http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15545183/why-did-my-life-have-to-be-hard

If you were to ask me what I take to be among Scripture’s most comforting passages, my answer may surprise you: Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes.
Psalm 90 is Israel’s poignant lament that, even though they are God’s chosen people, they are also Adam’s children, subject as he was to God’s righteous anger at their sin. Moses’s poetry in Psalm 90 leads us, step by step, deep into the cellar of their life’s brevity, pain, and toil. The third verse begins that descent by echoing God’s words to Adam in Genesis 3:19:
You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of Adam!” . . .
You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning:
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.
For we are brought to an end by your anger;
by your wrath we are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
For all our days pass away under your wrath;
we bring our years to an end like a sigh. (Psalm 90:3, 5–9)
We aren’t exactly sure of the details — perhaps, as Allen Ross argues, Moses penned this psalm at the end of Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness (A Commentary on the Psalms, 3:26–27). Whatever the specific backdrop, the Israelites had gone through a period of intense suffering and had thus learned the hard way that God’s anger against their sin meant that, even if they lived unusually long lives, their best years would be but toil and trouble that would soon be gone, and then they would fly away (verse 10).
Good But Unfathomable Providence
Ecclesiastes is best understood “as an arresting but thoroughly orthodox exposition of Genesis 1–3,” as David Clemens observes. In particular, it makes “the painful consequences of the fall . . . central,” clarifying how disconcerting life after the fall can be. The Preacher knows that God generally administers his providence through the world’s regular causal processes (Ecclesiastes 1:4–7, 9). Fools and sluggards generally get what they deserve because they refuse to conform to creation’s ordered patterns (Ecclesiastes 4:5; see also Proverbs 6:6–11; 20:4; 24:30–34). Wisdom is better than folly because the wise understand and honor those patterns and thus can see where they are going, while fools stumble around in the dark (Ecclesiastes 2:13–14).
But still, “time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). In other words, what God, in the course of his ordinary providence, ordains creation’s structures and processes to bring us, is not only outside our control but also beyond our finding out. Yet nothing can be added to what God does, nor anything taken away from it. “God has done it, so that people fear before him” (Ecclesiastes 3:14).
A healthy, holy fear of God’s providence thus keeps us humble and dependent as we acknowledge that he has so ordered life “under the sun” that, however hard we may strive to understand what was or is or will be, we won’t fathom much. “No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it” (Ecclesiastes 8:17 NIV).
More specifically, we can’t tell from what is happening whom God truly loves, since the same events happen to good and bad alike. In this fallen world, righteousness is not always rewarded, and wickedness doesn’t always receive the punishment it deserves: “There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous” (Ecclesiastes 8:14; 7:15). How God will apportion good and bad, joy and sorrow, ease and difficulty to each of us in our earthly lives exceeds our grasp (Job 9:1–12; Luke 13:1–5).
God Has Not Abandoned Us
The stark realism of Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes may seem disheartening. Yet, the apostle Paul tells us that “everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope” (Romans 15:4 NIV). So how do these passages encourage us and give us hope?
They remind us that, since the fall, suffering is an ordinary part of human life under sin’s regime. God’s judgments in Genesis 3:16–19 anticipate some of the sorts of suffering that are now endemic to human life. Genesis 4 then drives home just how excruciating human life can be: Adam and Eve’s first son, Cain, murders their second son, Abel, and then is condemned to be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.
“Since the fall, suffering is an ordinary part of human life under sin’s regime.”
Yet we must not conclude that our lives will be nothing but unrelieved suffering. In addressing the pagan polytheists in Lystra, Paul reminds them that God had not left himself without a witness, “for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17). Eve’s daughters will suffer physically and emotionally as they marry and have families (Genesis 3:16), but they may experience great joy in their marriages and families as well. Adam’s sons will always have to scratch out a living (Genesis 3:17–19), but the end of long days may still be satisfying if we have labored as we should.
Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes caution us against expecting settled happiness now. Since the fall, even creation itself groans because of its subjection to the futility of sin (Romans 8:18–21). And so, if life gets bad for us, it isn’t a sign that Christianity is untrue or that God has abandoned us. In fact, when we have faced significant suffering and survived it, we often experience the opposite: we find we can rejoice in our suffering, knowing that it teaches us endurance, and that endurance makes us stronger and deeper in ways that prompt us to hope for our final and complete salvation as we sense God’s love for us through the presence of his Holy Spirit (Romans 5:3–5; James 1:2–3; 1 Peter 1:3–9).
Joy with the Morning
To be a Christian means to believe in our Lord’s bodily resurrection (Romans 10:9), and to believe in his resurrection entails believing in our own resurrections (1 Corinthians 15). Our hope for the ultimate redemption of our bodies is, as Paul puts it, the hope in which we were saved (Romans 8:24).
This hope, Paul tells us, keeps us from losing heart, for while “our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). No matter what is happening to us, we can recognize that it will ultimately count as little more than a “light momentary affliction” that is “preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17–18; Romans 8:18).
“Our suffering can and should prompt us to look up and long for what God has prepared for us.”
Our suffering, in other words, can and should prompt us to look up and long for what God has prepared for us. And what is that? It is a life of no more sorrow, no more tears, when sin and death will be no more (Revelation 21:4). It is the life of complete joy in communion with God that our Lord has prepared for those who wait for him (Isaiah 64:4).
Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes encourage me to look only to God and not to anything or anyone in this world for every good thing (Psalm 90:13–17). They also assure me that, for those of us who have become his children through faith in his Son’s work, God’s anger against our sin will last for only a moment, while his favor toward us will last forever. While our weeping may last through the night, unending joy will come to us in the morning (Psalm 30:5).
You Might also like
-
Ten Looks at Jesus, Part 1
For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ.
Those are the words of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, a pastor in Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was born in Edinburgh in 1813, and what’s striking about his life (and that some still remember him today) is that he lived only twenty-nine years. He died of typhus fever in 1843.
Two years later, his friend and a fellow minister Andrew Bonar published Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M’Cheyne, which in time came to be published in over a hundred English editions. In Memoir and Remains appears a letter M’Cheyne wrote to a friend:
Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief! Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in His beams. Feel His all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and [rest] in His almighty arms . . .
Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in Him. Let the Holy Spirit fill every chamber of your heart; and so there will be no room for folly, or the world, or Satan, or the flesh. (293)
Ten looks at Christ for every one look at self. I suspect M’Cheyne’s counsel was striking in his day. But now, some 180 years later, what are we to make of it, living in an age so saturated in, so dominated by the ruse of the almighty self?
Ten looks at Christ for every one look at self was a countercultural word in M’Cheyne’s day. And how much more so for us now? And what healing might there be for us in heeding his counsel? How impoverished are we for our subtle and overt fixations on and fascinations with self, dwelling in a generation that both nourishes the love of self in us and conditions us for greater and deeper attention to self than we otherwise might dare venture?
So I want to ask you to come with me on a journey. I invite you in these moments — as much as you’re able — to put self aside, and together let’s take ten looks at Jesus. In this first session, we’ll take five looks at him from eternity past to the cross, and then in the second session, from his resurrection to eternity future. And with each look, we’ll anchor our glance at his glory in at least one key biblical text and also a key theological term that seeks to capture some of the majesty we find in Christ. So, ten looks at Jesus.
Look #1: He delighted his Father before creation.
Not only did he exist before creation — with all its implications for his deity — but, as divine Son, he delighted his Father, as we’ll see. First, John 1:1–3:
In the beginning was the Word [that is, the divine Son, who would come as Christ], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
“What was Christ doing for the endless ages of eternity past before there was time itself? He delighted his Father.”
Jesus — the divine Son, who would, in time, become man — existed in the beginning with God the Father. John says (1) he was with God (literally, “toward God,” as in face to face) and (2) he was himself God. Before anything was created, he was. “All things were made through him, and [if that’s not clear enough, then] without him was not anything made that was made.” The Word, the divine Son, was not made. He was not created. He himself is God — God’s own fellow and God’s own self.
Our key term for Look #1 is preexistence. The divine Son, the second person of the Trinity, who we now know as Jesus of Nazareth and as the Christ, preexisted his human life (and all creation as well). Which we see deeply embedded in various ways throughout the New Testament:
First, he came. Mark 10:45: “The Son of Man came . . . to give his life as ransom of many.” John 3:13: “The Son of Man descended from heaven.” Hebrews 10:5: “Christ came into the world.” 1 Timothy 1:15: “Christ came into the world to save sinners.”
Second, he was sent. Galatians 4:4: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman.” The owner of the vineyard sent his Beloved Son (Mark 12:6).
Third, he was given. John 3:16: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Romans 8:32: God the Father “did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.”So, fully God himself, Christ was given, he was sent, he came. And he preexisted not only his coming but the whole creation. So what was he doing for the endless ages of eternity past before there was time itself? He delighted his Father. And Proverbs 8:22–31 personifies God’s wisdom in such a way that for two thousand years Christians can’t help but see the preexistent Christ here. Divine wisdom speaks,
The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. . . .When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman,and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always,rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.
Divine wisdom rejoiced in God, and God delighted in his wisdom. Or, Son rejoiced in Father, and Father delighted in Son. And this delight of the Father in his Son, before creation ever was, helps to explain the amazing claim of Hebrews 1:1–2:
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
Did you catch that? The Father appointed the Son “heir of all things,” and then Hebrews adds “through whom also he created the world.” First, the Father, delighting in his Son, before creation, appoints him to be “heir of all things.” Then, with that appointment in view, God makes the world in order to fulfill his plan. Which means God made the world, and all its history, to give it as a gift to his Son.
“God made the world, and all its history, to give it as a gift to his Son.”
So, Look #1, the eternal Son delighted his Father before creation, and from that delight, the Father appointed to make a world and a story that would make much of his beloved Son, that would have him as its center and climax.
Look #2: He became man.
The preexistent Son — eternally begotten, not made — became man. So not only was he sent and given and came, but he became. John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The eternal Word, whom we heard about in John 1:1, “became flesh.” Meaning, he became man. He took on our flesh and blood, our humanity. 2 Corinthians 8:9: “Though he was rich [as God], he became poor [as man].”
But his becoming might pose a problem to our minds, depending on how we think about “becoming.” Does his becoming man mean that he ceases, somehow, to be God? Does he somehow empty himself of some of his deity, as if that were possible, so that he might become human? Do humanity and deity operate on the same level of reality, so to speak, as a zero-sum game?
