“A Special Kind of Revelation”

Many years ago, I would drive my elderly father around town so that he could pay some bills.  It was his monthly routine.  Sometimes, if he did not feel well enough to get out of the car and do it himself, I would take his money into the place of business and pay his bill for him.  One day when I had done that and returned to the car, I could tell by his demeanor something had happened to him, and he was excited to tell me about it.

“The Lord just spoke to me,” he said.  “He told me, ‘I never tell you to do something that I wouldn’t do.’”  I had never had such a thought before, and neither had my father.  I don’t remember much about the conversation we had after that, except that he said something to this effect: “If God commanded us to do something He would be unwilling to do, that would make Him a hypocrite.”  My father was no doubt thinking of the religious leaders of Jesus’ day who put heavy theological burdens on people’s backs, and wouldn't extend so much as a finger to help them (Mt. 23:4; Lk. 11:46).

Whenever God gives a commandment, He is revealing something about Himself.  He is saying, “This is the way I am, and it is the way I want you to be.”  For one example, God is never mischievously cruel, and so He commanded Israel never to be mischievously cruel: “Speak to all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say to them, ‘You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy. You shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind, but shall fear your God.  I am the Lord (Lev. 19:2, 14).

Every commandment that has ever come from heaven is a special kind of revelation of the nature of the God who created us. Then, let us rejoice for being given His commandments, and let us show our gratitude for them by walking in the light they give!

“Pinned and Wriggling on the Wall”

“I have heard the slander of many.  Fear was on every side.”

David, in Psalms 31:13a

In his poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, T. S. Eliot included a line that I have never been able to forget since the first time I read it in high school.  That line is this: “When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, . . .”  The imagery of that phrase is brilliant; it describes the utter helplessness felt by someone stuck in a situation beyond his control.  The man in Eliot’s poem felt as helpless as an insect caught by an insect collector and pinned to a specimen board along with other insects.  The only remaining reason for that poor creature to exist, then, is to be a gazingstock for the curious, an object to be talked about the way visitors to an art museum gaze at artwork and then discuss it among themselves.  “Pinned and wriggling on the wall.”  Not quite dead yet, but immobilized and unable to escape the fatal pin through the mid-section.

The invisible pin that immobilizes and kills people is talk, and the collector that pins righteous people with an evil reputation is Satan.  Once pinned, a person may wriggle in protest for a short while, as insects may do when they are pinned to the specimen board; however, there is no escape, and soon the pinned individual becomes to everyone only what he is labeled as, and nothing more.  In the end, he becomes no more than a thing to be looked at and commented upon, and eventually he decays in his appointed spot, along with the other lifeless specimens on the wall.

My father warned us that slander is murder.  He made that statement because he understood that if you ruin a person’s reputation, you kill his influence, and if you kill his influence, he is, in effect, dead to everyone around him.  My father didn't know T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, but he was an astute observer of life, and he saw how often and how easily an envious soul can leave others, even innocent people, “pinned and wriggling on the wall”.  Their pointed words pin souls on the wall of people’s minds, and then leave them there to wriggle a bit before the struggle exhausts them, and they die.

Reputation can be a deadly thing.  If someone you know dies the slow, agonizing death of a ruined reputation, be very sure that you are not the one who pinned him with it.  God has promised that He will destroy whoever slanders another (Ps. 101:5), and for that reason, we know that Solomon was wise to say that whoever dares to be a slanderer is a fool (Prov. 10:18).

What God Sees

Hey Brother John,

I was reading the story of Gideon in Judges, and I have a question.

Judges 6:12-14: “And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him, and said unto him, The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valor.  And Gideon said unto him, Oh my Lord, if the Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen us?  and where be all his miracles which our fathers told us of, saying, Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt? But now the Lord hath forsaken us, and delivered us into the hands of the Midianites.  And the Lord looked upon him, and said, Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel from the hand of the Midianites,  Have not I sent thee?”

My question: When the Lord said “Go in this thy might,” what exactly was the word “this” referring to?  Was it his faith that the Lord was in control of every aspect of his life?

Thank you.

Billy H.

===========

Hi Billy.

This portion of scripture from Judges provides us with an interesting scene, and it is one that we can take much from if God opens our eyes.

Did you notice where Gideon was when this angel came to him?  He was hiding from the Midianites behind a winepress as he threshed out a little wheat to make himself some bread.  There he was, so afraid of what the Midianites would do to him that he didn’t even want to be seen threshing wheat, and an angel suddenly appears and calls him a “mighty man of valor”.  We know from that, that God was speaking to the Gideon that He saw, not to the Gideon that anyone else knew – including Gideon himself!

God was about to bring out the Gideon that He alone could see, and then use that Gideon to deliver Israel.  The “might” that was in Gideon’s heart was his faith in the God that he had heard about, the God that had been testified about by his ancestors.  Gideon believed in that God, and he loved that God, but where was He?  Gideon wanted to know Him, but where was He?  That was Gideon’s question.  Nevertheless, Gideon believed in that God, and that genuine faith was the “might” that made Gideon a “mighty man of valor”, and man whom God would use to save His people.

