http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16225133/the-truth-of-christ-and-christian-unity
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Part 2 Episode 63
If disunity contradicts the undivided Christ, then we can pursue and deepen unity by focusing on his identity and work. In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper explores the truth of Christ and Christian unity in 1 Corinthians 1:10–17.
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Does Hidden Sin Bring Physical Suffering?
Audio Transcript
Welcome back to the podcast. If you’re reading the Navigators Bible Reading Plan with us in 2024, we read Psalm 22 together two weeks ago and then talked about the challenges it poses to understanding the cross of Christ. That was in APJ 2015.
Today we’re back in the Psalms, reading Psalm 31 together and then Psalm 32 tomorrow. Both psalms — Psalm 31 and 32 — carry the same internal dynamic that Sarah, a listener to the podcast, points out and is trying to figure out. Here’s what she wrote: “Pastor John, hello to you, and thank you and Tony both for this podcast.” You’re most welcome, Sarah! “As I read through the Psalms, I get an amazing picture of the emotional life of faith. I am thankful for such a vivid picture of what it means to be a believer and the spectrum of emotions that we feel, and how the psalmist shows us how to process these emotions.
“But then I come to places in the Psalms that are more jarring and foreign to me, namely, about the physical pain and physical release of sin and forgiveness. Obviously we must be careful not to equate all physical suffering with the direct guilt for one specific sin. But perhaps we need to be careful not to write off specific sins in our physical pains. This comes up specifically in Psalm 31:9–10 and Psalm 32:1–5.
“Can you explain these texts and talk about the physical consequences of our guilt, and the physical health and release that can come with forgiveness? I never hear solid Bible teachers, preachers, or theologians — or even Christian health gurus — connect hidden sin, the torment of guilt, and the release of forgiveness to our physical well-being. To what extent can we make this connection? And how have you seen this spiritual-physical link in your own ministry?”
I don’t have any doubt that Sarah is right, that we should take the Psalms seriously when they picture physical ailments as sometimes owing to unconfessed sin. Now, one of the reasons I say sometimes is because in John 9 Jesus’s disciples saw a blind man and asked, “‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him’” (John 9:2–3).
“We should take the Psalms seriously when they picture physical ailments as sometimes owing to unconfessed sin.”
So, I infer from that passage that we must be really careful not to assume that any given sickness or disability is owing to a particular sin — Sarah said that, and I just wanted to underline it — even though we know that all sickness and all disability is owing to the existence of sin in general. God subjected the world to futility, the whole world, all of our bodies and all the world (Romans 8:20). We all live in a fallen and disordered world. And all of us — no exceptions, all of us — suffer and die because of that fallen, disordered, condemned world, even when we have not done a specific sin to bring down on us a specific sickness.
Here’s something she didn’t mention that I think we need to put in as a careful qualification. Nor does the fact that Christ bore all our sins, absorbed all the wrath of God against us, and purchased our perfect, eternal healing forever — no disease, no tears, no crying, no pain — nor does any of that mean that God does not send sickness and hardship into our lives to discipline us as his children and to sanctify us. That’s not wrath. Jesus bore wrath — condemnation, judgment. That’s behind us. We don’t have that anymore. This is a fatherly discipline, a physician-like therapy. Remember Paul’s thorn in the flesh given to keep him from being conceited (2 Corinthians 12:7). And remember the painful discipline of Hebrews 12:3–11.
Now, with all of that in mind, nevertheless, we should not hesitate with Sarah to find true Christian experience in the Psalms that tell us physical miseries are sometimes owing to unconfessed sin. I see this in the Psalms, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes, in my own experience. I’ll mention that at the end, but let me stay with the word for a minute.
Disciplined for Sin
Psalm 31:9–10 — which you referred to, Tony — says,
Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also.For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing;my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away.
So, he traces his failing strength and his wasting bones back to his iniquity. Now, here’s a little catch in making the point that I want to make. He might be thinking of the totality of his life’s hardships and the general fallenness of his nature, because he says, “My years [are spent] with sighing,” not just a week, not just a day or a month. I’m going to be careful and not base my case on this particular example, though it might be so. It might be that he’s referring to a specific, limited sickness owing to specific sin. And there are clues to that in the context because of the parallel between bones wasting away, which turns up again over in Psalm 32. So, I just want to be careful.
There’s no doubt in my mind that we are dealing with a specific, unconfessed sin and its physical consequences in Psalm 32. So, looking back over his change of heart and his forgiveness, here’s what he says: “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed” — he’s just super happy at what has happened in his life — “is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit” (Psalm 32:1–2).
And now comes, in the psalm, his memory of that season when he had not confessed his sin. So, he goes on: “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer” (Psalm 32:3–4).
And then he recalls his confession, his forgiveness, and his healing. He says, “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin” (Psalm 32:5).
