Refuting the "Calvinist Conundrum" of Jerry Walls

In a presentation available on YouTube, the well-known and capable Arminian philosopher, Jerry Walls, presents what he calls a "Calvinist Conundrum".

His whole presentation is available here and the relevant section for our purposes starts at 19:55 and runs through to 23:29.

Walls presents the conundrum with the following premises and conclusion:

1. God truly loves all persons

2. Truly to love someone is to desire their well being and to promote their true flourishing as much as you can.

3. The well being and true flourishing of all persons is to be found in a right relationship with God, a saving relationship in which we love and obey him.

4. God could determine all persons freely to accept a right relationship with himself and be saved.

Therefore, 5. All persons will be saved.

As Walls points out, few evangelicals will accept the fifth premise, as not all persons will be saved. Therefore, he says, one of the four premises must be wrong.

As an Arminian, his choice is simple. He rejects premise 4. For the Arminian, God cannot determine someone to freely accept a relationship with himself. 

Yet premise 4, is a key Calvinist belief (known as irresistible grace in a world where divine determinism is compatible with human free will).

So, says Walls, the Calvinist must reject one of premises 1-3.

In my view, Jerry Walls's conundrum fails because his conclusion 5 does not logically follow from the first four premises.

There is logical leap that he makes here, which is unwarranted. 

Let's look at the first three premises again and then suggest a logical conclusion based on those premises first, before we come to Walls's fourth premise.

1. God truly loves all persons

2. Truly to love someone is to desire their well being and to promote their true flourishing as much as you can.

3. The well being and true flourishing of all persons is to be found in a right relationship with God, a saving relationship in which we love and obey him.

Therefore, 4A. God truly has a desire to save everyone.

Many Calvinists would agree with 4A. Those who don't would likely question either 1 or 2 (i.e. either God does not love everyone or that God can truly love someone but not desire their wellbeing in a saving sense).

Now, if we take our new first conclusion along with Wall's fourth premise (we will call this 4B) we have this:

4A. God truly has a desire to save everyone. 

4B. God could determine all persons freely to accept a right relationship with himself and be saved.

I believe it is clear that Walls's conclusion does not follow logically from 4A and 4B:

Therefore, 5. All persons will be saved. 

For Wall's conclusion to be valid, it rests on a hidden premise. The necessary hidden premise would be this:

4C. God must fulfil any desire he has if he is capable of doing so.

Only if 4C is true would Walls's conclusion 5 be valid. However, it is precisely this hidden assumption that Calvinists reject. For it is that this point precisely that God's sovereignty comes into the equation. God has the right to choose which of his desires he acts on, or rather decides to to act on in his decree, and which he determines will remain mere velleities (wishes or inclinations not acted upon).

Most Calvinists accept that God has desires for some things, considered in themselves, that he nevertheless chooses not to fulfil in his decree because of other conflicting desires or when considering something in light of everything else or in a connected way with everything else. In this context, God can desire the salvation of all when considered simpliciter yet desire the salvation of some and the condemnation of some when considered complexiter and in the light of God's desire to display his own glory and attributes above all else.

For these reasons, the existence of premises 4A and the hidden assumption in 4C, Walls's conundrum fails to present any significant problem for the Calvinist theologian. Rather than being a concundrum, it is a Calvinist explanation of the wisdom, knowledge and sovereignty of God.

 

 

 

The Biblical Doctrine of Common Grace

Reformed theology is often regarded as a theology of particularism. We believe that God unconditionally elects a particular people for salvation. We believe Christ with the intention of saving only the elect. We believe the Holy Spirit regenerates the elect and that irresistible grace draws the elect to saving faith. The whole focus of our doctrine of salvation is on the saving grace of God shown to a particular people chosen by God from every nation, tongue and tribe on earth to be his own.

Yet in viewing the world as it is and the whole counsel of God in the Scriptures, Reformed theology also teaches the doctrine of common grace, to account for all the goodness God gives to people indiscriminately, elect and non-elect alike.

In this piece we have three objectives:

1. To define what we mean by common grace.

2. To explain the content of common grace

3. To present the biblical basis for common grace.

1. Defining Common Grace

Common grace is essentially the goodness and kindness God shows to all people, elect and non-elect alike, out of his love for them as his creatures, in this world.

I agree with the Presbyterian theologian, John Murray, who said that common grace is 'every favour of whatever kind or degree, falling short of salvation, which this undeserving and sin-cursed world enjoys at the hand of God.' (from 'Common Grace' in Murray's Collected Writings, Vol. 2).

Each part of Murray's definition is significant. Common grace covers every good things of any kind and to any extent that God gives to the world other than instant judgment and destruction. Yet the 'boundary' of common grace is, as Murray says, that these favours or gifts given by God are those 'falling short of salvation.'

The Reformed theologian, Louis Berkhof, provides a similar definition to Murray. Berkhof says that common grace is 'the natural blessings which God showers upon man in this present life, in sprite of the fact that man has forfeited them and lies under the sentence of death.' (Systematic Theology, p. 435).

The Reformed Baptist theologian, Wayne Grudem, makes the point that everything human beings receive from God other than immediate judgment must be considered gracious on God's part. He says:

Once people sin, God's justice would require only one thing—that they be eternally separated from God, cut off from experiencing any good from him, and that they live forever in hell, receiving only his wrath eternally. In fact this was what happened to the angels who sinned, and it could justly have happened to us as well. (Systematic Theology, p. 657)

Why didn't this happen? Grudem asks the pertinent questions: 'How can God continue to give blessings to sinners who deserve only death—not only to those who will ultimately be saved, but also to millions who will never be saved, whose sins will never be forgiven?' (p. 657).

The answer, of course, is common grace, which Grudem simply defines as 'the grace of God by which he gives people innumerable blessings that are not part of salvation.'

The pastor-theologian, Sam Storms, helpfully defines 'common grace' like this:

Common grace, as an expression of the goodness of God, is every favor, falling short of salvation, which this undeserving and sin-cursed world enjoys at the hand of God; this includes the delay of wrath, the mitigation of our sin-natures, natural events that lead to prosperity, and all gifts that human use and enjoy naturally. ("The Goodness of God and Common Grace" at The Gospel Coalition).

A world of fallen, totally depraved sinners would soon dissolve into absolute mayhem, chaos and wickedness without common grace. Life in such a world would be as the philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, put it, one of 'continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' (Leviathan, I. xiii. 9).

The fact that the world is not, in general, like this, is accounted for in Reformed theology by common grace. The Reformed theologian, Louis Berkhof, put it this way:

[Common grace] curbs the destructive power of sin, maintains in a measure the moral order of the universe, thus making an orderly life possible, distributes in varying degrees gifts and talents among men, promotes the development of science and art, and showers untold blessings upon the children of men. (Systematic Theology, p. 434)

Yet, common grace has limitations. As it does not provide saving benefits, it only consists of 'temporary benefits' in this life. Although that does not make God's goodness or kindness any less real, they merely cover a temporary postponement of God's justice to come in the future. As Thomas Boston put it, such blessings are 'a mere temporary and permissive right, as a condemned man has to nourishment, as long as it pleases the king to postpone the execution, but this is a very uncertain and sad possession' (quoted by G. H. Kersten in his Dogmatic Theology, p.75).

Kersten, a Dutch Reformed theologian, says common grace has a threefold purpose:

• It glorifies God in the goodness and kindness he continues to show to humanity as his creatures.
• It supports God's good pleasure and purpose in bringing forth God's elect for salvation
• It exalts the righteouness of God in his judgment of the wicked (so they are utterly without excuse in rejecting God).

Having reviewed this material, I offer the following definition of common grace. 

Common grace is all temporal blessings given to human beings as creatures, proceeding from the goodness and love of God, furthering God's purpose in saving the elect and consistent with God's purpose in rejecting the reprobate.

2. The Content of Common Grace

Since common grace encompasses everything humanity receives from God other than immediate judgment and condemnation, the content of common grace is hugely extensive and it is not possible to cover every conceivable instance of common grace.

Yet theologians have put forward a number of broad categories of common grace, which we will briefly summarise.