How does God see us?  We may be in hiding, like Gideon, and oppressed, as Gideon and Israel were, but what does God see?  If God sees faith in His Son, and love for the truth, he will use us to bless His people.  And like Gideon, it doesn’t matter to God whether we can see ourselves doing that; it only matters what he sees.

Thanks for the question, Billy.

Pastor John

Being Angry Is Not Sin

And the next day, as they came from Bethany, he grew hungry.  And seeing in the distance a fig tree with leaves, he went to it, if perhaps he might find something on it.  But when he went to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not time for figs.  And Jesus answered and said to it, “Let no one ever eat fruit from you again!”  And his disciples were listening. . . . And when it was evening, he went out of the city.  And early in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots.  And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look!  The fig tree that you cursed is dried up!”  And Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God.”

Mark 11:12–14, 19–22

In this scene with the fig tree, we see Jesus so angry with God’s people that he acted irrationally.    It was not the season for fig trees to bear fruit; this tree was doing exactly what it was created to do; it was in the process of producing fruit at the time God created it to produce fruit.  In spite of that, Jesus cursed the tree, and it died.  What had men done to provoke Jesus to this extent?

The day previous to this, Jesus had ridden triumphantly into Jerusalem and then visited the temple of God.  It was what he saw there, the buying and selling in particular, that infuriated him.  All that night, he must have replayed the scenes he had witnessed in the temple, and this morning, he was on his way back to the temple, where he would go on a rampage, overturning the tables and seats of the merchants and money-changers, driving the livestock out of the temple complex, and even forbidding anyone to carry anything through the temple area.

But on the way to do all that, he grew hungry, and there, by the road, stood the hapless fig tree.  The men in the temple were blessed that Jesus did not curse them instead, that he took the worst of his wrath out on a tree instead of them.

An amazing element of this fig tree story is that, even though Jesus was so angry that he cursed and killed the fig tree for not having figs, even though it was not the season for figs, it was not sinful for Jesus to do that!  Jesus did no sin; the Bible is very clear about that.  Yet, he did some things that many probably would have condemned as sinful, based on human ideas of sinfulness.  God’s thoughts truly are not our thoughts.

This story of Jesus’ anger, and his acting on it, is encouraging.  It tells us that we, too, are free to feel righteous anger, as Jesus did, without it being sin.  But even more than that, it tells us that we can even act on that anger, as Jesus acted on his righteous anger, and still be sinless in God’s sight.

What the Bible, throughout, shows us is that the godliest men and women who ever lived were real, with the feelings that we ourselves feel, and their stories teach us that those of us who love God are free to act on how we feel and what we think – without being condemned as sinful!  This can be a vexing world, with its pride, malice, lust, and greed.  And as God gives us the grace to see things as they are, be fearless and (when it is time for it) do as Paul exhorted us to do: “Be angry, but do not sin” (Eph. 4:26).

God Promised to Speak

I had never noticed what God was saying to Moses in Exodus 19:9 until this morning as I was reading that part of the Bible.  In that verse, God said that He was going to speak out loud to Moses so all Israel would hear Him speaking.  The point of that, God said, was to help Israel believe in Moses!  He knew that if they believed Moses, they would do what they had to do to receive the great blessing he had promised them!  This happened in the next chapter, when God, in thunderous tones, spoke the Ten Commandments out loud to Moses.  The Israelites, gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai, heard Him speaking.

God's voice was too much for the Israelites, though.  After the tenth commandment was spoken, they backed away from the mountain and pleaded with Moses to go up the mountain and talk to God by himself, and then come back down to tell them what He had said (Ex. 20:18-22; Dt. 5:23-27).  In other words, God had accomplished His purpose, for Israel now trusted Moses, as never before, to speak for God – and God was pleased with that.  All along, God’s goal was for them to receive their blessing, not to show off His powerful vocal chords, and now, with their renewed confidence in Moses, they were more likely to receive it!

I enjoy finding new bits of information in the Bible after all these years of reading it.  Today, my blessing was to discover that God loved Israel so much that He promised Moses that He would speak out loud to him so that Israel would believe him and follow him to the land that God had promised Abraham He would give to his descendants.

Understanding the Temptation

Then Jesus was led up into the wilderness by the Spirit

to be tested by the Accuser.

Matthew 4:1

The Temptation is no better understood than the disciples’ experience on the day of Pentecost is understood – and for the same reason.  That reason is that when we read the story of the Temptation, we tend to forget that nobody at the time knew that the Son of God was still unknown and, therefore, nobody at the time knew that Satan was evil, including Satan himself.

Paul said that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are hidden in the Son (Col. 2:3).  This means that until the Son was revealed, only God and His Son possessed those riches.  In that wisdom and knowledge was hidden, among countless other things, the understanding that Satan and many other heavenly beings were evil in God’s eyes.  Surprised?  Look in the Bible again.  Nothing in the Old Testament revealed to people, or even heavenly beings, that God saw Satan as evil.  Throughout the Old Testament, Satan is only seen doing, and doing well, what God told him to do.

