And Yahweh said to Moses, “When you go back to Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before Pharaoh which I have put in your hand. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go. Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says Yahweh: “Israel is my son, my firstborn. So I say to you, let my son go that he may serve me. But if you refuse to let him go, indeed I will kill your son, your firstborn.”’”
And it came to pass on the way, at the encampment, that Yahweh met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at Moses’ feet, and said, “Surely you are a husband of blood to me!” So he let him go. Then she said, “You are a husband of blood!”—because of the circumcision. (Exodus 4:21-26)
God requires the dedication of children to him. The children of the unrighteous are destroyed, while the children of the righteous are covenanted to him—on pain of death (in the case of Moses) or of excommunication:
And the uncircumcised male child, who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant. (Genesis 17:14)
This is why the Westminster Confession of Faith reminds us that “it [is] a great sin to contemn or neglect” baptism, including the baptism of our little ones. It is noteworthy that Moses faces this opposition from God on his way to be rejoined to God’s people; in fact, on his way to make preparations for a feast: it is especially important for our children to wear the sign of God’s covenant with them when they enter into his presence in worship.
Likewise, it is a great sin to contemn or neglect our little ones’ participation in the Lord’s Supper. I have written of how strongly this is implied by the New Testament food laws (do not destroy or stumble your brother; you will either be eating at God’s table or the table of demons; examine yourself; discern the body; wait for one another; walk straightforwardly about the truth of the gospel). But this requirement also goes back to the time that the church was given the name of Israel:
But the man who is clean and is not on a journey, and ceases to keep the Passover, that same person shall be cut off from among his people, because he did not bring the offering of Yahweh at its appointed time; that man shall bear his sin. (Numbers 9:13)
Are you clean (1 Corinthians 7:14)? You must be baptized and you must participate in the feast. In neglect of this command, the evangelical church has largely excommunicated her children. Until she repents of despising God’s children in this way, God will oppose her just as he opposed Moses.
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Now both Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding. And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”
Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does your concern have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servants, “Whatever he says to you, do.”
Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece. Jesus said to them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, “Draw out now, and take to the master of the feast.” And they took. When the master of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom. And he said to him, “Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the [guests] have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!” This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (John 2)
One thing worth highlighting here is that the arrival of Jesus marks the arrival of good wine. If you are serving grape juice rather than wine in communion, then you are play acting that we are still living under the old covenants.
But a second thing worth noting is that it is purifying water that is turned into wine; the one necessarily gives way to the other. If you are baptizing your children, then well and good. But if you are not serving them the Lord’s supper, then you are play acting that we are still living under the old covenants.
Twice in the last few months I have checked myself when quoting Psalm 8:
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength, Because of your enemies, That you may silence the enemy and the avenger.
The word “avenger” feels out of place. Why would it be necessary for infants to silence the kinsman redeemer-avenger? As it turns out, the word for avenger here is a more general term, possibly even conveying the idea of self-vengeance.
Jesus quotes Psalm 8 in Matthew 21:
But when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant and said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?”
And Jesus said to them, “Yes. Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants you have perfected praise’? ”
Jesus leaves off the latter part of the verse, but we cannot avoid hearing its echo. Jesus is accusing the chief priests and scribes of having become God’s enemies, of seeking to avenge themselves against him and his people.
Likewise those who bar little ones from Jesus’s table. Many of them do so heedlessly rather than high-handedly. But there is still a rightful sting and shame they ought to feel as these little ones otherwise participate fully in Jesus’s worship.
Usually when I use the word “anxious” I have Edwin Friedman in mind. However, following are quotes and reflections from John Williamson Nevin’s The Anxious Bench.
My friend Jon observes that, while the anxious bench and even the altar call may have disappeared from many churches, reformed charismatic churches have an “anxious mic,” that is, the “prophecy mic.” In my experience, the absence of a confession and absolution from worship leaves a gap that needs filling. If there is a prophecy mic then it is frequently filled by the most anxious church members reassuring one another. By this means women often preach to the church.
I think it is interesting that the modern answer proposed for dead formalism is an equally dead emotionalism. Both are dead externalisms. Perfume will not awaken a dead body.
Study, and the retired cultivation of personal holiness, will seem to their zeal an irksome restraint; and making their lazy, heartless course of preparation as short as possible, they will go out with the reputation of educated ministers, blind leaders of the blind, to bring the ministry into contempt, and fall themselves into the condemnation of the devil. Whatever arrangements may exist in favor of a sound and solid system of religion, their operation will be to a great extent frustrated and defeated, by the predominant influence of a sentiment, practically adverse to the very object they are designed to reach. . . .
