Perhaps you’ve had unbelieving friends or neighbors tell you they will believe when they see God writing his message in the clouds. I can tell you firsthand, this is untrue.

The cloudy letters began to appear one by one while we were on a family trip to a crowded theme park. As if scribed ex nihilo, they read,

PRAISE JESUS

And then minutes later,

JESUS GIVES. . . . ASK NOW

Here they were, letters drawn in the sky by an unseen hand, exalting the Son of God and calling us to ask and receive from Christ’s goodness. Yet they incited little more than hurried glances. No one tore his garments in repentance or fell to his knees to worship Christ or cried aloud in gratefulness. Some already toting cross necklaces stopped to take pictures, but the masses continued unmoved, unmindful.

Seeing Is Not Believing

Moses tells us that God wrote the Ten Commandments himself, with his finger (Exodus 31:18). No one believed that these messages in the sky were written the same way. A man in a plane gave immediate causation.

But how did they know? The plane was nearly invisible to the naked eye. If you squinted hard enough, for long enough, you could catch the tiniest flash from the plane as he traced the letters.

Yet the masses did not stand staring at the clouds. The masses — some of whom believed in the existence of aliens and Bigfoot, or that men could become women — knew, without requiring a second glance, that this message could not be from God. Most did not see the plane — most did not need to see the plane. They already knew a human must have done it. If God granted their request and wrote the message himself, they would “know” in the exact same way.

All this to illustrate that seeing is not believing, as C.S. Lewis observes,

I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles. Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural. (C.S. Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Stories, 107)

The crowds could not be bothered to stop at the spectacle because all of life up to that moment told them that God, if God there be, would not do such a thing. He would not trifle in their daily affairs. The “god” of many who check the box is too often the distant god of good morals and clean living, not the God with inescapable actuality, breaking into our world without permission to write on tablets or with clouds.

Christian Naturalist

I thought these things as we continued walking when, like lightning, the realization struck me. Was I all that different? Their unbelief was clear to me — was mine? How had I received this message?

“Praise Jesus.” “Jesus gives. . . . Ask now.”

I knew that my God rules over all things. I knew that “The [the pilot’s] heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). I knew that my God made possible the weather conditions for that day — along with a million other factors that brought my family and me to that exact spot at that exact time to witness that exact message. I knew that in a real sense, God had in fact written in the sky that day — yet there I stood, wondering why other people weren’t getting the message.

Did any of my prayers find their response in this preordained spectacle? What, from a list of pressing needs, should I stop and ask Jesus for? Maybe God had something for me, a word for me, a desire to answer specific prayer and so liberate me from the barren land of “you have not because you ask not.”

Why had I assumed that God orchestrated all of this for the sake of unresponsive masses and not for his blood-bought son? If God scribbled his message in his clouds before my eyes, grinning, why did I reply unmindful, unmoved?

Devil in the Details

How would you have responded? How do you respond?

How many moments, big or small, do we miss given to functional naturalism, secularism, materialism? How often do we rise from our knees in the morning only to enter a world without God? The message written in the clouds, or the word given by a friend, or the “odd” coincidence we interpret as curious and causeless, as an unbeliever would. Do we often see the world as we ought? Can we also say of God, “You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me” (Psalm 139:5)?

“How often do we rise from our knees in the morning only to enter a world without God?”

The devil is busy in the details, providing reasonable explanations for this or that, assuring us there is nothing of our heavenly Father to see here.

And one of the strategies employed to keep us in a world without a personal God is to give us names for his created wonders. If we have a name to explain something, we can demystify it, taking something wonderful and making it dumb.

To illustrate, indulge me in a digression about lightning. A.W. Tozer quotes Thomas Carlyle as saying,

We call that fire of the black thundercloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it? Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience [the state of not knowing], whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it. (Knowledge of the Holy, 18)

“We smear the wondrous fingerprints of God all around us by thinking that because we name a thing, we know a thing.”

We smear the wondrous fingerprints of God all around us by thinking that because we name a thing, we know a thing. “Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds, the thunderings of his pavilion?” asked the ancient world (Job 36:29). “Oh, that blazing, electric fire flung down from the heavens? That’s just lightning,” responds the modern man. “Particles,” the more learned might say, “some negatively charged and others positively charged, separate and meet again in a massive current.” Wonder debunked.

Forgetting to Tremble

What is lightning, beyond the superficial facts and name? The unscientific poets outstrip us in seeing the manifest and untamable majesty.