Paul said that God, from the foundation of the world, hid the Son from both men and heavenly creatures (the “Aeons”):

Ephesians 3

3.   By revelation, the mystery was made known to me, as I also briefly wrote before,

. . .

5.  which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men as it is now revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.

. . .

8.  To me, the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach among the Gentiles the     incomprehensible richness of Christ

9.   and to enlighten all men as to what is the plan of the mystery that has been hidden from the Aeons by God, who created all things through Jesus Christ.

If Satan had known the Son, he would certainly have known that the Son was the one “through whom God made the worlds” (Heb. 1:2).  And if he had known that the Son made the worlds, he certainly would not have offered the Son authority over this world – one of the billions of worlds that he had created!  Moreover, if he had known the Son, Satan would have known that the Son created not just the worlds, but everything that was created (Jn. 1:3), including him.  And if Satan had known that, he would never have tried to persuade the Son, his Creator, to bow before him, as he did during the Temptation.

The Son could not have been known any more than the Father could have been known before the Spirit was given on the day of Pentecost, for it is only by the Spirit that we may come to understand the things of God.  From that day, when they were born again, the disciples began to truly know God and His Son.  That understanding is what reveals  the day of Pentecost in Acts 2 to be the event of unequalled importance that it was, and it is also what reveals the Temptation to be the astonishing event that it was.

When we read the Temptation with the understanding that (1) Satan did not know the Son of God and (2) Satan did not know that God saw him as evil, the story is transformed into an absolutely riveting tale.  You can read about the Temptation from this perspective in Chapter 7 of my book, God Had a Son before Mary Did, at GoingtoJesus.com.  I hope you will find the time to consider it.

Knowing about God vs. Knowing God

This is eternal life, to know you, the only true God,

and Jesus Christ, whom you sent.

Jesus, in John 17:3

As it is written, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered

the heart of man the things God has prepared for those who love Him.”

But God has revealed them to us by His Spirit,

for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.

For who among men knows the things of a man except the spirit of man that is in him?  And likewise, no one knows the things of God; just the Spirit of God.

Now, we have not received the spirit of the world

but the Spirit that is from God,

so that we might understand the things freely given to us by God.

1Corinthians 2:9–12

There is a difference between knowing about God and knowing God.  The whole world knows about God, but knowing God Himself is impossible without knowing His Son, Jesus.  When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father but by me,” he meant coming to the Father by any means, whether coming to Him spiritually by being born again, coming to know Him intellectually, or coming bodily to stand on the glassy sea in His holy presence.  No one can by any means come to the Father except by the Son, who holds the key to entering into the Father’s presence.

Paul said that it is by the Spirit that we have access to the Father, and the Son is the one by whom we receive the Spirit.  It is also by the Spirit that we may come to know God.  Only the Spirit of God knows the things of God, Paul said.  Even the Son came to know God by the Spirit.

We know God, then, only to the extent that we are filled with His Spirit, and the Spirit is given to us only in the name of God’s Son, Jesus.  Most of the human race is content merely to know about God.  Just a few, Jesus said, would ever find the way of life and truly come to know his Father.  When he returns for those who are in the Way, which road will he find us on?

Satan’s Messiah Is Coming

And then, the lawless one will be revealed,

whom the Master will destroy with the breath of his mouth

and will bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming,

him whose coming is by the work of Satan,

with every miracle, and deceptive signs and wonders,

and with every unrighteous deceit among those who perish

because they did not receive the love of the truth so that they might be saved.

And God will send a strong delusion on them because of that,

to make them believe the lie, so that they might be damned

who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in unrighteousness.

Paul, in 2Thessalonians 2:8–12

Satan's version of our Messiah, Jesus, is coming.  In the book of Revelation, that wicked messiah is called “the Beast”, and to him, Satan will give all his authority and power.  He will do this in imitation of the Father giving all power in heaven and earth to the Son.  

After the Beast appears will come the backslidden holiness preacher called “the False Prophet”.  This False Prophet will be key in turning the Beast’s secular rule on earth into a deeply religious matter.  He, not the Beast himself, will be the one who demands that every person on earth worship the Beast or die, and he, not the Beast, will utterly deceive all believers who are committed more to the Church than to Christ.

When James said, “Purify your hearts, you double-minded!”, that warning was for us, not the world, for James knew full well that God’s people who do not purify their hearts are in danger of being “turned over to believe a lie and be damned”.  This is what God has revealed that Satan, through the False prophet, will do to children of God in the last days who love the forms and fashion of religion more than they love Jesus.

May God help us to search our hearts with His candle, and purify our hearts from every worldly influence, so that we may believe and love the truth!

God Is Not Old

In the visions of the night, I was there, watching,

and behold, one like a son of man was coming with the clouds of heaven,

and he approached the Ancient of Days, and they ushered him in before Him.

And dominion was given to him, and majesty, and a kingdom.

And all peoples, nations, and languages shall serve him.

His dominion shall be an eternal dominion that will not pass away,

and his kingdom will not be destroyed.