Clinging to Mercy
We see a similar situation in Psalm 107. Sarah didn’t refer to this one, but it has been as useful to me in pastoral counseling as any other text in this regard — of people who feel like they’ve sinned themselves out of God’s possible blessing. So, Psalm 107:17–21 says,
Some were fools through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities suffered affliction;they loathed any kind of food, and they drew near to the gates of death.Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress.He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!
Here’s one more text that I call “gutsy guilt” — or it’s the text that I have based this term “gutsy guilt” on. A truly godly person has sinned. They are sitting under the disciplinary darkness and misery that God has sent. But this godly person will not let go of the mercy of God — or we would say, today, on this side of the cross, he will not let go of the blood-bought justification that we have in Christ. And I’m thinking of Micah 7:8–9:
Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness [that’s where he is right now], the Lord will be a light to me. I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me [not against me, but for me]. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication.
“Let none of us continue in sin, hiding it from others and refusing to confess it to God and forsake it.”
So, in view of those texts, very practically, I would say let none of us continue in sin, hiding it from others and refusing to confess it to God and forsake it. If we are truly the children of God, and we do that — that is, we fail to confess our sins — we should expect that such a season of falsehood and hypocrisy will bring down God’s disciplinary rod upon us. If he loves us, we should expect that discipline.
Gift of Misery
Now, I had a very good friend whom I caught in grievous sin. I was the one who saw it. And when I urged him — I mean, this was a serious marriage-destroying, ministry-destroying, life-destroying sin — to confess to those he sinned against, he denied it was true. He did this for about six weeks, and I watched his deceit and growing misery and physical deterioration.
And then, one night, he called me quite late and said, “We have to meet.” I called a few others, and we met. And we sat there, and as we sat there, he quoted Psalm 32:3–4: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”
So, the misery — his misery of those six weeks — was a gift. The misery and the physical pain was a gift. It saved his marriage. So, as Hebrews 12:11 says, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”
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Slow to Anger: The Beauty of God’s Perfect Patience
Many of the most common troubles in the Christian life come from relating to God as if he were like us — as if his kindness were as slight as our kindness, his forgiveness as reluctant as our forgiveness, his patience as fleeting as our patience. Under impressions such as these, we walk uneasily through the Christian life, insecurity rumbling like distant thunder.
John Owen (1616–1683) goes so far as to say,
Want of a due consideration of him with whom we have to do, measuring him by that line of our own imaginations, bringing him down unto our thoughts and our ways, is the cause of all our disquietments. (Works of John Owen, 6:500)
If we were God in heaven, we would have grown impatient with people like us long ago. Our anger rises quickly in the face of personal offense. Our frustration boils over. Our judgments readily fire. And apart from the daily renewal of our minds, we can easily measure God “by that line of our own imaginations,” as if his thoughts matched our thoughts, and his ways our ways.
Thank God, they do not. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). Our human nature has no ruler to measure God’s goodness; our natural imaginations cannot grasp his heights. His kindness is not like our kindness, his forgiveness not like our forgiveness — and his patience not like our patience.
‘Slow to Anger’
The God we meet in Scripture is a relentlessly patient God. He usually accomplishes his plans along the winding path. He fulfills his promises without haste. He compares his kingdom to a mustard seed.
The greatest displays of God’s patience, however, appear in response to our sin. “God is patient” means not mainly that God waits a long time, but that God shows longsuffering kindness to sinners (Romans 2:4). As God declares to Moses on Mount Sinai, he is not just “slow,” but “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6).
Consider the context of that famous declaration. Israel has just left slavery, redeemed by God’s mighty hand. They have watched the Red Sea swallow Egypt’s army. They have stood before a mountain wrapped in smoke and lightning, the entourage of the Almighty. They have been covered by the blood of the covenant. And then, in some of their first moments of freedom, they exchange the glory of the living God for a cow (Exodus 32:1–6).
Judgment follows (Exodus 32:25–29, 35) — striking yet restrained, tempered by a mysterious mercy. God does not destroy them; he does not forsake them. Instead, he reveals his glorious, incomparable name, like an unexpected dawn in an all-black sky:
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. (Exodus 34:6)
Why does full judgment tarry and mercy beckon? Because, unlike us, God is “slow to anger.” His wrath visits the unrepentant (Exodus 34:7), but only after taking the slow path. Meanwhile, his mercy stands ready to run.
Here on the slopes of Mount Sinai began a song that would be sung by Israel’s prophets and psalmists, sages and kings, even under the nation’s darkest nights (Nehemiah 9:17; Psalm 86:15; Joel 2:13). The living God is a patient God. And in the shadow of his patience we find hope.
Patience Toward His Enemies
God’s patience, like his love, has special significance for his chosen people — the slow-to-anger God of Exodus 34:6 is none other than “the Lord,” Yahweh, the God Israel knows by covenant (Exodus 3:13–15). And yet, amazingly, the record of God’s dealings in Scripture reveals a marked slowness to anger not only toward his covenant people, but toward those who hate and oppose him.
