http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16095937/sleep-beneath-his-promises
On some nights, as the lights go off and the house grows quiet, a restful hush seems to descend on everything around us — but not on us. We lie on our bed like Gideon’s fleece, the only dry spot in a world bedewed with sleep.
A thousand thoughts may keep us awake when all around us rests. Thoughts of work unfinished and questions unanswered. Thoughts of living sorrows and dead comforts. Thoughts of last day’s regrets and next day’s needs.
Falling asleep may seem simple enough. “All it takes,” writes sleep researcher Nancy Hamilton, “is a tired body and a quiet mind” (The Depression Cure, 207). Yet the second half of that equation sometimes feels like a wish beyond reach. We might sooner touch the moon.
Our Lord “gives to his beloved sleep,” Solomon assures us (Psalm 127:2). But on nights such as these, we can hold the gift in helpless hands, wondering how to unwrap it.
Calm and Quiet Mind
The psalmists knew just how easily cares, sorrows, and mysterious causes could chase the sleep from their eyes. They, like us, had lain for long hours on their beds, thoughts churning (Psalm 77:1–3). They had watched many moons roll slowly across the sky (Psalm 22:2). They knew that sometimes, for good and kind reasons, the God who gives to his beloved sleep also takes from his beloved sleep.
And yet, Solomon and David and the other psalmists also knew that sleep really was possible, even on the most unlikely nights. Even when hunted in the wilderness (Psalm 3:5), or sunk down in sorrow (Psalm 42:8), or consumed with thoughts of life’s half-finished buildings (Psalm 127:1–2), they had experienced the wonder of laying their cares before their God, and laying themselves down to sleep. The psalmists knew that a quiet mind could be theirs, even when a quiet life was not.
No doubt, a quiet mind comes, in part, from simple wisdom: if we drink coffee in the late afternoon, or try to sleep in the afterglow of our smartphones, we should not be surprised to find ourselves still awake at midnight. But ultimately, the Psalms remind us that a quiet mind comes from the hand of our sleep-giving God, who nightly draws near to our beds as the Lord who is our shield, our shepherd, our comfort, our life.
The Lord Is Your Shield
I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. (Psalm 3:5)
The David of Psalm 3 had every reason to be anxious, every reason to lie down on a bed of cares. Chased from Jerusalem by a treacherous son, he now ran through the wilderness, hunted like a beast (Psalm 3:1–2). I can scarcely imagine a scenario less hospitable to sleep. Yet sleep David did, and apparently without much trouble: “I lay down and slept,” he says (Psalm 3:5). But how?
David’s words just before these shed particularly helpful light on the faith that sent him to sleep:
I cried aloud to the Lord,
and he answered me from his holy hill. (Psalm 3:4)
David, king of Israel, was used to reigning on the holy hill of Jerusalem. He once sat atop that hill with tremendous authority, royal power. Yet David knows that even when his own throne sits empty, or occupied by a rebel son, God’s throne is always and ever full. David didn’t need to reign on his throne in order to sleep; he just needed God to reign on his. If only God was on his holy hill — his character sure, his covenant firm — then David could sleep in the wilderness.
“Our cares may be many and close; our God is mighty and closer.”
We may lie down tonight in some wilderness of helplessness, hunted by cares far beyond our control. We may feel utterly vulnerable before some dark and brooding uncertainty — some coming diagnosis, some job insecurity, some relational conflict with much at stake. But even then, our God still sits with crown and scepter, his holy hill untouched. He is, by night, “a shield about me,” and by morning, “the lifter of my head” (Psalm 3:3). Our cares may be many and close; our God is mighty and closer.
The Lord Is Your Shepherd
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures. (Psalm 23:1–2)
In his helpful little book And So to Bed . . ., Adrian Reynolds notes that sheep lie down for only one reason: to rest or sleep (35). Picture, then, those familiar green pastures of Psalm 23 dotted with mounds of dozing wool, at rest beneath a shepherd whose faithful care assures them, “I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1).
How many restless nights find their source in the deep-down fear that we shall, in fact, want — that the new morning will not bring new mercies, that tomorrow’s bread will not come? How often does our lonely ruminating suggest that we do not trust the Lord to be our shepherd? How strange and sad it would be to see a sheep anxious and fearful beside the rod and staff, bleating as if it walked alone. Yet so I often am.
