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Children of Promise

3/22/2015

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Galatians 4 : 21 – 31

At a time when carefully preserved copies of Magna Carta are in the news we observe that these verses contain Paul’s Magnificent Charter of Freedom for those who have faith in Jesus Christ.

He is reissuing its contents to a congregation of wayward believers who foolishly choose to live under the law (human obedience) as the means of gaining divine approval and acceptance.  They fail to see that such an attitude nullifies the gospel that put them right with God in the first place.  It is a stunningly serious lapse in understanding and endeavour.  To some extent the church in every era is imitative.  It is so easy to fall prey to legalism corporately and individually.

In the matter of human salvation there are two options:  the law and futile effort, or the grace of God in Jesus Christ.  Inevitably the sinful, self-sufficient bias in human nature tends to prefer the former.

Paul writes to the Galatians with dismay:  they have selected the law as the path to salvation.  It is a potentially fatal fall if they fail to see their grave mistake.  He points to the consequences and reminds them of their status and privilege as children of God.  It was Thomas Chalmers who sagely remarked that much of their time Christians are living below their privileges.

Paul seeks to awaken the Galatians with a telling comparison from actual and ancient history.  He traverses the trail of time back to the Father of Israel, the progenitor of the People of God – Abraham.  He bases his case on Genesis 16 and the account of the birth of Ishmael to Hagar.  “So Hagar bore Abram a son, and Abram gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne.  Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael” (v15).

Law and grace are represented by two women – the slave woman and the free, namely, Hagar and Sarah.  Their offspring, Ishmael and Isaac respectively, were stark opposites.  Hagar’s son was born in the ordinary way.  Sarah’s was born by the supernatural intervention of God according to the promise pertaining to the coming of the Saviour.  The women and their sons stood for two covenants.  One, the natural way to God through human moral obedience of heart and behaviour – a useless way now that man was sinful and incapable of the law’s perfection, and the other, reunion with God through the special seed or descendant of Abraham who would free us from the slavery of sin, and wasted effort to deal with it, and bring us back to God by grace alone through his accomplishment on our behalf.

For Paul the distinction is clear.  The choices are spiritual, either servitude to Sinai’s demands amounting to sinless perfection, or salvation through Jerusalem’s solution – freedom in Christ and citizenship of heaven.

We have the “impossible opportunity” – because it is a spiritual matter – to opt for our spiritual mother, either Hagar the earthbound way of enslavement and death, or Sarah and liberation from work’s righteousness to life in the power of the Spirit (justification by faith and renewal though the Spirit).   The latter way is the sole way of deliverance from sin and futility.

By grace, Paul says to the believers of Galatia, you are children of promise living beneath your privileges.   You are no longer to live in the ordinary way of nature, and those who do so are at odds with you.  There is a vast chasm between the converted and the condemned.  Nature is blind to God and insensible to the things of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:10-16) . Nature has no true estimate of its predicament and spiritual poverty.  Nature exists in the realm of sight and sense, the visible, the tangible, and all that impinges upon the spirit of man from the natural understanding of the mind of man.  Your life in Christ places you on a higher plane of new awareness wherein you are influenced by the Holy Spirit and you are granted a foretaste of heaven, fellowship with God in anticipation of the Jerusalem above.

Paul might add, you are not compatible with the ungodly children of Hagar:  they are at war with the free because their thoughts are alien and they do not understand them.  Their convictions are disconcerting because they clash with their values and pleasures.  Therefore there is friction in worldly society for believers and there is also friction in the fellowship for believers.

The natures of Hagar and Sarah are at variance.  One is wedded to law and the other welded to grace.  Legalism is oppressive and offended at grace.  It cherishes performance above the promise.  Sarah foresaw the coming conflict:  “But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking [the celebration of Isaac, v8]” (Genesis 21:9).

Paul, in offering very direct and plain advice to the Galatians, takes up the anguished speech of Sarah, “‘Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.’ Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.” (vv30-31).   He is saying, quit the law utterly and absolutely – the “do it yourself” way to God and the Jerusalem above, and be what you are, children of the free, not that you are free to sin, but to gain the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus.

We can never gain righteousness through the law – the way of human obedience and rectitude through human effort.  That is fruitless slavery through a non-effective pattern of procedure.  It is blighted by original and ongoing sin in manifestations we are not able to trace and which only God himself may discern in his majestic and uncompromised holiness.  The sinner does not see himself as he ought, therefore he has no measure of his condition, culpability, and unavoidable condemnation.  The unawakened sinner is quite pleased with himself with no sense of the displeasure of God.