Addition, Not Subtraction
Philippians 2:5–7 is the key text about his emptying:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, [being] in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. [We’ll come back to verse 8 in a few minutes.]
What does it mean that he “emptied himself”? Three observations:
Note his deity. “In the form of God” coordinates with “equality with God.” He shared in the Godhead, as one divine person among others, and as God in his own right.
This emptying of himself related to prerogative, we might say, not divine power. He did not grasp or cling to divine rights that might have kept him from entering into the finitude and limitations of humanity, and our fallen world, and the suffering that would come to him by virtue of his being human and coming as a creature.
This emptying, then — as Paul clarifies in the next line — was a taking, not a losing. He “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”So, in becoming man, he did not jettison his deity, as if that were even possible, but he took our humanity — not subtracting deity, but adding humanity to his person — and thus he became man as well as God. Without ceasing to be God, he added humanity. He became the God-man.
Wholly Human
Our key word for Look #2 is incarnation. Which means the “in-fleshing” or putting on or the adding of human flesh, human nature, to his eternal divine person. He took on a human body. He was born. He “was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.” He grew, and grew tired. He got hungry and thirsty. He experienced physical weakness. He suffered. And as Colossians 2:9 says, “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”
But humanity is not only body. It’s also soul. To be fully man, he took on our full humanity, both body and soul. He displayed human emotions: sorrow, compassion, anger, joy. He groaned. He was distressed and troubled. He wept. He prayed “with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7). As John Calvin summed it up, Christ “has put on our feelings as well as our flesh.”
But a human soul means not only emotions, but also a human mind. He increased, as Luke 2:52 says, not only in stature but in wisdom. And how else, but with respect to a finite human mind, might Jesus say in Mark 13:32 about his second coming, “Concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”? As God he knew all; as man he did not.
So too, we also can identify a human will in the God-man in addition to the divine will he shared with his Father with respect to his deity. So he can say in John 6:38, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.”
And then, when it mattered most, he chose with that human will to embrace the divine will, rather than the life-preserving impulse to which the human will is naturally given, when he said in Gethsemane, “My Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). (More on his human will to come.)
So, he became man, and so fully so that to the human eye and ear he was utterly, manifestly human. What a condescension, and what a dignifying of humanity as God’s crowning creature, that God himself would become one of us.
Look #3: He lived to his Father’s glory.
Here our key term is devotion. He devoted his human life on earth to his Father’s glory. At his birth, the angels announced, “Glory to God!” and at his death, a Roman centurion who stood by and saw him breathe his last, caught a glimpse of divine glory, and “praised God” (Luke 23:47).
Jesus consecrated his life to the honor and praise of his Father. Over and over again in the Gospels, the reported effect of his ministry is not that the crowds praised him but that they glorified God (Mark 2:12; Matthew 9:8; Luke 5:25–26). In fact, glorifying God is Matthew’s summary effect of all Jesus’s miracle-working:
The crowd wondered, when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled healthy, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they glorified the God of Israel. (Matthew 15:31)
So the effect of his life was glory to his Father. But what about Jesus’s own intent? Jesus says in John 5:43 that he comes not in his own name, but his Father’s. And he sums up his life in John 8:49 by saying, “I honor my Father.” And his intent to glorify his Father gets even more explicit as he approaches the cross. Three times in his high priestly prayer the night before he died, he prays,
I glorified you on earth. (John 17:4)
I have manifested your name. (John 17:6)
I made known to them your name. (John 17:26)
His ministry of healing, his teaching, his patience, his disciple-making, all stemmed from his utter devotion to the glory and honor and praise of his Father. And this both led to, and flowed from, various daily habits of devotion which fed his human soul on his Father and shaped his mind and heart for the work his Father had given him to do.
One way to capture it, which is both manifestly true in Jesus’s life and applicable to ours, is that he devoted himself to his Father’s word (in Scripture), his Father’s ear (in prayer), and his Father’s body (in the fellowship of the faithful).
It is striking to rehearse the place of the Father’s word in the earthly life of his incarnate Son. He was a man who was captivated first personally, and then in his teaching, by “what is written.”
In the wilderness testing, three times he quoted Scripture to combat the devil’s temptations.
In his hometown, he read from the scroll of Isaiah and spoke of its fulfillment in their midst.
He spoke of his cousin John as “he of whom it is written.”
He quoted Scripture as he cleared the temple of moneychangers and when he rebuked proud Pharisees.
Every step toward Calvary came, he said, “as it is written.”The word of his Father, in Scripture, played a markedly central role in his life.
But also striking was Jesus’s pattern of retreat (for prayer) and return (for ministry). He was a man of prayer, who availed himself of his Father’s ear, often withdrawing from the daily patterns of city and town life to meet with his Father in the wilderness. Again and again he went to desolate places to pray, often alone.
But also, at times, he took his men. He says to his disciples in Mark 6:31: “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.” And in such times, as well as his daily investment in his disciples, he availed himself of the fellowship, of the corporate body of the faithful. Jesus too drew holy strength, and experienced holy shaping, through the lives of the faithful.
“Even the God-man availed himself of God’s daily means of grace for the good of his soul.”