1. Sustaining Life and the World - since the death sentence on sinners is delayed on average for 70 or more years, every day of life given to human beings from their birth is common grace. Sustaining the existence of the world is also part of God's providential care, as are things necessary to life such as the water cycle, seedtime and harvest, sunshine and rain.

2. Providing Good Things - this would include giving us family and friends, resources such as food, shelter, work, money, enjoyment, work, leisure, which are all enjoyed by the elect and non-elect alike.

3. Providential Restraint of Sin - instituting civil government to promote good and punish evil, limiting sinful behaviour, maintaining civil order, peace, police and armed forces, giving people a conscience .

4. Providing Civil, Cultural and Scientific Advances - this would include music, art, medical, scientific and technological advances to improve human life and flourishing.

3. The Biblical Basis of Common Grace

There are many Bible verses that speak to the type of non-saving gracious goodness and kindness extended to all people, that we call 'common grace.' The following verses all speak to aspects of common grace and most of them can be listed without additional comment. All verses are quoted from the New Heart English Bible simply because it is a modern translation in the public domain.

Psalm 145:8-9: "The LORD is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and of great loving kindness. The LORD is good to all. His tender mercies are over all his works."

Acts 14:16-17: "In the generations gone by [He] allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. Yet he did not leave himself without witness, in that he did good and gave you rains from the sky and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness."

2 Thessalonians 2:6-7: "Now you know what is restraining him, to the end that he may be revealed in his own season. For the mystery of lawlessness already works. Only there is one who restrains now, until he is taken out of the way."

Speaking here of the "Man of Lawlessness," Paul states that God is restraining sin, which of one of the central aspects of common grace, which accounts for how a world of totally depraved sinners is not as evil as we might expect it to be.

Romans 2:4: ""Or do you despise the riches of his goodness [or "kindness"], forbearance, and patience, not knowing that the goodness [or "kindness"] of God leads you to repentance?"

Romans 2:14-15: "For when the non-Jews who do not have the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves, since they show the work of the law written on their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts either accusing or defending them."

These verses in Romans 2 make it clear that even pagan non-believers have a conscience which is a gift from God, a particular part of his common grace to restrain sin and leave everyone without excuse.

The following passage is part of Paul's sermon at the Areopagus in Athens. Among other points, Paul is clear that every in our lives, including our lives themselves, come from God. Agreeing with a pagan poet, Paul says "in him we live, and move, and have our being."

Acts 17:24-31: "The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands, neither is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath, and all things. He made from one blood every nation of the human race to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their dwellings, that they should seek God, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live, and move, and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also his offspring.' Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold, or silver, or stone, engraved by human art and design. The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked. But now he commands that all people everywhere should repent, because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained; of which he has given assurance to everyone by raising him from the dead."

Matthew 5:43-48: "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour, and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you only greet your brothers, what more do you do than others? Do not even the non-Jews do the same? You therefore are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

This is one of the most relevant passages regarding common grace and is the direct teaching of Jesus himself. Clearly Christ links the command for us to love our enemies with the fact that God loves everyone and that from this love he sends good gifts to the righteous and unrighteous alike. This is practically the definition of what we mean by common grace. A similar but not identical version of Christ's teaching occurs in the next passage from Luke.

Luke 6:35-36: "But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing back; and your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful."

Christ links us loving our enemies and doing good to them with being children of God—which includes being like God since "he is kind" to all, even the unthankful and evil.

1 Timothy 6:17: "Charge those who are rich in this present world that they not be haughty, nor have their hope set on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy."

James 1:17: "All generous giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, nor turning shadow."

Loyal Love

 I always enjoy the material from The Bible Project and this short video on a key Old Testament word, chesed or khesed, is no exception.

The word is a rich one, with English translations employing a wide variety of options to try to capture the scope of this rich Hebrew word.

The word occurs nearly 250 times in the Old Testament. Just within the King James Version alone, it is translated as: 'mercy' (149 times), 'kindness' (40 times), 'lovingkindness' (30 times) and 'goodness' (12 times) and several other variants.

Modern versions also utilise many different renderings to try to capture the sense of the word. If we look at a single test verse, 1 Kings 8:23, it reads (my translation): 'And he said, O Yahweh, the God of Israel, there is no God like you, in heaven above or on earth below. You keep covenant and lovingkindness [chesed] with your servants who walk before you wholeheartedly.'

In other versions, the word in bold 'lovingkindess' is rendered:

• mercy (KJV, NKJV)
• lovingkindness (ASV, NASB95)
• loyalty (CEB)
• steadfast love (RSV, NRSV, ESV)
• love (NIV, Good News)
• gracious love (ISV)
• loyal love (Lexham, 
• faithfulness (NASB)
• covenantal loyalty (NET)
• unfailing love (NLT)
• kindness (LSV)
• constant love (REB)
• loving-commitment (The Scriptures)

 From these a number of elements are clear enough:

• There is an element of emotion conveyed by 'love' and 'kindness'.
  
• There is an element of commitment conveyed by 'loyalty' and 'faithfulness'
• There is an element of constancy. This love is 'steadfast', 'unfailing' and 'constant'
• There is an element of this love being undeserved. It is 'gracious' and 'merciful'

That this is the love that God has for his people. This is his covenant love. It is no mere cold legal agreement - it is a loving commitment. It never fails. God remains faithful and loyal to his covennat promises at all times. And perhaps most wondrous of all, it is a love that we can never merit or deserve. 

This Old Testament language carries over in the New Testament concept of agape love. It is the same love Paul spoke about in 1 Corinthians 13 where we could easily substitute the Old Testament concept of chesed for the word agape in Greek which Paul used:

'Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.' (1 Cor. 13:4-8, ESV)

God's Covenant Love (Repost)

One of the most important words used in the Old Testament is the Hebrew word "Chesed". It signifies God's covenant love for his people Israel. The word occurs some 245 times in the Old Testament, across 27 out of 39 Old Testament books, over a hundred times in the Psalms alone.

In older English translations, the word was often translated as "mercy" but actually the scope of the this word is wider and deeper than the word "mercy" or "compassion" conveys in English. Modern English translations usually try to convey the greater depth of richness and complexity in this word. They tend to use a number of different words and phrases to try to capture the essence of "Chesed". Taking a number of translations together gives us a good impression of what one of the key terms in the Old Testament means.

Below are a list of different translations together with the Bible translations in which they are found.

"mercy" - KJV, NKJV

"love" - NIV

"great love" - GNB, NCV, CEV

"faithful love" - CSB

"constant love" - REB

"lovingkindness" - ASV, NASB, AMP

"steadfast love" - RSV, ESV, NRSV

"loyal love" - NET, LEB

"unfailing love" - NLT

"loyalty" - CEB

"gracious love" - ISV

No one of these translations captures all the depth of meaning in chesed. But together they give a wonderful picture of God's covenant love. It is great, faithful, constant, steadfast, loyal and unfailing lovingkindness. It is the love that saves. The love that gives. The love that sends the Son to be our Lord and Saviour.

Our Covenant God

The following was the sermon at the evening service at Bridgeton on 10 January 2010. It has been lightly edited for internet use. The Bible reading was 1 Kings 8:22-30.

Did you hear about the latest Bible to be released in the shops? It only costs £1.00 and it’s called the New Year’s Resolution Bible. It only has the first three chapters of Genesis in it.

New Year resolutions are promises we make to ourselves, aren’t they? But like the joke suggests, they aren’t promises we tend to stick to all that well. I’m going to suggest a new year’s resolution for you that I hope you will be able to keep, and that’s to grow as a Christian this year. That’s not just a good idea; as Christians, it’s what’s expected of us. 1 Peter 2:2-3 says:

Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.

One of the best ways we can grow as Christians is just to spend time getting to know God better through reading a portion of his word regularly. The Bible is full of passages that help us understand better what God is like. And as we get to know him better and love him more, so this shapes our lives, not only in what we believe, but in how we live. This is what Paul teaches in 2 Timothy 3:16-17:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Our passage tonight is not particularly well-known. But it’s a passage that tells us many important things about God. So let’s look at this passage we have in front of us and see what God has to teach us about himself tonight because if we really grasped and lived in the knowledge of these truths, I think all of us would grow as Christians this year.

