A few months back, considering the heightened level of contention among some American Christians in recent years, I stumbled upon this golden nugget of pastoral wisdom from Richard Sibbes, the English Puritan pastor from four hundred years ago:

It were a good strife amongst Christians, one to labor to give no offense, and the other to labor to take none. The best men are severe to themselves, tender over others. (The Bruised Reed, 47)

Sibbes was exhorting his Christian brothers and sisters during a terribly contentious historical moment, when professing Christians in England were saying and doing appalling things to one another. And it seems to me that we would be wise to heed Sibbes’s counsel, and do our part to contribute to the collective public reputation Jesus desires for us: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

We all know from Scripture, however, that there are times when faithful love requires us to speak hard, even sharp, wounding words (Proverbs 27:6). And we all know that those on the receiving end of our hard, wounding words may, and often do, find them offensive. So, if we embrace Sibbes’s biblical principle that, when possible, we all, for the sake of love, should labor to give and take no offense, what principle should guide us for the (hopefully) rare exceptions when we must, for the sake of love, risk offending someone with our words?

“There are times when faithful love requires us to speak hard, even sharp, wounding words to someone.”

Well, not surprisingly, Sibbes has something very helpful to say about this as well. But first, I need to provide the biblical context from which Sibbes draws his principle.

Jesus on the Offensive

It was during the last week of Jesus’s earthly life, just days before his crucifixion. There had been numerous tense verbal exchanges between Jesus and the religious leaders, as the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees all tried to get Jesus to incriminate himself with his words — and all failed. So, they gave up that strategy (Matthew 22:46).

And then Jesus laid into them, delivering seven prophetic, scathing “woes” to the scribes and Pharisees, requiring 36 of 39 verses in Matthew 23 to record. Here are a few choice excerpts:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. (Matthew 23:13)

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. (Matthew 23:15)

You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! (Matthew 23:24)

You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. (Matthew 23:27)

You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell? (Matthew 23:33)

This is Jesus at his most offensive — at least we would have thought so, had we been scribes or Pharisees back then.

But this raises an important question: Just because most of the scribes and Pharisees would have taken offense at Jesus’s words, does that mean he was truly being offensive? The distinction may seem small, but answering the question illuminates when our own love requires hard words — and what our aim in those hard words should be.

To answer, we need to briefly look at how the New Testament defines an offense. (Then I promise I’ll share that other gold nugget from Sibbes.)

No Offense?

Let’s start by tackling one of the most straightforward statements on offense in the New Testament: “Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32). Just on the face of this phrase, it looks like Jesus broke a Spirit-inspired command. But these few words don’t tell the whole story. We need to examine their context to understand what Paul specifically means when he says to “give no offense.”

He makes this statement after spending three chapters instructing the Corinthians to “take care” that they not exercise their Christian freedoms (like eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols) in a way that “somehow become[s] a stumbling block to the weak,” thereby destroying another’s faith (1 Corinthians 8:9). And then, as examples of forgoing personal freedoms for the sake of love, Paul describes three ways he and Barnabas had set aside their apostolic “rights”:

They were careful not to offend others by what they ate or drank (1 Corinthians 9:4).
They refrained from getting married so as to maintain undivided devotion to the Lord (1 Corinthians 7:35; 9:5).
They made no demands on the Corinthian church to provide them financial and material ministry support, even though they had brought the gospel to the Corinthians at great cost to themselves (1 Corinthians 9:6–12).

And why did they deny themselves in these ways? Because, Paul says, “We endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ” (1 Corinthians 9:12).

And right there we see what Paul means by an offense to Jews, Gentiles, and Christians: anything that is an obstacle to faith in Jesus. At one place, he even says, “If food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble” (1 Corinthians 8:13). The Greek word Paul uses here for stumble (skandalizō) is the same word Jesus uses when he warns us not to cause “little ones who believe in [him] to sin,” and to cut off our hand or foot or tear out our eye if it causes us to sin (Matthew 18:6–9).

These texts (and many more) capture what the New Testament considers a true offense: saying or doing anything that would prevent others from coming to faith in Christ or persevering in their faith.

