Audio Transcript

Are motorcycles for fools? That’s today’s question. And we’re speaking of recreational motorcycles here, of course — their primary function in the States. And it’s really a question about providence more than anything else. Here’s the email: “Hello, Pastor John. My name is Ian, and I live in the beautiful city of San Diego. My girlfriend and I got into a discussion recently about riding motorcycles for fun. I stated that if we got married, I wouldn’t ride motorcycles because to me it feels unwise to put myself in a greater risk of dying and thus leaving her alone, or if we had kids, leaving them without their father and leaving their mother to support all of them, because riding for us is just recreational. She believes that if I died riding, it was God’s will for me to die anyways, and taking precautions, like not riding, is to live in fear, while for me it feels like a wise decision to not take that unnecessary risk when others’ livelihoods are at stake.

“I’m having trouble reconciling the sovereignty of God in our lives, but also making wise decisions. It’s true that God oversees every event that happens in our lives, regardless of our precautions, but in my mind I feel like decisions that we make will also impact our future. But aren’t crashes and misfortune in the hand of God, too, making precautions like these worthless? Am I living in fear? Or am I being prudent and wise in not wanting to ride motorcycles? Thank you, Pastor John!”

There are two sentences in Ian’s question that I think need some correction. And in the process, perhaps I can clarify a way of thinking about God’s sovereignty and our risks and our fear that will shape the way he and his girlfriend and all of us make our decisions. One of those sentences expresses Ian’s opinion, and the other one expresses his girlfriend’s opinion (at least the way he articulates it).

All-Governing Sovereignty

Let’s take Ian’s sentence first. He says, “But aren’t motorcycle crashes and misfortune in the hand of God, making precautions like these worthless?” Now, I’m not sure Ian really believes that — that God’s sovereignty over motorcycle crashes makes precautions like not riding a motorcycle worthless — because he had just said in the previous sentence, “It’s true that God oversees every event that happens in our lives regardless of our precautions. But in my mind, I feel like decisions that we make also impact our future.” So, it sounds to me like, Ian, you’re waffling. Precautions make a difference in our future, and precautions seem worthless in making a difference in view of the sovereignty of God.

So, we need to think for a minute. We need to ponder what’s going on here in that ambiguity and what is the truth here. And I think we can settle quickly that, according to the Bible, God governs the smallest details of nature and human activity — including motorcycle riding, including all accidents and non-accidents — as well as the greatest events in government and history and the universe, the solar system, the galaxies.

Jesus said, “Not one bird will fall from the sky apart from your Father’s will” (see Matthew 10:29). That’s tiny, micro providence. Proverbs 16:33: “The lot [dice] is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” Isaiah 40:26 says not one of the stars is out of place because of God’s power. Ephesians 1:11: “[God] works all things according to the counsel of his will.” James 4:15: “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” So, the sovereignty of God over all things is not at issue.

“The sovereignty of God over human events does not make human choices about those events worthless.”

I think Ian agrees with that given what he says. But he does not seem to be as sure that taking precautions makes any difference in the outcome of our lives if God is sovereign over everything. That’s where he seems to be waffling. He says, “But aren’t motorcycle crashes in the hand of God, making precautions worthless?” Now, the answer to that question is a clear and emphatic no; they’re not worthless. They are not. The sovereignty of God over human events does not make human choices about those events worthless.

Over Ends and Means

The reason is very simple. God not only predestined the events that he wills to come to pass, but he also predestines the means by which those events come to pass.

If God predestines that there be a building, he also predestines that there be builders who build it. If God predestines that a person not starve to death, then he also predestines that they have food and that they eat it. If God predestines that you do not fly off a mountain cliff on your motorcycle, he also predestines that you not enter the curve doing 80 miles an hour. If God predestines that a nail be driven through a two-by-four, he also predestines that someone hit it with a hammer. If God predestines that someone be saved, he also predestines that someone bring that person the gospel.

It doesn’t make any sense to speak of God’s all-governing sovereignty as if it only designed the ends and not the means to those ends. It wouldn’t be all-governing if that were the case. Why would we think that? If he governs all things, he governs all secondary causes, all means to ends.

For the loss of a nail, the shoe was lost. For the loss of the shoe, the horse was lost. For the loss of a horse, the battle was lost. For the loss of the battle, the war was lost. For the loss of the war, the nation and the kingdom was lost. Every one of those causes, secondary causes — going all the way back to the nail that fell out of the horseshoe — is in the hand of the Lord just as much as the final outcome of a nation that falls. He sets up nations, he takes down nations, and he governs the billions of causes that develop over decades to bring a nation up or take a nation down. Any one of those causes may alter the outcome of our lives, depending on whether God wills it to be so.

So, it’s just wrong to say that because God governs final outcomes, our efforts to promote or hinder those outcomes are worthless. That’s just wrong. That would be a great, unbiblical mistake. God ordains means as well as ends, and our action is part of those means. So, not riding a motorcycle is a very good way not to be killed on a motorcycle. There is a real, causal connection between not riding motorcycles and not being killed on motorcycles.

Fearless Precautions

Now, the other sentence in that question is not Ian’s statement, but the one he says his girlfriend spoke. He says, “She believes that if I died riding a motorcycle, it was God’s will for me to die anyway and taking precautions like not riding is to live in fear.” Now, there’s more than one problem with that sentence, but we’re just going to take one — namely, the one about fear. She says, “To take precautions is to live in fear.” I doubt she really said that. I think he’s reporting it not quite exactly right.

I don’t think she really believes that, because that is certainly not necessarily true. And if she’s thought about it for five seconds, she’d know it’s not necessarily true that to take precautions is to live in fear. I take precautions by locking my doors every night. I take precautions by putting the car in the garage. I take precautions by backing up my hard drive on my computer. I take precautions by wearing a seatbelt. I take precautions by praying for protection before I go to bed at night. I take precautions by having health insurance. And on and on and on.

“God ordains means as well as ends, and our action is part of those means.”

The actual experience of fear in my life is almost totally absent. I don’t even think about it. It does not dominate my life. I hardly even give a thought to those things. Fear is rarely a conscious experience in my life. So, taking precautions doesn’t have to mean that you are living under the domination of fear. I have no intention of owning a motorcycle or going skydiving, for example. I don’t give them a thought. They don’t affect my fear level at all one way or the other.

What Risks Are Right?

So, the question that Ian and his girlfriend face regarding the motorcycle is this: What risks in life are wise and loving? So, instead of answering that question, which I don’t have time to do now, I’m going to send you to APJ 1446, where I do answer that question. I spent a whole session on it. The title of that episode is “How Do I Take Risks Without Being Unwise?” And I give six criteria there for answering that question — how to be wise, how to be loving and yet take appropriate risk. Because we all do every day. Life is a risk, right? You cannot not risk.

But the two main points here are (1) the sovereignty of God does not make precautions worthless, and (2) taking precautions need not imply that we are living in the grip of fear.

I looked in the rearview mirror at my kids, their cheeks wet and blotchy, their expressions contorted by grief. But I didn’t need to look to know how they were feeling; I could hear how they were feeling, as loud sobs echoed through the minivan. Two and a half years is a long time for anyone, but when you’re six or seven, it’s most of what you remember of your short life. We were driving their (foster) sister home, for the final time, to be reunified with her (biological) mother. They were saying goodbye to their sister forever, and they were feeling their loss deeply.

They weren’t the only ones. My husband cried — wept — in a way I hadn’t seen in our nearly twenty years together. And me? I wasn’t just sad. I was “done.” That’s it. We are done with foster care. I will not do this to myself or to them again. The heartbreak is too much to bear. The uncertainty is too much to carry. The brokenness is too much to wade through. This is not worth it.

“Worth it.” With those two words, I had backed myself into a corner where my emotions and beliefs would be forced to battle it out. Is foster care worth it? I was overwhelmed by what I was feeling: sad, weary, angry, fearful. But what did I believe? What had called me into foster parenting and kept me through the most painful and broken parts before? Simply put, the belief in those simple words — that foster care is worth it.

Children Are Worth It

I love the places in Scripture where we get to see the heart of God walking around with skin on in Jesus Christ. We all know the story. Jesus was with the people, teaching and healing, when they began “bringing children to him that he might touch them” (Mark 10:13), “even infants” as Luke recounts (Luke 18:15). Children? With their lack of status and rights, their snotty noses and silly questions? They don’t deserve to be in the presence of the Rabbi. “The disciples saw it [and] they rebuked them” (Luke 18:15).

But Jesus was “indignant” and turned upside down the view of the children that the disciples — and the society surrounding them — held. “Let the children come to me,” he said (Mark 10:14). “And he took them in his arms and blessed them” (Mark 10:16).

The foundation of foster care begins with this Christlike belief: children are created by God, deeply loved by him, and inherently precious. “God created [children] in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). They are a blessing, heritage, and reward (Psalm 127:3–5). They are the ones of whom Jesus said, “To such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14). Every child on this earth — every child in foster care — was “made in the likeness of God” (James 3:9), pointing to his beauty and worth.

It’s not just that my kids are precious; it’s that all kids — even “those” kids — are precious. The infant screaming and quaking from withdrawal is precious. The toddler finger-painting with poop is precious. The little girl hiding rotting food under her bed is precious. The little boy flipping his desk after being triggered is precious. The teenager withdrawing in fear from the presence of a man is precious.

