http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15406723/loving-praise-versus-lifting-burdens
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Why Does God Hide Himself from Christians?
Audio Transcript
Why does God hide himself from believers? It’s a question we have touched on, on the podcast, but we need to address it head-on. We do so today through a question sent to us from James, a listener in Toledo, Ohio.
“Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast. Way back in APJ 338, you said God sometimes chooses to withdraw from us his ‘manifest, experienced, known, tasted’ sweetness of his presence. But you also said that God never leaves or forsakes his people either. So God never forsakes his people, but he sometimes withdraws from them the sweetness of communion with him. He hides his face, as the psalmist says in about a dozen places.
“In that episode, you demonstrated conclusively why this dynamic is equally at work in the old covenant and new covenant. At the end of it, you said God has ‘his reasons for doing this,’ but that ‘maybe there would be another time for us to talk about that.’ That was eight years ago. I don’t know that you have addressed it since. Can you explain some reasons why God would intentionally hide his face from us?”
So important. Let me repeat the very, very crucial central statement that he made. He said this: “So God never forsakes his people, but he sometimes withdraws from them the sweetness of communion with him. He hides his face, as the psalmist says in about a dozen places.” His question is, Why would God do that to his own children?
God Hides His Face
First, let me make the case that he already accepts. He doesn’t need me to make the case. But my guess is some of our listeners are saying, “Really?” There is evidence in our very songs that we sing these days that there’s disagreement about this. For example, Edward Mote wrote this great hymn, which most of us would recognize, 150 years ago:
My hope is built on nothing lessThan Jesus Christ, my righteousness;I dare not trust the sweetest frame,But wholly lean on Jesus’s name.
On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;All other ground is sinking sand,All other ground is sinking sand.
When darkness veils his lovely face,I rest on his unchanging grace;In every high and stormy gale,My anchor holds within the veil.
That’s what he wrote: “When darkness veils his lovely face.” Then about a decade ago, a group (I won’t name them) adapted this hymn, and we sing it now, I think, under the title “Cornerstone.” And it goes like this:
My hope is built on nothing lessThan Jesus’s blood and righteousness.I dare not trust the sweetest frame,But wholly trust in Jesus’s name.
On Christ the solid Rock I stand,All other ground is sinking sand;All other ground is sinking sand.
When darkness seems to hide his face,I rest on his unchanging grace.In every high and stormy gale,My anchor holds within the veil.
So Edward Mote, who wrote the hymn, wrote, “When darkness veils his lovely face.” And the group thought they could improve on that and do better, and they say, “No, actually we are going to sing, ‘When darkness seems to hide his face,’” as if it doesn’t really happen. Well, there’s disagreement. That’s the least you can say: there’s disagreement about that.
Why would that be? My guess is that those who think darkness really doesn’t hide his face but only seems to hide his face would probably also reject William Cowper’s verse in his great hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious Way” — one of my favorite hymns. Here’s what he wrote:
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,But trust him for his grace;Behind a frowning providenceHe hides a smiling face.
Now, Cowper not only says that darkness hides God’s face, but that God hides God’s face. Behind a frowning providence, he — God — hides a smiling face, which is what the question is: Why would God do that?
He Disciplines the One He Loves
I think Cowper’s understanding is right in the way God relates to his people. God is never wrathful toward his forgiven, justified, redeemed, loved, secure children. Christ has absorbed all of God’s wrath, and we have passed out of death into life. We have moved beyond judgment because the death of Christ is our condemnation. We don’t bear it anymore. We have been transferred into the kingdom of his beloved Son. Therefore, God delights in us as his justified, forgiven children. But that delight does not exclude disapproval of behaviors and attitudes that don’t reflect the glory of the Father in his children, and it doesn’t exclude discipline of his children.
So Proverbs 3:12 says, “The Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.” That’s amazing! We reprove the very son in whom we delight. In the New Testament, the book of Hebrews quotes that very proverb in reference to the suffering of Christians and says,
Have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?
“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him.For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” (Hebrews 12:5–6)
“God delights in us as his justified, forgiven children. But that delight doesn’t exclude discipline.”
And that discipline sometimes includes seasons of spiritual darkness when God turns his face away — for example, when he turns his face away from answering our prayer, as in James 4:3: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
In other words, “I’m looking away from that prayer. Your attitude and your motives are so corrupt that I’m looking away from that sinful request.” That may feel like darkness. That may feel like a season of darkness, because it is — when his face turns away, there’s a cloud.
Why He Turns Away
So let me give three reasons why God may turn his face away from time to time and give us over to seasons of perplexity, confusion, and darkness.
