providing for us and taking care of us—but on his terms, not ours. Even there, it’s not about what we think we need or deserve, but about what God knows we need and is going to give us.
Now, nothing I’ve said to this point is unique to the church; Israel was a lot worse. That’s what Isaiah is dealing with here. Earlier in chapter 43, God calls his people to bear witness to all the ways in which he has blessed them—and in so doing, perhaps to see his blessings for themselves for the first time, and actually begin to understand themselves as the people of God. They haven’t forgotten that God did all these things, but they have no sense that what he did in the past means anything to them; they don’t see it as connected to their lives. No doubt they believe God had delivered their ancestors from Egypt; what they don’t believe is that that has anything to do with their lives and circumstances. They believe God had saved, but not that he will save—and that makes all the difference. It’s not that hard to believe that God has done miracles in the past—but that he’s still in the miracle business now? That’s another matter.
We’ve seen in this series so far that the work of the people of God is the work of revival, and that the work of revival is the work of the world made new, because that’s what God is on about; and we’ve seen that we’re completely dependent on him to make this happen, because it isn’t something we can do by our own effort and our own methods. The problem is, it’s easier to put our faith and trust in things we can see than in God whom we cannot see; it’s easier to put our trust in methods and programs and strategies, and it lets us take credit for the work, and claim ownership. As a consequence, we’re constantly being tempted into idolatry, and God’s work has to begin with the reconversion of his people to faith in him.
That’s what we see in Isaiah 43. In verses 16-17, the prophet gives Israel a vivid reminder that the Lord is the one who led the Egyptian army out to their destruction in the sea so that his people could escape; we don’t see this in the NIV, but these verses are mostly in present tense. This isn’t just something God did in the past, it’s something he’s still doing. Then in verses 18-19, the Lord says, “But never mind how I did it. Don’t get hung up on the way I’ve done things before. I’m doing a new thing. I’m still your deliverer, but I don’t need to do anything the same way twice.” God isn’t bound by the way he’s done things before, or the way we’ve done them before; when he moves in power in his people, for his people, through his people, he does a new thing in a new way, so that we can’t fool ourselves into thinking it’s our work—and so that we see that this isn’t just stuff that happens in the Bible.
Too many of us have this nice little box labeled “God” full of all sorts of things God did a while ago, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with how we live our daily lives. We pray, though maybe not that much, and we read our Bibles, at least a little, but when it comes to the issues we face and the choices we have to make, a lot of us are functional atheists—we do things just like the world does. Not only do we not ask God to guide us, a lot of the time, we don’t even take him into account—we base our decisions solely on “practical” considerations, things we can see and touch and quantify. And that’s not how God wants us to live. He wants us to remember, in everything we do, that we are children of the Lord of the Universe, that he loves us, and that he’s working for our good—including in ways we can’t predict, or see coming. He wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. He wants us to hear him saying, “See, I’m doing a new thing—it’s springing up right before your eyes. Don’t you see it? I’m making a way in the desert, and streams in the wasteland. Can’t you see? Look. Open your eyes. See.”
Micah 6 is a court scene: God, through his prophet, is putting his people on trial. In the first five verses, he calls them into court and declares his indictment against them. He reminds them of the covenant he made with them, which he has faithfully kept and they have dishonored. The only appropriate response would be to repent of their sin and recommit themselves to honor the covenant as faithfully as God has. Instead, in verses 6-7, we see someone speak for Israel who wants to reduce the covenant to a contract. A covenant is a 100% commitment on both sides—when you make a covenant, you’re all in, heart and soul. A contract is 50/50: meet the minimum requirements, and you can do what you like with the rest of your time. Here we see Israel bargaining with God, haggling over the minimum requirements so they can get him off their back.
I like the way Bruce Waltke describes the speaker here and his attitude:
Blinded to God’s goodness and character, he reasons within his own depraved frame of reference. He need not change; God must change. He compounds his sin of refusing to repent by suggesting that God, like man, can be bought. His willingness to raise the price does not reflect his generosity but veils a complaint that God demands too much; the reverse side of his bargaining is that he hopes to buy God off as cheaply as possible.