And so, in looking at his life of devotion to his Father, we find, at bottom, a man of the word and prayer. Even the God-man availed himself of God’s daily means of grace for the good of his soul through habits of accessing and rehearsing God’s word, and approaching him in prayer, living in the fellowship of those also devoted to God.
Look #4: He humbled himself.
We return to Philippians 2, this time picking up verse 8:
. . . [being] in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:6–8)
Jesus’s humbling himself not only had a climactic moment, but it was a life of obedience to his Father. So for Look #4, our key term is submission. To submit means to “accept or yield to the will or authority of another.”
Before His Parents
First, in becoming human, he submitted as a child to the authority of his human parents. Luke 2:51, after his visit to the temple at age twelve, says that “he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them.” By virtue of becoming human, he entered into various human relationships, and contexts, in which he was to have a disposition to yield.
There is nothing dehumanizing in such God-designed submission; in fact, nothing unbecoming of God himself in human flesh! Submission, then, we might say, is actually humanizing. Acknowledging the limits of our human knowledge and strength and abilities, and the God-ordained callings to which he gives us in variation, is to embrace our humanity and (for us) not to pretend we are God.
For Christ, though he was God, he also was human, and with respect to his human life, he righteously accepted and yielded to the will of those to whom he was assigned (by his Father) to submit, beginning with his parents.
To His Father’s Will
But of course his greatest and most defining submission came directly to the will of his Father. As we’ve already seen, in John 6:38 he says, “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.” Throughout his life, and culminating in Gethsemane, he chose to submit his natural human will to the divine will of his Father.
He was, in a sense, training his whole life for this. He was training his human will not only away from sin but toward his Father. And as he prays in the garden, “Father, . . . not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42), he completes the lifelong project of humbling himself, and now at this most critical moment. He has humbled himself, and now, in unjust custody, he will be utterly humiliated — slandered, false accused, unjust beaten, flogged, and crucified. Yet not against his will, but chosen. He humbled himself.
In at least three distinct settings, the Gospels quote Jesus saying, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12; Luke 18:14; Luke 14:11). It is one of his most repeated teachings. And he not only taught it, but lived it. Jesus’s human life is the supreme manifestation of his teaching. He humbled himself and waited for his Father to exalt him.
Look #5: He died for sins not his own.
At this point we might ask, Why was such a man executed? He did not deserve to die. In fact, this is the only human life in the history of the world that did not deserve death — the only sinless human life.
Now our key term is substitution. His death, like the sacrificial system in Israel, going back to Moses, was substitutionary. An innocent party without blemish served as a substitute for the guilty and blemished. In ancient Israel, God ordained and permitted that under the terms of the first covenant, sacrificial animals, who did not themselves deserve death, might stand in — that is, might be substitutes — for God’s people who had sinned.
The reality of sin demanded reckoning. Sin is an assault on the glory of God. Sin, at its heart, is a preferring of other things to God, which profoundly dishonors him. Sin cannot simply be swept under the rug without God himself despising his own glory and worth.
So God designed, in his grace, a temporary measure whereby his people’s sin might be dealt with, without they themselves incurring the death they deserved. For centuries, God’s people knew this provision both as amazing grace and as anticipating something greater. After all, in the final count, as Hebrews 10:4 says, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” Human blood would be necessary.
Our Sins Laid on Him
And so for centuries, the shedding of sacrificial blood in Israel had anticipated one unimaginably great once-for-all sacrifice that would secure God’s full acceptance of his sinful people forever. It would have been one thing for Jesus himself, before the cross, to say that he would “give his life as a ransom for many” and then for his apostles Peter and John and Paul to explain it in greater detail. But remarkably this revelation that a single human sacrifice might somehow suffice for the sins of many came seven centuries before Christ in the mouth of Isaiah.
Telling of a coming suffering servant, Isaiah says, “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3). Why was he despised and rejected? Not for any failures of his own, as we might assume. Isaiah then dares to tread where Moses had only pointed:
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way;and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:4–6)
It was our sorrows that made him a man of sorrows. Our griefs acquainted him with grief. He was pierced, he bled, for our transgressions. He was crushed, he died, for our iniquities. He was wounded by men so that believing souls might be healed before God. We whom he saves are the sinners, not the Savior. Yet on the righteous, unblemished one, God laid our iniquities. This is substitution. God condemned our sin in the flesh of Christ.
Willful, Blood-Bought Joy
As we close this first session, remember that Jesus chose it. His submission was not without joy. His was not obedience without willingness. He did not just endure death for those who believe; he embraced it.
Hebrews 12:2 says, “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross.” And I would not be surprised if Hebrews leaned on Isaiah 53:11 to make such a stunning claim: “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.”
What sustained Jesus on that dark Friday we now call “Good,” on the single most horrible day in the history of the world? Joy. He saw ahead and was satisfied enough that what joy he tasted even then sustained him through the agony, distress, and anguish.
Unlike the animals who stood in temporarily as substitutes for God’s people in the old covenant, Jesus willed it, with his human will. He embraced it. It pleased him to give his own life as a substitute for sinners — for the joy of the many who would believe and the glory of his Father. What wondrous love is this.
-
The Safest Soul in All the World: Rejoicing in the Risen Christ
The Lord is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!
