Psalm 102: Sermon Outline

I was intending to have a relaxed approach to the Proclamation Trust preaching guidelines, experiment a little, and allow myself to be a little more influenced by Puritan preaching, but I’ve ended up with a three-point sermon with alliterative headings anyway. Oh well.

This sermon, which I will preach – Lord willing – in three weekends’ time at St. James’s (Poole), highlights for me the pastoral value of postmillennialism. Psalms are poetry and this Psalm illustrates itself pretty well; my task with regard to this is to make the simile and metaphor come to life.

Readings: Psalm 102, Hebrews 1
Hymns: O God our help in ages past, O for a thousand tongues to sing, Crown him with many crowns, Tell out my soul, Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun

“I am like a desert owl of the wilderness,
like an owl of the waste places;
I lie awake.” – Psalm 102.6-7a

Sleeplessness is something I’m sure everyone has experienced at some time: you lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning and as you look at the clock, half an hour passes, then an hour, two hours, and you still can’t get off to sleep. Thoughts are churning through your mind, you worry about life, your circumstances, your future. God has given us this Psalm to address that experience: “A prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint and pours out his complaint before the LORD”. Athanasius wrote this about the purpose of the Psalter:

“It is like a picture, in which you see yourself portrayed, and seeing, may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given. In the Psalter, you can learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries. Moreover, whatever your particular need or trouble, from this same book you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you do not merely hear and then pass on, but learn the way to remedy your ill. In fact, under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our souls’ need at every turn.” 

The Psalmist gives voice to our troubles and shapes our thoughts and feelings and responses by showing us:
1. The Psalmist’s cry,
2. What leads him to pray: the Psalmist’s circumstances, and
3. Why he can pray: the Psalmist’s confidence

This Psalm is a prayer for Christian believers, and if that isn’t you, my hope is that this vision of God and the privileges of the believer you see in the Psalm will lead you to long to turn to God and seek refuge in him as your saviour and king.

1. The Psalmist’s cry

We can pray to God boldly in the day of our trouble.

The Psalmist addresses God as the LORD. It’s the covenant name; the Psalmist is part of the people God has chosen for himself to whom he has committed himself in love. This is the LORD who, according to Hebrews 1, has revealed himself in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ: this is a Christian prayer. Those who belong to Christ’s church can with confidence draw near to the throne of grace to receive mercy and grace to help in time of need. That confidence looks like:
(i.) Persistence – five times the Psalmist requests God to hear and answer him (vv. 1-2)
(ii.) Urgency – the Psalmist asks God not to delay but answer speedily

This Psalm challenges us:
(i.) Is our response in our affliction and distress to pray, personally, individually to God?
(ii.) Are our prayer characterised by this boldness, this persistence, this urgency?
This is the privilege we have as God’s people. The Psalmist moves on to describe in more detail his distress.

2. The Psalmist’s circumstances

We can pray to God in all the troubles of life.

We see seven different kinds of trouble in this Psalm.

(i.) Mortality (vv. 3, 11) – life is like the wisp of smoke rising out of a chimney or an extinguished candle which is easily dissipated by the wind, or the lengthening shadows of evening which eventually fade into the night, or the grass cuttings when you mow the lawn, quickly turning brown and drying up: life lengthens, is seen to be insubstantial, its splendour quickly and easily fades and comes to an end. Through this, the Psalmist’s experience is one of physical suffering – it’s lie there’s a burning fire in his body. This is the person who suffers a long, painful illness, who sees his body once full of strength looking increasingly weak and frail, the person consumed by cancer, the person who is confronted by his own death, even a premature death (vv. 23-24). So they cry out to God.

(ii.) Faint-heartedness (vv. 4-5) – the heart is the control centre of a person’s being: this is someone whose circumstances have sapped his will of all strength, like mown grass, dried up and withered away, the person who has given up all hope and just groans, who doesn’t even want to eat, so becomes nothing but skin and bones. So they cry out to God.

(iii.) Desolation (v. 6) – the Psalmist, like the owl, is kept awake at night, kept awake by thoughts of emptiness of his life, whose plans and projects and hope and dreams fail to come to fruition, who looks back on their life with despair because they have nothing to show for it, whose finances have dwindled to nothing, who has little in life that gives them pleasure. So they cry out to God.

(iv.) Loneliness (v. 7) – if you look along the rooftops, you may see a tiny, little bird perched on the edge all alone. Like that, this is the person who is kept awake at night with thoughts that they have no one to turn to , the person who has suffered bereavement, is struggling with singleness, who has been left by their husband or wife, who has moved to a new town and has left all their friends behind. So they cry out to God.

(v.) Opposition (v. 8 ) – this is the taunting and derision that comes because of all the other troubles of life that are being faced (v. 9) so here is the person whose failure to get promotion at work is a cause of joy and delight, who is the object of gossip at work or over the garden fence: “Have you heard what happened to her? Still, she had it coming to her.” This is person who gets no sympathy from anyone. So they cry out to God.

(vi.) Sorrow (v. 9) – ashes were a symbol of sorrow and morning; the Psalmist’s experience is that this grief is part of his staple diet, his everyday life. This is the person who is always down, who often breaks down into tears. So they cry out to God.

The final trouble is what the Psalmist thinks is the root cause for all that he is going through:

(vii.) Feeling God is angry (v. 10) – when a cat has caught a mouse, it plays with it, beating it with one paw and trapping it with the other; this is the person who feels that they’re God’s plaything, that God doesn’t care, that God doesn’t love them, the person who feels that God is distant, who feels no joy in reading the Bible or singing his praise or meeting with his people, who feels that their prayers are falling on silent ears. Yet though it feels like there’s an iron heaven above them which their prayers cannot penetrate and which hides God face, they cry out to God.

