Written by Barry J. York |
Sunday, November 27, 2022
One place we need to renew our sense of the horizontal in worship is when the Bible is being read and preached. You are not there merely listening to it by yourself. You are to hear God’s Word not only for its personal benefit, but you are also to listen as a fellow member of the body of Christ. Each person is to “hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev. 2:7, emphasis added). Understanding this corporate dynamic affects how we listen to God’s Word.

When the minister calls you to worship on any given Lord’s Day, undoubtedly he seeks to draw your heart’s attention heavenward, as he should. He uses texts of Scripture to call you to praise the Lord and to shout joyfully to Him. As Paul told the church at Colossae, as those who “have been raised with Christ,” we are to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1). In worship, we are to heed his admonition when he says, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col. 3:2). Our worship is “vertical” as we glorify and commune with our triune God.

Yet, we must not miss the needed “horizontal” nature of worship as well. Setting our minds on things above, and not on earthly things, does not mean we are to ignore the others around us who are worshiping with us. In worship, we are not only to fulfill the great commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We are also to love our neighbor who is there with us in worship. As the congregation arrives on Sunday morning, it is gathering for corporate worship. Thus, we need to be sure that we are putting the corporate into our corporate worship! In looking up, we must also look around.
Obviously, we think of this before and after worship. Christians enjoy seeing their brothers and sisters in Christ, greeting them and catching up with them, whether in the sanctuary before the service or over a cup of coffee afterward. But what about during the service? It is especially during the service that we are to be mindful of one another.
Do the Scriptures encourage this horizontal dimension of worship? They most definitely do. For example, think through how, as we participate in the various elements in worship, each element encourages this viewpoint.
When we are called to worship, we are called not as individuals but as the body of Christ, a temple of living stones who together offer sacrifices to the Lord (1 Cor. 3:16; 1 Peter 2:4–5). Many of our calls to worship emphasize moving beyond a mere personal sense of worshiping God to this corporate aspect. Listen to a few of these admonitions.

I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together! (Ps. 34:1–3)
Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! (Ps. 95:1–2)
And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Heb. 10:24–25)

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The Pharisees loaded the Sabbath with untold stupid laws and turned it into a day of fear and misery. Jesus now recovers it. For he is the Lord of the Sabbath. He is the God of the seven days of creation. He was the one who created the world and who rested on the Seventh Day.

My good friend has a heart problem. Sometimes it races uncontrollably, and dangerously. He’s a very busy man, with lots of plates in the air. The doctor says he has to slow down: “There needs to be time each day when you end up saying to yourself, ‘What shall I do now?’” Times of boredom are highly recommended. Does he ever find such times? I doubt it.
Our pace of life is frantic, perhaps especially if you have some kids running around. And then there’s our mind. There’s a three-ring circus going on up there: action, anguish, anger, drama, dismay, debate, and more action. “When I lay me down to sleep” is exactly when the circus of the mind is unmasked, “with inward furies blasted.” It can take a while to find sleep, and when you wake in the night, it begins again.
Whenever do we find rest for our bodies and minds? Rest from our worries? Rest from our financial obligations and strains? Rest from relationship clouds and puzzles? Above all, rest from sin? From relentless nagging temptation? From failure? From guilt and shame? When will we be able to look at one another with a placid conscience? When will we be able to look full into the awful and holy face of God without flinching with the shame and guilt of a sin-stained soul?
Rest is right here. Right here in the first three verses of the second chapter of Genesis.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. (Gen. 2:1)

Moses pictures completed creation: light, firmament, verdant land, sun, moon, stars, birds, fishes, and the mighty creatures of the ocean deep, the land animals—domestic, wild, and swarming—as a mighty and splendid army, a great host arrayed before her general. And we, male and female in the image of God, are at the head of that array, made by God to enjoy, subdue, and govern it all for the mutual benefit of humanity and creation.
God finishes what he starts.
God was thus successful in his work. This is emphatic—both verses one and two begin in the original language with the verb “finished.”
How many times do we start something that we never finish: War and Peace, a home-project, learning German, or writing a piece of music? And we fail so often to complete far more important things: we pull out of a friendship, we give up on parenting, or even a marriage. Why do we fail? Sometimes because we lack the strength and ability: we thought we could write an EP, or build a greenhouse, but we just can’t. More often we get bored, or we simply lack the will to stick with what we promised to stick with. God set out to create the universe, with humanity as his leading image-bearers; and lacking neither the power, ability, or will, he completed his work.

