Me Or My Lying Eyes

And he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief. -- Matthew 13:58

I don’t have much time today, so I’ll talk about this briefly and maybe come back to it.  I think it is an important concept and worthy of thought. 

The purpose of a miracle is not simply to give someone the help that they need.  Obviously giving sight to the blind is of benefit to the blind man, but miraculous works are a part of the revelation.  As such, they call on those who witness them to both glorify God and receive what is being revealed about God through the miracle.  Ridderbos (whom I mentioned last week) says a miracle necessitates a decision. 

It’s just like the witness of Scripture or of nature.  We decide whether or not to accept what we see – not just as a fact, but as a witness of God’s Glory and Person.  We can even, like the people of Nazareth, make that decision up front.  We can close our minds to the possibility of receiving a revelation, and close ourselves off to the possibility of witnessing the miraculous. 

Yes, miracles are more likely to take place among the primitive and the ignorant.  The sophisticated take that as an indication that the more primitive are easily deceived when perhaps it is, instead, an indication that they haven’t closed their minds to God. By refusing to even allow for the possibility of the miraculous, I exalt my own opinions, beliefs, and preferences over the truth I could see if I would.

I think this also tells us something about the unforgivable sin which the Lord said was blaspheming the Holy Spirit.  Jesus was casting out demons, and the religious leadership argued that He was doing so by the power of Beelzebub.  Those who opposed Jesus refused to accept the witness of the miraculous right before their eyes.  Worse, they said that the Lord’s power was itself of demonic origins.  So, it makes sense that this sin would be unforgivable.  If I close my eyes to what the Holy Spirit is showing me or if I say that what is happening is not His work or revelation, how could I possibly be forgiven?  I’m rejecting the Cross and refusing to take the only path to forgiveness that exists.   

Law Man

Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. -- Psalms 119:18

The law is, above all, revelation.  When Jesus said He came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, He meant that He would reveal it in practice, inhabit it and give it life.  The law isn’t just about telling me how to live and please God – though we could do worse than see it that way, and many of us do. 

From the very first the law was meant to reveal the nature of God, His concern for justice, His hatred of pettiness, oppression, and of our general lack of love toward one another.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is so different from the concept many cultures had of their gods.  He was not capricious.  He was not in it for Himself.  He did not use people or laugh when they failed – though He does indeed laugh at their arrogance. 

So God looks at all these people wandering around on the planet.  How does He make them understand He’s not like their idols and the gods of their imaginations?  You have to give the devil credit here, because he did a fine job admitting that there is a spiritual realm while perverting the idea and effectively convincing people that the gods are like them except with more power and immortality.  God has to correct that.  He picks one man, his family, and his descendants.  He sets them apart, allows them to be enslaved and then delivers them.  The very first thing they learn is that their God is superior to and completely unafraid of the gods of the Egyptians.  Jehovah makes a mockery of them all.    

The next thing God reveals is that He requires obedience and trust because He knows, not just more than humans, but better.  Then He gives them His Law.  And what does He tell them?  I am God.  You don’t have to worry about any other gods.   You don’t have to try to appease the things these other tribes and nations worship when you go into this new land I am going to give. 

The next thing you need to do is take one day out of seven to meditate on Me and My law, to turn from the daily grind, to rest and remind yourselves who I am. 

The reason the Sabbath is so important is most of the law can be reduced to doing and conforming.  The Sabbath is about transforming, about meditating – we might even say, marinating, in the Law, having the opportunity to see myself reflected in God’s Law.  By finding out who God is, I find out who I really am. 

Our next step is to realize how important family is.  Honoring our father and mother means that we recognize something is uniquely vital in our family relations, something that may be nearly impossible to get from any other source.  This is that first triad, as Bob often points out, that reveals to us the relationship within the Godhead. 

Outside the family, God wants us to understand that other people have the same rights, the same hopes, the same divine spark that we have.  They are not beasts to be exploited.  We have to respect their rights to life, property, and freedom.  We need to respect their family and their relationships, to see the sacredness of marriage, that the vows we take before God are to be taken with reverence and fear, and never to taken lightly. 

This is God’s nature.  Honor, respect, beauty, and truth are all found in the law.  God knows what is real.  He knows what is true.  He does not want us to be fooled or to live in a delusion because He loves us.  Wondrous things, indeed.

