God Bless the Child (Who Gives Us Peace)

This, believe it or not, is a post about Christ, and though it may not appear as such for a while, I must importune your patience and indulgence.  Sometimes the sobering realities of humanity's deserved lot are the best way to illuminate Christ's glory; amen?

Imagine for a moment that you have died in your sins, and that the time of your judgment has come upon you. (You will remind me, of course, that these are events very likely to be separated in time for most of us, which is true, but we will skip to the judgment here.) You find yourself, eyes to the ground, before the Lord Jesus Christ, unmistakable in power and incontrovertible in holiness.  This is no dying Savior upon the cross, not anymore.  This is the risen, exalted King.  Perhaps those words once caused no more than a shrug or a smirk with you, but now you see what they mean, in their fullest, most wondrous, most terrifying sense:  Christ, the risen, exalted King.

You feel the hope and the confidence bleeding out from your heart - a flow not to be stanched, a death wound.  Your legs are stone, and you make no doubt that this God - the only God there is, you now see - will know all about you, more than you know yourself, and far, far more than you would care to remember, if you could help it.  Your life is laid bare, though, and the sum total of what you are overwhelms the simple objections you used to make in defense of your supposed goodness of character.

You are a sinner.  God is holy.  He justly delivers your sentence of condemnation.

Perhaps you meet this sobering moment with quiet.  Perhaps, though, you are familiar with Jesus, and so feel as though your long hypocrisy gives you cause to speak, to say something before all is lost.  So words erupt from your lips and hang as a conspicuous intrusion into the reverence demanded by divine holiness.  You have just spoken the only words you will ever speak in the presence of God, and they are blasphemous:  "‘Lord, Lord, did I not do many things in your name?" (cf. Matt. 7:22) You have questioned the recollection of the Omniscient, and the judgment of the Omnisapient (the All-Wise); He is not moved; this latest sin augments your considerable tally, and you go down to the lake of fire.

As you find yourself in the suffocating maw of that blackness, the punishment will begin.  Whether you have a brief instant to anticipate and to dread the arrival of God's wrath or not, I cannot say.  However, when the fullness of divine, just, holy fury explodes upon you in that lonely place, it will exceed the meager limitations of any of your experiences or imaginings.  You will feel, in that first instant, that there is no possibility of your surviving even this preliminary fragment, this barest sliver, of God's fury.  How indeed could it not destroy you, and all of the universe with you, in a truncated flash of agony?  It is as though every conceivable pain which mankind has ever endured, or ever could endure, through every millennium of our world, has been compressed and concentrated into one divine blow - except a thousand times stronger.

The intensity of this fury is not the amazing part - the truly astonishing thing is that you find yourself quite whole and intact; indeed, the next wave of torment is already upon you.  You find even that your mental faculties are similarly preserved, although such complete agony should drive one mad.  It is then that it drives home in your perfectly clear intellect - the same God who visits such omnipotent fury upon you is the God who has omnipotently fitted you for that fury.  It will never consume you completely.

This is a pain beyond reckoning, a sharp, hot, complete misery that would annihilate a normal human body in a heartbeat.  Ten thousand white-hot bands of iron wrapped about your frame and searing into your flesh would be a welcome, even laughable alternative to what you now endure.  How I wish it could be described!  It crowds out and banishes hope.  You may clench your fists; you may double over until your knees touch your cheeks, but no such measures will bring relief.  Your tricks from your previous life can do nothing here.  Neither is there a friend whose hands you may grip, whose shoulder you could embrace.  You are utterly alone; your only companions are your own cries.  There is also nothing to distract your mind from your torment; the once-pleasant recollections of your former life now simply herald your sinfulness.

In fact, in the basest sense, this is probably the complete and ultimate focus of all your thoughts:  God and my sin.  God and my sin.  God and my sin.  Every wave of agony brings a fresh remembrance of your absolute deservedness of hell.  You cannot argue against the justness, but as you never learned to love God when you labored under His grace, you certainly cannot do so now.  You find yourself cursing Him with the appallingly blasphemous self-destruction of unrestrained sinfulness.  And for this, your miseries are now doubled, but still you live. 