The effects of abuse and neglect on children are destructive and pervasive. But there is no past abuse, current struggle, or future prognosis — no medical diagnosis, mental illness, physical handicap, behavioral issue, or learning disability — that can steal the divine image from a child.

“Any day — or life — spent loving and serving precious children is one well spent.”

In fact, Scripture reveals God’s especially tender heart toward the vulnerable (Deuteronomy 10:18), the oppressed (Psalm 9:9), the one “who [has] no one to help” (Psalm 72:12 NIV), the orphan (Hosea 14:3), the fatherless (Psalm 68:5) — the foster kid. Seeing children as God sees them informs the worth it-ness of foster care. Any day — or life — spent loving and serving precious children is one well spent.

Families Are Worth It

I became a foster parent for the wrong reasons. No, not any of the wrong reasons seen in the made-for-TV-movie portrayals of foster parents. But still, the wrong reasons. I became a foster parent to “save” kids from their “bad” parents. I became a foster parent believing reunification to be the unfortunate by-product of the system. I became a foster parent forgetting that, as precious to the heart of God as children may be, families are just as precious.

The family is precious for the same reason children are precious — it was created by God to display his glory. The family is a rich theological image, created to reflect the perfect love of God for his bride (Ephesians 5:25–27; Isaiah 54:5) and the relationship between the Father and the Son (Matthew 12:18; John 3:35). In the story of human history, the family is introduced at the very beginning. After God creates all things, he immediately acknowledges that aloneness is not good. So, he creates woman, forms the very first family, and commands husband and wife to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). This is the first of many commands God gives to parents and family members throughout his word, all of which demonstrate his good design for the family.

In his perfect plan for the perfect world he created, families would live together in love and unity, with parents tenderly caring for their children and children growing up safe and cherished. But just a few chapters into human history, before the first child is born, sin enters the world, and from that day forward, the curse touches every family ever to be formed. Sin has marred God’s good plan for the family.

But the gospel is great news for broken families. Jesus came to forgive the sinner (1 John 1:9), make new what is old (Revelation 21:5), heal the sick (Matthew 9:35), give life to the dead (Isaiah 25:8). He came so lost people — stuck in the bondage of sin, trauma, addiction, mental illness — could come to know him as Savior. He came so families may be healed and brought back together in wholeness.

Through the gospel, God is restoring all things that sin has corrupted. God created the family unit, and it is sacred to him. Playing a part in foster care — in families being healed and reunited — means getting to be on the front lines of God’s work of restoring families.

Living for Jesus Is Worth It

The life of a foster parent is complicated, full of contradictory emotions and experiences — beauty and brokenness, trauma and healing, gratitude and grief. But if I had to boil it all down to a single defining word, the most articulate one I can come up with is this: hard. Foster care is just plain hard.

I felt it that day in the car, driving my (foster) daughter home, as I’ve felt it many times before and since. Foster care is hard. It’s the hard of peeling a child’s arms from your neck as you send him on a visit with a parent he’s afraid of. The hard of watching a mom you’ve supported relapse and return to an abusive relationship. The hard of daily calls from the principal after a triggering incident.

So, what ultimately makes a life marked by the hard of foster care worth it? The question demands an answer of me, an answer that is steady and sturdy enough to sustain me through every trial, transcend every trouble. And my conclusion falls short if it culminates with the people I’m serving. Ultimately, it’s not the kids or the parents, but someone else completely.

In the end, I’m not a foster parent because I know children need homes or because I believe families should be reunited. I’m a foster parent because I love Jesus. I want to live in surrender to him; I want my days to be spent in the worship of him. I was “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that [I] should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Part of being his means joining him in his mission.

As I take up my cross and follow my Jesus (Matthew 16:24), he leads me to the people he came for, the people he loves. And loving them is one of the ways I love him. It is the miracle of doing for the least of these, and actually having done for him (Matthew 25:40).

Sometimes foster care feels like the warm embrace of a child, and sometimes it feels like offering my body as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). It is hard, but it is worth it. The kids are worth it. The families are worth it. But before and beyond the people, the reason foster care is worth it? Because living for Jesus is always, always worth it.

Few things in my fifty years of ministry have been more gratifying than to see the purposeful, all-wise, absolute sovereignty of God, which we call “providence,” move from being a stumbling block to faith to being a faith-sustaining, sanity-preserving rock of refuge for ordinary Christians passing through hellish circumstances.

For example, a quote from one of our missionaries, who at that time was in China:

In December 1987, my father died unexpectedly at age 63. . . . I was plunged into a journey of several months, struggling to understand what had happened. I was at Bethlehem, but new to the teaching, and apparently missing many of the distinctives. . . .

Fast forward to 1992. We had been in China for a year and returned home to have our first child. As you remember, she lived one day and died in our arms. It was then [that the teaching of God’s providence] came home to roost. God had not turned us loose to some natural events, but in his divine mercy had seen fit to give us a child, and through the process of taking her from us, work in us a honing and sanctifying unlike anything we had ever known. . . .

Thanks to the foundation . . . laid in my life through our years at Bethlehem, I was now able to embrace, and understand, such verses as “The Lord [gives], and the Lord [takes] away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

There was another missionary couple who went out from us to the Middle East. Not long after, they traveled to Turkey to have their first child. He too died. They came home, and their first Sunday back was the Sunday that we sang Matt Redman’s song “Blessed Be Your Name” for the first time. I was in the front row, as usual, and they were off to my right, so I could see them.

Blessed be your nameOn the road marked with suffering.Though there’s pain in the offeringBlessed be your name.

You give and take away.You give and take away.My heart will choose to say,Lord, blessed be your name.

Their empty hands were open in front of them. And I thought, “This is worth living for.”

Here’s another letter from a young woman who tells me of her uterine cancer:

I came to Bethlehem ten years ago. I had been a believer for only a few years. Within a few weeks of attending, I begin to hear you’re teaching on God’s sovereignty in salvation, and it was the weirdest thing I had ever heard. It sounded archaic and un-American, and later I realized it truly was archaic and un-American, but genuinely biblical. Eventually, by the awesome weight of Scriptural evidence, I was compelled to adopt the Reformed perspective on God’s sovereignty.

Little did I know that the hunger to understand God’s nature and his ways over the last ten years was graciously given to fortify me for this year’s surprise cancer diagnosis. Of course, the news that I had a life-threatening illness, and the realization that I would not be able to have children, was horribly painful, but the powerful assistance that comes from the truth amazed me. Theology can be so practical. It does wonders for anxiety and self-pity and despair.

I’m so glad God ordained my conversion to Reformed theology prior to ordaining my cancer. I know he is immeasurably strong and thoroughly in charge and one hundred percent on my side, even when he sends painful circumstances. Was it Spurgeon that said, “I will kiss the waves that dash me upon the Rock of Ages”?

The reason for lingering over these several testimonies, brothers, is to communicate a certain tone in which I want you to hear what I say. The reality of God’s all-governing, all-pervasive, purposeful sovereignty (providence) is controversial. From now until the day you see Jesus, there will be people who turn red in the face and speak angry words against you if you give the slightest hint that you believe it was God who took their child or their spouse. From now until the end of history, there will be scholars and pundits who write articles and essays and books describing the God of Jonathan Edwards as a moral monster.

Your job, when those things happen to you in your ministry, is not to return evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but to absorb the slander and the abuse, hand it over to God, and patiently minister to those in need.

I bear witness, brothers, some of those adversaries will do a complete one-eighty and love you someday. Don’t go online with guns blazing. This is not the kind of doctrine that should be handled that way. It is the great design of Providence to be the ballast in your peoples’ boats that keep them from capsizing in the waves of suffering. That’s the spirit in which I want you to hear this message, and that’s the spirit I think you should have when you speak of God’s absolute, purposeful sovereignty — of God’s providence.

So, let’s approach providence this way:

First, let’s say just a few more words about the meaning of “providence.”
Second, since the focus of this conference is on truth, and this is a message on “the triumph of truth through providence,” let’s identify some of the glorious promises of God, whose truth will not triumph without the providence of God.
Third, let’s look at some of the realities that threaten to defeat those promises, and how providence overcomes those threats and guarantees the triumph of those promises.

So: (1) clarify the definition, (2) identify some of God’s promises about our glorious future, and (3) show how providence secures those promises.

1. Providence’s Definition

What is God’s providence? The word providence doesn’t occur in the Bible, so if we are going to use it, we need to forge a definition from realities in the Bible, not from the use of the word itself. The short definition that I use is “God’s purposeful sovereignty.” Sovereignty and providence aren’t identical. “Sovereignty” means that God can do, and does do, whatever he pleases. “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). That’s sovereignty.

But the word sovereignty does not carry in itself any idea of design or purpose, just power and authority. “Providence” implies purposefulness. Buried in the etymology of the word providence is the word provide, which is formed from two Latin words: pro and videre — “to see toward,” or the unusual English idiom “to see to.”

As in: God saw to it that there would be a ram in the thicket to take Isaac’s place. He saw to it that Joseph would be sold into slavery. He saw to it that his Son would be killed. This way of talking implies purposefulness. He doesn’t act only in sovereign power. He acts according to plan, to wisdom — he acts in purposeful sovereignty. That is what I mean by “providence.” God sees to everything purposefully.

