Perhaps you will feel the same discomfort I felt overhearing saints of old speak of death.

“He who does not prepare for death is more than an ordinary fool. He is a madman,” began Charles Spurgeon.

“Agreed,” said the good Doctor Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Men seem to ignore the plain fact that “the moment you come into this world you are beginning to go out of it.”

But this fact need not spell doom and gloom for the Christian, Spurgeon responded. “The best moment of a Christian’s life is his last one, because it is the one that is nearest heaven.”

“I concur fully,” Richard Sibbes chimed in. “Death is not now the death of me, but death will be the death of my misery, the death of my sins; it will be the death of my corruptions. But death will be my birthday in regard of happiness.”

“When Christ calls me home,” Adoniram Judson added, “I shall go with the gladness of a boy bounding away from school.”

“May I also interject?” asked Calvin. “We may positively state that nobody has made any progress in the school of Christ, unless he cheerfully looks forward towards the day of his death, and towards the day of the final resurrection.”

“This strikes me as true,” said Thomas Brooks. “It is no credit to your heavenly Father for you to be loath to go home.”

“And why should we hesitate?” Samuel Bolton questioned. It is the “privilege of saints, that they shall not die until the best time, not until when, if they were but rightly informed, they would desire to die.”

“Exactly.” For the child of God, “death is the funeral of all our sorrows,” reasoned Thomas Watson. “Death will set a true saint out of the gunshot and free him from sin and trouble.”

“Indeed,” John Bunyan added, “death is but a passage out of a prison into a palace.”

As I listened, I overheard the most disquieting questions. “Has this world been so kind to you that you would leave it with regret?” C.S. Lewis posed. “If we really believe that home is elsewhere and that this life is a ‘wandering to find home,’ why should we not look forward to the arrival?”

“Hear! Hear!” exclaimed William Gurnall. “Let thy hope of heaven master thy fear of death. Why shouldest thou be afraid to die, who hopest to live by dying?”

“I am packed, sealed, and waiting for the post,” cried John Newton. “Who would live always in such a world as this?”

Even snippets of their prayers issued a subtle rebuke. I could not help but hear one George Whitefield plead, “Lord, keep me from a sinful and too eager desire after death. I desire not to be impatient. I wish quietly to wait till my blessed change comes.”

This proved the final blow. These men anticipated death, viewed an early departure as a “promotion.” I lowered my gaze. I rarely think this way, rarely feel this way. Do I really believe in heaven? Do I really love my Lord?

Snuggled in This Life

My squeamishness, flipping through an anthology of Christian quotes, helped me realize that my discipleship has slanted too American, too shortsighted, too this-worldly.

“Are you packed and ready to go?” Well, I was hoping to set sail several decades from now, so —

“Has this world been so kind to you that you would leave it with regret?” Well, I wouldn’t give it a ten-star rating, but it certainly hasn’t been half that bad (yet). So yeah, maybe —

“Nobody has made any progress in the school of Christ, unless he cheerfully looks forward towards the day of his death, and towards the day of the final resurrection.” Well, that’s intense.

“It is no credit to your heavenly Father for you to be loath to go home.” I see — worthy point. No credit to Jesus either, I imagine.

“These men daily lived awake to the truths I daily profess to believe.”

These men daily lived awake to the truths I daily profess to believe; they inhabited them, longing to fly away and be with Christ. Although they loved families, enjoyed things of earth, and did good in this world, they nevertheless were unafraid to dive headfirst into those cold waters of death at the first moment their Master allowed. They believed, with Paul, that “to depart and be with Christ . . . is far better” (Philippians 1:23).

I discovered then just how snuggled by the fireside I had become in this world. A place I too readily felt to be home.

Epitaphs of Exiles

My heart can live too much here, too little there. “My life is hidden with Christ,” I must remind myself (Colossians 3:3). As this world seeks to entice my affections to linger in its marketplace, I desire to be more of a heavenly disciple. And if you love Jesus but think too little of the life to come, I know you will agree. Oh, that this might be a true inscription over our graves, and all the more since we live after the coming of Christ, and the down payment of the Spirit:

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:13–16)

Abraham, by faith, left his home in Mesopotamia, not even knowing where God was leading him (Hebrews 11:8). He lived in the promised land before he could call it home, dwelling there as a foreigner. Isaac and Jacob, heirs with Abraham of God’s promise, lived in tents of temporality; their home was not yet (Hebrews 11:9).