From Daniel’s Vision in Daniel 7:13–14

In Daniel’s vision, the Son of God is the one to whom the “Ancient of Days” grants an eternal kingdom, and God the Father is the “Ancient of Days”.  But don’t let that title fool you.  God is indeed “ancient”, but God is not old.  If I may say it this way, God has for a very, very long time not been old, and throughout eternity to come, He will keep on not being old.

Age is the shadow of death, and death is the end result of sin.  God cannot sin, and so, He cannot die.  Therefore, He never ages.  And for those who love Him, He has promised the same kind of life He has: eternal, ageless life.

The Truth Can Become a Lie

As also Paul writes in all his letters when he speaks in them about these matters, among which are some things hard to understand, which those who are ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they also do the other scriptures.

2Peter 3:16

All the words of my mouth are in righteousness;

there is nothing froward or perverse in them.

The Son of God, in Proverbs 8:8

The truth is not the truth if it is spoken at the wrong time, or to the wrong person.

Zophar, one of Job’s three friends, told Job in the midst of Job’s horrific suffering:  “Should not this multitude of words be answered?  And should a man full of talk be justified?  Should your lies make men hold their peace?  And when you mock, shall no man make you ashamed?  For you have said, ‘My doctrine is pure,’ and ‘I am clean in your eyes.’  But oh, that God would speak and open His lips against you! . . . Know that God exacts of you less than your iniquity deserves!” (Job 11:2-5, 6b).

Now, it was true that God was exacting of Job less than his iniquity deserved – if we think of iniquity from a New Testament understanding.  When the Son of God came, he revealed a new kind of righteousness, the previously unknown righteousness of God, and with that revelation came a new and more perfect understanding of sin.  According to that newly revealed definition of sin, Job was sinful, along with every mortal who had ever lived on earth.

But that is New Testament truth.  It did not apply to Job.  God did not feel as Zophar did about Job because He is a just God, and He only judged Job according to the standard of righteousness that existed in Job’s time.  And according to that standard, God judged Job to be “a perfect and upright man, one who fears God and eschews evil” (Job 1:8).

Zophar was wrong.  He was telling the truth, but he was ignorant of the truth he was telling.  He was saying right words, from the perspective of what the Son of God would one day reveal, but the Son had not yet revealed it.  Zophar was condemning Job according to a human standard of righteousness, but Job was not a sinner by any human standard of righteousness.  Only God, at that time, could have said to Job what Zophar said and be telling the truth, but He did not say it.  And God did not say it because it was not His appointed time for such truth to be said.

My father taught his congregation that a person can do more damage with the truth than he can with a lie.  In other words, if we use something true in order to accomplish some evil thing, we will succeed more often than if we use a lie.  Satan, you will recall, quoted truth from the scriptures during the Temptation of Jesus; he knew that no lie would accomplish his purpose.  Consider how much damage would have been done if Jesus had fallen for that truth-turned-into-a-lie!  False prophets and false teachers have always used the holy Bible to persuade people to believe them and to follow their ungodly ways.  The truth has power that lies do not have.

It is our prayer that God would help us tell what is really the truth whenever we say anything, for if what we say is not spoken at the right time, and to the right person, it is not really the truth at all.

Humility: the Mother of Learning

From a sermon on Slander by Pastor John in 2006

The Spirit is teaching all of God’s children all the time, but if at any point along the way, we become proud of what we think we know, our growth in the knowledge of God will cease – until we regain our humility.  Pride is the mother of spiritual blindness, but humility is the mother of learning.  Humility makes us wise because it makes us willing to receive instruction.  If you stop and think about it, you will realize that everything you know – even so small a thing as knowing how to tie your shoes – you learned by humbling yourself to someone who was teaching you, whether it be to God or to a person on earth.

Solomon said, “A wise man will hear” (Prov. 1:5), but it is the willingness to hear which enables someone to become wise.  And, as Solomon repeatedly pointed out, it is the unwillingness to hear, that is, pride, which makes a person foolish (e.g., Prov. 1:7; 15:5; 23:9).  When someone becomes proud, he cannot become wise for his heart will no longer receive instruction.

May God give us the humility to become wise by listening to the instruction of the Spirit of God, and by listening to the wisdom of those who have been taught by the Spirit before us!

Proverbs 1

5.  A wise man will hear, and will increase learning, and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels,

6.  to understand a proverb, and the interpretation, the words of the wise, and their dark sayings.

7. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

8.  My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:

9.  For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck.

“Wine Is a Mocker”

“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is boisterous,

and whoever is deceived by it is not wise.”

Proverbs 20:1

From conversations with Preacher Clark in the 1970’s.

Sometimes, alcohol makes people act the way people act when they are under the power of the holy Spirit.  Those drunk on the wine of heaven may stagger, shake, fall to the ground, shout and praise God, or a thousand other glorious things, all of them perfectly good and clean in God’s sight.  On the day of Pentecost, when Jesus’ disciples first received the Spirit, they were overcome with joy and the power of God, and they spilled out into the street from the upper room where they had been staying.  Some onlookers concluded, “They are full of new wine!” (Acts 2:13), but those onlookers were wrong.  The disciples were indeed drunk, but not the way those onlookers supposed.  Peter told them so:

Acts 2

14. Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and declared to them, “Men of Judea,   and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and pay attention to my words!

