http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16276336/can-i-still-have-joy-in-seasons-of-doubt
Audio Transcript
Welcome back on this Monday, the final day of July. Last time, on Thursday, we looked at God’s joy, and how his joy becomes our joy by the Holy Spirit. It’s a really key episode: APJ 1962. This week, we continue on the joy theme, but we add another theme to it: the theme of doubt. In fact, can we struggle with doubt and experience joy in God? That’s today. And next time we look at how to fight off the inner skeptic when we have doubts about what we read in the Bible. That’s on Thursday.
So today, can we struggle with doubt and delight in God at the same time? That’s Steve’s question. He lives in Nashville. “Hello, Pastor John. My question for you is about how much joy I can hope to experience in the Christian life as someone who struggles seasonally with doubt. Sometimes I struggle with doubts about whether God exists or whether God is good, based on all the evil that I see on the news. Or I doubt whether God has a plan and purpose for my life. These doubts come and go. They’re seasonal. None of them extinguishes the smoldering flax that is my faith. The doubts do not stay long, and they do not overwhelm me. So, my question for you is this: Can I ever hope to have deepening joy in God in seasons when I also struggle with doubts like these? Or is joy in God simply impossible when doubts are present?”
I think the answer to that last question is no, it is not impossible to experience joy in God when doubts are present. And I think the answer to the question just before it is yes, you can hope to have deepening joy in God in seasons when you are also struggling with doubt. Those are my two answers. Now, let’s try to think biblically about this.
Intruding Doubts, Embattled Faith
First, a definition. Doubt comes in all sizes and shapes and durations and levels of seriousness. So, I’m going to call doubt of a Christian variety (that is, doubts that real born-again Christians have from time to time) thoughts that enter our minds from who knows where — they could be Satan’s fiery darts, desires of the flesh, a skeptical associate at work who mocks your religion, some new scientific argument, lack of sleep, dalliance with sin. There are all kinds of sources for how doubts rise or thoughts rise in our minds.
“Doubting is not a sign of no faith; it’s a sign of embattled faith.”
These doubts are thoughts that enter the mind that make us wonder whether something the Bible teaches is really true or whether we ourselves are as real as we thought we were. Those are the two kinds of doubts that I think a Christian wrestles with: Christian truth claims may not be true, or we may not be true.
Now, for the Christian, these thoughts are not conclusions; these are intrusions. They break in like a thief. They start moving around the house of your mind and knocking things over and making threats. This really does happen to Jesus’s followers. When Peter started to sink after walking a few steps on the water, Jesus said, “Why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31). When Jesus appeared after the resurrection, it says, “They worshiped him, but some doubted” (Matthew 28:17). Jude 22 says, “Have mercy” — this is in the church — “on those who doubt.”
In other words, such doubting is not a sign of no faith; it’s a sign of embattled faith. When Paul says we should “fight the good fight of the faith” (1 Timothy 6:12), he included in his meaning, “When doubts intrude, fight them.”
Fight them with prayer. “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). That’s a prayer. Or fight them with the word. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word” (Romans 10:17). That doesn’t just apply at the front end of the Christian life — that’s every day. We fight doubt by the word. Fight it by obedience. John 7:17 says, “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God.” Obedient people have fewer doubts than disobedient people.
Kept in the Storm
My answer to Steve’s question is that during that battle, during that season of doubt, it is possible to experience, alongside the anxiety of doubt, deepening joy in God. Now, why would I say that?
Doubt as Sorrow
First, because the anxieties of doubt are a kind of sorrow. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6:10 that Christians can have the experience of joy at the same time as experiencing sorrow: “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.” If sorrow and joy can mysteriously coexist in the same heart at the same time — and they can — then doubt and joy in God can coexist at the same time. Picture doubt as the troubled waters on the surface of the sea, and picture the new creation reality of faith as the deep, still waters of the ocean depths beneath.
Doubt as Perplexity
Second, I think in Paul’s mind perplexity is another way of talking about some kinds of doubt. He says in 2 Corinthians 4:8, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair.” What is perplexity? Perplexity is a state of confusion or uncertainty. And what is uncertainty but a kind of doubt?
And yet, Paul admits to experiencing this kind of perplexity, doubt, but knowing full well he will not be destroyed by it: “perplexed, but not driven to despair.” That confidence beneath the perplexity can be experienced as a kind of deep joy in God’s keeping. Picture a child lost in the forest, but underneath that growing anxiety of the child and his growing doubts is deep confidence: “Daddy will find me. He said he would. He will find me. He promised to keep me.”
Doubt as Suffering
Third, consider Romans 5:3–4: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces [approvedness], and [approvedness] produces hope.” Now, what that text teaches is that the reason we can rejoice in times of misery — suffering hurts; it’s misery — is that we have learned that enduring through experiences of misery has the effect of giving us a sense of authenticity. We made it. We’re real. We have been tested by fire and found to be approved. That, he says, produces hope, and hope is why we can rejoice. That’s the argument.
“Every season of doubt with triumph on the other side can bring a deepening sense that God is faithful.”