“Once God saved them, they refused to unpack their hopes again in this world.”

Abraham’s eyes were elsewhere. “He was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10). And he and his sons bore the heavenly insignia in their speech: they acknowledged, to anyone who cared to know, that they would live and die on this earth as exiles and sojourners (Genesis 23:4; 47:9). Once God saved them, they refused to unpack their hopes again in this world. The land far-off — big as God’s promise, sure as God’s word — held their allegiance. They made it clear that they sought a homeland not built by human hands.

As the world tried to tempt them back, the bait remained on the hook. Better to live in a tent in this world with a heavenly city before them than to dwell in the tottering kingdoms of men. They desired a better country, a heavenly one. And God is not ashamed to be called “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). He is not ashamed in the least to be the one they so hoped in, for he has prepared for them a city.

Still at Sea

So, is your mind mainly set on this world or the next?

This world is not our home, precious saint. We are not yet in our element. We fling open the window and send our dove about this earth, finding that it returns to us having found no homeland within this watery grave. But this world will be drained soon enough. The swells of judgment shall intensify and then subside. The new heavens and new earth shall arrive, and our Mighty Dove shall descend with a sword in his mouth for his enemies and an olive branch for us.

Until then, keep waiting, keep hoping, keep acknowledging, keep living in tents, longing for that moment when we can bound away from this world as the Father calls us home.

Her time had come, unexpectedly. The morning through the lattice shone with a bright and soft melancholy. In her arms, her second son. The fruit of the night’s long and anguished labor. Gentle tears fall; the child has her eyes.

A former life pressed in upon her. Leah, her sister, Leah. The feud between them over Jacob — for his love and for his offspring — had availed neither. So much of her married life, she now realized, glowed with envy — she wanted more than Jacob’s heart and eye. She wanted his heirs (Genesis 30:1). She remembered her desperate cry to her husband, a lifetime ago now, “Give me children, or I shall die!”

Even at the birth of her first son, Rachel already began to look for another: “And she called his name Joseph [literally, “May he add”], saying ‘May the Lord add to me another son!’” And now, she held him — for the first and last time. The midwife aimed to comfort her with the fulfillment, “Do not fear, for you have another son” — consolation to a dying mother.

How many such golden mornings would this son grow to know without her? How many grandchildren would her wilting arms never hold? As her soul made ready for its unwilling exodus, tears showered the plant just sprouted. She sighs a name, “Ben-oni, son of my sorrow.”

Jacob sat beside his great love, grief gripping him by the throat, yet managing to say, “He shall be called, ‘Benjamin, son of my right hand.’” Son of my right hand, as though to say, “As you depart, my Rachel, my dove, this son — this life you brought forth from death — shall be in favor at my side. He shall be closer to me than a shadow; as close as your memory. This, the last token between us on earth, I will cherish.”

And with that, Rachel departed from the world and was buried on the way to Bethlehem.

A Ghost, Crying

It moves the soul to imagine a mother saying hello and goodbye to her child in the same moment. We can see her with our imagination, gazing around longingly at loved ones, her eyes resting upon her son with a look to bring water from the hardest heart. Ben-oni, Ben-oni.

And it moves us to hear the other two mentions of this mother’s tears in Scripture. As the blood of Abel continues to speak, Rachel too continues to cry.

In the first incident, Israel has fallen bloodily to Babylon. Amid the stunning note of hope given in Jeremiah 31, we hear her:

Thus says the Lord,“A voice is heard in Ramah,     lamentation and bitter weeping.Rachel is weeping for her children;     she refuses to be comforted for her children,     because they are no more.” (Jeremiah 31:15)

Near the place of Rachel’s tomb, her voice cries out at the devastation of Benjamin and the other Israelite tribes. The Lord speaks poetically, resurrecting Rachel, as it were, to picture her as an Israelite mother weeping without remedy for her slain and exiled children.