Whatever the origins of our English word Easter — and they are apparently too ancient and complicated to trace with certainty, even for Encyclopedia Britannica — Easter has come to function for us today as a two-syllable designation for “Resurrection Sunday.” That’s a good abbreviation: six syllables down to two.
Easter is the highest day in the church calendar, the one Sunday that we specially celebrate the reality that we seek to live in light of every day of the year: Jesus, the eternal Son of God, who lived on earth in full humanity, and died on the cross on Good Friday, rose again bodily on Sunday morning.
And this Easter, we find ourselves at the halfway point of Philippians. In meditating on these verses, with Easter in view, I’ve paused over this word safe in verse 1. What does Paul mean that his “writ[ing] the same things . . . is safe”?
Appeal to Safety
As I was pondering Easter safety this week, I started seeing the word everywhere. Apparently, we are a people very conscious of safety, and very interested in safety, and we perhaps hardly realize how much. In the news just this week was more of the Boeing “safety crisis.” And I saw headlines that read,
“Eclipse safety: NYS task force has been working since 2022 to prepare for April 8”
“Senators say Meta’s Zuckerberg is slow-walking child safety inquiries”And I found appeals to safety in my own inbox:
The city of Minneapolis directed me to get an HVAC “safety check” as part of a home inspection.
I saw a message from SportsEngine with this call to action: “Keep your athlete safe.”
And I received unwanted marketing emails that offered the option to “Safely Unsubscribe” (in small print at the bottom, if you can find it).Some of our constant pursuit of safety is, of course, shallow and misguided and overly fearful. Our modern lives can be filled with petty and disordered desires for safety. And at the same time, there are wise, holy, reasonable desires for safety. That’s what Paul appeals to in verse 1:
Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.
Easter Joy
Before we focus on “Easter safety,” which will be our theme this morning, let me first say something about “Finally” at the beginning of verse 1. I know there’s a preacher joke here. “Just like a preacher! Paul says ‘Finally’ when he’s only halfway done!”
However, this “finally” is actually a loose connecting phrase that can mean “finally” in some contexts, but in others, it can be “so then” or “in addition” or “above all.” The key here is that Paul just mentioned joy and rejoicing in 2:28–29. And before then, he mentioned gladness and rejoicing, twice each, in 2:17–18. And before that, he made a double mention of his own rejoicing in 1:18. Have you noticed how often Paul not only talks about joy in Philippians, but does it in pairs? We’ll see it again in 4:4: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.” It’s like he just can’t say it enough. To say it just once doesn’t seem to do it. He needs to say it again.
And Paul is aware of how often he’s talking about rejoicing, and doing so in pairs, and so after saying “rejoice in the Lord” in 3:1, he adds a little bit of a defense for it. He wants his readers to know he’s aware he might sound like a broken record, but he means it, in the best of ways. He’s not being lazy or simpleminded. He doesn’t want to bore them, but to help them, to make them safe. He overcomes whatever dislike or distaste he might have for obvious repetition, and says, “To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you.”
It’s safe to keep saying, “Rejoice in the Lord.” It’s for your good. You can’t overdo rejoicing in the Lord. Now, you can underdo all sorts of other things while rejoicing in the Lord. You can underdo sorrow and grieving. You can underdo seriousness. And you can overdo all those. You can overdo all sorts of good things. But joy in Christ, rightly understood, truly experienced, you cannot overdo. You cannot overdo rejoicing in Jesus.
Three Safeties
Our question this morning on Easter is, Safe from what? What does Easter joy — the double joy, the repeated joy, the great joy of the resurrection of Jesus, which is the beating heart of the joy of Christianity — what does joy in the risen Christ give safety from and how?
I see three threats in these verses, and so three safeties for us in the Easter joy of rejoicing in the risen Christ.
1. Easter joy gives us safety from foes.
To be clear, foes, or opponents (1:28), in and of themselves, are the least concern of these three threats. They’re still real, but the least troubling on their own. So, Paul says in verse 2,
Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh.
So, who are these “dogs” nipping at the Philippians’ heels?
“You cannot overdo rejoicing in Jesus.”
My family and good friends will tell you I’m not a dog person. I recognize that many of you are dog people. I can respect that — to a degree. Sometimes when dogs come up, I like to say, with a smile, Well, you know what the Bible says about dogs, don’t you?
Let’s just say the picture is very negative — but it does have a twist. Dogs were the scum of ancient cities. They were unclean and nasty, like we think of rats today. Dogs would devour dead flesh and lick up spilled blood. And perhaps related to this, the Jews came to associate Gentiles (non-Jews) with dogs. Gentiles were unclean, according to the old covenant; they were outsiders. You may recall Jesus’s interaction with the Canaanite (Gentile) woman in Matthew 15 (and Mark 7), where he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. . . . It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” — the Gentiles (Matthew 15:24, 26).
For Paul, there is an insightful irony in calling these foes “dogs,” because they presume that they are the insiders, and that Gentiles, like the Philippians and us, are the outsiders. We’re the dogs, unclean and unsafe, they think — unless we add old-covenant law-keeping (marked by circumcision) to faith in Jesus.
We call these opponents “Judaizers.” They tried to Judaize Christianity; they tried to put Christ-believing Gentiles back under old-covenant Judaism, rather than letting them just be Gentile Christians in the new covenant without the baggage of the previous era. These Judaizers went around telling Gentile Christians that, essentially, they needed to become Jews physically in order to be truly saved, and safe.
