Satan’s Stolen Treasure
Too many in our churches are lonely. Not just the single, the widow, and the widower, but everyone, anyone of any age, any stage. And the tragedy in the church is that so often we’re too busy to even notice. In fact often those of us in ministry model the very opposite of friendship. But we need friends, those we can laugh with, be honest with, open up to, be comfortably silent with knowing there are no expectations just welcome.
Satan is a thief. He takes what’s not his. Be it glory, worship, children, whatever he can get his hands on. He’s also a saboteur, read Genesis 3, he doesn’t form things, he doesn’t do beauty, he can’t create culture, he can only sabotage it, or create counterfeits. He steals, he twists, he warps, he deforms. And we live with the consequences. Our lives so often are impoverished as a result without us even realising it.
One of the treasures that Satan has stolen is friendship. I love the image in the garden of Eden of Adam and Eve enjoying an rich intimacy that is founded on knowing one another without shame or fear. It was a relationship of love and laughter and total safety and joy. And it isn’t just an image of marriage, it’s an image of community, of friendship. What they experience they are to replicate as they multiply until God’s good creation is filled with people who enjoy relationship with God and with each other.
The Bible is big on friendship. It shows us dysfunctional friendships and beautiful friendships like David and Jonathan, or Jesus and his disciples, that leave us longing to taste that same joy filled trust and intimacy. But Satan is always looking to sabotage and steal that joy. And the result of that is that we are a church that is marked in the West by loneliness. And that’s tragic. Loneliness is endemic in Western society.
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Following the Footsteps of Jesus: Consecration to the Father
In all times and circumstances of life and ministry, Jesus kept His focus on doing His Father’s will. Jesus did not place conditions on doing His Father’s will, which we are tempted to do. We are tempted to think, and even say, “If my circumstances were different, then I would do God’s will.” Or we confess, “If I had a better husband or more supportive wife, then,” or, “If only I had good health or more money, then…” We must be like Jesus: this means obedience to the Father without conditions.
One of the main themes in the Gospel of John is the full consecration of Jesus to do His Father’s will. Jesus was fully devoted to say and do only what pleased His Father. What brought glory to the Father, what the Father wanted Him to experience, what the Father wanted Him to accomplish or not accomplish—this was the wholehearted desire of Jesus.
Consecration to God, giving ourselves to God as living sacrifices, is what Christian living is all about. It is knowing God’s will and doing it. It is willingly giving each aspect of our lives to God in grateful devotion for the great salvation that He has given to us through Jesus (Rom 12:1-2). Previously, we wrote about this need for consecration, and specifically about the need to consecrate our health, security, and safety to God.
As we pursue greater dedication to God, we find encouragement through the example of our Lord Jesus Christ. To be like Jesus is our goal for daily life. Let’s consider together how the apostle John shows us Christ’s example of consecration in his Gospel.[1][2]
Jesus voluntarily accepted the Father’s will.
The Father’s will for God the Son was to experience shame and suffering for the sins of the world in ways far beyond our comprehension. The Son knew this, knew all of what He would suffer before He came to the earth. And yet, He completely accepted the Father’s will. He voluntarily did His Father’s will, trusting His goodness, sovereignty, and plan in everything.
3:14-16 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
3:34 For he whom God has sent utters the words of God.
8:42 Jesus said to them, If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me.
10:17-18 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.
12:27-28 Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”
Just as Jesus was sent to do the will of the Father, so are we. Jesus was completely committed to doing the Father’s will, and our ambition must be to do the same. This includes when His will means hardship and suffering. We must place our trust in the Father and purpose to do His will, even if He requires us to experience trials that we previously feared would ever take place. Job said, “For the thing which I fear is comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me” (Job 3:25).
Jesus did the Father’s will in all of life’s circumstances.
4:34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work.”
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Lamenting in Wartime
Tough times can make us better. If we lament well, if we process pain effectively, if we opt for thorough wrestling instead of shallow dismissals, we can be transformed into more compassionate, more trusting, more mature disciples of the One who chose to endure the ultimate suffering “for the joy set before him” (Hebrews 12:2).
As I begin writing this article, reports come in like a tsunami about the horrors between Israel and Gaza. Meanwhile, American college students protest with slogans that oversimplify amazingly complex issues. In Washington, our political leaders seem more interested in their own fame than in the well-being of our country or the world. It’s enough to make you throw your hands up in the air and run for distractions you find most consuming.
I’ll let others more qualified and informed than myself offer political and military strategies. And I’ll save my comments about theological perspectives about Israel for other writings. I will say, as a follower of the One who called himself “the truth,” it is deeply disturbing that we live in a time of a famine for the truth. Some so-called “news” agencies seem incapable of presenting the facts without bias and many people seem to have no difficulty blatantly lying to advance sympathy from others. This drought of truthfulness may do more harm than the missiles flying over the Israel/Gaza border.
Regardless of what transpires militarily or diplomatically over the next few months, Christians are called to “love our neighbors.” And one of the most important ways (perhaps the most important way) is through prayer. But how can we pray to advance the Kingdom of God while not feeling dragged down in despair. I confess I find this a great challenge.
