The Parable of the Sower

The Difficulty of Coming to God

Jacob literally wrestled with God. Abraham experienced years of infertility and nearly sacrificed his son. Moses killed, and then fought God’s command to return to Egypt from the wilderness. Paul was blinded. I don’t know of many situations in scripture where someone came to knowing and following God easily.

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).

Scripture tells us of a rich young ruler who could not bear to give away his riches to the poor to follow Christ, and we are told, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Luke 9:57-62 tells us of a man who wanted to go back home and bury his father and mother before following Christ, “But Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’”

The Seed Does not Produce Easily

In Mark 4, Jesus give the Parable of the Sower and explains its meaning to the disciples. Verses 5-6 say, “Other seed fell on rocky ground where it didn’t have much soil, and it sprang up right away, since it didn’t have deep soil. When the sun came up, it was scorched, and since it didn’t have a root, it withered.”

Then the explanation in verse 16-17, “And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: when they hear the word, immediately they receive it with joy. But they have no root in themselves; they are short-lived. When pressure or persecution comes because of the Word, they immediately stumble.”

It says, in verse 20, “’But the ones sown on good ground are those who hear the Word, welcome it, and produce a crop: 30, 60, and 100 times what was sown.’”

I find it interesting that scripture doesn’t say the seed that fell on the good ground was received with joy. It says, in verse 20, “’But the ones sown on good ground are those who hear the Word, welcome it, and produce a crop: 30, 60, and 100 times what was sown.’” I don’t think it’s wrong to receive the Word of God with joy, per se, but I don’t find it consistent with many conversions we know of. Rather, we often find the Word received with trepidation, caution, and an overflowing of grief, but because the Holy Spirit draws us into its overwhelming goodness, we are able to welcome it despite our pain.

Paul writes, “For godly grief produces a repentance not to be regretted and leading to salvation, but worldly grief produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10).

To put it more simply, when people receive the Word of God, it’s a painful thing because we are immediately drawn to know the depths of our infractions against the infinitely perfect God of all creation. Paul writes, “For godly grief produces a repentance not to be regretted and leading to salvation, but worldly grief produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). And Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 1:18, “With much wisdom comes much sorrow; as knowledge increases, grief increases.”

Psalm 119:49-50 says, “Remember Your word to Your servant; You have given me hope through it. This is my comfort in my affliction: Your promise has given me life.”

I don’t necessarily find knowing my infractions against God to be a joyous occasion. Certainly, I think that the salvation that comes upon us will produce infinite joy, and we will be comforted by God’s promise of rescue, as Psalm 119:49-50 says, “Remember Your word to Your servant; You have given me hope through it. This is my comfort in my affliction: Your promise has given me life.”

My own turning to God was not an easy occurrence. I fought against it for 15 years. I wrestled with God and lived my own way, and yet, after this battle, His infinite joy has claimed me as His own, and I seek to produce a crop 30, 60, or even 100 times more than just myself. But it wasn’t easy.

The Gate is Narrow

And so we come to the point: a conversion easily won is not a conversion easily held. Jesus explains this clearly to the disciples that the ones who shot up easily in joy, in happiness, did not last long because the second a struggle came up, they turned away. It didn’t even take much: “’they immediately stumble.’”

Mark 4, verses 18-19 give us a bigger picture: “’Others are sown among thorns; these are the ones who hear the Word, but the worries of this age, the seduction of wealth, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the Word, and it becomes unfruitful.’”

These people whom the world chokes and stumbles find it easy to come to God because they are not giving up the things that keep them away from God, and this easy conversion makes for a just as easy deconversion. They are looking at the narrow gate and trying to walk the broad path. They want the joy but are unwilling to make the sacrifice.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:13-14, “’Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it.’” It is not easy to come to Christ. The gate is narrow and the path just as small.

Coming to Christ is a Fight

If you find it easy to come to Christ, it is likely that you are missing something because our very flesh rebels against this cause, and our unclean spirits will aid the flesh until the Holy Spirit takes over the fight for us. But it is a fight, and it is not a fight easily won. I think Jesus is very clear about this. I think all of scripture is very clear about this.

God wants to produce in us His righteousness and character, but these fruits are not ones that come easily; rather, they take all of our self-control, aided by the Holy Spirit, to cast off the flesh and put on His righteousness each day. This is why we work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

The seed can be planted in a day, but the root takes time and difficulty and hardship and nutrients to grow. Acceptance of the seed with no root leads to a spiritual life that is easily choked out, but a deeply installed root in the grace of Christ will lead to a crop that produces multitudes. It is not easy, and it is not always joyous, but a fight with the grief of knowing our depravity will bring you to the full-fledged joy of Christ.

Obedience Takes Precedence - Mark 1

The Places Where Jesus Commands

Multiple times in the New Testament after Jesus performed a miracle, He commanded the one He healed or exorcised, and also the witnesses, to not speak of the work He did. Sometimes, these people listened to Him, and sometimes, they did not.

A non-exhaustive list of these occasions in which Jesus commanded knowledge of His works not be distributed is: Mark 5:21-43, Mark 7:32-26, Mark 8:22-26, Luke 9:20-22, and Mark 1:34. Most of the time when we see this command, it comes to one of three groups of people/beings: the disciples, the people, and demons. And from each group, we typically see a different response.

What Happens When Jesus Commands

When Peter exclaims that Jesus is “God’s Messiah” in Luke 9, Jesus commands the disciples not to speak of this to others because, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, be killed, and be raised on the third day” (Luke 9:22).

“None of the rulers of this age knew this wisdom, for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

In this case, the disciples held in their knowledge, and we know this because Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, “None of the rulers of this age knew this wisdom, for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” The wisdom He speaks of is the gospel, that Jesus Christ is God, and that His sacrifice provided the means for our salvation and sanctification.

…’See that you say nothing to anyone; but go and show yourself to the priest, and offer what Moses prescribed for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.’ Yet he went out and began to proclaim it widely and to spread the news, with the result that Jesus could no longer enter a town openly. But He was out in deserted places, and they would come to Him from everywhere.”

When the demons in Mark 1:32-35 were brought out of the people they had possessed, they were kept unable to speak of who Jesus was because of His power over them. Not only did Jesus command them not to, they had no option but to listen.

The final possible response of these people is evidenced in Mark 1:40-45, most particularly in 44-45, which says, “…’See that you say nothing to anyone; but go and show yourself to the priest, and offer what Moses prescribed for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.’ Yet he went out and began to proclaim it widely and to spread the news, with the result that Jesus could no longer enter a town openly. But He was out in deserted places, and they would come to Him from everywhere.”

The Disobedience of the Leper

“This leper was disobedient to Christ—perhaps we might think he was naturally and excusably so—but we must never make excuses for doing what Jesus tells us not to do! Our duty is not to judge whether such and such a course will be profitable but to consider whether such and such a course is in accordance with the word of the Lord.”

Many sermons will include something akin to praise for the people who “just couldn’t hold in how amazing the works of Jesus were, so they just had to go and tell everyone.” And I was right there with them until I read through the note from Charles Spurgeon in my study Bible: “This leper was disobedient to Christ—perhaps we might think he was naturally and excusably so—but we must never make excuses for doing what Jesus tells us not to do! Our duty is not to judge whether such and such a course will be profitable but to consider whether such and such a course is in accordance with the word of the Lord.”

Perhaps I am the only one who never thought of this scripture in this way, but in case I am not, I feel it necessary to explain why this is the proper viewpoint by which to analyze these situations wherein a healed person or witness would deliberately ignore the orders of God.

First, we do not know why Jesus commanded people to keep silent about these situations unless He deliberately explains them. We may presume and make conjecture, but bar examples like with the disciples when He directly says it is so that He will be crucified at the appropriate time, we do not know for sure.

Second is that we reason with the leper’s humanity; of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the leper wanting to tell everyone about what had happened! Naturally, he would want to find every excuse to do so. But we also reason with the fact that Christ gave him an excuse: the law of Moses. He could have taken the appropriate sacrifices before the priests and joyously proclaimed God had healed him in accordance with His covenant with Moses. And this would have stolen no glory from the Lord.

Instead, we find an occasion somewhat in alignment with the way Job speaks to God as he rants about his desire to see God in court, to make a case for himself. The leper believes himself on a level at which he can approach God and say, “I am righteous enough to think my way of doing things is as good as, if not better than, Yours.”

Obedience is the Only Answer

But the prophet Isaiah is told, “’For My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways.’ This is the Lord’s declaration. ‘For as heaven is higher than earth, so My ways are higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:8-9).

“’For My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways.’ This is the Lord’s declaration. ‘For as heaven is higher than earth, so My ways are higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:8-9).

We are to never take up the act of thinking on our own as if we can make the right decisions. It is not our responsibility to determine if the course of an action is the appropriate one; it is only our responsibility to obey the course of an action that God directs us down to the best of our ability. When we start thinking we know better than God, we start to open up a real deep hole we can’t get out of, and suddenly we are lord, and God is not.

The Double-Edged Sword - Psalm 149

What is the Sword?

Many Christians today, and really, in all time, apply the Word of God as a single-edged blade, capable of only cutting in the direction which they slice or thrust it. But scripture is clear that as you wield the righteousness of God against others, so it will be wielded against you.

Psalm 149:6 and 9 says, “Let the exaltation of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword in their hands… (9) carrying out the judgment decreed against them. This honor is for all His godly people. Hallelujah!”

Psalm 149:6 and 9 says, “Let the exaltation of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword in their hands… (9) carrying out the judgment decreed against them. This honor is for all His godly people. Hallelujah!”

We find here an incomplete declaration of the sword that not only pierces the enemy but also the one who wields it. The mention of the sword is true in its double-edged nature, but its use is described only as an employ against the enemy nations, the ones surrounding Israel, the ones Israel would be used by God to bring judgment upon—so long as Israel is obeying God and living righteously as a nation. This fits with the theme of this psalm, and this section of psalms, which are doxologies, AKA the Hallelujah Psalms. They are songs of triumphant praise.

“For the word of God is living and effective and sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

But Hebrews 4:12 tells us that the Word of God, this double-edged sword, is used just as much against the one who wields it as the one who receives the judgment of God at its edge. “For the word of God is living and effective and sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

How to Use the Sword

The Word of God is righteous, and it is meant to be used against an unrighteous world, as the Israelites are proclaiming in Psalm 149:6, but it is mostly meant to be used against yourself. Christianity, and the sanctification of salvation, are much more an internal process than an external process. The most essential purpose of the Word is the remaking of the self through the sanctifying work of the Spirit indwelling in order to be made righteous.

This is why the Word judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart; it is to tell us how and where we are wrong and where we ought be changed. It can penetrate the deepest parts of ourselves, the parts we hide and shy away from, the parts we think are not us, the parts that are sin in us and need to be cut out. It can do this in order to cut it away.

Matthew 7:1-2 says, “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use.”

And even if you don’t use the Word of God this way intentionally, it will be used that way regardless. In an oft misquoted and mis-contextualized passage, scripture tells us that the way we use the Word of God is the way the Word of God will be used against us. Matthew 7:1-2 says, “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use.”

I could go off on a diatribe about how people use this as an excuse to not tell others they’re wrong, but it will be sufficient to say that this scripture completes the picture of the double-edged sword from Psalm 149:6 and 9. The honor is for the godly people to use scripture to judge the actions of others. This clarification of godly is important: when you use the Word, power, and righteousness of the living God to judge others, you’re going to be judged in the exact same way.

Israel was the recipient of this double-edged sword often. God used them to judge Pharaoh, the Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Philistines, all the nations around them. Through Israel, He judged and rebuked the nations, destroying them and reducing their power for their evil acts. But many times, Israel became just like Egypt and Assyria and Canaan and Philistia, and God brought them low, judging them and destroying their cities and people for their unrighteousness.

The standard of judgment is not just one we can bear against others, but as Hebrews 4:12 tells us, it is one we must bear against ourselves equally as much. There is no other choice. Either you first use it against yourself, and then it is an honor for you to show others the depth of their sins so they might come to the living God and be made whole; or you use it against others, and the living God will bring that sword down against you to show you the depth of your sins so you might come back to Him and be made whole.

The Sword for God’s Glory

2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

The Word is useful in all things for God’s glory; it is applied equally in judgment against the sinner and the saint so that the sinner might become the saint and the saint might become more like God than he was before. It is used to slough off the flesh of this world for all people so that we may only be judged here and not on the final judgment day. And as you exalt God in your life, you will find the double-edged sword of His Word applied both to you and those around you.