On such nights, we could hardly ask for a better bedtime confession than “I shall not want” — nor for a better assurance of that truth than “the Lord is my shepherd.” Especially when tomorrow seems filled with daunting needs, with wants beyond the strength of sheep, these words may become the staff that leads us to green pastures, the shepherd’s hand that lays us down.
If the Lord really is our shepherd, then our wants do not require a worried and wakeful heart. He can do far more in our sleeping than we can do in our waking. And whatever needs tomorrow holds, his provision will prove equal to the task.
The Lord Is Your Comfort
He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. (Psalm 147:4)
Among the many kinds of restlessness the psalmists bring to their beds, the restlessness of sorrow may be the most common. Throughout the Psalms, we read of midnight weepers (Psalm 30:5), of wakeful, comfortless souls (Psalm 77:1–2), of saints whose tears stain their sheets (Psalm 6:6). Sorrow often makes for a sleepless heart.
In such moments, God’s voice in creation joins his voice in Scripture to speak comfort over our pain. Turn, then, and look out your window. Can you see a hundred burning stars — and imagine beyond them billions more? Your God “determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names” (Psalm 147:4). Such a thought might, at first, make us feel smaller than ever, our broken hearts too humble for God’s notice. But the psalmist draws the opposite application: if God names the very stars — these background props of creation — then he has certainly not lost sight of his dear people’s sorrows (Psalm 147:3; Isaiah 40:26–27).
“As surely as God knows the name of every star, he knows our hidden sorrows, our unseen aches.”
God’s exhaustive awareness of heaven’s hosts is meant to assure us not of our insignificance, but of his attention — and his attention particularly to our pains: “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds,” the psalmist says (Psalm 147:3). As surely as he knows the name of every star, he knows our hidden sorrows, our unseen aches. And he is, for all his people, the great Healer of hearts and Binder of wounds.
Such a promise, shining from every star above, can become the song that sends us to sleep.
The Lord Is Your Life
As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness. (Psalm 17:15)
Someday, if Jesus should tarry, we will shut our eyes one final time, never to awake again in this world. The psalmists keenly felt the coming of this last sleep. But they were also given glimpses, however small, of something past this sleep. When David sings of a waking that will show him “your face . . . your likeness,” he sings of a waking beyond this world, a morning only heaven could make (see also Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2).
It was a precious glimpse, but still just a glimpse. You and I see more. For David’s Son has now come, bringing a dawn beyond death’s night. For two days he lay down in the tomb, and then on the third, he woke. The apostle Paul draws the line between Jesus’s great and final sleep and ours:
God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. (1 Thessalonians 5:9–10)
As we go to sleep tonight, our Lord’s hands are ready to hold us safe. And in the hollow of his hands is a quiet that can calm the loudest mind, waking or sleeping, living or dying. Because even if this sleep should be our last, our eyes will open once again — not now upon the face of spouse or children, but upon the face of him who for ten thousand nights has been our shield, our shepherd, our comfort, and now our everlasting life.
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Did Jesus Descend into Hell? Ephesians 4:7–10, Part 3
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14740468/did-jesus-descend-into-hell
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‘Paedobaptism Hath None’ Why Harvard’s First President Resigned
On paper, Henry Dunster (1609–1659) was the ideal choice to become the first president of America’s first college. As a “learned Orientalist,” he was fluent in several languages.1 Educated at Cambridge under English divines like John Preston and Thomas Goodwin, he was a Puritan of Puritans. When Dunster arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640 as the inaugural president of Harvard, he envisioned a “school of the prophets” in New England modeled after the Old.
His pastor Thomas Shepard, one of the leading voices against Anne Hutchinson in her heresy trial just two years earlier, called Dunster “a man pious, painful, and fit to teach, and very fit to lay the foundations of the domestic affairs of the College; whom God hath much honored and blessed.”2 Almost immediately after landing in the New World, Dunster began laying those foundations. The course requirements he established in rhetoric, divinity, and languages remained relatively unchanged for most of the seventeenth century.3 With such a pivotal role in the Puritan experiment, Dunster helped determine the future of America itself.
