Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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Reasons to Celebrate in Hard Times (Psalm 103), Part 2: God Is Good to His People

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Part 1: God Is Good to You and Me

David—or whoever wrote this Psalm—has begun with a call to praise God, and he’s given as his first reason a series of good things God has done for him—and you, and me; the recipients there are all singular. In the next section he changes to the plural; he talking about things that God has done not just for “me,” but for “us”—for his people corporately. Throughout history, God has consistently intervened to meet the greatest needs of his people.

At Israel’s birth as a nation, God revealed himself to them in multiple ways: at the burning bush (Ex 3.1-6), through the plagues in Egypt (Ex 5-12), at the parting of the Red Sea (Ex 14.21-31), and at Sinai (Ex 20). In fact, verse 8 of our Psalm is essentially a direct quotation of Exodus 20.6.

And what is the characteristic of God—what is the good thing about him—that the Psalmist chooses to highlight in this section?

Mercy.

In his dealings with his people, God is the sort of person who doesn’t give them the punishment that they deserve. Despite our sin, despite our selfishness, despite our arrogance and disrespect toward him, he shows mercy.

Specifically,

  • He is slow to anger (Ps. 103.8). He doesn’t lose his temper or lash out in uncontrolled rage. He puts up with a lot from us and doesn’t crush us like a bug—which, as omnipotent, he certainly could. He deals with us carefully, tenderly, reasonably, patiently.
  • When he does get angry—and when he should get angry,* he does—he doesn’t stay that way forever (Ps 103.9). When his justified anger has accomplished his purpose, he calmly sets it aside.
  • His dealings with us are underproportioned (Ps 103.10). He doesn’t give us the negative things we deserve.

He is merciful—filled with mercy, the attribute that stops punishment or consequence well short of what is truly called for.

And why is that?

Well, for starters, that’s who he is, and he always acts consistently with his nature.

But the Psalmist highlights another reason: he has a relationship with us; we are his people (Ps 103.11-13).

  • We fear him, reverence him, recognize his fatherhood over us (Ps 103.11).
  • He has removed our transgressions from us (Ps 103.12), as far as the east is from the west. I’ve traveled to the other side of the world both by going east and by going west, and I can tell you that they never meet. Why has he done this remarkable thing? Why has he unburdened us of the guilt of our sin? From the Psalmist’s perspective, he’s done so because Israel is his people, his special flock, and he’s given them the grace of forgiving their sins when they offer the specified sacrifices at the specified place. We who are not physical Israel know that those sacrifices prefigured another sacrifice, a greater, perfect sacrifice, offered by God the Son through the eternal Spirit unto God the Father. God has forgiven us because our sin debt has been paid, and we are now cloaked in the righteousness of Christ.
  • He is our Father, and we are his children (Ps 103.13). That’s a significant relationship, a permanent one, one that calls for love and patience and loyalty and provision and protection.

So it’s not just that God’s a nice person, nice to all the human persons in a beneficent sort of way. No, we his people are corporeal, a body, a flock, and we have a relationship with the God who created and redeemed us. He’s good to us for reasons far deeper than the need to help a beggar on the street or an accident victim on the highway.

We’re family.

And we’ll always be family.

* There are times when anger is the only appropriate response. If you see a child being sexually abused, you should get angry, and you should put a stop to it. Injustice should make us angry and spur us to action. Imminent threats to the well-being of those we love should make us angry. They make God angry, and that is a virtue, not a weakness or a flaw.

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Reasons to Celebrate in Hard Times (Psalm 103), Part 1: God Is Good to You and Me

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We live in unstable and unhappy times. Lots of people are complaining—and there’s a lot to complain about. But we all know that living in a spirit of complaint isn’t good for us, and we also know that we tend to magnify our difficulties and minimize our joys.

I’ve been spending extra time in the Psalms lately, and I’ve found that time to be well invested. It’s good to be around happy people—though not all the Psalms are happy, certainly—and it’s good to be reminded that our time is not substantially different from what lots of other people have endured, and over which they have triumphed.