The Sovereign God - Psalm 135

The Background

I wrote on Psalm 129 that God’s sovereignty means He controls and dictates when both good and evil occur. I find this view to be consistent with scripture in both the Old and New Testaments. I think many will try to unrightly skew this fact of God’s character and power into a debate of Calvinism and Arminianism. I don’t think there’s a debate.

If you are Calvinist and find this to somehow stray too far towards the Arminian view for your liking, know that this is purely scripture. If you are Arminian and find this to be too close to Calvinism for your liking, know that this is purely scripture. You may argue with what I say about the scripture, but the idea of God’s sovereign control, of His vengeance that kills kings, and His love and compassion that slaughters civilizations, is evident throughout His Word. There is no mistaking that.

Paul writes in Romans 9:21-22, “Or has the potter no right over the clay, to make from the same lump one piece of pottery for honor and another for dishonor? And what if God, desiring to display His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience objects of wrath ready for destruction?”

Through this chapter of Romans, Paul frequently calls back to an OT God (who, I might add, did not change from then to the NT times to now) has mercy on whoever He wants and who raises up people for a display of His power. Elsewhere, we find Jesus claiming the same thing: a man who cannot walk is kept lame, not for his sin, but for God’s glory, to be healed by Christ in His mission to save His people and reveal the glory of the Father.

God is Great

Psalm 135:3-4 “Praise Yahweh, for Yahweh is good; sing praise to His name, for it is delightful. For Yahweh has chosen Jacob for Himself, Israel as His treasured possession.

Psalm 135:3-4 “Praise Yahweh, for Yahweh is good; sing praise to His name, for it is delightful. For Yahweh has chosen Jacob for Himself, Israel as His treasured possession.” Encapsulated here is a non-exhaustive list containing why God is great. He is great because He is good; He is great because His name is delightful; He is great because He has chosen for Himself His own people. This is the easy part to understand. All believers know God is good because of who He is and the good He does.

The hard part is recognizing that God is good when the act does not quite compute in our brains to being good. Or perhaps delightful is the better word here. In light of my post on Psalm 129, we know that good sometimes involves evil. That doesn’t mean that good turned from evil appears delightful to us, and it is at these things we cringe back saying, “Who is this God?”

But the psalmist says, “For I know that Yahweh is great; our Lord is greater than all gods. Yahweh does whatever He pleases in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all the depths” (Psalm 135:5-6).

But the psalmist says, “For I know that Yahweh is great; our Lord is greater than all gods. Yahweh does whatever He pleases in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all the depths” (Psalm 135:5-6). What follows is a description of the plagues, of the slaughtering of kings and the destruction of many nations (verses 8-12).

So Who is God?

Let’s be plain. There is no hiding the fact that our God is one who slaughters kings and destroys nations. He wipes out bloodlines and ends entire cultures. We cannot look at the scriptures and claim He does not do these things. There is no dodging or ducking conversations about this. God is the Author of salvation, the Creator of all things good. But He is also the God who told the Ninevites “repent or be destroyed.” He is the One who looked on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed them. And even Lot’s wife, who looked back on those cities, went with them.

Paul writes, “But who are you, a mere man, to talk back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” (Romans 9:20).

So let’s not hide from it. Let’s take it head on. Undoubtedly, our God is a good God, and undoubtedly, He commits acts that humanity would claim as devastating atrocity. But why do we get to make the claim of what is and isn’t atrocity? Paul writes, “But who are you, a mere man, to talk back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” (Romans 9:20). Half of Job includes Job questioning why things are as they are. It ends with God asking Job, “Who are you to ask me these things? Were you there when I set the world in place, when I defined all of reality as you know it and even the things you could not even comprehend?”

I just finished reading Paul Washer’s Narrow Gate Narrow Way. It’s a brilliant little sermon book. In it, he says this idea that pervades Christianity, and even the world at large, today: God is love, so He cannot be hate. But Paul and I both tell you, God is indeed both. God loves, and because God loves, He hates. God loves righteousness, so He hates unrighteousness. God loves children, so He hates those who kill and assault them. God loves His people, so He hates what harms them. To love intensely, you must hate the opposite of what you love with the same intensity. This is God.

The Matter of Compassion

Psalm 135:14 says, “For Yahweh will vindicate His people and have compassion on His servants.”

Psalm 135:14 says, “For Yahweh will vindicate His people and have compassion on His servants.” In line with what I said moments ago, we see there is no strange dichotomy between compassion and vengeance. If you love strongly, you hate just as strongly. God loves His people strongly; His compassion on them is beyond our understanding, even though it is written numerous times. Because His compassion is on His people, and He vindicates them, or justifies them, He commits acts of what we would call atrocity on those who harm them.

The demons, those following Satan, who attempt to inflict themselves on God’s creation in a manner of ways for evil and chaos seek nothing but to harm. They will influence the world and attack God’s chosen ones, whether we speak of Israelites or professing believers. God strikes down the nations of these people. He tears kings from their thrones. He annihilates entire generations because He hates them for their evil against His people. He hates their attacks on His chosen ones as the enemy seeks to pull them from His grasp.

The demons are bound for the lake of fire already. The people who reject God will go there as well. This is a matter of compassion just as much as it is vindication just as much as it is hate. They all go hand in hand. God loves His people and holds them close to justify their place as His creation; He has compassion on them in His hatred against the demons and those who take the broad way, and in this compassion towards His people and hatred of those who hate Him and seek to harm His people, He will slaughter and annihilate and turn them toward the lake of fire.

They go hand in hand. They are inseparable. For God to love us as greatly as He does, there is a necessity of hate against those who oppose Him, and, by proxy, us. For God to have compassion at all, He must have a hate that makes that compassion required. You can’t rightfully claim God does not hate evil, but you also can’t rightfully claim that God does not love, and have compassion on, those who come to Him.

The Forgiving Dawn - Psalm 130

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The Reality of Mercy

I think we often have an inflated view of ourselves. I don’t think it’s difficult to see how this occurs when so many people believe they can work their way to Heaven. I came across this turn of phrase again recently and remembered how sad of a mindset it is: “Do your best, and let God do the rest.”

At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with this idea, but at closer inspection, we can see behind it this notion that we can somehow close the gap between our sin and God’s righteousness with a measure of hard work, and, that, once we are finished coming close by our own power, God’s power is sufficient to cover the final distance.

The fault, as always, lies on our prideful thoughts that, somehow, we have the ability to come close to God with human power. But even our very first act of drawing near to Him is originated in the work of the Holy Spirit, who reaches out to us in order to affect our whole selves in seeing the glory of the Lord. In the very first moment of the first step to salvation, the mercy of God works, for it is by no other power that we reach out to perfection but perfection Himself.

Psalm 130:3-4 says, “Yahweh, if You considered sins, Lord, who could stand? But with You there is forgiveness, so that You may be revered.”

Psalm 130:3-4 says, “Yahweh, if You considered sins, Lord, who could stand? But with You there is forgiveness, so that You may be revered.”

This idea, perpetuated in much scripture, is how we get the series of events that first, God moves; then, we accept His work. If God considered sins, none could stand, and we know that the sins of the nonbeliever are, indeed, considered, lest there would be no judgment. But His forgiveness, which He reaches out to us, gives us the platform to revere Him.

This is mercy, that forgiveness is outpoured, and in this outpouring, we may glorify Him by His Spirit, which draws us near to Him. The form and function are that God’s power covers the entire distance, and our only involvement in the process is crucifying ourselves for the Spirit to do His work.

Awaiting Dawn

The great news about mercy is that it’s new every morning. Lamentations 3:22-23 says, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning: great is Your faithfulness.” Psalm 30:5 says, “For His anger lasts only a moment, but His favor, a lifetime. Weeping may spend the night, but there is joy in the morning.”

Pardon me for being so literal, but at each new dawn, there comes new mercy, there comes new grace, there comes new forgiveness for everything that happened in the darkness of night. There comes an abatement of righteous anger because the Lord is pleased to show favor to those He loves, if only we might find ourselves willing to wait through the night, watching for His mercy.

Psalm 130:5-6 says, “I wait for Yahweh; I wait and put my hope in His word. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning—more than watchmen for the morning.”

Psalm 130:5-6 says, “I wait for Yahweh; I wait and put my hope in His word. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning—more than watchmen for the morning.” Throughout history, the most terrifying, nerve wracking, and stressful time to be a guard is at night. Night is when the attacks come. Whether a guard is defending an encampment of soldiers and fears for a sneak attack, or even the prowling predator looking for a meal; watching over the walls of a city for enemy soldiers preparing to siege; or even a castle hoping to hold out a defensive position, he watches, trembling, hoping that nothing occurs before dawn. Because if it does, a battle is to come.

This is the image we see in Psalm 130. It’s not dissimilar from the ideas perpetuated in the The Parable of the Ten Virgins from Matthew 25 or the thief in the night from Matthew 25. We stand on guard as a soldier on a watchtower, waiting and hoping that our Savior comes.

When the Dawn Comes

Ephesians 6: 18 says, “Pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and request, and stay alert in this with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints.”

The reason we wait so attentively is because we know what the dawn means, what the arrival of the Savior means. In the night, there is the stress of keeping on guard. Ephesians 6: 18 says, “Pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and request, and stay alert in this with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints.” This is the role of the guard on watch. He stays alert, interceding for all in the city, ensuring that no enemy may sneak in to harm the guard or the citizens within the walls.

But in the morning, when the dawn comes, the city awakens, and the light of the sun makes it easy to see what’s outside the walls. The defensive readiness of the city is no longer an issue because an attacker can be seen from miles away. There is no fear or worry that an enemy might be right at the gates.

The arrival of the Savior means the guard can relax. It means that we no longer have to worry about sin and the powers and principalities that perpetuate it. When the Savior makes His arrival, all evil will be washed away, unable to touch us. When redemption comes, when perfection comes, we can finally let down our guard and stop straining against the darkness for any sight of the prowling enemy. There will be no darkness, only light.

But until that day comes, we stand watch, persevering, hoping in His promise that He will come, awaiting the mercy that comes to us in the morning.

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Protection of the Oppressed - Psalm 129

The Background

Tuesday nights are one of three Bible study nights for me. I like to keep busy, and moreover, I love to study the Word with like-minded believers my age. We want to not just know the Word but also how others are seeing the Word and what we can do to teach those around us.

So Tuesday, May 9, we talked about demon possession and oppression. The world moves in cycles, and one on repeat recently has been this heavy focus on the work of the demonic. Ephesians 6 tells us that our war is not against flesh and blood but powers and principalities and commands us to put on spiritual armor, the armor of God, to combat it. It’s fairly clear Paul speaks of the demonic and not in a sense that the works of demons will cease until the judgment day.

The Theology of Evil Activity

We began with the foregone conclusion that those born of the Spirit of God, who indwells all who profess belief in Christ through repentance, are forever marked safe from the act of demonic possession. God is light, and there is no darkness in Him (1 John 1:5). The forces of darkness cannot overpower the Holy Spirit of God, and, thus, they are incapable of forcing Him to move from the temple He has chosen to indwell in order to occupy it for themselves.

But we reached many conclusions within this conversation about the works of evil, first and foremost of which is the sovereignty of God. In Job, whether we see this as mere metaphor or true story, God is the author of Job’s blessings and the allowance for his suffering. It is He who says to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” (Job 1:8).

Blameless, God calls him. There aren’t many in scripture who receive this distinction. Satan states Job’s righteousness is because of his blessings and seeks permission to take them away. God grants it, and so we have the book of Job. But there’s an important act to focus on. In order to touch Job or his blessings, Satan had to ask permission, and then God had to allow it. Sovereignty. Not even evil occurs without God’s okay. There are many tough theological nuts in here to crack, but I don’t have space for that here.

The understanding reached from this comes from many places. First, Paul’s declaration about the messenger of Satan he attempts to pray away thrice, and thrice, God refuses him. Second, Paul also writes in Romans 8:28 that all things work for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose (capitalization of “His” added by me). Third is Paul writing the reason this messenger of Satan is allowed to continue tormenting him: “to keep me from becoming conceited” (2 Cor. 12:7). So we see that God allows the works of evil to afflict His beloved in order that He might sanctify them fully because it is for their good.

A friend of mine often says, “God will always trade the finite for the infinite.” I find this to be accurate to a Tee. Both Peter, James, and Paul write multiple times of present suffering for eternal glorification and reward. God works in this just as much as He does in blessing, and we can’t discount this from the OT either: Israel is constantly being left to experience evil temporarily in order that they might come closer to God for permanent rescue. The story of God’s work is using the evil and pain and hurt of the world in order to affect His people to come closer, and as they do, they find blessing.

The Endless Battle

So we finally come to Psalm 129 — in the HCSB, this psalm is entitled “Protection of the Oppressed.” Verses 1-2 say, “Since my youth they have often attacked me—let Israel say—Since my youth they have often attacked me, but they have not prevailed against me.”