I’m sure everyone can relate in some way to the Psalmist’s experience, or realise that at some point this may well be them. This Psalm encourages you and me, when we are confronted by mortality, faint-heartedness, desolation, loneliness, opposition, sorrow, and even when it feels that God is angry, to pour out our hearts to him.

This would all be hollow and meaningless unless there is some truly solid reason for hope in God, which is precisely what we have in the rest of the Psalm. The writer turns his face upwards from his situation to consider God, and we see,

3. The Psalmist’s confidence

(i.) God reigns forever and builds his church so that the whole earth will worship him.

God is this world’s king and his rule lasts forever (v. 12) and the shape of God’s kingship is always to lift his people up out of their affliction when they cry to him in their distress, so that he builds his church (vv. 13, 16-17, 19-20). This was most clearly seen in the ministry of Christ. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” – John 1.14. When Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God was at hand, he healed the sick and raised the dead, welcoming those who came to him who were nothing in the eyes of society: lepers, blind beggars, children, prostitutes. Ultimately he died on the cross in the place of people like you and me, by nature objects of God’s wrath and dead in our sins, so that when we turn from our sin – our rebellion against God – and put our trust in him, we are given pardon and freedom, included in his people the church, and given the hope of everlasting life and resurrection in God’s new world. By his resurrection from the dead, Jesus is the guarantee and assurance of all this: he was the destitute one, the prisoner, the one doomed to die, but God regarded him, did not despise him, but looked down on him and loosed him from the chains of death and raised him to new life. Because the Lord is enthroned forever, the effect of this is that God will continue saving and building his people, and gradually the whole world will see, turn to the Lord and gather together in Zion, in his church as his people, to worship him (v. 15 – nations, not just people from the nations, but nations themselves, v. 22). This will happen in history (v. 18). This is a glorious vision of a future world where God is praised and served by every king and every nation on this planet. This has always been God’s purpose: he promised Abraham, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” – Genesis 12.3. Psalm 22, foreshadowing Christ’s sufferings and death on the cross, concludes: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. For kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations.” The United Kingdom, China, Russia and Iraq will all fear and worship the Lord.

It is in the future of God’s people and the world that the Psalmist locates his hope for his personal situation. Similarly, we need to impress this vision of God and his unending kingship on our hearts and minds, so that as we see he will build up his people and cause nations and kingdoms to worship him, we can be sure he will hear us and deliver us, and so we can have confidence in praying to him.

(ii.) God lives forever and establishes his people from one generation to another.

The Psalmist reflects on his weakness and the prospect of an early death, and so prays to God, on the basis that he lives forever (vv. 23-27). If you wear a jumper enough, you get holes in the elbows, if you wear trousers enough, the knees start to fade and get thin. I’ve lost count of the number of pairs of trousers I’ve had to buy as I cycle around town and the material wears thin and frays. You try and patch them up but eventually they get beyond repair and you have to buy new clothes. Though the world around us looks so solid, so permanent, it is like clothes in the process of wearing out when we compare them to God himself, who was there before the world existed, who made the world, who will always be there, who will never die or decay. When the first people sinned, the creation was subjected to futility and bondage to corruption. God alone remains the same and his years have no end.

It is because God’s years endure throughout all generations that his people have a future from one generation to another (v. 28). This is what God promises throughout the Bible. He says to Abraham, “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and your offspring after you” – Genesis 17.7. In the New Testament, on the day of Pentecost, when the ascended Christ pours out the Holy Spirit, Peter preaches and says, “Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” – Acts 2.38-39. This is why it’s right that the children of Christian believers should be baptised, given the sign and seal of God’s promise. We pray for them and teach them God’s word, trusting that they will grow up hoping in and leaning upon the Lord. The children of God’s servants shall dwell secure, their offspring shall be established bfore him, and again, it is in this future that the individual can find hope for the present.

There are so many areas where we look for security which will only fail us:
(1.) Economy: the present trouble shows us that much – prices rise, value falls.
(2.) The things we own, our property and our possessions: homes can be broken into or damaged by fire and weather, things break down and wear out.
(3.) Employment: we might easily think that we have a job for life, but a business can suffer losses or go bankrupt, and we’re made redundant.
(4.) Other people: we’re part of this decaying world – people let us down, they don’t keep their word, they’re unfaithful; physically they become ill and weak and die
In this unstable, ever-changing world, God is everlasting and changeless, his people are therefore secure, and it is in him alone that our security may be found, which is why we have great cause to pray to him with confidence.

At the end of the Psalm, the situation has not changed; there is no resolution. But as we look at the Psalmist’s cry, circumstances and confidence, we see that we can pray to God boldly in the full range of life’s troubles – mortality, faint-heartedness, desolation, loneliness, opposition, sorrow and even feeling that God is angry. We can be sure that God will hear us, have mercy on us, answer us, and deliver us, as he sees fit, for our greatest good, because of the glorious, lasting future he will bring about for his church and his world through his endless, changeless rule.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

‘The evil be ever mingled with the good’

Article XXVI remarks that, “in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good”. The Reformers held this view, as did the earlier Puritans, in seems, comparing the visible church in England to Old Testament Israel, and its cities to Jerusalem. A passage often adduced in favour of this is Matthew 13.24-30, where the kingdom of heaven is compared to a field in which an enemy sows bad seed amongst the good, and they grow up together until the harvest. Some disagree, appealing to the fact that, when the disciples ask Jesus what the parable means, he says that the field is the world (v. 38). The interpretation still stands, however. It is, after all a parable about the kingdom of heaven, and the point is that the sons of the kingdom grow up alongside the sons of the evil one until the close of the age. Wherever sons of the kingdom are to be found, so are the weeds. If you were to draw a circle around a particular section of the field to demarcate a particular local congregation, sons of the kingdom and sons of the devil would be found.

