Van Gogh’s work has been regarded by some as “hallucinatory,” however his letters show that few artists were as intelligent and rational. His work was not the product of his dark times but of his struggle against them.

“I am feeling well just now… I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible—and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger and makes haste in what he does.” [1]

William Cowper, who battled debilitating and often life-threatening depression throughout his life, and yet was the author of many famous Christian hymns and poems, was the same. John Piper writes:

“I live with an almost constant awareness of the breach between the low intensity of my own passion and the staggering realities of the universe around me, heaven, hell, creation, eternity, life, God. Everybody (whether they know it or not) tries to close this breach—between the weakness of our emotions and the wonder of the World. Some of us do it with poetry.

William Cowper did it with poetry. I think I know what he means, for example, when he writes a poem about his mother’s portrait long after her death and says,

And, while that face renews my filial grief,
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief.

There is a deep release and a relief that comes when we find a way of seeing and saying some precious or stunning reality that comes a little closer to closing the breach between what we’ve glimpsed with our mind and what we’ve grasped with our heart.

It shouldn’t be surprising that probably over 300 pages of the Bible was written as poetry. Because the aim of the Bible is to build a bridge between the deadness of the human heart and the living reality of God.” [2]

I want to relate this to every Christian life. This fruitfulness from the darkness is a process that belongs to every child of God. At the very heart of it is the tension caused by challenges to unseen truth by an unbelieving world, and the desire for vindication and rest. This is one of the processes inherent in Covenant history, and an understanding of it helps us to persevere in the truth, even in the darkest times. The New Covenant is no exception. [3]

God calls a man
…..Separates him for duty
……….Gives him the rules
…..Tells him the consequences of his performance
Arranges for the next tour of duty

Of course, this is Ray Sutton’s 5 point Covenant pattern, and I maintain that it becomes 7 point when “played out” on the stage of history:

Creation: God’s call and anointing
…..Division: The man is sent to work

and this is where the distress of the Covenant comes in. The central point is split into three—LAW/LAW/LAW:

……….Ascension: He receives the Covenant Law (as above)
……………Testing: He is challenged by a false Law

This is where the rubber meets the road. It is the Starry Night of Day 4, the saints in the wilderness. Will we be rulers, or will we be ruled? Will we be filled with the law as burning bushes (Lampstands) like Daniel and his friends, or will we be incinerated like the sons of Aaron?

The test is that the world suddenly doesn’t seem to correspond to what God said. We can only see so far, and Satan and those who follow him maintain that what is beyond our sight is not what God said (which is also why evolution is not science but philosophy). How many Christians feel that God has abandoned them, or betrayed them, or failed to reward them for their faithfulness so far? The challenge is to understand that God is qualifying you for more responsibility, more servant-kingship, and of course, more glory.

God’s Word often seems to contradict reality. Imagine being instructed to build a very large boat on dry land, and to put up with the jeers and taunts of the scientists and philosophers of the day. Imagine being instructed to tell the rulers of Judah to submit to the king of Babylon. Imagine being a Pharisee instructed to eat with Gentiles, and form new Jew-Gentile synagogues across the empire. Imagine being instructed to tell the King of the Jews that it is, in fact, You Who are the true King of the Jews. Both Jesus and Paul were thought to be mad. Do you know that feeling? [4]

Of course, vindication came, in torrents, in every one of these situations. The Book of Hebrews is a plea to Christian Jews to hold out, to persevere with this “new Covenant,” despite the fact that the Herods were still building monuments of white stone and gold all over the Land (including the Temple) and Christians were being persecuted and slaughtered across the empire. The words of Jesus certainly didn’t correspond with reality, did they? But the elect, as Daniel predicted, shined like stars. They believed the Word spoken, saw the fulfilment of the promises by faith, although they were far off and not yet seen. Faith is not blind. It is long-sighted.

Faith is also attractive, especially when it rides against the zeitgeist. It is very striking for people today to come across Christians who not only know what they believe, but are also not idiots. I teach the Bible to high school students, and the testimony of someone who believes it from cover to cover stays with them forever. I know, because the Bible was taught to me by people just like that. Brave testimony, under distress, is the heart of the New Covenant.