One more clarification on the meaning of providence, namely, on its extent. I use the terms all-governing and all-pervasive to describe the extent. We will see this from the Bible as we go forward, but what I mean is that this purposeful sovereignty governs everything in the universe, from the most insignificant bird-fall (Matthew 10:29), to the movement of stars (Isaiah 40:26), to the murder of his Son (Acts 4:27–28). It includes the moral and immoral acts of every soul. Neither Satan at his hellish worst, nor human beings at their redeemed best, ever act in a way contrary to God’s ultimate, all-embracing, all-wise plan — his providence.

2. Providence’s Role in God’s Promises

What are some of the promises of God that capture this ultimate purpose, whose truth would not triumph without the providence of God? I’ll mention three.

The Promise of Gospel Reach

First, the promise that the gospel of Jesus Christ will successfully penetrate all the peoples of the world, gathering into Christ all of God’s ransomed elect: “This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). It is promised. It is going to happen. The gospel will reach all the peoples of the world. World missions cannot be stopped.

And as it reaches all the peoples of the world, the gospel will succeed in gathering all the ransomed into Christ. Revelation 5:9–10: “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.”

The risen, sovereign Christ promises to gather his flock. John 10:16: “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” “I must . . . I will . . . I will.” That’s the promise. It cannot fail.

The Promise of Glorification

A second promise: All of these ransomed elect, the bride of Christ, will be sanctified, glorified, and made perfectly beautiful for the eternal enjoyment of her divine Husband. Romans 8:30: “Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.” The promise of the glorification of God’s predestined, called, justified people is as good as done. They will be glorified, that is, made splendid and beautiful for Christ.

Ephesians 5:25–27: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her . . . so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” Christ did not die to set in motion a failed marriage. She will be blameless and beautiful.

“The promise of the glorification of God’s predestined, called, justified people is as good as done.”

First Thessalonians 5:23–24: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” Or Philippians 1:6: “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” It is promised. It will happen. She will be beautiful, perfectly beautiful, for the mutual enjoyment of bride and Bridegroom.

The Promise of God-Centered Pleasure

Third promise: This beauty of the bride will consist essentially in the sinless echo of Christ’s excellencies, his preciousness, reverberating back to him in the all-satisfying pleasures that his people find in him forever and ever. Isaiah 55:12–13:

You shall go out in joy     and be led forth in peace;the mountains and the hills before you     shall break forth into singing,     and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;     instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;and it shall make a name for the Lord,     an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

What shall make a name for the Lord? What is it in the new creation that will magnify the worth of the Lord forever? All creation, especially the bride, goes out in joy and breaks forth in singing. Isaiah 35:10: “The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

And what is the center and focus and source of that joy? Revelation 21:3–4:

Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

God is their joy. The center, the focus, the source. Psalm 16:11: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” This is the end of the story. This is the ultimate purpose of God’s all-wise providence. “Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isaiah 43:6–7).

And how will the infinite worth and beauty and greatness and preciousness of God’s glory be on display in this new world? It will enter God’s people and awaken in them undreamed-of pleasures, which will echo back to him, and to all the universe, that God is an all-satisfying treasure. It’s a promise. That’s going to happen.

The nations will be reached, the elect will be gathered in, and they will be made beautiful for the enjoyment of Christ, as they echo back his excellencies in the everlasting pleasures that they find in him.

But none of that is going to happen without the omnipotent exercise of the providence of God. Why? Because there are massive threats or obstacles standing in the way of God’s ultimate purpose. We turn to our third main point.

3. Threats to God’s Promises — and How Truth Triumphs

Now we look at some of the realities that threaten to defeat those promises, and how God’s providence overcomes those threats and guarantees the triumph of truth. But let’s say it a little differently: the providence of God doesn’t just overcome the threats and obstacles to the triumph of God’s promises; it actually makes the threats and obstacles serve the triumph of those promises.

I take that to be the meaning of Romans 8:35–37: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered’—” There they are, the obstacles threatening to nullify the promises of God. To which the apostle Paul says, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” I take “more than conquerors” to mean that God doesn’t just prevent the threats from sabotaging his purposes; he does more, and makes them serve his purposes.

So, the banner flying over Joseph’s brothers’ sin of selling him into slavery flies over every sin and threat to God’s purposes. Genesis 50:20: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” Not “used” it for good, but “meant” it — planned it, designed it — for the good of his people. So it is with every obstacle and every threat. So it is with every evil from the fall of Lucifer to the lake of fire.

Now, to name a few.

The Threat of God’s Wrath

The greatest obstacle standing in the way of the final, glorious purpose of a beautiful, happy bride of Christ in the presence of an all-holy God is the wrath of God because of our sin. Nothing compares to the horrible, blazing barrier of God’s wrath between us and our everlasting happiness in him.

“The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). This is why we pour out our lives in the course of world missions. The greatest obstacle to the everlasting happiness of every culture, every people group on the planet, is the wrath of God.

One thing can remove this obstacle: the love of God, propitiating the wrath of God through the death of the Son of God to vindicate the glory of God. Romans 3:25: “God put [Christ] forward as a propitiation by his blood.” But right here, at the most important point in redemptive history, at the most horrible, sinful point in history, the providence of God is in total control, without which there would be no salvation. Acts 4:27–28:

Truly in this city [Jerusalem] there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

Herod, Pilate, mobs, soldiers — you thought you were threatening and destroying the saving purposes of God. No. You were fulfilling them. In God’s providence you were doing whatever God’s hand and God’s plan had predestined to take place. “You meant it for evil. God meant it for good.”

The Threat of Satan and Sin

So now, the ransom for Christ’s bride is paid, the sins are covered, the condemnation is endured and past, the justice is satisfied, the impeding wrath is removed. But for the bride to enjoy all of this purchase, she must hear and believe (Romans 10:14–17). And Satan, in concert with human depravity, will do everything in their power (Satan and sin’s power) to keep that from happening.

Satan and sin conspire to turn kings and governors — the ones who make laws and break laws that hinder the spread of the gospel. “They will lay their hands on you and persecute you . . . and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake” (Luke 21:12). And what does that mean for the spread of the gospel? “The kings of the earth . . . and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed. . . . He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision” (Psalm 2:2–4).

Why? Because “the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will” (Daniel 4:32). “He removes kings and sets up kings” (Daniel 2:21). When they are in place, they act according to his plan: “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1).

Do you think, O king of Assyria, because you destroy my people, that you are not a hatchet in my hand?

Shall the axe boast over him who hews with it,     or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it?As if a rod should wield him who lifts it,     or as if a staff should lift him who is not wood! (Isaiah 10:15)

No. When Satan and sin conspire to raise up kings and governors against the mission of God, they cannot succeed. They simply find themselves to be advancing his ultimate purpose. “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”

The Threat of Disaster

But what about disease, like missionary kids in intensive care? What about freak accidents that take two missionaries from driving over a cliff, or a whole family of five wiped out on their way to the mission field? What about imprisonment and murder?

Disease? We have a sovereign Lord in heaven, to whom all authority is given. He rebuked fevers (Luke 4:39), cleansed lepers with a touch (Luke 5:13), opened the eyes of the blind (Matthew 9:29), made the deaf hear and the mute speak and the lame walk (Mark 7:34–35; Matthew 11:5). He raised the dead (Luke 7:14), and all the powers of hell obeyed him (Mark 1:27). And he “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

To be sure, Satan strikes with sickness (Luke 13:16). But he is on a leash. He cannot act contrary to God’s decisive plan. God can step in at any moment. And what he permits Satan to do, he wills to permit. He plans to permit. He doesn’t permit on the spur of the moment. He plans his permissions, and planned permission is providence. This is why Job 2:7 says, “Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores.”

But Job, three verses later, says, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” To which the inspired author comments, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:10). Indeed, the writer speaks his final word over the whole book in Job 42:11: “[Job’s family] showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.” And Paul called his painful thorn in the flesh “a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited” (2 Corinthians 12:7). How it must gall Satan to be made the means of Christian holiness. “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”

And yes, Satan throws into prison (Revelation 2:10). Satan kills Christians (Revelation 2:10). Satan orchestrates freak accidents (John 8:44; 12:31). But from God’s standpoint, there are no accidents — freak or otherwise.

James 4:15 tells us how to speak of random events: “Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” If the Lord wills, we live. If the Lord wills, we die. We are immortal until our work is done. And while we live, James says, “this or that” will happen to us if God wills. From man’s viewpoint it can feel like “random this, random that.” But not with God. “If the Lord wills, this or that happens,” no matter how freakish it looks to us.

And if Satan and the enemies of God rub their hands together in triumph when a Christian witness languishes and dies, let them hear this word from Revelation 12:11: “They have conquered [the accuser, the serpent] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.” The death of a Christian is not Satan’s victory. All of heaven knows it, and we need to teach our people to know it.

The Threat of Shipwreck

Glance briefly at one last threat to God’s plan. God’s ultimate purposes would fail if Satan’s blinding power over the depraved human heart were sovereign. If he could hold God’s elect in the blindness of spiritual death, or if he could deceive the Christian elect and cause them to turn away from the path of holiness and make shipwreck of their faith, God’s purposes would fail.

Neither Satan nor man is sovereign, either in the blindness of unbelievers or the fragile perseverance of Christian faith. God is. And over the new birth of every blood-bought sinner fly the words, “[God] made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:5). And over the miracle of every glory-seeing and glory-savoring Christian flies the banner, “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

At the end of every person’s life, for those who have persevered in faith, fought the good fight, finished the race, flies the banner, “Now to him who has kept me from stumbling and presented me blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen” (see Jude 24–25).