However, this point is made much more clearly, it seems to me, in the parable of the wedding feast, in Matthew 22.  The kingdom of heaven is compared to a king giving a wedding feast for his son (v. 2) who sends his servants to call those invited (vv. 3-4). They refuse, prioritising their farms and their businesses (v. 5) while others seize the servants, treat them shamefully and even kill them (v. 6) which angers the king who sends his troops in and destroys their city (v. 7). This is a clear reference to Israel who refuse to come to Christ, shamefully treat his disciples, and are judged when the Roman army attacks and destroys Jerusalem in AD 70 (yes, there it is again). The king then sends out his servants to invite as many as they can find (vv. 8-9). And so we are told that the servants go out and gather all they find, “both bad and good”, filling the wedding hall with guests (v. 10). The king, however, comes in and sees one of the guests unprepared, without a wedding garment, and he is ejected into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (vv. 11-12). This is to say that in the present, at the gathering for the wedding feast (clearly referring to the the church, the ekklesia, the assembly, which gathers around the table of the Lord) there will be those who, when the king comes on the day of judgment, will be found to be unprepared for the feast, and will be ejected. Amongst the professing Christians of the present day, there are both those who have been predestined for life from before the foundation of the world and those who have not.

This has application, unsurprisingly, to baptism. Some people think we must baptise and thereby admit to the church those who are ‘real Christians’, those who have genuine faith. But as Jesus says, the church is not simply the gathering of the decretally elect. Those who belong to it are a mixed company and the eternal standing of its members may well only be truly known on the last day. With this understanding of the church, we see why, on the basis of God’s reiterated promise throughout Scripture to be God to us and to our children, it is right for children of believers to receive the baptism and be admitted to company of the church, just as circumcision was applied in Old Testament Israel, even if they turn out on the last day to be unprepared for the feast.

On Prayer

A faith is for man a necessity. Woe betide the person who believes in nothing.

You are not idle because you are absorbed. There is visible labour and invisible labour.

To contemplate is to toil; to think is to act. Crossed arms are at work, joined hands are doing something. Raising eyes to heaven is an opus…

There is, perhaps, no travail more useful.

- Victor Hugo in Les Misérables (from the ‘parenthesis’ on convents in the section entitled ‘Cosette’).

The Streets and Lanes of the City

A key component of the church’s response to God’s mission in the world is evangelism, explicitly sharing with others the good news of God’s free and gracious salvation which he wrought for us in Christ at the cross, and inviting them to personal faith in Christ. In the context of a university city, Christian students have many opportunities for evangelism, both personally sharing their faith with friends with whom they live and work, and through talks and courses hosted by the Christian Union and the local churches. Inevitably, however, this means that students share their faith almost exclusively with people like them – other students – but as the angel announced to the shepherds, the coming of Christ to be our Saviour is “good news of a great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2.10). It is estimated that forty percent of the population have never been to church, twenty percent have attended church at some point in their life but were damaged or disillusioned and have no intention of returning, and a further forty percent have attended church and left at some point in the past but are open to return if contacted and invited: the challenge is to reach out to them with the good news of Christ.

In Luke 18, Jesus tells the Parable of the Great Banquet in which the master (representing God) wants his house to be filled with all kinds of people and so commands his servant to go out “to the streets and lanes of the city”, “to the highways and hedges”, to compel people to share in the feast. Several years ago in Oxford, one student, passionate about sharing the gospel with all kinds of people, particularly those who were unlikely to go to church, started an open-air outreach in one of the main shopping streets, a work with which I have since become involved. Like the Athens of Paul’s day, this is something of a forum where people “spend their time… telling or hearing something new” (Acts 18.20): each Saturday, while the street is bustling with shoppers, there are a number of stalls representing different political, charitable and religious causes. Fortnightly a group of us, comprised of students and local workers from a number of local churches in different denominations and traditions, set up a display board and give short talks and testimonies, offer literature, and engage with those who stop, listening to them, responding to their questions, and speaking to them of Christ. This kind of model, which continues to bear fruit, has a noteworthy heritage in the church in England, not just amongst evangelicals such as George Whitefield in the eighteenth century, but also with those in the catholic tradition like Charles Lowder, who ministered in the East London slums during the nineteenth century, preaching mission sermons on the streets, often in the face of considerable disruption.

This form of evangelism poses its challenges. In the seventh century, St Aldhelm addressed the problem of local people talking to one another at the Eucharist rather than listening to the preacher by standing on a bridge and singing ballads like a minstrel; he attracted a huge crowd and when he had their attention, he began to preach the gospel to them. Similarly, as one Anglican minister who stopped to encourage us remarked, we need to find what it is that will draw people. Trade justice and climate change are matters of contemporary relevance, both as potentially emerging sources of self-righteousness for which we may need to seek forgiveness, and perhaps more significantly as issues to which the breaking in of God’s new creation through Christ’s life, death and resurrection can speak powerfully and offer hope. Moreover, we must not isolate our evangelism from the broader mission of the church: that is where its potency lies, and we find that it is when the people we meet encounter us living the gospel in our communities that our preaching tends to bear fruit. To conclude with N. T. Wright’s observation in his book Surprised by Hope, if a church “is actively involved in seeking justice in the world, both globally and locally, and if it’s cheerfully celebrating God’s good creation, and its rescue from corruption, in art and music, and if, in addition, its own internal life gives every sign that new creation is indeed happening, generating a new type of community – then suddenly the announcement makes a lot of sense.”

