You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2009.
“ . . . ‘The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord; but the prayer of the upright is his delight.’
Wicked men may abound in the external acts of religion, as if they intended to compensate the defects of the inward man. By this means they flatter themselves into dangerous and presumptuous hopes of the favor of God, and sometimes gain a name among the godly, who are neither qualified nor authorized to search the secrets of the heart.
“ . . . [Will] the Lord thus take us to his bosom? ‘He shall gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom,’ Isa. xl. 11; and every saint shall be treated with affection great as that shown to the beloved disciple who leaned on Jesus’ bosom at the sacramental supper. At the marriage supper of the Lamb, when the beloved drinks with us the new wine in his Father’s kingdom, to that bosom shall we all be gathered; and if oppressed with a sense of unworthiness, we would know how agreeable our presence will be to him, we find the answer here given with a fullness leaving nothing more to be desired. In the state of heart here represented, is fulfilled the prayer of the Apostle, ‘That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.’ Eph. iii. 17.”
(George Burrowes qtd. in The Song of Solomon, Lafayette: Sovereign Grace, 2001, pp.411-2; John 13:18-26; Matt. 26:26-29)
“ . . . ‘And if a soul sin, and hear the voice of swearing, and is a witness, whether he hath seen or known of it; if he do not utter it, then he shall bear his iniquity.’
. . . ‘The voice of swearing’ undoubtedly means here the adjuration of a judge to a prisoner. The term . . . employed here is the same as that used in 1 Sam. xiv. 24, ‘Saul had adjured . . . the people’; and in 1 Kings viii. 31, ‘If an adjuration be laid upon him, adjuring him to speak out the truth’; and in Judges xvii. 2, ‘The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou didst adjure’; and Prov. xxix. 24, ‘He heareth an adjuration, and yet telleth not.’ The judge, in a court of justice, was permitted to elicit information from the witness by solemnly charging him to answer and tell all he knew, under penalty of a curse from God if he did not reveal the whole truth. It was in those circumstances that our Lord was placed before the High Priest. (Matt. xxvi. 63.) He was then, surely, in the depths of humiliation! For now he is called upon, under threatening of the curse of his own Father, to break that strange silence, and tell all he knows, ‘I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God.’ And then it was that the Lamb of God no longer kept himself dumb; but, bowing to the solemn force of this adjuration, showed the same meekness in replying as before he had done in keeping silence. From the depth of his humiliation he pointed upward to the throne, and declared himself Son of God, and judge of quick and dead.
One of the sad realities of the fall of Adam and Eve is that men and women will act ashamed toward marriage, and will idolize each other’s bodies as their demonstration of rebellion against God and against His instituted covenant of marriage. We men and women shape our own identities through each other’s bodies. Men see women as not the flesh of their flesh for marriage, but rather as the flesh of their flesh apart from marriage. Women see men as not their helpmate and their beginning flesh, but as their obstacle to personal freedom and happiness. And men and women seek sex outside of marriage as their demonstration that they can reorganize the identities of Adam and Eve on their own terms apart from God. Sex becomes an intimate display of false worship and self-righteousness.
If we are to take the Gospel seriously as a message of holiness and a message of grace, we have to delight in turning away from false pleasures toward good things of this world, the gold and the diamond, as well as the more ordinary straw and brick, and count these false pleasures as dead to Christ and Him crucified for moving to a life of holiness and grace, real sanctification, with God. God delights to lead His believers away from idols, conforming them to the image of His Son Jesus, the perfect and new “imago Dei” for His believers. When God sees His believers, He sees His Son Jesus, His Son’s image credited onto them.
“ ‘ . . . And if his oblation be a sacrifice of peace-offering; if he offer it of the herd, whether it be a male or female, he shall offer it without blemish before the Lord.’
The Peace-Offering is introduced to our notice without any formal statement of the connection between it and the preceding offerings. That there is a connection is taken for granted, and the Prophet, Amos v. 22, refers to this understood order when he says, ‘Though ye offer me burnt-offerings, and your meat-offerings, I will not accept them, neither will regard the peace-offerings of your fat beasts.’ The connection is simply this: a justified soul, devoted to the Lord in all things, spontaneously engages in acts of praise and exercises of fellowship. The Lord takes for granted that such a soul, having free access to him now, will make abundant use of that access.
“ . . . [As] Christ’s presence makes the believer’s day, so his absence makes it night with them. . . . [The] change of a believer’s frame is often very sudden; not only their frames are changeable, but they are often changed: it was not long since that the church was in the banqueting-house with Christ, and there had her fill of love, and was sweetly refreshed with his gracious presence: and though she fell into a relapse of dullness and sleepiness, yet he in love visits her again, and recovers her out of it; insomuch that she became so lively in the exercise of her faith, that she could claim her interest in him, and relation to him, and say, ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his’; and yet now she is at a loss for him, and knows not where he is; she is grown dull and sleepy, carnal and secure, and he withdraws himself from her; so that a believer can sometimes say, as the Psalmist did, Psalm xxx. 7, ‘Lord, by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong’; and perhaps immediately, say, almost at the very same time complain, ‘thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.’
I recently started reading Paul David Tripp’s book War of Words: Getting to the Heart of Your Communication Struggles (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2000). I believe this book is a very edifying read (and one on which I may do a book review in the near future). One very big reason for my appreciation of this book is that human language – our words of everyday life – is a prominent issue in the Bible. The Bible is about our fallen worship lives, our craving for idols, and about Jesus’ atoning sacrifice for our idolatrous hearts. One particular aspect of our worship lives is our use of words. We use our words, the fruits of our lips, to speak false things about ourselves to our own glory and our own righteousness apart from God. God uses His words to speak judgment and justification among sinners. God sets apart sinners to judgment by His pronouncements in the divine and moral Law. God also justifies sinners freely by His only begotten Son, the only begotten Word, Jesus the divine and incarnate fulfiller of the Law.
I write with a bit of a strong wince at this time, as I’m recovering from a shoulder and collarbone injury that restricts me from much typing on the keyboard. But I wanted to share a sermon from this past Sunday by my pastor Scott Seaton of Emmanuel Presbyterian Church (PCA).
“God’s Redemption for God’s Glory,” Scott Seaton (Exod. 1:1-8 )
Seaton talks about the overarching literary theme of Exodus as continuing the story of Abraham and the patriarchs and God’s covenant promises from Genesis. God has promised to redeem His people or reclaim His people to Himself, even as God promised Abraham that God would make him into a great nation. And God has promised to redeem His people to Himself for His own glory, as God would use a sinful people and their encounter with Pharaoh to establish God’s name before the nations.
“When Samuel was instructed to reprove Saul for his sin, ‘he cried unto the Lord all night,’ and uttered his faithful reproof in the morning (1 Sam. xv. 11). Such a preparation would take none of its strength away, and greatly add to its softness. For rightly receiving reproof, the short and simple rule is, be more concerned to get the benefit of the reproof, than to wreak vengeance on the reprover. He who should habitually act on this plain maxim would grow rich by gathering the gold which other people trample under their feet.”
(William Arnot qtd. in Studies in Proverbs: Laws from Heaven for Life on Earth, Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1978, p. 159)