1. To teach us the value of his presence.
He does it to teach us the value of his precious presence by withdrawing it for a season. In Ephesians 1:18, Paul prays for the Ephesians that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened to know God. He’s praying for Christians. He’s praying for Christians because the brightness and the light of God’s preciousness is not always as clear as it should be or as we want it to be.
So he asks that we would know God as we ought to know God — know the sight of his face as we ought to know the sight, with the eyes of the heart. He asks that fresh glimpses of the worth and beauty and greatness of God would be given to us and that we would cherish him more because of having lost sight for a season.
2. To show us our own weakness.
He does it to teach us our own weakness in holding fast to Christ and keeping a clear view of his face — our weakness to keep a clear view of his face — so that we are humbled and made to realize how utterly dependent we are on God to keep his face before our heart’s eyes. That’s why Paul’s praying. It’s God doing.
“God allows us to taste that former darkness so that we will come trembling back to the word, and prayer, and the cross.”
At the end of the book of Jude, Jude 24–25, Jude soars with the most beautiful doxology in the Bible, and all of it is because of how amazed he is that God and God alone can keep us from stumbling and present us before God’s face — God’s glorious face. So, I think from time to time he allows us to slip into darkness so that we realize how desperately dependent we are on his grace for seeing him, which Jude so powerfully celebrates.
3. To remind us of our great salvation.
Finally, I think he does this to remind us what it was like to be lost without Christ. In Ephesians 2:12, Paul commands us, “Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ.” He never wants us to forget what a wonder it is that God has revealed his beautiful face to us, removed separation, stepped in, lifted the veil, and made his face bright to us in the gospel.
So, from time to time he allows us to taste that former darkness so that we will come trembling back to the word, and prayer, and the cross, and lay hold on God in a fresh way and love our salvation more than ever.
So my prayer for all of you, all our friends who listen to these programs, is that when you walk through such a season, you would do what Isaiah 50:10 says: “Let him who walks in darkness and has no light trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God.” Because as Hosea 6:3 says, “His going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”
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Should We Envy Abraham? Why Christians Love the New Covenant
I can’t remember the preacher, but I remember the line: “Abraham would have traded places with us in a heartbeat.” It caught my attention because I so often read my Bible and wish I could have the experiences that Abraham had. Or Moses. Or Joshua. Definitely David.
But the preacher was right. In fact, he wasn’t saying anything different from what Jesus says to his disciples: “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Matthew 13:16–17). Now, in other words, really is better than then: better than Abraham’s experiences at Haran (Genesis 12:1–5), Moses’s at Sinai (Exodus 19), Joshua’s at Jericho (Joshua 6), or David’s in the Valley of Elah (1 Samuel 17). Now — the present chapter in God’s story — is better, and it’s better for all kinds of reasons.
Here I want to draw our attention to one often-overlooked reason. It’s found at the end of Hebrews, and it’s full of implications for how we read our Bibles — and whom we baptize.
Running with a Limp
Right at the end of the “Hall of Faith” in Hebrews 11, the pastor concludes his list of Old Testament heroes by telling us this: “All these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” (verses 39–40). We find the same idea in two other places in the chapter (verses 1–2, 13): the Old Testament faithful lived and died without receiving what God had promised them.
The promise in view is variously described as a “land” (verse 9), a “city” built by “God” (verse 10; see also verse 16), a “homeland” (verse 14), and a “better” and, indeed, “heavenly” country (verse 16). In other places, Hebrews calls this same place “the world to come” (2:5; 1:6), “a Sabbath rest” (4:9), “the inner place behind the curtain” (6:19; 9:11–12, 24), “the promised eternal inheritance” (9:15), “a better possession” (10:34), “Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (12:22 NET), “a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (12:28), and a “city that is to come” (13:14).
It’s a place the Old Testament faithful never reached. They didn’t reach it because God had planned “something better for us.” Or, to say it another way, God had decided “that apart from us they should not be made perfect” or fit to enter God’s presence. That’s what perfection means in Hebrews. It’s a fitness made possible by Jesus’s sacrifice (10:14), and it includes new and immediate effects upon the believer’s conscience (9:9, 14; 10:2, 22) and, one day, on his body too (see 11:35). It also gives believers new spiritual access to God now (4:16; also 4:3; 12:22–23), and bodily access to the heavenly city when Jesus returns (12:22; 13:14). It’s an extraordinary gift and one, Hebrews insists, that Old Testament believers, from Abel to Zechariah (Hebrews 11:4, 37), ran their race without.
“In the new covenant, God enables every member to keep covenant. He enables every member to persevere in faithfulness.”