A Hymn for the Sabbath

Happy Lord’s Day!

Tune: Church Triumphant

Again the Lord’s own day is here,
The day to Christian people dear,
As, week by week, it bids them tell
How Jesus rose from death and hell.

For by His flock their Lord declared
His resurrection should be shared;
And we who trust in Him to save
With Him are risen from the grave.

We, one and all, of Him possessed,
Are with exceeding treasures blessed,
For all He did, and all He bare,
He gives us as our own to share.

Eternal glory, rest on high,
A blessèd immortality,
True peace and gladness, and a throne,
Are all His gifts, and all our own.

And therefore unto Thee we sing,
O Lord of peace, eternal King;
Thy love we praise, Thy Name adore,
Both on this day and evermore.

At­trib­ut­ed to Thom­as à Kemp­is (1379-1471)
Trans­lat­ed from La­tin to Eng­lish by John M. Neale and the com­pil­ers of Hymns An­cient and Mo­dern.

(HT: Timothy van den Broek, whom I have apparently met when doing open-air preaching, but my usually elephantine memory for these things currently fails me.)

Review: Heaven Misplaced

In the words of that great theologian Roy Wood, “I wish it could be Christmas every day.”

Douglas Wilson describes Heaven Misplaced: Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, due to be released on December 16th, as “a small effort to get Christians to believe their Christmas carols year-round”, which is to say, to take seriously declarations like “He comes to make His blessings flow, far as the curse is found.” His thesis is that,

“the gospel will continue to grow and flourish throughout the world, more and more individuals will be converted, the nations will stream to Christ, and the Great Commission will finally be successfully completed. The earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. When that happens, generation after generation will love and serve the Lord faithfully. And then the end will come.”

I have had the privilege of listening to Pastor Wilson arguing in favour of postmillennialism, here in England at The Blenheim Lectures earlier in the year, and also via the interweb, in his Ascension Day sermon. Here, he draws together the strands of what he describes as ‘historical optimism’ in a highly accessible introduction. In this book, eschatological terminology is relegated to an appendix for the interested reader who wants to read more, and technical vocabulary in general is kept to a minimum, and what little there is is explained in brief footnotes. This, then, is a primer on postmillennialism – and more - for everyone from the newest Christian upwards.

While the eschatological landscape amongst conservative evangelicals here in England, in my experience at least, tends to be amillennial rather than (dispensational) pre-millennial, in contrast to the United States, we nevertheless share the gloomy expectation that this world is going to go from bad to worse before resurrection morning: this world is a kind of Vietnam out of which we need to be airlifted. Wilson recognises that he’s up against a challenge and asks his readers to suspend their disbelief as they read this book, as they would with, for example, The Lord of the Rings, and temporarily enter into the story of the future of the world he is telling. He describes what he is doing, not so much as systematic theology, but ‘lyrical theology’: his aim is to show how lovely postmillennialism is. Does that mean, therefore, that there is no robust, Biblical basis for what Wilson is advocating? By no means. Throughout this book, Wilson expounds key Old Testament promises in light of the way Christ and the Apostles used them, and deals with common objections, to show that postmillennialism is strongly grounded in the Scriptures. As Wilson concludes, “How wonderful it would all be if all this could be true. The best part of the story is, it is.”

Wilson’s vision is profoundly Christ-centred: Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension shape his optimism. In a similar vein to the Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, Wilson offers a corrective to the widespread view of Christ’s resurrection that it means we get to go to heaven when we die, but history remains largely unchanged, and which is yet another product of our individualism: Christ’s resurrection is at the heart of history and is the firstfruits of our resurrection and the new creation itself. It is not the case that we live in a two-storey universe, where we live out our earthly lives down below and then spend eternity upstairs. Yes, when we die, we do go to heaven to be with the Lord, but at the second coming, Christ will return to the earth and transform it. In support of this, Wilson provides a helpful exegesis of Philippians 3.20-21: just as Philippi is a colony of Rome and the point of a colony isn’t that the people living there eventually get to go to the capital city, but that the colony is itself meant to be a centre for the expansion of the influence of the capital, so too the church is a colony of heaven, and while we get to visit the capital city, heaven, what we are waiting for is Christ’s arrival from the capital city to the colony, to transform it. Wilson rightly insists that the new creation is a complete transformation, but it is a transformation of this world, just as Christ rose again with the same (but glorified) body with which he died, and just as we will, like a seed growing into wheat. The ground of the hope Wilson expounds is the cross of Christ. He reminds that Christ came into the world not to condemn the world, but to save the world. Moreover, the cross, like the resurrection, has public ramifications, particularly for the powers of this world, for the crucifixion was a public event. Wilson argues from 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 that it topples the princes of this world and everything under their jurisdiction – the arts, sciences, politics and so on – so ‘preaching Christ and him crucified is as broad as the world’. Wilson wants us to have a full-orbed view of the atonement  – penal substitution, Christus Victor, Christ as example – which reflects Christ in all his offices, prophet, priest and king. Christ’s public death and resurrection have massive implications for justice: he is coming back to judge in righteousness, delivering those accused and victimised by the world as the falsely accused victim who has been raised from the dead. As the ascended Lord, Jesus Christ has been formally invested with all authority in heaven and on earth, before everyone must bow, human rulers and judges, all organisations and countries. Moreover, Christ’s kingship is what we are to proclaim. The Great Commission doesn’t give Jesus authority, it declares the authority he already has and summons people to repend and believe in him. Christ reigns until all his enemies are subdued and the last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Corinthians 15.25-26). Only once all opposition has ended will death be destroyed, and then the end will come. Jesus is the example we are to follow, and Jesus teaches us that by going to the back of the line as he does, we get to go to the head of the line – the chief seats – and so we are not to be so holy as to refuse the promotion when it comes, nor are we to strive directly for those highest positions.