I’ll bring Paul back for just a moment: daily, he was attacked by this messenger of Satan. Whatever this thorn was, it was constant, consistent, and debilitating enough that it could keep him from inflating in pride. If the attacks ceased, might Paul have become prideful? We don’t know, but the discussion was had that in all things, there is good to be had for those who love God and are called according to His purpose.

I say all this to bring it back to what this psalm is titled and the information it carries: it is not “Deliverance of the Oppressed,” nor “Freedom for the Oppressed,” but “Protection of the Oppressed.” Now I’m aware that this psalm isn’t titled this way originally. But the scripture tells the same point. Nowhere in this psalm does it indicate that Israel permanently pacifies their enemy. Instead, it states they continued to attack, but they never prevailed.

The messenger of Satan against Paul never prevailed or we’d have a much smaller NT. Satan never prevailed against Job, for Job never once cursed God. He questioned, he struggled, and he cursed the day he was born, but Satan did not win Job’s curse. David was attacked by Saul over and over and over as he was inflicted by evil, yet David became the man after God’s own heart. In each case, a man was oppressed, and in each case, he was protected from turning away. His life was not stolen, and especially Job is very clear about that: Satan was allowed to touch Job, to inflict him with illness, but his life was not on the table.

Everything in a believer’s life works for ultimate good. You may be oppressed, whether by the work of the demonic or your own fleshly desires, but have these things stolen you from God? If not, you are protected. If you still seek God; if you still praise Him for His goodness; if you are still His (for who can pluck you from His hand?) then you are protected. You may be attacked ceaselessly, but driving back the attack and continuing to serve the Lord is a victory in and of itself.

Doing is Learning

Jonah is a book that we often reference as an example of what happens when you run away from God and His plan, but, and I speak mostly from anecdotal experience here, we rarely talk about why Jonah ran. And, personally, I find that odd because the reason Jonah ran, and the work God was doing in that time, is probably more important than the lesson to not run.

If you haven’t heard Jonah’s story, the summary is this: Jonah was tasked to go to Nineveh by God to deliver the message of their impending destruction for their evil acts, but he refused to go, instead attempting to run as far in the opposite direction as he could by sea. When a storm arose and threatened to sink the ship he was on, he directed the sailors to throw him overboard to calm the seas so they might live, and when he landed in the waters, he was swallowed by a whale or a giant fish, depending on your translation. After three days and nights, the whale/fish spat him up onto shore and he traveled to Nineveh where he prophesied their destruction, and the entire city repented at once.

Now, typically, we stop there when we tell Jonah’s story, but I believe the rest tells us so much more about God and how He works in our lives.

 Jonah’s Hatred of Assyria

Firstly, we need to understand the reason Jonah did not want to travel to Nineveh. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to make the journey, nor was it to avoid his responsibility as a prophet, necessarily. Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh because he hated the Ninevites. The people of Nineveh were diametrically opposed to everything God stands for. God is love; Nineveh was hate. God is peace; Nineveh was war. God is just; Nineveh was cruel.

Assyrians, the people of Nineveh, had a reputation as a warmongering people. They were a cultural and military power in the area because they were ruthless and evil. Everywhere they invaded, they caused widespread destruction, captured, tortured, and raped the people who lived there, and took those who survived as slaves. And as much as Jonah hated the Ninevites, the Ninevites hated Israel; the two nations had mighty conflicts frequently throughout biblical times. And it was for all these reasons Jonah hated them.

If you paid attention while reading through Jonah 1, however, you might still be questioning why Jonah refused to go to Nineveh. After all, God told Jonah to prophesy about their destruction, and surely Jonah would be fine and dandy with that since he hated them so much, right? And that’s the right question to ask. Once you get there, you start to understand just how well Jonah knows God as His prophet and just how deep his hatred for the Ninevites runs. And to see the whole picture, we’ll have to skip around in the book a little bit.

Why Jonah Refused to Prophesy

Jonah 1:1-2 says, “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because their wickedness has confronted Me.”

Jonah 3:4 tells us that he did just that, eventually, though his sermon was quite lackluster by most accounts. He might’ve even take some form of sadistic glee in delivering his five word message (in Hebrew). “Jonah set out on the first day of his walk in the city and proclaimed, ‘In 40 days, Nineveh will be demolished!’”

And to wrap it up, Jonah himself tells us why he didn’t want to prophesy to the Ninevites in Jonah 4:1-2.

“But Jonah was greatly displeased and became furious. He prayed to the Lord: ‘Please, Lord, isn’t this what I said while I was still in my own country? That’s why I fled toward Tarshish in the first place. I knew that You are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to become angry, rich in faithful love, and One who relents from sending disaster.”

To be very clear, Jonah knew who God is. He knew very well that the reason God sent him to Nineveh was not so Nineveh would be aware of their destruction so they could keep marching toward it, but so that they could repent and be saved from doom. Jonah refused to go because he didn’t want the Ninevites to be saved. He wanted them destroyed, dead, eternally. That was the depth of his hatred.

God Cares for All His People

After Jonah reveals the nature of his thoughts in prayer to God, however, is where the real theme of the book of Jonah reveals itself, and it all comes from a shade tree.

Jonah 4:4-9 says, “The Lord asked, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’

Jonah left the city and sat down east of it. He made himself a shelter there and sat in its shade to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God appointed a plant, and it grew up to provide shade over Jonah’s head to ease his discomfort. Jonah was greatly pleased with the plant. When dawn came the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, and it withered. As the sun was rising, God appointed a scorching east wind. The sun beat down so much on Jonah’s head that he almost fainted, and he wanted to die. He said, ‘It’s better for me to die than to live.’

Then God asked Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It is right. I’m angry enough to die!’”

There are a few incredibly important things to point out in these verses, the first of which is God’s dual response to Jonah’s anger. He asks the same things both times Jonah admits to being upset with his situation: “Is it right for you to be angry?” At first glance, it seems to be a relatively innocent question with little connection between the two occurrences, but it becomes apparent in Jonah’s response to the plant providing shade for him what the purpose of the question is.

 God Cares for All His People

Verse 6 tells us that Jonah was greatly pleased with the plant, which he did not grow, but benefited from greatly, and it is in the understanding of this where God begins to reveal the purpose of having Jonah deliver the prophecy to Nineveh and the purpose of this book for us.

Verses 10-11 say, “So the Lord said, ‘You cared about the plant, which you did not labor over and did not grow. It appeared in a night and perished in a night. Should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot distinguish between their right and their left, as well as many animals?”

The Dual Nature of God’s Work

If you paid close attention to this book, you might notice that in God’s actions to move Jonah to Nineveh, He prompts two distinct outcomes in the people who experience them. The first example of this is when He brings about the storm while Jonah is at sea. When Jonah is tossed off the boat as a result of this storm, the sailors who threw him overboard know that they have experienced the one true God, and chapter 1 tells us they turned away from their pagan gods and to Yahweh, sacrificing and making vows to Him. The second result of this is in Jonah, who repents of his actions and chooses to go to Nineveh as he was asked.

This establishes an important standard for how events play out in the book of Jonah. Essentially, the formula is, wherever Jonah goes, God does two things: He impacts the people around Jonah, and He teaches Jonah a lesson about who He is.

Thus, Nineveh, where God impacts all the Ninevites, turning them to Him. But rather than learn his lesson this time, Jonah spits God’s character into His face, angry at God for being who He is. So God uses the plant to knock the lesson into Jonah’s thick skull: all people are His creation, and He is allowed to care for them all equally, to have mercy for them all equally. After all, He made them, labored over them, and knows them all individually.

 The Lessons for Us

And that’s two of the three main lessons we’re supposed to learn here, too. Firstly, it is that God cares for all His creation because He is jealous for them, invested in them. He created every single person and loves each one, and because of that, He chooses to save them. Secondly, we didn’t do any of those things, so our feelings shouldn’t negatively impact our mission to point them to God. We don’t get a vote in who God chooses for us to deliver His message because we had no part in making them; we just go deliver the message.

And finally, the third lesson comes in the revealed theme: when God calls us to do something, the benefit isn’t only for the people we’re called to help. Twice, Jonah’s actions helped others, and twice, God revealed more of Himself to Jonah through those actions. Jonah learned about God’s character: how He saves those who turn to Him, and how He cares and has mercy for all of His creation.

So the next time God calls you to do something for someone else, think about why He’s given you that task. Don’t just do it to do it, but truly seek God in the doing of it. You might find that you benefit from your actions just as much as the people you help.

Completely Destroy Sin

I champion the Israelites as our (current Christians) people because we are, in so many ways, exactly like them. Put simply, we are mirror images of each other in every way that matters, which is why it’s so brilliant to read through the struggles of the Israelite people and identify with them as I do so. It also makes for great teaching material because we can see exactly what helped them succeed and what caused them to fail. If our God is a God of metaphors, which I say He is, then the Israelites are our big metaphor, our great comparison.

And in Deuteronomy, they have quite a lot to teach us on how to best sin.

Doing What We Don’t Want

For me, it’s a fact of the matter that I sometimes feel too weak to stand up to the sin I perpetuate in my life. When I’m in a cycle of, as Paul says, doing things I don’t want to do, that I know are wrong, I frequently feel incapable of driving out the feelings, temptations, and behaviors I know are incorrect.

But what is truly factual is that I, and we, have the strength to destroy sin at its source in the flesh, just as the Israelites did, thanks to the power of God going before us and fighting the battle.

The Big Metaphor

If you pay close attention as you read the Old Testament, you’ll find an incredibly stark contrast between the Israelites and everyone else, and if you break that contrast down to its simplest pieces, you get two different adjectives to describe them. For the Israelites, we have righteous; for everyone else, we have sinful.

It’s fairly easy to work out: God’s people are righteous, just as we are made righteous when we become His today, and everything that is not with God is against God. Every person and thing that does not belong to God is sin.

It’s simple, then, to carry on this idea of the Israelites driving other peoples out of the Promised Land as driving out sin. (It’s even easier to carry on the idea when you read Deut. 7 because the Bible just tells you, but I had to explain the big comparison between the Israelites and us for teaching’s sake.)

The Strength to Thoroughly Destroy Sin

Jumping back up to the idea from the introduction in this post, the Israelites, then, felt too weak to destroy the sin they faced in the Promised Land. If you’ll remember, they were exiled from the land for 40 years because they were too afraid to fight for it, thinking they would be destroyed by the nations in it.

But, what the Israelites, and we, often forgot in fear, is that they had the strength from God to drive out that which does not belong, that which is not good.

Deuteronomy 7:15b, 17-19 says, “He will not put on you all the terrible diseases of Egypt that you know about, but He will inflict them on all who hate you. (17) If you say to yourself, ‘These nations are greater than I; how can I drive them out?’ do not be afraid of them. Be sure to remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all Egypt: the great trials that you saw, the signs and wonders, the strong hand and outstretched arm, by which the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the peoples you fear.”

Fear of being incapable, fear of the sin we face, even fear of facing God in our failures can hold us back from defeating sin. But God has given us the strength to destroy it, just like He gave the Israelites strength to destroy the nations inhabiting the Promised Land if they would stop being afraid of the people because of what they looked like.

But if we remember the strength of God to defeat our sinful natures and pull us to Him for salvation, if we remember the miracles He worked to draw us away from death in the first place, we’ll remember He easily has the power to inflict destruction on our sin now that we are His.

Why We Fail to Defeat Sin

Sometimes, even though we have the strength of God on our side, we still fail to defeat sin, though, right? Paul most certainly had the Lord with him whenever he was tempted, and still he sinned and did things he didn’t want to do. That’s because, so often, we fail to completely drive out and annihilate sin in the place we live.

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 says, “When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess, and He drives out many nations before you—the Hittities, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and powerful than you—and when the Lord your God delivers them over to you and you defeat them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.”

And just like the Israelites, when we fail to completely destroy sin and route any chances it has at coming back to us, it slithers its way back into our lives. That’s why Matthew 5:29-30 urges us to gouge out our eye or cut off our hand if it causes us to sin because that’s the kind of extremism we need to go to in order to completely eliminate sin. (Please don’t actually go cutting your hands off and pulling your eyes out at the behest of this blog post.) It’s a metaphorical expression of extremism: whatever it takes for you, do it to stop yourself from sinning.

Extremist Application Methods

God’s goal with the Israelites was to create a land without even the barest hint of potential temptation for idolatry because He knew that was the only way the Israelites could resist putting the gods of Earth above Himself. That’s why Deuteronomy 7 is almost completely full of God telling them to destroy literally every last bit of the culture, practices, and evidences of the people who once lived there.