Micah responds to the fake religiosity of the speaker by saying, in essence, “Don’t you play games with me. You know what the Lord wants from you; he’s told you many times.” He could stop there, but he still goes on to summarize the Lord’s requirements, giving them one last chance to listen and obey.
The landing point in verse 8 is the last line: “to walk humbly with your God.” The primal human temptation is to live proudly toward God—to declare, in the words of the poet William Henley, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” Or if you prefer, you could channel Frank Sinatra: “I did it my way.” It’s the insistence that I don’t care what God wants, I want my own way, I deserve to get what I want, and I’m going to do whatever I have to do to get it. What does the Lord require of you? Set that aside, and bend your stiff neck; accept that he’s the boss, not you, that your life belongs to him, not to you, and that he has the right to control everything, not you. Live your life for him, not for yourself, and for his approval, not for your own satisfaction.
The character of such a life is revealed in the next-to-last line of verse 8, which combines two of the most loaded words in the Old Testament. “Mercy” is the word ḥesed, which we talked about several weeks ago; it’s the unrelenting, unfailing love and faithfulness of God toward his people with whom he has made his covenant, to whom he has made his promises. You might have wondered at the time why we translate it “mercy,” but there’s good reason. Human beings may show mercy for a lot of reasons which aren’t particularly noble; what we call mercy is often just indifference, or fear, or an attempt to promote our own agenda. It’s easy to act as if we’re merciful when we don’t really care all that much about justice. God, however, is absolutely and fiercely just. He shows us mercy not because he doesn’t think our sins matter that much, but because he loves us even more, and his faithfulness is even fiercer.
Having said that, we need to understand what God means by “justice,” which is the other loaded word in this verse; the Hebrew word is mishpat. Old Testament scholar Paul Hanson defines mishpat as “the order of compassionate justice that God has created and upon which the wholeness of the universe depends.” Actions in keeping with mishpat are those which advance the restoration of the original created order of the universe, when everything was right—just, and whole—in accordance with God’s perfect will.
So then, the life of those who walk humbly with God is a life characterized by the justice and mercy of God; but note how. What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, and to love mercy. We turn that around. We want, first, to love justice. That sounds like a noble thing, and we’re able to tell ourselves it is; but whether quickly or slowly, those who love justice come in the end to love justice as they define it. This is because we instinctively believe that justice is something which is owed to us and to the people we care about: justice means we get what we think we deserve. As the missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin observed, “Each of us overestimates what is due to him as compared with what is due to his neighbor,” and we use the language of justice to try to enforce that overestimation.
Second—no, we don’t want to do mercy, it’s not that easy a swap—but we want mercy done to us. We want justice only to be for us, not against us; for ourselves, even when we admit we deserve justice, we want mercy instead. After all, whatever anyone else might think, we know we had good reason for everything we did; if maybe we went a bit too far or shouldn’t have handled things the way we did, it wasn’t actually that big a deal. Maybe technically we should be judged, but really, we ought to be cut some slack. We ought to be let off lightly, or maybe even let off the hook altogether.
We naturally see justice and mercy as things we should receive from others. Micah turns us around: justice and mercy are what God calls us to give others. He tells us to do justice—to treat those around us in ways which are consistent with the character and nature of God and obedient to his will—and there are no exceptions here, and no escape clauses. When others don’t do justice to us, we come hard up against the next command: love mercy. Like the God whom we serve, we’re to keep treating those around us with his love and grace even when they obviously don’t deserve it. We’re called to do justly to others, but not demand that for ourselves; we’re called to love God’s mercy and extend it to others, but not insist on it for ourselves.
From a worldly point of view, this is a good way to lose out. The world is with the proud. The world honors those who demand justice—until someone comes along with a more convincing demand. The world even honors some who call for mercy, as it’s busy changing its idea of justice. The world respects those who go after everything they want, especially if they manage to get it. That’s the way to succeed in this world. Walking humbly with God just doesn’t get the job done.
But the world isn’t all it thinks it is. Its success doesn’t last, and its powers don’t endure; the Lord blows on them, and they wither and fade. To those who walk humbly with him, he gives this promise: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.” The world is with the proud, but the Lord is with the humble; and it is the Lord who is always faithful, and the Lord who never fails.