Providence Will Stand

I conclude that the truth of God, the promises of God, triumph.

The gospel of Jesus Christ will successfully penetrate all the peoples of the world, and will gather into Christ all of God’s ransomed elect.
All of these ransomed, the bride of Christ, will be sanctified, glorified, and made perfectly beautiful for the eternal enjoyment of her divine Husband.
This beauty of the bride will be the sinless echo of Christ’s excellencies, his preciousness, reverberating back in the all-satisfying pleasures that his people find in him forever and ever.

These truths, these realities, cannot fail, because God’s providence is his all-governing, all-pervasive, purposeful sovereignty, or, as he himself says, in Isaiah 46:10, “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.”

I can still remember when we first learned to preach it.

We’d just arrived at grad school and were stretched thin by long nights, a baby boy, a budget we couldn’t possibly balance, and immaturities to boot. My wife and I had asked one of my professors for church recommendations, and he’d given us one, a still-young church plant just up the road and across the state line. Neither of us had done a lot of church “shopping,” so all the differences we noticed that Sunday morning left impressions.

For starters, the church met in a “gym-natorium” that was long on basketball hoops but decidedly short on aesthetics. (I’m not sure any of the walls were even painted.) Then there was the music, led by a pastor, written by new-to-us artists like Getty, Townend, Kauflin, and Cook, and sung — really sung — by everybody in the room, grayheads and kids raising their hands in the air. All of it was followed by a remarkable sermon — still the best I’ve heard on Ephesians 6 — and preached, we’d come to find out, by an intern. (What kind of place has interns like that?)

All of this left its mark, but what struck us most was the surprising attention the church paid to the gospel. It was like the best news they’d ever heard, like they’d just discovered it for the first time, even though so many in the room, we guessed, were already Christians. Every part of the liturgy — from the announcements to the offering to the benediction — was shot through with a celebration of what God had done for us in Jesus and a call to live in the goodness of that news. To say we were encouraged would be insufficient. We were transformed.

The Gospel for Today

We soon learned there was a name for this fresh attention to the gospel — “gospel-centered” — and that it was, in God’s mercy, sweeping through many churches at that moment. We also soon learned that “gospel-centered” was shorthand for a cluster of underemphasized and glorious realities that Christians could “preach to themselves” on Sundays and every other day. We would spend most of the next decade learning to do just that.

Maybe you know this already. Maybe you don’t. But if you’re a Christian, the gospel is for you. It’s full of good news about your past and future — and your present day-to-day life. It’s full of good news for today. And to live in the goodness of this news, there are precious truths you simply must learn to rehearse, to preach, to yourself.

Here’s how that sermon might go.

New Ability

The gospel tells us that we’ve been regenerated. That’s a big word that points to an even bigger reality: Christians — those of us united to Jesus by faith — have been given brand-new spiritual abilities, thanks to what Jesus has done for us in his death, burial, and resurrection. We have brand-new powers. Paul calls these powers “incomparably great” (Ephesians 1:19 NIV). I like to think of them as superpowers. The gospel takes skinny little Steve Rogers and turns him — you — into Captain America. The gospel takes sinners like you and me and turns us into saints.

If you’ve been joined to God’s family, if you’ve believed the gospel, then you’ve received the Spirit Jesus sent when he ascended to heaven. And because you have the Spirit, you can and will follow Jesus and please God with your life. “The righteous requirement of the law” will be “met” by those of us “who . . . live . . . according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:4 NIV). If you’re a Christian, you have God’s law written on your heart (Hebrews 8:10). What God demands, you now can do. Not yet perfectly, of course — we have to wait until we see Jesus face to face for that (1 John 3:2). But if you’re a Christian, you can and will sin less and increasingly obey more (2 Corinthians 3:18).

When we’d rehearse this one together as a church, we’d often use the words of a lovely little poem that goes like this:

Run, John, run, the law commands,but gives us neither feet nor hands.Far better news the gospel brings:It bids us fly and gives us wings.

If you know and love the Lord Jesus, the gospel — Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection — gives you wings. Satan wants you to think you’re still earthbound. Jesus, however, reminds you: it’s time to fly!

New Identity

The gospel also tells us that we’ve been justified. If you know and love the Lord Jesus, you have Jesus’s perfect life — his sin-cleansing obedience — as your own (Hebrews 5:5–10; 10:14). He’s gifted it to you. Your ledger was red as can be. Then you believed, and your debt was erased. Because of Jesus’s faithful life and death for you, you’re in the black — big time. Think Publisher’s Clearing House times infinity! If you’re connected to Jesus, you can’t out-sin his sin-covering gift. Where your sin runs deep, his gracious gift is more. It’s always more.

“If you’re a Christian, the gospel is for you. It’s full of good news about your past and future — and your present.”

We call this gift “imputed,” “alien,” or simply “outside-of-us” righteousness. While Christians still sin — after all, we’re not yet fully righteous ourselves — we’ve nevertheless been declared righteous, thanks to the gift Jesus deposited in our account when we believed. Martin Luther famously captured this dual identity, describing Christians as “simultaneously righteous and sinful.” Most of us are all too aware of the latter. The gospel, however, doesn’t want us to forget the former. To glory in the former.

Back in the early 2000s, when gospel-centrality took many churches by storm, this way of thinking about the gospel led the way. Preachers and authors told us again and again and again to remember who we are in Christ. The indicative mood (“You are forgiven”) became a place many of us took fresh comfort in.

It’s a place we can still take comfort in. For those of us who know and love the Lord Jesus, the gospel gives us a new identity. Before you believed, your sin made you God’s enemy. Now that you believe, and thanks be to Christ, you are God’s forgiven son or daughter. The gospel reminds you: this is now who you are.

New Example

The gospel also tells us we have a brand-new example to follow. If you were around in the 1990s, you might remember the popular bracelet that read “WWJD” — “What Would Jesus Do?” The gospel gives us a brand-new example of what it looks like to be the kind of humans God created us to be. Jesus himself points to the goodness of this reality when he tells us, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34 NIV).

When we wonder what it looks like to love God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves, it helps to glance at Abraham, Moses, Rahab, or any of the other faith-filled believers who’ve run this human race well to the end. But you’ll want to look at Jesus (Hebrews 12:1–2). There’s nobody else like him. He’s in a class all by himself. It’s “in his steps,” guided by his footprints, that you’ll want to walk this road of life (1 Peter 2:21).

How kind of our heavenly Father. He didn’t just call us to reflect his image to this world he’s made. He also showed us how by sending Jesus — and giving us four biographies of Jesus to read while we wait for his return.

New Sight

The gospel also gives us a brand-new way to read the Bible God has given us. Before Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, we’d all have been like Peter. None of us could have anticipated that God would save his people by sacrificing his Son (Mark 8:27–33). Without Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, we’d all have been like the blind man Jesus heals right before Peter’s confession (Mark 8:22–26). We’d have seen the biblically revealed realities not as the “people” they are but as “trees walking around.” Paul, at one point, says that the gospel reveals things that were hidden in the Old Testament (Romans 16:25–27). Only after Jesus’s resurrection are we able to see.

The resurrection, however, wasn’t enough. For us to see — really see — all that God has revealed for us in his word, God not only had to reveal Jesus to us; he had to reveal Jesus in us (Galatians 1:16).

The gospel, when believed, gloriously removes two sets of blinders from our eyes. It removes the hermeneutical blinders caused by the mysterious nature of God’s story and the moral blinders caused by the willful stubbornness of our sinful hearts (Matthew 13:15). Now, with the Spirit Jesus sends, we can and will profit from Holy Scripture. To those of us who know and love the Lord Jesus, the seals of God’s book have been broken, and its glorious treasures have been revealed (Matthew 13:52).

With God’s Spirit, we now read the Bible with the gospel at the center. We see that the story’s tension is fundamentally, if surprisingly, resolved by Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. We see, like never before, that the Bible’s story, begun in the Old Testament, climaxes in Jesus, continues in his church, and culminates in his return and the new creation.

The realities of the gospel shape the way we read every part of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. It’s a way of reading the Bible as only a Christian can.

Yours to Preach

It’s been nearly twenty years since that Sunday morning. We’re no longer in grad school. Our baby is a senior in high school, and he’s got two teenage (and precious) siblings. We’ve moved three times. And we’ve gotten older; we’re no longer the fresh-faced twentysomethings we were that day, so many Sundays ago. Much has changed. But one thing hasn’t: Not a day goes by when we don’t think about this sermon. Not a day goes by when we don’t preach its glorious realities to each other and ourselves. If anything, we know even more now than we did back then just how much we need to hear it.

If you know and love the Lord Jesus, this sermon is yours. It’s yours to preach and sing and pray and share. If you’re a Christian, then you can — you must — live in the goodness of this good news every day of your life.

Audio Transcript

Should we ever speak directly to the devil? Some Christians do. Many don’t. Who is right? Here’s the question, from Frederic, a listener in Germany: “Pastor John, hello! An episode of APJ — APJ 1439 — really jumpstarted my prayer life. Thank you for it. As I felt really blessed, I was also concerned about something you did there. While you were pressing into reasons why the devil loves it when our prayer life is weak, you even addressed the devil directly, telling him to get out of the way. While I got the point, I was left concerned.