……….Maturity: He repeats the Law, warns the Bride,
……….and there is great plunder

After obedience at Testing, there are always plagues and plunder. That’s what we see in Exodus. That’s what we see in the ministry of the Apostles and the Reformers and the great missionaries (and not-so-great).

How about you? Are you willing to submit to God for the sake of the plunder? For the New Covenant missionary, the plunder is people, even if he doesn’t live to see the result (like Jim Elliot). I read about a missionary who spent seven long years evangelising some remote tribes and died without seeing a single convert. But those who followed after him reaped the harvest. Unlike discipling your own children, teaching the Bible to other people’s kids seems fruitless at times, because the seed takes a while to germinate. We have faith that it will sprout and that God will give the increase. Many Australians trace their conversion back to Sunday School or SRE (Bible teaching in public schools).

Faith is like time travel. In the midst of suffering, abandonment or persecution, we travel back in time to remember God’s faithfulness in the past, in our life, in the biographies of saints, and in the Bible. And we jump ahead in our head and hearts to the Conquest and Glorification that God has promised for the elect. The Psalmists did this (in both directions), and so did Christ and the Apostles. God is consistently faithful, regardless of how things might feel right now. How can we be trained to judge if there is no tension, no true and false witnesses presenting evidence? The question is, will you turn to other, short-term gods to ease the pain? [5] Or will you persevere and produce the abundant fruitfulness possible only through this process of pruning? Jesus said that if we judge ourselves, we will not be judged.

He shall see the labour of His soul, and be satisfied. Isaiah 53:11

Van Gogh sold only one painting, and died by suicide in poverty. William Cowper had the loving ministry of John Newton, and His God, watching over him. Imagine if Van Gogh and Cowper could see how their labours, the fruits of lives spent suffering in the dark, have been a blessing for hundreds of years to millions of people.

Faith, the substance of things not seen, is like time travel. By your obedience to the Word, and your fearless witness, you are a memorial to something that hasn’t even happened yet, and something that happened long ago. Like Noah, like Jesus, you are the incarnation of the past and a window on the future. Faith is the domain of the prophet, and in the New Covenant, all God’s people are prophets who know the end from the beginning.

So stick with it. Stand. Perseverance is just about everything. And vindication will come.
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[1] Quoted in Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical.
[2] Listen to or read the transcript of Piper’s wonderful biographical sermon here. See also Seeing In The Dark.
[3] See A Lamentable Life.
[4] See Mercury Rising.
[5] See What Comes Out.

I said, “You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High. But you shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.” Psalm 82:6

As discussed elsewhere here, the five-point Covenant model as it gets played out in history becomes seven-point. The central “Ethics” gets split into three: Law-Testing-Law.

Moses, the Covenant head, ascends and receives the Law. He opens it for Israel as Mediator. Israel, as body, is tested under the Law. The Law is given again to a “resurrected” Israel, the next generation.

In microcosm, we see this in the incident with the golden calf. Moses is given the Tablets, Israel is tested, and the Tablets are broken. Moses brings the Law a second time.

In macrocosm, the Law is given from Sinai, Israel is tested for forty years, and Moses brings the Law again in Deuteronomy to a “resurrected” Israel, the next generation.

At the centre of the heptamerous pattern are the “governing lights,” pictured in the Creation week by the sun, moon and five visible planets. Law-Lights-Law. Will the members of the body be gods (Psalm 82:6; ), or will they turn to false gods. Will they become rulers by obedience to the Law, or will they disobey and be ruled by those who should have been in subjection to them? Will they be aflame with the true light, or like Adam, be duped and ruled by the beast. This perhaps shows the depth of Jesus’ strange words in John 10:

“…the Jews took up stones again to stone Him. Jesus answered them, “Many good works I have shown you from My Father. For which of those works do you stone Me?” The Jews answered Him, saying, “For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy, and because You, being a Man, make Yourself God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, “You are gods” ‘? (John 10:31-34)

The New Testament, being a Covenant, follows the Old Covenant pattern. Jesus ascends and opens the New Covenant. Most of Israel turns to the superseded priesthood to build them an image of a beast, the Herodian Temple. How is the Law given again, ie. deuteronomically?