15. Contrary to what you think, these are not drunk, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.

16. But this is that which was spoken through the prophet Joel:

17. ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

18. In those days, I will even pour out my Spirit on my slaves, male and female, and they will prophesy.

Preacher Clark taught us that when God’s people are under the power of the Spirit, they are not imitating the drunks of earth.  Rather, the drunks of earth are imitating, and so, mocking, the power of God when they are drunk.  We need to look at it the right way.  Instead of saints mocking worldly drunks, worldly drunks are mocking happy saints.  And as we all know, “God is not mocked.  For whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap” (Gal. 6:7).  God will have the last laugh, and He will be laughing hard when He strikes the whole earth with such wrath that the earth itself “shall reel to and fro like a drunkard” (Isa. 24:20).  On that day, who will be mocking who?  God says this to those who mock Him now:

Proverbs 1

24. Because I have called, and you refused, I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded,

25. but you have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof,

26. I also will laugh at your calamity.  I will mock when your fear comes,

27. when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction comes like a tornado, when distress and anguish come upon you.

Paul exhorted the saints not to be drunk with wine, but to be filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18).  He exhorted God’s children to participate in life, not to imitate it.  The holy ghost can move our mortal bodies with its power, the power that will someday raise us from the grave.  The world’s version of this is being drunk with earthly wine, but that only hastens the day that we enter into the grave; it can do nothing to get us out of it.

May God fill us with the kind of wine that thrills the soul with its purity and love, the holy “new wine” from heaven that flows from the throne of God and has filled thirsty souls with His righteousness, from the day of Pentecost until now.

Losing a Member

“Command the children of Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper,

and every one that hath an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead.

Both male and female shall ye put out, without the camp shall ye put them,

that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell.”

Numbers 5:2-3

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away from you!

It’s better for you that one of your members perish than that your whole body

be cast into Gehenna.  And if your right hand causes you to sin,

cut it off and throw it away from you!  It’s better for you that one of your

members perish than that your whole body be cast into Gehenna.”

Matthew 5:29–30

“Put that wicked man out from among you!”

1Corinthians 5:13

Whether under the law or in this time of grace, there are times when, for the good of a body of believers, ties must be broken with an individual member.  Sin is like a contagious disease, and when left unopposed, it always grows.  As Paul said to the saints in Corinth, who had allowed a grievous sin in their midst to go unopposed for a long time, “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1Cor. 5:6).  And what was the medicine that Paul prescribed for this body of believers?

1Corinthians 5

3. Absent in body but present in spirit, I have already judged, as if present, the one who has done this deed.

4. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,

5. turn such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

6. Your glorying is not good.  Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

7. Purge out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, since you are unleavened.  For Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us,

8. so that we might keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

9. In a letter, I wrote to you not to associate with immoral people,

10. not meaning, of course, the immoral of this world, or the covetous, or swindlers, or idolaters, for in that case, you would have to leave the world.

11. But now I write to you not to associate with anyone called a brother, if he be immoral, or covetous, or idolatrous, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler – not even so much as to eat with such a one.

12. For what have I to do with judging those outside?  Do you not judge those who are inside?

13. Those on the outside, God will judge.  So put that wicked man out from among you!

Of course, many times, those who are put out of the congregation feel misunderstood and mistreated, and some, like Satan when he was put out of heaven, become angry.  But the important thing is that the body be protected from the influence of souls that have gone astray and are now committed to some ungodliness.

To lose a member of the body of Christ is no more pleasant than to lose an eye or a hand.  But those in the medical field, and men who truly know God, will tell you that there are certainly times when a body must lose a hopelessly diseased member, or lose its entire self.

Unwanted Blessings

And it came to pass after these things that God, testing Abraham,

said to him, “Abraham.”  And he said, “Here I am.”

And He said, “Take now your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac,

and go to the land of Moriah, and there offer him up for a burnt offering

on one of the mountains that I will point out to you.”

Genesis 22:1–2

Abraham was not being punished when God told him to slay and sacrifice his young son Isaac.  On the contrary, he was being rewarded.  The great test of being told to offer up his only son as a burnt offering was reserved for no one but Abraham because there was no one else on earth who qualified to face that test.  By his great love and faith in God, Abraham had earned the privilege of being tested with fire.  It was, no doubt, a blessing that Abraham did not want, but it was the blessing God wanted him to have.  And because Abraham met that trial with faith toward God, we are still talking about him today as a wonderful example for us.  

The apostle James exhorted God’s people to rejoice when they were tested (Jas. 1:2).  He understood that a hard trial is a compliment from God.  Those who have great faith do not fall into and stay in the pit of “Why me?”  Instead, they rise up and face their unsavory circumstance as Jesus did his, with meekness and faith in God.

