Advent Meditation: Behold the Father’s Love
When we look at the Christmas manger, we need to see more than a baby. We need to see a heavenly Father, the One who gave his only Son to us so we might become adopted sons and daughters. Could a Father this good, who gave this much, be anything but perfect for our weary, sinful, broken hearts?
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)
Reflect
Early in the morning, I wake and quietly make my way to the gray wing chair in my home office. I’m determined to be productive in these precious predawn hours.
Only a few minutes into my routine, however, the door next to me slowly opens and my 4-year-old son walks in, bleary-eyed. All he wants to do is crawl into my lap and put a tired head on my shoulder. My plans for this moment are spoiled, but I couldn’t care less. Why? Because I’m this boy’s father, and he’s my son, and that’s enough to make me welcome his intrusion with joy.
One of the reasons we miss drinking more deeply of God’s love is that we forget to think of him as Father. We may know it’s true because we’ve read our Bibles, but our intuitions still imagine God as a more distant figure. This isn’t merely a shortcoming in our thinking; it’s a tragic distortion of our view of God.
“Father” isn’t a random nickname for God. It’s who God fundamentally is. He is Father. God the Father has eternally begotten God the Son.
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A Great Sin: Exodus 32:15-35
Though you and I are no less sinful and idolatrous than the Israelites and no less prone to make light of or excuse our sin than Aaron, we have One who is greater than Moses who has made atonement for our sins. Being both eternal God and the only sinless man, Jesus alone was fit and able to give Himself as a perfect and lasting atonement for all of the sins of all His people. And that is precisely what He did, not upon Sinai, but upon the hill of Golgotha.
After studying through the several chapters of instructions that Yahweh gave to Moses regarding the building and design of the tabernacle, our previous text brought our attention to what the Israelites were doing at the foot of Mount Sinai while Moses was meeting with God. Sadly, even while God was giving his prophet the plans for the tent where He would dwell in the midst of His newly redeemed people, they were already turning aside from the covenant that they promised to keep. They gathered around Aaron and demanded that he make an idol for them, and though Aaron apparently tried to pretend that the golden calf represented Yahweh, both he and the Israelites were fully guilty of violating the First and Second Commandments. Although God said that He ready to consume Israel in His wrath, Moses interceded for the people, and the LORD relented from His anger.
Yet that is not the end of the incident of the golden calf. Although Moses’ initial intercession stayed the wrath of God from falling upon the Israelites, the people had still committed a great sin that could not be simply overlooked. Thus, while the immediate danger of God’s fiery judgment was no longer overhead, the remainder of chapter 32 deals with the ongoing consequence of Israel’s idolatry.
A Broken Covenant: Verses 15–20
Even though we already know what the Israelites have been doing, the suspense of the passage is raised again by slowly taking us down the mountain with Moses and Joshua.
Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides; on the front and on the back they were written. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, “There is a noise of war in the camp.” But he said, “It is not the sound of shouting for victory, or the sound of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.”
These four verses force us to wait in suspense over what will happen when Moses encounters the people. Verses 15-16 linger over the tablets that Moses carried with him down the mountain, reminding us as explicitly as possible that these were the work of God and written by God Himself. As one commentator notes, these tablets were the most precious and valuable items on earth, and they were the written documentation of God’s covenant with Israel. A covenant that the people had already broken.
Verses 17-18 then linger on the noise that Moses and Joshua hear coming down the mountain. Even though the people were supposedly having a feast to Yahweh (at least that is what Aaron told himself), Joshua mistakes the noise of their feasting for the sounds of war. But Moses points out that the noise is neither of defeat nor victory; it is the sound of partying. As Ryken notes, “the Israelites were singing to an image of a grass-eating, milk-producing, moo-sounding cow. Someone would almost have to be drunk to worship such a deity, and the Israelites probably were.”
Indeed, the description of Israel as making noise reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ thought on noise through the mouth of the demon Screwtape:
Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it. Research is in progress.
Verse 19 then describes the bursting of the dam.
And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it.
Even though the LORD had already told Moses what was happening at the foot of the mountain, the prophet’s anger was kindled whenever he saw it with his own eyes. Moses then takes two immediate actions. First, he threw the tablets to the ground and broke them in front of the people. Since Moses is not rebuked for this action, we can safely assume that Moses was not being controlled by his anger, which would have been sinful. Rather, as Stuart argues, “Moses’ breaking of the tablets was an important symbolic act done carefully, deliberately, and openly for the benefit of the Israelites… It was a reasoned, overt act demonstrating a fact (the covenant had been broken) and warning of a consequence (divine wrath—far worse than the anger of Moses)” (677). Furthermore, Ryken comments that:
By breaking the tablets, Moses showed that the Israelites had broken the whole law. The Bible says that “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (Jas. 2:10). Actually, the Israelites stumbled at more than one point. But the principle still applies: By worshiping the golden calf, they had broken the whole law of God.
Second, Moses destroyed the golden calf, which all of Israel is blamed for making. Again, Moses’ actions here do not indicate that he was blind with rage. Instead, he burned the idol with fire, ground up the charred remains into powder, and scattered them into Israel’s water source so that the people would be drinking their own false god. Stuart points out that Moses probably did not have all of Israel line up to drink from the water; rather, by scattering it over their water source, every time they got a drink of water they were drinking the golden calf. This all was a means of thoroughly polluting the gold used for the golden calf. It was burned to disfigurement, ground into dust, and drunk.
But what is the next logical implication of what became of the golden calf? The god that they were just worshiping literally became a part of their excrement.