To begin with, just a brief word of background to the passage. One of King David’s unfulfilled dreams was to build a temple for the Lord to honour him and so that David's God didn’t have to 'live in a tent.' When David died, his son, Solomon, was his successor. And at the beginning of Solomon’s reign, there was a period of peace and prosperity in Israel. And Solomon decided that this was the right time to finally build a temple to the Lord in Jerusalem. The temple took seven years to build, although we learn something about Solomon’s attitude from the fact it took 13 years to build his palace in Jerusalem and the palace was nearly double the size of the temple! But that’s an aside. When it was finished, Solomon ordered that the Ark of the Covenant be brought from the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting, and be placed in the inner chamber of the new temple, the holy of holies. And as the priests left the Ark there, 1 Kings 8:10-11 says:

‘When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the LORD. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled his temple.’

Imagine the scene. The new temple has been built – seven years in the making – and now God himself gives the work his seal of approval as it were by actually taking up residence and dwelling in the temple itself, symbolised by the shekinah glory cloud.

At which point, Solomon first addresses the assembled Israelites and tells them that he has built this temple in accordance with his father’s wishes and in accordance with God’s promise to David. He then stood before the altar in the temple and began to pray. And the passage we’re looking at is the first couple of paragraphs really of what is a long and mighty prayer that Solomon spoke that day.

We’re going to have a look at five things this prayer of Solomon’s teaches us about God:

• God is faithful
• God is loving
• God speaks to us
• God listens to us
• God is mighty and can answer prayer.

So, let’s have a look at the first of these five things this passage appeared to me to be teaching us. And it’s that the LORD is a faithful God. The very name of God speaks of his faithfulness. As you’ll know, when the Bible has the word LORD in capital letters, this is the personal, covenant name of God, that the Jews thought was so holy they wouldn’t write it all out, but just the consonants YHWH. This is God’s personal name, Yahweh, the name he revealed to Moses at the burning bush, the name that means I AM THAT I AM. And this was the name that God revealed only to his own people, Israel. It is a name that speaks of God’s commitment and love for his own people – and that includes you and me – everyone Christian is part of God’s special covenant people through Jesus Christ.

But it’s not just in his name that the passage speaks of God’s faithfulness to his people. The passage is full of the idea. Verse 23 is the key verse in the passage:

O Yahweh, God of Israel, there is no God like you, in heaven above or in earth beneath, keeping covenant and showing steadfast love to your servants…

The covenant relationship that God has with people speaks of faithfulness. A covenant is a solemn promise, a total commitment between two parties. A covenant resembles a marriage, which is a specific kind of covenant. God’s covenant with his people is little different. It’s not a bond between two equals entering into a commitment to love each other and share their lives; it’s a bond between the sovereign king of the universe and unworthy sinners, and so it is often called a covenant of grace. But like a marriage, it is nevertheless a bond of love between God and his people. The covenant of grace is also a sign of his faithfulness and commitment to his people.

Verse 24 also speaks of commitment and faithfulness. Solomon points out that God kept his promises to Solomon’s father, King David. ‘You spoke with your mouth, and with your hand have fulfilled it this day.’

Now when you stop and think about it, God’s faithfulness to his people is actually an amazing thing. It truly is amazing grace. Even a cursory reading of the Old Testament shows that the Israelites were anything but faithful to their God. Scarcely were they delivered from Egypt before they turned their backs on the invisible God to build themselves a golden calf. During their 40 years in the wilderness they continually grumbled and complained and turned away from God. During the time of the judges, the Bible says that ‘everyone did what was right in his own eyes’ and sin was rampant. Later they chose for themselves a human king to be like the other nations, even though God told them that he was their king. And so it went on and on through the time of the prophets and eventual exile in Babylon. God’s covenant people were anything but faithful to God. And the same is just as true of us. Rarely in Christian history has the church lived up to its calling and mission. If it were a matter of merit, how could God be faithful to people like us? People who sin in thought, word and deed every single day?

But thanks be to God that he is faithful, not because of anything in us, but because of his own grace and mercy. And this means God can be trusted and relied on by us all the time. He never plays us false. He never changes. He never gets fed up with us. And that’s really foundational for our relationship with him, isn’t it? All around us might fail and fall away, but God will stand by us, no matter what. He is faithful forever.

The second thing this passage teaches is that Yahweh is a loving God. Indeed, it is from God’s love that his faithfulness and grace to his people flows. He abides with us, because he loves us. Again, verse 23 brings this out:

O LORD, God of Israel, there is no God like you…keeping covenant and showing steadfast love…

The Hebrew word translated ‘steadfast love’ is ‘chesed’ and it’s a very rich word that occurs some 275 times in 27 out of the 39 books of the Old Testament. It is the word used to describe God’s covenant love. It means all of the following: a great, steadfast, unfailing, constant love, mercy, grace and lovingkindness. It the love that God has for his own people, his children and so it is a deep and special love, a love that is sure and steadfast, a love that sought us and saves us.

That’s the kind of God we know and worship, a God of love. In the New Testament, we even find the apostle John teaching that ‘God is love.’ Love is at the very centre of God’s being and personality. Love is the very reason God created the universe, the reason God is working to save the human race, and the reason why he will one day renew the whole universe at the end of the age.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16).

The challenge for us to somehow catch a glimpse of the greatness of God’s love. It is so great that to glimpse it, to recognise it, is like staring into a blinding light. It is dazzling and awesome and inspiring and life-changing.

The love of God is like a comforting presence with us all the time. No matter what we go through, we have this knowledge with us: God loves us and wants the best for us. And he’s in control of our lives, even when we’re not, even when bad things are happening to us. As Romans 8:28 says:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

That’s why we could sing earlier that he or she ‘who trusts in God unchanging love / builds on the rock that none can move.’

The third thing the passage tells us about God is that he is a speaking God. He is a God who communicates with us, a God who reveals himself to human beings. This truth is sprinkled throughout the passage in different verses.

Verse 24, ‘Who have kept with your servant David my father what you declared to him. You spoke with your mouth, and with your hand have fulfilled it this day.’

Verse 25, ‘Keep for your servant David my father what you have promised him, saying…’

Verse 26, ‘Now therefore, O God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you have spoken…’

As Christians we’re so used to this concept that we can almost take it for granted that God speaks to us. But consider all the pagan gods in the world, all the gods of wood, stone and metal that men worship. They are dumb idols. They do not speak. They do not communicate. Consider all the imaginary gods of other religions. People might think they are hearing from their god, but they aren’t because they are not real. There is only one god – Yahweh, the God of Israel.

So how does God speak to us? Well, I think we have to say that there are several different ways. God can speak to us in any way he chooses. Sometimes, he speaks to us by putting thoughts into our heads. Sometimes, he speaks to us through what other people say to us. Sometimes, he speaks to us through events, through things that happen in our lives. Sometimes, he even speaks to people in visions or dreams. But the most important and authoritative way God reveals himself is through his Word, through his written Word the Bible, and through the eternal Word, Jesus Christ himself. As Hebrews 1 says:

In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.

The fact that God speaks to us, flows from the fact that he loves us, and leads on to the fact that he is faithful. Do you see what I mean? Because he cares about us, he wants to talk to us. He wants to tell us about himself. He wants to tell us the truth about himself, and about us and about life. He wants to warn us so we won’t make mistakes and do wrong things. He wants to promise us good things to come in order to encourage us. His words to us flow from his loving character. But they also form the basis of his faithfulness. God makes promises. He tells us how things are going to be. And God keeps his word. A promise from God is more certain than seeing something with our own eyes.

The fourth thing to note from the passage is that God is a listening God. It’s one thing to consider that the sovereign Lord of the universe might communicate with tiny little specks of humanity like us. After all, the 'great' sometimes communicate with ordinary people. Kings issue proclamations. Prime Ministers make speeches. Parliaments pass laws. Judges hand down judgements. These days, every famous person seems to write a blog or have a website to reach their fans. So it’s one thing to consider that God might speak to us.