I think the very same process of testing and enduring and hope and joy can be experienced when the kind of suffering is not physical pain but psychological doubt. “We rejoice in our seasons of doubt, knowing that the suffering of doubt produces endurance, and endurance produces approvedness, and approvedness produces hope.” That’s the ground of our joy.
I would answer Steve’s question, that’s the ground of deepening joy. Can I experience deepening joy in these seasons? My answer is yes.
Paradoxical Calm
In fact, he said, these kinds of doubts are recurrent, seasonal. When that’s true, every season of doubt with triumph on the other side can bring a deepening sense that God is faithful. God will hold me fast. I can, in a sense, laugh at these intrusions on my peace. I can scorn the foam and the waves on the surface because, in the deep waters of my soul, I enjoy paradoxical calm because of Christ’s keeping promises.
So yes, Steve, you can hope to have deepening joy in God in these recurring seasons of doubt.
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Train Them Up in Jesus: The One-Verse Vision for Dads
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)
Following the negative charge to fathers — “do not provoke your children to anger” — Paul captures a positive vision for Christian parenting with two key terms: “discipline and instruction” in the ESV. The Greek words beneath them have been the subject of much discussion and have led to a variety of translations. We might capture the meaning just as well, if not better, with training and counsel — which might help both our clarity of vision and practical application in parenting.
The first concept, “discipline” or “training” (paideia), is the broader and more comprehensive of the two. It likely speaks to the full educational process from infant to adult, and the years of intentionality, initiative, energy, and follow-through it takes to train a child for adulthood. That is, it is a long-term process, like training for the Olympics, but with far more at stake.
We might think of it as whole-life training — body and soul — not mere classroom instruction. “The term paideia,” comments S.M. Baugh, “has rich cultural associations in the Greek world for the training and education of youths in a wide range of subjects and disciplines” (Ephesians, 509–10). This kind of fatherly training, then, involves not only words, but example and imitation.
Training Toward Maturity
Such comprehensive life-training is what Moses received when he was “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” making him, in time, “mighty in his words and deeds” (Acts 7:22). It’s what Paul received, for years, as he was brought up in Tarsus, “educated at the feet of Gamaliel” (Acts 22:3). Such whole-life training, as extended preparation for healthy adulthood, is our calling as Christian parents, training both the outer person and behaviors as well as pressing through to the heart to form and re-form the inner persons of our children.
“Maturity, after all, in any sphere of human life, typically does not come automatically, but through training.”
As Jesus spoke about his disciples being trained during their time with him (Matthew 13:52; Luke 6:40), so we disciple our children toward Christian maturity. Maturity, after all, in any sphere of human life, typically does not come automatically, but through training (Hebrews 5:14). Discipling does something; it changes the disciple — and greatly so over time. And such training is often not easy but requires persisting in moments of discomfort, even pain, to endure on the path toward the reward set before us (Hebrews 12:11).
Work ethic, for instance, is not automatic; we must teach our children to work. Nor does holiness come naturally, but God’s grace in Christ trains us, and our children through us, “to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives” (Titus 2:12).
Well-Equipped to Train Well
We might be so quick to disclaim the proverbial nature of that famous childrearing verse that we neglect to pause and really ponder what training involves. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). There may be far more to training — both with the body, and with the more pliable soul — than modern parents tend to recognize.
And our God has made sure that we as parents are amply supplied and fully resourced for these extensive years of training our children: he gave us his Book. At the heart and center of parental training is not our own life experience and acquired wisdom (valuable as that is), but the Scriptures, “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17).
This training doubtless includes what we might more narrowly call discipline (Hebrews 12:3–11), even as we note well the difference between discipline toward a goal and punishment as an end (1 Corinthians 11:32; 2 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:20; 2 Timothy 2:25; Revelation 3:19). Yet the whole process of parental training is comprehensive and constructive, not only responsive; and holistic, not only intellectual.
Specific Verbal Training
The second concept, then, translated “instruction” — or perhaps “counsel” (nouthesia) — is more specific, and included under the broader category of training.
With this second term, the accent is verbal, and less hands-on — specifically about the role of our words as parents. Now we move beyond visionary teaching and demonstration to corrective speech, but still as a means to the child’s long-term good, not as an end. This is how we often use the word counsel today, though not without the sense of “admonishing” or “warning.” And parental counsel typically endures beyond the years of immediate training. Parenting doesn’t end when our children move out of the house. Parental training, at that point, may be essentially complete, but parental counsel, we hope, will long endure.
Such counsel in the New Testament covers a range of circumstances, whether the more positive counsel that Old Testament examples provide for Christians today (“they were written down for our instruction, 1 Corinthians 10:11), or the more negative warnings we extend to “a person who stirs up division” (Titus 3:10). On the whole, we do well to remember the kind of father’s heart — slow to chide and swift to bless — from which such warnings and admonitions issue.
Consider, then, at least five realities that will accompany godly counsel.