In response, Yahweh comforts her, “There is hope for your future, and your children shall come back to their own country.” He will relent of his judgment, and depicts himself as a Father to Israel, saying, “Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my darling child? . . . I will surely have mercy on him” (Jeremiah 31:16–20). In other words, he shall be called “Benjamin” — a son at my right hand.

She Refuses to Be Comforted

Hundreds of years later, her consolation is again disturbed.

Herod has done the unthinkable. Furious at the wise men for not divulging the location of baby Jesus, “he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under” (Matthew 2:16). The dragon devoured many to ravage the one.

Matthew writes of the infanticide,

Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,     weeping and loud lamentation,Rachel weeping for her children;     she refused to be comforted,     because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:17–18)

“She weeps, and refuses to be comforted, because they are no more.”

As the brutes went door to door, Rachel again raised her anguished cry. These tears did not signal exile, but extermination. She does not die with her healthy child in her arms — bequeathing her son with a hope and a future — she watches, as baby boy after baby boy is ripped from his mother’s arms and done away with. She weeps, and refuses to be comforted, because they are no more.

Do We Weep with Her?

Because they are no more.

There is a discomforting calm in these words: The deed is done; the violence spent. The water is again calm over the sunken ship. The dreadful stillness; an unholy hush. Little giggles, gone. Creaking floors cease playing the music of pattering footsteps. They are no more.

“Because they are no more.”

“If a pitiless culture will not mourn for the missing, she will. If we live too busy to mind the brutality, she isn’t.”

What a word to echo through the empty corridors of the world today — and in the United States alone, a child misplaced every minute. Though not ancient Israel, I hear Rachel, from a forgotten corner of the world, weeping. If a pitiless society will not mourn for the missing, she will. If we live too busy to mind the brutality, she isn’t.

Day after day, she mourns as a mother bereft of more children. As one after another is stolen from behind fortress walls, she begets tears without number. Final punctuations fall; biographies end. Nothing left to read, nothing more to say. Towns and cities and even nations full of people — gone — “Ben-oni.”

She looks out from the lattice, daylight rests upon her with a bright and terrible melancholy. How many have never lived to see this dawn? Will we not weep with her — because they are no more?

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.

“Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?”

Cassius, one of the villains in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, is ambitious. He sees Julius Caesar ascending to power, and Cassius hates it. Yet he knows, like Scar in The Lion King, that if he wants to take down Caesar, he must gain powerful allies. Brutus, a noble war hero, is such a man.

Cassius slithers up to Brutus while Brutus is in some untold conflict with himself (perhaps fighting a similar concern with Caesar’s rise). Listen again to his question,

“Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?” (1.2.51)

Cassius asks Brutus if he can see himself. In other words, Cassius asks if he can properly know himself — see Brutus as Brutus is — without the help of another.

“No, Cassius,” Brutus responds, “for the eye sees not itself, but by reflection, by some other things.” (1.2.52–53)

As the eye cannot see its own face, Brutus responds, neither can he know himself alone. He must see his reflection by some mirror. Cassius, to recruit this needed Knight to checkmate the potential King, offers to be that mirror for Brutus. Flatteringly, he reflects a majestic Brutus. A regal Brutus. A Brutus that is as great, if not greater, than Caesar — a Brutus the people would wish was in charge.

Who Shows You Your Face?

Shakespeare gives us the perceptive question that I turn now to you.

“Tell me, good reader, can you see your face?”

Who do you look at to see yourself? Whose opinion of you forms your identity? If you have been like me, perhaps you rely on many mirrors. Does this group think I am fun to be around? Does my wife find me desirable? Does this pastor or small group respect me? Do these people think I am smart, or those people, funny? Does this group like my writing; does he think I talk too much?

“Who do you look at to see yourself? Whose opinion of you forms your identity?”

I see myself, if I am not careful, reflected in a carnival of mirrors. In this one, I’m short and chubby. In that one, I am tall and skinny. In this one, I have an inflated head. In that one, massive feet. In the one over there, I am “too Christian.” In this one here, I am just right — at least for the moment. We too often live from mirror to mirror, always looking into others’ faces to see our own. We live and move and have our being looking for certain people to approve of us.