But it’s simply astonishing that the creator of the universe might actually want to listen to us as well! Yet the passage tells us that it’s true. God listens to us. He hears our prayers and answers them. Solomon speaks to God in this passage and petitions him with requests in the belief that the Lord will hear and answer him. The very fact that he prays at all testifies to this, never mind praying in public before all the people.

Verse 28: ‘Have regard,’ he says (pay attention, listen to), ‘the prayer of your servant and to his plea, O LORD my God, listening to the cry and to the prayer that your servant prays before you this day, that your eyes may be open night and day toward this house…Listen in heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.’

Does it sometimes feel as if we’re only talking to ourselves or to each other when we pray? Well it isn’t like that you know. God is listening and watching everything that happens in the world of course. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about. All our conversations are known to God. But our prayers are not heard in that way, like divine omniscient CCTV. Our prayers are heard in a special way because they are addressed to him.

Prayer is such a huge subject, I can’t go into it in much detail tonight, but taken together with the other things we know from this passage about God: that he loves us, that he speaks to us, and that he’s faithful to us and to what he’s promised, this should encourage us to pray. When we pray, we are not addressing some cold, remote deity. We are speaking to our heavenly Father, who loves us. God tells us in his Word that he wants us to pray to him and he wants to give us what we ask for in His name. So our prayers are neither falling on deaf ears, nor is he reluctant to give us what we ask for. There’s nothing he likes better. The only time God won’t give us what we ask is when it isn’t the best thing for us. And when we ask for something that isn’t the best for us, we are not really asking for it in his name, because his name is Yahweh, and that means that is the covenant God who always and only does good to his people.

Our fifth and final point is that the LORD is a mighty God. As a modern worship song puts it:

Our God is an awesome God,
He reigns from heaven above
with wisdom, power and love,
Our God is an awesome God.

Obviously that’s linked to the fact that God listens to us and wants us to pray. After all, what’s the point of asking God if he can do things in this world if lacks the power or ability to carry it out?

It’s not that the passage says that God is mighty in so many words in this passage, but it’s implicit in the whole passage that God is mighty and awesome. For one thing, Solomon speaks to God in the knowledge that he can carry out what is asked of him. After all, who but an almighty God can organise history so that promises to one king are kept years later after his death? Who but an almighty God can ensure that one of King David’s successors would rule on his throne forever? Solomon was a rich and powerful man, but he recognises that God is ‘way out of his league’. Even the great temple that they had constructed in Jerusalem was like a joke compared to God’s majesty and power. Solomon can scarcely believe that God would dwell in a building at all. ‘But will God indeed dwell on earth?’ he asks. ‘Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!’

God is so big that the vast expanse of space cannot hold him.

I was recently at the planetarium at Glasgow Science Centre. There you see how the night sky would look on a clear night in the dark, away from the city lights. There are hundreds of visible stars, and millions of stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is only one of millions of such galaxies in the universe. Millions of galaxies. Billions of stars. Possibly trillions of planets. And yet all that unimaginable expanse of outer space is not big enough to hold God. In fact He created it by his Word.

That means that God is powerful and mighty enough to deal with anything that happens in the whole of space. All the events on earth, all our lives, are just one infinitesimal part of the universe and God is more than able to answer our prayers to change things on earth.

The passage is all good news for us with five aspects of God to comfort us and lead us through this year: his faithfulness, his love, his Word, his listening ear and his might. There’s only one thing for us to do in response and that’s to have faith in this God. To believe in him and follow him in obedience. That’s what that little phrase at the end of verse 23 means where it talks about ‘your servants who walk before you with all their heart.’

God’s servants are people who have faith in him, and our calling is to walk with him with all our heart. In other words to be committed to him wholeheartedly is God wants from us.

So at the start of 2010, let’s re-dedicate ourselves to our God, because there’s no-one else like him. There’s no-one else who deserves our total commitment, because our covenant God is totally committed to us.

Children of God

This is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on 19 April 2009 on 1 John 3:1-3.

I wonder: if you were asked to sum up your relationship as a Christian to God, what would you say? And if you were asked to sum up the Church’s relationship with God, what would you say? Well of course the Bible speaks of these relationships in a number of ways. An individual might say he or she is a believer, a follower of Christ, maybe even a servant of God. The church might be described as a group of sinners saved by grace, the congregation of believers with a living faith, God’s covenant people, or maybe as Christ’s body. And of course none of these descriptions is wrong – in fact all of them are biblical and all of them are complementary. But there’s another way of describing both the individual and Christians as a group that includes all these things and conveys, I think, so much more about the personal, loving, sharing, relationship and commitment that each of us as individuals and together as a church has with God. And that’s the way that the apostle John describes in this passage: we are each children of God and together we are the family of God.

Think about an earthly King. It’s one thing to say you are a subject of the King, or to say you are the King’s servant, or to say you are a loyal follower of the King, or even to say that you are the King’s friend; but it’s quite another thing to say that you are the King’s son or daughter. That’s the difference. And I think that if we look at our relationship with God the Father, our relationship with Jesus Christ, and our relationships with other Christians and with the world, everything somehow changes when viewed through this lens of sonship, daughtership and Christian brother and sisterhood. I hope that as we look at this together we will find our faith, hope and love deepened and strengthened.

If we look at the passage we read in 1 John 3, and in particular the first paragraph from verse 1 to verse 3, I think there are three main points for us to focus on as God’s children:

· The Father loves his children
· God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father
· During their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins.

So, the first thing for us to grasp from this passage is one of those truths in the Bible that grabs to me deep in my heart every time I hear it: God is my Father and he absolutely loves and adores me as his son. God loves each and every Christian, including you, more deeply and more powerfully than any human father could ever love his son or daughter. Isn’t that an astonishing thing when you think about it? The almighty God who created the universe, who governs all things by his providence and rules over all things in his sovereign power as King of Kings and Lords of Lords, the One who sits in all majesty and glory in the throne room of heaven, and is worshipped night and day by squadrons of angels and archangels – this God is my Father! This God is my Daddy (‘Abba’ as the original Greek has it). He’s not some remote spiritual being with no real knowledge of me, no real interest in what’s happening in my life. He’s not an absent father. The Child Support Agency doesn’t have to go after him. No, this God – the God of the Bible – is my Daddy who stays with me, who loves me, cares for me, is concerned about me, provides for me and protects me. All these things are implied whenever we call God ‘Father’.

There are places in the Old Testament where the God of Israel is described as being like a Father to his people.

As far back as Deuteronomy 1:31 we read of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt described like this: ‘The LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son.’

In Psalm 103, it says: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.’

In Isaiah 63, the prophet says to God: ‘You are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, O LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.’

However, although the Old Testament people of God might have regarded God as their Father, they would not have dared address God as ‘Father.’ Jesus changed that forever. It will Jesus who taught that not just that God is like a father to his people, but that God is their Father, and it’s okay to speak to God like a child speaks to his father. That’s one of many truths Christ taught us in the Lord’s Prayer that we say every week: ‘Our Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 6:9).

So, God is our Father, and as our Father God loves us with all his heart. That’s what the first verse in our passage says. God doesn’t love us a bit – God’s love is ‘lavished’ on us. He loves us so much that he makes us his children. ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’

That is absolutely one of the most astonishing and profound teachings in the entire Bible. In fact it may be the most amazing thing of all.

We know that God’s amazing love for us is one of the big themes of the Bible – especially in the writings of the apostle John. In perhaps the most famous verse in the whole Bible, John points out that God loves us so much that not only does he make us his children, but that he gave his own child to die for us:

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ (John 3:16)

The apostle Paul said the same thing in his own way:

‘But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:8)

Later on in this Letter, John writes:

‘This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.’ (1 John 4:9-10)

I know that for me, when I think about God as my Father, about Christ as my Father’s Son and my brother, and about the Holy Spirit as my family counsellor and guide who brought about my adoption as a child of God (as Romans 8:15 teaches), it completely changes how I feel about God, it has really deepened my relationship with God this past week or two, especially over Easter. Once you see God as Father and Christ as your brother, it’s hard to not feel different. For me it changes my attitude and my heart in worship, in reading the Bible, in prayer, in sharing fellowship with others, in obeying God’s commandments, in serving other people, in being the man I want to be.