Friends of Fatherly Counsel
The first friends of fatherly counsel are our tears. On the beach at Miletus, when Paul bids farewell to the Ephesian elders, he reminds them that “for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears” (Acts 20:31). His apostolic counsel came with tears, not vindictiveness. He did not speak critically, from an angry or distant heart, but in love he spoke his words of correction for their good.
Second, and related, is a good heart. He says to the Romans that he’s confident that they are “able to instruct one another,” because “you, my brothers, . . . are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge” (Romans 15:14). Fullness of both knowledge and goodness coexists in a heart that offers such counsel. It is from such a good heart that our children need our counsel and warnings.
Third, fatherly love. When Paul spoke hard words, as he did to the Corinthians, he did so not “to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children.” The reason he gives is his fatherly heart for them: “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers” (1 Corinthians 4:14–15). General counsel and admonitions may have their place; but our children have special need of corrective words that flow from a father’s peculiar love.
Fourth, teaching and wisdom. Twice Colossians speaks of “warning everyone” and “admonishing one another” (that is, Christian counsel) that is both paired with teaching and accompanied with “all wisdom”:
Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. . . . Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 1:28; 3:16)
As parents, we might also observe here the goal of our parenting (Christian maturity), the essential means of our calling (the word of Christ), and the correlation with singing (joy made audible) and thankfulness. Singing, thankful fathers make for good counselors, who both correct and give hope.
Finally, brotherly warning. In 2 Thessalonians 3:15, Paul contrasts the disregard one might have for an enemy with the kind of warning counsel of a brother. And in 1 Thessalonians 5:12–14, this warning counsel is again the kind of speech characteristic of a congregation’s loving fathers — that is, its pastor-elders (verse 12) — and is deserving of the church’s esteem (verse 13). Such warning keeps company with encouraging, helping, and patience (verse 14).
Making Fathering Christian
In Paul’s one-verse vision of parenting, he finishes with one final phrase that is no throwaway. In our efforts at fatherly training and counsel, we dare not ignore it. In fact, this last note is the most important one of all. All our years of training, and all our hard and precious words of counsel, will be for naught in view of eternity without the finishing touch: “of the Lord.”
“Christian parenting aims, in everything, to teach our children Christ.”
Christian parenting aims far higher than competent, seemingly healthy adults. Christian parenting aims, in everything, to teach our children Christ. We want them to “learn Christ.” Which fits with the way Paul warns the church in Ephesians 4:20–21: “That is not the way you learned Christ! — assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus.”
In Christ, we want all our parenting covered by the banner of teaching them Christ. As Charles Hodge comments on Ephesians 6:4, “This whole process of education is to be religious, and not only religious but Christian” (Ephesians, 204). Our parental training is training in Christ. And our parental counsel, however encouraging or corrective, is counsel in Christ. In him, and through him, and for him is all Christian parenting.
As we nourish our children in the training and counsel of our Lord, we make knowing and enjoying him the final focus of our efforts. As we do, we get to be instruments in his hands, and mouthpieces of his words, in his cause for the deep and eternally enduring joy of our children.
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How Human Is the Mind of Christ?
Christ is the heart of Christianity. It is hardly surprising, then, that from the beginning of church history his own person has been the target of foes from without and heretics from within. Early on, some attacked the doctrine of his eternal deity, others the belief that he had a real physical body, and yet others that he had a real human mind.
This last attack is particularly fascinating because it was driven by a bishop, Apollinarius (310–390), who had previously distinguished himself as a defender of the deity of Christ. Most likely, he hesitated to acknowledge Jesus’s full humanity because he feared compromising the Lord’s deity. He took John 1:14, “The Word became flesh,” to mean only that the eternal Word took a human body: he did not take a rational human soul. The incarnation thus involved a union between the Son of God and only part of human nature. Jesus did not have a human mind.
Apollinarius’s doctrine eventually was condemned as heresy, but only after a keen debate. A key figure in this debate was Gregory, bishop of Nazianzen (in what is modern-day Turkey). Gregory (329–390) famously summed up his argument in the statement, “The unassumed is the unhealed” (Letter to Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius). His logic was simple: a rational soul is as essential to human nature as a human body; if Christ didn’t take such a soul, he didn’t take the whole of human nature; and if he didn’t take it, he didn’t redeem it. Without a human mind, Jesus would have saved only a part of man, and not the most important part.
Side by side with Gregory in this debate stood his friend, Gregory of Nyssa (about 335–395), who also bequeathed to us a memorable image. Starting from the premise that it was not the body only, but the whole man that was lost, he proclaimed that the Good Shepherd, who came to seek and to save the lost, “carries home on his shoulders the whole sheep, not its skin only” (Against Eunomius, 2.13). Thus did the Good Shepherd make the man of God complete, redeemed in both body and soul.
Tempted Yet Triumphant
We shouldn’t overlook how tempting it is for those who are sensitive about the deity of Christ to follow the path taken by Apollinarius and to shrink from giving the humanity of our Lord its due place. Indeed, we already see the temptation confronted in the epistle to the Hebrews, where some in the early church found it hard to believe that the Son of God could sympathize with us in our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15). This is likely why the writer has to stress that Christ was “made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17).