Wilson describes for us the shape that Christ’s kingdom takes – it starts small and gradually fills the whole earth (Matthew 13.31-32, Daniel 2.44-45. In answer to the objection that the Bible says the way of salvation is narrow, an objection I myself have heard on a number of occasions, Wilson points us to Luke 13.22-30 and its context, in which the narrow gate refers to the salvation of the Jews in the first century, followed by the streaming in of the Gentiles. Christ makes a similar point about the salvation of a small remnant of Jews and of a large number of Gentiles elsewhere – Matthew 21.43 and Matthew 8.11, for example. Moreover, it is the salvation of the ends of the earth that was on Christ’s mind as he died: he quotes Psalm 22, the Psalm which in the first half is a prayer to God in the face of derision and suffering for deliverance, and in the second is a cry of faith that he will be delivered, and as a result, the ends of the earth will turn to the Lord. Wilson also offers us a helpful reminder abut what is happening on the cross. In fathoming out the mechanics of the atonement, we often hear accounts of the cross which describe how the Trinity was somehow ruptured at the cross. This is problematic to say the least. As Wilson points out, Christ being forsaken by the Father ‘is not to say that the Trinity unraveled [sic], but rather that the unbroken fellowship between God and his incarnate Son was disrupted.’ Through the cross, Christ has conquered the world.

Pastor Wilson exhibits no exegetical trickery in establishing his position. I was at the Proclamation Trust’s Cornhill Summer School three years ago, where Christopher Ash told us when we look at Old Testament passages, we interpret them in the light of the way the apostles understood them, and where a New Testament passages quotes or alludes to an Old Testament passage, we should take into account the Old Testament context. On this basis, Wilson reminds us that the Old Testament promises don’t merely await future fulfilment, but that they began to be fulfilled with the coming of Christ. On the basis of Psalm 2, we know that following Christ’s resurrection, the Father invited him to ask for them and he owns all the nations now, as the Great Commission testifies. Moreover, the implication of the concluding appeal of Psalm 2 is for the world’s political rulers to become Christians. The way the New Testament uses Psalm 110 proclaims Christ’s present princely rule. In addition, the radical peace and worldwide knowledge of the Lord as the nations stream to Christ in the gospel age is established by the way Paul applies Isaiah 11.9-10. Indeed, this is one example of what was particularly thrilling for me when reading through this book: the logic of Wilson’s unfolding argument mirrored time and again the discoveries I made myself in my own reading of Scripture. This was also the case with the gradual increase of Christ’s government and of peace in this world from the time when he was born (Isaiah 9). Wilson also deals with issues arising from New Testament apocalyptic, in the gospels and in Revelation, making a convincing case for preterism, i.e. that a straightforward literal reading of Matthew 24 describes the events of AD 70 and a right understanding of the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven – it is about the authority with which he is invested at his ascension and subsequently exercises. Language about the sun beng darkened, the moon not giving its light, stars falling from heaven, refers to God’s judgement on nations and cities, like Babylon and Edom (Isaiah 13.10, 34.4). The point in Matthew 24 and its parallels is that Jerusalem, too, will be judged for its sin. Wilson also makes a good case for an early dating of Revelation, following clearly events in the Roman Empire, with Nero as the beast, and Jerusalem the whore of Babylon.

As Pastor Wilson concludes his book, he issues a rallying call to the church. In light of the cultural mandate of the opening chapters of Genesis, and its reiteration after the Fall and its restoration in Christ, we are not to shirk our responsibility to exercise dominion in this world or abuse it to lord it over this world, but to exercise godly dominion in Christ. To this end, we need to divest ourselves of the ghetto mentality which believes that the secular state is unconquerable and that we must escape from our responsibilities and be saved from this world, but also of the mentality that wants Christ to be a player at the table of ’secular democracy’. Wilson invites a high view of the church indeed: the new humanity God is creating in Christ, the future of the human race, in which the image of God is being restored. She is a mother, the mother of cities, cities which are planted where the word and sacraments are ministered. He therefore summons us to faith in God’s promises in Scripture (for faith is required for a right understanding of Scripture) for ourselves.

Concerns I have heard raised about postmillennialism is that it is a theology of glory, or that it encourages the view that humanity can gradually make progress towards a better world under its own steam, or that it fails to give due attention to this world corrupted by sin, or even that it is universalism. Those charges simply will not stick to the position Pastor Wilson is advocating. He is gospel-centred throughout. The ground for the glorious vision he describes is the cross of Christ, and it is brought about through the preaching of the word. It is clear Wilson thinks that the kingdom will advance through opposition: “The victory of this kingdom is still watered by the blood of the martyrs, figuratively and literally: the way of the cross is still the only way to enduring glory.” indeed he encourages us to reflect whether the relative lack of opposition we are facing at the moment is a result of compromise:

   “If God grants a genuine reformation, it will be one like that which was granted in the sixteenth century, and the most obvious common feature it will share with that earlier reformation will be that it challenges the rulers of this age. No greaster indictment of the contemporary church than this can be found: the secular state is operating on all cylinders, and yet for the most part, the Christian pulpit remains a safe place to be.
   “More pastors ought to wonder about this. Shouldn’t ministers and churches be more concerned than they are about the lack of opposition they are facing? And shouldn’t they be willing to consider if it isn’t the result of diluting the message. It is possible to talk about the final judgment and the lordship of Jesus Christ in such a way that makes it clear that He is only lord over those areas that secularists are frankly happy to let Him have – the afterlife for example. Who cares if Jesus is Lord in ways that never make any difference at all?”