False views of religion abound. Conversion is everything, sanctification nothing. Religion is not regarded as the life of God in the soul, that must be cultivated in order that it may grow, but rather as a transient excitement to be renewed from time to time by suitable stimulants presented to the imagination. A taste for noise and rant supersedes all desire for solid knowledge. The susceptibility of the people for religious instruction is lost on the one side, along with the capacity of the ministry to impart religious instruction on the other. The details of christian duty are but little understood or regarded. Apart from its seasons of excitement, no particular church is expected to have much power. Family piety, and the religious training of the young, are apt to be neglected. (63-64)
It is certainly a little strange, that the class of persons precisely who claim to be the most strenuous, in insisting upon unconditional, immediate submission to God, scarcely tolerating that a sinner should be urged to pray or read the bible, lest his attention should be diverted from that one point, are as a general thing nevertheless quite ready to interpose this measure in his way to the foot of the cross, as though it included in fact the very thing itself. And yet a pilgrimage to the Anxious Bench, is in its own nature as much collateral to the duty of coming to Christ, as a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In either case a false issue is presented to the anxious soul, by which for the time a true sight of its circumstances is hindered rather than promoted. (68)
A low, shallow, pelagianizing theory of religion, runs through it from beginning to end. The fact of sin is acknowledged, but not in its true extent. The idea of a new spiritual creation is admitted, but not in its proper radical and comprehensive form. The ground of the sinner’s salvation is made to lie at last in his own separate person. The deep import of the declaration, That which is born of the flesh is flesh, is not fully apprehended; and it is vainly imagined accordingly, that the flesh as such may be so stimulated and exalted notwithstanding, as to prove the mother of that spiritual nature, which we are solemnly assured can be born only of the Spirit Hence all stress is laid upon the energy of the individual will, (the self-will of the flesh,) for the accomplishment of the great change in which regeneration is supposed to consist. . . .
Religion does not get the sinner, but it is the sinner who “gets religion.” Justification is taken to be in fact by feeling, not by faith; and in this way falls back as fully into the sphere of self-righteousness, as though it were expected from works under any other form. In both the views which have been mentioned, as grounded either in a change of purpose or a change of feeling, religion is found to be in the end the product properly of the sinner himself. It is wholly subjective, and therefore visionary and false. The life of the soul must stand in something beyond itself. Religion involves the will; but not as self-will, affecting to be its own ground and centre. Religion involves feeling; but it is not comprehended in this as its principle. Religion is subjective also, fills and rules the individual in whom it appears; but it is not created in any sense by its subject or from its subject. The life of the branch is in the trunk. (114-116)
To acquire, in any case, true force, [the will] must fall back on a power more general than itself. And so it is found, that in the sphere of religion particularly, the pelagian theory is always vastly more impotent for practical purposes, than that to which it stands opposed. The action which it produces may be noisy, fitful, violent; but it can never carry with it the depth, the force, the fullness, that are found to characterize the life of the soul, when set in motion by the other view. (127)
This spiritual constitution is brought to bear upon [man] in the Church, by means of institutions and agencies which God has appointed, and clothed with power, expressly for this end. . . . Due regard is had to the idea of the Church as something more than a bare abstraction, the conception of an aggregate of parts mechanically brought together. It is apprehended rather as an organic life, springing perpetually from the same ground, and identical with itself at every point. In this view, the Church is truly the mother of all her children. They do not impart life to her, but she imparts life to them. Here again the general is felt to go before the particular, and to condition all its manifestations. The Church is in no sense the product of individual christianity, as though a number of persons should first receive the heavenly fire in separate streams, and then come into such spiritual connection comprising the whole; but individual christianity is the product, always and entirely, of the Church, as existing previously and only revealing its life in this way. Christ lives in the Church, and through the Church in its particular members. . . .
