Saints
M. F. Sadler discusses the meaning of “saint” in his 1876 book, The Second Adam and the New Birth:
The word “saint,” or “holy person,” is now almost universally used as implying real purity of heart and devotion to God’s service. It is applied to Apostles, such as St. Peter or St. Paul; to eminent men who have been raised up by God in bygone times to contend for the faith, such as St. Athanasius or St. Augustine; or to men and women of very deep holiness and spirituality of mind.
In the New Testament, on the contrary, it is the common appellation of Christians. In no one place is it used to distinguish Christians of very deep holiness and spirituality from those who have not attained to such a measure of conformity to God’s will. In only a small number of texts does it imply internal purity and spirituality, and in these places it has reference not to the present character of Christians, but to that which those will be found to possess at Christ’s second coming who have continued in that service of Christ to which at Baptism they were solemnly separated and set apart. (111)
As James Jordan often says, the meaning of saint is to have sanctuary access:
[God] raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:6 ESV)
Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16 ESV)
Calvin on prayer
Calvin writes eloquently of prayer as a digging up of treasure:
To prayer, then, are we indebted for penetrating to those riches which are treasured up for us with our heavenly Father. For there is a kind of intercourse between God and men, by which, having entered the upper sanctuary, they appear before Him and appeal to his promises, that when necessity requires they may learn by experiences that what they believed merely on the authority of his word was not in vain. Accordingly, we see that nothing is set before us as an object of expectation from the Lord which we are not enjoined to ask of Him in prayer, so true it is that prayer digs up those treasures which the Gospel of our Lord discovers to the eye of faith. The necessity and utility of this exercise of prayer no words can sufficiently express. Assuredly it is not without cause our heavenly Father declares that our only safety is in calling upon his name, since by it we invoke the presence of his providence to watch over our interests, of his power to sustain us when weak and almost fainting, of his goodness to receive us into favour, though miserably loaded with sin; in fine, call upon him to manifest himself to us in all his perfections. Hence, admirable peace and tranquillity are given to our consciences; for the straits by which we were pressed being laid before the Lord, we rest fully satisfied with the assurance that none of our evils are unknown to him, and that he is both able and willing to make the best provision for us. (Institutes, Book III, 20.2)
Seventy times seven
Frequently, in the gospels, when Jesus has words or parables that apply to us as individuals, he is also making a deeper theological point that applies to his people, his church. This is the case for how he speaks to Peter about forgiveness in Matthew 18:21-22:
Then Peter came and said to Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”
Certainly Jesus’s answer is applicable to us as individuals. But it is not merely the case, as many commentators suggest, that Jesus is employing hyperbole to underscore that our forgiveness is to be without condition, presumably just as God’s forgiveness is without condition. We can see this from the fact that seventy times seven is not just a random and meaningless number that Jesus makes up. There are two previous occurrences of seventy sevens in the Bible that I can make out.
The first is in the time of sin and apostasy leading up to Judah’s exile. Leviticus 26 warns Israel what will happen “if you do not obey Me and do not carry out all these commandments, if, instead, you reject My statutes, and if your soul abhors My ordinances so as not to carry out all My commandments, and so break My covenant” (vv. 14-15). God will give them over to their enemies, make their land desolate, and scatter them among the nations. God concludes that “the land will enjoy its sabbaths all the days of the desolation, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. All the days of its desolation it will observe the rest which it did not observe on your sabbaths, while you were living on it . . . the land will be abandoned by them, and will make up for its sabbaths while it is made desolate without them” (vv. 34-35, 43). But God also assures them that “if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers, in their unfaithfulness which they committed against Me, and also in their acting with hostility against Me . . . I will remember for them the covenant with their ancestors, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God. I am Yahweh” (vv. 40, 45).
Thus, when Jeremiah prophesies seventy years in exile for Judah (Jeremiah 25, 29), we should recall Leviticus 26 and realize that the land is making up for seventy sabbath years, seventy times seven. God tells us this explicitly in 2 Chronicles 36:21, that the exile “fulfill[ed] the word of Yahweh by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths. All the days of its desolation it kept sabbath until seventy years were complete.”