And Wilson is no universalist:

“This must not be taken to mean that every last human being who ever lived will finally be saved. Our Lord’s teaching on the terrible nature of everlasting fire excludes that option. So the fact that Christ will save the world does not mean that He will save every last individual who ever lived in it… Every Bible believer must reject the universalism that denies the awful reality of the final judgment for unbelievers.”

This book, then, is a robust, Scripturally-rooted exposition of the Christian hope that takes into account God’s promises in the Bible and the very public ramifications of Christ’s public death and resurrection. This is a hope which gives great confidence for the future of this world before the Lord Jesus returns, and after, and which will be realised, unlike the kingdoms of this world by humble faith, walking the way of Christ, trusting his promises and preaching his gospel. This is challenging reading, which should cause evangelicals to reconsider assumptions with which we have grown up in the light of Scripture, but with this book, Pastor Wilson lights a lamp which dispels much of our current eschatological gloom and galvanises the church to work in the power of the Spirit to see Christ’s present reign over all things acknowledged in this world, throughout this world. He succeeds in describing with clarity and vigour a vision which is altogether lovely.

The Poetry of Penal Substitution

I was reflecting on penal substitution this afternoon and reading that excellent book Pierced for our Transgressions (which, contrary to its critics, and as I have articulated elsewhere, is a firm and robust yet gracious treatment of the heart of the gospel, sensitive to Scripture and tradition, pastorally helpful, and magnifying the love, justice, and truthfulness of the Triune God who saves us), when, in a different book entirely, I came across the following familiar poem from George Herbert, in which he writes of how he, a guilty and unworthy sinner, is shown tender grace and invited to feast with his Lord, because his Lord has faced what he deserved:

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked any thing.

“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste My meat.”
So I did sit and eat.

Review: A Primer on Worship and Reformation

How will we hear without a preacher? And how will they turn red and embarrassed without a satirist?

In his forthcoming book, Pastor Douglas Wilson acts as both preacher and satirist with regard to contemporary evangelical corporate worship. He makes the case that we need to repent of the triviality, irreverence and worldliness which characterises modern evangelicalism. While the excesses of the commercialism which characterises the American evangelical culture into which Wilson is writing has not yet reached British shores to quite the same degree (at least in Anglican evangelical circles), nevertheless we too have stumbled in our corporate worship and church life, and we need to hear this message. He rightly points out that “all cultures have a cultus at the center [sic]“, that “the center [sic] of every culture is its worship”, and he appeals to Henry Van Til, who said that all cultures are the externalisation of religion. Faulty worship is what has gone wrong with the modern evangelical church, the kind of worship that is driven by an admittedly well-meaning desire to present the gospel to unbelievers in a way that is “relevant”, and he blows right out of the water the myth that the contrast between traditional and modern forms of worship is because one emphasises external forms and liturgy while the other does not: all inward faith has a physical expression, but the so-called liturgical forms stand out because those external forms are so different from the culture around them. What Wilson is not doing is merely advocating a return to traditional forms: it begins in the heart, but it musn’t end there. The love of God that is required for God-centred worship is an incarnational love; to use Wilson’s phrase, it “begins in the heart, and ends at the fingertips”.

Wilson diagnoses the underlying problem as individualism. People refuse to humbly submit to lawful authority and one another, and so as soon as disagreement arises, even over trivial things, war arises and splits occur. He suggests that the right alternative is humility and mutual submission – to God and his authoritative and infallible word, to God and his authoritative and fallible church, to God and the other fallible authorities he has placed in our lives – for example, families and civil government. What we want is reformation without schism, not simply setting up a different banner under which to gather people. Evangelicals (American and British) have a tendency to think they have an elect-o-scope, the ability to see the invisible church, and so they divide from those who, on their terms, can’t possibly be Christians. Evangelicals who flee from this Scylla, however, have the tendency to collide with the Charybdis of dispensing with doctrinal standards to welcome anyone and avoid any hostility. The way Wilson suggests is the Biblical, covenantal way: we need to take covenant status seriously. Those who are baptised and profess faith in Christ yet who deny even key doctrines of the faith are unfaithful Christians, but they are unfaithful Christians and that has to determine the way they are treated. We don’t simply split off from them and so retreat in the name of purity. Nor, however, do we simply pass over disagreements as if they don’t matter. It is because these people bear the name of Christ that we stay and we fight, for their sakes and for others, and we do so, again in Pastor Wilson’s words, with “a large heart and a narrow sword”. This explains the subtitle for this book: “Recovering the High Church Puritan”. The majority of the early Elizabethan Puritans, Wilson rightly reminds us (and I might include the early Stuart Puritans such as Richard Sibbes in here as well), while wanting to further purify the church according to Scripture following the Elizabethan Settlement (hence they were abusively called “Puritans” by those who opposed them), nevertheless did not desire to separate from the church or behave like a schismatics, separatists, independents or individualists but had a high view of the covenant and their corporate identity, and they recognised their need for accountability and so for one another (hence they can be described as “high church” Puritans). The way of the high church Puritan is the way he commends.