As this indescribable maelstrom of inescapable agony continues, you realize that you are not growing accustomed to it at all.  It is in no way like those pains back on earth that afflict people until they simply learn to deal with them on a continual basis.  Every stab, every bite, every hot needle is exquisite in its novelty and relentless upon your person.  If there are two things which you begin to learn after the first thousand years of unbroken torment (that first drop in that infinite, incomprehensible bucket), they are simply that you will never grow even the slightest bit acclimated to your situation (if anything, the contrary), and that you will never, ever get out of hell.  Could you see that great ocean that is God's holy wrath against you, your heart would break to see that it has not lowered even a thousandth of an inch.  Your shrieks of pain, of frustration, of hopelessness, and of black, impotent rage, will never cease to pour from your parched and writhing lips. 

This is what it is to have enmity with God - a battle which we can never win, and which will rob us of every glory, every prize, every grace, and every hope.  Of course, we have no choice but to be the enemies of the Lord, having been born into the family of sin.  Romans 3 teaches us that we never could and never would love God, so it seems a hopeless matter from a human standpoint.  We are doomed, in and of ourselves, to run straight into the teeth of hell.

I speak specifically to you here, Christian.  Walk your mind as profoundly as you can through the horrific marches of hell, which, for all these words, I have not even begun to describe here - this is how the enemies of God meet eternity.  It is sure, unavoidable, and deserved. 

For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6

These are familiar words, but does your heart not bound for gladness at them?  Read the last phrase once more:  Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace.  This is a far, far greater thing than the dubious fraternity that the world pretends around Christmas - this is peace with God Himself!  This is a complete reversal from the devastating certainty of eternal despair at the hand of a just God to the heartening certainty of eternal delight at the hand of that same God!  "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." (Rom. 5:1)

Let us never commit the sin of naming Christ the Prince of Peace without reverent remembrance of what that means - the incredible magnitude of the hell which He suffered on the cross, and the immeasurable gift of peace with God.  Our esteem for Christ the peace-giver should be seeping more and more, if not outright flooding, into every element of our lives - certainly into our interaction with others and into our faithfulness to kingdom work, but let it start where it should, with a heart of humble and grateful worship toward the Prince of Peace.

Nobody Wants a Boring God

As Christians, we serve a very interesting God.  He is interesting for many reasons (not least of which is His unique reality in this universe), but we see this best perhaps when life itself becomes interesting.  In the unforgiving jaws of a boring, predictable, run-of-the-mill life, God is still incredibly interesting - it is simply more difficult to perceive this.  If we desire to glory in our God in His fullness, we must prepare ourselves for the possibility of unsettling, discouraging, painful, even hazardous circumstances.  When we encounter the living God in these conditions, though, we do not walk away disappointed.

We remember how God sent Moses back to his enslaved people in order to begin His certain task of dislodging them from Egypt.  Exodus 4:30-31 recounts how the divine power displayed through Moses's miraculous signs causes the downtrodden Israelites to believe.  This could never be counted boring, but it is expected:  God is powerful.  We believe, with a genuine belief, because we have seen that power.

Something wonderful happens at the end of verse 31, though.  The display of God's power is momentous enough - it kindles belief in the midst of an oppressed people!  However, Moses and Aaron then deliver incredible news:  the One who holds this power is concerned for you, dear brothers and sisters.  Your omnipotent God has seen your travails, and He is not pleased with your present station.  At this, the people prostrate themselves and worship their God.

It is one thing to perceive the excellencies of the Lord; they are worthy of notice, of worship, of appreciation, of pure wonder, all by themselves.  However, we must confess that it is another thing altogether when those very same qualities are directed, incredibly, at us!  We, these sinful, transient, weak, myopic, squabbling trifles, pass under the specific notice of the Divine, of the Perfect!  His mighty hands, which fashioned the cosmos, now extend to give us grace!  When we have not deserved the slimmest iota of life here on earth, He gives a lifetime, and He fulfills His powerful and heartening covenants for His children.  Believe, by all means, dear friend, but do not forget to worship as well.

One further point on the Exodus narrative - Moses applies to Pharaoh for the release of his people, and is summarily turned down.  Furthermore, the workload of the Israelites is augmented to an impossibly grueling pace.  In this moment, as despondency readies itself, the Lord says simply, "Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh; for under compulsion he will let them go, and under compulsion he will drive them out of his land.” (Ex. 6:1b) 

In other words, the stage is now set for the Lord to begin His work.  Indeed, He might have worked such that Pharaoh was induced to free the Israelites before this point, but this would not been nearly so interesting, so telling of God's character, as what He actually does.  The increase in difficulty for the Israelites, as God reckoned in His perfect wisdom, was not wasted, because it allowed Him to reveal Himself far more strongly to His people.