As a rule, God does not scourge His children for doing wrong.  He may chasten them for doing wrong, but He reserves His scourging, that is, His hardest trials, for those, like Abraham, who have demonstrated great faith already.  In his gospel tract, “Trials Are Opportunities, my father once wrote, “The strongest type of character always receives the hardest trials.  What a glorious opportunity we have – the privilege to be stamped with the trademark of heaven!  Trials of faith are God’s greatest compliments to His earthly children.”  To this wisdom, he added this exhortation: “One should never look upon his trials as mere attacks from the Devil.  Not at all!  God's sheep should be taught that it is God who designs and sends trials of faith and that they are intended for our greatest blessings!  There is great peace in understanding that faith must be tried, and that when it is tried, it is being tried by God!  From trials, one learns his most precious lessons, lessons custom-designed for each of us by our heavenly Father, to match our faith and to enhance our spiritual development.”

Solomon said that “no evil shall happen to the just” (Prov. 12:21).  This means that the hurtful things that happen to us, as with the pleasant things, are designed by our heavenly Father for our good.  And if we love Him, and if we are among those called according to His purpose, everything that happens to us can only be for our good, just as Paul said (Rom. 8:28).  Paul was a hated and maligned apostle.  As an old man, he was deserted by most of the people he had won to the Lord in his lifetime, as well as by some of his closest fellow-workers in Christ.  His aged body bore the scars of the great physical abuse he had suffered.  Still, he said, “I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in distresses, in persecutions, in troubles for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2Cor. 12:10).  He did not necessarily want those blessings; at the same time, he understood those “blessings” were necessary for him and that overcoming them meant that he would receive a better resurrection.  Let us emulate Paul’s faith!  If we do, we will have the same joyous testimony he had!

Scourged...but Saved

“No discipline at the time seems joyous, but grievous;

however, afterward, it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness

in those who have been trained by it.

Therefore, straighten up the listless hands and the feeble knees,

and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned aside,

but let it be healed instead.”

Hebrews 12:10–13

From a 2006 sermon by Pastor John on Slander.

Carnally-minded people whom Paul described as “natural men” frequently speak of what God will or will not do.  One such man, a professor of the New Testament, once declared to us seminarians that God would never take the life of an innocent child.  When this brilliant but foolish theologian told us that, King David came to my mind, and what God did to his new-born baby after the prophet Nathan confronted David about his  adulterous affair with Bathsheba:

2Samuel 12

13. And David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord!”  Then, Nathan said to David, “The Lord has put away your sin; you will not die.

14. Nevertheless, because by this deed, you have caused the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the son that is born to you will certainly die.”

15. And Nathan went to his house.  And the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and he was very sick.

. . .

18a. And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died.

God is not a big one of us, and His ways and His thoughts are so far beyond us that without His help, we cannot comprehend them.  God will do whatever He pleases to do, without regard to what humans think He should do.  In a parable, Jesus described God as “austere” (Lk. 19:21–22); Peter warned us that the trials God appoints for us can be very difficult and confusing (1Pet. 4:12); and the author of Hebrews went so far as to say that God “scourges” His children (an extraordinarily painful event) and that only those who humbly submit to the scourging will be saved in the end (Heb. 12:6).

James did say that God does not tempt anyone (Jas. 1:13), but in context, what James clearly meant is that God does not tempt anyone with evil.  For example, God tempted, or tested, Abraham (Gen. 22:1), but what He tempted Abraham to do was good, not evil.  

Old and New Testament writers alike made it absolutely clear that God tests His people (e.g., Jer. 17:10; 1Thess. 2:4), and the Psalmist even revealed that the opposite of being tested by God is to be hated by Him (Ps. 11:5).  James also said that when those who are being tried by God resort to evil, it is not that God has led them into sin but that they have yielded to the ungodly desires of their own fleshly nature (Jas. 1:14).  In other words, it is not that the test God gave them was too hard (that is never the case –1Cor. 10:13); rather, it is only that they failed the test.

You can overcome anything you face in this world because your heavenly Father, who loves you with all His heart, designed that trial for you, knowing you could overcome it.  Yes, at times, He has more confidence in our ability to overcome than we have, but He is always right.  You can win.  You are going to win.  Nothing can separate you from your heavenly Father’s love and care.  Every creature in heaven is on your side, and best of all, God and His Son are on your side.  You will be tested, but after you weather the storm, you will know God – and yourself – better than you ever have known Him.  That will make you a happier and wiser person than you ever were before, and when that happens, you will feel a very deep joy, and gratitude for the awful test that you had to go through.

Being Cut

God is looking for fruit from you.  And if you bear fruit, Jesus said the Father would prune you, so as to enable you to bear even more fruit.  That may sound harsh, but Jesus added that if you do not bear fruit, the Father would cut you off completely (Jn. 15:2).  This means that you are going to be cut on, one way or the other.  You are going to be cut on or be cut off.