For us, it’s much of the same. When you allow yourself to even briefly consider sin, you’ve opened yourself up to temptation that is difficult to resist (Matthew 5:27-28). That’s why you must go to incredible extremes to avoid the hints of sin all around us. If that means you have to give up social media, TV, music, reading, sports, games, whatever, you should do it until you are capable of standing up to the temptation with God-given strength.

You have to destroy the world around you (metaphorically) to keep it from infecting you with sin until you glow brightly enough with the power of God to walk through the darkness without stumbling.

Living is Christ

What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? Why are we here?

These questions plague the minds of nearly every person, if not individually, then collectively. It’s been the struggle of secular humanity since the beginning of time due to the belief that life was created by mere accident.

As believers, we know we have a purpose; we know we’re here for a reason, but I honestly find myself thinking that even we sometimes don’t grasp the “why” fully, even though it’s written out for us plain as day in the Bible.

The Problem with our Purpose Vocabulary

As is often the case, I find that our vocabulary starts the problem. I hear this around the church fairly often: God’s got a purpose for you; you may not know what it is yet, but you’re still here to do something. The problem with this phrase is that you do know what your purpose is already. What you might not know is the method by which you fulfill that purpose.

Here’s the thing. Once you become a believer, your purpose is the exact same as every other believer’s purpose: to make disciples. Your only goal, your only reason for still being alive is to point nonbelievers to Christ. That’s it. It really is that simple. If you don’t believe me, allow me to point you to Philippians 1:21, which says, “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

More on the second part later, but for now, let’s break down the first part. To live is Christ means that while you are alive, you are to be Christ. Disregarding all the things about Christ that we can’t achieve, such as perfection and sacrificing ourselves for the sins of all, what was Jesus’s purpose while He was here? His purpose was to make disciples so that people could be saved!

So, if we follow the Bible, which we should be doing, every believer’s goal is to be like Christ while they live. This means the purpose for each Christian life is the exact same; the only difference is the method. Just like Jesus fulfilled His purpose in a variety of ways: teaching, preaching, healing, etc. so are we to fulfill our purpose in varying ways. Believe it or not, this is also biblically sound.

Spiritual Gifts Give us the Means to Fulfill our Shared Purpose

Whether you get your list of spiritual gifts from 1 Corinthians 12 or Romans 12, they’re both a list of ways for believers to show the power and glory of God to the world. What they are not is a list of purposes for you to fulfill. If your spiritual gift is wisdom, you are not in this world to be wise. You are in this world to use the wisdom God has granted you to point people to Him. Likewise, if your gift is healing or prophecy, your purpose is not to heal or prophesy. Your purpose is to point people to Christ by providing mental, physical, or emotional healing or by speaking the Word of God to those who need to hear the message.

I’ve already written on this, too, but it needs repeating for context here, so I’ll cover it briefly. Paul provides us yet more proof that our purposes are one and the same following his list of the spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12. (You can check out the original post here: https://nathanielgevans.net/blog/unique-positioning.)

Every last part of your body serves the same purpose: keeping you alive. Your liver does it by purging toxins. Your heart does it by pumping blood. Your lungs do it by giving you oxygen. Your intestines do it by gathering nutrients from the food you eat. If the body of Christ is a body, each part is unified in fulfilling the purpose of the body while diversified in how they go about the process.

By this point, I’m hopefully beating a dead horse about our purpose being the same, so I’ll move on.

Lack of Purpose Fulfillment

Earlier, I quoted Philippians 1:21 and mentioned I’d get back to the second part later. Later is now. Something that disturbs me about Christians nowadays is the penchant for ignoring 1:21a and skipping straight to the second half of the verse: to die is gain.

For whatever reason, a number of Christians are so focused on the end times, on Jesus coming back, that they aren’t bothering to fulfill their purpose. They just want to die so they can get to Heaven; they just want the second coming so they can end their existence on this planet and be completed with God.

And to be fair, the desire to be complete and in Heaven is a good one. I can’t begrudge that because I believe that growing closer to God implants an intense desire to be with Him in our glorified bodies. There’s not even anything wrong with being prepared for Jesus’s second coming. The Bible says we must be ready for it to occur at any time (Matthew 24:42-44). What I can begrudge is those who neglect their purpose while on the path to true sanctification.

End Times Preparation

So, if just waiting in anticipation isn’t what you should be doing, what should you be doing? Why, fulfilling your purpose, of course; it’s selfish to do otherwise and in complete contradiction to God’s character. You can even see a clear example right at the crucifixion.

Even unto the moment of His death, Jesus was saving people. Luke 23:42-43 depicts Jesus saving one of the men being crucified with Him right before they were both to die on crosses. There’s even a chance that a Roman centurion who was there was saved as Jesus died. Three of the gospels include text indicating that at least one man knew Jesus to be the Son of God at the moment of His death.

What believers should be focusing on in Philippians 1:21 is the first half of the verse: living as Christ. We should settle for nothing less than doing as He did, preaching, teaching, healing, loving as He did. Whatever the method we were granted by God to fulfill our purpose, every action we take should be tailored toward making Heaven more crowded, right up until our dying breath. We should even hope for our actions to be so purpose-driven that they inspire people to turn to Christ after our death. If your every action isn’t directing people to Jesus, you’re doing it wrong.

Eating the Manna

Long time; no write! I could make plenty of excuses, but the fact of the matter is that I just haven’t written and created teaching lessons like I should have been doing. Though, sometimes, one of the best ways to learn from me might be learning how not to do things.

So, I have a short lesson before my actual lesson for this blog post: don’t fall into the trap of requiring motivation or a burst of God-given energy to do things you know are proper in your walk with God. Following Christ is not about motivation or feelings. It’s about self-denial and doing what is right in God’s sight. For more on that, check out this blog post: https://nathanielgevans.net/blog/when-motivations-gone

Our Humanity Desires Comfort Over Goodness

In our imperfection, we don’t always desire what is genuinely best for ourselves. We have issues with following Christ to what is actually good because the path to righteousness is difficult and sometimes painful. We are incredibly shortsighted, especially compared to the vision of God’s plans for our lives, and our ability to see goodness is determined not by what is actually good, but by the circumstances that surround us at the moment.

Our definition of “good” is circumstantial, subjective, even, whereas God’s definition of “good” is objective, and His is actually correct.

As a child growing up, I often hated going to bed. Not because I was energetic and hated sleep, although I did, but because the growing pains that afflicted me at night terrified me because they hurt so much. I thought they were the epitome of evil; at times, I thought I would’ve preferred to remain in a child’s body forever if it meant not going through those pains.

But in my shortsightedness, I wasn’t ready to consider that what I needed was growth. All I could see was the pain that accompanied it. Had I remained in my body as a child, I would be completely unable to do any of the things I do today. It would not be good for me now, and it wouldn’t even be as comfortable as it was when I was a kid. Now, being in the body I have is both more comfortable and better for me.

Growing Pains in The Christian Life

Things work the same way in our second lives as born-again believers. What was comfortable for us as nonbelievers is neither genuinely comfortable nor good for us. What was comfortable for our understanding as children in the faith is not comfortable as adults in the faith. There were things we couldn’t comprehend on our biblical milk diet that become difficult and possibly painful as we transition to bread and meat.

There are thousands upon thousands of metaphorical situations I could present to supplement this lesson, but the best one comes straight from our most accurate representation in the Bible: the Israelites.

The Israelites’ Desire for “Comfortable” Slavery

In Numbers 11, only a short time before the Israelites arrived outside the Promised Land, a number of people began to complain about their metaphorical growing pains.

Verses 1, 4-9 say, “Now the people began complaining openly before the Lord about hardship. When the Lord heard, His anger burned, and fire from the Lord blazed among them and consumed the outskirts of the camp. (4) Contemptible people among them had a strong craving for other food. The Israelites cried again and said, ‘Who will feed us meat? We remember the free fish we ate in Egypt, along with the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. But now our appetite is gone; there’s nothing to look at but this manna!’ The manna resembled coriander seed, and its appearance was like that of bdellium. The people walked around and gathered it. They ground it on a pair of grinding stones or crushed it in a mortar, then boiled it in a cooking pot and shaped it into cakes. It tasted like a pastry cooked with the finest oil. When the dew fell on the camp at night, the manna would fall with it.”

Let’s put these verses in context. The Israelites had recently been rescued from slavery in Egypt where Pharaoh had issued a decree to kill all their male children right after birth. In Exodus 1, we’re told the Egyptians cruelly and ruthlessly worked the Israelites to the bone, hoping to make their lives as bitter as possible so they would become weak. Exodus 3:9 says their spirits were broken by the nature of the slavery forced upon them.

When the Israelites were brought out of their slavery, their trek to the Promised Land was through some of the harshest terrain found on Earth: the desert (The map below shows their path, but if you want to know how it really looks, check the satellite view on Google Maps. That should give you some real perspective). Numbers 1:46 says that the number of Israelites present in the wilderness just over a year after they left Egypt was over 600,000 (and that’s just those over 20 years old). If you know anything about the desert, you know that there is no way it could’ve supported that many people as they traveled through. Not without the divine intervention of God, anyway.

This map shows the area the Israelites traveled through from Egypt.

And divinely intervene, He did. God provided for every need the Israelites could’ve had as they wandered through the desert, even after they continuously rebelled against Him worshiping idols and intermarrying with other people groups. Even when they didn’t trust Him enough to take the Promised Land they were given, He provided for them in the wilderness for 40 years until they finally grew enough in their faith to enter a place overflowing with natural resources and the ability to easily sustain their numbers with excess.

The Difficulty of Current Trials Blinds Us

The Israelites had no right or reason to complain about their circumstances, but in their shortsightedness, they let the repetitive food cloud their understanding of what was good for them. Despite the fact that the food they had would’ve been some of the most delicious tasting stuff you could eat, they longed for what they thought was better in their past: the cuisine of Egypt. Their subjective understanding of “good” caused them to forget about or minimize the struggles they faced during their slavery in Egypt in favor of scratching an itch they had at that moment: the desire for different food.

In that moment of human imperfection and weakness, the desire for something as simple as different food clouded the vision of these people until they couldn’t see the goodness God had promised for their future and the atrocities He rescued them from in their past. Thankfully, God had a plan for that. Unfortunately, it hurt far more than just eating the manna and thanking God for their blessings would have.

God’s Answer to Our Misled Desires

Numbers 11:31-33 says, “A wind sent by the Lord came up and blew quail in from the sea; it dropped them at the camp all around, three feet off the ground, about a day’s journey in every direction. The people were up all that day and night and all the next day gathering the quail—the one who took the least gathered 50 bushels—and they spread them out all around the camp. While the meat was still between their teeth, before it was chewed, the Lord’s anger burned against the people, and the Lord struck them with a very severe plague.

Regardless of the Israelites’ personal feelings on their diet, the fact of the matter is that they were incredibly ungrateful. They fought against God in their craving of what was not good, what was lesser, and were corrected in their beliefs.

Regardless of what the plague was that they were afflicted with, it was certainly deadly to a number of them, and it was meant to be, undoubtedly. But it served its purpose in teaching the Israelites a lesson: the things of the past, the things they enjoyed in Egypt might have seemed good at first, but they came with a painful consequence. That consequence far outweighed the good that they enjoyed. After all, is a good-tasting quail really worth death? No.

And a lesson the Israelites should have learned upon their arrival to the Promised Land, that we can learn from now, was that God’s goodness for us is undoubtedly worth the minuscule pain we perceive when we are being delivered to it; the goodness of the Promised Land and its bountiful abundance was most certainly worth the time spent eating manna.

A Life of Joy is Worth a Little Manna

So, apply this to your life. When things seem a little annoying or painful in your walk with God, when the path God is guiding you down leads you through a desert and provides you manna to sustain you, remember the lesson the Israelites should’ve learned: a life of bountiful joy is undoubtedly worth eating a little bit of manna.

Harshness of Sins

If you grew up going to church, it’s likely that, at some point in your life, you were told all sins are equal, for the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). And that is fully true; I’m not here to discount that fact in the slightest. All sin leads to death—a final, eternal death followed by everlasting torment in Hell. The Bible is frequently very clear on that subject. But this known fact presents an interesting moral quandary—at least it does to me.

The Moral Quandary of Sin Equality

When you only acknowledge that all sins are equal because they all lead to death, you create some interesting thought patterns. All of a sudden, you must determine whether you treat all sins as harshly as murder or rape, or as lightly as a white lie. For if all sins are equal, they must all be treated the same, as the reasoning follows. With this follow-through, you can’t treat a murderer as any worse than a liar, and you can’t treat a liar as any better than a murderer.