“Should we ever speak to or address the devil directly while praying to God? I know that it is a common practice in many churches to address the devil directly, to rebuke him, in corporate prayers for example. I consider these practices false as I don’t see any biblical reasons to do so. We even read in Jude: ‘But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you”’ (Jude 9). It seems like some people spend a lot of time speaking directly to the devil while praying to God. But should we?”

Well, may the Lord give us wisdom not to overemphasize the presence and danger of the devil and demons, and not to underemphasize the presence and the danger of devils and demons. That’s what I’m going to try to do — strike that balance in these few minutes that we have together. I want to get a biblical balance, and you can fall off the fence on both sides here.

Stay Grounded

Here are three preliminary, brief encouragements to set the stage.

First, the devil is not our main problem. Sin is our main problem; we are our main problem. And therefore, we should focus the lion’s share of our spiritual warfare not against Satan and not against other people but against sin in our own heart and life. If you succeed there, you defeat the devil, and you defeat your adversary. What God delights in is your holiness, and if you attain that by putting to death your own sin through the power of the Spirit, you triumph over Satan and over the world. Satan doesn’t care much about being seen. What he cares about is destroying people by trapping them and holding them in sin. So, sin is the main issue. That’s the first preliminary observation.

Second, never forget — preach it to yourself many, many times — that “he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Christ, by his death and resurrection, dealt a decisive, defeating blow against Satan. He cannot destroy you except by tempting you to distrust Jesus and walk in sin. Believe in the triumph that you already have — the down payment by the Spirit in your life — and walk in this victory.

“The devil is not our main problem. Sin is our main problem; we are our main problem.”

Third, prioritize the method of demonic deliverance that Paul gives in 2 Timothy 2:24–26. He said to Timothy that he should “not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.” And then he adds, “God may” — so, as you do that, here’s what God’s going to do, perhaps — “perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.” That’s the steady-state, normal way of defeating the power of the devil in the Christian ministry.

There is a kind of demonic possession that may call for a remarkable power encounter and real exorcism. I’ve been part of one of those in my life. But the ordinary way of deliverance is the way of teaching the truth that Satan cannot stand, and therefore he leaves because truth begins to take hold by God’s grace in people’s lives.

How Not to Speak to the Devil

Now, with those three encouragements in place, here’s what I’d say about speaking to the devil directly.

First, never negotiate with the devil. He is evil through and through. He is too subtle and deceptive, and he is expert in laying traps for people. Never bargain with the devil. Jesus refused to do it in the wilderness. We should refuse to do it everywhere.

Second, never speak to the devil approvingly. In John 8, Jesus said he’s a liar from the beginning, and behind that trickery is a murderous intent. Even when he speaks in half-truths, you would do well not to approve any half of it, because its intent is to trap and deceive.

Third, never speak a self-reliant or self-dependent rebuke to Satan. Now, mark those words: “self-reliant, self-dependent rebuke to Satan.” Any power that we have over Satan does not reside in us by nature. It is the power of Jesus Christ. We do not have authority in ourselves apart from him. We do not have wisdom in ourselves that is sufficient to oppose or figure out the schemes of the devil. It’s all of Christ.

In Whose Authority?

Now, this is where Jude 9 seems to be misunderstood — even by Frederic, who asked us this question, it seems. Frederic, in his question, seemed to use this text to say, “Not even the angel Michael spoke to the devil.” But in fact, the text says the opposite. “When the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’” He’s talking to the devil. The word you means he was speaking to the devil. But what he would not presume to do, and we should not presume to do, is speak to the devil in his own name or in his own authority. And so, he says, “The Lord rebuke you.”

We know that Jesus had authority over demons and that he spoke to them — like, “Be silent, and come out of him!” (Mark 1:25). And we know that he gave this authority to his disciples in Mark 6:7: “He . . . gave them authority over the unclean spirits.” And we know that when the 72 disciples returned, not just the twelve, to report about their ministry, they said, “Even the demons are subject to us in your name” (Luke 10:17). The words “in your name” mean that’s how they cast out the demons. Jesus cast them out in his own authority; the disciples cast them out in the name of Jesus. “Get out in the name of Jesus” is probably what they said.

So, when 1 Peter 5:9 and James 4:7 say that we should “resist the devil,” I think those commands in 1 Peter and James include those times when the demonic assault on you or your loved one is so plain and so blatant that you should say something like, “No, no, in the name of Jesus, leave me alone” or “Leave my child alone in the name of Jesus. Be gone, Satan — get out of this house.” Then we turn to Christ. Oh yes, we turn to Christ. This is the step that’s probably neglected. At that moment, we turn to Christ — we turn to the promises of Jesus:

“I’ll never leave you.”
“I’ll never forsake you.”
“I’ll always be with you.”
“I bought you; you’re mine.”
“No one can snatch you out of my hand.”
“I will help you.”
“I’ll be your shield.”
“Hold up the shield of faith. Believe in my promises. I’ll protect you. You will never be less than a super-conqueror as you trust in me.”

And then we rest. We rest in his sovereign care.

Fight Daily

So, my answer is yes, Christians may talk like that to the devil, but it will not be their normal, daily way of triumphing over his schemes. That’s the imbalance I’m trying to avoid. The hour-by-hour life of faith and holiness and love will be the normal way, and God will make us very useful in this world of defeating the schemes of the devil as we focus on his promises and defeat our own sins by his power.

How do you feel about the word father?

Growing up, I felt the word like a thorn in my flesh. A frequent reminder of what I didn’t have. A gateway term into descending valleys of discouragement, insecurity, and envy. Father: whenever I heard the word, it mercilessly brought back to my mind what I was trying to forget. I was fatherless.

Perhaps your story is similar. Perhaps your father, like mine, left you and your family when you were young. Or maybe your father, unlike mine, was often home but never really present for you. Or perhaps your father had every intention of being a good father but was prevented by disease, disaster, or death.

Regardless of the reason, many today know themselves as fatherless. You might count yourself among their number. But have you also come to know yourself in light of what God, the Father, says to his fatherless people?

He Will Be Yours

Father figures are a great gift from God. I had a few growing up; perhaps you did as well. Though some of them were truly fatherly, none was ever truly my father. At the end of the day, they returned to their own home and I to mine, only to find my temporary escape from fatherlessness evaporating once again. Can the fatherless ever truly find a father of their own? King David, writing Psalm 68, answers in the affirmative:

Father of the fatherless . . . is God in his holy habitation. (Psalm 68:5)

What a breathtaking reality! God is not merely a father figure to the fatherless. Nor simply father-like to the fatherless. He is not a part-time, second-string, when-available father to the fatherless. He is a full-time, all-in, every-sense-of-the-term Father to the fatherless (Psalm 68:5).

He disciplines as a father (Hebrews 12:7), listens as a father (Matthew 6:9), provides as a father (Matthew 7:11), and shows compassion as a father (Psalm 103:13), including to the fatherless. He is present and available to his children in ways that even the best of earthly fathers could never be.

He doesn’t slumber or sleep as you toss and turn in the night. Though even the best of earthly fathers must eventually rest, God the Father remains attentive — ever ready to hear the voice of his children (Psalm 17:6).

He doesn’t give bad advice or mislead in ways that even the best of fathers occasionally do. No, his counsel is always good. His instruction is always wise. He makes his children’s paths straight (Proverbs 3:6).

He does not weaken in strength or fail in energy as the strongest earthly fathers will. Through his strength, his children are made strong (Ephesians 6:10) — even and especially when his children see they have no strength of their own (2 Corinthians 12:10).

“Though even the best of earthly fathers must eventually give way to rest, God the Father remains attentive.”

Your father’s absence from your life was real and significant. Yet far more real and significant is God’s presence in your life. He is not like a father, but actually Father. And not just any father, but your very own heavenly Father.

Do you long to know the love of a father? Do you yearn to have a father to call your own? In Christ, God is the Father to the fatherless, and the fatherless become the fathered in his embrace.

His Help Will Be Yours

We all are needy by nature. When fathers help meet those needs, calm and security flourish. When they don’t, fear and anxiety take hold, and questions begin to arise. Who will protect me when someone seeks my harm? Who will provide for me when my need is greatest? Who will be there to tell me who I am, what I’m worth, and where I should go when I no longer know?

If fatherless, then “dad” is scrapped from the list of viable answers. It seems only a matter of time before “no one” or “guess I’ll have to” fills in the gaps. Those voices will mask our neediness for a while. They’ll numb us for a time. But they cannot change reality — we are still needy till help arrives. But what kind of help arises for the fatherless? Psalm 10:14 explains: “You have been the helper of the fatherless.”

When the fatherless lift their eyes to the hills, where does their help come from? God, the Maker of heaven and earth (Psalm 121:1–2). It is he who executes justice for the fatherless (Deuteronomy 10:18). It is he who pleads their cause (Proverbs 23:10–11). It is he who upholds the fatherless and keeps them from ruin (Psalm 146:9). He guards them with his law; he hears them when they cry; he executes vengeance on their behalf so that injustice never has the final word over them (Exodus 22:22). The fatherless throughout the ages have brought their needs to him. They’ve called out to him expectantly for love, provision, and protection. He, their Father, has been their helper.

Do you feel needy? Do you feel weak? Do you seek a father who can strengthen you, help you, and uphold you (Isaiah 41:10)? One who will go with you and never leave you nor forsake you (Deuteronomy 31:6)? One on whom you can cast your every fear and anxiety and know his genuine care (1 Peter 5:7)? Look no further. God has been the helper of the fatherless. If you put your hope in him, he will be your helper too.