The second occurrence of seventy sevens comes as Daniel, the prophetic representative of Israel, realizes the seventy years of exile are ending, and so confesses and repents in obedience to Leviticus 26. Daniel prays:
Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and lovingkindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments, we have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly and rebelled, even turning aside from Your commandments and ordinances. Moreover, we have not listened to Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings, our princes, our fathers and all the people of the land. . . . O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and take action! For Your own sake, O my God, do not delay, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name. (Daniel 9:4-19)
In answer to Daniel’s prayers, the angel Gabriel reveals that there will be a second period of seventy weeks, seventy sevens, for sin to abound and then to be covered forever. This is the great exile which will end with the Messiah’s final great exodus into new creation.
Jesus is self-consciously calling attention to this in his answer to Peter. Jesus is identifying himself as the anointed one who has come at the end of Daniel’s seventy sevens to bring about the new creation, the new covenant, the enduring forgiveness. But, as we see from Leviticus, this new creation is a double-edged sword (Matthew 10:34ff). One of the things that Jesus is doing in the gospels is bringing an indictment against his people, his bride. It turns out that God’s forgiveness is not without condition: after the seventy sevens comes the purging fire of exile; on the other side of exile is death for those who, like the unforgiving servant, treat God’s forgiveness lightly; but resurrection life for those who forsake wickedness and identify with the anointed king and his way of life (which includes seventy sevens’ worth of patient forgiveness). Jesus clearly warns Israel of this throughout the gospels, including the parable of the unforgiving servant that immediately follows his conversation with Peter (Matthew 18:23ff), but elsewhere in even more pointed terms (e.g., Matthew 24).
Thus, while Matthew 18 has general application to individuals today, it had a particular prophetic application in the time of Matthew’s writing. It was both a warning and an encouragement to Israel and the people of Israel that time was running out: they were to identify with their Messiah and walk in his ways, or else suffer final destruction. This prophetic application continues to apply today to God’s church; as Paul reminds us, “Do not be conceited, but fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you, either” (Romans 11:20-21). And this same prophetic perspective continues into Matthew 19. When Jesus answers the Pharisees’ question about divorce, there is an implied subtext that Jesus would divorce his own bride for her persistence in adultery, and that he would form a resurrected bride out of the remnant (c.f., Ezekiel 16). In every new covenant the old things must pass through death and resurrection; the old kingdom must come over to the new king (2 Samuel 5:1-5).
If, with Matthew 18 and Daniel 9, we speak of seventy sevens of forgiveness and atonement, we are almost certainly speaking about 490 days of atonement (Leviticus 16, 23) — 490 years. But if, with Leviticus 26 and 2 Chronicles 36, we are speaking of seventy sabbaths, it is possible we have a different time interval. If we count jubilee years as years of rest for the land, then seventy years of rest are accomplished in about 430 years. This makes me wonder if seventy sevens also applies to God’s patience toward converted Canaanites. Abraham carried on a ministry of establishing places of worship in Canaan, including among the Amorites (Genesis 13:18, 14:13). God told Abraham that he would delay the conquest of Canaan because “the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16). Unlike the Amalekites, whom God had singled out for destruction for their great wickedness (Deuteronomy 25:17-19), it seems that God had greater patience with the Amorites because at one time they had worshipped him through Abraham. Depending on the starting point, the Amorites were given 400 (Genesis 15:13) or 430 (Exodus 12:40-41) years. Consider, too, that the Amorites were given a further forty-year reprieve because of Israel’s disobedience (Numbers 14). Israel herself is granted a similar reprieve: if Jesus’s resurrection marks the end of Daniel’s seventy sevens, then Israel had forty more years to come into the church before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Incidentally, this makes the church’s struggle with Jews and then Judaizers a kind of wilderness period before entering into the fullness of the new covenant.
Marriage equality
Should government be allowed to divorce the people and marry business?