Where it prevails, a serious interest will be taken in the case of children, as proper subjects for the Christian salvation, from the earliest age. Infants born in the Church, are regarded and treated as members of it from the beginning, and this privilege is felt to be something more than an empty shadow. The idea of infant conversion is held in practical honor; and it is counted not only possible but altogether natural, that children growing up in the bosom of the Church, under the faithful application of the means of grace, should be quickened into spiritual life in a comparatively quiet way, and spring up numerously, “as willows by the water-courses,” to adorn the Christian profession, without being able at all to trace the process by which the glorious change has been effected. Where the Church has lost all faith in this method of conversion, either not looking for it at all, or looking for it only in rare and extraordinary instances, it is an evidence that she is under the force of a wrong religious theory, and practically subjected, at least in some measure, to the false system whose symbol is the Bench. If conversion is not expected nor sought in this way among infants and children, it is not likely often to occur. All is made to hang methodistically on sudden and violent experiences, belonging to the individual separately taken, and holding little or no connection with his relations to the Church previously. Then as a matter of course, baptism becomes a barren sign, and the children of the Church are left to grow up like the children of the world, under general most heartless, most disastrous neglect. The exemplifications of such a connection between wrong theory and wrong practice, in this case, are within the reach of the most common observation. (129-132)
How often should we pray for our daily bread—or our coming bread, as some would say? We should pray “this day”—that is, every day. Wouldn’t it be strange if, on such a day, the congregation assembled for worship, but the coming bread was not set out for her? We would be declaring that God was the kind of father who, if his son asks for bread, gives him something else.
And isn’t worship itself, in a sense, a kind of prayer? Wouldn’t it be strange if, in this prayer, we did not confess our sins and ask forgiveness? We would be declaring that it was not necessary to obey Jesus’s instruction to pray “in this manner.”
Jason Garwood recently proposed a reading of Paul’s head-covering passage that attempts to address apparent inconsistencies by using “quotation theory.” Quotation theory proposes that some of the text is not Paul’s writing, but his quotation of a previous letter from the Corinthians.
This made me wonder how we might apply quotation theory to 1 Corinthians 14. It seems to me that you could take the following statements to be quotations:
“For he who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God, for no one understands; however, in the spirit he speaks mysteries.” (v. 2)
“He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself” (v. 3)
“if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays” (v. 14)
To me this is not really satisfying. It is interesting that it pushes against the idea of a private prayer language; but it requires Paul to be humoring the Corinthians more than pushing back against them, which doesn’t seem to strike the right balance. If what they are doing is allowable but immature, then I would expect more pushback: “though by this time you ought to be teachers.”
Quotation theory is quite a powerful scalpel; many folks want to use it to disregard the latter part of 1 Corinthians 14. It is an easy way to play the game of “has God indeed said.”
From the vault of the evening sky, from the countryside beneath her gaze came the murmur of the mass intoned as she had heard it thousands of times before, in the voice of her father, who had explained the words to her when she was a child and stood at his knee: Then Sira Eirik sings the Præfatio when he turns toward the altar, and in Norwegian it means:
Truly it is right and just, proper and redemptive that we always and everywhere should thank Thee, Holy Lord, Almighty Father, eternal God. . . .
When she lifted her face from her hands, she saw Gaute coming up the hillside. Kristin sat quietly and waited until the boy stood before her; then she reached out to take his hand. There was grassy meadow all around and not a single place to hide anywhere near the rock where she sat.
“How have you carried out your father’s errand, my son?” she asked him softly. (Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, Kindle Edition, loc 11196)
Seven hundred years later my children hear this same declaration as they enter into worship:
Truly it is proper and right that we should at all times and in all places give thanks to You, O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty and Everlasting King, . . .
Twice Paul commands us to sing Psalms: Ephesians 5, Colossians 3. James commands us to sing Psalms as well.
These commands from God are commands for us to develop a biblical typology, a biblical theology, and a covenant theology. Why is that? Because otherwise we might as well be singing Psalms in an unfamiliar language. We would be, so to speak, unfruitful—out of our minds.
“Son, isn’t it too bad that there is no longer any holy temple where we can meet with God?” “Sweetheart, isn’t it too bad that babies no longer trust in God?”