The most forceful examples of God’s wrath, for instance, begin as examples of his patience. The flood waters swallowed the earth only after “God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared” (1 Peter 3:20). God lingered for four generations before cleansing Canaan of its idolatry, for, he told Abraham, “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Genesis 15:16). And nine warning plagues fell on Egypt before the devastating blow to the firstborn (Exodus 11:4–8).
God’s wrath may be “quickly kindled” when the time for judgment comes (Psalm 2:12), but until then, he warns and invites (Psalm 2:10–11). God’s patience toward his enemies extends so far, Owen observes, that his people sometimes cry out, perplexed, “How long before you will judge?” (Revelation 6:10; Psalm 94:3). And still he patiently waits.
God, the patient potter, bears with the rebellious clay of his creation. He endures vessels of wrath with “much patience” (Romans 9:22), Paul tells us. How much more, then, does he deal patiently with vessels of mercy?
Patience Toward His People
When Paul rehearsed his testimony to Timothy, he framed it as a story of God’s patience:
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. (1 Timothy 1:15–16)
God saved this “blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent” (1 Timothy 1:13) so that no humble, broken sinner would think he’s out-sinned the patience of God. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus is patient toward his people — perfectly patient. As patient as the prodigal’s father, waiting on the porch (Luke 15:20).
Nor does his patience end when former rebels like us heed his summons and become his sons. As Israel’s faithful celebrated again and again, God not only “was” slow to anger; he “is” slow to anger (Psalm 103:8). His patience, like his love, endures forever (Psalm 136). To what else can we ascribe his ongoing kindness, his every-morning mercies, his present help, and his ready forgiveness, through all the fluctuations of our souls? Today and every day, “He does not deal with us according to our sins” (Psalm 103:10), but according to his great patience.
“In Christ, your life tells a story of divine patience.”
In Christ, your life, like Paul’s, tells a story of divine patience. God was patient with you as you wandered from him — scorning his Son, treasuring sin, scarcely giving him or his gospel a thought. He is patient with you now, as you daily find need for forgiveness. And he will be patient with you tomorrow, and the next day, and until the day of Jesus Christ, when he finally finishes the good work he’s begun (Philippians 1:6).
And why? Because, some several centuries after Moses, God once again revealed his slow-to-anger name. This time in flesh and blood.
Patience Supreme
In Jesus, the God-man, the song of God’s slowness to anger swells to its crescendo.
Jesus’s ministry was one of patience, for to be with us was to bear with us (Luke 9:41). He lived here as light among darkness, sinlessness among sin, the straight among the crooked — as the unrivaled prince of patience. We occasionally see the pain of his patience, as when he says, “O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?” (Matthew 17:17). But he mostly kept the cost hidden, pouring out his soul to his Father (Luke 5:16), and receiving from his Father the patience needed as his enemies slandered him, his neighbors rejected him, his disciples misunderstood him, and the crowds tried to use him.
And thus he also died. Though twelve legions of angels stood ready for his summons (Matthew 26:53), he never called. Instead, Patience incarnate took the lashes, the thorns, the nails, allowing his creatures to mock him with the breath he gave, all while pleading for their forgiveness (Luke 23:34).
In the cross of Jesus, we see not only that God is patient, but how God can be so patient. How could he, “in his divine forbearance,” pass over former sins (Romans 3:25) — and how can he, in his divine forbearance, continue to show us mercy? Because the patience of God, in the person of Christ, purchased our forgiveness (Romans 3:23–24). God’s patience rests on the passion of his Son. And therefore, his patience will last as long as our resurrected Christ pleads the merits of his blood (Hebrews 7:25) — which is to say, forever.
Let Us Return
English pastor Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) once prayed, “Teach me . . . to read my duty in the lines of your mercy.” And what duty do we read in the lines of God’s merciful patience? In the words of Isaiah, “Return to the Lord” (Isaiah 55:7).
“Whoever and wherever we are, God’s patience invites our repentance.”
The patience of God is a beckoning hand, an open door, a pathway home. It comes to us as Jesus came to Matthew at the tax booth: not to condemn us, and not to comfort us in our sins either, but rather to turn us again to “seek the Lord while he may be found” (Isaiah 55:6), whether after a miserable lapse or simply a regrettable moment. Whoever and wherever we are, God’s patience invites our repentance.
And what do we find when we return to him, confessing and forsaking our sins? We find a Father running to meet us (Luke 15:20). We find a Savior who has already been knocking (Revelation 3:20). We find a God who abundantly pardons and plentifully redeems (Isaiah 55:7; Psalm 130:7). We find a Lord whose patience is perfect (1 Timothy 1:16).
One day, we will stumble and sin no more; the good work begun at our conversion finally will be complete (Philippians 1:6). But until then, the patience of God is not bound to the measure of our weak imaginations. It is not the pinched, passing, shallow patience we so commonly find among men, and within ourselves. His patience, like his peace, surpasses all understanding (Philippians 4:7). Return to him, then, now and forever, and in returning find rest.