“Jesus endured temptation to a degree that we shall never know because, unlike us, he never gave in.”
Before we go any further, however, we have to remind ourselves there is one exception to this: Christ was without sin. This fact is all the more remarkable when we recall that he not only shared our nature: he also shared our temptations (Hebrews 4:15). Indeed, he endured temptation to a degree that we shall never know because, unlike us, he never gave in. Though the devil pursued him relentlessly — through family, friend, and foe — Jesus would not yield, even when faced with the cursed death of the cross.
These temptations were real and protracted, sometimes cunning, sometimes violent, but from them all Christ emerges with his integrity inviolate. But the very fact that he was tempted is fatal to the idea that he had no human mind. A mere body cannot be tempted. The divine Logos cannot be tempted. Omniscience cannot be tempted. We are tempted by what we know, by what we shrink from, by what we fear, and by what we love. So it was with Jesus, as we see from his experience in Gethsemane. He knew something (but not all) of what the cup involved, he shrank from it, and he wished, as man, there could be some other way. But in the end, he prayed, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). This was not mere submission. It was the keynote of his life.
Real Human Mind
When we turn to Jesus in the Gospel accounts, we are immediately aware that here is someone who not only lived in a human body but one who also had a real human mind. This is made plain at the beginning, when Luke tells us that Jesus grew not only in physical stature but in wisdom (Luke 2:52). God doesn’t grow in wisdom. He is eternally all-knowing, but the child Jesus was not.
His physical development was accompanied by a normal human intellectual development. His mother would have taught him what every human mother teaches her child, but she would have shared with him, too, what she had been told by the angel who had been sent to announce his birth. He learned from the Scriptures, which he clearly read for himself and which he cherished as a font of wisdom all his life. He learned by attending the synagogue, and by questioning the rabbis at the temple (Luke 2:46). He learned from his father, Joseph, to whom he was apprenticed. And he learned by observing the world around him and the ways of his own people.
Yet this human mind, acute and probing as it was, was also aware that it didn’t know everything, and couldn’t answer every question that might be put to him. The prime example of this is his confession of ignorance about the time of his own second coming (Mark 13:32). He was never ignorant of anything he ought to have known, or of anything his people needed to know. From that point of view, the Father had delivered to the Son everything that would be helpful to the “babes” (Matthew 11:25 KJV). But on such a detail as the date of the end, all that Jesus could say was that the Father had set it by his own authority (Acts 1:7).
The fact that Jesus had a real human mind and confessed himself ignorant on certain matters doesn’t mean, however, that his knowledge was never more than ordinary. He clearly had supernatural knowledge, as appears, for example, in his conversation with the woman of Samaria. He has never seen or heard of her before, yet he knows all that she ever did (John 4:29). Yet supernatural knowledge is not omniscience. It was a normal adjunct of the prophetic office, as we can see clearly in the ministries of men like Elijah and Elisha.
Deep Affections
If we see in Jesus a man possessed of a real human mind, we also see in him a deeply affectionate human being. Above all, of course, this affection is directed toward his heavenly Father, whom he now loves according to his two natures, human and divine. But alongside this affection, the Gospels highlight Jesus’s love for his fellow humans.
Perhaps the most fascinating instance of this is Jesus’s love for the rich young man who approached him to ask what he had to do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17–23). The man went away sad, we are told, because he was unwilling to part with his possessions. We have no reason to believe that he ever chose eternal life, but we have very good reason to believe that Jesus loved him (Mark 10:21). Jesus was drawn to him, it seems, as one human to another.
It is clear, too, that Jesus loved company, and in this respect he was a marked contrast to his cousin, John the Baptist. John was a solitary who preferred life in the desert to life in the city and was happy to live on his diet of locusts and wild honey. Jesus never found fault with John’s lifestyle, nor did John with his, but they were men of different temperaments (Matthew 11:18–19). Jesus readily accepted invitations to enjoy the hospitality of others, even when they came from tax collectors and sinners.
But he also had his own circle of intimate friends. Its nucleus was the original band of twelve disciples, whom he called apostles “so that they might be with him” (Mark 3:14), but within this band there was another even more intimate circle consisting of Peter, James, and John; and even within the inner three there seems to have been one who was special: John, “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved” (John 20:2). This also bears the mark of humanity. Some were close to him, others were even closer, and one was closest of all. But they were all his friends (John 15:14). He loved them as the Father loved him (John 15:9), and his love for them was to be the paradigm for the way they were to love one another (John 13:14, 34).
There was another group, too, to which Jesus was especially close: the Bethany household of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Jesus, we are told explicitly, loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus; and in the sisters’ message to Jesus informing him of Lazarus’s illness, they refer to their brother as “he whom you love” (John 11:3).
There was clearly a close bond here: a bond that embraced the sisters as well as their brother, and a love so deep that when Jesus saw Mary stricken with grief, he was profoundly moved in his spirit, and wept (John 11:33–35), even though he knew that Lazarus’s illness would ultimately lead not to his death, but to the glory of God. The sight of human heartbreak convulsed his soul.
Human Emotions
Then we see, too, that Jesus experienced ordinary human emotions.