Isn’t it a wonder, then, that there was one who walked among us who cared not for human mirrors, one of whom even his enemies had to admit, “Teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone’s opinion, for you [do not look at the faces of men]” (Matthew 22:16)?

Nothing but the Truth

The Pharisees, in the spirit of Cassius, said this to manipulate Jesus. They meant to entangle him. They wanted him out of the way, so they held a meeting to discuss how to trap him in his words. This introduction, which flattered Jesus for not regarding faces, was bait.

For their plan to work, they needed him to continue to do what he had been doing: speak truthfully regardless of the consequences. He couldn’t back down now, or the web wouldn’t stick. They need him to answer; they think they’ve asked a question Jesus cannot answer without his harm. So they say in effect,

Teacher, we know you’re true and speak God’s way truthfully and that you don’t fear any man. We know you will tell us exactly how it is — that you will speak plainly the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — come what may.

They speak truly of Jesus falsely, yet they speak truthfully about him. Matthew Henry comments,

In his evangelical judgment, he did not know faces; that Lion of the tribe of Judah, turned not away for any (Proverbs 30:30), turned not a step from the truth, nor from his work, for fear of the most formidable. He reproved with equity (Isaiah 11:4), and never with partiality.

He did not shrink back from declaring the whole counsel of God. He spoke the truth as it was. No faces swayed him; no appearances prejudiced him against the truth. He is the Truth.

Whether Friend or Foe

We come to more fully appreciate our Master’s impartiality when we consider the various groups to whom he delivered the undressed truth.

He spoke plainly to his enemies and to sinners. He saw the faces of the chief priests and Pharisees, the faces of tax collectors and prostitutes, the faces of large crowds, and taught directly the way of faith and the way of repentance. He “went there” with the woman at the well concerning her sordid relationship history. With the powerful scribes and Pharisees, he pronounced “Woe to you!”

What’s equally admirable (and at times more difficult) is that he lived without undue regard even toward the faces of his own family and friends, altering his message for none. At twelve years old, he caused his parents great distress by staying back in the temple three days, only to ask when found, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). He notes the disciples’ little faith, and then memorably confronts Peter, that great rock of an apostle, saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mark 8:33).

He did not receive his identity from men and thus he could perfectly love men with the truth. Uninhibited by the fear of man or the craving for endorsement, he did not campaign for human votes, but baffled crowds as one who spoke with authority, as one without need of their applause and support.

The King’s Face

So tell me, Christian, can you see your face?

Instead of looking around to see your reflection in faces around you, look to the beautiful face of God in the face of his only Son, Jesus Christ. His face gives freedom from the fear of man. If he approves, let all the world condemn.

“Jesus’s face gives freedom from the fear of man. If he approves, let all the world condemn.”

To illustrate how looking to this exalted face can extinguish the slavish fear of any other face on earth, consider in closing a story Michael Reeves recently gave at Ligonier about Hugh Latimer (1487–1555). Latimer, an English bishop, once preached before the frightful King Henry VIII, an easily provoked man with many wives and mistresses.

Spurgeon described the scene this way.

It was the custom of the Court preacher to present the king with something on his birthday, and Latimer presented Henry VIII. with a pocket-handkerchief with this text in the corner, “Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge” [Hebrews 13:4]; a very suitable text for bluff Harry. And then he preached a sermon before his most gracious majesty against sins of lust, and he delivered himself with tremendous force, not forgetting or abridging the personal application.

The king, as you would expect, was not pleased. He told Latimer that he was to preach again the next Sunday and apologize to him publicly. Latimer thanked the king and left.

The following Sunday arrived, Latimer climbed the pulpit, and said these unforgettable words:

“Hugh Latimer [referring to himself in the third person], thou art this day to preach before the high and mighty prince Henry, King of Great Britain and France. If thou sayest one single word that displeases his Majesty he will take thy head off; therefore, mind what thou art at.”