Painful Application of a ‘Sweet Balm’

Now we can return to our question: Just because most of the scribes and Pharisees would have taken offense at Jesus’s words, does that mean he was truly being offensive — in the New Testament sense? Finally, it’s time to share that gold nugget from Richard Sibbes I promised:

We see that our Saviour multiplies woe upon woe when he has to deal with hard hearted hypocrites (Matthew 23:13), for hypocrites need stronger conviction than gross sinners, because their will is bad, and therefore usually their conversion is violent. A hard knot must have an answerable wedge, else, in a cruel pity, we betray their souls. A sharp reproof sometimes is a precious pearl and a sweet balm. (The Bruised Reed, 49)

I love Sibbes’s take on Jesus’s scathing rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees. He didn’t lose his temper with them and unleash his pent-up frustration with offensive language. He was taking the sharp wedge of a hard rebuke to the hard knots of their hearts.

If, like me, you’re an inexperienced woodsman, you may wonder what a wedge has to do with a knot. Sibbes was quoting an old proverb everyone probably knew back when felling trees was a normal part of life and a sharp wedge was needed to break through a hard timber knot.

“Jesus took the sharp wedge of his words to the knot of their unbelief. He applied a ‘sweet balm’ with painful reproof.”

The wedge wasn’t the real offense; the knots were the real offense. The scribes and Pharisees were putting obstacles in the way of the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:12), obstacles that were preventing both them and others from entering the kingdom of God (Matthew 23:13). It would have been a “cruel pity” for him to say nothing — or to say something soft. So Jesus took the sharp wedge of his words to the knot of their unbelief. Or to use another image from Sibbes, he applied a “sweet balm” with painful reproof. And we can see the heart behind this reproof in the tears of Jesus’s lament that appear in the last three verses of the chapter (Matthew 23:37–39).

Hard Kindness of Christian Love

If we embrace Sibbes’s biblical principle that, when possible, we all, for the sake of love, should labor to give and take no offense, what principle can we distill from Sibbes’s counsel above that can guide us when we encounter the (hopefully) rare exceptions when we must, for the sake of love, risk offending someone with some hard words?

Give no offense to anyone (1 Corinthians 10:32), unless it would be a greater kindness (1 Corinthians 13:4) to bring a hard word and an act of cruelty to withhold it.

This is why Nathan risked offending King David (2 Samuel 12); it’s why Paul risked offending Peter (Galatians 2:11–14); it’s why Jesus risked offending the scribes and Pharisees; and it’s why we are sometimes called to risk offending someone with a painful rebuke. In these cases, if our motive is love and our goal is to remove a stumbling block from someone’s path of faith, our hard words are not truly offensive. They are acts of love, the “faithful . . . wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6). If our hearers find them to be “a rock of offense” (1 Peter 2:8), it may be due to the hard knots of unbelief in their hearts, rather than the sharp wedge of our words.

December is the darkest month. January may be coldest (at least here in the northern hemisphere), but December has the winter solstice, least daylight, and most nighttime hours. Without a fresh layer of snow to reflect the moon and stars, December is as dark as it gets. This makes it both a surprising and wonderful time for the light of Christmas — and for the season of waiting we call Advent.

From now until December 21, the days will grow shorter, and we’ll be waiting with increasing expectation for the light to return and grow brighter. Advent itself is a season of waiting, and an ancient invitation to slow down (during the month that has become the busiest of the year). The season bids us to mark the days and make them count, to relearn a pace of life that is more unhurried (and more human) in the midst of December’s consumer chaos.

Advent invites us to wait for Christmas with patience and hope, and to be ready, when Christmas finally arrives, so that we’re not caught off guard, but actually enjoy the great feast.

Short and Sweet

The English “Advent,” from the Latin adventus, means “arrival” or “coming.” The advent in view each December is the first coming of Jesus, and with it, his promise to come a second time. Advent begins the fourth Sunday before Christmas and ends on Christmas Eve.

Each year, in our season of waiting to rehearse the arrival of God himself in human flesh, Christians remember the people of faith who waited centuries — not months and years but centuries! — for the coming of God’s promised Messiah. They had God’s precious promises: a seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15; Romans 16:20), a prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15, 18; Acts 3:22; 7:37), a priest who would surpass the first-covenant order (Psalm 110:4; Hebrews 5:4–6; 7:11–17), a son of King David and heir to his throne (Isaiah 9:7; Matthew 1:1; 22:42) who would be greater than David, as his Lord (Psalm 110:1). For centuries, God’s people waited. And they “did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us” (Hebrews 11:39–40).