He was moved to anger, for example, by the hardness of the human heart, by the hypocrisy of the religious, and by the desecration of his Father’s house. More typically, however, the emotion we see in Jesus is compassion. He feels pity for the crowds, living aimlessly like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:36), and it is pity that moves him to raise the widow’s son (Luke 7:13) and to heal the leper who approaches him imploring, “If you will, you can make me clean” (Mark 1:40).
In fact, as B.B. Warfield points out in his splendid essay “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” compassion is the emotion most frequently attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, and it was no shallow feeling. The Greek verb used to express the Lord’s pity (splanchnizomai) is closely related to the word for the inward parts (“bowels,” in the older English versions) and underlines the fact that Jesus’s compassion was visceral. He was deeply upset, stirred to his depths, by the misery he saw around him, whether in the state of society in general or in the plight of individuals, and his distress was frequently accompanied by clear physical symptoms such as, for example, his weeping at Lazarus’s tomb and his tears over the doomed city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). Jesus felt, and felt deeply.
Nor is compassion something that Jesus, now that he has risen, has left behind as not fit to be taken back to heaven. After all, compassion is an emotion clearly ascribed to God himself (Psalm 103:13). Indeed, it is a key attribute in the name revealed to Moses when he hid in the cleft of the rock and the glory of God passed him by (Exodus 34:6). Pity is a part of the glory, and it is perfectly consistent, then, with the exaltation of Christ that he still sympathizes with his people in their weakness (Hebrews 4:15). He knows how they feel, he feels with them, and he feels for them, because he has stood where they stand.
Yet the fact that he can follow our experiences doesn’t mean that we can always follow his, because he has plumbed emotional depths that none of his brothers or sisters has ever known. The supreme example of this is Gethsemane. The cross had long occupied Jesus’s mind, but in Gethsemane, “Today is the day,” and the full horror of the cup he has to drink is well-nigh overwhelming. He cannot hide his anguish. “My soul,” he declares (speaking of his human soul), “is very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34); and he prays, not once but thrice. He wanted the cup removed. Could there not, he asked, be some other way?
These, as John Calvin put it, are the feelings of a condemned and ruined man (Institutes, 2.16.11), and when what he dreaded in Gethsemane became a reality on Calvary, they found expression in the dreadful cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). What did they mean? That is between himself and the Father. Only they know what our salvation cost them each. But let’s never forget that while we have all, at one time or another, cried from the depths (Psalm 130:1), we have never cried from such depths as these: the depths of the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13).
Does the Whole Sheep Matter?
Back, then, to the two Gregorys. Why was it important that the shepherd should carry the whole sheep — or, more prosaically, that the Redeemer of the human race should take to himself the whole of human nature, and not just a human body?
“The sins of the human soul need to be atoned for as well as the sins of the body.”
First, because the sins of the human soul need to be atoned for as well as the sins of the body. This becomes clear the moment we look at such a passage as Galatians 5:19–21, where Paul lists the sins of the “flesh.” It is doubtful that any of these is exclusively a sin of the body, but some — such as enmity, jealousy, envy, and fits of anger — are clearly sins of the mind; and the bearer of the sins of the world had to bear these sins of the mind as surely as he bore the sins of the body.
Second, the human mind had to consent to the sacrifice offered on Calvary. It was not merely a physical act, but a voluntary act; otherwise it would have had no moral value. The power of the cross lies not in the degree or quantity of the pain it involved, but in the fact that Christ offered himself in love. In the very act of delivering himself up, Christ loved the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind. Like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, the cross was an act of worship (Genesis 22:5).
Third, the soul, no less than the body, had to bear the cost of redemption. This is the great truth highlighted by the Puritan theologians: “The suffering of his soul was the soul of sufferings” (Christ’s Famous Titles, 124). And just how real these soul-sufferings were, we have already seen. The cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” came from the depths of Immanuel’s soul.
Fourth, the soul, no less than the body, needs a full salvation. It needs renewal and cleansing as well as forgiveness. But just as the resurrection of the body presupposes our union with Christ, so does the transformation of the soul. We are sanctified in him, our souls united to his soul, and drawing on one and the same Spirit.
Full Propitiation
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the two Gregorys provide a complete understanding of the atonement. There was a tendency among the great Greek theologians to see the union of the two natures in the person of Christ as itself the defining atoning act.
But the incarnation, magnificent as it was, was not an end in itself, as the writer to the Hebrews makes clear when he tells us that Christ took flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). Or, as he puts it a moment later, the reason that Christ became like his brothers and sisters in every respect was that he might make propitiation for his people’s sins. The propitiatory act was not his incarnation, but his death. He is a propitiation by his blood (Romans 3:35).
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Press Afresh into Jesus: Four Truths About Genuine Faith
Just a small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world . . .
I suspect most of us have heard the 1981 song, by the band Journey, called “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It came into a second life around 2007, and for the last fifteen years it has reached a level of popularity it didn’t first have.