Must power ever be crowned with feminine glory, or may it hunger for other power?
In a multitude of people is the glory of a king,
but without people a prince is ruined. (Proverbs 14:28)
Invest
The first principle of investing is to put all your eggs in one basket.
Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'” (Mark 12:29-30)
Trust in the LORD with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6)
And of course, Psalm 2:
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”I will tell of the decree:
The LORD said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the LORD with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
Self-control
Self-control is not opposed to self-expression.
Self-control is the very foundation that makes possible the most powerful and beautiful forms of self-expression.
Do not be afraid to teach your little ones to color in the lines and stay out of the street. It is preparing them for the day that they must draw their own lines, the day that they stand with you in the square.
Derby
Asher and I raced our derby cars this morning. Here’s a picture of our cars before the race, with Asher’s in the foreground. He did a great job on his car!
Asher named his car “Fear, Fire, Foe!” Mine was “Supplanter.”
Asher won fifth place for design among Ranger Kids, and I won third place for speed in the open competition. There were some pretty creative and pretty fast cars there!
Treebeard
We’ve been listening to The Lord of the Rings audiobook as a family. Yesterday we happened upon this great quote:
Merry and Pippin heard, clear in the cold air, the neighing of war-horses, and the sudden singing of many men. The Sun’s limb was lifted, an arc of fire, above the margin of the world. Then with a great cry the Riders charged from the East; the red light gleamed on mail and spear.
Song and warfare go hand in hand. Worship is warfare.
It interests me that Tolkien has the hobbits refer to the sun as feminine:
‘Hullo!’ said Merry. ‘The Sun must have run into a cloud while we’ve been under these trees, and now she has run out again; or else she has climbed high enough to look down through some opening. It isn’t far—let’s go and investigate!’
This rainy Sunday afternoon we drew our impressions of Treebeard. Here’s what we came up with:
Asher
Charlotte
Ivy
Scott
In the regeneration
My pastor turned up this great quote from Herman Bavinck:
In short, the counsel of God and the cosmic history that corresponds to it must not be pictured exclusively—as infra- and supralapsarianism did—as a single straight line describing relations only of before and after, cause and effect, means and end; instead, it should also be viewed as a systemic whole in which things occur side by side in coordinate relations and cooperate in the furthering of what always was, is, and will be the deepest ground of all existence: the glorification of God. Just as in any organism all the parts are interconnected and reciprocally determine each other, so the world as a whole is a masterpiece of divine art, in which all the parts are organically interconnected. And of that world, in all its dimensions, the counsel of God is the eternal design. (Reformed Dogmatics, II:392)
This is a great perspective on how God relates to time and history. God is the painter to our painting, the composer and conductor to our symphony.
I want to consider how this perspective relates to the doctrine of regeneration. We generally speak of the regeneration of the Christian almost as though God reaches down and flips an invisible switch inside of us from death to life. For example, Wayne Grudem writes:
We may define regeneration as follows: Regeneration is a secret act of God in which he imparts new spiritual life to us. . . . Because regeneration is a work of God within us in which he gives us new life it is right to conclude that it is an instantaneous event. (Systematic Theology, 699-701)
This may be true as far as it goes, but it does not fully account for the way that God works with his creation and with us. Consider the example of Ebenezer Scrooge’s conversion-regeneration:
Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this. I say it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees!”
He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears. (Dickens, A Christmas Carol)
In one sense, it is quite correct to say that something changed inside of Scrooge from death to life. But this is not the whole picture: it does not account for Dickens and his own steady resolve to make a new man out of Scrooge. In the same way, our understanding of regeneration should take into account how God works with his creation and how he imparts life to us. For our physical life we are dependent on God to sustain us at every moment; certainly we are equally dependent on God at every moment for our spiritual life. It is thus more proper to speak of regeneration as a settled determination on God’s part to continually fill us with life through his Spirit.