And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Gen. 2:2-3)

Work is good.
God worked. Work is good. We were created to work. Work is not the result of the curse any more than childbirth is the result of the curse. It is the difficulty and frustration of work that came as part of the curse, just as it is the pain of childbirth—of bringing a child into a world of war and disease and evil—that was curse-caused.
The great goal of many in the West is retirement from work: endless summers of eggs Benedict, country drives, and barge tours down the Rhone. Work is painful and frustrating. Who does not want to be freed from that? But our Maker works (“My Father is always at his work to this very day,” John 5:17), and he made us to work. Work is good, and it is sin to want to have no work and responsibility. To get old and frail in body and mind, where we can no longer do as much work, is a sadness. We should look forward to those new bodies that are promised to Christ’s people, so that we can get back to work! What we need is not the absence of work, but the redemption of work.
Yet on the Seventh Day of creation week, God stopped working, and rested. Work is good, yet work is not an end itself. It is done to make something good, to achieve something worthy, and then after completion there is rest and the enjoyment of what is made. It is very bold of Moses to say that “God rested,” and even to say that he was “refreshed” on that day (Exod. 31:17). The idolatrous mind, always hankering to belittle God, instinctively seizes at his phrase: “Who is this god who is so wearied by his exertions that he needs to rest? Is he really almighty and self-sufficient?” Genesis 2 doesn’t say that a tired god needed to stop. This is God’s way: he works, and then he ceases from work and rests.
God’s way: work, and then rest.
This is likewise to be the way of God’s image-bearers. For God “blessed the seventh day, and made it holy.” When God blesses, he turns his face towards someone or something, communicates his goodness to that thing, and bestows function. (Thus, God had blessed the birds and fishes, land-animals, and humanity [Gen. 1:22, 28].) The Seventh Day alone is blessed, to reflect the face of God and all his goodness. The Seventh Day will carry a special function: God makes it holy—distinct, life-imparting, and good.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Daily, mysteriously, the Holy Spirit uses the ministry of the Word and the prayers of believing parents to bring baptized covenant children to new life and true faith. More than a few covenant children never remember coming to faith because they have always believed. 

Jackson writes to ask, “As it relates to continuity with the Abrahamic covenant, for example, Abraham and his children get circumcised, therfore in the new administration, Jesus and his children (spiritual) get baptized. Do you think that someone can retain their Reformed confession of the WSC and still be Baptist if they use that kind of reasoning?”
The essence of the question is the nature of the continuity of between the new administration of the covenant of grace and the Abrahamic administration of the covenant of grace. Under Abraham the promise was to believers and to their children and it included the external administration of the sign of the covenant to believers and to their children. Genesis 17:1–14 says:
When Abram was ninety-nine years old the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.”
And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. You shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. Every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring, both he who is born in your house and he who is bought with your money, shall surely be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (ESV).
There are two aspects to the promise as it was articulated in Genesis 17: children and the gentile nations. In connection with this expression of the promise (see also Gen ch. 12 and 15) Yahweh changes Abram’s name to Abraham. He will be the father of a multitude of nations. In v. 9 Yahweh articulates the second aspect of the promise, to be Abraham’s God and a God to his children.
Yahweh gave a sign and seal of the promise: circumcision. It was a bloody, typological sign pointing forward to the death of Christ (Col 2:11–12) and he commanded that the sign be applied both to Abraham the believer (Gen 15:6) and to his sons. The external administration of the covenant of grace under Abraham included both believers and children. This is significant for New Covenant believers because Paul invokes the Abraham promise as the pattern for the New Covenant:
For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith. For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.
That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist (Rom 4:13–17; ESV).
Abraham is the father of all Christians, both Jew and Gentile. Abraham believed before he was circumcised, when he was a Gentile and thus he is the father of all Gentile Christians, and he believed when he was circumcised and thus is the father of all Jewish Christians.
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