It helps us see that our relationship with God is for every day living, every second of our life, every situation we go through, good and bad. Most of us here have families – brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. How natural do we find it to spend time with them, to share our lives with them, to tell them our worries and laugh with them in our joys. Isn’t that how our relationship with God should be too?

The next time you are feeling a bit down, a bit low, or the next time you are feeling disheartened because you’ve been laughed at or scoffed at for being a Christian, remember this verse: ‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’

The passage teaches, like so much of the New Testament teaches us, that opposition is what we should expect as Christians. As verse 1 goes on to say: ‘The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.’

But I think that John is also encouraging us here to ‘keep your chins up’ in the face of opposition. You are a prince or princess of the Most High God. You are a child of the royal family of King David. You are destined to rule with King Jesus forever. Once you see yourself in that light, don’t you feel a bit better about yourself and about the challenges life throws at us?

The prophet Zechariah wrote: ‘The LORD…will save his people…as a shepherd saves his flock. They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown.’

All God’s sons and daughters are like jewels in the royal crown. Grasp that and hold on to that, and never forget it.

The second thing for us to take from this passage is that God’s Children will grow up to resemble their Father God.

John writes in verse two: ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’

The contrast that John makes here is not between bad and good (things are bad now but will be good later) but between good and better. We already are children of God, and the future we will ‘grow up’ if you like to fully become like our Father God.

Unfortunately, isn’t the Christian life often caricatured by those who don’t know Jesus in a different way? People distort the Christian gospel and say that what Christianity teaches is that we are supposed to be content with a second-rate life now in exchange for a first rate second life after we die. This was one of the objections that Karl Marx had to Christianity – that it told the poor to be happy being miserable in this life.

I don’t know often I’ve heard people say things like – the trouble with asking me to be a Christian is that I’m you then expect me to have a miserable life of not sinning and enjoying myself now, in exchange for happiness in another life I don’t even know for sure exists. The kind of spiritual equivalent of ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ Have you ever heard anyone say anything like that?

Well the apostle John has an answer to that. He says the truth is that things are great now but will still be better in the next life! We are children now he says, but ‘what we will be has not been made known.’ We do know some of ‘what we will be’ in the life we shall have after death. We know that we shall go to heaven, we shall see God and Christ face-to-face, we shall conform to the image of Christ, we shall become without sin, we shall know things we do not know here, and one day we shall receive new resurrection bodies and go on to live with God forever in a new heaven and a new earth. But what John is saying is that God has not told us the full extent of the joy and bliss that awaits us as God’s children. He really means ‘the full extent of what it means to be a child of God in eternity has not been revealed to us yet.’

We do know when this will happen though – it will be when Christ appears – for the second coming of Christ will usher in the end of this world, the last judgment and beginning of those new heavens and earth that John later wrote about in the Book of Revelation.

That’s what’s ahead of us in the future. For now, John points out that God’s children will resemble their Father.

There’s an old saying – ‘like father, like son’. Sometimes people will say of a child that he’s ‘cut from the same cloth’ as a parent, meaning not just that he or she looks like their parent, but resembles them in their attitudes, behaviour, speech, mannerisms, and so on.

I think John is saying here that God’s children should resemble their heavenly Father when he says ‘We shall be like him’. It doesn’t really matter whether that ‘him’ refers to the Father or Christ the Son, for to have seen one is to have seen the other, and they are One anyway. Either way, we should be ‘cut from the same cloth’ so that people can see in our attitudes, our words, our actions that we look like in practice what we actually are in principle – God’s beloved children.

This is exactly the same as what Jesus himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:44-48 Jesus says to us:

‘But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’

My goodness, don’t these words challenge us? I know that they force me to look at myself. What a standard to set! ‘Be perfect.’

That is the long-term goal for all of us as Christians, to become in nature, what we are in status already. To grow into the kind of people who live as God’s children should. Why are we to do this? To make ourselves into God’s children and earn God’s blessings? No! John teaches we already are God’s children and therefore should live that way.

The way we become God’s children is not by something we do, not by doing good works, but by faith in Jesus Christ and trusting in his work – his perfect life, his sacrificial death on the cross and his victorious resurrection from the dead.

As John taught in his Gospel:

‘Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.’ (John 1:12-13)

A lot of this is future of course. John is clear that we won’t realise our ambitions to truly perfect lives as children of God until we get to heaven. It will only be once Christ returns that this will happen.

Even so, the third point that John makes is that during their childhood on earth, the process of living as God’s children begins for us. In other words, the process of God’s adopted children growing and developing into the people God wants them to be begins in the here and now.

Verse three says as much: ‘All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’

We’re going to be looking at verses 4-10 next week and they teach us a lot more about the Christian’s battles against sin and the devil but here in verse 3 John makes it very clear that although becoming a child of God is entirely of grace and entirely of faith – it is not a matter of human effort or good works – nevertheless being a child of God does affect how we live our lives. The Bible knows nothing of a Christianity that so emphasises grace so as to excuse sinful, wrong behaviour.

As Paul answered an imaginary questioner who thought that the gospel of salvation by grace was a licence to commit sins in Romans 6:1-2:

‘What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?’

John’s message is exactly the same as Paul’s. ‘All who have this hope in him [i.e. in Christ] purify themselves, just as he is pure.’

In other words, all who consider themselves children of God, and look forward to eternal life as princes and princesses of their Father God, seek holiness in this life, because their Father is holy.

The Old Testament gave the same command to the people of God time and time again. Nine times in the Book of Leviticus alone the commandment occurs:

‘Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy.’ (Leviticus 19:2)

The principle in the New Testament is the same as in the Old – if you are my people, my children, God says, you’ll be like me. You’ll copy me, follow me. You’ll live my way.

It’s interesting that what John writes in verse 3 is not a command, it’s a description. He doesn’t say: ‘All who have this hope should purify themselves’. He merely points out that anyone who is a Christian does purify themselves.

You see what we mustn’t do is think that we need the gospel of Christ dying for us to take away our sins to get into God’s Kingdom or God’s family, and then think that once we’re in we have to stay in through doing enough good. In theological terms, I thought we entered the Kingdom by grace but stayed in by law, by doing good.

That is a mistake I made in my Christian life for years and it stopped me from growing as a Christian for years. Instead of feeling loved and enjoying the freedom I have in Christ, I would feel I’d never done enough good, had sinned too much, and I was burdened with a sense of guilt for what I’d done and what I hadn’t managed to do nearly all the time. It reduced my Christian walk to a hard drudgery, a world away from the ‘easy burden and light yoke’ that Christ promises his followers.

I used to think that becoming a Christian was by faith, but remaining a Christian was by works. This is just not the case. I remember my thinking being completely turned around when I read an article by an American evangelist and Bible teacher, Jerry Bridges. Bridges pointed out a simple truth that I hadn’t really grasped before – that the gospel message of salvation by grace through faith in Christ is a message for Christians as well as for non-Christians. It’s the key to living as a Christian, not just the key to becoming a Christian.

You see, we as Christians need the message of the cross and the empty tomb preached to ourselves every day to stop ourselves turning into either guilt-ridden legalists or sin-stained libertines. Trusting in Christ and his work on the cross is not just something people need to believe to become Christians; it’s what we need to believe every day in order to live as Christians. It’s the way in which we ‘purify ourselves’ in the way John describes.

John has already said as much in this very letter. That’s why it’s really useful if sometimes we read large chunks of the Bible or even a whole letter at a sitting. It helps us get things in context.

On their own, John’s words about people ‘purifying themselves’ might suggest they are to do it on their own effort, without reference to Jesus. But that would be entirely wrong. Back in the first chapter of this letter, John has already explained what he means by a Christian purifying themselves. I’m going to read 1 John 1:7-10 because they are very important to us understanding this verse about us purifying ourselves just as God is pure. Listen carefully to what John says:

‘If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.’