He loads the thick cloud with moisture;     the clouds scatter his lightning. (Job 37:11)

He covers his hands with the lightning     and commands it to strike the mark.Its crashing declares his presence. (Job 36:32–33)

He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth,     who makes lightnings for the rain     and brings forth the wind from his storehouses. (Psalm 135:7)

Let a man answer his God if he can:

Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,     that a flood of waters may cover you?Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go     and say to you, “Here we are”? (Job 38:34–35)

As we claim to be wiser than our prescientific ancestors, we miss what is most obvious. We wax eloquent about protons and electrons and miss God; we claim we’ve seen it before and forget to tremble.

Lives Without Lightning

As with naming lightning, we are tempted to miss the daily realities of God for a name. “Oh, that? It’s just some guy in a plane.” “Oh, that? It’s just a random text of encouragement from a friend.” “Oh, that? It’s just a lucky break, a random kindness, a smiling accident.” We even can wonder at answers to prayer: Can I really prove this wasn’t just a coincidence?

When did God leave his world? When did he stop intervening in its affairs and governing its happenings with purpose? In an effort to protect the overindulgence of the imagination that saw God “telling us” to do things irrespective of his word and wisdom, have we sacrificed interpreting our circumstances (even the hard ones) in relationship to our great God? Do we look at lightning as only lightning, setbacks as only setbacks, read the words written in the sky and miss their meaning?

Ours is a supernatural existence under a sovereign God. He uses secondary causes, but it is he who uses them — all of them — for our good. God is acting, today and every day. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28); “in his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:10). Let’s see his personal care and personal provision more in our everyday lives, composed for us daily, personally in the clouds.

Audio Transcript

What’s the big deal with fearing man? What’s the problem with trying to impress one another? The desire for peer approval, that dopamine hit we get when we impress others, that desire to be admired — what’s the problem with it all? Well, on Monday we looked at 1 Peter 3:15. There we saw the commission that we honor Christ or revere Christ in our hearts. It’s a text about fearing God. And it brought to mind a sermon Pastor John preached 42 years back in the fall of 1980. I wanted to share a clip from that old sermon today. Here’s 34-year-old Pastor John to explain this connection between revering Christ and dying to the approval of others.

What is this reverencing the Lord Christ in our hearts? What’s this amazing thing that has the power to turn the fear of men into hope and the power to always give us a reason for the hope that is in us that we can speak to others?

Now, to answer that question in accord with the immediate context, what we need to do — instead of importing our ideas in there and saying, “Well, everyone knows what reverence is” — is to notice what Peter’s doing. Peter is quoting from Isaiah 8:12–13. And I’d like you to look at that with me. He’s taken this quote that God gave to Isaiah for his day, and he’s adapted it for his own situation. God gave Isaiah a warning in these verses about how he should feel about his adversaries and about how he should feel about the Lord God.

Let Him Be Your Dread

We’ll start reading at verse 11, and you’ll hear immediately the similarity to 1 Peter.

The Lord spoke thus to me with his strong hand upon me, and warned me not to walk in the way of this people, saying: “Do not call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.” (Isaiah 8:11–13)

You can see clearly that Peter was alluding to this text. It’s not an exact quotation but an adaptation for his own situation. God had warned Isaiah, “Don’t fear what men fear. Fear me — reverence me in your hearts.” Peter takes it, adapts it to the people who are being persecuted in his own day, and says, “Don’t fear what men fear — reverence the Lord Christ.” He puts Jesus right in the place of Jehovah in the Old Testament, which is done more than once in the New Testament.

So if we can find out what Isaiah meant by reverencing (or regarding as holy or sanctifying, depending on which translation you have) the Lord in his heart, then we will have a sound and solid foundation for determining what Peter meant when he said, “But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy” (1 Peter 3:15).

Now, Isaiah 8:13 makes it very clear what Isaiah means by reverence for God. It means to fear him instead of fearing men, or to dread him instead of dreading men. Isaiah says, “But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread” (Isaiah 8:13). So that’s Isaiah’s, or God’s, explanation of what it means to reverence the Lord in your heart.

Displeasing Man or God?

But now, probably, if you’re really with me, you’re saying, “But surely God doesn’t want his chosen people to walk around filled with the emotion of fear toward God.” That wouldn’t be a very exciting invitation, but only one of misery. But that’s not what God meant here.