The song has a memorable tune, which makes the main line, “Don’t stop believin’” (which doesn’t come till the last minute), seem so powerful. Yet if you analyze the words — as a pastor who likes classic rock might be prone to do — you find out how disappointing and thin the lyrics are. For one, “Don’t stop believing” in what? What’s the object of belief?
The story behind the song is that one band member “went to the band with the iconic line ‘Don’t stop believin’; hold on to that feeling’ with the vague idea that Steve Perry [the voice] would want to sing it. Perry loved it,” reports one site, “and the band went on to improvise and jam until they had dialed in a workable version of the song.”
A sidenote about the line “Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit”: If you look at a map, you can see that “South Detroit” is what the Canadians call Ontario. Perry thought “South Detroit” sounded good, and he didn’t realize until years later that it didn’t exist.
Four Truths about True Faith
I mention “Don’t Stop Believin’” because that would be a fair summary of the exhortation sections of Hebrews — except that Hebrews makes the object of faith very clear. We’ve talked about how Hebrews alternates between exposition and exhortation. A summary of the expositions, we’ve said, would be “Jesus is better.” A summary of the exhortations, cast negatively, might be “Don’t stop believing in Jesus.” Or to put it positively (as in 3:1 and 12:1–3): “Look to Jesus; fix your attention on him; hold fast to him.”
“You aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, but you have today. Turn to Jesus today.”
Hebrews likes to quote from the end of Psalm 95. First, he immediately applies it to his Christian audience (3:12–19), admonishing them to this effect: “Today if you still hear God’s voice, don’t harden your hearts, but renew your faith in Jesus.” Some are drifting and in spiritual danger. You aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, but you have today. Turn to Jesus today. And as a church, be God’s means of grace in the lives of each other.
But Hebrews sees more in Psalm 95 than just the immediate exhortation. This morning we’ll see that Psalm 95 opens up a whole panorama of God’s heart and plan for his people, giving new reasons from across the Old Testament as to why it is so critical that God’s people today press afresh into Jesus.
The focus in Hebrews 4:1–11 is faith: what it is and is not, what it does, and what its object is. So we’ll look at this passage through the lens of four truths about genuine faith.
1. Faith welcomes the goodness of God, through his word.
Faith is the instrument of receiving God’s promises and benefits and entering his rest. Look at verses 2–3:
Good news came to us [Christians] just as to them [the wilderness generation that came out of Egypt], but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said,
“As I swore in my wrath,‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
We saw in 3:19 last week that “they were unable to enter because of unbelief.” That is, they did not welcome God’s promise.
Hebrews 4:2 says that “good news came to us just as to them,” which does not mean that the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ, came to them a millennium and a half before Jesus came. It means that good news came to them in the form of God’s promise to rescue them from Egypt and to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, and they believed (Exodus 3:17; 4:31). And God brought them out of Egypt.
But when they came to the edge of the promised land, and ten spies came back with fear about the strength of the inhabitants of the land, God’s people, by and large, did not believe his promise.
Hebrews sees a parallel with us: God’s people once heard his promise (or good news), believed, and were brought out of Egypt, but later they lost faith and did not enter into his rest. So we too have heard good news — the good news about God’s divine Son coming to live among us, die for us, and rise in triumph, sitting down in the seat of honor at God’s right hand. We have heard good news and believed, but we too have not yet entered into God’s promised rest. And if we lose faith, we will not, just like them.
Which raises two questions about the nature of saving faith. First, how does faith receive God’s goodness, his good promises, his good news? Does faith receive his goodness with disgust — as in, “I think that’s true, but I don’t like it”? Of course not. Or, more telling, does faith receive his goodness with apathy? With indifference? No.
Rather, true faith, saving faith, welcomes God’s goodness as communicated in the good news. Faith receives with joy the promises of God for our good. Faith is not mere intellectual assent. It is not emotionally neutral. Faith is a function of the whole soul, including the heart.
A second question then about the nature of saving faith is the particular emphasis of this passage. What does Hebrews 4 emphasize about saving faith? Answer: genuine faith perseveres. Which leads to our second truth about genuine faith.
2. The world and the devil oppose and threaten our faith.
First, look at verse 1:
Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.
The most common command in all the Bible might be “do not fear.” So we might think that fear, all fear, is bad. But Hebrews 4:1 says, “Let us fear,” which literally means, “May we be made to fear.” There is an important place for fear in the Christian life: the fear of facing omnipotence in our sin, without the covering of Christ through faith. We indeed should have a holy fear of God and of what it would be like if we were to give ourselves over to unbelief.
“Once saved, always saved” is easily distorted. Genuine faith does indeed persevere, and we come to know our faith to be genuine as it perseveres. Faith that fades and dies shows itself to have been false faith, and those who once seemed to have faith, but in the end no longer believe, will not enter God’s rest. Genuine faith perseveres.
“Faith that fades and dies shows itself to have been false faith.”
Which means that “losing faith” is a real threat. But it’s not a threat that happens all at once. Typically, it comes at the end of a process, often a long one. And the reason I say that “the world and the devil oppose and threaten our faith” is because of Jesus’s parable of the sower in Luke 8, where he warns of Satan, times of trial, and the cares of this life.