Psalm 103 is a simple meditation on good things, encouraging things—and better yet, eternal things. According to its superscription, it’s Davidic—by David, or perhaps for him or in his style; the Hebrew preposition can mean a lot of things. It begins and ends with a call to praise, first by the author himself (Ps 103.1-2) and at the last by all of creation (Ps 103.20-22). In between, the Psalmist considers some of the reasons why we should praise God—and along the way there’s a hint that his life hasn’t been all sunshine and roses.

We’ve all heard the children’s prayer at mealtime:

God is great,
God is good;
Let us thank him
For our food.

This psalm appears to pray that prayer on a much grander scale.

The Psalmist begins—after the initial call to praise—with God’s goodness (“his benefits,” Ps 103.2), and specifically his goodness to the Psalmist himself as an individual. He lists those benefits in two categories.

First, God has delivered him (and you, and me) from many of the negative things about life:

  • He forgives all your sins (Ps 103.3).
    • We’re defeated by an enemy far greater than we are; we’re at the mercy of sin, and we even find ourselves being attracted by it. We’ve sinned ourselves so deeply into slavery and brokenness that there seems to be no hope for us.
    • But God has stepped into our misery and has rescued us, applying Christ’s righteousness to us and forgiving the depraved things we’ve done. Further, he’s cast them into the sea (Mic 7.19), as far from us as the east is from the west (as we’ll see later in the psalm).
  • He heals all your diseases (Ps 103.3).
    • Is this line an indication that the Psalmist has just come through hard times? He seems to speak from experience.
    • We find that often physical healing is available to us in answer to our prayers; but I think, given the close reference to forgiveness of sins, that we should consider our healing from spiritual sickness and death (Ep 2.1-7) here.
    • And further, we anticipate the day when there will be no more disease—physical or spiritual—because God has brought history full circle and returned us to the “very good” state in which we began (Re 21.4).
  • He redeems us from destruction (Ps 103.4)—that is, he sets us on a path to life instead of death.

Then the Psalmist considers how he has replaced those negative things with positive ones:

  • He crowns us with lovingkindness and tender mercies (Ps 103.4)—that is, he pours out his loving loyalty and his compassion on us. He is a gentle and committed shepherd.
  • He feeds us well, nourishing us for strength (Ps 103.5). I think it’s interesting that God made food taste good. He could have made it all a tasteless grey paste, just something we have to choke down every so often to keep our strength up. But he didn’t do that; he made food really good. Salty, sweet, sour, bitter, meaty. Cold, hot, and in between. Crunchy, smooth, creamy, crispy. It’s all good.

There’s a lot more that God does for each of us that demonstrates his goodness; the Psalmist has given us just a sampling. We can profitably meditate on the much longer list. And as we’ll see, the Psalmist is just getting started.

Next time.

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On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC

There are other things we learn about the Creator by observing his creation. I’ve written before about a number of implications from the fact that God is our Creator. Here I’ll mention a couple of related thoughts in closing.

First, we know almost instinctively that when someone makes something, he gets to decide what to do with it. My father was skilled with his hands, and when I was a boy he made a workbench that he intended to use for working on automobile engines. The surface consisted of a long row of 2 x 4 beams turned sideways, so that the tabletop was 4” thick. As it turned out, I don’t remember him ever using it to work on engines; he did other things with it. He’s allowed to do that. It’s his table; he made it.

Similarly, the Creator has the right to govern his creation. We call that sovereignty. What he says goes.

Now, we’ve already established that he is powerful—able to do what he decides to do—and wise—able to determine the most effective uses of what he has created. We’ve also noted that he’s good; he doesn’t abuse any element of his creation, most especially us, but rather cares for us. I’ve written elsewhere about that fact that everything we really need is free.

All this means that his sovereignty over creation is no threat to us—unless we foolishly decide that we know better than he does. And unfortunately, the tendency to do that is part of our fallen nature.

A second thought derives naturally from the first. We ought to respect the Creator’s wisdom and follow his direction. Again, I’ve developed this idea elsewhere. You can use a chainsaw any old way you like, but if you reject the engineer’s recommendations for safe and proper use, don’t be surprised if you end up getting hurt.