And these Judaizers often dogged Paul’s ministry. They followed him around. After he’d bring the gospel to Gentiles, and move on to the next town, they’d sweep in and try to get new Gentile Christians to think they needed to add Judaism to their faith.
So, when Paul calls them “dogs,” he’s not aiming to insult them but to use instructive irony for the sake of his readers. He’s turning the tables to make the point that believing Gentiles are actually the true Jews (spiritually), and these Judaizers have become the new Gentiles, the outsiders, the dogs. Now Christ has come, and been raised, and inaugurated a new covenant. With Easter Sunday, old is gone; behold, new has come.
And these Judaizing foes might think of themselves as doing good works, according to the old covenant, but in fact they are “evil workers.” In trying to circumcise Gentile flesh in obedience to the old covenant, they are, in fact, mutilators of the flesh. They have missed how Good Friday and Easter have remade the world.
So, how does Easter joy, rejoicing in the risen Christ, make us safe from such foes — these and a thousand others? Specifically, rejoicing in the real Jesus fortifies our souls against trying to add anything to the grounds of our rejoicing. In rejoicing in him — in who he is, in what he accomplished for us at the cross, in his rising back to life, and in that he is alive today and our living Lord on the throne of the universe — we come to know a fullness of joy that will not be flanked or supplemented by anything else. Being satisfied in the risen Christ keeps us from being deceived by other shallow appeals to joy, and keeps us from temptations to try to add to him.
Rejoicing in Jesus is practical. Are you seeking to rejoice in him? Do you aim at this, and pray for this? When you open the Bible, when you pray, when you gather with fellow Christians, and when we come to worship together on Sunday mornings, and when you go to work, and when you live the rest of life, are you seeking to rejoice, to be satisfied, to be happy in the risen Christ?
So, Easter joy gives us safety from foes.
2. Easter joy gives us safety from our own flesh.
This is a greater concern — the danger of self-ruin, the threat of our own sinful hearts, various habits and patterns that would lead us to trust in ourselves for salvation. Or, we might say, the way that foes are a real threat to our souls is through our own sin. Foes harm us by deception. Then, being deceived, we move to trust in ourselves. Verse 3:
For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.
Remember from verse 2 that these Judaizing foes — who claim to be God’s true people, his Israel, the circumcision — they are actually the dogs, the new Gentile outsiders. Because, Paul says, in verse 3, with emphasis, we are the circumcision. We Christians, both Jews like Paul and Gentiles like the Philippians, who — and this is such an important “who” with the sequence that follows.
Here we get to the heart of the Christian life, which is the human heart. Oh, get this clear on Easter Sunday. Get this heart. Get what it means to be God’s new-covenant people. Circumcision of the flesh is not what makes and defines us. Human deeds and efforts and abilities do not make us and define us. Rather, what circumcision of the flesh had been pointing to all along is circumcision of the heart. That is, a new heart, new desires. A born-again soul. New creation in you. God opens the eyes of your soul to the wonder of his risen Son. He changes your heart to marvel at Jesus and rejoice in him. So, here in verse 3, we get three marks of what it means to really be a Christian.
One, we “worship [live, walk, serve] by the Spirit of God.” That is, God has put his own Spirit in us. He dwells in us. We have the Holy Spirit. Can you believe that? If you are in Christ, you have the Holy Spirit. God himself, in his Spirit, somehow “dwells in” you. We saw it in 2:13: “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” What power against sin! What power to rejoice in the risen Christ! What power for taking the initiative to love and serve others and gladly do what Christ calls us to do.
The risen Christ has poured out his Spirit, and ushered in a new era of history following Easter. Now, God’s people are no longer under the tutelage of the old-covenant law, but have his own Spirit at work in us. We do not worship and live in the old era but in the new, with God’s own Spirit dwelling in us.
And so, two, we “glory in Christ Jesus.” Which is more joy language, but elevated. “Glory” is literally “boast” — we boast in Christ Jesus. “Boasting” is tricky in English because it has negative connotations. So, the ESV translates it “glory” (as in 1:26). What makes boasting, or glorying, good or bad is its object. And so we boast, The Lord is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!
True Christians are those who glory in Christ Jesus as the sole grounds of our full acceptance with God. So, when someone asks, How do I get right with God? Or, How can I be truly safe — not in the little trivialities of this life but forever? We boast in Christ. “On my own, I’m ruined. But I glory in the risen Christ. I boast in the one who died for me and rose again. He is worthy. I glory in him!”
So, “boasting” or “glorying” is stronger language for the rejoicing of verse 1. This is Easter joy. This is double joy. This is joy intensified, joy magnified, joy heightened, joy expanded, joy enriched, joy elevated, joy resurrected.
Which means, third, by contrast, Christians are people who “put no confidence in the flesh.” We boast in the risen Christ, not self, for ultimate safety. And if you wonder what “flesh” means here, Paul will make it clear in verses 4–6, as we’ll see next week. In sum: putting “no confidence in the flesh” means not trusting in ourselves or any mere human effort or energy to get and keep us right with God. Not any privilege of our birth, nor any natural ability, nor hard work, nor achievement, nor human wisdom — nothing in us or related to us, whether who we are or what we’ve done. Rather, we glory in Jesus.