We’ve talked before about the general background noise in Hebrews, pushing the church to return to Judaism and just abandon the Jesus piece, which was producing trials. And chapter 4 adds an important detail about how the listeners came into this dangerous position: they had become spiritually sluggish. Their hearts had cooled and begun to harden. Their faith in Jesus was fading, not just from trials, but from the cares and riches and pleasures of life.
And when your heart is hardening and your faith is dull, threats multiply. Hebrews 13 shows us his concern for them: for failures of love, whether for the brothers, strangers, or others in need; for sexual immorality and adultery; for love for money; for their forgetting once-beloved leaders and entertaining strange and diverse teachings, different from what they had known and once firmly believed; for their beginning to see the here and now as the lasting city. The main threat in Hebrews 13 is not Jewishness but worldliness.
What makes the background noise and other temptations of Hebrew 13 live threats is waning faith, an increasingly casual attitude about Jesus, and a lack of striving to persevere. The main problem for Hebrews’s audience is not persecution from the outside but their own sin and unbelief within. Same for us today. Persecution, whether physical or just verbal, is not the greatest threat. Unbelief is the great threat. Do not fear those who only can kill the body, but let us fear lest any of us should have our hearts hardened and our faith fail.
So, how is your faith in Jesus? Is it strong, steady, thriving? Stronger today than, say, three years ago? Or is your faith embattled? Is it thin and weak? Are you just surviving and spiritually sluggish? You are not promised tomorrow, but you have today. And as verse 1 says, “The promise of entering his rest still stands.” But how is that? How does Hebrews say that the promise of rest, offered a thousand years before Jesus in Psalm 95, still stands? That leads to number 3.
3. Genuine faith strives to persevere.
First let’s look at verse 11, then we’ll come back to verses 4–8. Verse 11 says,
Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.
“That rest” that Hebrews focuses on in this chapter is, in some sense, already present for those with genuine faith, but the main referent here is future and “not yet.” Initial faith coordinates with leaving Egypt, and the rest, with entering the promised land. So then, for Christians today, the rest is “the world to come,” which we’ve already seen in Hebrews 2:5, and “the promised eternal inheritance” (9:15), and the heavenly country (11:16), and “the city that is to come” (13:14; 11:10), and the “kingdom that cannot be shaken” (12:28).
And Hebrews says, “Let us . . . strive to enter” this coming rest. “Strive” — that is, “work hard,” make every effort, apply yourself diligently. George Guthrie comments, “It speaks of focused attention toward the accomplishment of a given task” (NIV Application Commentary: Hebrews, 155). Saving faith perseveres.
But how? Very practically, if I want to keep on believing, how do I strive? How do I make every effort to persevere? Hebrews may be as clear as any single book in the Bible about three particular means of God’s ongoing grace in the Christian life for our faith surviving and thriving: God’s word, prayer, and fellowship. In other words: hearing God’s voice in his word, having his ear in prayer, and belonging to his body in the fellowship of the local church — three glorious channels of his ongoing grace around which to build habits for our striving to enter God’s rest.
But what’s in 4:1–11, leading to verses 12–16, is the particular, central place of God’s word. Look at verse 2. The phrase “the message they heard” in the ESV is literally “the word of hearing” or “the heard word.” Faith comes by hearing (Romans 10:17).
So one very practical reality for cultivating habits for striving to feed faith and enter God’s rest is, Are you hearing God’s word? Reading his word, studying his word, meditating on his word, conversing with others about his word, hearing it read and preached and discussed? Are your ears hearing, and eyes reading, enough of God’s word to feed the flame of faith in your heart?
Big Story of God’s Rest
Now, what about verses 4–8? The author makes a stunning move at the end of verse 3. After saying, “We who have believed enter that rest,” he quotes the end of Psalm 95 again: “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’” And then, almost as if out of left field, he adds this phrase: “although his works were finished from the foundation of the world.” And on a first reading, or twentieth perhaps, we say, “What?” Where did that come from?
Immediately following, Hebrews goes on to say “for” or “because,” which is like saying, “Let me explain.” Look at verses 4–5:
For he [God] has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” And again in this passage [that’s Psalm 95] he said, “They shall not enter my rest.”
Now, when Hebrews says God has spoken of the seventh day somewhere, he’s not saying he doesn’t remember where. He’s communicating, in an endearing way, that he and his readers know full well where God rests. We already saw Hebrews do this in 2:6, when he introduced Psalm 8. He said, “It has been testified somewhere” — not because he didn’t know where but because he knew his audience knew. There’s some holy confidence here in how strong the argument is. These are not stretches. These are well-traveled texts of Scripture.
Famously, Genesis 2:2 tells us God “rested on the seventh day from all his work.” But how does Hebrews get there? Answer: the last two words in Psalm 95, “my rest.” Which is a pretty ominous way to end a psalm: “They shall not enter my rest.” And Hebrews asks, Wait a minute, did you say God has a rest? God says, “My rest.” Where does God have a rest? Of course. So a pillar goes in place: God’s rest, day seven, at the creation of the world.