For me, this completely fails to satisfy the innate morality impressed upon me by the image of God I am made of. And I believe that if you seriously consider it, we can all come to agreement on this. The nature of this sinful world is actually that all sins are equal. It’s built into phrases like “the ends justify the means,” which dictate that, so long as the end goal is accomplished, whatever is done to make it to that goal is perfectly allowable.

But God’s character doesn’t work that way. For God, the means justify the end, such that what is done on the journey leads to the final result. That is precisely why we cannot work our way to Heaven—our means are not good enough to get us to the end. Only by the means of Jesus’s death and resurrection are we justified to the end.

One Sin Cannot be Forgiven

If you truly pay attention to the Bible, you can find many instances when one sin was regarded as a less grievous offense than another, but let’s start with the biggest.

Matthew 12:31-32 says, “Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this are or in the age to come.

It really doesn’t get clearer than this. All sins can be forgiven except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. But that does mean there is a distinction among sins—some can be forgiven, and one cannot be. (There are different people who interpret what, exactly, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is. It’s not the purpose of this article, but in my opinion—based on the character of God—blasphemy against the Holy Spirit likely means a rejection of the Spirit, i.e., a rejection of the gift of salvation. That’s literally the only thing that will keep you from Heaven.)

Distinction Among Sins in the Old Testament

There are further distinction among the severity of sin offenses, too. Some of the clearest levels of sin distinction appear in Exodus and Leviticus as God lays down laws for the Israelites to follow, and more importantly in this case, how to profess repentance and find forgiveness for breaking those laws.

Exodus 21:12-14 describes a difference between planned murder and an accidental death. To murder was to invite the death penalty as punishment, but if it happened by accident, punishment was exile.

Fighting someone and injuring them required one to pay for lost work time and provide for the recovery of the person who was injured, as stated in verses 18-19. There are far more distinctions in chapters 21-23, but you’ll have to read those on your own time.

In Leviticus, God requires the Israelite people to provide different sacrifices depending upon the severity of the crime they committed against Him. Leviticus 4:3, 22-23, 27-28 and chapter 5:14-15 detail different sin sacrifices one must offer up based on their position within the people and the sins they committed.

We can even find direct contrasts of sins in situations like Abraham lying to Abimelek about Sarah being his sister and not his wife. There’s an argument to be made that Abraham was not lying because Sarah was technically his half-sister but lying by leaving things out is just as much a lie as directly stating incorrect information. Yet, Abraham did not receive punishment worth mentioning in the Bible for his lie, whereas we are told Abimelek would’ve been punished harshly had he been intimate with Sarah.

A Hierarchy of Commandments

God is incredibly purposeful in how He does everything He does, so it should be no surprise to any of us that the numbering of the Ten Commandments was more than just a way to keep track of how many there are. They’re listed in order of importance, the first being “Do not have any other gods beside me,” from Exodus 20:3.

Jesus reaffirms this in Matthew 22:34-38. The greatest commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second: love your neighbor as yourself.

And if there is a hierarchy of laws, it stands to reason there is a hierarchy of transgressions against the law. Thus, the worst sin would be to not love God. The second worst would be to not love others, and so on.

The Greatest Conundrum

I could go on and on listing sins and their punishments for thousands of words, but I leave it up to you to continue doing research in your own reading of the Bible, but it really all boils down to this: we believe all sins are equal because one price was paid for them all: Jesus’s death on the cross. But if you truly believe a murderer is no worse than a liar, then I challenge you to view Jesus’s sacrifice for sins not as one massive sacrifice, but as many, many trillions of sacrifices, each one equal to a sin that was, or will be, committed.

See, the sacrifice wasn’t just His death. It was the experience of separation from God He took on for every transgression against God. For the murderer, Jesus would’ve experience the punishment for murder. For a liar, He would’ve experienced the punishment for lying. For sexual immorality, the punishment for it, etc. For a God who is just, who outlines justice in His very character, who loves what is good and hates, detests, what is bad, there is distinction.

We see things as black and white or varying shades of gray far too often. Instead, many things are both. Character, morality, sin, and the law are both black and white and shades at the same time. There is a distinct line separating what is good and what is bad. Of that there is no doubt in the Bible. But there are things on the bad side that are farther away from the line. Liars stand much closer to the line of the law than murderers.

How Should We Treat Sin?

That is a far easier question than, “Is all sin equal?” The Bible is far, far clearer on this subject. In John 8:7, Jesus says, “Let he who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

When it comes to your own sins, let your understanding of God’s character be the drive for your own choices—know that, even though some sins are more grievous than others—for the thousandth time I’ll state that it is far worse to murder than to lie—they are all, indeed, punishable by an eternity of separation from God. If you are a follower of Christ, seek to be like God, seek to emulate His character, and you’ll find that you worry less about how to avoid grievous sins and more about how to pursue righteousness. Hate your sin and resist temptation to escape from its grasp. Whether your sin is as harsh as murder or as small as a lie, you still sinned, and you still require redemption. As a liar, you are no better than a murderer in that regard.

When it comes to the actions of others, hate all sin. If you find you have a harsher reaction to murder or rape than thievery in your heart and mind, don’t worry for your salvation, your thoughts, or your heart and their place with God. But do remember that you do not get to mete out justice to those who commit sins against God. God has His holy system, as well as Earthly systems, in place to do that, and it’s not our business to act outside of those.

But truly, when it comes right down to the question of how we should treat sin, there is only one answer: Love your neighbor as yourself. Don’t deny someone the chance to seek Jesus because of their transgressions and your hatred. Until someone dies, they always have a chance to be redeemed, for all sins can be forgiven but one. If God loves them enough to give them a chance by continuing to breathe the breath of life into them, you have no right to take away that chance.

Folly Proves Itself

One of the most advantageous functions of the Christian belief is that it tends to root out those beliefs that are added on to its core and do not fit with the inerrant Word of God. Scrutiny of fake Christian tenets is guided by a strict and infallible gradebook, and one way or another, false beliefs always fail the test against the Bible, against God.

Solomon relates this to us in Ecclesiastes 10:1-4, which my Bible most accurately entitles, “The Burden of Folly.” Verse 1 says, “Dead flies make a perfumer’s oil ferment and stink; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor.

A perfumer’s oil should smell good, pleasant; however, the presence of dead bugs would cause the perfume to react in quite an unpleasant manner. I’m no biologist or chemist, so my less than satisfactory scientific explanation of this verse will have to suffice, but when animals die and are broken down, they typically begin to stink. A perfume would most certainly go from pleasant to unpleasant in the smells department if it were to ferment thanks to the introduction of any organic material that could complete the process.

But since I’m no scientist, and that breakdown was certainly lackluster, here’s an explanation that we can all make sense of:

Foolishness is a dense weight on the scales of life. A visual explanation of folly’s load can be easily found in the riddle, “What weighs more: 100 pounds of bricks or 100 pounds of feathers?” The answer, of course, is that they each weigh the same, but the conundrum is in the number of feathers one must use to equal the bricks. To balance the scales with a single brick of folly, you must match it with 100 feathers of wisdom.

The effect of that riddle, however, is that it plays on the mind by seeming to equate to unequal objects, and we do much the same when it comes to our choices and decisions. The idea of one good decision being the equal of one bad decision is one that has been perpetuated through many cultures and religions since the first sin. It’s the whole idea behind karma, and it is even prominent in certain sects of Christianity. It’s the entire function behind the “good works” faith denominations. If you do enough good, you can outweigh your bad deeds and make it to Heaven.

Speaking of which, this verse does not, in any way, affirm that good works can get you to Heaven. Even ignoring the verses in the New Testament that clearly state you can be saved by God’s grace alone through faith alone, Solomon, I believe because God wrote this through him, is quite intentional with his word choice here in saying that “a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor.” Just the one sin is enough to outweigh all you good deeds.

With all that said, how does one spot a fake Christian belief? Well, by its stench, of course. A nonbiblical belief will stink beyond reason, even if it appears to be on the right path. By default, every other way will prove itself to be wrong at some point in its belief structure. That’s what Solomon says in verses 2-3.

“A wise man’s heart goes to the right, but a fool’s heart to the left. Even when the fool walks along the road, his heart lacks sense, and he shows everyone he is a fool.”

These verses are talking about people, but the idea behind the people applies to everything. A wise man walks the right path. If we equate the Bible with the “right path,” which it is anyway, the wise man follows the tenets of the Bible, and so too do wise ideas. Yet, a foolish man will not follow this path; he wanders aimlessly and, on occasion, stumbles across the road and travels along it for a bit before departing for the wilderness again. So, too, do foolish beliefs.

We can actually see this when we confront even something so broad among nonbelievers as simple morals and laws. To a nonbeliever, killing is, typically, just as wrong as it is to a believer. In this way, they’ve stumbled upon the path, but their reasoning for why killing is wrong will never hold up.

Once you jump down the rabbit hole of questions, there stands no good reason from an atheistic viewpoint that murder is wrong. No matter which way you take it, either no one had the power to decide that it was wrong, or it truly isn’t wrong. But down one path of questioning or the other, the belief has no foundation.

In terms of beliefs among Christians, the good works belief is the easiest demonstration because it can be dismantled with one question: If good works can get you to Heaven, why did Jesus have to sacrifice Himself for our sins? Because, really, if we were capable of paying for our burden ourselves, why would Jesus do it for us and then expect us to do it again by performing good deeds? He wouldn’t.

Metaphorically speaking, then, verse 4 tells us how to react when we spot beliefs that try to usurp God’s character and truth: “If the ruler’s anger rises against you, don’t leave your place, for calmness puts great offenses to rest.”

Being a follower of Christ is a great offense to some. They won’t be able to stand the fact that you believe in God. But the best thing to do is always to remain calm and stay down your path. Your best witness to those people is to always continue doing what you know is right. If you poking holes in the logic of their argument angers them, remember to treat them with love and kindness.

You don’t need to track down false beliefs or threats against the foundations of Christianity; they’ll weed themselves out by virtue of their own imperfections. In your own walk, remember to confront all teachings and beliefs with the Bible. If it doesn’t hold up to God’s Word, it’s not right, no matter what pastor, preacher, podcaster, YouTuber, blogger, or whoever tells you.

All Scripture's Value

“All scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” 2 Timothy 3:16-17. Every Christian should agree about a few things when it comes to the Bible: that it is inerrant, that it was written down by men who were chosen, inspired, and guided by God, and that it is just as useful and needed for believers today as it was for the Israelites and Jews in the times it was written originally.

There are some, however, who seek to twist the word of God into something it’s not, and even more who read the word but are unable to understand it and how it should apply to them.

Indeed, there is, as always, an attack against God and His word found in the so-called “Progressive Christianity” movement. They seek to change the Bible’s tenets and morph the true and inerrant word of God into a book meant to satisfy the world’s desires. They read the Word of God, not as a manual for our behavior or a way to understand the world, but as an influence to be twisted into whatever they feel fits current culture the best. It’s dangerous to them and to anyone who gets caught up in it.

But even true believers sometimes fail to understand God’s truth as they should. The Bible is a difficult book to read and apply to yourself. None of us can do it perfectly. However, God, as always, provides us with a method to help us grow closer to Him.

If you’ve ever struggled reading the Bible and wondering how to apply passages of scripture, you need look no farther than the verse at the beginning of this blog: 2 Timothy 3:16. It gives us four ways that every last verse in the Bible can be used: to teach, to rebuke, to correct, and to train in righteousness.

“Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

— Matthew 24:35

I want to be clear here, too. Passages of scripture are not to be used as an either/or application in this manner. While I can’t speak to Greek sentence structure, I know that God’s word and meaning will be maintained for us to understand how He intended it, and the English meaning here is crystal clear.

In English, we have two forms of series or lists. One of them is an either/or list (it has no name, but for the sake of reducing word waste, I’ll call it a separative list), and the other is an additive list.

Separative lists include the conjunction “or” to separate items from one another, indicating that the items in the list are exclusive from one another. Each item in a list following this word becomes its own one word list. To put it simply, a separative list, such as, “you may have steak or chicken or pork for dinner,” means that whichever you choose, you may not pick the other options. Instead of one list with three items, you end up with three lists with one item.

The additive list includes the conjunction “and.” Each item that comes after this word in a list is added to the list. To put it simply, an additive list, such as, “you may have steak and chicken and pork for dinner,” means that all options can be chosen at the same time. You have one list with three items.

You might be thinking, “Hold on a second, there. Neither of those words appear in the list in 2 Timothy 3:16.” And you are, of course, correct. But what does appear is a comma. In English, commas are always additive, taking the place of the word, “and.” To have a separative list, you must have the word “or” included somewhere, else it defaults to being an additive list. And that’s what I’m getting at here.