Which leads then to one last safety that’s implicit beneath the first two.
3. Easter joy gives us safety from God’s righteous fury against our sin.
This is the greatest threat of all: omnipotent wrath. The offense of our sin against the holy God is the final danger beneath the other dangers. The reason foes could be a danger is they might deceive us to put confidence in ourselves and our actions. And the reason putting confidence in ourselves is a danger is that this discounts the depth of our sin and leaves us unshielded, unsafe before the righteous justice of God against our rebellion.
When Paul says that rejoicing in the Lord “is safe for you,” what’s at bottom is ultimate safety, final safety, eternal safety, safety of soul, safety from the divine justice that our sin deserves.
But Easter joy keeps us safe from the righteous fury we deserve, because rejoicing in the risen Christ is the way we take cover in the Son of God who came, and died, and was raised, to deal with our sin and usher us safely with him into the very presence of God.
You might put it this way: the safest soul in all the universe is the one that rejoices in the risen Christ.
“Being satisfied in the risen Christ keeps us from being deceived by other shallow appeals to joy.”
Rejoicing in the Lord is a place of great safety, shielded from every real threat, even the greatest. God will not destroy those who delight in him. Delight in him is a stronghold (Nehemiah 8:10), a fortress, a safe place, because God always preserves those who delight in him.
So, Cities Church, rejoice in the risen Christ! To say it again is no trouble for me, and safe for you.
The Lord is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!
Seeds of Joy at the Table
As we come to the Table, let’s address a question some of us have on a high feast day like Easter, and in a book like Philippians, which accents the importance of rejoicing in the Lord. What if you’re not feeling it? What if you don’t feel happy in the risen Christ? Perhaps you want to rejoice in Jesus, you want to glory in him, but you’re a sinner; your heart’s not where you want it to be. One answer, among others, is this Table.
This Table is not only for those who are boiling over with Easter delight, overflowing with joy in Jesus. It’s also for those who feel their hearts to be sluggish, and know they’re not rejoicing in the Lord like they want to, or like they should. And yet, in the ache of that desire is the seed of joy. In the longing, in the wanting is the seed of Easter joy that we come to nourish and strengthen at this Table.
If you would say with us this morning, “I claim the risen Christ. However high or low my rejoicing, I know myself undeserving. I put no confidence in my flesh. But I do put my confidence, for final safety, in the risen Christ,” then we would have you eat and drink with us, for joy.
-
My Body Is Not My Own: How God Redeems What Sin Seized
Oh, the paradox of this human body. How wonderful — and how terrible.
For those with eyes to see, our Creator’s brilliance will be on unusual display next month at the Summer Olympics as the world’s fastest, strongest, and best-conditioned bodies compete for the gold. For some, it will be the apex of their human glory. For others will come massive letdown, even humiliation.
The rest of us also know our bodies as instruments of both glory and humiliation. Apart from athletic achievement, many of us live in the glories of sight and taste, of bodily movement, of balance and coordination, of acquiring and honing new skills. Our bodily abilities may not be Olympic, but they can be stunning in their diversity and precision, especially when compared to the far more limited and focused abilities of animals — and in view of the sorrow of disability.
At the same time, however, how familiar we are with bodily weakness, shame, and humiliation.
God Made Brother Ass
When C.S. Lewis quotes Saint Francis on the human body, he too speaks of glory and humiliation:
Man has held three views of his body. First there is that of those . . . who called it the prison or the “tomb” of the soul, [those] to whom it was a “sack of dung,” food for worms, filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation to bad men and humiliation to good ones. Then there are [others], to whom the body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view which St. Francis expressed by calling his body “Brother Ass.”
Lewis then comments, “All three may be . . . defensible; but give me St. Francis for my money.” He continues,
Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now a stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. (Four Loves, 93)
Long before Lewis, the apostle Paul also spoke of our present “body of humiliation” (sōma tēs tapeinōseōs) as well as our coming “body of glory” (Philippians 3:21). What Scripture teaches about the human body is not simple but textured. The Creator’s design is magnificent, even in this present age with its layers of sin and the curse. We can only imagine how able and beautiful were those first two bodies God made, before they fell into sin. We do not reside in Eden. Nor have we Christians yet reached our final homeland in the Zion that is to come.
Story of the Body
For those in Christ, we view our bodies in layers — layers of a redemptive history. Our bodies are not only fearfully and wonderfully complex but vitally en-storied. Understanding our past (as human), our future (in Christ), and our present (in the Spirit) is critical for duly appreciating, chastening, and making the most of our bodies in this life. So let’s rehearse the story.
1. Sin has seized our bodies.
After remembering that God designed and made our bodies, and that “the body is . . . for the Lord, and the Lord for the body” (1 Corinthians 6:13), the next truth to recall is that we, and our bodies with us, are fallen.
Sin wracks our bodies, not only in the effects of the curse into which we’re born, but also in our own culpable desiring and doing of evil. The bodies God gave us to image him as we move about his created world have become bodies of sin and death (Romans 6:6; 7:24; 8:10). No longer the original unfallen creations, nor yet the coming imperishable bodies, they are now “mortal bodies” (Romans 6:12; 8:11), dishonored in our sin (Romans 1:24). We will be judged for what we do in the body (2 Corinthians 5:10) — and apart from God’s redemptive provision, we will be thrown, soul and body, into hell (Matthew 5:29, 30; 10:28).