Therefore, when Dunster withheld his fourth child from baptism at Cambridge Church in the winter of 1653, it made news. The man entrusted with the theological education of New England’s ministers had deprived his own child of the sacred “seal of the covenant.” One of the most enlightened, influential figures in colonial America had become, in the words of Cotton Mather, “entangle[d] in the snares of Anabaptism.”4
In a so-called “godly commonwealth” where church and state were intertwined, Dunster’s decision was not just shocking; it was potentially cataclysmic. Withholding an infant from baptism was subversive to the public order. Such radical views might have been acceptable in Rhode Island or even in Plymouth Colony, but not in Massachusetts Bay. In the land of the Puritans, Dunster’s action was equivalent to the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary sprinkling his newborn — if credobaptism were state law.
Brave Affiliation
Indeed, to publicly affiliate with Baptists in seventeenth-century New England was a bold, even brave, endeavor. In 1635, Roger Williams had been banished to the colony of Rhode Island for espousing Baptist views. In 1651, just two years before Dunster decided to keep his child from baptism, a man named Obadiah Holmes from the town of Lynn was tied to a whipping post in Boston Common and lashed thirty times for baptizing several people. The imprisonment of Holmes and fellow Baptists John Clarke and John Crandall in Boston was a turning point for Dunster.
Although he had never been immersed himself, Dunster had always been somewhat skeptical about infant baptism. When he joined the church at Cambridge twelve years earlier, he confessed that he saw biblical evidence for immersion. Nevertheless, he told the church that as “there was something for sprinkling in the Scriptures, he should not be offended when [it] was used.”5 Dunster’s conscience was ultimately tied to the Bible. However, the Puritan treatment of Baptists opened his eyes anew to the ills of state-sponsored religion.
School officials rushed to quiet their beloved president. If Dunster could keep silent about his objections to infant baptism, Harvard would look the other way. However, as any Puritan worth his salt, Dunster could not approve of something he could not find in the Bible. Not long after withdrawing his child from baptism, the usually mild-mannered Dunster decided that he had been silent long enough. To declare his views, and to avoid the appearance that he had been muzzled with the threat of being fired, he chose the most public space in New England society: the church.
‘Paedobaptism Hath None’
According to Baptist Isaac Backus, Dunster “boldly preached against infant baptism, and for believers’ baptism, in the pulpit at Cambridge in 1653, the year after Messrs. Clarke, Holmes and Crandal were imprisoned at Boston[.]”6 In the sermon, Dunster took aim at any form of baptism predicated on someone else’s faith. In one of Dunster’s manuscripts written around the same time, he wrote,
If parents’ church-membership makes their children members, then John admitted makes his first-born a church member; excommunicated for 7 years makes suppose 4 children non-members, restored in ye 9th yeare makes his 6th child a member. Show me where Christ ever indented such a covenant.7
When Dunster was summoned before a conference of ministers and elders to defend his views, his thesis was very simple: Soli visibiliter fideles sunt baptizendi (“Only visible believers should be baptized”).
For Dunster, the question was about biblical authority. “All instituted gospel worship hath some express word of Scripture,” he insisted. “But paedobaptism hath none.” Drawing upon the Puritan understanding of salvation, he also noted, “If we be engrafted into Christ by personal faith, then not by parental.”8 Baptism was more than an issue of church polity; it had potentially eternal consequences. As Dunster later articulated in a letter, the true danger of infant baptism was its potential to deprive sinners of their “due consolation from Christ and dutiful obligation to Christ.”9
The conference was not moved. In their view, the president had fallen into a grave “mistake.” To make matters worse, Dunster was brought before the General Court of Massachusetts. Due to his significant influence over the youth of the colony, his views on baptism became a civil matter. He was deemed “unsound in the faith.” But Dunster would not change course. Evidently, he cared more about his faithfulness to the Bible than his job. He later wrote to the Middlesex County Court, “I conceived then, and so do still, that I spake the truth in the feare of God, and dare not deny the same or go from it untill the Lord otherwise teach me.”10
Humble Resignation
In fact, Dunster had one more “Here I Stand” moment. In a desperate attempt to retain their president, Harvard informed Dunster that he could remain at his post as long as he refrained from “imposing” his views upon others. However, this too was not enough to change his mind. Dunster officially submitted his resignation and once again preached at Cambridge Church against infant baptism! Of his five points, his chief point was that “the subjects of Baptisme were visible pennitent believers.” His last point was a warning and a foreshadowing of the so-called “Halfway Covenant” that would evoke the disdain of later Puritans like Jonathan Edwards: “That there were such corruptions stealing into the Church, which every faithful Christian ought to beare witnes against.”11
Dunster resigned his post at Harvard with such humility and dignity that some historians have marveled at the lack of “apparent controversy” in the entire episode.12 The disgraced clergyman did not instigate a debate in the public square, and Harvard did much to cover up the embarrassment. Ironically, for Dunster’s replacement, Harvard chose Charles Chauncy, another Congregationalist who believed in immersion. However, unlike Dunster, Chauncy agreed to keep tight-lipped about his views.