Some years ago I recall seeing a commercial for Sherwin-Williams paint. The video began with a shot of the space shuttle on the launch pad, with a voiceover saying, “Sherwin Williams designed the paint for the space shuttle.” Then you heard the countdown, and at “Liftoff!” the screen went white as the exhaust from the solid rocket boosters obliterated the view of everything else, and the roar of those engines drowned out the voice. Then the image changed to a different kind of white, and as the camera zoomed out, you realized you were looking at a door. It opened away from you, and you saw a typical residential bathroom. Against the quiet, the voiceover said, “Chances are we can handle your bathroom.”

When I consider God’s heavens, the work of his fingers, I am driven to a simple confidence. He can handle my life: needs, wants, questions, doubts, sins, perplexities, griefs, all of it. I can trust his wisdom, his power, his goodness, for all that lies ahead, just as for all that he has brought me graciously through.

And, by his grace, I will.

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On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 4: TLC

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence | Part 3: Omniscience

There’s something else we learn by observing creation carefully. Despite its brokenness, it seems to fit our needs just perfectly.

Our planet is in the solar system’s “Goldilocks zone”: like the fabled baby bear’s porridge, it’s “not too hot, not too cold—just right!” Further, the temperature is finely tuned by the planet’s slant on its axis, which gives most of the inhabited areas seasons—whether 4 or 2—and furthers the thriving of plant and animal life. And unlike its sister planet Mars, ours has an atmosphere, an ocean of air, with just the right amount of oxygen to support human and animal life, and just the right amount of nitrogen to keep the oxygen from causing us to burst into flame at inopportune moments. (And from what I’m told, all moments are inopportune for that.)

The balance of the biosphere is a remarkable thing; as we breath oxygen, we exhale carbon dioxide, which the plants use to produce more oxygen. Helpful little critters, no?

And it turns out that the sun that warms us and lights our days is also something of an enemy; it sends out radiation at levels that are harmful to us from even more than 90 million miles away. But invisibly surrounding our planet are streams of charged particles, driven from the sun but held in place around us by the planet’s magnetic field, that serve as a shield to divert the lethal levels of that radiation away from us.

Let’s see; what else?

Well, areas of the planet feel really crowded, and sometimes folks in those areas wish there were more land. I grew up in the West, “big sky country,” where we didn’t feel that pressure so much—and preferred it that way. I note that the planet’s average density of humans per square mile is just over 39—though of course, much of the planet’s land surface is uninhabitable (think Antarctica) or nearly so (think Sahara). But the Creator was being kind to limit the extent of the land mass, because the rest of the surface—ocean—is a gigantic water purification system that collects, distills, and then delivers drinkable water right to our feet.

Now, our environment’s not perfect. I mentioned a few words back that the system is broken. Lions choke wildebeests to death—I’ve seen it happen, up close and personal—without mercy and without apparent regret. Some people are inclined to focus on the brokenness; Jack London made a living writing stories about a nature that was “red in tooth and claw.” I think it’s important to note the brokenness, first, for our own preservation, and second, for evaluating the brokenness that we’re causing and then remedying it. After all, the Creator has made us responsible for the care and preservation of the planet as well as its wise use.

But the obvious brokenness makes creation’s general kindness all the more impressive. We deal everyday with things, creations of fellow humans, that don’t work at all when any little thing goes wrong. That’s why so many people make such good money repairing and maintaining expensive systems.

But creation just keeps doing what it does so well—supporting life. It amazes me how desperately life wants to continue. You can be out in the middle of a lava field, and there’s a little weed growing up through a crack, clinging to a few grains of something resembling dirt, raising its tiny leaves to the sky and soaking up the sun, yearning to grow.

Of course it’s true that by foolish mismanagement we humans can interfere with the Creator’s systems and make life difficult or even impossible (think Chernobyl). But it really is astonishing that a system so complex continues to support life after millennia of inattention or even abuse.

Whoever made all this must really, really like us.

Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator (1P 4.19).

Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 3: Omniscience

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Omnipotence

The second thing that I notice when I study the cosmos is its complexity. Again, from the macroscopic to the microscopic level the universe is just unbelievably complex.

At the largest scale there are gravitational forces affecting everything—not just galaxies as they rotate, but galaxy clusters, and even the “great wall” macrostructures of galaxy clusters. Astronomers tell us that there isn’t enough visible matter—stars—in a galaxy to account for its rotation, and hence they postulate “dark matter” to account for it. We can see that the system is complex over unfathomable distances (boy, there’s an insufficient adjective if ever there was one), and invisibly so at that.

At the other end of the spectrum, quarks—several kinds of ‘em—and muons and fluons are doing their things at the minutest of scales, while electrons orbit, or populate shells, or something, and the strong nuclear force keeps all those protons in the nuclei from repelling one another, and the motions are frantic—and the elements appear to us to be pretty much standing still.

So is light a particle or a wave? And why not?

And we haven’t even talked about living things yet.

The more we learn about the cell, the more complicated we realize it is. And the DNA and RNA that it contains are equally complex, containing—and writing—instructions for all the characteristics that make one life form different from others, and from other examples of the same life form. Not to mention epigenetics.

(I have no idea what I’m talking about.)

One of my favorite examples of complexity is symbiosis—the mutually beneficial relationships between life forms. And my favorite one of those involves the termite.

As someone who has bought and sold a couple of houses, I’m no fan of termites. Pretty much all they do is eat. And they eat just one thing—wood. They’ll wreak havoc on the joists and other wooden components of your house—which is why you can’t sell a house without a “termite letter” from an inspector, confirming that there is no termite infestation in the house and that any damage from previous infestations has been properly repaired.

Interestingly, though, the termite’s digestive system is unable to digest cellulose—which is what wood is primarily made of. Which means that he could eat like a madman all day long and starve to death—his entire dietary intake would go right through him.

But as it happens, there live in the digestive tract of the termite a bunch of little microorganisms called flagellates. They excrete a substance that renders the cellulose digestible by the termite.

How fortunate.

But there’s more to the story.

The flagellate is anaerobic.

What does that mean?

It means he never exercises.

No. #dadjoke

It means that oxygen is toxic to him. If he’s exposed to the air, he dies.

So the flagellate keeps the termite alive, and the termite keeps the flagellate alive.

Now.

Which one of those little beasties do you suppose evolved first?

And it’s actually more complicated than that.

You see, both the termite and the flagellate reproduce sexually.

Without going into too much detail, that means that there has to be a boy flagellate and a girl flagellate. In the same place. At the same time. And they have to like each other.

Same with the termites.

And, of course, all four of them—actually much more than four—need to be together, because, as you recall, they’re keeping one another alive.

There are lots of other examples of symbiosis, little macrocosms that represent just a small picture of what the cosmos itself is—an infinitely complex system, in perfect balance, running smoothly for thousands of years, and so reliably that we can literally set our watches by it.

Whoever made this place must be really, really smart.

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, [that] the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? [there is] no searching of his understanding (Is 40.28).

Part 4: TLC | Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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On What We Learn from Looking Around, Part 2: Omnipotence

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Part 1: Introduction

So what do we learn about the Creator by observing what he has created?

I’m not going to be picky about the order here—I suppose different people will notice different things at different times—but the one that jumps out at me first is power.

Whoever made this place must be really, really strong.

Philosophers note that effects have causes—that’s the basis for all science—and that the cause is typically greater—more comprehensive, more powerful, more something—than the effect.

Why do I start with strength? Because the cosmos is so big.

Unimaginably big.

The fastest any human being has ever traveled is just a hair under 25,000 mph. That was the crew of Apollo 10, returning to the earth from the moon. Now, suppose you start at the sun (I know, if you start at the sun you won’t get anywhere, because you’ll be incinerated. Work with me here.) and head outward at that speed.

  • If my math is right, you’ll reach Mercury in 60 days.
  • Venus in another 56.
  • Earth in 39 more.
  • Mars in 78 more.