And then there’s a second pillar. This whole time, we’ve been talking about the wilderness generation that came out of Egypt with faith, and then they disobeyed on the brink of the promised land and wandered in the wilderness for forty years until that whole unbelieving generation died out. Then, after the death of Moses, Joshua led the next generation into the promised rest. That’s pillar two. These are chronological.
But then what Hebrews sees, because he’s reading his Bible very carefully, is a third pillar. Psalm 95 is the third pillar in the story, with its mention of God’s rest. And what tips him off is the word today. Four centuries after Joshua, David says in Psalm 95, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” Look at verse 7:
Again [God] appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted [Psalm 95], “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on.
Note the time words. These are very important in Hebrews: verse 7 with “so long afterward” and verse 8 with “another day later on.” So, pillar one: God rested on the seventh day from his works. He entered into his rest. Pillar two: after the unbelieving generation died, the next generation, under Joshua, entered into the promised land. However, that’s not the end. Pillar three: Psalm 95, which is “later on” and “so long afterward,” still offers entrance into God’s rest during the time of David. And so we ask, What is that rest?
Reading Big and Small
But first, let’s just pause for a minute and consider how Hebrews reads his Bible. Learn from this. Imitate this. We might call it “reading big and small.”
Reading small: The words my rest at the end of Psalm 95 open up this whole panorama, across time, of God’s rest from creation to Joshua to David in Psalm 95, to bring his people with him into his rest. Brothers and sisters, learn to read small like this. Slow down. Linger over particular words and phrases. Read without hurry, even leisurely. Read at a pace that is conducive to understanding and meditating and enjoying — not at the pace you’ve learned to read a screen. Read slow enough to ask questions like, Where does God have a rest?
And in doing so, you’ll give your brain the precious milliseconds it takes to make connections across the sweep of Scripture. That’s reading big. Consider how concepts, captured in particular words and phrases in one place, as well as sequences and structures of thought, connect and relate to other times and places in God’s word. Reading big is seen in Hebrews’s use of chronological terms like so long afterward and another day later on.
Let’s learn to read Scripture like Hebrews does: big and small — slowly, unhurriedly, meditatively, and all the while, over time, putting together the pieces, in order, in God’s big story from beginning to end.
Now, back to the question, What is that rest for us? God’s seventh day rest, then rest in the promised land, then “the promise of entering his rest still stands” four centuries later in Psalm 95. Now what? What’s the fourth pillar for us?
A thousand years after David, one of his own descendants, and the forgotten heir to his throne, would say in the backwater streets of Galilee,
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11:28–29)
4. Saving faith rests in the person and work of Jesus.
This gives us a peek of what’s coming in Hebrews: Jesus, who is our great high priest (as we’ll see in chapters 5–7), who offers himself as the better sacrifice (chapters 9–10), is the one who gives us entrance, by faith, into God’s final rest. So, after verses 3–8 piece together the sequence from God’s rest at creation, to Moses and Joshua, to the invitation still remaining under David, he concludes in verses 9–10:
So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
Why does he call it a “Sabbath rest”?
This is not a reference to Jews or Christians observing a weekly Sabbath. This is upstream from that. The Jewish Sabbath was grounded in God’s creation rest and, from the beginning, anticipated the ultimate and final rest to come in Christ.
In fact, Jesus himself, seated on heaven’s throne, has finished his work and entered into God’s rest. Verse 10 might be specifically about Jesus, or perhaps carefully worded to be true of both him and us. The ESV says, “Whoever has entered God’s rest,” but a literal translation would be, “The one who has entered into his rest — even he himself rested from his works.” I can’t help but wonder.
But either way, verse 10 surely is true, at present, of Jesus and will be true, in the future, of us who persevere in faith to the end. “Sabbath rest” is Hebrews’s way of saying the true Rest, or the final Rest, or the better Rest.
“The object of our faith is not our faith. The object of our faith is Jesus.”
Finally, what does this mean for assurance? If genuine faith perseveres, and we come to know our faith to be genuine as it perseveres, and we have not yet finished our course and “rested from our works” in this life, can we have real assurance? Can we enjoy some solid measure of confidence that our faith is real, and that Jesus will hold us fast and be at work in us to endure and keep us? The answer is yes. And it relates very much to this Table, which is, among other things, a weekly corporate means of grace and assurance.
He Will Hold You Fast
How would Hebrews give us assurance? He would say, “Look to Jesus. Consider Jesus. Have faith in Jesus. Hold fast to Jesus.” In other words, what do you do with Jesus? Do you believe in him, trust him, treasure him, cling to him? Do you have faith in Jesus?
To the degree your soul leans on him, rests in him — and that your life confirms it, rather than calls it into question — you can have real, meaningful, substantial assurance. He’s working in and through you, and you can believe, “He will hold me fast, as I strive, enabled by his grace, to persevere in faith.”
The object of our faith is not our faith. The object of our faith is Jesus. And this meal keeps feeding faith, which is why we share it each Sunday. We want to persevere, and this Table gives us, again and again, the one to believe in: his body and blood given for us.