So, yes we are to purify ourselves. But how do we do it? According to John it is by looking to Jesus. We do it by trusting in his work on the cross, by relying on his blood, which purifies us from all sin. We do it by being brutally honest with God and admitting to him that we are far from perfect, by acknowledging that his word is right to assess what we’ve said and done as sinful. We do it by confessing our sins to God and trusting that God’s word is true and so he will be faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us.

John is clear that Christians are to seek to live good lives, to try to do good works, and to make an effort at refraining from sinning. It is the heart that the Father looks into. It is the seeking that matters to God, not the succeeding. Or to use a sporting cliché, it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part. Truly seeking to do good, to follow Christ and to not commit sins matters more to God than whether we actually succeed or fail. We are his children; he knows what we’re like. He remembers we are only like little toddlers here on earth staggering around, not too good on our feet and likely to fall over more often than we stand up.

John characterises how we should live as ‘walking in the light’ but he is also totally realistic. John – like the apostles Paul and James, and Jesus himself – knew we would not reach perfection in this life, and it is not God’s will for us to live lives crushed by guilt. Friends if you leave here with one thing tonight, make it this: God does not want you to spend your life feeling guilty because you fail. Because you will fail, over and over again, and God wants his children to be filled with love and joy and peace, not guilt. Instead, when we sin, we need to remember that we are not saved by our works but by Christ – that there is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus as Romans 8:1 says, and second, we need to come to God, confessing to him what we’ve done and asking to be forgiven. And there’s no limit on how often we can do that. God’s love and God’s grace are boundless. If we commit a sin a hundred thousand times and come back to God to ask for forgiveness and are truly sorry, he will forgive us.

After all, as God is our Father, so Jesus Christ is our brother. Once Peter asked him: ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus, our brother answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’

And when you remember that the number seven signifies perfection and completeness in the Bible, then it is obvious that Jesus is not saying up to precisely 490 times, but rather, an infinite number of times. Just as he commands this of us, so he offers us unlimited forgiveness.

It is through availing ourselves of that forgiveness on offer because of Christ’s cross and resurrection that John understands and pictures Christians purifying themselves.

Next week we’ll look more at the battle the Christian faces with sin. Tonight may we all rest and find comfort in the facts that God loves us as his children, that great though that is, the future will be even better, and until then as God’s children we will purify ourselves, not by our own efforts, but by looking to Jesus, his cross, his blood and his victorious resurrection life.

As the writer to Hebrews put it, echoing the words of John here in this passage:

‘We … see Jesus … crowned with glory and honour because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.’ (Hebrews 2:9-11).

The Lord our Redeemer

This is a sermon based on Isaiah 44:21-28 preached at the evening service on 22nd July 2007.

Tonight I’d like to begin with a story. It’s called “The Boy Who Lost His Boat”.

Tom carried his new boat to the edge of the river. He carefully placed it in the water and slowly let out the string. Tom sat in the warm sunshine, admiring the little boat that he had built. Suddenly a strong current caught the boat. Tom tried to pull it back to the riverbank, but the string snapped and the boat sailed further and further away from Tom, until he couldn’t keep up with it and it vanished out of sight. He’d lost it.

Tom walked along the riverbank looking for his boat until it was getting dark. And then he had to go home without his precious toy.

A few days later, on the way home from school, Tom spotted a boat just like his in a charity shop window. When he got closer, he could see -- sure enough -- it didn’t just look like his, it was his!

He hurried in to speak to the shop manager. "Mister, that's my boat in your window! I made it!" he said.

"Sorry, son, but someone else brought it in this morning. If you want it, you'll have to buy it back. You can have it for a pound."

Tom ran home and counted all his money. He just had the price, but it was all he had. When he reached the shop, he rushed to the counter. "Here's the money for my boat." As he left the shop, Tom clutched the boat tightly under his arm. "Now you're twice mine,” he said. “You're mine because I made you and now you're mine again because I bought you."

That’s what our redemption by God is like. He is our Creator, and in that sense we are his already. But as sinners, we are like the boat swept away by the river, taken away from God’s presence. Then in his grace, God seeks us out again and pays the highest price he could –the sacrifice of his own dear Son on the cross – to buy us back and make us his again.

Our passage in Isaiah chapter 44 is all about redemption. It’s all about God delivering and saving his people.

In fact there are three different threads or aspects of redemption that run through this passage and I want us to look at each on in turn. No doubt you all got the three “Rs” at school. Well, this passage contains it’s own three “Rs”. For the purposes of alliteration, we might call them restoration, rescue and re-creation.

Restoration concerns God delivering his people from captivity in Babylon and bringing them back to Jerusalem and the land of Israel. It is what we might term a national or political deliverance and I think it symbolises what for us is God’s protection of our nation, and God’s providence that ensures that normal life was we know it goes on.

Rescue lies at very heart of the passage and the Christian gospel and concerns God’s salvation of his people from sin. This is the very core of God’s redemption, this dealing with the problem of sin and bringing us, who are by nature enemies of God, into a relationship of friendship with him.

Re-creation looks forward beyond the redemption and salvation of God’s people to the re-making of the whole of creation - the heavens and the earth and everything in them at the end of time, undoing the effects of evil and removing evil from the universe for all eternity – and bring the whole created universe under the headship of Jesus Christ.

There are elements of all three levels of redemption in this passage. The order in which Isaiah presents them to us is different from the way I’ve analysed what he is saying, so in effect we’ll look at the passage back to front a bit since Isaiah focuses on the restoration of the people of Israel and their deliverance from captivity in verses 25 to 28, on the rescue of God’s people from their sins in verses 21 and 22, and on the re-creation of the universe in verses 23 and 24.

So looking first at restoration, we can see in verses 25 to 28 that these verses contain a remarkable prophecy of promise to the people held in captivity in Babylon. Just how remarkable you think this prophecy is depends on whether you take a conservative or liberal line in biblical scholarship. You see, while conservative scholars – and the church generally for the past two thousand years – accepts that Isaiah wrote the whole of this prophecy and that is dates from about 200 years before the Jews went into captivity, liberal scholars deny this can be true because of how precise and how true Isaiah’s prophecy is. They would argue that this section of Isaiah was not written by Isaiah and dates from the time of the exile in Babylon, or even after it! – and not from 200 years before. If the liberals are right, there’s not much remarkable in what Isaiah says. It would be like me “prophesying” now that Germany would invade Poland in 1939, pretending that my prophecy was written before 1700. Some prophet I’d be. You might call me a fraud, and you wouldn’t be far wrong.

But if the conservative view is correct – and I believe it is – then it is a remarkable prophecy, and shows the supernatural, divine origin of the Scriptures. For Isaiah prophesied two centuries before the exile to Babylon even happened how it would end, in great detail. For instance, notice that not only is Israel’s restoration to their homeland and to the capital city, Jerusalem, predicted, but even the very name of the person who would bring this about, the Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great, is mentioned, by name in verse 28, hundreds of years before Cyrus was born!

Of course, the liberals will say, this proves this passage was written long after the real Isaiah died. But that is no more than unbelief dressed up as scholarship. There’s no reason why God, who knows the future with absolute certainty, could not reveal to Isaiah the very name of the future pagan emperor who would have such a hand in the freeing of the people of Israel from their Babylonian captivity and their restoration to Jerusalem.

One thing we do know for certain is that Isaiah’s prophecy concerning Cyrus and the restoration of Israel is accurate. We read about what happened during the reign of Cyrus in 2 Chronicles 36:22-23:

“Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing: "Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, 'The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him. Let him go up.'”

God calls Cyrus his shepherd in verse 28. Notice in passing that God can use people who are not his people to do his work. Here he will use a pagan emperor called Cyrus. He can just as well use a worldly monarch like King Henry VIII to bring about the reformation of his church in England, or even an evil tyrant like Joseph Stalin, to help the Allies defeat Nazi Germany and rid the world of Hitler’s barbarism. God is not restricted to using the godly to achieve godly ends. He can use the wicked to serve his purposes, even when they don’t think that’s what they’re doing!

