Nov 12
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What a Glorious and Fearful God We Serve
ChristianGovernance eletter – November 12, 2012
What a Glorious and Fearful God We Serve
Our morning sermon at church Sunday was on Hebrews 12:15b.
Verses 14-16 read: “Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son.”
Apparently, the reference to seeing that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble is likely an allusion to Deuteronomy 29:18b: “make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.”
This is part of Israel’s covenant renewal ceremony. The chapter begins: “These are the terms of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in Moab, in addition to the covenant he had made with them at Horeb. Moses summoned all the Israelites and said to them: …”
The devastation of idolatry
If it’s a reference to Deut. 29, then it’s not a warning against bitterness between people, but a warning against idolatry. This would be in line with the two other warnings given in the same paragraph: See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no one is sexually immoral/godless.
The complete sentence from Deut. 29:18 reads: “Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.” The paragraph begins earlier, at verse 16, and reads: “You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through the countries on the way here. You saw among them their detestable images and idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold.”
This is an amazing passage, and you won’t walk away from it without trembling if you truly read it. God is an awesome God. This is mid-way through Moses’ comments. You can read what came before, but once we get here, we are reminded of the great deliverance of God’s people from Egypt – and that is the context of the warning against idolatry. It’s a warning that if they move into idolatry, they turn away from tremendous blessing, they fall from great heights, from the amazing miraculous delivery by God from 400 years of tyranny and oppression.
This text would make for a fantastic pre-election sermon for the U.S. or Canada. From what great heights our nations have fallen! And there’s more…
The devastating judgment on arrogance
Some of the most despicable sins we commit against Christ are our attempts at self-justification and self-satisfaction, and Moses speaks Gods words of total destruction against those who commit these sins in the face of such a great legacy of grace and victory/deliverance.
Verse 19 reads: “When such a person hears the words of this oath and they invoke a blessing on themselves, thinking, ‘I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way,’ they will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry.” This is followed by verse 20: “The Lord will never be willing to forgive them; his wrath and zeal will burn against them. All the curses written in this book will fall on them, and the Lord will blot out their names from under heaven.”
What a horrible and devastating penalty – but what a deserving penalty – for the sins of idolatry and self-justification against God and His Messianic Ruler, the Lord Jesus Christ – by those who know better because of the heights from which they have fallen. Those who are a part of God’s covenant people, who heard the truth as children, who lived within the framework of God’s special and particular covenant blessings.
Thinking back to Hebrews, this should remind us of the two difficult passages there (6:1-6 and 10:26-31) which seem to warn about the impossibility of restoration for those who sin against a clear knowledge of God’s truth.
The warning in Deuteronomy is that God will visit the wicked with “all the curses of the covenant written in this Book of the Law.” The Church is still God’s covenant people. God still blesses and curses in history. And He continues to use His Law-Word, the holy Scriptures as the standard against which He judges mankind. There is an eternal decree based on Christ’s perfect obedience to the law, and His victorious resurrection to redeem His people. There are also God’s judgments in history which reflect His assessment of our obedience and disobedience. Hebrews 10:31: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
The devastation of Sodom and Gomorrah
Keep going in Deut. 29, and we see Moses likening the judgment on God’s covenant people of Israel in their sin to the judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah: “The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur” (v. 23).
Christians today can be humanists when we approach the Bible, picking and choosing what we like instead of submitting to it in its entirety. We are quick to use the language of Sodom and Gomorrah against sin, conjuring up that image from the Old Testament, but when it comes to dealing personally with God, we go through all kinds of intellectual gymnastics to avoid being bound by the law of God. We have our theological justifications to argue that the law laid down in the Old Testament is not applicable today. We like our “baptized” individualism. We prefer to enjoy only the newer Testament for ourselves, but we’ll whack others with the older Testament.
In the past, God governed all the nations, not only Israel, by His law. And today, He governs the nations in similar fashion, except that today Christ rules as King over the nations by virtue of both His creative work and His messianic/ redemptive work. God is owed the allegiance of men twice over – and His subjects willingly give Him homage and worship.
Is that you today? Is that me? Or are we idolaters? Do we live among a people of idolatry? Do we live within a Church guilty of gross idolatry – against a legacy of greater grace and an amazing spiritual heritage? I fear we do.
“All the nations will ask: “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?”And the answer will be: “It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of Egypt. They went off and worshiped other gods and bowed down to them, gods they did not know, gods he had not given them. Therefore the Lord’s anger burned against this land, so that he brought on it all the curses written in this book. In furious anger and in great wrath the Lord uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now” (Deut. 29:24-28).