The gospel went to the Jew first, then to the Greek/Gentile. But, as Peter Leithart observes, at least in the order of the New Testament canon as we have it, there is an obvious shift back to the Jew. [1] The final letters are full of warnings. The apostolic witness is serving papers upon the Jews once again, but this time it is the next generation. The book of Hebrews, perhaps, is the Final Notice. The old and decaying worship structure had two witnesses against it now—Jew and Gentile. [2]

The apostolic lights—the men who became “gods,” judging rightly between good and evil, were the Pentecostals. Just like the 49-fold Lampstand in Zechariah’s vision, they were witnesses to the resurrection of all Israel as a holy priesthood. Leithart observes the connection between the Spirit and the Law in His ministry of conviction:

The name given for the Spirit in John 16, paracletos, is a legal term.  A paraclete is a defense attorney, a public defender.  The word “convict” also has legal connotations.  It sometimes focuses on the subjective shame felt by the person convicted, but it doesn’t always include that. James says that those who show partiality to the rich are convicted as transgressors of the law (2:9), and whether or not they feel convicted, they are in fact guilty. Paul writes to Titus about the “conviction” of false teachers, and he’s mainly talking about exposing their false teaching (Titus 1:9, 13). Jesus’ instructs the disciples, “If your brother sins, go and convict him in private.” This obviously doesn’t mean that the person repents, because Jesus goes on to tell disciples what to do if the person who’s been “convicted” doesn’t listen. According to Jesus, a brother can be “convicted” even when he’s not “convicted” in our usual sense of the term.

In sum, Jesus is talking not about feelings of remorse but about legal processes. Like the prophets, Jesus thinks of the world’s battles as legal conflicts. In this sense, the conquest of the land was also a legal battle: Who has rightful claim to the land – Israel or  Canaan? Yahweh or the gods of the Canaanites? When Yahweh gave Joshua victory in battle, He was handing him a legal decision as well. Victory was vindication, proof that Yahweh and Joshua were in the right.

After Jesus leaves the scene, He warns, there will be a courtroom battle royale. The great legal conflict that is human history will reach its climax as the church crosses over the Jordan to take the land. At Pentecost, the Spirit arrives as the Paraclete to take the disciples’ side in the cosmic lawsuit that follows Jesus’ ascension. [3]

The Gospel we share is offensive because it is a foretaste of the New Covenant sanctions: life or death. [4] When we share the Gospel, we are serving papers. That is not a claim on merely individual souls, or of the possession of some future world. It is a clear statement that every man alive is living on Jesus’ turf, under Jesus’ fiery eyes, and subject to His government.

__________________________________________________
[1] See Peter J. Leithart, Jew Gentile Jew.
[2] See The Two Witnesses.
[3] Peter J. Leithart, Conviction by the Spirit.
[4] See Fragrance of Christ.

“Let his days be few, and let another take his office.” Psalm 109:8

The imprecatory Psalms seem to contradict the instruction of Christ to love our enemies. Ben Myers recently noted a campaign to pray for President Obama, to pray Psalm 109:8, that is:

Apparently some Southern Baptist pastors have been using Psalm 109:8 as a prayer for Obama’s death: “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership. May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.” This even inspired a line of creepy bumper stickers and T-shirts that read “Pray for Obama.”

 One of these pastors says: “You’re going to tell me that I’m supposed to pray for the socialist devil, murderer, infanticide, who wants to see young children, and he wants to see babies killed through abortion and partial-birth abortion and all these different things. Nope. I’m not gonna pray for his good. I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell.”

I replied:

Yes, these guys are nuts, but…

Modern Christians fail to understand the need for imprecatory prayer. When leaders do evil, praying for God’s judgment is what we are called to do. That is our ministry. We are Spirit-filled elders with access to the true throneroom. When we pray, in unity, it changes history. 

We are to obey those in power, and we are also to leave vengeance to God. Praying for judgment upon a leader with bloodlust of any kind (whether murdering civilians overseas or slaughtering the unborn) is godly ministry. Bombing abortion clinics is not. 

