Bottom line up front: The Unfolding Plan: God keeps His Word

Historical context: “The silent years,” that’s what they’re called when we refer to the historical period between the closing of the Old Testament and the opening of the New Testament. They’re called the silent years because God did not inspire any biblical texts during that period. Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament, and he wrote at the same time as the books Ezra and Nehemiah encompass(400s B.C.). That period from the 400s B.C. to the incarnation of Christ is called “the silent years” and our calendars reflect B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord”) to this day. But those so-called silent years were pregnant with meaning. Why? God has determined to save His people from their sins (Matthew 1:21), and He is faithful to His covenant promises to adopt a people in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:6). During those years where no Scripture was inspired, God was still at work.

More context: When Matthew’s gospel opens, the main theme he emphasizes for 28 Christ-saturated chapters, is that God’s promises are fulfilled in Christ. Christ is the promised Redeemer. He’s the One to whom all the Old Testament types and shadows pointed. He is the true and final prophet, priest, and king. He is the sacrifice that is acceptable and pleasing to God. That’s why Matthew opens his gospel the way he does–namely, with the genealogy to show that Christ is the promised Immanuel, “God with us.” To borrow Francis Schaeffer’s language, God is there, and He is not silent.

Gabriel’s announcement of Christ’s mission: “She [Mary] will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Mt 1:21, ESV). The 39 Old Testament books (Genesis-Malachi) promised the Redeemer. And the 27 New Testament books reveal that Redeemer as Christ the Lord. Promise and fulfillment. Shadows and then the substance. Promises made, promises kept.

Encouragement/takeaway: This is one of the most encouraging aspects of the Christian worldview. It’s the coherence of Scripture. The fact that Scripture has one overarching storyline, written by multiple authors, but inspired by the one God, composed over centuries and myriad cultures, but with one consistent storyline of the redeeming God.

I’m entering Matthew 21 next Sunday with the saints from class, and Matthew 21 is the beginning of Holy Week/Passion Week in church history. It’s where Christ enters Jerusalem and the crowds sing out, Hosanna! (Mt 21:9), but then they will soon be demanding his crucifixion.

Again, it was all laid out in the Old Testament—that this promised Redeemer would be born in Bethlehem, of the house of David and tribe of Judah, be rejected by sinners, pierced for their transgressions, and crushed for their iniquities, be crucified, buried, and raised again on the third day.

And just like “the silent years” were not to lead people to think that God was absent but rather to give us yet another day to see that God is executing His mission in precise detailed fulfillment. Our duty is to trust Him and to be found faithful.

Issue: Calm amidst the storm

Connection: Parts of the Middle East are aflame this morning. Some American cities that heralded themselves as sanctuaries are aflame, too. ‘Protests’ are predicted across certain demographics. Somehow certain people have plenty of time to organize, throw incendiary devices, demolish private property, assault law enforcement officers, and deface buildings and properties. Spray painted lewdness is included, too.

While some of us work a job, or two, or three, and provide for our families, and support our local church, etc. others somehow have time to destroy. ‘Sanctuaries’ smell of incense in some religious communities, but now these so-called sanctuaries are thick with the scents of tear gas instead. Who knows the end? I don’t. What I do sense, however, is that some people’s fuses are getting shorter. To borrow from Austen, sense and sensibility are being jettisoned and replaced with ad hominem attacks, temper tantrums, and violence.

Encouragement: God speaks to this. Will we listen to His word: “Scoffers set a city aflame, but the wise turn away wrath. If a wise man has an argument with a fool, the fool only rages and laughs, and there is not quiet. Bloodthirsty men hate one who is blameless and seek the life of the upright” (Pr 29:8-10, ESV).

It’s become cliché nowadays; you see memes and t-shirt slogans and decals with the same message, and it’s this: Stay calm and drive on. As Ecclesiastes 3 reminds us, there is a time “for every matter under heaven.” Let us pray that cooler heads prevail and that the violence will abate. May we be a people who are calm amidst the storm.

The first time I saw the Beach Boys, it was at Chastain Park in Atlanta. My Aunt Dee had turned me onto them after she’d been a student at UGA. She was listening to Squeeze, R.E.M., and others. I loved one Squeeze album in particular, several songs from R.E.M., but the band who gripped me was the Beach Boys.

The harmonies, of course; we all get that. The beach sounds; we all get that, too. But there was a tragic innocence of Brian Wilson that was endearing. It’s similar to the ways in which one might appreciate Walker Percy or Pat Conroy or Dickens in the literary medium.

Each had a slice of life he was uniquely equipped to exploit beautifully. For Wilson, it was the world of sounds.