His Home Will Be Yours

A house without a man of the house rarely feels like home. With one parent instead of two, a home can feel stuck in a state of flux, perpetually incomplete. It is, after all, a fraction of what God designed it to be, and often everyone inside knows it. Will the fatherless ever taste a true experience of home?

In Psalm 27, David revels in the glory of home — God’s home. Here is a place of supreme gladness: “I will offer in his tent sacrifices with shouts of joy” (verse 6). Here unshakable security and safety can be found: “He will hide me in his shelter” (verse 5). Here is a dwelling in which to enjoy unfathomable intimacy with the Father: “To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (verse 4). It’s no wonder David longs to go there. But do you know who else is invited?

My father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in. (Psalm 27:10)

Watch as the fatherless approach his doorway in droves. See the Father open wide his door to them. Take in his smile, his gladness, his joy as he leads all of them to their very own room — the one he’s made just for them. His home is now their home. His courts are now their courts. He, the God who made his dwelling among them, now makes their dwelling with him. They are home, finally home, experiencing every bit of glory that word conveys.

The once fatherless, now fathered. The once helpless, now helped. Those once kneeling in the ashes of a broken home, now standing in the glory of his unbreakable home. This is the blessing of our great God and Father. He sent his Son so that we could become his sons, and now he ever works for the good of his children.

When Jonathan Edwards was nineteen years old, he wrote a series of life resolutions. Decades ago, as a young man, I read them, and number six lodged itself in my mind and heart as something I very, very much wanted to make my own. And I have tried to.

Edwards wrote, “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.” My hope is that your years here at Bethlehem College and Seminary have kindled in you this fervent disposition of mind. While you live — all the way to the end — you live with all your might. All your life, with all your might. There’s a biblical name for that. It’s called zeal. And that’s what I want to talk about: your zeal, for the rest of your life.

God’s Will for God’s Will

I was sitting beside my wife while reading Romans 12 a few weeks ago, and I read these words in verses 6 and 8: “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them . . . the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.”

I turned to my wife and asked her, “What’s the common denominator between contributing generously and leading zealously and showing mercy cheerfully? What’s the basic point in saying, ‘Do what you do generously; do what you do zealously; do what you do cheerfully’?” And she said, “You really want to do it. You’re not being forced. You’re not half-hearted. You’re all in.”

And I thought, “That’s it.” When, six verses earlier, Romans 12:2 said, “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that [you can prove] what is the will of God,” the point was not only that God wills for us to do certain things, but that we do them in a certain way.

Once you have found God’s will for what to do, now the question becomes, What is God’s will for how to do God’s will? And one answer is this: with all your might, while you live. That is, with zeal. All in. Nothing half-hearted. Therefore:

If God’s will is for you to contribute, you do it generously. You divert all the tributaries of grace and goodness and kindness in your heart into that one river, and you give generously. Not begrudgingly.

If God’s will is for you to lead, you lead zealously. You corral all your energies and all your skills and all your creativity and all your desires, and you harness those horses to the wagon of your leadership, and you lead with zeal. Not sluggishly or carelessly.

And if God’s will is for you to show mercy, you do it cheerfully. You gather all the kindling of God’s promises, and you throw it on the fire of your joy, and you give cheerfully. Not reluctantly or under compulsion.

God’s will is not simply that we do the right thing. His will is that we do the right thing in the right way — that we do it with zeal.

Then, as if to confirm that we are on the right track, the very next verse says, “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil” (Romans 12:9). In other words, it’s not enough to love. We need to love in a certain way: genuinely, deeply, really, zealously. It’s not enough to hate evil. We need to hate evil in a certain way: with abhorrence. Be all in with your love for people. Be all in with your hatred of evil. Nothing phony. Nothing half-hearted. Nothing ho-hum about love or hate. Love people zealously. Hate evil zealously.

Intensified, Clarified, Focused

To make crystal clear what Paul is so concerned about here, one verse later (in Romans 12:11), he says, “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.” So, he intensifies the zeal of zeal. He defines the meaning of zeal. And he focuses on the goal of zeal.

First, he intensifies the zeal of zeal. He says, “Do not be slothful in zeal.” In other words, be zealous about being zealous. Don’t be lackadaisical about not being lackadaisical. Don’t be half-hearted in your repudiation of half-heartedness. He intensifies the zeal of zeal.

Then he defines zeal. He says, “Be fervent in spirit.” The Greek verb literally means “boil.” “Boil in spirit.” In fact, the Latin word fervens, from which we get the word fervent, means “boil.” Christian zeal is a flame ignited by God’s Spirit in our spirit to live with all our might while we do live.

This is not a personality trait. It is a spiritual duty. Your personalities are all over the map: some are high-strung, and some are phlegmatic and passive. Nobody gets a pass on zeal. It is not a personality trait. It’s a spiritual response to the King of kings. “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:32).

“What is God’s will for how to do God’s will? One answer is this: with all your might.”

And third, he focuses our zeal on the ultimate goal of zeal. He says, “Serve the Lord.” Here’s the entire verse again: “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.” Zeal for the sake of zeal is atheism — energetic atheism. Paul is not aiming at zeal for the sake of zeal. He’s aiming at zeal for the glory of the Lord Jesus: “Serve the Lord” — the Lord! Let your unflagging zeal serve the Lord. Let your boiling spirit serve the Lord.

In other words, gather all the streams of your heart, and harness all the horses of your creative energies, and pile on all the kindling of God’s promises, and live with all your might to make Jesus look great.

All Your Might for All Your Life

From those biblical reflections, I draw out this doctrine:

It is the will of God that the graduates of Bethlehem College and Seminary do the will of God with zeal.

Or:

That you live with all your might while you do live — for the glory of Jesus Christ.

To clarify and support this doctrine, consider these realities.

1. Consider the example of zeal in the Lord Jesus.

His passion for the purity of his Father’s house moved him to drive out the money-changers and say, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” And “his disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’” (John 2:16–17).

2. Consider the reward of zeal in heaven.

Colossians 3:23–24: “Whatever you do, work heartily [zealously!], as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.”

3. Consider the camaraderie of zeal.

Hebrews 10:24–25: “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together.” The word for “stirring up” is paroxysmon, from which we get paroxysm. It means “arousing a person to activity” — provoking, awakening, kindling, bringing alive. This is what Christian friends are for. This is what the church is for. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Your zeal has stirred up most of them” (2 Corinthians 9:2). Zeal is contagious. This is what we do for each other — the camaraderie of zeal.

4. Consider the loneliness of zeal.

Jesus warned in Matthew 24:12, “Because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” You may have to stand alone (or with the few), surrounded by lukewarm, indifferent people. God will help you.

5. Consider the danger of zeal.

Paul never ceased to think of himself as the chief of sinners largely because, before he was a Christian, his zeal was so great and so evil. Philippians 3:5–6: “as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church.” And he called all of it “refuse,” garbage (verse 8). So, he warned the churches: there is a zeal that is not according to knowledge (Romans 10:2). Measure your zeal by biblical knowledge and biblical love.

6. Consider the price Christ paid for your zeal.

Titus 2:14: “[He] gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.” Christ died to make you zealous for good works. Christ gave his life so that you would not just do the will of God, but that you would do it in a certain way — with zeal.

Therefore, graduates of Bethlehem College and Seminary, “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.” Say from your heart over the rest of your lives, “Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.”

Anyone who reads the Bible from cover to cover will encounter passages that deeply disturb — anyone, at least, who’s paying attention. And the more seriously one takes the Bible, the more disturbing these passages can be.

I was reminded of this recently when an earnest believer, a mother of young children, shared something with me that had been troubling her for some time. Recalling the Genesis 22 account of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, she was haunted by this unsettling question: If God could command Abraham to do such a shocking, brutal thing in order to test his faith, couldn’t God command me to do the same?

It’s a good question, especially from a Christian who takes the Bible seriously as God’s inspired, inerrant word. Of course, this mother is far from the first to be troubled by God’s command to Abraham, even if most don’t voice it for fear of sounding crazy. But it’s not a crazy question. Since God once commanded a parent to take his child’s life with his own hand, why should we assume he wouldn’t do that again? That question deserves an answer.

So, for the sake of others who have been similarly troubled, and to help us all consider carefully how to approach disturbing accounts in Scripture, I’ll share with you the three reasons I gave to this concerned mother for why the Abraham-Isaac event was unique and unrepeatable.

Historical-Cultural Uniqueness

Looking at the whole of Scripture, it’s important to notice that when God communicates to humans, he does so within their historical-cultural context, their recognizable frame of reference. This is true even when he communicates things they don’t yet understand. So in that light, let’s try to consider God’s command to Abraham within Abraham’s recognizable historical-cultural frame of reference:

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” (Genesis 22:1–2)

Foreign Frame of Reference

To our twenty-first-century ears, this sounds horribly strange. Of course it does! Unlike Abraham, our beliefs and values, the frames of reference we tend to take for granted, haven’t been forged in the Bronze Age cultures of the ancient Near East.

What’s crucial to remember is that when God called Abraham in Mesopotamia, the only religious framework he would have known was shaped by the prevailing Near Eastern pagan beliefs and rituals. Nearly everyone in this region believed their gods sometimes required human sacrifices to prove worshipers’ devotion or to grant some great request. They took this for granted just as we take for granted that human sacrifice is morally abhorrent. If you and I lived back then, we likely would have assumed human sacrifice was sometimes necessary.