My favorite quotes from Peter Leithart’s Theopolitan Mission:
The principle of ministry in the church is simple: “Let all things be done for edification” (1 Cor 14:26). This is the rule: Do everything you do to complete Christ’s body. (39)
Macedonians make a koinonia contribution to poor saints in Jerusalem (Rom 15:26). As Paul sees it, they don’t throw money at a problem from a distance. Rather, their generous gifts overcome distance, joining Macedonian Gentiles and Jerusalem Jews in one fellowship of the Spirit. Material gifts have a quasi-sacramental power to join the members of the church into one body. (50)
A church isn’t carrying out the mission of Jesus if it doesn’t gather on the Lord’s Day at a common table. (54)
Conflict is no accident, nor is it avoidable. Suffering is the only path into the kingdom, an inevitable part of mission. (71)
Like the ark, the church receives and preserves the treasures of the world (Rev 21:24) so they can be purged, transfigured, and brought out again to adorn creation. As worlds collapse, the world’s riches are kept safe in the ark of the church. All things are gathered into the church so that all things can disembark into a new creation. Noah performs this magic only once, but Jesus does it continuously. Treasures flow continuously into the ark of Christendom. The church has received the treasures of Greek and Roman art, philosophy, and politics, to purify them and bring them to fulfillment. It will plunder the gold of China, Japan, and India, of the Masai and Zulu, of Arabia and Iraq and Afghanistan. Treasures from the city of man enter the city of God so they can return to the city of man, renewed. The city of man enters the ark of God so it can become more perfectly what it’s supposed to be, more perfectly an image of heavenly Jerusalem.
The church pilots the world. What happens in the holy church guides what happens outside. If the church is unfaithful, leaves her first love, and turns to false teachers, Jesus will move the lampstand and abandon the house (Rev 2-3). If the church keeps her lamps burning, continuously supplied by the oil of the Spirit, the world will be full of light. (79)
I wonder sometimes if any of my international colleagues are secret brothers and sisters.
Transformed by the Eucharist, our making is freed from pure utility and functionality. Utility is good. A woodworker makes tables for meals, weavers make cloth for clothing, metalworkers make wires for electricity and rebar to strengthen walls. All these forms of making have practical ends. But when we make in order to offer our fruit to God in praise, we transcend mere usefulness. The cobbler doesn’t just cover bare feet; he cobbles for the glory of God. At the same time, the sanctuary frees us from the sterile circularity of making for its own sake, the effete snobbery of “art for art’s sake.” Making Eucharistically, a craftsman makes for God. “Art for art’s sake” is a sign of decadence. It’s a symptom of the decay of liturgy. (88-89)
A flood is coming. It’s already sweeping away the world as we know it. The world we know will be submerged as the Lord turns the world upside down and gives it a sharp shake (Hag 2:6-7).
It’s not the end of everything. Creation will survive, and civilization will be reborn. Jesus will steer the ark of his church through the storm. As the clouds gather, as the thunder begins to roll, as the deluge crashes down, we’re called to continue the often-imperceptible work of building the ark of Jesus. With our lives scripted by the Scriptures that reveal the Christ, we cling to the apostolic gospel, gather to break bread, share our material and Spiritual gifts, offer a continuous sacrifice of prayer and song. We preach the good news in false churches and public squares, endure the rage of the mob, suffer with Jesus so we may share His glory. We confront idols and demons and call all men from darkness to light, from Satan to the living God (Acts 26:18). In the Last Adam, we’re made right-makers, grateful makers whose making is an act of worship. Some will slip, lizard-like, into palaces (Prov 30:28) and gain a hearing before Prime Ministers and Presidents.
As we do these things, we preserve the treasures of the past and, by the alchemy of the Spirit, transfigure ancient treasures into new. When the storm is over and the flood waters recede, we’ll have and be the seeds of a new creation. We’ll flow like living water to fertilize the wasteland.
If you’re a Christian, that’s what you’re doing. Your life may not look like a big deal. You’re kind to your neighbors, serve your brothers and sisters in church, gather each week to receive God’s Word and God’s Bread. You train and teach your children as disciples; you love your husband or wife. You’re an honest and productive employee, an attentive employer, an entrepreneur or bureaucrat in a well-established institution. You do and make, but no one notices. . . .
You feel invisible, but that’s an optical illusion. You’re participating in the biggest project imaginable. You’re joining with millions of others to build the self-building ark of Jesus. Through your witness and labor, a new world is taking form. You’re fighting the battle of the ages. You’re constructing the city of God among the cities of men in order to transform the cities of men to become more like the city of God. Nothing is small in the kingdom of Jesus.
There’s nothing to fear. We live in joy and expectant hope. Jesus is in the boat, and He calms the seas. The Carpenter of Nazareth will pilot his ark until it rests on a new Ararat, a new Eden, the garden-city where the river of life flows. (100-101)
I gotta have my orange juice. 