The question is of what relevance are these things to us here today. We know that God could prophecy the future because he knows what will happen in the future. That’s one thing. We also know that he can use anyone to work out his purposes and achieve his ends – even when those who bring it about don’t realise they are doing it and even if what they want is completely at odds with God’s character and commandments. But is there anything else here for us to learn? I think there is and it’s this: there is an aspect of God’s protection and deliverance of his people that concerns their physical well-being, and survival and success of the nations and societies where they live.

If God had wanted to he could have given his people the spirit of repentance and given them the gift of saving faith, and restored them to the living covenant relationship he always wanted with them, while leaving them to live in Babylon. But he didn’t. He didn’t just save the people from their sins, he didn’t just make them believers, he looked after them by bringing them home to their own land and their own capital city.

Of course the people’s leaving captivity and coming home is symbolic of their returning to God in faith, but as well as that, there’s an element of God looking after all his people’s needs, not just their spiritual needs. Just as the deliverance from Egypt was both a spiritual event and a national, political event, so the return from Babylon is both a spiritual event and a national restoration.

Under the New Covenant, God’s people are no longer to be found in only one nation – the church of Christ is composed of every nationality and race. But there’s still a sense in which God looks after the nations where his people reside. God still looks after nations where he is honoured and his word respected. Historically that can be shown to be true. It is no accident that Great Britain rose from being an insignificant island on the fringes of Europe to being the greatest colonial power the world has ever seen. It is no accident that the nation where the Reformation flourished and God was honoured in both church and state was blessed and protected against all its enemies, and given the responsibility of taking the gospel to the four corners of the earth.

God is interested in his people’s welfare. Period. Not just their spiritual welfare – but their health, their peace, their prosperity, their physical survival and that of future generations of believers who are more likely than not to be the children of other believers and churchgoers.

The second of our three “Rs” in this passage is “Rescue”. Although God is interested in the temporal affairs of his people, it is their spiritual well-being from which all other blessings flow and it is God’s salvation of his people from their sins that lies at the very heart of the entire Bible’s message of good news. And this rescue that God has carried out for this people is what is mentioned in verse 22 of our passage, where God himself says:

“I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you.”

There are three things to notice in this verse 22 that spells out the gospel for us. That’s why I want to look at this verse in more detail than the others.

The first thing this verse teaches is that there is a problem that God had to sort for us. And the problem is our transgressions and our sins. The problem is that human beings do not treat God as we should, and instead we break his laws and try to live our lives without reference to the God who gave us life in the first place. Instead of loving God and our neighbour and seeking to live lives that please God, by nature human beings are full of pride and selfishness. We prefer to please ourselves rather than God, and the Bible calls this sin. This problem of sin breaks the relationship that God designed us to have with him, because he is a good and holy God whose very character cannot tolerate evil. And it’s a big problem with the way the universe is. The Bible says that sin must be punished and the punishment, or wages of sin, is death, eternal death in hell.

The second thing this verse tells us is that God has sorted out the problem. It is not something that we can sort out for ourselves. “I have blotted out your transgressions...I have redeemed you,” God says. “I have done it, not you.” And the Bible is very clear about this throughout the Old Testament as here, and throughout the New Testament, both in the teachings of Jesus and the apostles.

Look at Jesus’ teaching in John’s Gospel. In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” So according to Jesus, the only way for people to come to God, the only way to be saved, is to come to God through Jesus. Jesus is the only Saviour as Acts 4:12 also teaches. But back in John 6:44 Jesus had also taught: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” Isn’t that a remarkable two-way relationship that Jesus identifies? No one can come to Jesus unless the Father draws him, gives him the will and faith to come. And no one can come to God except through coming to Jesus Christ in faith. Jesus makes it absolutely clear that salvation is the work of God, and accomplished by the will of God and not by the will of man. And Jesus makes that point many times in his teaching. In John 3 he teaches that no one can see the kingdom of God unless is born again. But he also teaches that those who are born again – those who are children of God – are born not of the will of man, but by God’s will, through the Holy Spirit.

The third thing this wonderful verse 22 teaches is how God accomplishes his people’s salvation. He describes it as being like when a cloud comes over and blocks out the sun, or when a mist descends, hiding the world from view. This summer we should have no trouble understanding the picture Isaiah paints of thick clouds blocking out the sun so that you wouldn’t even know it was there. That, according to this verse, is what God does with our sins and transgressions. He takes them away. He hides them from view. And it’s not our view he hides them from. He hides our sins from his own view. And that’s a tremendously significant thing.

In Habakkuk 1:13, the prophet prays to the LORD, “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil.” So for such a God to live in a relationship of friendship with sinners, their sins must be taken away and hidden from his view. We could not have a relationship with a holy God if he could still see our sins. They need to be blotted out and this is precisely what God promises he will do in this verse in Isaiah.

We know now the way God accomplished this. It is through the death of his Son on the cross. I could read dozens of verses to show this. But I’ll just read one. The first is what John the Baptist said when he saw Jesus approaching him on the day after his baptism: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” he said. (John 1:29). The sacrificial lamb who removes, who takes away, who hides from view, the sin of the world.

On the cross, Jesus took away our sins, hiding them forever from God’s view, and in place of our sins, he gives us, he transfers to our account, his righteous standing before God, so that when God looks upon Christian believers, he cannot see our sins, but instead he sees Christ’s righteousness and accepts us as holy and worthy to enter into heaven because of the righteousness we possess through Christ. That is the gospel of grace that Jesus and Paul and Peter and John taught and that Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets saw in shadowy outline. But they saw it nonetheless. Even Isaiah could write of the Messiah in Isaiah 53:5-6: “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

It is through Christ’s blood that God blots out our trangressions and sins. It is through giving up his own Son as a sacrifice for sin that God redeems us.

The great American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, wrote about this wonderful gospel in these words:

“The redeemed are dependent of God for all. All that we have-- wisdom, the pardon of sin, deliverance, acceptance in God's favour, grace, holiness, true comfort and happiness, eternal life and glory--we have from God by a Mediator; and this Mediator is God. God not only gives us the Mediator, and accepts His mediation, and of His power and grace bestows the things purchased by the Mediator, but He is the Mediator. Our blessings are what we have by purchase; and the purchase is made of God; the blessings are purchased of Him; and not only so, but God is the purchaser. Yes, God is both the purchaser and the price; for Christ, who is God, purchased these blessings by offering Himself as the price of our salvation.”

The hymn writer Toplady sums it up in fewer words like this:

“The terrors of law and of God
with me can have nothing to do;
my Saviour’s obedience and blood
hide all my trangressions from view.”

And John Wesley translated a great German hymn like this:

“Jesus, Your blood and righteousness
my beauty are, my glorious dress;
midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
with joy shall I lift up my head.

Bold shall I stand in that great day,
for who aught to my charge shall lay?
Fully absolved through these I am,
from sin and fear, from guilt and shame.”

Now although our salvation in Christ is absolutely fundamental to everything else in our lives and lies at the very centre of the Bible’s message, though it will be our song throughout the ages, the Bible actually teaches that our salvation from sin and our entry to heaven is not the entirety of God’s good news. Our salvation is the centrepiece of a bigger picture. And so we come to the third of three “Rs” – re-creation.

The gospel is not just about us reaching heaven, being snatched from destruction in hell. It certainly is about that, but that’s not all the gospel is. Hard though it is to comprehend, the Bible’s message is even better and bigger than that. Eternity will be much more than being incorporeal spirits living in heaven. No the Bible teaches that in eternity we will be people with resurrection bodies, inhabiting a new heaven and a new earth, in an eternity where all of creation will be remade, repaired and restored by God.

This is what comes through in verse 23 of our passage in Isaiah chapter 44: “Sing, O heavens, for the LORD has done it; shout, O depths of the earth, break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it! For the LORD has redeemed Jacob, and will be glorified in Israel.”