If that seems undignified and offensive, that is precisely the point. Sin, particularly idolatry, is undignified and offensive to the Holy One. Also, this is not the last time that the Bible leaves us to make such an implication. The wicked Queen Jezebel died by fall from a window and being eaten by dogs. Thus, the once seemingly great queen may very well have ended up fouling the sandal of some poor Israelite. This is a strong warning to we whose hearts are idol factories. In 1 Kings 11:4, false gods are referred to using the same word that is translated as vanity all through Ecclesiastes. Idols are nothings, and as Psalm 115:8 warns, “those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.”
A Cowardly Priest: Verses 21–24
In these verses, Moses confronts Aaron, who was clearly supposed to be in charge of the people while Moses was upon the mountain, and he does so with only one question: What did the people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them? Notice that the careful wording of this question shows that Moses knew, whether through revelation or simply intuition, where the fault lay. He knew that the people were at fault somehow for pressing Aaron into making the golden calf. However, he is by no means excusing Aaron, for he places the blame squarely on Aaron for bringing such a great sin upon them.
What then is Aaron’s answer?
And Aaron said, “Let not the anger of my lord burn hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, ‘Make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ So I said to them, ‘Let any who have gold take it off.’ So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.”
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Making Every Issue “Your Thing” Is Impossible
It’s interesting to think that the story wasn’t that the good Samaritan had to go into every town and locate all the people who might be sick or dying and then find a plan to alleviate all of those. Even Jesus, who could literally heal people just by a word or a touch, and yet it says in Mark 1 that he went to the other towns. He didn’t stay when everyone could have been healed if he would’ve just stayed there. So even Jesus understood that, as fully God and fully man, he had bodily human limitations. And in order to do what was his first priority, which was to preach the gospel, he had to go over to the next town.
Our Limited Capacities
I read an article a few years ago that had this phrase: “the infinite extensibility of guilt.” And the idea is that particularly in this digital age—where we can see millions or billions of people through their digital media and follow them on all the social media sites—we have access to people’s hopes, dreams, fears, pain, and suffering. And with that access comes this infinite extensibility of guilt that we feel. Should I be doing something with all of these problems—these intractable problems?
And it may sound pious to suggest that you ought to do something about all of them. But really it’s not, because it doesn’t allow for our own finitude. Only God is able to handle 8 billion people making requests to him. Only God is able to comprehend and handle an entire globe of joys and catastrophes and needs. The human psyche isn’t meant to bear that. And I know the danger is that you’re going to be the opposite of the good Samaritan and you’re not going to care for the needs that are around you. But even there, remember in the parable that Jesus refused to answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” What was more important was to understand just what it means to be a neighbor. And what it means to be a neighbor is like the good Samaritan.
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The History of American Evangelicals’ Opposition to Abortion Is Long
Written by Joseph S. Laughon |
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
[The] account of Evangelicals being late to the pro-life cause isn’t meant to convince the serious pro-lifer but to poison the well against pro-life advocacy. If the public can be convinced that pro-lifers are disingenuous, and hiding racist motivations, then it can more easily disregard discomfort about the ethics of abortion.As the pro-life movement remains entrenched among American voters, a new pro-choice talking point has entered the media narrative.
In the new historiography of the abortion debate, the reason that pro-lifers are against abortion is not that they sincerely believe it to be murder. Rather they are operating from a false consciousness, hiding their real motive, racism. That narrative, which now gets repeated by the usual pro-choice advocates in media outlets such as the Guardian and the New York Times, is inaccurate and disingenuous. It is an obvious attempt to manufacture a politicized history.
The narrative is simple: American Evangelicals never were pro-life and were in fact quite pro-choice until, losing their apparent battle in favor of segregation, they decided (for reasons never fully explained) to turn against abortion in their presumed quest for political power. There are several problems with this. For starters, it doesn’t matter. No one’s convictions about abortion have their basis in what some Evangelicals allegedly believed half a century ago. Before someone decides whether abortion is wrong, he doesn’t ask himself, “Wait! What did W. A. Criswell believe?” Moreover, this point ignores both the influence of American Roman Catholics in the pro-life movement and the growing secular pro-life contingent.
The main problem with this account however is its inaccuracy bordering on total falsehood. It ignores the history of Christians opposing abortion for two millennia and assumes that the American Evangelical experience starts in the late 20th century. In his compelling work Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America, Marvin Olasky, the noted Evangelical journalist, lays out the pre-Roe history of Evangelical Americans’ fight against abortion. From the Colonial era onward, American Protestants, both mainliners and their Evangelical counterparts, took inspiration from the Bible as well as from the ancient, medieval, and early modern church in their doctrine on abortion. Though limited in their scope at first, American Protestants sought to keep abortion criminalized, increasing the pressure as it became more common in the United States. While it is true that Evangelical Americans’ history with abortion is more nuanced than thought in some quarters, the whole story is not one that makes for good pro-choice agitprop.
It’s telling that this chronicle always starts in the early 1970s. A more complete history would start in the ancient Near East, where the early Christians uniformly interpreted their scriptures, replete with texts about the personhood of the unborn, as prohibiting abortion. As early as the first century, Christians taught:
The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not seduce boys. You shall not commit fornication. You shall not steal. You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child. [Didache 2:1–2 (a.d. 70)]
The medieval Church was no different, and the Protestant Reformers were similarly consistent in their stance. Early Americans would be most influenced by the latter, as most were some variety of British Protestant. Early American Protestants would have been informed as well by the British legal environment in which abortion was a serious crime. To take pro-choice revisionists at their word, one would have to believe that, with Roe, the Supreme Court struck down restrictive abortion laws that came from nowhere and were passed by nobody but merely existed.
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