2. God himself took a body.
That redemptive provision, stunning in so many ways, begins with the incarnation, when God himself took a human body in the person of his eternal Son — and not only took on the full flesh and blood of our human bodies but also gave up his human body to death on a cross to cover our sin and rescue us (Philippians 2:8).
If you come to the Christian Scriptures with questions about your own body, one of the first surprises will be how much the New Testament talks about the physical body of Jesus Christ (Romans 7:4; 1 Corinthians 10:16; 11:24, 27, 29). His human body is the turning point in the story of our bodies. Jesus bore our sins in his body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24). And Hebrews 10, so memorably, puts Psalm 40 on the lips of Jesus, when he came into the world as man: “A body have you prepared for me. . . . Behold, I have come to do your will, O God” (Hebrews 10:5–7; Psalm 40:6–8). Hebrews 10:10 then comments, “By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
Because sin, its curse, and death have infected us in both soul and body, the divine Son assumed both human soul and body, and gave his body up in sacrificial death to rescue us, soul and body, who are joined to him by faith.
3. God himself dwells in our bodies.
Next, and perhaps the part of the body’s story most often overlooked, is that God himself not only became human in Christ but also now dwells in his people by his Holy Spirit. When 1 Corinthians 6:19 says, “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God,” the emphasis is not on how impressive our bodies are. Rather, the focus is the spectacular reality that God himself, in his Holy Spirit, has taken up residence, as it were, “within you” — that you have the Spirit. This is almost too good to be true. It is news to receive with the kind of pulsating joy that comes “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).
Paul makes it plainest in Romans 8:9–11. If you are in Christ,
the Spirit of God dwells in you. . . . [And] if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
“You not only have indwelling sin, but now also have the indwelling Spirit.”
In case you missed it, if you are in Christ, “Christ is in you” — his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, “dwells in you” (as Paul says three times). You not only have indwelling sin, but now you also have the indwelling Spirit. Our human bodies have become temples, dwelling places for God, whom we have in the person of his Spirit.
4. We glorify God now in our bodies.
Now, because of Christ’s work outside of us, in his human body — and because of his Spirit’s work in our own souls and bodies — we live to the glory of God. So 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 says to us in Christ: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
Our bodies of humiliation already, though not yet fully, have become instruments for God’s glory. And they are being redeemed both as we (positively) magnify God in our affections and actions of love for him and neighbor, and as we (negatively) “by the Spirit . . . put to death the deeds of the body” (Romans 8:13).
So, we pray like Paul that “Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death” (Philippians 1:20). Given the depth and pervasive effects of sin in our bodies, we might think we need to get out of these bodies in order to glorify God, but because of Christ’s body, and the dwelling of his Spirit in our bodies, we can now honor Christ and glorify God in our bodies. So, in Christ, we realize how our bodies are “for the Lord” (1 Corinthians 6:13).
Whereas we once presented our bodies to sin, we now present them to God as living sacrifices (Romans 12:1). We do not sacrifice our bodies for Christ in the way he sacrificed his body for us — that is, redemptively. He died (and rose again) to rescue us. We live for him (which could lead to dying) as those rescued by him. His sacrificial death is the cause; our sacrificial living is the effect. And to that end, we discipline our bodies (1 Corinthians 9:27), refuse to let sin reign in our mortal bodies (Romans 6:12), and so pray and act that our bodies “be kept blameless” till the day of Christ (1 Thessalonians 5:23).
5. We await a spectacular bodily upgrade.
Our future, forever, will be embodied — beyond our best imagining. At that coming day of Christ, he “will transform our lowly body [literally, “the body of our humiliation”] to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21).
Here we live, as Jesus did, in a state of humiliation. Even as we experience some of the original glories of our human bodies, they are short-lived. Soon enough, we age, or suffer tragedies and losses, and we realize more and more what a state of humiliation this life is for our bodies. And if Christ does not return first, we soon endure the humiliation of death.
But for those in Christ, the dishonor of death will give way to the glory of resurrection. Our natural bodies will be sown, in death, like seeds that will spring up and blossom, through Christ’s resurrection power, into bodies of glory like his risen body.
What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15:42–44)
Note: this will be a spiritual body. Not merely a spirit, like a ghost, but a spiritual body fit for the fullness of the Holy Spirit in the rock-solid world of the new heavens and new earth.
Praise the Man of Heaven
If you are in Christ, your resurrection body will be spectacular. No more aches and pains. No more colds and COVID. No more sprains, contusions, and broken bones. No more heart attacks and strokes and cancer. No more devastating physical and mental disabilities.
Soon enough, you will shine like the sun in your perfected, strong, imperishable, glorified human body. And the best part of it all isn’t what your body will be like, but whom our imperishable bodies and souls will help us to know and enjoy and be near and praise: “the man of heaven.”
Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [Jesus Christ]. (1 Corinthians 15:49)
Our focus in the new heavens and new earth won’t be our bodies. Our perfected bodies will get the many distractions of our previous humiliations out of the way. They will enhance and support our making much of our King. But the focus in glory will be the one that we as Christians eagerly await right now — the man of heaven.