If you’re struggling to learn from scripture, it is perhaps because you are being too narrow in your application of it. Instead of simply trying to find how scripture is rebuking your sins or correcting your behavior, think about how it can teach you about God, rebuke your sins, correct your behavior, and train you in how to do better.

The stories in Genesis are more than just stories. Each one of them serves to teach you a lesson about God’s character, rebuke sinful behavior, correct that behavior, and train you in how to behave in the future, it just depends on you to look for each of those things.

Take the story of Joseph, for example. The story teaches us about God’s commitment to His people, His loyalty, and His compassion for those who are mistreated. It rebukes the behavior of Joseph for being too proud in his place in his father’s heart and bragging to his brothers, which you can see in his punishment carried out by his brothers who sold him into slavery. That serves to correct proud behavior. But his brothers are rebuked as well for the revenge and anger they gave into. Their struggles and their shame served to teach both them and us a lesson, correcting that behavior. And, just as Joseph’s life as a slave trained him to be righteous and serve God, it does the same to us, training us to rely on God and do what we know is right even when circumstances don’t look like they’re going our way.

So, if you’re struggling to find meaning in God’s word, if you’re failing to find a way to apply it to your life, read it with 2 Timothy 3:16 in mind, keeping in mind that all four of these lessons are found in each and every passage of scripture. You’ll start to see the old stories and laws still hold quite a bit of knowledge and wisdom where you used to see only dusty words of boredom.

Life Isn't Fair

I think it’s incredible how some people are capable of taking incredibly complex topics and thoughts—wanderings about life, eternity, God, and anything else—and turning them into a paragraph or less that conveys the entirety of the thought process in just a few words. Take a couple of the following quotes, for example:

“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall”

            -Nelson Mandela

“If life were predictable, it would cease to be life and be without flavor.”

            -Eleanor Roosevelt

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.”

            -C.S. Lewis

I mean, I understand words pretty well, and I think I’m decent enough at using them, but some of these folks are able to grasp and synthesize information so well that they’re able to tell books worth of stories in a single sentence. But I came across a sentence today that tells billions of lives worth of stories. It’s found in Ecclesiastes chapter 9, verse 11.

“Again I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, or the battle to the strong, or the bread to the wise, or riches to the discerning, or favor to the skillful; rather, time and chance happen to all of them.”

Man, is there a ton to unpack in that. Not only is Solomon explaining a universal truth that most people accept in each statement, like “the race is not to the swift,” but he’s counteracting them by pointing to the contradictions that come from the world we live in, which is both logically imperfect and divinely oriented.

This sentence briefs the hubris of man in every case, believing that we have guaranteed success when we have gathered sufficient skill, that our achievements come from the diligent work of our own hands and abilities. That’s a fact of our own human pride, and why many believe the way to Heaven is through works.

We believe if we are fast enough, we can outrun others to our goals; if we are strong enough, we can beat back the competition; if we are wise enough, we can make ourselves rich beyond imagination; if we are skilled enough, we can accomplish anything; if we are good enough, we can get to Heaven. In fact, this sentence reflects on similar events to the Tower of Babel, wherein people determined it among themselves that they could reach Heaven if only they could build a tower tall enough.

And if you know the story of the Tower of Babel, the Lord humbled those who attempted to reach Heaven in that way. He turned the hubris of the people into their humbling by acting in such a way to turn their beliefs on their heads. Because no matter how fast, wise, strong, or skilled we are, God is greater, and no amount of anything we possess is enough to displace God and His will.

But not only are we incapable of surpassing God’s will and feats, but we are also victim to sin, which has corrupted the world and turned the good processes God created here upside down in order to wreak havoc. Sometimes, we end up with people being in places they have no business being. Some businessmen have no understanding of running a business, but because of extenuating circumstances, they find themselves in control of a business. An unskilled worker may get a promotion over a skilled worker due to in-company politics. Because of the corruption of sin, things don’t always turn out like they logically should.

But more than that, things don’t always turn out like they morally should. Verses 13-16 say, “I have observed that this also is wisdom under the sun, and it is significant to me” There was a small city with few men in it. A great king came against it, surrounded it, and built large siege works against it. Now a poor wise man was found in the city, and he delivered the city by his wisdom. Yet no one remembered that poor man. And I said, ‘Wisdom is better than strength, but the wisdom of the poor man is despised, and his words are not heeded.’”

It’s not likely that this is the case, though I’m sure it’s possible Solomon could have had a vision about the future, but these verses remind me of Sennacherib’s invasion against Hezekiah. Compared to Sennacherib, Hezekiah had an incredibly small army, and he was expected to give in to Sennacherib’s strength. Instead, Hezekiah outwitted Sennacherib and forced his armies to retreat, delivering the city by his wisdom. Though his story is written in the Bible, he’s probably a less popular historical figure than Sennacherib.

But I know for sure that no one remembered Hezekiah’s wisdom, which came from the Lord. Not even Hezekiah himself. Shortly after, Judah returned to its old ways, abandoning God, and finding themselves in trouble once again. I think it fits pretty well, but what Solomon’s getting at more than a possible reference to events that happened a couple hundred years in the future, is that, sometimes we are outfitted with gifts and skills for a position we aren’t in.

It’s probably better explained in Ecclesiastes 10:7, “I have seen slaves on horses, but princes walking on the ground like slaves.”

This could be a literal reference to captured princes being forced to walk while servants of a conquering kingdom ride horses, but, as I wrote here: (https://nathanielgevans.net/blog/god-of-metaphors), God is a big fan of teaching us through metaphors, and I can think of no better figurative representation for Solomon’s statements in verses 11-16 than this.

Sometimes, you just happen to have skills for one thing but be in a place to do another. I’m sure there are many people out there who could be smart enough to cure cancer, fix many world issues, or unite people, but who will never see a science lab, a government seat, or a place of influence; it is simply a fact of this world.

Verses 17-18 say, “The calm words of the wise are heeded more than the shouts of a ruler over fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner can destroy much good.”

The good news is that, more often than not, people end up where they are supposed to be to do what they are called to do. Generally, you’ll find the science whizzes in the lab, the thinkers writing and speaking their thoughts into existence, the mathematicians with a calculator, the physicists discovering more of God’s design. But all it took was one to change this world from, “everyone will end up where they’re supposed to be,” to, “most will end up where they’re supposed to be.”

In the end, you can boil Solomon’s statements down even more—to just three words, in fact. Life isn’t fair. But I’ll qualify that statement. Keep this in mind the next time you see someone whose talents aren’t being employed properly, even more so when you become disgruntled with your position and believe it is your own talents that are being wasted. Life isn’t fair, but the God who holds it in His hands is just and good. He will not forsake you nor abandon you; He will use you as He needs you used and work things together for your good.

God of Metaphors

Our God is a God of metaphors. Whenever you can’t understand something about His nature, character, choices, actions, etc., it’s fairly likely that you will be able to find a metaphor in the Bible or in His creation, Earth, to help you grasp that part of God.

Metaphors are pretty unique because they excel at turning the abstract into concrete, along with other forms of comparison, such as similes and analogies. And when it comes to God, you can find millions of concrete existences that serve to reveal a small part of the picture of who God is.

My favorite is the marriage/family metaphor because the further you dig into it, the more it reveals of God’s nature. You can literally go as far down the rabbit hole as you like, and you’ll always be finding revelation after revelation. And I loved it even more when I discovered how it applies to free will.

To start from the top, let’s acknowledge and prove that marriage is an earthly representation of the divine relationship we are to have with God.

God, through Paul, states this in Ephesians 5:23, 25. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of the body. (25) Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.”

There’s a reason marriage is a holy institution, and that is solely because it is meant to represent a holy relationship on Earth. When you apply the selfless love of Christ in the context of marriage, you get a godly relationship in which a man sacrifices himself to provide and care for his wife, and a wife sacrifices herself to love her husband and follow him.

This is the ideal relationship of Christ and church. Christ sacrificed Himself in fully selfless love for his bride, the church, and He provides for us, taking care of our needs. In exchange, we need only sacrifice ourselves and wholly commit ourselves to following Him.

Let’s move beyond marriage, then, and turn to the family structure. The family structure flows from the divine marriage structure, and it then becomes an example of something divine as well. The relationship of parents to kids is literal inasmuch as it is figurative.

In the literal sense, children are just that, children. They are the children of their parents, and they are also children of the church. In both manners, they are meant to be raised and taught about Christ as they grow. A community of believers is meant to come together and train and teach children (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).

But the figurative begins to stretch and define the relationship we are to have with God. When we become believers, we become children of God, and our relationship with God then functions like a child’s relationship with his/her parents does.

When we examine it from the side of faith, we are to look to God as children look to their parents. Like children view their parents as having no ability to do wrong, we are to look to God. Children have the utmost faith in their parents; it’s practically unshakable. We are to have that same faith in God, as Jesus implies in Mark 10:13-15.

From a discipline point of view, we can gather how God disciplines us for doing wrong and rewards us for doing what is right. I think this one is one of the simplest because it’s fairly clear. When a child breaks a rule, the parent provides a consequence, and especially when the child is young, teaches them something in the process. The parent provides this consequence, not out of anger, but from love so the child does not do something they may regret later.

To put the metaphor into another metaphor, let’s say a parent tells their four-year-old not to touch the stove. The child doesn’t listen, touches the stove, and nearly burns their hand after turning it on. The parent, then, stops the child from touching the stove, and puts the child in timeout after explaining what they did wrong and why it was bad. The parent doesn’t take this action just to punish the child, but to keep the child from getting hurt.

Sometimes, even, God allows us to experience the consequences of our own actions to teach us rather than do it Himself. Some parents may choose, in lieu of punishing the child afterward, to allow the child to briefly touch the stove while it’s hot. They do this not to cause the child pain but because they know that’s the only way their child will truly learn the lesson. We’re stubborn people, and sometimes the only way God can be sure we learn to avoid sin is to let us experience the consequences of sin.

If we take the parent/child relationship yet another way, we can discover how free will works in alignment with God’s plan. Typically, parents have plans for their children when they are born. Whether their plans are just as simple as a name or as complex as having everything they want their child to do planned out through high school, parents don’t wing it when it comes to their children. They’re too precious to do that to.

Likely, parents plan out where their kids go to school, what sports they play, who they interact with around home and with family and family friends, where they go to church, what they get to do at home, etc. I think you get the point. But kids are not perfect little angels who are willing to do everything at their parents’ behest. As they grow into their own person, there will be times they go against the will of their parents. They’ll make friends they shouldn’t, do things they shouldn’t, skip church a few times, skip school just as much.

Likewise, God has a plan laid out for each of us before we are born. He knows who He wants us to know, where we should go to school, what friends we should make, what career we should choose, who we should witness to, everything. But we’re not perfect little angels, either. As we go through life, we’ll inevitably choose to go against God’s plan sometimes. We’ll make friends with the wrong people, not witness to someone we needed to, skip church a few too many times, choose the wrong career for us.

See how perfectly that fits? There’s a ton more, too, but I don’t have space in this post to fit it in. God is incredibly complex—He is literally more than our minds are able to comprehend in so many ways—but when you take a look around, you can turn parts of Him into simple, easy to understand ideas so that you can get to know Him better.

I challenge you to look around the next time you find yourself struggling to understand God or why He would do something one way or the other. You may find that the answer is in something as small as the flower by your front porch or as convenient as your best friend.

Today's a Gift

Are you enjoying your life? Or is it something you just muddle through because you have responsibilities you feel you must attend to? Do you live in the moment, or are you constantly attacked by the problems that may arise in the future?

I rather like this quote (it’s been attributed to various people in various forms, but I like this version best), and I think it fits perfectly with the ideas conveyed in Ecclesiastes 9:1-10: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift from God, which is why we call it the present.”

Solomon begins to tackle the ideas presented in this quote from verse 1. “Indeed, I took all this to heart and explained it all: the righteous, the wise, and their works are in God’s hands. People don’t know whether to expect love or hate. Everything lies ahead of them.”

He skips the history because it’s not relevant to his point, but he tackles the mystery of tomorrow with “People don’t know whether to expect love or hate. Everything lies ahead of them.” This is fairly clear. We don’t know what’s coming next, so we have no way to determine the outcome of our actions until we live through them. And then Solomon qualifies this further while relating back to chapter eight’s themes.

Verses 2-3 say, “Everything is the same for everyone: there is one fate for the righteous and the wicked, for the good and the bad, for the clean and the unclean, for the one who sacrifices and the one who does not sacrifice. As it is for the good, so it is for the sinner; as for the one who takes an oath, so for the one who fears an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun: there is one fate for everyone. In addition, the hearts of people are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live—after that they go to the dead.”