By the way, this assumes that the planets are all lined up in a row, which they never are, and ignores Newtonian physics, which encourages rocket scientists to save fuel by using the gravitational forces of planets to accelerate a spacecraft by “slingshotting.” This means that your rockets will have to be firing all the time, and you could never carry that much fuel. But again, work with me.

So far this seems doable. But as you probably know, the distances start to increase outside Mars’s orbit.

  • Jupiter is 576 days more. 800 total so far. That’s between 2 and 3 years.
  • Saturn is another 700 days. Almost 2 additional years.
  • Uranus another 1500.
  • Neptune another 1650.

You’ve reached the edge of the solar system, in just 12 years and 9 months. And oh, my friend, you’re just getting started.

  • The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is another 115,333 years. I hope you brought a book.
  • The nearest edge of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is another 670.5 million years.
  • The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is another 53 billion years.
  • The edge of our “local” galaxy cluster is another 2.65 trillion years.
  • The edge of the observed universe is another 131 trillion years.

Now, we’ll see in a bit what the James Webb Space Telescope shows us. If the Lord tarries, I expect we’ll keep developing technology that allows us to see deeper into space, using various frequencies. And I also suspect there will always be more—that we’ll never come to the “edge” of it—whatever that means.

The sheer scope of the cosmos tells us of the power of its Creator.

Consider a different aspect.

The sun, they tell us, is an average-to-mediocre star. Yet it’s an 800,000-mile diameter ball of raging nuclear fusion, with a core temperature of 16 million degrees. (That’s Kelvin, but with these numbers the scale you use doesn’t really matter.) It shoots out flaming geysers of gas 200,000 miles high for hours at a time.

And if you took the most powerful power plant on earth and duplicated it 2.5 billion times, and collected all the power that army of plants generated in a year, it would equal the output of the sun in just 1 second.

Yikes.

There are lots of other evidences of the Creator’s power. I’ve stood on the “hurricane deck” at the foot of Niagara Falls and been nearly knocked to my knees by the power of the falling water—and there’s a bigger waterfall right next door.

I’ve stood at the edge of Victoria Falls (“the smoke that thunders”) in Zambia and placed my finger in the water, knowing that the precipice stretches across the Zambezi River for more than a mile.

Apparently Isaiah gave some thought to this concept:

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, [that] the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? (Is 40.28).

You don’t need a Bible to know that whoever did all this is really, really strong.

Part 3: Omniscience | Part 4: TLC | Part 5: Closing Thoughts

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On Stillness, Part 3: Thinking on God’s Works

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Part 1: It’s a Good Thing | Part 2: Thinking in the Silence

We’re using times of quiet to do some deep thinking. Last time I suggested that we begin by thinking carefully about the attributes of God. This time I’d like to suggest taking the obvious next step: thinking carefully about his works.

The attributes of God have to do with who he is; if we were describing a human friend, we’d refer to his “personality”—that is, his characteristics, what he is like. God’s works, on the other hand, have to do with what he does. And the Scripture commends thinking in that direction specifically—

  • I will meditate on all your work, and muse on your mighty deeds (Ps 77.12).
  • I remember the days of old, I think about all your deeds, I meditate on the works of your hands (Ps 143.5).

Organizing your thoughts around his works can get a little complicated, if you’re trying to be theologically precise. Officially, the works of God are just three in number: creation, providence, and miracles. Creation is the work by which God brings all things into existence; providence is the work by which he maintains and directs those things; and miracles is anything that doesn’t fit into the first two categories. (Theologians have offered more technical definitions of the word miracle, but I’m inclined to see shortcomings in each of those definitions, and so I use this as a simple, practical workaround.)

Some would make miracles a subcategory of providence, and most would see two other subcategories as well: preservation and government. The former is God’s maintenance of what he has created (think science), and the latter is his direction of the affairs of people and nations (think history).