This pattern can be harrowing, and it is certainly familiar to us in its essentials, but it is far from boring; amen?  Life is rarely easy.  How easy it is for me to imagine that the remedy to my present dilemma, whatever that dilemma is, can come only in one form.  I quietly, and often unwittingly, conclude that there is only one recourse that will extricate me.  Any other course of events tends to whisper that God has answered my prayers in the negative, but this ignores the manifold complexities of the world, of God Himself, and of His perfect plans.  We all know that God delivered the Israelites, and He delivers us as well, even when it is death itself that brushes our difficulties away, like a shroud from our faces.

Life is certainly interesting when we follow an interesting God - it becomes something not to be feared, but anticipated, as our indestructible God reveals His perfect plans and perfect character. 

The New Precious

How pleasant it is to notice still more ways in which God differs from His creation!

The Koh-i-Noor diamond is a stunning piece of the history of India, an exceptionally large gem that was unearthed hundreds of years ago.  For a time, it reigned as the largest diamond in the world.  Generations of rulers and aristocrats have regarded it with calculating eyes, and as one might expect of an oversized diamond, it has passed rather forcibly through many hands and nations over the years, being carried away time and again in the aftermath of some conflict.  This gem currently resides in the Tower of London.

It is large, rare, and old, and so increasingly precious.  This axiomatic:  a thing is hard to come by, or it ages through the centuries, and so becomes precious.  Be it a Stradivarius, a first-edition Dumas, a Colt-Paterson 1836, or a photograph of a 19th century ancestor, scarcity generates "precious." 

So says the world, and so it often contents itself with this sort of "precious" - and to be honest, there is some truth here, of course.  The intent here is not to puncture our notion of preciousness, but rather to demonstrate how wonderfully precious God's character is, and in an entirely unique manner.  Think about this a moment - if you told me that there was something which was found throughout the world, and could be had freely, and would never wear out, and indeed more could always be had, I would conclude you were speaking in riddles, and perhaps the answer was "dirt."  "Precious" would not be the first adjective I would ascribe.

Of course we refer not to dirt in this description, by to the nature of our Lord!  If we can turn our thoughts from dirt and the like, and consider instead God's character, then things curiously transform.  Let us consult the authority and take a brief sampling:

• God's ways are unsearchable.  (Rom. 11:33)
• God's judgments are unfathomable.  (Rom. 11:33)
• God's wisdom and knowledge are profoundly deep.  (Rom. 11:33)
• God's love surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:19) and extends to the heavens (Ps. 103:11)
• God's peace surpasses comprehension (Phil. 4:7)
• God's faithful love never ends (Lam. 3:22)
• God's mercy is rich (Eph. 2:4)
• God's grace is surpassingly rich (Eph. 2:7)
• God's sovereignty encompasses all (Ps. 103:19)

Thus the things God is, and the things God does, are precious, but they are not rare; they are superabundant!  Were all believers, for instance, to devote themselves to standing on the nearest street corner and crying out continually of our Lord's abudant forgiveness and saving love, and were each of us seeing ten lost souls come to repentance in every hour, we would no more risk exhausting the extents of that love and forgiveness than I would risk blotting out the sun by standing atop the CN Tower.

The outpourings of God's character upon us are exquisite, but not fragile; valuable, but not rare; priceless, but not locked away; as old as time, but new every morning.  How then do we explain how wonderfully precious He and His character are to us?  It is simply as follows:  the preciousness of God's character does not stem from its scarcity, but from its perfection.  Who God is, and what He does, are so entirely and unfailingly perfect that He immeasurably distinguishes Himself from His own creation until even His holy seraphim, who have never tasted evil, cannot look upon Him, and and are pleased perpetually to cry out His utter holiness (Is. 6:2-3). 

This perfection, and the incontestable separation that it brokers, mean that God possesses what we cannot.  Here we perceive the scarcity of it - it is alien to our fallen sensibilities - and when by those very perfections our spiritual eyes are opened in salvation to the sheer wonder of God, He is made exceedingly precious to our hearts.  We are prostrated before the glorious grace He bestows, and then are pressed down again as we perceive the magnitude of grace yet promised but not dispensed, an infinity of unceasing glory which will serve through long and tireless epochs to increasingly demonstrate just how precious He has been all along.