Now we live, with fantastic privilege, in the era of the Messiah. Christ has come as the climax of history and revealed the Godhead and his gracious purposes. It is good for us, though, to rehearse the patient waiting and anticipation of God’s ancient people, to renew and deepen our appreciation of what we now have in him. And like them, to wait for the advent that is to come.

Baby Steps for Jesus

To be clear, the risen Christ, Lord of the church, has not mandated that we celebrate Advent. Or Christmas, or Easter, for that matter. Observing Advent, or any other season or calendar square, does not secure (or keep us in) God’s favor (see Galatians 4:10–11; Colossians 2:16–17). Christ has finished that work, and through his Spirit, we are joined to him, receiving the Father’s full acceptance by faith alone.

Advent, then, is an opportunity, not an obligation — an occasion to make much of Jesus. Here at the outset of another December, we might consider three concentric circles in which to take up some modest initiative to point ourselves and others to Christ.

And if I may, let me emphasize modesty. New seasons can bring the temptation to endeavor more than we can realistically sustain. Wisdom often chooses small but significant beginnings that ultimately add up, day by day, to a more Christward, worshipful Advent.

In Our Own Hearts

First, ask about your own soul. How might this new and brief season be an opportunity to tend to your own heart and faith? The length of Advent makes it ideal for habit formation. Ask how you might seek to warm your soul during the darkness of December. What fresh initiative might you take in personal devotions or your spiritual habits to both quiet your soul in all the noise, and lead you into a new year, with spiritual buoyancy rather than discouragement?

You might lay out some Advent reading (and meditation) plan in Scripture — in the birth narratives of the Gospels, or in Isaiah (the great Christmas prophet), or working through the minor prophets, or even the book of Revelation. This time of year, many reach for Advent devotional books (two options from Desiring God are Good News of Great Joy and The Christmas We Didn’t Expect). You might identify certain passages of Scripture to memorize and meditate on. Or you could ask yourself, Has some particular means of God’s grace been absent from my life in recent months? Consider fasting or renewed practices in prayer or local-church fellowship.

In Our Families and Churches

Moving out from our own hearts and private practices, ask how you might draw others into the joy of waiting well for Christmas. Special Advent plans for family devotions have been a favorite of ours over the years (including the very spiritual use of chocolates for the kids). Long readings can be a challenge with small children. One idea for young families is to plan for one particular Advent verse (or short passage) for each day, with a brief, heartfelt explanation from mom or dad. Without small children, you can aim higher (yet remember the wisdom in small beginnings).

Beyond family devotions, consider other Advent traditions, whether adjusting old practices or starting new ones, to bring Christ-intentionality to the season. One we’ve enjoyed now for many years is trying to make the most of a social custom, the family Christmas card. Each year, we strive not only to send a new family picture and give updates on the kids, but also to say something clear and compelling about Jesus.

As for church families, pastors and elders might think how to make Advent special in the rhythms of our fellowship. I know an old pastor who wrote Advent poems for each Sunday in December. It was a labor of love for 27 years. Many churches do Advent candles with special readings or set apart those weeks for an Advent sermon series. Many do Christmas concerts and extended worship in song. Some keep largely to the minor chords and Advent mood of waiting up until Christmas Eve, and then bring in the bright, major chords of the Christmas season from December 25 to January 6.

In Our World

Wonderful as it may be to warm our own hearts at the fires of Advent, we find an outward impulse at the very heart of that first Advent.

Advent marks the greatest missionary act in history: God himself, in Christ, came into our world to dwell among us and save us from our sins. Heaven forbid, then, that we keep all the warmth of Advent indoors and to ourselves. There is no better time than Advent and Christmas to speak boldly of Christ’s love and seek to show it through acts of love.

Each December we see our world convulse in the irrationalism of sin. Remarkably, the secular world both stops for Christmas, like no other day of the year, and at the same time tries so hard to paper over Christ with Santa and reindeer. Advent is a call to take a risk and speak into the tension. Pull back the curtain. Make the pinprick of light into a beam.