As a pariah in Puritan society and receiving little support from Harvard for his family, Dunster moved to the more tolerant neighbor colony of Plymouth, where he took up a ministry position at the Independent church in Scituate, only 28 miles from Boston. As his biographer (and Baptist president) Jeremiah Chaplin notes,
He probably never identified himself with a Baptist church, as indeed in his lifetime there was scarcely an opportunity of doing. We judge that he was content, under the circumstances, to remain in fellowship with his Independent brethren so long as they did not interfere with his liberty of conscience.13
Friend of the Baptists
Whether or not Dunster was a Baptist or simply baptistic is difficult to say.14 The evidence suggests that he was never immersed himself and was never excommunicated from the church in Cambridge.15 Nevertheless, Baptists on both sides of the Atlantic were fond of the man who had defied the Puritan establishment.
Thomas Gould, the first pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston, called Dunster his friend, leading the historian Chaplin to speculate whether Dunster would have joined First Baptist if he had been alive when it was established in 1665 (Dunster passed away in 1659).16 In July of 1656, Dunster also received a letter from Irish Baptists inviting him to move his family to Ireland and “have free liberty of your conscience.”17 In the end, Dunster stayed in Plymouth, symbolizing his warm relations with Congregationalists and Baptists alike.
This combination of conviction and conciliatory ministry was his legacy. Even Cotton Mather, who had little affection for Roger Williams, extolled Dunster for bearing “his part in everlasting celestial hallelujahs.” “If,” Mather wrote, “unto the Christian, while singing of psalms on earth, Chrysostom could well say, ‘Those art in a consort with angels!’ how much more may that now be said of our Dunster.”18
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Poured Out for Others: The Meaning of a Sacrificial Life
Leviticus is the book where many Bible-reading plans go to die. Those who begin well in Genesis and Exodus find themselves, like the people of Israel, stumbling through the wilderness in Leviticus and Numbers, desperate to find their way to the story of David or the letters of Paul. For many, they stumble because they haven’t been taught the ABCs of the sacrificial system. The instructions about arranging animal parts, sprinkling blood, and bodily emissions are incomprehensible until they learn the basic grammar of the Levitical world.
Once we’ve grasped some of the basics, however, we find that we’re not only able to read Leviticus with more understanding; we’re also able to see depths in the rest of Scripture, including Paul’s letters, that were hidden before. Consider the following sentences, tucked away in his exhortation to the Philippians to do all that they do without grumbling or complaining:
Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me. (Philippians 2:17–18)
The language here is Levitical and layered. We are invited to consider the Christian life, and ministry to others, through the lens of Leviticus. Paul assumes that his readers would be familiar with the various sacrifices and offerings, and therefore able to comprehend the aim of his ministry and the aim of their lives.
All of Me to All of You
Paul references two offerings — the drink offering and the sacrificial offering (literally, “the sacrifice and service of your faith”). The latter is most likely a reference to the ascension offering, sometimes called “the whole burnt offering.”
“Every Christian is now a living ascension offering, daily presenting ourselves to God through faith in Christ.”
The whole burnt offering is the baseline offering in the Old Testament, in which the worshiper lays hands on the unblemished animal so that the spotless animal now represents the sinful worshiper. The animal is killed, its blood drained and then sprinkled on the altar by the priest. After this, the priest arranges the dismembered body parts on the altar, with a particular focus on the head and the fat portions. Finally, the priest burns up the whole animal so that the animal, as the representative of the worshiper, ascends to God in the smoke as a pleasing aroma.