This perspective helps us in several ways. It reminds us that God is the source of regeneration, so that we are always looking to him rather than making a futile search into whether something invisible has happened inside ourselves. It reminds us that regeneration is an ongoing process. So, just as we cannot rely on past repentance and faith but must walk in new repentance and faith each day, neither can we rely on past regeneration. We must look to and ask for more help from the Spirit each day. Rather than asking “am I regenerate,” we ask “will God give his Spirit to those who ask him?” Yes (Luke 11:13), he will!
Another way to think of this is in terms of what we might call the tenses of salvation. There is a sense in which we can say we have been saved, we are being saved, and we will be saved. Likewise, we have been given new life, we are being progressively given more abundant life, and we will finally be fully given life.
Calvin speaks of regeneration as occurring progressively. In the Institutes, he refers to it as something “which [God] begins in us” (Method and Arrangement III). It will be “complete” at “the final resurrection,” (M&A III) which he refers to as “the day of regeneration or resurrection of the body” (M&A IV). Calvin identifies regeneration with the ongoing procession of the Spirit to us, saying that “we have nothing of the Spirit except through regeneration” (II.3.1). Interestingly, he identifies regeneration and mortification as two halves of repentance, to the point that he says “by repentance I understand regeneration” (III.3.9). He later speaks of the “commencement and progress of regeneration” (III.11).
This definition of regeneration also underscores that it is a change in our status and position before God at least as much as it is an internal change in our persons. We are grafted into a tree (Romans 11), into a vine (John 15); we are planted by streams of water (Psalm 1). This links it closely with other great changes in status like justification and adoption. Adoption in particular is how we come to receive the Spirit (Romans 8:15). In regeneration we enter into God’s new creation, which is to say that we are reconciled to God and made a part of his kingdom (2 Corinthians 5:17ff) — again, a change in status.
Scripture uses the term regeneration to refer to a change in our status. In Matthew 19:28, Jesus refers to his kingdom and new creation itself as the regeneration. In Titus 3:5, our baptism is called the “washing of regeneration.” In The Priesthood of the Plebs, Peter Leithart demonstrated that baptism is a symbolic form of priestly investiture, hearkening back in all its imagery to passages like Leviticus 8:15. In terms of Titus, this means we can speak of baptism not only as our investiture into priesthood and sonship, but also our entry into the new-creation kingdom that is God’s church, our enrollment into an inheritance (Titus 3:7).
On the one hand, this serves as a warning to us that we are not meant to coast on yesterday’s experiences and accomplishments. But it also serves to remind us that God is near to us, and has a settled determination to provide all that is needed to complete his work (Philippians 4:19, 1:6).
Do this
It is rare to practice the Lord’s supper without reading from 1 Corinthians 11. There is certainly nothing wrong with this, but it is odd. We have plenty of other material to draw from for communion reflections; it would take a year alone to work through passages that reference bread (or grain) and wine, not to mention food and feasting in general.
I worry that we have come to believe reading God’s instructions discharges our duty to obey them. Jesus commands us to “do this.” Considering 1 Corinthians 10-11 together with Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts, what is it that we are to do?
- Use bread
- Give thanks to God for the bread
- Break the bread
- Use wine
- Give thanks to God for the wine
- Examine ourselves to ensure we discern one another’s membership in the body
Many evangelical churches are failing on all counts listed above, possibly with a sense that it is permissible to ignore these, but without the necessary conviction that it is better to ignore them.
The last point may be the least obvious. I have argued elsewhere that Paul’s use of discern and examine is generally misunderstood. I suggest that we are failing to do this not least in failing to recognize our young children’s participation in Jesus and their full welcome to his presence and his table. We therefore, with Peter, stand condemned and out of step with the truth of the gospel (Gal. 2:11ff). If we were to work through those many food and feasting passages, we would become more sensitive to this.
The result is that we have arrived at something unnaturally stilted, unfamilial, un-supper-like. It is not straining in every way to enact a foretaste of Jesus’s marriage feast, or to welcome all those here who would be welcome there if they were to die today.
See also: Unbelievers?
I gotta have my orange juice. 