Another Lost Opportunity?

Scottish theologian Donald Macleod, who died this year, once lamented,

Every year the world — and the church — experiences Christmas, that curious amalgam of paganism, commercialism, and Christianity which Western civilization has invented to tide it over the darkest days of the winter. Christmas is a lost opportunity, a time when the world invites the Church to speak and she blushes, smiles, and mutters a few banalities with which the world is already perfectly familiar from its own stock of clichés and nursery rhymes. (From Glory to Golgotha, 9)

What surprising word might you speak, or act of generosity might you take, toward unbelieving neighbors and family and coworkers? Might Advent be an occasion, and excuse, to take the potentially awkward initiative for Jesus you’ve been wanting to take all year? Perhaps your words and faith-inspired efforts will prove to be their turning, from darkness to light.

May the opportunity not be lost on us this year. Make this Advent your invitation to make much of Jesus in your own heart, in your home, with your church, and in our world.

Audio Transcript

Today’s question comes from a podcast host by the name of Tony. It’s from me! I’ve got a question that’s been on my mind, Pastor John. It’s something I’m trying to figure out. It’s about one of the most remarkable statements in the Bible when it comes to this topic of God’s sovereign design in our suffering. Job 13:15 is the text I’m thinking about. Job says, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him.” It’s a remarkable line, made famous in more recent times by Shane and Shane and their incredible and powerful song by that title: “Though You Slay Me.” Years back, Desiring God partnered with them to record a new edition of the music video that featured a sermon clip of yours, a remix we published in APJ 639. The music-video version of that song now has a whopping nine million views on YouTube, and counting!

So here’s my question about Job 13:15. I know you’ve made passing mentions over the years to this phrase “though he slay me,” but I see only one explicit mention of the text in your entire ministry corpus — from one of your earliest sermons, preached seven and a half years before you even became a pastor. It comes in a sermon titled “Your Calamity in 1973,” preached on New Year’s Eve 1972, in Greenville, South Carolina. As we approach another new year, and the fiftieth anniversary of that sermon, I see that you’ve never mentioned the text again in a sermon. And you’ve never tweeted the line either, though it’s a text that seems to be primed for short-form contexts. In mid-November, when your annual Bible-reading trek takes you through Job 13, you’ve tweeted a couple other verses from the chapter (like Job 13:5 and 24), but never Job 13:15. The meaning of the text is debated. So where do you land now? Are you certain, or uncertain, of its meaning? And with such a text that has become synonymous with Desiring God, why the silence? Wow, Tony, with a thorough question today!

“God, in his absolute ownership and sovereignty over all life, appoints the time and the kind of every death.”

The first thing to say is that I love the truth — and it is the truth, spoken from God’s own mouth — that God, in his absolute ownership and sovereignty over all life, appoints the time and the kind of every death of every person on this planet. And this fact of God’s right to give and to take life is not a reason to reject him, but a reason to hope in him. I love that truth, which means that I love the fact that every Christian — owned by the Creator, doubly owned by the Redeemer — can say and should say, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15). Yes, we can say that. We should say that.

Job’s God-Exalting Theology

That is the ESV of Job 13:15. It is virtually the same as the NIV, virtually the same as the NASB and the KJV. If the declaration that God slays — that is, takes the life of his own precious children — and I don’t doubt that Job was a precious, blood-bought child of God, the blood of Jesus going back over the Old Testament and covering all the saints’ sins, as it says in Romans 3:25. I don’t doubt that. If that declaration, that God takes the life of his people — and that while he does it, we ought to keep hoping in him, trusting in him, loving him, treasuring him — seems foreign to us, or unbiblical to us, or contrary to God’s nature, then we have not been paying attention to our Bibles or thinking rightly about what we are reading, including the book of Job.

In the very first chapter of Job, God takes the life — you could use the word kills — all ten of Job’s children. Job saw this. He saw this, and he confessed that fact, tore his clothes, shaved his head, fell on the ground, and said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). That’s a breathtaking statement of worship. “The Lord has taken my ten children away. Blessed be his name.”