We can see that it’s not what God meant if we just look at the next phrase in verse 14, where he promises that for those who do fear him, “he will become a sanctuary.” And then he goes on and talks about what he will become for those who don’t believe him. But he will become for those who fear him a sanctuary. Now a sanctuary is a place where you feel peace and security and hope. So, I don’t think it would be fair to say this text is teaching that we’re always cringing when God is our God.

“Let God be your dread, and he will become your sanctuary.”

That sounds kind of paradoxical. “Let God be your dread, and he will become your sanctuary.” That’s what it says, but it’s not really as paradoxical as it seems if we take verse 13 to mean not, “Be filled with the emotion of fear toward God all the time,” but rather take it to mean something like this: “If you reverence God, you will consider the prospect of displeasing him as a more fearful prospect than displeasing man.”

“That’s what it means to let the Lord be your fear. The prospect of offending or displeasing God will be a more dreadful or a more fearful prospect to you than worrying about what men can do to you.” The degree of Isaiah’s reverence for God was the same as the degree of his desire not to displease God.

Trust His Promises

Now, what in this particular context in Isaiah 8 displeased God? What here in these several verses did God want Isaiah to avoid because it would have displeased him? And the answer is given in verse 12: “Do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread” (Isaiah 8:12). God would have been displeased with Isaiah if Isaiah had feared men or feared what men could do to him. Why?

“If Isaiah fears the threats of men, he is casting his vote against the trustworthiness of God.”

Why is God so displeased when we, his people, fear men? Why does that offend God? Isn’t the answer this? He has made promise upon promise upon promise that he would take care of us, and if we believe those promises, it should take away fear of men. It should fill us with confidence and hope if we believe those promises. But if we fear men, then it’s a sign, isn’t it, that we are not believing those promises to take care of us. And when you don’t believe an honest man, he ought to be offended and displeased because you don’t trust him. And so it is with God. God had said to Isaiah, for example, in Isaiah 41, “Fear not . . .” And he gives some reasons:

. . . for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you up with my righteous right hand. . . . For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not, I am the one who helps you.” (Isaiah 41:10, 13)

You can see God pleading with Isaiah and the people of Israel, “For goodness’ sake, believe me!” Or Isaiah 35:4: “Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.’” Now, there are many, many such promises in Isaiah and in the whole Old Testament. And therefore, if Isaiah fears the threats of men, he is casting his vote against the trustworthiness of God and he does not reverence God in his heart. But if he does not fear men, but instead fears to displease God and thus trusts in God’s promises, then he is reverencing God in his heart.

Audio Transcript

Two weeks back, two Mondays ago, we looked at how to glorify God in our business successes. That was APJ 1915. Now two weeks later, we are talking about business again more broadly. It’s a question from a listener named Travis. “Pastor John, hello to you. Can you tell me whether our work today is a blessing or a curse? Much of our work seems to be cursed, based on Genesis 3. But a lot of our work also seems to be a God-given blessing, according to Ecclesiastes. According to the Bible, is my nine-to-five job a blessing, or is it a curse?”

Let’s start with the first work mentioned in the Bible — namely, God’s work. Genesis 2:2–3:

On the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

You can’t miss the point. God worked, God worked, God worked. Now, work was not a curse for God. God is not cursed; he’s not burdened; he’s not frustrated; he’s not coerced to do what he does not wish to do. He worked in creation because it was a sign of his greatness and his fullness that he should overflow in creating a world that declares his glory and a human image of himself that can enjoy and worship that glory. That’s no sign of weakness or burdensomeness or frustration; that’s glory. Work was glory for God.

Satisfying Work

From the beginning, work was not a curse. It was a God-like gift, a blessing. The essence of work, as God designed it before the fall into sin, was creativity: creative, productive doing, arranging, making. When God did his primal work, he created the world. Now, that’s the essence of work. Then he created us in his image to put us in a world that he had made, and he said,

Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. . . . [Let them] fill the earth and subdue it. (Genesis 1:26, 28)

Then in Genesis 2:15, it says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Literally, the word is serve. “Serve it,” almost like a serving in the work of the Lord — to serve it, to work it and keep it.

Now, I presume this working and keeping of the garden before the fall was a partial fulfillment of having dominion over the earth and subduing it. Now, what does that imply then? It does not mean that the garden was imperfect as God made it. It wasn’t imperfect. It didn’t need correction, as if God had made a mistake. “Oops! I didn’t fix the garden right; it needs help.” It means God made the garden for man, and part of its perfection was in providing for the man the raw material for being creative like God. Man would flourish in working the garden; the garden would flourish in being worked. It would be beautifully satisfying — not frustrating, not burdensome, not futile. That’s work before the fall: thrilling, satisfying, creative.