These bumper sticker guys, despite the gimmick, and the attitude Hauerwas describes, are correct. But what action would Hauerwas advocate? To withhold such judgment is to hand your culture over to Satan. Biblically, there is such a thing as good death. It is a judicial death to be carried out by the state. [1]

When you actually read the offending psalm, it seems like these politically incorrect gents picked the least offensive verse. Its context appears to make matters even worse.

One commenter quoted Scot McKnight with a possible resolution:

“Here’s the sad and tragic irony: interpreters today (Goldingay, Alter) agree that vv. 6-19 are the words of the opponents, the accusers, the enemies of God’s king (David) and not the words of the man of God! … In other words, these folks have clipped — probably reading the psalm mistakenly — words from the opponents of God and used for themselves.”

This is a possibility. The accusers are plural, yet the curses are invoked upon a single man. Moreover, they are Covenant curses for crimes against God’s Law. We know David did not commit these crimes. Like Satan the arch accuser, like Job’s accusers, and like those who accused Jesus, the crimes for which they invoke the curses are slanderous lies.

But even this theory backfires against those who doubt the lawfulness of imprecatory prayer, for after recounting the curses, David says:

“Let this be the Lord’s reward to my accusers, and to those who speak evil against my person.”

David might not have been the one who spoke the curses, but he did ask that these same curses would fall upon his accusers. This is exactly what happened to Jesus’ accusers. The Covenant curses fell and they were wiped off the face of the earth. The great Accuser was thrown down “like lightning” and replaced with the Advocate.

“I will greatly praise the LORD with my mouth;
Yes, I will praise Him among the multitude.
For He shall stand at the right hand of the poor,
To save him from those who condemn him. “

So, after some thought, it seems like both sides might have this psalm wrong. It is not a psalm about vengeance but about vindication. Just as Paul waited for the Day of the Lord in AD70 to reveal who were the true “sons of God” (ie. the Christians or the Jews/Judaisers), David waited for the Lord’s judgment to reveal his innocence. We know that he was vindicated against his enemies. Even the ones he failed to destroy were eliminated wisely and efficiently by his Covenant-successor, Solomon.

But then, what are we to do with this song?

The best conclusion might be that, like all of the Old Testament, application takes wisdom. Not all of the Bible is “timeless.” Much of it actually is contextual. That sort of “Greek” thinking leads not only to this wooden quoting of single verses to put on T-shirts and bumper stickers, but to things like the Jews’ manufactured Oral Law or the idolising of creeds and traditions. It leaves no room for growth. James Jordan writes:

“The Jews and the Circumcision rightly said that God had given the Law and that the old arrangement was good. That’s true: It was good as long as we were children. But now we must move on toward adulthood. This movement into the future was what is rejected by the Jews and the Circumcision. For them, all time was the same, and there is no progress in history. They had become philosophers, treating the Law as a timeless ideal instead of as rules for children in their home.

This is how all paganism thinks. For them, time and change are evils. The writings of Mircea Eliade explore this hostility to time in depth. The pagan will admit to eternal cycles, but not to any real progress or maturation in history and biography. It is for this reason that pagans never grow up. They never progress beyond childhood and adolescence. Any missionary will tell you this, that the heathen are just like children. Greek philosophy and literature also never progresses beyond adolescence and Homer’s two great poems are about adolescents. Stuck in the time before marriage, the Greeks became homosexuals. Because this hostility to God’s plan is part of our sinful nature, we find that the Church repeatedly falls into the same way of thinking…

While it is true that a major sin is to cling to the past, to the old way, and not embrace the new birth and the new marriage, it is also possible to move into a new future that is a false future. Think of adolescence. Our very bodies impel us toward a new relationship with a member of the opposite sex. It is possible to enter a sinful future by having sex without marrying first, to seize forbidden fruit. It is possible to leave home in a rebellious way.

We see this phenomenon in a very striking way in the New Testament history. The fact is that what we call the Old Testament was not complete, for the completion awaited the New Testament writings. In the Restoration era, the Jews became wonderfully enamoured with the Bible and studied it constantly. At some deep level of their psyche they became conscious that it was incomplete. But then they jumped the gun and created their own new testament, their own completion of the Bible. This was the demonic Oral Law tradition that Jesus fought, which was eventually written down as the Mishnah and is commented upon in the Talmuds. Thus, they were impelled forward, but they refused to remain patient.