The question is further complicated by a theological concept called “inseparable operations” in the Trinity. This is an attempt to highlight the unity of the Godhead by asserting that all the works of God are performed by all three persons in the Trinity. The standard exceptions are that the Father eternally begets the Son, and that the Father and the Son (unless you’re Eastern Orthodox) send the Spirit—or rather, that the Spirit “proceeds” from them.

(Can I say “them,” if God is One?)

As you can see, the attributes of God, which are infinite and thus beyond our complete comprehension, make our meditation on his works complicated as well.

There is constant opportunity here for wonder and for worship. If you think you understand it, there’s something you haven’t thought of.

But God, in grace, has revealed himself in his Word and in his works, and the fact that he’s infinite doesn’t mean that trying to understand and know him is a fool’s errand. We cannot know it all, but we can know—and experience—what he has revealed of himself.

I’ve organized my daily thanksgiving prayer around God’s works as well as his attributes. I thank him for Creation—and as anyone born in the American West knows, there’s a lot of creation to be thankful for. Its beauty and grandeur are beyond words, from the complexities and mysteriousness of subatomic particles, to the cell, to Yosemite Falls, to the interworkings of biomes, to the Great Wall of galactic clusters in the ubercosmos—or as D.A. Carson put it, “every galaxy, microbe, and hill.” Even in its broken state, God’s work of creation commends him.

I thank him for his providence, before I existed and since. It took me just a few minutes to jot down a whole catalog of good providences from which I have benefited. Some were painful, and some were not, but all were from God’s hand and have worked good in my life, my mind, and my soul.

I thank him for his miracles, most especially the work of new birth, and all the works that led up to it and have proceeded from it.

God is unspeakably good in his works. The more I think about the topic, the more convinced I am of his might and of his love.

God is great, and God is good.

Next time, we’ll suggest one more topic for deep thought.

Part 4: Thinking On God’s Word | Part 5: In Your Heart

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On Stillness, Part 2: Thinking in the Silence

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Part 1: It’s a Good Thing

Years ago I read that the brain is not a bucket to be filled, but a muscle to be exercised. That is, your head is not limited in capacity in such a way that you need to save it for just the most important stuff. Rather, it can keep adding material forever; in fact, the more you exercise it, the more it can hold.

That concept has heavily influenced my thinking, my studying, and my teaching. Our minds don’t need rest; they want to be active. Oh, they do need change, or variety; I’m often encouraging my students to study in sprints rather than marathons, to stop and think about something else for a while. But even when we’re asleep, our minds are busy, making up stories, many of which make no sense at all. Thinking is what we do by nature.

The advantage to thinking in silence is raising the focus, and thus the quality, of how we’re thinking. I know it’s alleged that kids these days, I suppose largely because of Starbucks, need background noise in order to think—that sheer silence overwhelms them. I haven’t seen that demonstrated; in fact, I see indications that when my students think they’re “multi-tasking,” they’re really just doing several things poorly. (And I have the test scores to prove it.)

So what should we do with the silence that we find so rejuvenating?

The few biblical passages I noted in the previous post at least imply that we should be using the quiet time to think.

To think about what?

Again, the Scripture gives us some direction.

Think About God

The well-known passage cited earlier says simply, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Similarly, while hiding from King Saul in the Judean desert—where it gets really quiet, especially at night—David wrote,

5      My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,
and my mouth praises you with joyful lips
6      when I think of you on my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
7      for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy (Ps 63).

I suppose David had an advantage there, in that as he lay on the desert ground at night, with no light pollution, he had a spectacular display of God’s glory in the canopy of stars and planets and meteors and the bright ribbon of the Milky Way. Saul doesn’t seem like such a big deal out there.

There’s a lot to think about with reference to God. (Understatement of all time.) I find it highly profitable to list, organize, and meditate on God’s personality—his qualities, what theologians call his attributes. I’ve worked a list of them into my prayer life, meditating on a different one each day. I find that having such an attribute in your head at the beginning of the day tends to give greater clarity—and peace—when the day gets noisy.