Sometimes people say, “Yeah, but Job was a bad theologian at that point.” No, the inspired writer comments in the next verse that Job “did not sin” with his lips when he said that, as if he knew what people would think when they read it (Job 1:22). It was true, godly worship. Then, in Job 12:10, Job said, “In [God’s] hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind.” God owns all things. He has absolute rights over all living things. He gives and he takes when and how he decides in his infinite wisdom. This is part of what it means to be God, the Creator and sustainer and governor of all things. Deuteronomy 32:39 says (this is God talking), “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.”

More Than the Sparrows

Now, Tony, you know that I wrote a book on providence recently. Fifty pages of that book are devoted to this one single biblical reality. It’s section 5, called “Providence Over Life and Death.” Dozens and dozens of texts say this, like James 4:15. Don’t presume upon tomorrow. “Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” If the Lord wills, John Piper will live to the end of this podcast. If the Lord does not will it, then this microphone goes silent, and you’re going to wonder what happened. Another minute of life, and it’s the Lord’s will or not. If he wills, we live. If he doesn’t will it, we die.

So whether the text of Job 13:15 has become synonymous with Desiring God, the reality has. And I am glad because it is true and it is glorious. I mean, really, whom would you like to be in charge of your martyrdom or your cancer? Satan? You want Satan to be in charge of your cancer? You want fate to be in charge of your cancer — meaningless, mindless, purposeless forces of nature?

It is a glorious thing that not a single sparrow falls from the sky apart from our Father in heaven. And how much more certainly does he govern the death of his precious children? Even the hairs of our head are all numbered. “Fear not,” Jesus says, “you are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:28–31).

So it is our joy at Desiring God to say, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26). We love to say, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). We love to say, “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). We love to say, “The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life” (see Psalm 63:3) — better than being kept alive.

So, the sentence “Though he slay me, yet I will trust him” is a beautiful expression of reality and biblical faith. God does take the life of his people. And they have every reason to keep on hoping in him, not in spite of that fact, but because of that fact — namely, that he is the all-wise, all-loving, purposeful God, doing nothing from any mistake or any lack of wisdom or any lack of love. Satan doesn’t have the final power over death. Disease doesn’t have the final power over death. Natural disasters don’t have the final power over death. Life and death are in the hand of God, finally. And he is our Father and our Redeemer. By the blood of his Son, he reached back and covered all our sins. And by the resurrection of his Son, he has conquered death.

‘I Have No Hope’?

The reason, Tony, that I have not made Job 13:15 (“Though he slay me, I will hope in him”) the touchstone of my exultation in this glorious truth of God’s sovereignty and our hope is that I knew that if I put too many eggs in that textual basket, someone could come along and make a plausible case that I’m building on sand, because the RSV, for example, translates the verse like this: “Behold, he will slay me; I have no hope.” That sounds like the very opposite of other translations: “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him.”

“God’s right to give and to take life is not a reason to reject him, but a reason to hope in him.”

There is a real Hebrew textual problem in this verse. There are two Hebrew variants pronounced exactly alike, namely lōw. One variant has lamed-holem-aleph and means “no.” And the other variant has lamed-holem-vav and means “to him” or “in him.” So the readings are “I have hope in him,” or “I have no hope.” And I have not been able to have certainty in my mind, as I’ve worked and worked over the years on the Hebrew, which one the author intended. If the correct variant is “I have no hope,” it doesn’t have to mean (and I don’t think it would mean), “I have no hope beyond the grave,” because that would contradict Job 19:26: “After my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.” Job, I do believe, was granted insight into eternal life. All it would mean is, “If God slays me now, my hope for vindication on the earth is over. My hope for restored fortunes is over. It’s gone. Life here is over. I’m not going to have a daughter named Jemimah. It’s over.” And that’s true. That would’ve been true. And it would not have been hopeless — just no hope for vindication here and now.

Now, in conclusion, I think the traditional translation, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him,” is the right one. If you put a gun to my head and said, “You’ve got to vote,” I’m voting for the traditional translation. I’m glad the ESV translates it that way. I know — now I don’t just think — that it expresses biblical truth; the traditional translation expresses biblical truth. But I have chosen, over the years, to defend and exult in that glorious biblical truth from dozens of other passages where I know the rug won’t be pulled out from under my exegetical feet.