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When God makes a vow we have no reason to ever doubt His word. It is sure and without fail. That’s really what perseverance is all about. The deep knowledge that when the Lord has elected us before the foundation of the world to be His covenant people, He has fashioned a vessel of mercy to carry about in it the righteousness of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. It’s such a gift that is beyond compare.
Over the past five months we’ve been walking through T.U.L.I.P. on Sunday nights at Bethany. Now, for those of you who may not know what that means it is an acrostic which spells out some of the basics of the Reformed faith. Those things that we believe about our redemption purchased by Christ. How we came to be in need of it, and the way that God has provided an answer for it. As an aside we’d love for you to join our merry little band on the Lord’s Day evening for this time of growing in faith together through the fellowship of the saints. One of the benefits of that second service is that it allows us to close the Sabbath with a word of reminder of God’s grace and love for His people, a booster if you will to get us ready for the week that is to come. But we’re not going to talk specifically about evening praise in this morning’s prayer and worship help. I want to go back to that whole T.U.L.I.P. thing for a second.
The “P” is what we are on now, and it represents the Perseverance of the Saints. First of all I am thankful for the little red squiggly line that appears in Microsoft Word, because for reasons unknown to me the word Perseverance is in the list of words, like pharaoh or irregular that I misspell all the time. I guess I just need to persevere until I get it right. But seriously, for the Christian outside of God’s sovereign election, Jesus’s atoning death for dead sinners, and the Lord’s gracious grant of faith the reality is nothing is more important for the believer than to be reminded that when we are told that our Redeemer has provided eternal life for His people we are to understand that the word eternal means what it says.
When Jehovah makes a promise we have the assurance that He will do it. Part of the witness of the Book of Hosea is to illustrate this truth. In the third chapter of that portion of Holy Scripture we see the prophet say, “And I said to her, ‘You shall stay with me many days; you shall not play the harlot, nor shall you have a man—so, too, will I be toward you.’” There is a clear exposition of what we mean when we talk about the doctrine of perseverance. Remember the situation in Hosea. He has taken Gomer, a loose woman, a prostitute, to be his lawfully wedded wife. She is depraved, a sinner, ungodly, but he has taken her on as his own flesh and blood, in accordance with Genesis 2 and Matthew 19.
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Nehushtan
God commands Moses to lift up this symbol and if anyone would simply look to the symbol, then they would live. And this was not lost on Jesus. In John 3:14 and 15 (the setup to John 3:16), He says, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” He understood that this was a shadow that was pointing to Himself.
He removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah. And he broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it (it was called Nehushtan).
2 Kings 18:4
Did you know that it’s easy to make idols. Really anything will do. Money, status, jobs, etc… God’s word tells us that presumption and covetousness are like idolatry (Col 3:5, 1 Sam 15:23), and that we should, “flee from idolatry” (1 Cor 10:4). God expressly forbids idolatry in all its forms in the Ten Commandments. The Heidelberg Catechism defines idolatry as “having or inventing something in which one trusts in place of or alongside of the only true God, who has revealed himself in the Word.” John Calvin said that our hearts are idol factories, and I can believe it. We are often tempted to push God to the side in order to trust and be satisfied in something else.
But something about the verse at the top of this page strikes me in a different way about idolatry. Something that might not be obvious at first glance. Idols can be overtly evil, but did you know that even good things can become idols? Did you know that even things that are meant to be pictures of Christ can be turned into idols? This is where Nehushtan comes in.
Nehushtan was the name that the people of Israel had given to the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness.
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Gender Confusion and the PCA
Earlier this month, the SJC’s ruling was sent to the parties. TE Stephen O’Neill was one of the faithful elders who helped present the case of RPR before the SJC and he joined the podcast to discuss the ruling of the General Assembly in this matter. The SJC is to be commended for its work on this case. The SJC clearly performed a thorough analysis of what MNY presbytery has both done and left undone. The Commission expressed awareness of steps taken already by MNY presbytery to correct the delinquencies in this matter. But the SJC also noted what the MNY presbytery has done so far is “clearly inadequate.”