But then said he, “Hugh Latimer, thou art this day to preach before the Lord God Almighty, who is able to cast both body and soul into hell, and so tell the king the truth outright.” (Godly Fear and Its Goodly Consequences, 237)

The most foreboding face among men looked menacingly upon Latimer and bid him mind his tongue. But Latimer gazed above the man, in whose nostrils was breath, and considered the face of Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth. He would not play small. He would not tamper with his Master’s message. He would not mind a merely human face, even the face of his earthly king, if that face bid him look away from the face of the King of heaven.

And while our moments may be (far) less dramatic and less threatening, we are still in need of such lion-hearted, Christ-exalting courage. Who cares what the world thinks? Faces do not show us ourselves; but Christ does. Christ calls us to look to his face, to hear his word, and to listen to his people to understand who we are in him. And as we hear what he speaks over us, mere human faces lose their hold on us. We speak truthfully and love freely because we, like Christ, are not receiving glory from men.

Some texts mark you for life. As Jacob, you grapple with them, and though you come away with a blessing, you leave with a limp. You think differently. You pray differently. You love, speak, and act differently. Life as it was before can be no more.

Elijah’s question to the wavering people of Israel has been such a text for me. As a young college student, alone in my dorm room with a Bible I had just started reading, I came to it:

How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him. (1 Kings 18:21)

When I read it on my futon, it was as though I witnessed the scene unfold firsthand.

“Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” The wicked king addressed the prophet he had hunted like a deer in the forest. He sneered. Not often did the prey beckon the hunter or the fish, the fisherman. But here, weaponless and alone, the prophet emerged from his hiding place to challenge his pursuer, and all of his prophets, to a public showdown.

“I have not troubled Israel, but you have, and your father’s house, because you have abandoned the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals,” Elijah replied. “Now therefore send and gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, and the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table” (1 Kings 18:18–19).

Ahab happily complied.

News spread quickly; the people of Israel clamored around to see the spectacle. I took my place among the masses. The excitement was palpable as prophets and their gods prepared for war. Baal’s king and his army of prophets stood in one corner; the Lord’s prophet approached alone, taking his position in the other.

Pierced Without a Weapon

Yet as the prophet advanced toward the mountain to face off with the hundreds of prophets, Elijah’s eyes of fire rested elsewhere. He gazed at us, drew near to us. The contestant walked over to the crowd, slowly looking us over, and lifted his voice for all to hear,

How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him. (1 Kings 18:21)

Weaponless, he shot the first arrow. Swordless, he cut me to the heart. Alone, I trembled to hear another speaking.

As I read those words, a lifetime of spiritual indecision flashed before my eyes. It took shape before me. The amphibious creature, offspring of a hearty worldliness and brittle religiosity, reared its head. It bore the horrible beauty of a demon. This angel of light had pleased and soothed my half-waking conscience for a lifetime, while remaining false enough to damn my soul.

This god I followed took no issue with the lukewarmness — the starts and stops, the ins and outs of what I took to be Christian devotion. None of my prophets interrupted me, nor protested when I went my own way. For over a decade, my god was compliant, polite, civil. He did not ask for much, nor threaten me, nor ask me to do anything I did not already agree to. He sat in the corner of the world, just smiling at me, his beloved.

If He Be God

The prophet, however, served another God. A jealous God. One who would not endure the waffling another moment. And this prophet burned with his Master’s fire. Elijah decided that if he was walking headlong into his death, he would leave his half-hearted people with a simple question: How long, O faithless bird, will you go fluttering back and forth between two branches?

We, the people, were the only ones undecided before that mountain. The priests of Baal were decided, even to the point of shedding their blood. They cut themselves with swords to invoke an answer from Baal. King Ahab was also decided. He and his wicked wife Jezebel hunted down Yahweh’s prophets and feasted with Baal’s. Elijah was decided. He stood alone before a spiritual legion of darkness, sure that his God could swallow all these mighty minnows.

“A God, if he be God, must be totally followed. Any true God must be completely obeyed.”

At this, a nearly novel thought pressed against my mind: A God, if he be God, must be totally followed. Any true God must be completely obeyed. He demanded a decision. He must be the most important reality in one’s life. Then the amazing conclusion that I professed for years finally caught up with me: I believed God existed. An eternal being, an infinite Person, a supreme monarch.