The Great Pretender

So they drew near to the village to which they were going.  He acted as if he were going farther, but they urged him strongly, saying, Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent. So he went in to stay with them. -- Luke 24:28-29

I have been reading a sermon of Andrew Murray’s based on these verses, and then Rick mentioned in a comment yesterday that sometimes we seem to think “God is out to get” us.  That reminded me of the way this whole passage is worded.  God sometimes pretends in order to move us and draw something out of us. 

After His resurrection, Jesus joined two of His followers as they walked the seven miles or so from Jerusalem to Emmaus.  The travelers spoke of the events that had just taken place, and Jesus, unrecognized yet, chided and corrected them:  And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!  Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”  And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:25-27). 

The hearts of the two listeners were stirred as they began to grasp the fullness of the revelation.  By this time, they were near their destination, and it was late in the day.  Where the ESV says Jesus “acted as if he were going farther”, the KJV says “made as though” – the Greek word behind this occurs only here in the New Testament and means “to conform oneself to [an appearance]”, that is, to pretend. 

Jesus pretended He had somewhere else to go. 

The two who had walked all this way with Him still had no idea who He was, but they were fascinated and hungry for hope.  The only reason Jesus did not go on down the road and perhaps find someone else to talk to was that these two “constrained him”; they begged Him to stay with them.  In fact, you could say, they prayed Him stay with them. 

Now it was the Lord’s intent all along to go in and reveal Himself to these two, but He would not have done so had He not been invited to abide with them.  This parallels what we read in Revelation 3:20 where Jesus says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”  The three go in the house and sit down to eat.  Jesus takes up the bread, blesses it and breaks it.  Suddenly, the eyes of the two listeners are opened, and they recognized the Lord in their communion. 

Murray pictures the Emmaus Road experience as being comprised of four stages.  First, there is the stage the death of Jesus had created where the two men had hearts that were sad and troubled.  That’s the state of those who have lost hope, who believe that, if indeed this Man named Jesus ever lived, He died long ago. 

The second stage is that of the heart that is “slow to believe”.  Christ was crucified.  We know that.  We also know that we ought to believe the message we have heard that He is alive, but we are not sure.  Perhaps it is only a legend, a hallucination – He lives metaphorically.  It’s something we ought to believe in, but we struggle.  The two whom Jesus found were at this stage because they had heard that the women had gone to the tomb and found it empty.  It seems they were not thoroughly convinced of what that meant.

When the Lord joined them and began to speak to them from the Scripture about His death, burial, and resurrection, He took these two to the third stage of having hearts that burned.  As they were walking along this road, they were taking a journey much longer than seven miles.  They were going from hell to heaven, from death, hopelessness and alienation to life everlasting.  They moved from believing only in the crucified Christ to believing in the living Christ. 

They were at the stage of Romans 10:9-10 -- because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.  For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.   I suppose, at that point, they were on their way to heaven.  The Stage Three Christian is a Christian -- righteous, church-going, Bible-believing.  We long to see Jesus when we all get to heaven, right? 

Unless there is such a thing as a Stage Four Christian.  What if we could have not just a burning heart but a satisfied heart, as Murray puts it?  What if Jesus would reveal Himself to us?  Is that possible?  If Luke is right, it is possible.  If we are willing to admit that we believe but we are not yet satisfied, if we are willing to entreat and pray and beg the Lord to come and abide with us, He will.  He will come through the door we open for Him.  He will commune and abide with us always. 

Now, right here is where it becomes a problem for people like me.  These boys in Emmaus did not know they were inviting Jesus into their house.  My mother would let anybody in her kitchen for beans, cornbread, and coffee.  It didn’t matter who they were, how dirty they were, where they were from, or what they did for a living.  I have seen preachers, politicians, doctors, judges, and lawyers sit down at her table.  Old hound men and hillbillies that hadn’t had a bath in a year sat there as well.  She would try to pick up and clean up a little if she knew somebody was coming, but even if she didn’t have any warning and the place was mess – and it often was – she didn’t turn anybody away.  That’s the way to do it.

A lot of times, we are kind of ashamed of how our place looks.  Maybe it hasn’t been swept in a while.  Maybe the windows need washing, and the shelves need dusting.  Maybe there is some stuff in here I would just as soon Jesus didn’t know I had.  If I knew He was coming in, I’d try to make it spotless.  We are not to be that kind of a host.  If He is knocking, we need to go ahead, open the door and bring Him in.  If He has been walking with us and acts like He’s going to go on and not come in, don’t think, “Wow, that’s a relief.”  No, beg Him to come on in.  Tell Him, “You’ll have to forgive me.  This place is a mess.  But, please, please, come in, and abide.”