The greatest help for me, and therefore the one I am commending in this article, is to follow the templates of Lament that we find dozens of times in the Book of Psalms. Lamenting (as starkly contrasted with griping, complaining, moping, or despairing) is a rarely practiced but remarkably powerful spiritual discipline for trying times such as these. If we can develop the spiritual muscle memory of praying prayers of lament, we will grow stronger during difficult times rather than being discouraged by them.
If you were to categorize the Psalms, as many have done, you’d find groupings such as Thanksgiving Psalms, Royal Psalms, Messianic Psalms, and others including Lament Psalms. You’d also find that there are more lament Psalms than any other category. Apparently, God wants us to learn how to cry out to him during the darkest of moments.
Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, with a lifelong focus on the psalms, comments, “We may wonder how lament or complaint can coexist with faith, so it is worth recalling well that over a third of the Psalms are laments. This observation by itself informs us that lament and faith are not incompatible. Certainly, it is sinful to complain in unbelief, but lament need not be untrusting of God’s providential care.”[i]
Lament Psalms include common ingredients: cries of lament, reminders of God’s character, pleas for deliverance, and statements of hope. These prayers flow from honest lament to confident trust. They don’t always follow the same sequence but all but one land in a place of strength.
Psalm 88, the outlier, ends with these seemingly hopeless words, “Darkness is my closest friend.” I used to think this was a totally despairing Psalm that never turned the corner. I took ironic encouragement that, sometimes, life does seem as dark as that. But a closer reading of Psalm 88 won’t allow for such a lopsided perspective. Note how the psalmist begins: he cries out to “the God who saves me.” In other words, he began in the place of hope. The very fact that he chose to pray at all expresses a faith we need to find during the darkest of days.
Psalm 13, a beautiful and brief lament can serve as an instructive guide to all the other lament Psalms. Consider its emotional honesty, its theological depth, and its profound expression of trust.
How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever?How long will you hide your face from me?How long must I wrestle with my thoughtsand day after day have sorrow in my heart?How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Look on me and answer, LORD my God.Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in deathand my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
But I trust in your unfailing love;my heart rejoices in your salvation.I will sing to LORD ‘s praise,for he has been good to me.
We begin to lament well by recounting to God our pain. Notice how the psalm begins with four statements that start, “How long?” This is not a calmed, cool, “I’m just asking a question” sequence of inquiries. The psalmist is wailing. He feels like God has forgotten him and turned his face away. Pause there for a second. Have you ever felt like God has forgotten you or that he’s ignoring you? Do you feel the pain behind such a blatant contradiction to what we (and this psalmist as well!) know to be true? Our God never forgets anything. He knows everything. And the greatest blessing you can offer someone is for God to “make his face shine upon you.” (see Numbers 6:25). So, to cry out to God the way this psalmist does is not a quiet sobbing in the corner. The volume is turned up high.
Note also that the psalmist looks inward and outward. He wrestles with his thoughts and looks at his enemies. He fears that his foes will take credit for his demise. The Bible talks about our enemies quite often. For most of us, we can think of few human beings who hate us. So, we (rightly!) turn our attention to the greatest enemy of our souls, the devil himself. True enough. But we should not be naive enough to think we don’t have people who hate us. We follow the One who was hated and scorned—enough that they nailed him to a cross. If we haven’t experienced persecution because of our faith yet, we shouldn’t be surprised if that changes sooner than we’d like.
Some of us, depending on our personality or culture, resist this terribly. We think the psalmist was sinning when he uttered the first four verses of this psalm. Or we rush to a theological resolution like, “Well…that’s just his flesh talking. He gets straightened out when he remembers that ‘greater is he who is you than he who is in the world.’” To be sure, I John 4:4 is true. But we rush too quickly to resolutions that don’t really resolve if we skim past the lengthy laments in these psalms. We should also remember the many honest expressions of pain in Job, the Prophets, the entire book of Lamentations, and Jesus’s intense prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. God doesn’t tell us to shut up or get ahold of ourselves when we cry out to him in our pain. He listens. And his word encourages us to keep talking—to him and to ourselves—until we see the fullest picture possible.
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America’s Campus Meltdown
Written by R. Albert Mohler Jr. |
Thursday, May 2, 2024
What is not unclear is that the students now condemning Israel are the products of an elite American academic industry that offers leftist ideologies as its main product and, brace yourselves, the younger professors on many campuses are much further to left in both ideology and politics. The old liberals are scared to death of the young leftists. Furthermore, the young professors are scared to death of the students, many of whom have been coddled in privilege and even more of whom have been marinated in a brine of radical ideologies.The chaos engulfing elite college campuses across America should surprise no one. The sight of privileged university students chanting “from the river to the sea” and calling for an end to American support of Israel was absolutely predictable. This is exactly what happens when the ideological left is in the driver’s seat and leftist students are all too ready to go along for the ride. Americans of a certain age might be tempted to say this is 1968 all over again. But, in the case of the campus protesters, the current situation is actually far worse.
Just look at New York’s famed Columbia University, founded as a college by the Church of England and later the historic school of American patriots. In 1968 Columbia was the scene of campus protests and a surging ideological Left, with students directing their ire at the U.S. government and the war in Vietnam. Like many elite institutions, it has a long history of anti-Semitism. Fast forward to 2024 and the same scenes now flood back, with students protesting and leftism ascendant. This time the anger is directed at the State of Israel and the students have styled themselves as liberationist allies of the Palestinians, who they present as victims of Israel’s “settler colonialism.”
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