Moses’s Unfinished Journey: Death and Work Left Undone
Moses’s sin and mortality made it so he could not finish the job he had spent most of the latter years of his life working toward. We are not all that different. The Lord has given us all work to do in this life and for his Kingdom. Though we may all do a decent job sometimes, we all struggle with our own sinfulness. And even though we are justified in Christ Jesus, we too will someday face death.
God’s promises to Moses came true, but only after his death. This truth should encourage us because God’s promises to us do not die when we die. Joshua chapter one opens by telling us that Moses was dead and Joshua was to take over and lead the people into the promised land. Moses had worked for 40-plus years leading the people. The Lord had even promised Moses that the people would enter their rest, but Moses never saw it.
Through the work of the Lord, Moses’s leadership was awe-inspiring, and he was extremely humble on top of it all. However, one day, he sinned against the Lord and struck the rock instead of speaking to it so that the Lord could provide water for his people. It may seem like a little thing to us, but it was a direct affront to God. Because of this, God said Moses would not go into the land with the people.
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A World Awash in Sheer Monkery
While our modern world may not speak with the same theological vocabulary, modern people face just as much pressure to prove that we are right with ourselves and right with the world. We may not ascend a holy staircase on our knees, but many of us daily count our steps and count our calories. We may not cry out to saints in the middle of a storm, but every time a hurricane comes, leading intellectuals will cry out to science to save us from our carbon sins.
Reformation Day may be behind us, but a huge responsibility lies before us. The faith of the Reformation must be kept alive because the ideas Luther combatted are just as much present in our own day.
The story should be familiar to most Protestants.
Martin Luther was walking toward the village of Sotternheim when he got caught in a thunderstorm. Terrified by a bolt of lightning, Luther cried out in fear, “St. Anne, save me! And I’ll become a monk.” Two weeks later, an anxious Luther entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt.
Five years later, in the winter of 1510, Luther and another monk were on their way to Rome to represent one side of a conflict involving the Order of the Augustinian Hermits. As the junior partner in their monastic tandem, with few official responsibilities, Luther turned the trip into his own personal pilgrimage. For Luther, the Holy City of Rome was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see holy places and sacred shrines, to do works of penance, and to gain indulgences for himself and for his loved ones.
One day while in Rome, Luther visited the Scala Sancta—the Holy Stairs said to be the very steps Christ ascended during his trial before Pontius Pilate. The staircase, filled with relics and carved crosses, provided pilgrims with an unparalleled opportunity to procure a plenary indulgence for himself or for others. A young man racked with guilt, Luther dutifully climbed all 28 steps on his knees, kissing each step as he went and repeating the Lord’s Prayer all along the way.
As earnest as he was in his self-abasement, the Scala Sancta provided no relief for Luther’s anxiety. Upon reaching the top, Luther looked back down and said to himself, “Who can know if these things are so?” Luther desperately wanted to know that he was right with God, which is why he cried out to St. Anne in the thunderstorm, and why he made an 800-mile pilgrimage across the Alps to Rome, and why he climbed the Holy Stairs on his knees, and why he was almost killing himself with vigils, prayers, and a punishing pursuit of obedience.
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So You’ve Been Told You Should Read Some Old Books…
If I had to plot out a short reading list with one book from each era, I might go in this order: The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, A Little Book on the Christian Life, Holiness, Knowing God, Confessions, the Religious Affections. Either way, I hope this article brings some clarity and motivates you to explore some of the true classics of the Christian faith.
A reader of this site recently got in touch to ask me for some book suggestions. She has been a believer for quite a long time and along the way has heard of the value of reading “Christian classics.” Yet she hasn’t been sure where to begin and asked for some guidance. I was glad to take on that challenge!
In this article I will offer some suggestions that cover various eras from the early church until the late twentieth century. I should note that these recommendations will tend more toward literature that is devotional than scholarly or purely theological. And I should note as well that there is not a person in the world who will agree with every book I’ve included and every book I’ve excluded—and that is just fine because there is always a degree of subjectivity to these things. And now, without further ado, here are some Christian classics to consider reading.
John Bunyan allegorical The Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the bestselling books in all of history and a great place to begin. It has never gone out of print and in one way or another has influenced every generation of Christians since it was first published in the late 1600s. For those reasons alone it is well worth a read. Though you can find modernizations that adapt the language either lightly or significantly, the original is still surprisingly accessible. There are also some lovely audio versions available. If you’d like to listen to it, I recommend the Nadia May recording. If you’d like to read a slight modernization, this one by Crossway is well done. Otherwise, perhaps try this edition. (Most editions contain part 1 and part 2—the journeys of Christian and Christiana. You can consider yourself to have read The Pilgrim’s Progress once you complete part 1 since that is the original work.)