There’s no telling how many millions of fans around the planet tonight are listening to the same album, Pet Sounds.

You were a troubled, beautiful, musical soul, Mr. Wilson. Thank you for using your gifts with us.

Have been on a Bret Lott kick lately, reading through his oeuvre. Not disappointed. Reading his body of work backwards, it’s been rewarding. I see the images, the sounds, the moods, etc. that recur.

The novel I completed this evening was the first one he published. It’s about marriage, trying to make it work, about losing a child, about how hateful spouses can sometimes be to one another, about grief and anger, and about the ache of it all.

But amidst, in, and among all of that, there is love. And friendship. And a kind word. And an invitation to go deer hunting with one’s plumber, and a revelation of hubris and human folly.

All that to say, it’s all here–in this first novel. It has its flaws, as does everything this side of Genesis 3, but it’s a fine story about tender matters. And I commend it to you.

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear” (Coleman Luck, Day of the Wolf).

Paul wrote as much centuries ago:

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Timothy 4:3-4, ESV).

Introduction: When I was in graduate school in English, one term I took an entire semester in the poetry of William Butler Yeats. It was one of the most revealing courses I ever took. Revealing in the sense that we students had to learn the intellectual and spiritual wells from which Yeats drank, in addition to learning Yeats’ body of work. We studied not only Yeats’ poetry and other writings, but also the writers that Yeats read and the ideas he imbibed. Even those who may be largely unfamiliar with Yeats may have at least some relationship with Yeats’ oft-anthologized poem, “The Second Coming.”

Text:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Context:

Why do I share all this? Because even as unorthodox and convoluted as Yeats’ intellectual moorings were, his best poems (“The Second Coming” is surely one of those) do portend important themes. When I look around at all the violence being perpetrated in America’s cities by unhinged mobs, it grieves me. How does one reason with a mob? Obviously, one cannot reason with a mob, as they’ve foregone reason and descended into terror. This is what got me again thinking about Yeats’ poem.

Imagery:

The images are striking, are they not?

• There’s a schism between the falcon and falconer.
• A “rough beast” is slouching in pregnant terror, like a foretaste of what’s coming in formidable violence.
• A “blood-dimmed tide” is washing over the shores.

On and on the images of madness and violence are put forth. Why? I would argue, to get us to see. Sometimes folks will refuse to see reality until it literally hits them in the face. It takes that for some people. When you have an undiscerning people, evil rides roughshod over the sheeple. Or as Yeats so beautifully phrased it, “the centre cannot hold” and “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Takeaway:

When you study Yeats’ theological and philosophical moorings, he was awash in mysticism, the occult, some teachings of Roman Catholicism, and loads of Oneist paganism. His fractured worldview is instructive for us, though, in this regard. He understood that men can easily become beasts if and when they abandon truth and embrace the lie. This is the way Scripture teaches it:

18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. 19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. 21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?” (Eccl 3:18-21, ESV).

Solomon’s point in Ecclesiastes is to teach that when we embrace paganism, we actually end up empty. It is when we listen to and obey God that benediction comes. That’s sounds saccharine and anemic to a world that doesn’t want to hear.

But the question remains: How’s the lie working out in the world system? How’s secularism playing out? How’s cognitive dissonance working out in L.A. right now? Why are politicians protected by men with guns, by walls around their estates, and personal bodyguards, but the mobs simultaneously decry walls and borders and law and order? As Yeats would remind us, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” Would that we learn from Yeats and Solomon. I am weary of the blood-dimmed tide.

Bottom line up front: Soul Investment

Illustration: One of my favorite illustrations follows. You may’ve heard it before. It remains for me one of the powerful anecdotes I know: “Charles Francis Adams, nineteenth-century political figure and diplomat, kept a diary. One day he entered, “Went fishing with my son today—a day wasted.” His son, Brook Adams, also kept a diary that is still in existence. On the same day he made this entry: Went fishing with my father—the most wonderful day of my life!” (quoted in Making Sense of Your World, W. Gary Phillips, William E. Brown, and John Stonestreet, p. 234).

Teaching: Do we recognize the delicate responsibility we have to invest in the souls of men? It’s clear we address the externals of folks. We PT; we tend to the visible elements, etc. But what about the inner man, the spirit, the soul, the persons we are when we’re most ourselves?

Encouragement: I bet when we reflect on those who mean the most to us, I would venture to say that those who mean the most to us are the ones who feed our souls. For me, it was often my grandparents. They’ve since passed on, but their impact remains. I think of some professors, too, with whom I clicked; they invested in me, and I worked hard to please them. I think, too, of fellow elders-pastors, with whom I’ve deep spiritual kinships. I think of men who’ve served nobly in uniform and/or still serve today–men that influence me via their testimony. My list, like yours, could go on and on. The point? May we be a people who speak to others’ souls—not just to their veneers.