The devastating power of God brings victory in history
The only way of escape is repentance and reformation. With the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, we see the amazing power of God at work to build His Church through His Spirit-filled subjects. We have looked at this theme before from Acts. I continue to read through the book. Acts 19 gives us some more amazing reports of the power of God through His people. Contrast this Church with the kind of Church which God warns He will judge most severely. In Acts 19, we have a Church that is expanding. Many people focus on the miraculous activity in this passage. Far more exciting is the power, the fire, the boldness, God builds into His people for the long-haul, for multi-generational growth; the courage God’s people exhibit in the face of hostility.
In v. 8 we learn that Paul spoke “boldly” – “about the Kingdom of God” – for three months in the synagogue (in other words to Jews). They got hostile, so he moved to the hall of Tyrannus, where he could teach people each day. This, we’re told, went on for two years “so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord.”
In the context of this teaching and preaching ministry, building a Church, discipling people, many miracles were done through Paul.
There’s a very interesting account here about demon possession. This is what pulled my mind back to my reading in Acts during this Sunday sermon. Heb. 12:15b says that the bitter root causes trouble. It was noted that the only other New Testament use of this Greek word for trouble is in Luke 6:18b which, talking about the ministry of Christ, reads: “Those troubled by impure spirits were cured, …”
In Acts 19:13-16, we read of how an attempted exorcism by heathens hoping to piggyback on Paul’s testimony didn’t quite go as planned. But it demonstrated the antithesis – the power of the true God (at work through Paul) over against the complete inability of the heathen against unseen forces. As a result of this incident, people were seized with fear, the name of the Lord Jesus was held in honour, more people publicly confessed their faith in Christ, there was a public scroll-burning ceremony AND the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.”
Whether or not we should expect signs and wonders today, we can expect the Spirit of God to give His people courage, boldness, endurance, faithfulness in the face of real wicked opposition. And if we exercise that boldness in the love and power of God, we will see the Church advance against God’s and our enemies. This experience is built upon repentance and reformation, humility and sacrifice.
Why would a Church and a civilization that has been given so much in history, such a great heritage, embrace idolatry and fall from such great heights to the shabby condition we find ourselves in today? No wonder such a disposition brings such judgment! We saw so much of this disposition, and the accompanying argumentation, around the recent U.S. elections. So much fear. So much compromise. So much rationalization. And, in the end, what did Americans get in the trade-off?
The devastation of playing God
The last verse of Deut. 29 is probably the one I mentioned more than any other in speaking into the debates around the U.S. elections. Verse 29: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” So much of the argumentation around the elections confused what IS with what OUGHT TO BE. Often what IS was accepted as what OUGHT TO BE because of the providence of God. Good theologians, though, know that there are two realms of God’s will. His decretive will is all that comes to pass because God is sovereign and orchestrates all of history (cf. Westminster Shorter Catechism Question 7). His revealed will includes His law which binds our actions (cf. Westminster Shorter Catechism Question 39). With many of the election-related arguments, people were ignoring God’s revealed will, presumably because they didn’t like it or didn’t know it, and were trying to get into the mind of God to align themselves with His decretive will. We can, no doubt, do this in many other areas of our lives as well. This may well be one of the most prevalent sins today especially among pious reformed-type Christians – attempting to act in the realm of the secret things of God instead of submitting to His revealed law.
In the West, today, we live among a pantheon of gods, but the chief god is the state. This is nothing new. Through history, heathens have worshiped their messianic state, the king, the emperor, the dictator, the civil magistrate in whatever form. Heb. 12:15b, then, with its warning to God’s people not to succumb to the bitterness of idolatry, is very relevant because so many of us are doing just that. God is not giving us the leaders we want when we want them, so we become guilty of bitterness and idolatry by fudging on Biblical principles when it comes to voting and understanding our relationship to the civil magistracy. We’re bitter over God’s apparent lack of justice, so we approve of the state stealing from Peter to pay Paul. Redistributive taxation of this kind is an expression of bitterness and idolatry, and it is sin against God as per Heb. 12:15b. Other examples could be offered.
You and I have a role to play in determining what kind of Church we are part of, and what kind of Church we are going to leave to our children. It’s Christ’s Church and it will advance, but will you walk in repentance and reformation to be part of a faithful victorious Church, or will you contribute to setbacks and severe chastisements through idolatry and rebellion?
Let’s be men and women of repentance and victory. Men and women who understand the covenantal relationship between God and His Church, who embrace God’s law as relevant and authoritative for every area of life, and our Messianic King, Jesus Christ, as our Lord, our Commander-in-Chief, our Saviour and our Friend. According to Heb. 12:14, what is the formula for seeing the Lord – in this world and the next, I would add: “Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.” Amen.