We should go back in time a little to make sure we don’t neglect the earliest Christian classics, which include the most noteworthy work of Augustine: Confessions. It is available in a multitude of editions and translations.
I know little about the 1,000 years between Augustine and the Puritans so don’t have a lot to offer here beyond names like Dante and Thomas Aquinas. But as far as I can tell, this was not an era in which there were a lot of devotional works that have since been affirmed by Protestants. (Authors like Thomas à Kempis and Brother Lawrence are still read and treasured today, but typically not by Reformed Protestants.) Calvin’s A Little Book on the Christian Life gets us into the Reformation era and is an excerpt of the most practical section of his Institutes.
You may have heard of the Puritans and been told you should try reading their books. When we talk about “Puritan books,” we are talking about thousands of titles written over more than a century, many of them incredibly voluminous, so there are more options than any one person could read in a lifetime (except maybe Joel Beeke).
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The Lies of Pride Month
At its heart, Pride Month is a month of deception. LGBT activists are deceiving people into believing pride is a virtue, that sexuality determines identity, and that LGBT activities are family friendly. There is nothing further from the truth. Only Jesus can give identity, direction, and purpose to a world of sexual confusion.
We’re approaching the final week of ‘Pride Month’ — a growing shibboleth of our secular age. Corporate firms are one-upping each another to virtue signal how woke and inclusive they are. Retail stores are parading the rainbow flag to boost sales.
From a Biblical perspective, there are remarkable parallels between Pride Month and idol worship under King Nebuchadnezzar II. Just as the Babylonians were mandated to worship the golden image, LGBT activists demand that we pledge allegiance to the rainbow flag. While the stakes aren’t as high as they were under Nebuchadnezzar, there are real risks involved in refusing to bow the knee.
If my suspicion is correct, most Australians are not particularly concerned about Pride Month. In fact, many are beginning to feel uncomfortable with how politicised and intolerant the LGBT movement has become. In response, many people have flocked to culture warriors like Jordan Peterson for answers.
While figures like Peterson are insightful and worth listening to, their answers are ultimately psychological rather than spiritual. They don’t acknowledge that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only truth that sets people free. It is only the grace of God in the person and work of Jesus that gives answers and hope to a world lost in sexual confusion.
What follows are three of the lies paraded during Pride Month, along with the gospel answers Jesus provides.Sexuality = Identity
Pride Month declares that you can find your identity by looking inward. It is proclaimed that you can discover your identity by exploring your sexuality. The modern self is defined by sexuality. This explains the insistence within the LGBT movement of identifying people as ‘gay,’ ‘trans,’ ‘lesbian,’ and so on.
The great tragedy in such thinking is its reductionism. It shrinks a person from being an intelligently designed, unique, and beautiful image-bearer of God to the mere product of sexual instincts (cf. Gen. 2:17). Is there anything more animalistic than reducing a person to the sum of their sexual desires?
Contrary to Pride Month, our identity is not self-generated; it is given to us by our Maker. The Bible makes clear that humans were created to magnify the glory, beauty, and majesty of our Creator. Indeed, there is no other creation in the universe that was made imago dei. Furthermore, the good news of the gospel liberates us to find our identity in Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, as the Westminster Confession of Faith 15.5 states, Biblical repentance is for specific sins. In an age when national repentance is used as a smokescreen for our own guilt, we must face the reality of our rebellion against the Creator. We must name our sins, yet not be named by them. This is especially relevant in a time when identifying some believers as ‘gay Christians’ has become commonplace.
There is nothing more enslaving to a child of God than to identify them by their sin. Any adjective placed before ‘Christian’ — whether it be ‘same-sex attracted,’ ‘anxious,’ or ‘adulterous’ — enslaves a believer and legitimises their sin. It denies their identity as a child of God, freed from the bondage of passions.
There is nothing more liberating than for a Christian to know their sin has been dealt with fully and completely. To be a Christian is to have one’s life hidden with Christ in God, and to be defined not by our sin, but by His perfection and glory (Col. 3:3).Pride = Virtue
Arguably the chief lie of Pride Month is that pride is something to be celebrated. According to God, pride is a vice to be restrained. Pride is not something to be paraded; it’s the parent of all other sins. It’s the cesspool from which all other wickedness flows (Gen. 3:6). Pride not only destroys a person’s relationship with God; it ultimately consumes the person themselves (Prov. 16:18).
In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis wrote this of pride:
“It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the completely anti-God state of mind” (Book III, 8.)
Puritan Jonathan Edwards spoke of pride in these terms:
“Pride is a person having too high an opinion of himself. Pride is the first sin that ever entered into the universe, and the last sin that is rooted out.”
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