Cursed Work?

Now, what the fall did, what sin did when it came into the world (Genesis 3), was to make this glorious reality of satisfying work become futile, burdensome, frustrating. Genesis 3:17–19:

In pain [Adam] you shall eat of [the earth] all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. . . . By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground.

“The futility and burdensomeness of work is part of the curse of creation, and it won’t always be this way.”

It’s not accurate to say that work is a curse. What’s accurate is to say that the futility and frustration and burdensomeness and painfulness of work is a curse. Paul said in Romans 8:20–21, “The creation was subjected to futility.” When sin came into the world, God subjected creation to futility, “not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself would be set free from its bondage to [futility].” The futility and burdensomeness of work, therefore, is part of the curse of creation, and it won’t always be this way. He said, “There’s a hope coming,” and God put the world under this curse temporarily to show the exceeding sinfulness of sin.

God’s Workmanship

But Christ has come to redeem the world from the curse, and that happens in stages, not all at once. This is true for work as well. It is really significant, when you think about it, that the gospel — the good news of Jesus’s salvation — does not stipulate that work is how you earn it. You can’t earn it; it’s free. Work is not assigned that impossible, hopeless, burdensome role in salvation. This is really good news.

Listen to the three things said about work in our salvation, according to Ephesians 2:8–10:

By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, [1] not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his [2] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus [3] for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

“We are recreated in Christ for good work.”

This is glorious. First, work does not bear the weight of having to save us. Christ saves us; he does it by faith. Second, God steps in and does the work. He makes us new, and he does everything required to make us new creatures in Christ. We are his workmanship. Third, now that we are loved and forgiven and accepted and adopted, we are created for good works. We were created the first time — that is, brought into being as human people — for good work, way back in the beginning. That was our original intent as human beings, and we are recreated in Christ for good work.

Light Yokes for God’s Glory

This work in Christ is not burdensome. If we find it burdensome, if you find obedience to Jesus and work for Christ to be burdensome, then you’re not thinking clearly, or you’re not trusting Christ the way you should. Listen to Matthew 11:28–30. This is the paradox of the work that Christ calls us to do. On the one hand, we are like hardworking, yoked oxen — and on the other hand, our work is lighter than a feather. Here’s what he says: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke” — oh, wait a minute, you just said rest. What’s with the yoke? A yoke is what you put on oxen to pull a plow, and it’s hard. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Yes, there is meaningful work to do as we follow Christ. That’s the meaning of yoke. We have a yoke to wear. We’re not thrown out to be doers of nothing. How boring would that be? But in that work, that yoke, there is a restfulness of spirit that is free from the curse. The key in all our work that turns it from curse to blessing, and the key that glorifies Christ in it, is described in 1 Peter 4:11: “[Let the one who] serves” — just say, “Let the one who works” — “[work] by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” The one who gives the strength gets the glory. We get the help, he gets the glory, and work is delivered from its burdensome cursedness.

Or here it is again in 1 Corinthians 15:10: “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them” — any of the other apostles — “though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” That’s the glory of hard work in the Christian life, just like it was before the fall. I don’t doubt that Adam gloried in a long day’s work in the garden, making it perfectly suitable to his needs, flourishing in all his efforts. “Not I, but the grace of God with me” — that takes away the misery of burdensomeness and futility.

Whatever You Do

When Paul calls us to do lots of work as Christians, he’s not calling us to a burdened, frustrated, cursed life. He’s calling us to our glory and our joy. First Corinthians 15:58: “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” — I think that means doing lots of it — “knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” It’s not futile. I think that applies to any work done in the name of Jesus, for the glory of Jesus, in reliance upon the power of Jesus — not just church work, all work.

In fact, Paul says in Colossians 3:23–24, “Whatever [that’s an important word] you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.” So that elevates all of our work — not just church work, but all of our work — to the level of worship. If we do it in the name of the Lord, in reliance on the Lord, for the glory of the Lord, it’s not mere human work; it’s divine work. It honors Christ.

I’ll say it again. From the beginning, we were made for work — shaping, creating, subduing the world according to the wisdom and goodness and beauty of God. This was not — it is not — a curse; it is a blessing. And I think it will last happily forever.