See, while you can’t know a lot of what’s coming, there is one thing that comes for us all: death on this Earth. As we discussed last week, the consequences of sin affect everyone, even if you feel like you’re a good person, even if you follow closely the commands of God. The product of being in a sinful world is sinful consequence. So, the one thing about your future that is not mystery is death. You won’t know the time or hour, but you know it’s coming.

So, for many, it’s difficult to not live for the future, to plan and prepare in hopes that they can determine what’s coming. In doing so, they often forget to live for today. But God gives us three gifts if we choose to live in the present. The first is the ability to hope.

Verses 4-6 say, “But there is hope for whoever is joined with all the living, since a live dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die, but the dead don’t know anything. There is no longer a reward for them because the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, and their envy have already disappeared, and there is no longer a portion for them in all that is done under the sun.”

I think this points directly to salvation and the ability of people to pursue God and find His salvation while they are still alive. We know, for a fact, that once you’re dead, your chance is gone for good, so it only makes sense that this is what Solomon’s referring to.

The comparison between a live dog and a dead lion is striking in this case for a number of reasons, but mainly the position of each animal in a food chain. A dog is one who relies on a master to feed and care for it, while a lion is a top predator in its habitat. Once a beloved dog is dead, its body is cared for and it lives on in the memory of its master. But once a mighty lion dies, its body is torn apart by scavengers and memory of it, its loves, hates, whatever, is gone. Similarly, a believer who is taken care of by God is taken care of and remembered after death by God, but a predator of sin who chooses no master but herself dies and is torn apart by other predators. That’s a pretty clear image of humanity’s treatment of the dead. If given the chance and the provocation, a dead man’s reputation will be torn down without hesitation just because he’s no longer around to defend himself. There’s no place for the dead among the living. In essence, the gift of hope God is providing is for safety, both in life and death.

The second gift God provides is a reward. It comes with having your name listed in the Lamb’s Book of Life—the Lord your God will remember you and care for you, just like a master would his dog. Your reward is undying loyalty, love, and care that only God can provide.

The third gift God promises for today is joy from peace, from verses 7-9, which say, “Go, eat your bread with pleasure, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already accepted your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and never let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife you love all the days of your fleeting life, which has been given to you under the sun, all your fleeting days. For that is your portion in life and in your struggle under the sun.”

This is also fairly cut and dry. God grants us the ability to enjoy the days we have in this life in the moment with the pleasures of good food, drink, and companionship. These are all things we are granted by God, knowing that He had already planned out the days, weeks, months, years, decades, and centuries ahead. He has already accepted us into Heaven when we become His children, so we are granted the peace to enjoy the gift of today.

But the real power of these verses becomes apparent when we reverse the gifts and apply the consequences to nonbelievers. While believers are granted the gift of hope, nonbelievers are not. Hope disappears with worry, and for many nonbelievers, all they can do is worry about tomorrow, next week, next month, etc. That’s not to say worry isn’t a problem with believers, but the stress that comes with the belief that you are fully in control and responsible for everything in your life reduces the chance of hope being alive and well.

Straight from verse 5, we know that they don’t receive a reward because they declare themselves to have no master. When they do well, they have no one to whom they can turn to be rewarded except themselves, and when they’re dead and gone, their only reward is to be devoured by scavengers.

Finally, they can have no joy, no pleasure, because they aren’t capable of living in the present. Their circumstances are always monitored, always important to them. In the same way worry blocks hope, worry blocks joy and pleasure because worry is a distraction to what is good.

This works with the quote, too. For believers, our yesterday is history, as God has removed our transgressions from us, freeing us from the past. Our tomorrow is a mystery, but not to the God who has it planned out. And we are truly able to enjoy the gift of the present because we have no need to despair over the past or future.

But for nonbelievers, their yesterday is no history because they must account, and face punishment, for their transgressions come judgment day. Tomorrow is a mystery, but one they believe they must work tirelessly to uncover and change. And because they are so obsessed with tomorrow, they are incapable of living in the gift of today. The worst part is that these beliefs set them up for a rude awakening come time for them to pass on from this life.

Verse 10 says, “Whatever your hands find to do, do with all your strength, because there is no work, planning, knowledge, or wisdom in Sheol where you are going.”

Sheol refers to, basically, death. Its meaning is complicated and somewhat confusing biblically, but it’s pretty much just the land of the dead, a euphemism for the afterlife, if you will. The depth of the frustrations of nonbelievers in life will become apparent in death because nothing they’ve lived for will prepare them for what death is like and the things that come from it. Work, planning, knowledge, wisdom, none of the things that matter to a nonbeliever on Earth will matter in death.

And that takes us back to verse 4. There remains hope for any who are still alive to turn from being a proud, dead lion to become a living, loved dog. The life of a nonbeliever, the mindset of a nonbeliever, will not prepare anyone for death and eternity. Only God can do that, which I think is a key point of these verses. The other is a reminder to believers to have faith and take the gifts that God gives you.

The Fallen World

Anyone who’s been reading and keeping up with the series on Ecclesiastes should know by now that the world we live in is a wicked, fallen place full of sorrow, sadness, anger, pain, hatred, and more, and it is only by the good will of God that we have the good, kindness, peace, love, and joy that we have. But a fact that believers try to avoid thinking of sometimes is that the presence of the goodness of God does not mean that evil disappears while we are still living in imperfection.

We hear it all the time in questions like, “Why do good things happen to bad people?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” We don’t like coming to terms with the fact that imperfect life on this Earth is a dichotomy of good and bad. We don’t get one in a vacuum. Having both is a futility of this world that we just have to live with, as Solomon details in Ecclesiastes 8: 11-15.

Verse 11 speaks directly to our fallen human morals. “Because the sentence against a criminal act is not carried out quickly, the heart of people is filled with the desire to commit crime.”

We’re a people who take a mile when given a foot. It’s a disturbing symptom of life after the fall that we do not adhere to the law of morals, but the moral of laws. In other words, we live within the letter of the law and not the spirit of it, such that if something is not expressly prohibited, we often act as though it is inherently allowable.

Think about it this way, if you will: Say a teenage boy’s parents expressly forbid him from having a party inside the house when they leave for a weekend anniversary celebration. The boy understands the rule, so the parents leave and come home expecting to not have the house destroyed from a party. When they return home, the front yard looks as though a tornado went through it, and the back yard is filled with trash from what was clearly a party. The parents find the boy to punish him for breaking the rule, but he proudly exclaims, “You said I couldn’t throw a party inside the house, so I threw one outside!”

Here’s the thing about that situation; even though the rule did not expressly forbid parties outside the house by letter, the spirit of the rule was that there should be no parties that would destroy the house. What’s saddening about it all is that punishment must still be meted out for the breaking of the rule, and this creates a separation because the punished does not feel as though he did anything wrong.

Okay, I’m getting really wordy about this, but the point I want to make is that we treat the rules God wrote for us the same way. We pretend as though His laws apply by the letter and not the spirit, and if that doesn’t work, we stretch the letter of the law to “allow” ourselves to sin. And then we pretend that we’ve done nothing wrong, that we’re good people, and we deserve Heaven and not punishment for our wrongdoings. And falsely believing we’re good is what got us into the mess of good things happening to bad people and bad things happening to good people.

Verses 12-13 say, “Although a sinner commits crime a hundred times and prolongs his life, yet I also know that it will go well with God-fearing people, for they are reverent before Him. However, it will not go well with the wicked, and they will not lengthen their days like a shadow, for they are not reverent before God.”

If you’re not paying really close attention, these verses seem like they contradict each other, but they don’t. First, let’s settle the good versus bad debate here. It’s Paul in Romans who tells us that no one is good, but Solomon kindly settles what qualifies as the standard for character judgment: God-fearing. Notice that “good” doesn’t exist in these verses, but that we have the separation of being “reverent before God,” and “not reverent before God.” But there’s a third distinction: sinner. Note that one who is a sinner and one who is reverent before God are not mutually exclusive. They can exist in the same person (because we all sin).

So, the first thing Solomon says is that a sinner commits crimes and prolongs his life. How does that work? Well, he doesn’t say that sinners prolong their lives by committing crimes or because they commit crimes. It just says that both can exist: a sinner could live a long time or a short time. We know that objectively: people can die before they are born, sadly, or they can live to be over 100. So, in this way, there is little distinction between the Earthly length of life belonging to a sinner who is reverent before God and a sinner who is not reverent before God, affirmed by Solomon’s qualifying statement, “yet I also know that it will go well with God-fearing people.”

And now I’m about to get giddy because the imagery in verse 13’s metaphor is astounding. Take a moment to just think about how shadows work; as the day goes on, they grow longer and longer until, eventually, everything is covered in shadow, making it, for all intents and purposes, infinite. (You may have to finagle with your understanding of nighttime to reach this conclusion, but remember that the darkness of night is effectively the shadow of the Earth.) So, how does this really cool image of shadows apply?

Think of it like this: one who is not reverent before God counts down the time on his life. Each day he lives, his lifetime grows shorter by a day. But for the God-fearing, life is measured additively. For every day they live, their life is lengthened by a day, exactly like a shadow, which, for every moment it exists, grows longer. Eventually, the life of one who is reverent before God becomes like the shadow of night, all-encompassing. In other words, eternal!

Since I’ve gotten you all excited about cool imagery and eternal life like me, it’s time to come back down to Earth because, even though this ultimate truth of eternal life is the case, we still live in a fallen world that hurts sometimes, and Solomon knows this, too.

Verse 14-15 say, ‘There is a futility that is done on the earth: there are righteous people who get what the actions of the wicked deserve, and there are wicked people who get what the actions of the righteous deserve. I say that this too is futile. So I commended enjoyment because there is nothing better for man under the sun than to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, for this will accompany him in his labor during the days of his life that God gives him under the sun.”

It’s sobering to remember that bad things are going to happen to those who love God and good things will happen to people who choose to be evil. Sometimes, it may even seem like the world is attacking believers, and Satan will try his best to make it seem that way. He wants fearing God to look as unappealing as possible.

But I, along with Solomon, encourage you to avoid dwelling on the punishments and rewards other will receive. Instead, focus on what the Lord has given you to enjoy here and do what He has called you to do. Life is so much more enjoyable when you don’t constantly wonder about the effects of the fall and instead just strive to do all you can for the kingdom.

Controlling your Character

Last week, I wrote about character and the importance of maintaining a lifestyle that is focused on God to both protect yourself from persecution and show the light of Christ to the world. I wrote about what makes up that character, but this week, I want to talk about how that character is formed.

 I left you with a saying, “You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react.” What I mean by that is based on Matthew 15: 10-20, but I’ll start you off with a well-used analogy first.

There’s a story about two brothers, we’ll even say they’re twins for the sake of genetic similarity. These twins grew up under a drunkard of a father who drowned away every moment he should’ve spent teaching his boys how to be men. When they grew up, the first twin became a drunkard and never amounted to anything more than his father did. The second twin grew up and never touched alcohol once in his life. People talked about them frequently. About the first twin, they often said, “Who can blame him? Look at his father.” And about the second twin, they often said, “Who can blame him? Look at his father.”

Neither of those boys had control over how they grew up, but they could control what they did in response to their far from ideal childhood. They both had every chance to succeed at escaping the alcoholism of their father, and they both had every chance to fall into it just like their father. But the key is that the way their lives ended up didn’t come from the things that happened to them outside of their control, but from the things they chose to do because of what happened.

To give you a biblical example, let’s talk about Jonah. I’m sure everyone remembers how Jonah was called to preach in Nineveh but decided to run away because he didn’t want to. The calling was something out of his control; God said, “Go preach in Nineveh.” Jonah’s choice to run away, however, was very much in his control. He had two options: do as God said or run away. The characteristic that we know Jonah by was not determined by his calling but by his answer to that calling. We can determine that he was either incredibly selfish or full of cowardice. Take your pick.

In a similar way, he had another choice when storms appeared to assault the boat he was running away on. He could continue to build a character of selfishness/cowardice by refusing to speak up when they drew lots, or he could speak truth and be cast overboard selflessly to save the crew and the others on the ship. He couldn’t control the storm, but his character was built by the choice that he made when confronted with an event out of his control.

This is what Jesus is speaking about in Matthew 15. My Bible subtitles verses 10-20 as, “Defilement is from Within.” I quite like that because it stands true to what I’ve been saying: your character is defiled by the things within you, what you control.

In this moment, Jesus was speaking to the Pharisees, who had again confronted Him because of His teachings in yet another time of Pharasaical big-headedness. The context provided in the first 9 verses of chapter 15 set up the explanation of defilement Jesus serves to them in 10-20 as he confronts the Pharisees’ hypocritical nature as ones who say they worship God but do not live out their lives in obedience to the Law.