Elijah looked me in the eyes and said, If the world or your flesh or you yourself be god — follow them. Eat, drink, for tomorrow you die. But if the God of Scripture is God, then reason, justice, and sanity itself cries aloud: If this Glorious, Mighty, and Beautiful God will have you, you must follow him — unreservedly, unquestionably, unhesitatingly.

How did I answer the prophet?

“And the people did not answer him a word” (1 Kings 18:21). I joined the crowds in solemn silence.

The most daring among us held their tongue. Tough guys didn’t protest. Not a chirp was heard before the mountain; all beaks were stopped. What could we say in our defense?

If Christ Be God

Before the sun beat upon the forsaken and bloodied prophets of Baal, before fire fell from heaven and gave the outmanned Elijah decisive victory, before the people rallied and slew the priests and Elijah ran for his life, the prophet’s question seared me: How long will you go on indecisive?

How many more days and months and years will pass while you still pretend to have made up your mind? “If Christ be God, follow him. If the world, follow it.”

Has Elijah’s question lost its edge? To others not refusing to associate with Jesus, yet simply adding him to a collection of other allegiances: “How long will you go on fluttering between two branches?” Between Christ and the love of money. Between Christ and this world. Between Christ and your favorite sin. Between Christ and your comfortable, uninterrupted life.

How long, professing Christian, will you too live halfhearted, half-bowed? How much longer will you persist with half-waking commitments to Christ? How long will you think to give him the loose change of your attention, the crumbled bills of your affections? “If Jesus is God, follow him; but if your girlfriend be god, your reputation be god, your earthly pleasures and career be god — then follow them.”

“I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5). “You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their Asherim (for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God)” (Exodus 34:13–14). One cannot play footsie with the consuming fire for long.

“One cannot play footsie with the consuming fire for long.”

The Christian God is God, and he will not sit idly by within a pantheon of other gods and pleasures. He entertains no rivals. Friendship with the world is adultery and enmity against him (James 4:4). This text, and this reality, God used to shake me awake and bring me to Jesus.

Dear reader, is your Jesus really God? If he is God — and the Jesus of the Bible is God — then follow him. I long for fire to fall again, pleading with Elijah, “Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back” (1 Kings 18:37).

You’ve done it again. Your conscience begins to stain. Here it is: that sin you vowed — you prayed — never to repeat. You feel the desperate urge to flee from yourself. You wonder, Does God feel the same?

You’ve read of that rocky ground that produces new life yet in the end falls away and dies (Matthew 13:20–21). You tremble at Demas, who, “in love with this present world,” deserted Paul to his apparent undoing (2 Timothy 4:10). You fear, after all your fighting, to finally fall prey to the sin at the door like Cain (Genesis 4:7). As Esau, do you wonder if you’ve sold your birthright so decisively that no power of tears can bring it back (Hebrews 12:17)? Was this your final chance? Will God leave you alone with your red stew?

Perhaps you wonder more specifically, Will he finally take his Spirit from me? You’ve already pled in David’s voice, “Cast me not away from your presence; and take not your Holy Spirit from me!” (Psalm 51:11). You wonder if you will end up being more Saul than David, for “the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul” (1 Samuel 16:14). What makes you any different from him? You know for certain that if the Lord’s Spirit leaves you, you will leave the Lord.

And so it gets your attention afresh when you happen upon Paul’s command to the church at Ephesus: “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4:30). Do all sins grieve the Holy Spirit of God? And can you finally grieve him to provoke his leaving you for good?

How We Grieve the Spirit

How do we grieve the Spirit of God? Do all sins grieve his heart the same?

Does grieving the Spirit entail sins like “lying to him” and “testing him,” as with Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:3)? Does it mean “provoking him” with unbelief, like the wilderness generation (Hebrews 3:7–11)? To “resist him,” like Stephen’s hearers (Acts 7:51)? Is grieving the Spirit the same as quenching him (1 Thessalonians 5:19)?

Instead of first considering that grieving the Spirit means poking at him with our own personal, more isolated sins of thought and deed, it is worthwhile, especially in our day, to realize that the context of this command is primarily corporate. How we frustrate the Spirit’s work to unite his people is in view more than how we sin in the chambers of our mind or alone in our room (though we may rightly imagine these also grieve the Spirit).