Now, I’m not advocating moral relativism. I’m not saying the human sacrifices of Abraham’s day weren’t truly abhorrent (they were). Nor am I saying that God’s command to Abraham implies that God condoned such sacrifices back then (he didn’t — and I’ll explain why in a moment). I’m saying that when Abraham heard God’s command, he heard it through historical-cultural filters very different from ours. Up to this point, Abraham likely took for granted, as everyone around him did, that the Deity he worshiped might require a human sacrifice.

When Everything Changed

So, in faith that “the Judge of all the earth [would] do what is just” (Genesis 18:25), that God would not break his covenant promise regarding Isaac, even if it meant raising his slain, lamblike son from the dead (Hebrews 11:17–19), Abraham made the agonizing journey to Mount Moriah and, in obedience to God’s dreadful command, took hold of the knife. Then he received the most blessed shock of his blessed life:

The angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. (Genesis 22:11–13)

That was the moment when everything changed. God intervened to stop a human sacrifice and provided a substitutionary sacrifice instead. This inaugurated such a massive paradigm shift that the Hebrew tribes became unique among their Near Eastern neighbors in not engaging in human sacrifice — except during periods when pagan syncretism infected and defiled their worship, which God abhorred and repeatedly condemned (2 Kings 16:1–3; Psalm 106:35–38; Jeremiah 19:4–6).

So, viewing the event on Mount Moriah through a historical-cultural lens, we can see why it was unique and not to be repeated. Through God’s disturbing command to Abraham — one Abraham would have culturally recognized — God was orchestrating an abrupt and dramatic sacrificial paradigm change: the God of the Hebrews doesn’t require his worshipers to sacrifice their children but provides for them substitutionary sacrifices acceptable to him. This paradigm change was so revolutionary that now, four thousand years later, most people around the world view human sacrifice as morally abhorrent.

Typological Uniqueness

Another crucial thing to notice from Scripture is that after the Abraham-Isaac event, God never again made such a demand — not of Abraham or any of his biological or spiritual descendants. Two significant reasons for this also highlight the event’s historical uniqueness.

“Jesus was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.”

First, as the person God chose to be the founder of this new faith, Abraham was called to embody and exemplify the type of faith that pleases God: a faith in God’s faithfulness to keep his covenant promises despite circumstances that appear contrary (see Romans 4; Galatians 3; Hebrews 11:8–10).

Second, when God provided a substitute sacrifice for Isaac, he intended it to be a typological foreshadowing of God’s salvific plan in Christ: God himself would provide the ultimate and consummate sacrifice of his only Son “once for all” (see Hebrews 7–10). Abraham appears to have prophetically spoken beyond his understanding when, in reply to Isaac’s question about the sacrifice, he said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son” (Genesis 22:8).

Theological Uniqueness

This brings us to the third reason the Abraham-Isaac event was unique, the ultimate reason we need not fear God demanding of us a ritual sacrifice of any kind, human or animal: Jesus was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. As “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), Jesus was the ultimate and final sacrifice God provided. And unlike Isaac, Jesus was sacrificed voluntarily. He said,

I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father. (John 10:17–18)

Since now “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10), God neither demands nor desires any further ritual sacrifices (Hebrews 10:5–6).

That’s the theological significance of why, in God’s providence, he ultimately removed the Jerusalem temple in AD 70, ending its sacrificial system, and has since made it essentially impossible to reinstate because of the mosque on the Mount. And that’s why, as the influence of Christianity has spread around the globe, the vast majority of people have come to view ritual human sacrifice as morally abhorrent — and even animal sacrifice is increasingly rare.

Think and Pray Together

The Bible contains plenty of disturbing content. It demands a lot of hard thinking from its serious readers.

But none of us is so wise and educated that we can figure it all out on our own. Each of us is too limited and too weak and has too many blind spots. That’s why God gave the Bible to his church. He wants us to think hard and wrestle together — which is why I’m grateful for the dear saint who was willing to ask me this difficult, tender question, allowing me to share a few insights, most of which I have gleaned from others who in turn have gleaned from others.

The Abraham-Isaac event in Genesis 22 is understandably disturbing, especially to twenty-first-century Western readers so far removed from the time and culture in which it occurred. It can seem like God put a man through an unnecessarily cruel ordeal just to test his faith. It can also leave us wondering if he might do the same to us.

But seeing that there’s so much more to this story than first meets the modern eye has encouraged me to beware of presuming too much when reading other unsettling biblical accounts that appear to cast a suspicious light on God’s character. It reminds me that the path to understanding often involves prayerfully questioning my own assumptions, prayerfully putting in the hard work of thinking, and prayerfully seeking help from other saints, past and present, who have done the same.

Recently, my wife and I became fascinated with documentaries about mountain climbers. It started with Free Solo, which tells the story of Alex Honnold and his ascent of one of the most difficult rock faces in Yosemite National Park — without any ropes! We watched awestruck at what Honnold accomplished and, at the same time, appalled by the risks he took. What would drive a man to that?

Next, The Alpinist landed in our playlist. The film kept us on the edge of our seats as it followed Marc-André Leclerc’s obsession with solo climbing America’s most dangerous peaks. Leclerc’s longing to experience the highest heights eventually led to his tragic death.

Other tales of alpinism followed, and after watching scores of people ante up their lives to summit the loftiest peaks on the planet, my wife asked the obvious question: Where does that desire come from? Why do mountains so mesmerize us?

Curious Cravings

Now, you may not feel the allure of the alpine aesthetic as keenly as Honnold or Leclerc — or me. You may not ache to ascend the roof of the world or thirst for a glimpse of mountain majesty. But the practice of discerning desires — the ability to interrogate where your desires come from and where they lead to — sits right at the heart of wisdom (Proverbs 20:5).

As the Puritans were fond of pointing out, desires reveal the shape of the soul. Often man’s deepest longings — though they may attach to the wrong objects — unveil what God made us for. To paraphrase Chesterton, Every man who walks into a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. Can the same be said for everyone who walks up mountains? What does this desire reveal about your soul and mine?

Where Heaven Touches Earth

In the early 2000s, the United Nations declared 2009 “International Year of Mountains” and dedicated it with the slogan, “We are all mountain people.” Whatever the UN meant, that phrase summarizes well the role mountains play in Scripture. From start to finish, the story of the Bible swirls around mountaintops, and the people of God truly are mountain people. Let me explain.

In the beginning, God created everything, including mountains (Psalm 90:2; 95:4; 104:8). God made man, gave him dominion, and placed him in the garden of Eden on God’s holy mountain (Ezekiel 28:14). This Edenic peak is paradigmatic of all other noteworthy mountains in Scripture because here God dwelt with man. On the mountain, heaven touches earth. However, man’s stay on these blessed heights was short-lived. He chose death, and down he went from paradise.

Throughout the rest of God’s story, mountains grant a foretaste of when heaven and earth will be renewed — God and man together again. Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Elijah all met God on the mountain. The temple and tabernacle, both modeled after Eden, had their own mini-mountains in the form of the altar. And Zion towered over all other rival heights as “the mount that God desired for his abode” (Psalm 68:15–16).

Jesus regularly sought God on the mountain (Matthew 14:23; Mark 6:46). But more than that, Jesus was God on the mountain. He met man there in thunder and cloud (Mark 9:2–8), reuniting heaven and earth. All the alpine cords of Scripture climax in Christ. He calls his own to join him on the mountain (Mark 3:13), and from the mountaintop he commissions his new humanity to mediate his dominion to the ends of the earth (Matthew 28:16–20). And one day, those kingdom subjects will climb further up and further in to dwell with God on the Mountain forever (Revelation 21:10).

In Scripture, mountains stand as metaphors in stone. They are the place where heaven meets earth, where God descends to man. They are monolithic reminders of the enormous bliss of Eden.

Anatomy of the Ache

Given the prominence of peaks in Scripture, we should not be surprised that the human soul longs to climb. But can we say more about this desire? What is the anatomy of the alpine ache? In the allure of the mountains, we can identify at least five longings God placed in the human soul.

1. We long to exercise dominion.

In 1923, shortly after geographers identified Everest as the tallest mountain on earth, a reporter asked explorer George Mallory why he was hell-bent on summitting the peak. He famously replied, “Because it’s there.” Mallory died the following year attempting to be the first man to put Everest under his feet. Here we find the ancient drive to take dominion.

On the original mountaintop, God commanded man to subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28). The word subdue means to subjugate, to conquer, to take mastery over. I cannot help but imagine God issuing this commission with a smile. It was almost a dare. Knowing the very-goodness of the world he made, knowing the soaring heights and unsounded depths, knowing the waves and winds, knowing the wonders of water and the charms of snow, surely God delighted to invite man to explore this cosmic playground!

He sealed this desire for dominion in his image bearers, especially in the hearts of men. The urge to set foot on the highest heights in the most dangerous ways and direst conditions testifies to this hunger.

2. We long to see beauty.

Several years ago, my wife and I bought a van, converted it to a camper, and toured the South Island of New Zealand. I was a kid on a country-sized playground. I climbed every hill, cliff, crest, and mountain we could drive to. On those heights, I encountered beauty that could pierce like an arrow, seize like a vice, and brand like hot iron — majesty that kindled delight and awakened desire. I will never forget some of those moments, but not because of the marvels in front of me. Those experiences are etched in my mind because I know in my bones that I played on the border of what I was made for — to see Beauty.