Those who bear fruit to God earn the blessing of receiving another level of holy discipline; they have earned the privilege of being scourged and perfected.  He scourges every son who will be judged worthy to escape eternal damnation.  Every child of God who will be saved in the end will have submitted to His scourging – after they had borne good fruit!  Every one of them!  If you never receive that kind of scourging, it is because God considers you to be a bastard (Heb. 12:8).  He will not even consider you to be a son because you did not receive the Father’s correction.  When Israel failed to receive correction, God commanded Jeremiah not to pray for them anymore (Jer. 7:16).  Tender-hearted Jeremiah must have kept on praying for Israel after God told him to stop because God had to tell him at least twice more not to pray for them any longer (Jer. 11:14; 14:11).

If you receive no correction from God, you get no comfort from God.  If you receive His correction, He has oil to pour on your wounds.  As the prophet said, “He has wounded us, and He will bind us up” (Hos. 6:1).  “The wounds of a friend are faithful,” said Solomon (Prov. 27:6), and Jesus is the friend who sticks closer than a brother (Prov. 18:24).  How precious to have your wounds bound up with the balm of Jesus!

When your wound is bound up by Jesus, you find that you have a submissive, grateful attitude similar to my father’s attitude after he had been scourged by God with cancer.  He often referred to the disease as “that blessed cancer” because he felt that he would not have been prepared to meet God in peace had he not been afflicted with it.  “Uncle Joe” Murray was the same way.  He looked back on the days of his affliction as a good time, when his fellowship with God was perfected.  Given sixty to ninety days to live by physicians, no one on earth could help him, no matter how much they loved him.  Nobody on earth could do anything, either for him or against him.  He was altogether in God’s hands.  God had him all to Himself, with Uncle Joe’s future in the balance.  And when Uncle Joe met God’s expectations, an angel came to him and anointed him to be healed, and Uncle Joe’s sixty-to-ninety-day death sentence was transformed into thirty-seven healthy, happy years!

I know how it feels to be in a place where no one can help you.  You can feel the love that people have for you, and their desire to help, but when God puts you in that place, there is absolutely nothing anyone on earth can do.  God may give them credit for wanting to help, but He will not allow them to do a thing.  It is you, alone with God, where the hottest fires burn and the greatest amount of dross is burned out of your soul.  However, as lonely and hard a place as it is, it is still a very good place for God to have you, for it will make you cry out to God as you never have before.  It will make you spend some nights on your knees, but when God has gotten the fruit from you that He is looking for, when you have done the will of God to His satisfaction, when the heart is perfected, you will lift your battered head and say from the heart, “Thank you, heavenly Father, for loving me enough to have put me through that.”

Of course, those who do not humble themselves and render to God the desired fruit will become bitter at what they went through.  They will always see themselves as victims and will never be able, from the heart, to thank God for their trial.  But every person who accomplishes God’s purpose for the trial will end up thanking God forever for every bit of the suffering He put them through.  There will be no bitterness in their souls.  They were scourged, but in their time of hurting, they gave God what He wanted from them, and in His presence, they will be full of joy and peace.

True Humility

“My thoughts are not your thoughts,

and your ways are not my ways,” says the Lord.

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways,

and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8–9

Being humble before God includes humbling ourselves to labor because to labor was God’s original curse on humans for their sin.  What this means is, a lazy man is a rebel against God.

Being humble before God also includes humility in the face of natural disasters, disappointments, and inconveniences because they are just more of God’s ordained consequences for our sin.

Being humble also means standing up for the right, even if few others have the courage to do so.  Moses was the humblest man on earth, according to the Bible (Num. 12:3), and yet he stood fast with God and the truth through some very perilous situations, even daring to smash the people’s beloved golden calf to very tiny bits – and then making them drink it!  Jesus was even meeker than Moses, but he became furious when he saw his Father’s house being used by men to make money, and he overturned their tables and drove them out of the temple (Jn. 2:13–17).  Jesus once said, “I am meek and lowly”; at the same time, he always “called a spade a spade”, and he would boldly stand up for the helpless against the powerful who were abusing them (e.g., the hapless woman caught in adultery).

Men can appear to be humble by making a show of their humility.  But be careful.  Before judging someone to be humble, let us pause to consider what God thinks humility is.  His thoughts are not our thoughts, and He is not fooled by appearances, as we so often have been.

Worth More Than Half

Herod, on his birthday, made a feast for his chief officials, the captains of a thousand, and the leading men of Galilee, and the daughter of [Herod’s wife] Herodias came in and danced, and she pleased Herod and those banqueting with him.  And the king said to the girl, “Ask of me whatever you desire, and I will grant it to you.”  And he made an oath to her: “Whatever you ask of me, I will grant you, up to half of my kingdom!”  So when she went out, she said to her mother, “What shall I ask for myself?”  And she said, “The head of John the Baptizer.”  And immediately, she hurried in to the king and made her request, saying, “I want you to give me, right now, the head of John the Baptizer on a platter.”  And the king was deeply grieved, but because of the oaths and those feasting with him, he would not refuse her.  And so, the king sent an executioner and commanded that his head be brought in at once.  And he went out and beheaded him in the prison, and carried his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl, and the girl gave it to her mother.