Symphony of Unity

Consider the communal emphasis preceding the command.

The Spirit has now unveiled the “mystery of Christ” through the holy prophets and apostles to God’s people: “The Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Ephesians 3:6). Christ’s blood has brought the far-off Gentiles near, leaving in the place of two people (two enemies) one new man (Ephesians 2:15).

To protect God’s magnum opus of diverse harmony, the church herself has a part to play: “Maintain the unity of Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). The Spirit unites us in one body, with one call, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Father (4:4–6). We must not aggravate that work by slander, bitterness, corrupting talk, anger, and lovelessness against one another (Ephesians 4:25–29). We grieve the Spirit, most immediately, when we publish nasty tweets against each other, willfully misunderstand and gratify anger, backbite and gossip, neither seek forgiveness nor extend it.

This oneness (or not) plays out before more watching eyes than those of an unbelieving world. The hidden plan of God went public “so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10). We are placed on stage in a cosmic theater, before the eyes of the demonic forces and spiritual realms. The play is titled “The Manifold Wisdom of God,” and it stars one actress: the church. The theme of the play is God’s glory in the unity of his people.

How ugly, then, a shame for us, to refuse the union that the Spirit creates, that the blood of Christ purchased, that the Father planned before the foundation of the world. To sit on stage as devils and rogues, sneering as the church bites and devours one another. This, suffice it to say, grieves the Spirit.

Will He Ever Leave Us?

Can the Spirit be so grieved as to leave us? When Satan addresses us as Ichabod, saying, “The glory has departed” (1 Samuel 4:21), is he right?

Individually, we can wonder, What of Saul or Samson, or those who “go on sinning” and so trample underfoot the Son of God, profane the blood of the covenant, and “outrage the Spirit of grace” (Hebrews 10:29)?

Corporately, we can wonder, What of the unbelieving Jews that Paul alludes to in giving us the command? “They rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit; therefore he turned to be their enemy, and himself fought against them” (Isaiah 63:10). Will the Spirit who convicts and encourages us today become an enemy because of our sin?

Paul assures us, “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). This is Paul’s second mention of this glory. Consider the first:

In [Christ] you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. (Ephesians 1:13–14)

“After so many provocations, you would leave you — but God the Holy Spirit will not.”

If you have been indwelt, renewed, sealed by the Spirit, he will never leave you, nor us as a people. After so many provocations, you would leave you — but God the Holy Spirit will not. He is given as our down payment in a way Old Testament saints (and Israel at large) did not receive him. The Spirit came upon individuals, anointing them for kingship and other great feats, but he did not indwell them as promised in the new covenant (Ezekiel 36:27).

The apostate may outrage the Spirit and choose his darling sins over Jesus, but this proves he did not truly have the Spirit — for the Spirit seals us, marking us as God’s for the day of redemption, the day of Christ’s return.

Love-Sweetened Grief

So we grieve the Spirit of God by our sin, specifically our sins against the devil-shaming, God’s-wisdom-exalting unity of the gospel. But this is not a grief unto desertion. As God’s people, the Spirit is our guarantee until Jesus returns.

“As God’s people, the Spirit is our guarantee until Jesus returns.”

Perhaps one more question is in order: Does the Spirit dwell in us as we might dwell in a broken down, dirty motel? Is he only ever grieved by our sin?

Charles Spurgeon beautifully reminds us of the flower’s scent contained in the very word grief:

There is something very touching in this admonition, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.” It does not say, “Do not make him angry.” A more delicate and tender term is used — “Grieve him not.” . . . For grief is a sweet combination of anger and of love. It is anger, but all the gall is taken from it. Love sweetens the anger, and turns the edge of it, not against the person, but against the offense.

Don’t miss the point: the Spirit is a Person. The Spirit himself loves us (Romans 15:30). He inspires the word grief here to communicate this grand love, even in view of our sin. A disapproval that is wrapped in undying care. May we not grieve the love of the third person of the Trinity, who has sealed us irreversibly for the day of our Savior’s arrival.