Sovereign Grace

I've been hoping to come to this for some time...and it just hasn't panned out very well. I have a host of things on the TODO list right now that aren't getting done.

But given the apocalyptic nature of the times—I believe the weather report for Hell included some freezing once the Cubs won the World Series—my thoughts have turned on and off towards the sovereignty of God.

One of the significant contrasts between the Old and New Testaments is how the former pairs law with anarchy and the latter law with grace.

The OT is replete with examples of flawed and failed kings, with everyone doing what is right in his own eyes, and with promises for the Messianic king. The setup is made more pronounced by seeing the holy and righteous law indiscriminately condemning everyone it touches—I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.

It is tempting, and my wont, to discuss the contagious and destructive holiness of God, and how the only remedy for that is found in the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, but I wanted to note why, I think, the themes of the NT are so dramatically different.

Broadly speaking, because the OT speaks of law in contrast to anarchy, it points out our unwillingness and inability to keep it. Where no king is, anarchy reigns and everyone does as he pleases. The pattern is most pronounced in the book of Judges, I think, but it is not the only case—Lamech in Genesis is presented as a vigilante, taking vengeance as he sees fit rather than giving way to God's justice. (In this way, I hasten to point out, the Mosaic covenant is hardly retrograde: instead of giving carte blanche to take your own revenge, it actually limits you.) Law, then, as seen in the OT, is set largely against man's desire to be his own master and go his own way.

The NT opposes law not to anarchy, but to grace. Why is this?

I haven't fully developed the train of thought, but I think it is because Jesus is the true King whose sovereignty is unchallenged. He is the King. His will shall be done. He is the ultimate, final, and complete authority over all that is given to him by his Father, and we know this is true because he was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection. It is not an accident that the epistle to the Romans begins with the declaration of the Lordship of Jesus Christ ("... our Lord Jesus Christ, which was made of the seed of David ... and declared to be the son of God with power ... by the resurrection from the dead.").

The extent of his authority means that there is no longer any possible escape into the anarchy of our self-kingdoms. What has replaced this is his grace. Because the Father grants him all authority in heaven and earth, he judges and stays judgment, executing the law and granting grace.

Grace, in other words, is enabled not only by his death, but by his sovereign power; it is because he is sovereign that he gives grace. It is because his authority is incontestable that he can assure us of his favor.

There is more to dig at here (e.g., seeing all power as the authority over life and death—for this is what the power exercised by authority really boils down to), but I am writing on very limited and overextended time. Hopefully time will present to pursue it, but I am guessing it will be months and months before I come back to this again.

Even so, amid the Sturm und Drang of these past months and years, it is a comfort in my relatively undisturbed pocket of existence to be reminded of the ultimate authority of Jesus Christ. He is the King, and we pray for his soon return. Maranatha!

It is Finished

I will be out for Holy Saturday. It seems appropriate, then, to remind each other of the finished work of Jesus Christ.

Hosea

In the new year, I decided to spend a bit of time in the minor prophets instead of reading through the Bible in a year. There are twelve of them and twelve months in the year, so it seemed like a reasonable plan. Moreover, some of them are quite short (Obadiah, anyone?) and that afforded some flexibility in the study as well.

Because this is the first go-round for me in any depth, I don't expect that it's going to yield insights much beyond the surface. Even so, it's an interesting experience.

Hosea is largely concerned with Israel, that is, the northern kingdom—perhaps better said than kingdom, the whoredom, but there are references made to Judah, too (the book is written during the times of Uzziah, Jotham, and Hezekiah).

There are a few solid bullet point insights I can offer before my time is up:

• Israel was a very religious nation: their primary sin was not that they didn't worship Jehovah, but that they mixed their worship of the Baals with their worship of the true God. They worshiped calves as they did in the wilderness, and called them Jehovah.
• Israel by all accounts worshiped with roughly the correct forms: otherwise God would have had no need to reprove them by saying, "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice." Jesus would use exactly the same argument against the religious leaders of his time, who worshiped the Law instead of God.
• Judah and Israel are contrasted subtly in the book, but their failings are rather similar. (The kings of Judah during this time were mostly good kings, excepting Ahaz, but the people had corrupt practices.) One of the common themes from the OT is that one's military success was the result of having the more powerful deity—at least in the pagan world, this is what is expected. So part and parcel of Israel's whoring after other gods is their desire to be as militarily successful as the nations that conquered them. Judah is somewhat less afflicted by this malady, but instead of trusting in God, she trusts in her fortified cities. It is a study to see that Uzziah had an exceptionally strong military, but all of his fortified cities were destroyed by Sennacherib. God rescued Hezekiah by divine miracle, and not by strength of arms.

There are obvious applications, I think, to our own perspectives and thinking today. One is that being religious is no safeguard to idolatry: indeed this is part and parcel of idolatry. We want the form of religion and its familiar comforts, but we are unwilling to come to God on his terms and worship him in the way he must be worshiped. We are content to put him on the shelf as first among money, success, and security, but never to take the other things off. (I say this as a principal offender in these matters.)

But we also see the irony in Judah's failures, that those who do worship God truly and are blessed by him forget him and trust instead to their own strength—falling prey, as it were, to the same idols that consume the former group. We have the right forms, the right location, the right rules, the worship of a single God. We tithe mint and dill and cumin. But we neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy.

There is also the lesson to be learned that military success is no real indicator of God's favor; he often uses military might as a tool of judgment against nations in the OT, even though those nations are terrible nations (Assyria and Babylon especially, but of course there's also all those nations in Judges).

Contrariwise, while we might expect military failures to indicate God's displeasure—and this is true in the OT—it is also his means of purification. The horror that the Israelites endured from the Babylonians and Assyrians nonetheless did not purge them utterly from the earth. And he likewise superintends the rebuilding of the temple, even in troublesome times.

I guess part of the takeaway for me, then, is that looking at circumstances as the indicator of God's favor or blessing is probably a mistake. Instead, we should be looking at the person and work of Jesus Christ through whom we have a sure inheritance and exceedingly precious promises.