With this framework in mind, it is Pastor Wilson’s belief that the right worship of the church will impact in the world outside and this leads him to give a helpful, liberating corrective on the subject of evangelism. While he acknowledges that direct evangelism is necessary for local churches in each genearation (as per the Great Commission), he challenges the practical approach taken by the contemporary evangelical church: it seems to be the case that in American colleges as well as in British universities, young people are taught that integral to their walk with Christ is the need for personal, daily, direct evangelism, with the result that as these people grow up and there is less time and fewer opportunities, guilt arises and the evangelistic zeal of the whole church is wounded. While Scripture makes it clear that Christians should be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in them (1 Peter 3.15), the work of an evangelist is a demanding task, the office of which is a gift from the risen and ascended Christ. This approach to evangelism flows from the nature of the church as a body in Paul’s letters. Some have the ability to be good personal evangelists. Others don’t, and actually their function is to support the evangelistic work of the church as a body – working faithfully, attending church faithfully, giving to the work of the church. In this, they are no less evangelical (and actually, this kind of lifestyle tends to provoke questions anyway). Moreover, Wilson argues that biblical corporate worship is the weapon God is pleased to use week by week to knock down the unbelief in our communities. The form that biblical corporate worship takes is covenant renewal worship.

The individualism of contemporary evangelicalism manifests itself, among other ways, in our approach to Scripture. We tend to think it is a message for me about my personal life, and while personal faithfulness is a requisite response to Scripture, the Bible is nevertheless the collection of the church’s covenant documents which demands corporate faithfulness, and that is particularly the case when it comes to corporate worship. Wilson makes the case from Scripture, especially the Psalms, that worship belongs primarily in the public congregation, and not in private spiritual exercises. It is something that we are to do together. He demonstrates that Christians when they assemble together on the Lord’s Day spiritually ascend into heaven (cf Revelation 8.4 and Paul’s description of the church at Ephesus in Ephesians 2.5-6). Given the corporate nature of the book, this is particularly clear in the letter to the Hebrews, which urges meeting together (Hebrews 10.25) because that means ascending into heaven with the boldness that comes through Christ’s shed blood (Hebrews 10.19, 22). The gathered church comes to the heavenly Jerusalem, the assembly of innumerable angels, the universal church, and the presence of God himself (Hebrews 12.22-24). It is the realisation that this is what happens in worship services which will inspire in us reverence and awe (Hebrews 12.28 ) and thus a desire to approach God in the way he wants. While Wilson acknowledges that under the new covenant, animal sacrifices are done away with because of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice of himself on the cross, such sacrifical patterns undergird new covenant worship – the sacrificial language is still there. The pattern Wilson takes is the order of the Old Testament sacrifices – the guilt offering to make the worshipper fit to enter the presence of God, the ascension offering, in which the smoke symbolically ascends to God when it is burnt on the altar, and the peace offering, which the worshipper eats the presence of the Lord, a demonstration of God’s acceptance of the worshipper and his willingness to share in the covenant meal. In worship under the new covenant, this corresponds to confession of sin (exhortation, prayer of confession, assurance of pardon and congregational singing of thanks), offering ourselves to God (through the reading of Scripture, prayers of petition and thanks, sermon, a hymn or a psalm, and the bringing forward of the offering), and the Lord’s Supper. All this is preceded by a call to worship, and a commissioning (including a blessing). Wilson wants us to see the glory of all this and so be stirred up out of the laziness into which we have fallen.

Wilson then focuses on specific elements of the worship service. He impresses upon us the significance of the preaching of the word. The word cuts us like a sword (Hebrews 4.12-13) cuts sacrifical animals to be offered to God. The sword-like nature of the Scripture, and its living and active character must shape how the preacher handles it – with conviction, not merely making suggestions. Wilson roots our Scriptural focus, our focus on the word, in our focus on Christ, the Word, whence human words derive their power to communicate truth, goodness and beauty to us. “The pulpit should be one of the liveliest places on earth, because in it, words are imitating the Word,” Wilson says, words through metaphor revealing God to us as the Son reveals the Father. For this reason, handling of Scripture must never be truncated or wooden: our preaching needs to be liberated from mere tight historico-grammatical exegesis (which goes beyond the responsible hermenutic advocated by the Reformers against out-of-control allegory in a decidedly rationalistic direction) and needs to be guided by the way Scripture teaches us how to handle Scripture. We need to be sensitive to the sensus plenior of Scripture, a hermeneutic which precedes the Greek Fathers, and is found in the words of Christ and Paul. We need to be faithful to Scripturally-controlled typology in all its Biblical fullness. Covenant renewal worship also features weekly communion and Wilson argues this not so much from proof-texts, but by leaving us content with nothing less when he demonstrates what is happening in the Lord’s Supper – being knit together by the Spirit, and, in line with the historic Protestant view, partaking of the body and blood of Christ when we come by faith, and so being transformed into a new humanity. The Lord’s Supper is a corporate act – we have communion with one another – and so the way we celebrate it must reflect this: rather than withdrawing into private introspection, we should be sitting up, looking around. Faith shows itself in doing what God says, meeting him where he says he will be found – at his table. Wilson also calls for reformation in the music of the church: both the music and the content has become progressively more simplistic (although there are some encouragements from the American Sovereign Grace Music and the Australian EMU). Wilson reminds us for the need for a robust faith and an evident zeal, and for Christ’s word to dwell in us richly, which is to overflow in our singing (Colossians 3.16). The reflection of a rich faith in Christ will be rich lyrics, rich melodies, rich harmonisation, rich, joyful and robust singing. As with every other aspect of our life, public worship should be fervent in Spirit, serving the Lord (Romans 12.11), Wilson notes. Wilson himself admits that he found contemporary music refreshing and more accessible when he first encountered it in contrast to the dirge-like traditional music which seems to have characterised his early church experience. But he challenges us to consider why more traditional forms can be inaccessible – has it become mere professionalism or a lifeless traditionalism? These things, not the music itself, are the real problem. He doesn’t want us to be satisfied with anything less than robust, intelligible content and glorious words and rich music. Moreover, good content, zeal and Biblical consistency are best served by a return to the Psalms. We need to be prepared for hard work in recovering a music heritage that we have thrown away, but that shouldn’t stop us. He finishes by noting that the psalmist had enemies which he dealt with the music: the Psalter is a battle hymnal which is vital to recover if we are serious about conquering the world with the gospel through biblical worship.