Mark 6:21–28

If Herod wanted to give this dancing girl anything up to half of his kingdom, it was no one’s business but his.  It was perfectly lawful and permissible for him to do that, even if it was foolish for him to make such an offer because he enjoyed someone’s dancing.  Herod was probably drunk, having been at his birthday bash for a while before the girl danced; but again, the King was well within his rights as king to make that offer.  Even one of Jesus’ parables upheld the legality of a man doing whatever he wanted to do with what is his (Mt. 20:15).

But it was when the young girl, after being advised by her wicked mother, asked for the head of John the Baptist that Herod showed what a great fool he really was.  A sane response to the girl’s insane request would have been that John the Baptist was worth more than half his kingdom, more even than all of it.  God certainly thought so.  That is why He warned His people, “Touch not my anointed, and do my prophets no harm!” (1Chron. 16:22; Ps. 105:15).

But Herod was a fool.  He did not value John as he should have, and so, he foolishly fell into his wife’s trap and assented to the ungodly request.

The apostles warned us that there are people around us like Herod’s wicked wife who will also lay traps for our souls.  They hate the truth as she did, and those who speak it, and if we get drunk on the things of this world, they will take advantage of our weakness and get us to agree with something that we should not agree to.  Our safety is in esteeming the things of God above everything in this life, all we have and even all that we are.  When the love of God fills our hearts as it did the prophets, Jesus, Paul, and others, nothing can move us to say or do anything which does not please God.  We will please God in everything, and keep our victory over sin. 

Comparing Yourself to the Giants

Moses sent [twelve men] to spy out the land of Canaan, and he said unto them, “See the land, what it is, and the people that dwell therein.”  So they went up, and searched the land.  And they returned from searching of the land after forty days.  And they came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, and said, “We came unto the land to which thou sent us, and surely it flows with milk and honey, and this is the fruit of it.  Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great, and moreover we saw the children of Anak there.”

And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once, and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it!”  But the men who went up with him said, “We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we!”  And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eats up the inhabitants thereof, and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature.  And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants, and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

– excerpts from Numbers 13

The spies whom Moses had sent out to scout the land of Canaan were troubled.  God had already done the impossible for the Israelites.  He had delivered them from Egyptian slavery and taken them safely across the burning sands of the Sinai Peninsula, miraculously feeding them every day with manna, the sweet wafer-like substance that David called “angels’ food”.  Now, here Israel was, just about to be given the whole land of Canaan, but the spies discouraged them, telling them they could not take Canaan, and they convinced their fellow Israelites that they should all return to Egypt.

Two of the spies, Caleb and Joshua, did not agree with the other spies.  Caleb and Joshua believed God and were thrilled that He was about to give Canaan’s land to Israel.  But because they were thrilled about it, and because they told their fellow Israelites that they could take the land, the other spies and Israelites set about to stone Caleb and Joshua, and they would have succeeded if God had not miraculously appeared and stopped them.

God was so angry with the ten spies who discouraged Israel that he struck them dead.  Then, He cursed Israel by sending them all back into the desert wilderness to wander about until that whole generation died.  Forty years later, a new generation of Israelites did take the land, including old Caleb and Joshua, whom God spared because they had put their faith in Him and did not fear the giants of Canaan.

This was the kind of faith Preacher Clark was exhorting us to have when he said in a sermon in 1972, “Don’t compare the giants to your own strength.”  The giants of this world can indeed defeat us.  We are small, and they are big.  But God has promised to be with us, and to give us the victory.  And as Paul said, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”  That is how Caleb and Joshua felt, and because they felt that way, they were allowed to enter into the Promised Land and to possess a portion of it.  If we believe God as they did, if we look to God instead of the giants that oppose us, we, too, will enter into the Promised Land and be given our portion, with all the rest whose faith is in God instead of in the giants.

My Father’s Greatest Achievement

Perhaps the greatest achievement of my father as a servant of God was that he left behind a congregation that was spiritually alive; that is, a congregation willing and able to hear from Jesus and to follow him. He didn’t leave us with the feeling that we had to circle around what he taught us and never grow beyond it.

There is a group in Indiana who has been spiritually dead in the water since their leader died.  Their meetings, I hear, consist of gathering to listen to recordings of him preaching.  God help him.

Preacher Clark would have been displeased with us if we had done that.  He expected us to follow on with Christ and grow in the grace and knowledge of God.

God has more to tell us, and He has more to do to us to make us like Him.  Let’s seek Him and wait for His voice.  He is a faithful Father!

Just You

God has been good to us all.  He is worthy of all our praise and devotion.  The next time you thank Him for His goodness, however, I want you not to think of “us”.  I want you to think only of your life and the grace God has shone toward you, alone.

Yesterday, I realized that when I give God praise, I often do it with reference to us all.  And at other times, the many who have refused His grace will come to mind while I am talking to Him.  But the Lord impressed on me to forget about all others (for the moment) and to just praise and thank God for His great mercy shown to me as an individual, to make my praise very personal, between Him and me without reference to anyone else.

That kind of communication with God brought with it a sweet, humbling feeling.  Try it sometime, and let the Lord take a walk with you through your past and remind you of how merciful and kind He has been to you as a solitary soul, throughout you life.