Verses 10-11 say, “Summoning the crowd, He told them, ‘Listen and understand: It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.’”

When you understand the Pharisees and how they get to be Pharisees, you come to understand this a little more. Pharisees were pretty much the top of the intelligence line in the Jewish community. Like Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates were to the classical Greek community, so were the Pharisees to the Jewish. They knew a lot, were incredible thinkers, and were rather intelligent. There’s a decent chance they had all of the Old Testament memorized and studied it deeply and consistently. When it came to religious practices, there was no one’s advice you’d want more than a Pharisee.

But therein lies the problem that Jesus is speaking to. This group of people knew so much about the Old Testament and the practices, morals, and lifestyles taught within it. If there was any group that should be expected to be model believers, it would’ve been those guys. But even though they were fed the Bible constantly, what came out was hardly of God’s Word at all.

Verses 17-20 say, “’Don’t you realize that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is eliminated? But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this defiles a man. For form the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies. There are the things that defile a man, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile a man.’”

Okay, so if you’re catching on, you’re likely thinking that Jesus was actually talking about literal food, and He was. Make no mistake that Jesus was directly confronting the Pharisees on their beliefs about unclean foods and ritualistic handwashing practices. But in verse 15, Peter indicates that he believes this is a parable, and it’s important to note that Jesus does not say it isn’t.

Verse 19 would seem incredibly out of place if Jesus was only talking about pears and chicken, but He’s not. He’s also talking about character, as He often did when the Pharisees reared their heads. If you’ll refer back to what I said about the Pharisees earlier, you’ll remember that I mentioned their incredible education in the Old Testament—that’s the food they ate in this parable.

Now, let’s do some rewording of verse 11 to show you how this really becomes a parable: It’s not the things you learn that determine your character, it’s the things that come from what you learn that determine your character. Like I said before, ideally, the Pharisees should’ve been the ideal believer, but they weren’t. They were full of hypocrisy, anger, pride, and entitlement. What they learned from the Bible was not that they were people in need of God, but that, by following enough laws, they could effectively become like God as rulers of people. They were wrong, of course, but that’s what they learned, and it was that which became their character.

In other words, what made the Pharisees the Pharisees wasn’t the spiritual nourishment they received, but what they did with the knowledge they held. And that goes for everyone. You can’t control what happens to you in this life, but who you are is determined by what you do because of, or in spite of, the things that occur. People can’t see everything you’ve eaten, but they can see the effects the food has on your body. In the same way, people can’t see everything that has happened to you, but they can see how you’ve let it affect you.

Battling the Unknown

What does the future hold? That’s a question a lot of people have, and no human has the specific answer to. Yet, many still question the one who actually knows the answers, who guides life in the right direction. Many worry fruitlessly about the things that have yet to come, even knowing that the only thing they can do is live through it and choose how to react.

Anxiety: it’s dangerous and terrible and altogether a thorn in the minds and lives of people everywhere, but especially to believers who know the one true God who has all of time in His hand. I know it’s hard to live with, through, and around, but I hope the message Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 8: 1-9 will help you a little in tackling and overcoming anxiety.

Ecclesiastes 8:1 says, “Who is like the wise person, and who knows the interpretation of a matter? A man’s wisdom brightens his face, and the sternness of his face is changed.”

I think, and I think psychology backs me up on this thought, that how we choose to think overrides how our brains actually think, given time. Solomon, at least, seems to agree with me. In this first verse, he details something similar, if you can get past the weird phrasing he used. One of the things that helped me battle my own anxiety was the knowledge of, not only my own thought process, but what my thought process should be.

Let’s translate verse 1 into some more common English: who is wise enough to know what everything means? Who knows exactly what will happen based on what has already happened? A man’s wisdom enlightens his mind, and the strength of his mind is changed.

If we finagle with the words a little bit, we can adjust a brightening of the face to an enlightenment of the mind. (The Hebrew word “panah” used here has a whole paragraph and a half of possible translations. One of them is mind. Whether that’s more correct than face, I don’t know, but it does fit the idea.) And there is some sense to this: the brain works by establishing neural pathways to memories, actions, emotions, and more, and it is fully possible to override and rewrite pathways that have already been constructed. Thus, it is fully possible that coming to terms with your thoughts, knowing how you should think, and changing how you think could strengthen your mind against anxiety.

Knowing is half the battle, and with the mind, it’s even more than that. I think it’s important to note that, in verse 1, the verb is “changed” not “increased.” In this case, the strength of your mind isn’t increased to handle anxiety, but it is changed to rely on God, who does know what will happen, instead of yourself.

Verses 2-4 say, “Keep the king’s command because of your oath made before God. Do not be in a hurry; leave his presence, and don’t persist in a bad cause, since he will do whatever he wants. For the king’s word is authoritative, and who can say to him, ‘What are you doing?’”

I think the thing to take from this verse is the fact that you don’t have control. Part of the problem with anxiety is that you can’t control things you want to control, specifically, our lives. As believers, God has full control over our lives, just like a king would have full control over his subjects. There’s no point arguing or railing against it because we promised to follow what He says. And there’s no point in running away to do whatever you want, either, because He is an authority. He knows all that was, is, and is to come, so asking God what He’s doing as if He doesn’t know is silly.

And Solomon writes all this to point it out: you wouldn’t say or do these things to an all-knowing human king, so why would you do the same with God? It’s important to come face to face with this thought process, to know, unequivocally, that the one who guides your life has everything under control, and you don’t need to do anything but follow his plan. And it’s important to know because, again, knowing that is half the battle to changing your mind to have reliance on God.

Verses 5-6 say, “The one who keeps a command will not experience anything harmful, and a wise heart knows the right time and procedure. For every activity there is a right time and procedure, even though man’s troubles are heavy on him.”

Part of verse 5 is a promise from God: if you do as I say, I promise that evil will not come to you. And we can take God at His word for this because, even things that seem evil will come to good if we follow His plan. The rest is an assertion and a reminder that you can’t rush things. In God’s plan, there is a time for everything. Even when it feels like the world is weighing so heavily on your shoulders you feel like you’ll be crushed, there is not a moment of your life that the Lord has not looked over and prepared personally for you. He knows what you need and when you need it even better than you do, and he knows just how to give you what you need in the right time for good.

Verses 7-9 say, “Yet no one knows what will happen because who can tell him what will happen? No one has authority over the wind to restrain it, and there is no authority over the day of death; there is no furlough in battle, and wickedness will not allow those who practice it to escape. All this I have seen, applying my mind to all the work that is done under the sun, at a time when one man has authority over another to his harm.”

You can take thoughts like those expressed in verse 7 as either good or bad. It’s kind of like one of those: which animal you see tells you about your personality quizzes on Facebook, but this verse actually does something useful. Verse 7 can either be assurance or fear. You can read it as “Despite not knowing what will happen, I know God knows, so I have no need to worry,” or you can read it, “I know God knows, but I still don’t know what will happen, so I worry.” I think the way you first interpret this verse is an indication of your battle with anxiety.

But look, another key thing to know in the battle against our own minds is that, even if you had all the knowledge, you still would have no power to control things; therein lies the crux of the anxiety problem: part of the cause of anxiety is that we believe we have power to change things. But as verse 8 says, we don’t. It would be like trying to restrain wind or stop death. It’s just something we cannot do. You can’t control others without harming yourself, just like a soldier in war can’t be sent home unless he’s injured. And those who do try to control others will only harm themselves by the wickedness they practice.

I know this is a hard battle to fight. Anxiety is a beast that does not let its prey slip from its claws with ease, but you can escape it. There is much power in knowing God has it all under control; you can rework your brain to be dependent on Him rather than yourself, to trust Him, even when your mind tells you to fear. I don’t say this to just be optimistic or lessen the struggles, but I know it helped me, and I know it can help others.

Character Above Reproach

Let’s talk about character, because it’s something that a lot of people tend to struggle with. Honestly, I think “Christians” struggle with good character more than any other group of people. Not because Christians are bad or because there are a lot of “Christians” out there whom I worry are not actually followers of Christ, but because even those who are truly devoted to Christ have a tendency to hide their character.

Integrity was one of the core values pushed on me by my school as I grew up. I say pushed as if it’s a bad thing, but I’m actually glad for it, even if the lesson didn’t seem to stick for a lot of us kids. Integrity involves this idea that one must act the same alone as they do/would around others. And the idea of good character works in, generally, the same way.

A lot of Christians struggle with good character because they don’t actually have integrity; they act one way with a church group and act totally different alone. They’re pious around other believers, but raunchy around non-church friends. And, I know that’s a generalization, but honestly, if you take offense to this assertion, you’re likely one of the ones acting this way, and I want you to know that I love you, but this post is meant to rebuke you. Because I wish someone had done it for me many years ago.

In the Bible, Paul twice calls for leaders in the church to have “character above reproach.” In 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. But, newsflash for all of y’all: this applies to every Christian, not just those who want to be pastors and deacons. Why? It has to do with what “character above reproach” means.

To have character above reproach means that no one can look at your character and find hypocrisy within it. A person whose character is above reproach has actions that match with their words. They have nothing to hide because they have done no wrong. It’s the characterized antonym of the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do.” What they say and do are the same, and they are good.

To take a few things from today’s world, if you tried to “cancel” them, you would find absolutely no dirt on them. Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram users could search for months and never find something out of line online or in person that has not seen the light of day and been atoned for. A person whose character is above reproach is not above reproach because they’ve never done wrong, but because they owned up to faults and mistakes, expressed repentance, and received forgiveness.

Does that sound similar to anything else? It should, because that’s an integral part of the process of giving your life to Christ and choosing to follow Him. You have to own up to being a sinful being, express your repentance, and receive Christ’s forgiveness. And from there, you’ve set up the process to become a person whose character is above reproach.

As you become sanctified by the Spirit, your goal is to become blameless, not in the eyes of God, who already sees you as one without fault thanks to the cover of Jesus placed over you by your salvation, but to the people around you. Not because you don’t still make mistakes here and there, but because your idea of quality character is new, and you adhere to it. You’re looking to be set apart from others by who you are, how you act, and what you say.

Now, I know Paul was specifically referring to leaders here, so I’m sure there are a number of people still arguing, “Well, this clearly doesn’t apply to me; I don’t want to be a pastor or deacon!” Well, think again! We are all called to be leaders, showing the blind to Christ so that they may see. And whether or not you believe it, all of what Paul says about the character of church leaders applies to every believer.

So, what are some characteristics of a person who is above reproach? Paul kindly lists them off for us in Titus 1:7-9, “For an overseer, as God’s administrator, must be blameless, not arrogant, not hot-tempered, not addicted to wine, not a bully, not greedy for money, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, righteous, holy, self-controlled, holding to the faithful message as taught, so that he will be able both to encourage with sound teaching and to rebuke those who contradict it.”

These are the qualities that you must aspire to. It’s these things that serve to make you above reproach. It’s these qualities that let leaders like Billy Graham speak life into millions of people and have no one question his character: there were no scandals that could pick up fuel against him, no insults that could stick, no evil labels that could ruin his ministry. Why? Not because he didn’t sin, because he assuredly did at some points, but because his character, despite his mistakes, was so full of God that no one could even begin to find something evil within him.

And it’s important to be that clean when it comes to your character because of what Paul says in Titus 1:10-11, “For there are also many rebellious people, full of empty talk and deception, especially those from Judaism. It is necessary to silence them; they overthrow whole households by teaching what they shouldn’t in order to get money dishonestly.”

And this is why the message of blameless character is even more important, because not only do you have to have character that is markedly different from the average nonbeliever, but you must also have character that is above that of even those who profess “Jesus is Lord,” know the tenets, and speak half truths about the Word. You have to distinguish yourself from false preachers and fake Christians so that nonbelievers may see the real truth.

Just as a short example, the difference we’re looking for is the difference between one who teaches the prosperity gospel and one who preaches the Gospel. The prosperity gospel, when taught well, sounds just close enough to be true Christianity. With the right words, you can convince people it’s true and right. But if you look at the pastors at prosperity gospel churches, you see a disconnect between what they say and what they do: their lives are so unclean. They talk the talk but can’t walk the walk, whereas a Gospel pastor follows the same tenets he teaches to his congregation.

And there are too many people who are fooled by false Christianity because it’s so difficult to distinguish between true Christians, near misses to Christianity, and even nonbelievers. That’s why you aim to have character above reproach; not only is it protection for you in a world that hates you, but it serves as another way for us to be a city on the hill, shining light for all to see.

And here’s a final reminder about your character to think about until I cover the full topic next week: You can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it. And that’s what really matters for character.