Wilson concludes his book with two chapters on the wider implications of the biblical vision he is proposing. The first is that of the Sabbath and feasting. Not only ought we not to be disregarding the Sabbath day, but we must not overreact and misuse it in a restrictive way. It is a positive ordinance, providing for us rest and pleasure. We mustn’t keep it gnostically, denying ourselves the physical enjoyment of preparing a meal or going for a walk. Rather, the Sabbath is a feast (Leviticus 23.1-3) and the way the church organises its services and programmes shouldn’t push that out. It, with the public worship of the church, should be something to which God’s people look forward the whole week. Finally, we are reminded that Scripture encourages us to see things far more through the lens of covenant than the lens of election (for we do not know the elect, but we do know those who are in the covenant) and this has important implications for our children. Thinking that we can know if our child is one of the elect harms our children: in the name of high conversion standards, the faith of a young child is doubted and they then grow up in doubt. In the New Covenant, God promises himself to us and to our children (Ezekiel 37.24-26, Isaiah 59.21, Acts 2.39). God promises himself in mercy. We must look to God’s word of promise for our children in faith and conceive, bear, discipline, feed, comfort and teach them in faith. This attitude will have implications, not only for the home, but in the church, as we bring our children to the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

My minor quibble with this book is that Pastor Wilson from time to time tries to make the verses he quotes say too much, or they don’t make the point that he is making – if there is application from them, then it’s not obvious to me and I’d like to see some more of the working. Accuse me of exegetical pedantry if you will, but I think this is important, and has the potential to weaken the otherwise very good arguments that he makes. In one case, Wilson makes the point that God in his kindness permits us to assemble in his courts every seventh day, and appeals to Leviticus 23.3. While it may be true that we assemble in heaven every seventh day, that verse makes no mention of assembling in God’s courts. The other verses Wilson quotes in regard to assembling in God’s courts are much more explicitly about the temple, which Leviticus 23.3 clearly isn’t. All it says is that God in his kindness commands us to keep every Sabbath day as a feast. Wilson goes on to identify the Lord’s day with the Sabbath rest that remains for the people of God in Hebrews 4.9. While I certainly affirm the keeping of the Sabbath, the Sabbath rest which remains for the people of God in Hebrews 4.9 is the parallel to the rest which the Israelites failed to enter, namely the Promised Land, a rest into which we are to strive to enter, which I take to be the new creation. Finally in this regard, Wilson says that Paul urged feasting on the Lord’s Day and appeals to 1 Corinthians 5.8. However, Paul isn’t making the point about literal feasting there. In the previous verse, he is using the typology of the Passover lamb. Christ is the Passover lamb who has been sacrificed. Christians are therefore to keep the antitype of the feast of unleavened bread, which is to live lives characterised not by malice and evil but sincerity and truth. The surrounding context of the verse makes it clear that Paul is criticising the immoral, boastful lifestyle of the Corinthians which is inconsistent with their Christian calling and of which they must repent, like removing yeast from dough.

In conclusion then, Wilson is not merely offering a criticism of the external forms of public worship and advocating a return to traditional liturgies. He goes to the heart of contemporary evangelicalism, makes his diagnosis and prescribes a change of thinking about the church. Whilst standing for Scriptural truth, we must nevertheless take the church seriously and the covenant seriously. Wilson then offers a manifesto for change in our view of evangelism, Scripture, what happens when we gather together, our forms of worship, our music, the Lord’s Supper, the Sabbath and our children. Each chapter on its own could be (and probably has been) the basis of a book. While Wilson is writing into an American Evangelical context, British evangelicals have our own problems and would do well to listen to what Pastor Wilson is saying. We, too, have bought to some extent into the idol of individualism and we fail to take the church seriously. We use simplified liturgies, have communion infrequently, and neglect our musical heritage in the name of evangelism. We don’t really even think about the Sabbath, feasting and the status of our children. And particularly with regard to Anglican conservative evangelicalism, our desire for reformation and purity seems to be increasingly at the cost of our commitment to the wider Anglican church. This book, then, is a welcome call back to the way of High Church Puritanism, where true gospel potency lies. And as Pastor Wilson remarks in his closing chapter, “To be understood, almost all of this has to be tasted, not discussed.”

A Primer on Worship and Reformation: Recovering the High Church Puritan by Douglas Wilson is due to be released on November 11, 2008 and is published by Canon Press, from whom this book can be pre-ordered at www.canonpress.com.