The day is now far spent.

It's Always Personal

And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation.   For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. – 2 Peter 1:19-21

I was raised in a good old Southern Baptist country church.  The Bible was considered the Word of God, and as having what is technically called “full verbal plenary inspiration”.  If the King James Version was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it was good enough for us.  I learned the Scripture as a kid the same way that I learned history, the state and federal constitutions in school.  I don’t ever recall being an atheist or even agnostic with regard to the existence of some kind of spiritual reality.  Materialism made no sense to me, and the first time I read about the Big Bang, I immediately reconciled it to the Bible and equated it to God speaking creation into existence. 

What I wasn’t sure of for a long time was Christianity, especially Christianity as it had been preached, taught, understood, and practiced by my good, church-going hillbilly family, friends, and neighbors.  My friends and I would sit around drinking beer and smoking dope talking about Jesus as someone worthy of respect and emulation while rejecting the pale, frowning, foreboding image presented by our elders.  I changed one day as I was sitting at the little, round kitchen table we had in our trailer where I was reading “A Chapter Not Strictly Necessary” in Miracles.  I started going to church. 

Within a few months, I was not only attending church three times a week, I was teaching.  Generally, I was teaching from a Sunday School quarterly, and, other than adding my own rhetoric flourishes, metaphors, and illustrative stories, I stuck to the doctrinal points in the lesson.  Where I would get into trouble was in talking to people off the cuff over lunch.  I have heard many times the King James Version of verse 20 above:  Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.  Often it was said this way, “Yes, but remember, there are no private interpretations.”    

 What the speaker meant is that a) you have to be careful about applying a verse to a specific situation in the world – something with which I agree, or b) trying to understand Scripture in a way not perfectly consistent with the generally accepted understanding and application is a bad idea – something with which I disagree.  Even if I am wrong, this particular verse does not endorse that view.  What Peter is saying is that Scripture is not something made up by a person to serve that person’s ends, like the Book of Mormon or the Koran.  With apologies to any Mormons or Muslims that might happen to read this, that’s what I believe else I would be a Mormon or Muslim.  Right? 

As far as I can tell, revelation is always personal and individual.  By that, I do not mean to imply that I disagree with any basic doctrine of Christianity or that I think there is any way of salvation apart from the Cross.  If God doesn’t speak to us personally, we do not know God.  If God speaks only to the congregation and the revelation is only corporate then I do not see how an individual experiences salvation apart from being initiated as a member of the corporate body.  Indeed, this seems to be what is taught by some churches.  I don’t know that any denomination puts it exactly like that, but such a statement would be consistent with their practices.      

To me Scripture is a carrier of revelation.  I’ve told the story before of how I had that experience of connecting to Christ and asked my wife to pick up a new Bible for me.  The one she bought was a KJV like my old one, but more compact, about 4” by 6”, and no red letters or references.  When I started reading it, I was astounded that someone had the audacity to change the Bible.  I was so convinced that it was different that I dug out my old one to compare it.  The difference in the revelation was like night and day.  But the words were the same. 

I can read the same verse that I read ten years ago, even a passage that I studied in depth or taught on, and, today, I will find a whole new level of meaning and understanding it.  And I will sit here and say, Now I see what it really means.  Ten years from now, if I should still be living for some strange reason, I will likely read it, see something new, and say the same thing.  It is like what Jeremiah says in Lamentations 3:21-23 -- But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:  The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

God’s revealing of Himself is a continual – we might even want to say an evolving process.  In any long-term relationship with real friends or with a spouse, with children and parents, there is always this kind of newness and discovery.  If that isn’t there, the relationship can falter and breakdown.  It doesn’t mean that a person needs to get a divorce or abandon a friend or never call home, but it does mean there is less joy and meaning in the relationship.  We may remain loyal and faithful out of decency or a memory of what once existed. 

With us as imperfect people the loss of interest in a bond of love can usually be blamed on both parties to a greater or lesser extent.  When the bond is between us and our Father, I’m pretty sure the fault lies all on my side.  It is important for us to continue to pursue God and never accept the rigid view that knowing all the doctrines of the church means knowing all there is to know about Christ.