“In Scripture, mountains stand as metaphors in stone. They are the place where heaven meets earth, where God descends to man.”

The psalmist knew this stab of longing well. Beauty pierced him through, and the ache would never leave. It dominated him. Like Captain Ahab, he had one all-consuming pursuit: to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord (Psalm 27:4). We were made to “behold the king in his beauty” (Isaiah 33:17). Our souls will be satisfied with nothing less than basking in “the perfection of beauty” shining in the face of Jesus Christ (Psalm 50:2).

The perilous majesty of mountains whets this appetite — by God’s design. All the wonders of lesser mountains remind us of the mountain of God. “His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north” (Psalm 48:1–2).

3. We long to participate in glory.

Still, don’t we want more, so much more than simply to see beauty? We want to be swallowed up in the beauty. We don’t just want to behold; we want to become. To touch is not enough; oh, we want to be transformed! We want to join the great dance. We want in.

To put it another way, we want glory; we seek it (Romans 2:7). We yearn to participate in the glory we were made for — the glory we even now restlessly reflect (Romans 8:29–30). Which of us would not trade all to hear on the lips of our Lord, “Well done! Enter into the joy of your Master”? This divine approval meets our deep desire for glory. As C.S. Lewis explains, “Glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last” (The Weight of Glory, 41).

That knocking reverberates from mountain walls and echoes from the highest peaks. One caption translates all the countless selfies taken on the world’s summits: “Is this not enough? Let me in!” When asked why he takes such climbing risks, Honnold replied, “If you succeed, everybody celebrates you as a big hero.” Honnold, like all made in the image of God, wants glory, but he is knocking at the wrong door.

4. We long to savor fear.

Have you ever wondered why so many people enjoy scary movies? Or why the very risk that makes extreme sports hazardous also makes them wildly attractive? Or why “danger tourism” draws so many? In part, the answer lies in our longing to savor fear.

There is something uniquely thrilling about fear. Yes, the pleasure is a sharp one. It boasts a razor edge, but it remains, nonetheless, a genuine pleasure. Thus, Nehemiah admits that the servants of God delight to fear him (Nehemiah 1:11). They worship in fear and rejoice in trembling (Psalm 2:11). They fall before God in awestruck adoration. We were made to fear.

Therefore, we seek out what Rudulf Otto calls numinous experiences. Encounters that make us feel small. Occasions that make us aware that we are mere creatures in the presence of a Creator wholly other. The alpine aesthetic preeminently grants this experience. Describing the magnetism of the mountains, Leclerc explained, “One of the coolest feelings a human can experience is to feel so small in a world that’s so big.” The wonder of mountains scratches this itch. It both feeds and fuels our desire to fear.

5. We long to dwell with God.

Here we come to the principle of our longing. The Bible shapes our imaginations to see the mountain as a place where the divine touches the dust. At the top, the physical world waxes translucent, and the presence of God peeks through. The winds that blow from the high country thrum with the hope that one day we will leave the shadowlands behind and ascend to the homeland we long for. The promise of the sunrise will burst upon us in the light of the Lamb.

Mountains awaken this sweet desire. We want to dwell with God. The booming invitation of Aslan to “Come further up! Come further in!” leaves us breathless. Shakes us to the soul. We ache to ascend to Eden — but better.

Massive granite arrows, mountains point beyond themselves to Someone far higher and more thrilling — to the One where all the beauty comes from. If we mistake them for the God they beckon us to know, they become stone idols, dragging their worshipers down. But if we heed their call to climb, we may admit with Lewis, “All my life the God of the Mountain has been wooing me” (Till We Have Faces, 87).

Audio Transcript

Today we read Luke 15:11–32 together in our Bible reading, the parable of the prodigal son, or the parable of the prodigal sons (plural). It’s a famous story about a father — a blameless father — and his two sons, who are anything but blameless, each of them entrapped by his own sin in very different ways. For parents of prodigal sons and daughters, the story resonates deeply in offering hope, like it does for Heather, a mom in Birmingham, Alabama.

“Pastor John, hello. I am the mother of a prodigal son in his early twenties. I read Luke 15 over and over. I have studied it a hundred times. I was wondering, if you were to talk to the parent of a prodigal son or daughter, how would you give hope to them from this text? I want my life to reflect the life of the father in this story as I wait on the porch.”

It really is an amazingly encouraging parable for parents of prodigals. It has so many layers of encouragement in it. I don’t think we or anybody has ever gotten to the bottom of it and its amazing portrait of the gracious heart of God. We could talk for hours about the implications of this parable, but we don’t have hours. So, let me perhaps mention seven encouragements from this parable.

1. God pursues sinners.

First, this is one of the three parables in Luke 15, which are told by Jesus in response to being criticized in verses 1–2 because of eating with tax collectors and sinners. When the Pharisees and scribes grumble, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2), Jesus responds by telling the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, the parable of the lost son (or sons — we’ll see).

So, all three parables are meant to illustrate the fact that when Jesus is eating with sinners, this is what God is doing. He’s embodying the pursuit of God that’s described in the parables as he pursues the lost. That’s what’s happening when Jesus comes into the world and eats with sinners. God is not in any way compromising with sin. Christ is not becoming a sinner by eating. He’s doing John 3:17: God sent his Son into the world not “to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” And so, the father in the parable of the prodigal son is a picture of God acting in Christ to save prodigals. That’s just the basic picture that we should be encouraged by. We need to see God that way. Think of him that way. He’s pursuing sinners.

2. God is glad to have prodigals home.

Second, in all three parables, there’s this jubilant celebration over a single sinner who repents. “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). And in the parable of the prodigal son, the father says, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him. . . . Let us eat and celebrate (Luke 15:22–23). So, God’s heart in this parable, in all three parables, is glad to have prodigals come home. He’s not begrudging; he’s glad.

3. God, not guilt, is in view.

Third, in all three of these parables, there’s no focus on the guilt of the woman who lost the coin, or the shepherd who lost the sheep, or the father who lost a son. Now, I’m not saying that to make any comment about the quality of my or your parenting, which all of us know could have been better on every count. People sometimes ask me, “What would you do differently?” And I say, “Everything. I’d try to do everything better.”

“When Jesus eats with sinners, he embodies the Father who pursues the lost.”

I’m simply saying, when I observe this, that that’s not the issue here. Jesus is simply not calling any attention to that, which is crystal clear in the parable of the prodigal son, because the father is a picture of God, who is the absolutely perfect Father, and yet he’s got this lost son. I mean, go figure — how can you be a perfect father and have a lost son? We are encouraged to fix our gaze in these parables not on ourselves, not on our shortcomings, but on the kind of God we are dealing with in these parables.

4. God can bring sanity through misery.

Fourth, the prodigal son experiences a change of heart at the lowest point of his miserable life. He’s ready to share food with the pigs. At the boy’s lowest point, he came to himself (Luke 15:17). And the encouraging thing is that just when it looked absolutely hopeless — How could you return from something so low? — he experienced his awakening.

5. God’s heart runs toward his children.

Fifth, perhaps the most tender and beautiful and powerful moment in the parable, which Jesus surely intended for this effect because he told the parable this way, is the moment when the father sees the boy a long way off and runs to greet him — not walks; he runs to greet him. “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). So, he saw, he felt, he ran, he embraced, he kissed. So, oh, let us — I want to say it to myself — let us keep that picture in our minds, not only as a picture of God’s heart, but to make our own hearts tender that way and eager that way.

6. God can raise the dead.

Sixth, the father describes the change in the boy’s life as a change from death to life. “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:24). This is encouraging because the father did not minimize the dreadfulness of the boy’s condition. The boy was dead. From a merely human standpoint, he was hopeless. So, don’t ever look upon the hardness, the indifference, even the bitterness or the cynicism of a prodigal and think, “That can’t change. This is never going to change.” Don’t think that way. It can. He was dead and he lives.

7. God invites both sons home.

And then, finally, seventh: Remember that this father in the parable of the prodigal son had two prodigals, not just one. When Jesus was eating with the tax collectors and sinners, there were two groups of lost people he had to deal with. One was the tax collectors and sinners, and the other was the scribes and Pharisees.

The tax collectors and sinners are represented in the parable by the prodigal son, and the scribes and Pharisees are represented by the older son who was angry. He was angry that the father was celebrating the return of the younger son. Life — he was angry at new life. This older brother, like the Pharisees, saw his relationship with the father in terms of earning privileges rather than enjoying a relationship. So, how would the father respond to this kind of wayward son, the second prodigal son? How would he respond?

Sometimes people say — and I heard this when I was in Germany, writing a dissertation on loving your enemies — “There’s no way that Jesus ever tried to woo the Pharisees. He only had negative things to say about the Pharisees. He never invited them to believe.” And I pointed out in my dissertation that that’s what’s going on here. Look at verse 28. The older son was angry, and he refused to go in and be a part of the celebration of life and salvation. And his father, just like with the younger son, came out and entreated — not commanded, not was angry — he entreated him. He had come out to meet the dissolute younger son. He came out and wooed and pleaded with the legalistic older son.

So, here’s my conclusion, for myself, for all of us: Let’s take heart for at least these seven reasons, and remember Jesus’s encouragement in chapter 18, just a few chapters later, that we should “always . . . pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1).