There are lots of places you can get information on God’s attributes. Any systematic theology book will have a section, usually a whole chapter, devoted to them. Many people have been helped by J. I. Packer’s Knowing God; Arthur W. Pink and A. W. Tozer both have books on the topic as well. Tozer’s book Knowledge of the Holy is also helpful. If you want something more challenging, the Puritan Stephen Charnock’s work is the standard.

There are also several helpful websites—

Next time, we’ll get further guidance from the Bible on what to think about in the silence.

Part 3: Thinking on God’s Works | Part 4: Thinking On God’s Word | Part 5: In Your Heart

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Bigger Than Anything, Part 2

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Part 1

The Nation (Ex 12) 

  • Some 400 years later, the people of Israel are slaves in Egypt, and God miraculously delivers them, with the greatest show of power the world had ever seen (Ex 12.33-36). He promises to give them a permanent homeland, one that’s fertile and beautiful and peaceful. He makes a covenant with them at Mt. Sinai, and they promise—unanimously—to do everything He tells them (Ex 19.8). 
  • Now the people are a nation. So He tells them to take the land, and they get scared and quit (Num 14.1-4). That’s discouraging. 
  • They wander in the wilderness for 40 years, eating food and drinking water that God miraculously provides. Their clothing and shoes don’t wear out (Dt 29.5). But all they do is complain (Nu 11.1). Even their leader, Moses, fails so badly that God won’t let him enter the Promised Land (Dt 32.48-52). 
  • But the nation does enter it. They live in houses they didn’t have to build, and they eat from gardens they didn’t have to plant (Dt 6.11). God has taken them another major step toward the killing of the snake. 

The Royal Line (2Sa 7) 

  • God chooses a shepherd boy to lead this nation. And He promises that David’s royal son will reign forever. 
  • But David’s son Solomon, despite receiving unequaled wisdom from God, breaks God’s Law (Dt 17.17) by marrying multiple foreign wives, and by the end of his life he’s worshiping their false gods (1K 11.4). And his son, Rehoboam, splits the kingdom. 
  • From that day, the Northern kings are unremittingly evil, and most of the Southern kings, offspring of David, are evil too. 
  • But every so often, there’s a good one. One of them, Hezekiah, gets sick one day, and God tells him to get his affairs in order, because he’s going to die. Hezekiah begs, and God gives him another 15 years (2K 20.1-7). 
  • And when he dies, his son, Manasseh, becomes king, at the age of—12 (2K 21.1). And he is the worst king of Israel to that point. But God is still working His plan. 
  • Several generations later Jehoiachin is king. He is so evil that God curses him: no offspring of Jehoiachin will ever sit on the throne of his father David (Je 22.24-30). The messianic line is cursed.
  • And Judah goes captive to Babylon, and that’s the end of it (2Ch 36.15-21).

Or so it seems. 

The Seed (Mt 1) 

  • About 6 centuries later, a carpenter from Nazareth is the heir to the throne. But he can never be king, since he’s under the curse. He meets a godly young woman and eventually makes the arrangements with her father, and they are engaged. 
  • One horrible day he discovers that this woman that he had thought was so godly, who he thought loved him, is with child. She has apparently been with another man. 
  • As he sleeps one night, he sees an angel, and he learns the truth (Mt 1.20). Mary has not been unfaithful; her child is the Son of God. And Joseph is to adopt this Child. 
  • This will ruin Joseph’s reputation. But he decides to trust God and obey the angel. 
  • And in that simple act, God uses him to enable the rescue of you and me from our sin. As Mary’s son through Nathan, Jesus has no legal claim to the throne of David, which comes through Solomon. But as Joseph’s adopted son, He is the only rightful heir, and He is unaffected by the curse on Jehoiachin. 
  • And 30 years later, He crushes—crushes—the serpent’s head. 

Epilogue 

  • And then He builds His church. He gathers disciples, fills them with His Spirit, and sends them to the ends of the earth (Ac 1.8). He finds a proud but hateful Pharisee, a mass murderer in the very name of God, and revolutionizes him to be an apostle to the Gentiles (Ac 9.15-16). Paul and his partner Barnabas begin the daunting task of taking the message to all nations (Ac 13.1-3). 
  • And after just one trip, Paul and Barnabas, who is the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet (Ac 4.36), have such a disagreement that they decide to go their separate ways (Ac 15.39). And now there are two teams spreading the gospel, instead of one. 