This offering is a fitting image of total surrender, of our heartfelt desire to draw near to the living and holy God despite our sinfulness. In it, the worshiper confesses, in essence, “All of me to all of you, O God.” Paul draws out this element of the sacrificial system in Romans 12:1–2:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
In the new covenant, rather than offering an animal through fire and smoke, we offer ourselves — our bodies and our minds — as our spiritual service and worship to God. We present the members of our bodies to God as his instruments, and we submit our minds and hearts to the truth of his word. And as Paul makes clear in Philippians, we do all of this by faith. Every Christian is now a living ascension offering, daily presenting ourselves to God through faith in Christ.
And, of course, the deepest reason that we are now able to make this spiritual offering of our bodies and minds is that Christ has fulfilled the Levitical sacrificial system by offering himself on the cross. Christ entered the heavenly holy place, “not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12). Christ offered a better sacrifice than bulls and goats, putting away sin once for all by the sacrifice of himself (Hebrews 9:26). We offer ourselves totally to God only on the basis of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice.
Poured Out for Their Sacrifice
Remember, however, that Philippians 2 mentions a second offering with which the apostle identifies both himself and his ministry: “Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering . . .” Again, with the ABCs of Leviticus in hand, we recall that alongside the primary ascension offering were also secondary offerings such as the tribute or grain offering, representing the works and labor of the worshiper. If the ascension offering is the main course, the tribute offering is the side dish.
In the book of Numbers, we learn that once Israel entered the Promised Land, they were to offer not only grain offerings but also drink offerings. They were to pour out wine on the altar, along with the grain. And here’s a crucial point: according to Numbers 15, every ascension offering made in the Promised Land was to be accompanied by a grain offering and a drink offering. Every cheeseburger came with fries and a drink.
So, what does that have to do with Philippians? Paul says that each of the Philippians is being offered as a living sacrifice, as an ascension offering. And his labor for their joy and faith is the drink offering on the side. He’s being poured out so that they can be offered up. And so, he’s willing to be poured out, all the way to the bottom, that is, to death.
Isn’t this a wonderful, biblical, Levitical picture of the church and the Christian life? We are all called to offer ourselves wholly to God. “All of me to all of you, O God, because of Jesus.” Total surrender. Each of us is an ascension offering, daily giving ourselves to God, renewing our minds by his truth, and presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice. This is our spiritual worship.
Following the apostle’s example, though, each of us is also called to be a drink offering for others. We’re called to be poured out as a glorifying accompaniment to their lives of sacrificial service. Like Paul, we labor and run and work and give so that others can be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. We pour ourselves out so that they can offer themselves up.
Offering One Another to God
This Levitical background shapes our vision of the Christian life and ministry to others. For instance, consider how this vision of Christian service reorients our labor to shepherd our children. To begin, we are not fundamentally asking them to offer their obedience to us; we’re aiming at a living sacrifice and service to God by faith. When we exhort them to not grumble and complain, but instead to offer cheerful, happy, and full obedience, we are calling them to gladly say, “All of me for all of you, O God, through Jesus Christ your Son.”
Or consider how it shapes our prayers. When Paul says that he is being poured out as a drink offering, this includes the prayers that he offered for the Philippians at the beginning of his letter.
It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God. (Philippians 1:9–11)
Abounding love, growing discernment, wise approval of what is good and right in any circumstance — this is a Godward life. If God answers this prayer, these people will be pure and blameless, living sacrifices filled with his righteousness, and fully pleasing to him. And behind such a Godward life of spiritual worship lie the prayers and labors of the apostle, graciously assisting and serving the full and complete offering of God’s people to God.
And all of this is done with joy. When Paul pours himself out in prayer and service, even unto death, he does so with indomitable joy. And he invites the Philippians to join him in that joy. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4).
For Paul, living is Christ, dying is gain, and therefore, his labor for the progress and joy of the Philippians’ faith is a deeply happy one. He gladly spends and is spent for their souls, pouring himself out as a drink offering, to help bring them nearer to God. Through his written words, he still does the same for us. And now we share in the joy of pouring out ourselves for others.