Quote from a Founding Father: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly unfit for any other” (John Adams).

Questions:

• What standard does the mob go by?
• Do you think the mobs will suddenly lay down their arms if the U.S. government folds?
• Is it possible the mob’s ultimate standard is power?
• If mobs get what they want, what message does that send to the citizenry?

Remember what Solomon asked God for? It’s relevant for us today, too. Here’s the text:

“Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this your great people?” (1 Kings 3:9, ESV).

For what did Solomon ask the Lord?

• Wisdom
• Discernment
• To be able to distinguish good from evil
• To be able to govern wisely

Does this not seem relevant in our day?

I tell my class almost every time we assemble that we flounder when we lack discernment. Why? Because folly and evil then triumph. Wisdom gets banished by the wicked.

But in addition to discernment, we also need courage.

Solomon petitioned the Lord, and the Lord answered him.

Would that we, too, had the discernment and courage of a Solomon in our land today–wisdom from God, a discerning people, and the transcendent unchanging standard by which a moral and Christian people might not only distinguish good from evil, but have the courage to love the good, and thereby govern themselves and their land with sagacity.

Text: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9, ESV).

Connection to Today: Literally, America is aflame. The nation’s flag is being burned. Law enforcement personnel are under assault. Mexico’s flag is being paraded through the streets of Los Angeles, CA.

Does any thinking person think it’ll be long before the same violence plays out in Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, et al?

It’s so predictable.

Like clockwork.

Scripture’s teaching: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen 6:5, ESV).

In short, don’t say God didn’t tell us. He did–over and over again.

Questions: Do we learn? Do many care to learn? The questions answer themselves.

This is why I find Ecclesiastes germane each day. Human history is the same bloody and foolish story, again and again.

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9, ESV).

Introductory Question: How should the Christian view the intentional shattering of law and order?

Connection to Daily Events: Don’t worry; I’m not going to go on a political screed. I only want to ask the above question and take you to Scripture. First, I think it is incumbent upon all to tell the truth. The Christian and non-Christian alike should admit what is obvious—namely, that there is a civil war underway by certain elements on American soil.

Exhibit A: When I read the news this morning on my laptop, America’s flag was being covered in lighter fluid and set on fire in downtown Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the Mexican flag was being held high on staffs and run through the streets. One of America’s largest cities where the American flag is desecrated? Regardless of our political affiliation, does anyone deny that this is serious? Some illegals demand the abolition of ICE and at the same time herald Mexico’s flag. If the flags of other nations represent your values, why not live there? Why destroy L.A. and harm law enforcement officers and destroy property in the city to which you have fled? If it’s so horrendous here, why come? Why stay?

My fellow soldiers are deployed to try and restore some semblance of law and order. This is a civil war. When you have (un)civilization that refuses to manage itself; when America’s flag is burned on the streets; when law enforcement officers are under attack; when public and private property are destroyed by thugs; when America’s military has to be activated to quell violent criminals from destroying the very nation to which they’ve come illegally, how should the Christian view this? Below are some initial thoughts from Scripture:

• All of us are fallen; all men are sinners (Rom 3:23 says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”)
• All cultures have a “God of the system”; if and when cultures abandon the true God, God’s judgment falls (I’ve linked Deuteronomy 12:29-32 below for you.)
• When evil is not punished, ruthless power is the idol, the “God of the system.” (Hosea 4:2-3 reads, “there is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed. 3 Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens, and even the fish of the sea are taken away.”
• God calls all men to repent and believe (Acts 17:30 says, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent …”)

Text:
29 “When the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, 30 take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods?—that I also may do the same.’ 31 You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.

32 “Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it. (Dt 12:29-32, ESV)

Encouragement: Again, this is not a political cheer for any party; there’s more than enough culpability by every political identity. This is meant to go deeper—to the heart of the issue. How should the Christian respond? Prayerfully, winsomely, courageously, and with biblical conviction. Everyone surely knows the bromide about what happens when good men do nothing. Evil triumphs. May we not be a people like that. I hate it when I see my country ripped asunder by violence, by people who ostensibly have no sense of self-discipline or commitment to much of anything but the god of their appetites.

I don’t know what it will take for Christians and non-Christians to admit the reality of man’s depravity, man’s fallen condition. Most folks simply don’t grasp it until it comes to their doorstep. But that may be much closer than you think. There’s wisdom—always—in doing things God’s way. When we fail to address human fallenness properly, a democratic republic can be replaced by a thugocracy. I, for one, do not want that; we are a better people than that, sinfulness notwithstanding.