On “Reformation Sunday” in 2021 a priestess in The Episcopal Church took the pulpit at Trinity PCA in Rye, New York where Craig Higgins serves as senior pastor. The lady paused after reading a portion of Scripture and promising to return to read the rest of the pericope at the end of her “teaching,” she said with a smile.
She went on “teaching” for quite some time. She talked about sin and the grace of God, she warned about self-righteousness and resentment, she asserted American Christians should pay more attention to the teachings of the “Calvinist theologian Karl Barth,” lamenting that Barth’s theology has not caught on in American Churches, and she extolled the freedom that is found in Christ alone to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
News of what had taken place at Trinity PCA in Rye, NY scandalized many in the PCA.
When a ruling elder from another presbytery raised questions as to how such a thing could be done in a PCA Congregation, the Metro New York Presbytery (MNY) investigated. The representatives of the Session and TE Higgins asserted they take no exceptions to the relevant portions of the standards related to whether a woman may preach in public worship. The presbytery then closed the investigation without finding any basis for charges.
When the Review of Presbytery Records Committee (RPR) of General Assembly examined the Minutes of MNY on this matter, many members of RPR were puzzled as to how MNY arrived at its conclusions. Accordingly and with only one dissenting vote, RPR recommended the matter be referred to the General Assembly’s Standing Judicial Commission, since there appeared to be particularly glaring violations of the PCA Constitution in this case.
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Trusting Through Trials and Tragedies
If God can hold all the waters of the earth in the hollow of his hand, if he can move the mighty mountain ranges on a scale like a toy to weigh them, then he is certainly able to help us through our trials. So as we begin this new year and face whatever trials may lie ahead, let’s wait confidently on the Lord. His strength alone can carry us on wings like eagles through every storm.
Each year, for some reason, we buy into the belief that next year will be different. As December concludes, we have high hopes that a change in the calendar will end the struggles and hardships that we are facing. However, as the new year dawns, it usually doesn’t take long for such happy hopes to be dashed to pieces by the less-than-romantic reality before us.
For my family, the first blow came in February with the unexpected loss of my brother-in-law. One minute he was completing his normal duties at work, the next minute he was unexplainably unconscious on the floor, leaving behind my sister and two young children. Then, in July, my granny passed away. It wasn’t as unexpected, but the loss still hurts. It has been a recurring theme in my life this past year: Death deals his blows while I cower in the corner longing for Resurrection Day.
Hope When Love Hurts
God has ingrained in us a desire for authentic and meaningful relationships. It’s therefore no surprise that we find great joy in living life deeply with those in our family, church, and community. In these relationships we enjoy lots of laughs, make lots of memories, and always have a story to tell. No doubt, the deeper we love, the more we enjoy other people. But, there’s also a greater potential for pain. Losing someone we love dearly is heartbreaking. Traversing such painful times can often leave us desperately searching for hope and strength to sustain us.
As believers, we know our hope is always in the Lord, yet it’s sometimes difficult to feel it during a season of hardship. It’s often a battle to let the propositional truths we know to be true sink down into the depths of our heart and stir our affections. It’s a continual fight to soak in the hope-filled truths of our majestic God, who alone encourages and sustains us, yet Isaiah 40 is an encouraging chapter to remind us of the greatness of God.
The Majesty of God
Isaiah 40 clearly demonstrates God’s majesty. For example, it teaches us that God holds the waters of this world in the hollow of his hand (v. 12). Imagine all the waters of every ocean, river, stream, and pond being held in God’s hand! We’re told, too, that he names each star. We can’t even count the stars, but God knows them all by name. And, because he is great in power, not a single star goes missing (vv. 25–26).
If God so cares for the stars, how will he not much more care for his people.
In verse 27, God’s people ask two questions of him that most of us can relate to: Is my way hidden from God (does God see me)? Has my way been disregarded by God (has he abandoned me)? In the midst of hardship, we, too, might find ourselves asking these things of God. I am thankful for how these questions are answered in verses 28–31.
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