This God? He’s bigger than giants, bigger than kings and their armies, bigger than all the forces of nature, bigger even than sin and failure and frustration and distraction. Big enough to use the sin He hates to accomplish His will, whether in twelve angry brothers or an adulterous shepherd boy or a much-married wise man or even the death of His Son. 

He’s bigger than anything.

Photo by Philip Graves on Unsplash

Bigger Than Anything, Part 1

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We have some odd ideas about God.

I hear students say, “We won our soccer game. Isn’t God good!”

Well, yes he is. But he was good to the team that lost, too.

“I passed my test. Praise God!”

But he would be worthy of praise just as certainly if you hadn’t passed.

The Bible’s story is very different from this sort of self-referential, circumstance-based thinking. God is good all the time. And he’s great all the time. He’s bigger than anything.

  • The shepherd boy goes up against a giant, and he kills him with a sling (1Sa 17.48-51). God’s greater than giants.
  • The Assyrian army surrounds and besieges Jerusalem, and the Angel of the Lord kills 185,000 Assyrian soldiers as they sleep in their tents (Is 37.36). God’s bigger than emperors and their armies.
  • Nahum says that God’s way is in the whirlwind and storm (Na 1.3). Have you ever seen a tornado? I’ve seen a town shortly after it was obliterated by one. Who sent that storm? God did. He’s bigger than the greatest natural forces we can ever imagine. 

Let me go a step further.

He’s even bigger than sin! He doesn’t sin, and He doesn’t like us to sin, but it doesn’t frustrate Him or mess up His plans. He even uses it to accomplish His purposes. 

Watch how it happens. I’d like to lay out the biblical story—what some call its “metanarrative”—in a couple of posts. It’s not a story in which we’re the heroes, or even the main characters. But it changes our lives and our fortunes.

The Promise (Ge 3) 

The story I got in Sunday school was simple:

God makes a beautiful world, Adam ruins it, and God has to figure out a way to rescue him and still be just.

Simple enough for a child. But not accurate. That’s not really how the story goes—or perhaps more correctly, that’s not the point of the story.

This is more like it:

  • God hasn’t made this difficult, but Adam and Eve sin anyway. And God knows, and He confronts them. He pronounces judgment on each of them, and then He turns to the serpent, and in the midst of judgment, He speaks grace to Adam and Eve (Ge 3.15). 
  • There will be a “seed.” And that “seed” will crush the serpent’s head. Out of unexpected failure, and shock, and fear, comes Hope. 
  • Adam and Eve clearly don’t understand. She has a son and names him Cain, “getting,” because she’s gotten what God promised, a seed (Ge 4.1). Boy, is she ever wrong. 
  • But God is doing what He wants. This is not Plan B; there is no Plan B. This is what He intended all along. 

The People (Ge 12) 

  • God finds a pagan man, an idol worshiper (Jos 24.2), and makes a completely unreasonable demand: Leave your home and your family, and go somewhere else. Where? I’m not telling you. Just go (Ge 12.1). 
  • And Abram believes, and he goes. But he’s not exactly perfect; he’s afraid of a king, so he lies and tells him that his wife is his sister (Ge 12.13). And only direct intervention from God preserves the purity of the woman Abram’s supposed to protect. That’s a pretty serious failure. 
  • Then Abram tries to help God keep his promise by having a child with his wife’s servant (Ge 16.3). That’s disappointing. 
  • But by the time it’s over, Abram (now Abraham) and Sarah have a son, and everybody’s laughing (Gen 21.6). And that son has a son named Israel, who’s a cheater (Ge 25.26); and that son has 12 sons, 10 of whom sell their spoiled little brother into slavery (Ge 37.28); but they become the 12 tribes of Israel, and God has taken the first big step toward keeping His promise to crush the serpent’s head. 

Next time, the story continues.

Part 2

Photo by Philip Graves on Unsplash