This false future was really no future at all. The Oral Law is not a new kingdom, but a perversion of the old. The Law of God was taken as timeless truths, as an Ideal, on the model of Greek philosophy, and then turned in upon itself to generate new laws in order to create a perfect, static timeless order, a Jewish version of Plato’s Republic and Laws. Thus, the Oral Law provided nothing new at all, but rather reflected a complete rejection of time and history.” [2]

The Bible is anchored in history for a people growing from childhood to maturity. New situations and applications arise to make us use our noggins (as the Jews were forced to do after the exile). But the Bible also makes clear what is obsolete and what is not, like any good parent. The Covenant under which David lived is not the New Covenant, although the latter grew out of the former. The New Covenant, like the Restoration Covenant, calls for greater maturity than its predecessor. Things aren’t quite as cut-and-dried once we are out of school; there’s no longer any truant officer to harass us if we don’t attend lectures.

However, this factor certainly leaves the Scriptures open to abuse from both sides, not just the hardliners. Both sides use isolated Bible verses as simplistic slogans. For the fuzzy-thinking liberal theologian, the gradual revelation of truth is a handy excuse to make “obsolete” the very delineations and categories inherent in the created order (ie. male and female)– the ones that offend their modern sensibilities, anyway. That is not honest exegesis. [3] It is not wisdom, either. They invoke the Covenant curses upon themselves, twisting the Scriptures to their own destruction. Being a biblical Covenant, even the New Covenant has both blessings and curses. This has more to do with those within the church than those without.

Timeless truth is a tree. The trunk is not the branch is not the fruit, yet they are all parts of the whole. President Obama is not the king of Israel, nor his accuser, but just as the Jews were priests within Ezekiel’s Jew-Gentile Temple, Christians are a royal priesthood in a New Jerusalem that is gradually conquering the world. When a Gentile empire turned bad, God eventually replaced it. We live in a situation that is similar and yet even wider in its scope. Our “oikoumene” is global. Governing it by prayer requires the wisdom found only in Christ. We no longer have to draw lots. We have the Spirit of God.

Any leader who rejects the lordship of Christ (by his actions and policies) is an enemy of Christ and His people. This is the reign of Christ and we are required to pray for those whom He has put in government. We blindly follow neither the sycophants of the left or the right. Our goal is the vindication of Jesus Christ and His gospel. If this means asking God to bring the slanderous curses of unrepentant murderers down upon their own heads, so be it. God’s judgment is exactly that—a judgment. He chooses between the goats with wisdom beyond our understanding. It is God’s call. Jacob’s Pharaoh was converted. Moses’ Pharaoh was hardened. In both cases, the people of God were vindicated. [4]

If the slanderers repent, we sing with the angels and welcome them into the holy city. If they harden their hearts, we also sing. We sing like the firstfruits church sang over the destruction of the Jezebel-city who twice let the blood of innocents run freely in her streets.

So, pray for President Obama with the wisdom of greater Solomon, Christ. Pray that both His love and His truth would be vindicated.

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[1] See Good Death – 7 and Dashing Her Little Ones.
[2] Excerpts from James B. Jordan, From Bread to Wine, Toward a More Biblical Liturgical Theology. Booklet available from www.biblicalhorizons.com
[3] See Timeless Truths?
[4] We could also mention the contrast between Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar. Also, the book of Esther contains one of my favourite examples of God’s people praying for a leader.

Jesus’ words against the Temple hung over Jerusalem for a generation, and would be vindicated despite Herod’s obsessive glorification of his graven image. Its completion in AD64 was taken as proof that Jesus was indeed a false prophet.

Christ came in judgment as He promised and the Temple was destroyed. Vindication and redemption came in one event, and new worship would be born through the death of the old.

“The pagan view of law is that justice is a balancing of the scales. The biblical view of law is that justice is transformational.”1

The death and resurrection of Israel in Christ as the head would be measured out in the people of God as the body. God’s Word brings division that leads totransfiguration. His justice always has one eye on the future.

1  James B. Jordan, Preterism vs. Gnosticism [lecture]. Available from www.wordmp3.com