Now it might appear that Isaiah is simply being poetic here and saying that even the natural world should celebrate because the LORD is going to save his people. But I think it’s not just poetic licence here. The Bible teaches that God’s plan of salvation is not just to save for himself a people to be his and to live with him forever. Certainly that's part of it. But the plan is also to make a new heaven and a new earth – to renew and restore the whole of creation – to undo the fall and for eternity to be spent in a heaven and earth made perfect by God just as the old universe was made imperfect by man’s sin. This saving of the entire creation is why the mountains and trees should sing – because God’s eternal purpose for the whole of creation is gradually being realised. The heart of it is the salvation of his people, but the end of it is the salvation, the healing and making whole, every part of creation.

God’s big picture is summed up in Colossians 1:19-20:

“For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [that’s Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

And in Ephesians 1:10-11, Paul says that God’s purpose through Christ is “to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.”

In Romans 8:19-21, Paul writes what could almost be a commentary on verse 23 of our passage. Paul writes: “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

Do you see what Paul is saying here? It really is fantastic! He’s saying that through the salvation of God’s people, the curse that came upon the whole of creation as a result of mankind’s fall into sin will be lifted, and through the salvation of God’s people, the whole world – the very mountains and forests and birds and animals – will all be saved and brought to glory. And in the new heavens and new earth, all of creation will dwell in peace and concord again, as if the fall had never happened. It’s as if creation itself knows that the salvation of God’s people will be the key to the salvation of all the other parts of creation. Now they wait for it. One the day that this salvation comes to creation, the very mountains and trees will praise God!

No wonder then that Isaiah breaks forth in a joyful exultation for all of creation to praise and thank God for redeeming Israel in verse 22.

Hopefully we’ve come to see something of greatness of God’s redemption too. A redemption and salvation that looks after the everyday, temporal needs of his people, a redemption that takes away his people’s sin, ends the enmity between God and sinners and restores that covenant bond of friendship with them, and a redemption that has as its ultimate end the salvation of the whole of creation under Christ Jesus – who made all things and for whom they were made.

I began this sermon with a story about a boy and his boat to show something of the nature of God’s redeeming love for his people. I’d like to finish with another story. A true story this time.

There was once a gathering of friends at an English country estate. The garden party nearly turned to tragedy when one of the family children fell into a river that ran through the estate. The gardener heard the boy’s cries for help, dived in, and rescued the drowning child. The boy’s name was Winston Churchill.

His grateful parents asked the gardener what they could do to reward him. The man was a Scot and reluctant to speak. He hesitated, then finally said, "I wish my son could go to the college someday and become a doctor."

"We'll see to it," Churchill's parents promised.

Years later, while Winston Churchill was Prime Minister during the Second World War, he was stricken with pneumonia. The country's best physician was summoned. His name was Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered and developed penicillin. He was the gardener’s son who had indeed gone to college and become a doctor. Of course Churchill recovered from his illness and the rest is history.

Churchill wrote of this later: "Rarely has one man owed his life twice to the same person."

In the sense that Churchill meant it, he was right of course – the gardener saved him from the river and in a sense saved him again by choosing for his son to grow up to be a doctor, of all the rewards he could have asked for. What a remarkable train of events that is. But for all of us who are God’s people, it’s not a rare event at all. Far from it being rare, it is actually true for all of us without exception, for we all owe our lives twice to the one person – to the LORD God, our creator and our Redeemer. Our heavenly Father gave us life once through deciding to create us, and he gave us life again when he chose that his Son should grow up to be our Saviour.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

It's the thought that counts

The editorial from our Church's Magazine for December 2006

There's a saying you often hear around Christmas: "It's not the gift, it's the thought that counts." How very true that is. Let’s look at it in two ways to show it’s true! Firstly, we value the time and thought that someone put into a gift, we prize the love behind the gift far more than the gift itself. When I think back to Christmas as a child I received many lovely presents. I remember one year receiving a set of little plastic farm animals and farm equipment and the farmer with a shotgun tucked under his arm. That was what enthralled me then. Now thinking back, I appreciate even more the wooden farm with hills and little loch, the barn and farmhouse my father made himself from wood. It must have taken him a long time to make and paint it. On the other hand it was only plywood, papier-mâché, bits of sponge and paint. It was worth almost nothing. But that’s the gift that came to mind when I sat down to write this. Why should that be? Because the thought behind it revealed how much my father loved me in a very special way.

On the other hand, how do we feel if we know no real thought went into a gift, even if the gift itself is expensive? There’s a scene in the film Dead Poets Society where it’s the birthday of one of the schoolboys and he’s sitting up on the roof looking very depressed. Another boy sees the expensive desk-set his parents gave him as a present and asks what’s wrong. “They gave me exactly the same set last year,” he says. If no thought went into it – if someone gives us clothes in a size that’s obviously too big or small for us, or if someone gives us a box of chocolates and earlier in the year we told them we’re diabetic (I’m not by the way before you ask!), it inevitably creates disappointment in the giver’s lack of thought.

Another aspect of the thought behind the gift is where the person makes a big deal of the “thinking about you”, but the gift never comes through at all! All thought and no gift isn’t really much thought at all is it? I’m not talking about people who cannot afford a gift here. Please don’t think that. I’m talking about people who like to appear generous but in practice are pretty mean. James in his New Testament letter writes about people like that. He writes at one point (James 2:15-16): "If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?" There's something phoney about good wishes that aren't backed up by kind practical actions.

What’s all this got to do with the real meaning of Christmas? Well, the point I wanted to make is that Christmas shows not only God giving us the supremely valuable gift, but it also shows that he gave the gift out of the deepest love, and in doing that he was keeping his promises made in the Old Testament over more than a thousand years. Let’s look briefly at these now, in reverse order.

Unlike people who promise the earth but don’t deliver, God keeps his Word. In the Old Testament he promised to send the Messiah. And he didn’t just leave it as a wonderful idea, a set of fine promises, never followed through and delivered. God is not a politician! When he promises it, he does it. The Scriptures promised many things about him. They tell that he would destroy the devil when he came, that he would be conceived in a virgin, that he would be a descendant of Abraham and King David, that he would be born in Bethlehem, that he would be a Redeemer, a Saviour of his people, and possibly most astounding of all, that it would be through his death that his people will be saved, but that his death will somehow not be the end of his life. Look at Isaiah 53:5, 9-10: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed…And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.”

The second thing to remember is that in sending us his Son, God sent us a priceless gift, the most valuable and precious thing he had, the thing he loved most. Probably the most famous verse in the Bible says it most clearly: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16). God’s gift is no mere “stocking filler” if I can dare to put it that way. He gave us his beloved Son! From eternity, the holy trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit had existed in a perfect bond of unity and love, knowing and loving each other more deeply that we can ever imagine. And that first Christmas, God the Father sends God the Son down to such a world as this, to save us.

That leads us to consider the thought in the Father’s mind behind the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. The “thought that counts” most supremely of all at Christmas is the Father’s strongest and deepest saving love for his chosen people. A lot of people treat God’s election of his people as the dirty secret of Christian doctrine, something we should hide or be embarrassed about. Well we shouldn’t be and I’m not. I rejoice in it and I don’t care who knows it. From before the beginning of the world he knew and loved us. Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 1:9 that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” Or as he put it in Ephesians 1:4 “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.”

How can we begin to conceive of such a love as this? A love that has been working since before time, and all through human history, to order all things for our good (Romans 8:28) and to save us through Jesus Christ (Romans 8:30).

If John 3:16 is the best known verse in the Bible, it should be joined by Romans 5:8, where Paul writes: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While all the wonderful verses about predestination fill all who believe in Jesus Christ with joy, those who don’t yet know Christ may feel excluded, wondering if God didn’t choose them. But that’s where verses like this are so important. It was while we were sinners, Christ died for us. If you are not a Christian, you don’t need to worry about whether God chose. God is calling you to come to Christ and believe in him. It’s that choice, whether to accept God’s gift or not, that should concern you. There is no qualification required to come to Christ other than to accept you are a sinner in need of a Saviour, because it was for sinners like you and me that Christ died to save.

This Christmas may we all see that in Christ both the gift and the thought count. And may we never despise or reject either.