Our Lord Jesus, grant that we should regard you with the value that is Your glorious and unique due, and may appropriate and genuine worship issue not only from our minds and our hearts, but from our hands in service to You alone!

The Ruthlessness of Prayer

On November 15, 1864, some 62,000 Federal troops departed the still-smoldering city of Atlanta under the brilliant and collected generalship of W.T. Sherman.  Year's end would see this force having won to Savannah, leaving in its wake a scene of immeasurable devastation some 300 miles long and 40 miles wide.  Their mission was complete - they had driven to the ocean, effectively taking or destroying anything which the South might employ in its rebellion against the North.  The railroads were smashed, the cattle harnessed, the field pieces taken, the cotton burned.  Many miles behind its tenacious soldiers and exceptional generals, the Confederate war effort lay in ruins.

In a way, we are all of us Sherman in Atlanta - everyone who has been saved by the precious blood of Christ is engrossed in a brutal conflict, albeit one that is won or lost in the human heart.  We are consumed in a constant clash between the godliness which our Lord is actively creating within us, and the sinful impulses that foray sharply from the quiet corners of our hearts (Rom. 7:22-23).  This is a battle that must be accorded our fullest measure of sobriety and perseverance, for though a hundred grim specters of temptation may fall upon the Sword of the Spirit, yet there are untold thousands behind them.  The press of battle is always upon us in this world.

It is an irony that the most seasoned and mature Christians you will meet are at once accustomed both to the most gracious gentleness and patience with the rest of humanity, and yet to the quickest and strongest violence against the incursions of temptation and pride within themselves.  In this respect, the gift of prayer becomes either a formidable ally or an exercise in wanton futility. 

Prayer is formidable only if pride is stamped out while the prayer is being made; otherwise, it is pure futility.  Elihu wisely instructed Job, "[God] does not answer [prayers] because of the pride of evil men." (Job 35:12b) The psalmist explains that this is so because the prideful are not actually interested in God at all:  "The wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance, does not seek Him.  All his thoughts are, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 10:4)

In other words, pride serves to remove any true regard we have for the Lord in a given moment.  Prayer, then, must be effected in such a way that our pride is devastated to the utmost.  Any tool that pride might grasp in a bid to dominate our hearts must be broken, or else wrested away for the worship that is owed only to the Lord.  We must sift through our hearts as Sherman sifted through the South, not hesitating to smash what merits destruction, and to take back whatever we in our pride have stolen.

Consider the elements of prayer for a moment.  We are called, for instance, to reverent praise of our sovereign Maker, Sustainer, and Savior.  The barest tinge of pride blights our praise by introducing falseness and sin.  This is especially sad, given that prayerful praise is calculated to draw our adoration to its rightful divine recipient - recalling the excellencies of the One to whom we pray should serve to shape the course the entire prayer.  Remember, His character is our lifeline, but we must achieve a purity of heart in our pursuit of His glory!

Another crucial feature of prayer is repentance.  Of course, pride is the bane of true repentance, but we must take care, lest we suppose that the simple desire for repentance indicates an absence of pride.  We can always muddle through repentance simply because we know we should, or we can congratulate ourselves that we so humbly desire repentance that, ironically, the repentance itself is spoiled with pride.  It is also sometimes the case that we freely confess some sins, but not others - pride restrains us from acknowledging certain sins. 

Finally, there is the matter of supplication in prayer.  Pride can certainly spoil this activity, and if such is the case, we must not expect the Lord to respond with pleasure.  If we can unshackle ourselves from pride (say, through humble confession of sin and genuine worship of our Lord), then our requests will be made for His sake, and not ours, and so will work toward His enduring kingdom and glory.  Think a moment, and I am certain that you, like me, will be able to recall certain requests you once made of the Lord that now only induce cringing for their selfishness.  What waste, no? 

It is not unwise to patently assume the presence of pride in our lives - we will usually be correct - and prayer life can serve as good gage of pride.  Do you hesitate to repent to your God?  Do your prayers themselves die in your throat?  Are your praises brief and skin deep?  Then you have but one recourse:  you must go before your worthy God and admit of your prideful indifference, and beg His help once more as you move through your heart with an attitude of ruthless impatience, seeking to stamp out every instance of pride - identify it, confess it, and set yourself against it!  Do this again and yet again until every spark of pride is devastated and the Lord crowds your heart!  This absolute ruthlessness against ourselves must be an indispensible feature of our prayers.