The author couldn’t make his point more forcefully. When his friends asked whether it was possible to run the Christian race, they needed only to remember the “great cloud” of the Old Testament faithful, who lived and died full of faith (Hebrews 12:1 NET). These heroes were tempted in every way, just like we are, yet without giving up. Like us, they too ran their race through many dangers, toils, and snares. But, on top of all this, they also ran with a limp. They ran their race without the gift of perfection (11:39–40). Surely (and this is Hebrews’s point) if they could run and finish full of faith, so can we!
Three Lessons from Perfection
This brand-new gift of perfection makes our place in God’s story better and, at the same time, teaches us fresh lessons about how we should read and understand God’s written word, including the relationship between the covenants, the nature of Christian apostasy, and the proper subjects of Christian baptism.
1. Relationship Between the Covenants
According to Hebrews, Jesus’s perfection-bringing death inaugurated a new covenant (9:15–17, when properly translated). Hebrews calls this covenant “better” when comparing it with the old covenant that Moses inaugurated at Sinai (8:6; 9:18–22) and under which most of the faithful in Hebrews 11 lived (11:23–38).
It’s better because it’s “not like” the old covenant that God made with Israel and that Israel didn’t keep (8:8–9). Unlike the new covenant, the old covenant couldn’t guarantee its members’ faithfulness. It couldn’t keep itself from being broken or its members safe from its curses (3:11, 17–18). It had no power to ensure that its members would, like the heroes of Hebrews 11, live and die full of faith. It was good but, owing to these deficiencies, not good enough.
The new covenant’s new provisions, therefore, supply precisely what the old covenant lacked. God now puts his “laws into” his people’s “minds” and writes “them on their hearts” (8:10). In short, he enables his people’s obedience. In fact, he does this for each and every covenant member: “all” the members of God’s new covenant “know” God, from “least” to “greatest” (verse 11). The days of a believing remnant inside a hardened majority are forever ended. In this new covenant, God enables every member to keep covenant. He enables every member to persevere in faithfulness.
All of this, however, can be gifted to sinful people only because our thrice-holy God, in unfathomable love, finally and fully forgives his people’s sins through Jesus’s perfecting sacrifice (8:12; 10:14, 18).
Hebrews 11:39–40, therefore, teaches us that Jesus’s perfecting death inaugurated a covenant that is better than the old covenant precisely because it includes benefits never before experienced. None, in fact, could be experienced in earlier eras of God’s story, neither through God’s earlier covenants nor proleptically through the new, because “God had planned something better for us” (11:40 NIV).
To say it again, the Old Testament faithful were not perfected. The new covenant was not inaugurated, nor its better promises experienced, until Jesus died. This means that the new covenant is not simply a further revelation of the one covenant of grace, but a substantively new covenant, new in its revelatory content and in its soteriological provisions (1:1–3).
2. Nature of Christian Apostasy
The new covenant’s superiority implies that apostasy in the new-covenant era is substantively different from apostasy under the old covenant. While an old-covenant member might fail to “continue in” the covenant (and, sadly, many did; Hebrews 8:9), a new-covenant member cannot. It’s this very distinction — the unbreakable-ness of the covenant — that makes the new covenant better. Thus, the warnings against apostasy in Hebrews, which some in the author’s audience did not heed (10:25), refer to new-covenant experiences available to members and nonmembers alike (see 6:4–6 and 10:29). After all, the covenant is either better or breakable. There is not a third option.
3. Proper Subjects of Christian Baptism
Considering the inviolability of the new covenant and the connection Hebrews draws between faith, perfection, and covenant membership (3:6, 14; 10:14, 18, 22–23), Hebrews gives us no encouragement to treat non-professing individuals (those who do not profess faith in Christ) as covenant members. Rather, the (sad) reality of apostasy suggests that the visible new-covenant community will be phenomenologically mixed until Jesus returns, with real and false professors, while the superiority of the new covenant suggests the true covenant community will remain ontologically (and gloriously) unmixed.
To admit non-professing people into the visible (professing) community confuses these two realities. It fails to recognize the crucial difference between a professing member who claims to “know the Lord” and a non-professing member who doesn’t — and who therefore requires something that new-covenant membership itself specifically provides (8:11).
Our Place in God’s Story
What more shall I say? Time would fail me to tell of what Hebrews 11:39–40 teaches us about Levitical sacrifices or circumcision or regeneration or the intermediate state. Time and space fail already to give anything more than a cursory look at the three implications I’ve sketched above.
Still, what we’ve seen gives us more than enough reason to agree with Jesus (and the nameless preacher) about the goodness of our place in God’s story. We have even more reason to persevere in our race of faith as we await Jesus’s return, a perfected body, and life with God and in his city forever and ever.
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Sex, Money, Praise, Power — No! 1 Thessalonians 2:5–8, Part 1
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15387138/sex-money-praise-power-no
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