Freedom from the bondage and helplessness of sin is found in the Promise of which Christ is the embodiment, fulfilment, and applicator.  He impresses the stamp of the letter “P” upon the foreheads of his own people with his own thumb.  “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.  Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (ch5 v1).

Through him we get rid of the slave woman and her son.  They get no inheritance from God.  In Jesus and through Jesus we inherit all the blessings of God for all eternity.  His favour is free and we are free in him, finding rest in him.  An incomparable, immeasurable prospect is ours through trust in the One who fulfils the oath sworn to Abraham (Benedictus).

RJS

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Testing the Heart

3/11/2015

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Jeremiah 17:5 - 10

Jeremiah’s passage presents Scripture as a spiritual cardiograph checking the movements of the human heart, recording its direction, testing its fundamental affection - toward God or away from God.

The health of the heart is Jeremiah’s searching theme, and its soundness is determined by the nature of its trust.  Trust is the essence of life - on what or whom do we rely.  It determines the beat of the heart, that on which our interior life - the life of the soul - depends.  Everything in creation is dependent on some force or condition.  Man is rationally conscious of where his confidence is placed.  He possesses sensibility and volition.

Humanity is divided into two distinct categories.  There are those who depend on the flesh for their strength and those whose confidence is in God.

Jeremiah has been in consultation with the ultimate heart specialist. - the Lord himself who framed the heart and knows its inclinations exhaustively.  His examinations are infallible.  He looks at our disease - the sin that destroys the heart, and he prescribes the way of health and fruitful life.

There are two alternatives before us as we consider the welfare of the soul; the way of man and the will of God and the spiritual prosperity that it affords.  The heart may move in two directions.  The first option is the innate tendency of our fallen and diseased nature.  This inclination prevails from the womb:  “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on the flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord” (v5).  The defective heart departs from the Lord.  It is born with that tragic bias inherited from our original forbears and it is the curse of the human family.

We inherently and inevitably trust in man.  Our hope is in the flesh - the resources of our nature, and we fail to see that our nature is damaged and debased and all our faculties impaired.  Our instinctive faith is placed in something that is seriously flawed.  In our breach with God we pridefully boast in ourselves.  We celebrate our capacities while intensifying the curse within and without.   Of the cursed man Jeremiah declares, “He will be like a bush in the wastelands, he will not see prosperity when it comes.  He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives” (v6).  This is a horrifying description of isolation from God.

We are incapable of diagnosing our condition, which we deem as normal, and we deceive ourselves that we can rise above our difficulties and myriad handicaps.  We constantly bring harm to ourselves through our ill advised exertions and we augment our distresses and increase our imperilment.

The confidence in the flesh is futile and eventually fatal.

The second alternative described to us by the prophet is the way of attachment to God and trust in him.  We become linked to the healer of souls and source of restored wholeness.  “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him” (v7).  The physician of the fallen nature makes us fit again.

The language of verse seven is intriguing and needs to be observed with care.  It contains our effective medicine.  It advises us to trust God as the way of deliverance and wellbeing, but then becomes more personal and intimate, taking us beyond a mere prescription that we may read to a person we may know.  “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord [proposition], and whose trust is the Lord [person to person encounter].

The way of human rescue and restoration is not some-thing (a magic spiritual formula we might ingest) but some-one, whom we know, love, and confide in, whose touch and embrace achieves our healing through direct contact.

God himself is our health, our greatest benefit and blessing, and all our advantages accrue from fellowship and union with him.  Disunited we fell from him.  Through reconnection we are uplifted.  He is our life support.

Detached from him we wither and die.  Attached to him we flourish.  “He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream.  It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green.  It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit” (v8).

With the hints we have as to our malady, and the symptoms we see and feel, we are helpless to effectively treat ourselves.  Our condition is beyond our expertise whether we think of it as moral, spiritual, psychological, or circumstantial; and we can blame nothing else but our own wretched hearts which we cannot comprehend or control.  We are unable to apprehend the dangers and dimensions of our plight.

We are ignorant of our true selves and living an illusion - frightening at times but false in its optimism and devices for improvement.  The way of self-betterment is a cul-de-sac that confronts us with dejection or despair.  The only knowledge and diagnosis that count are the conclusions that God draws concerning our predicament and peril.

Only he is competent to get to the root and core of our grave disorder.  We will only fool ourselves.

The Scriptural verdict is thorough, radical, and alarming.  “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it” (v9).  Our hearts are supremely adept at lying to us and misleading us.  They make us colour blind when we come to reading red and green lights.  To follow our hearts is perilous folly.  Such is satanic advice.  Our inner device for discernment and decision is utterly deceitful “above all things”.  And beyond this divine estimation it is “beyond cure’.

I must mistrust me/myself.  I must address myself as “liar” in the spiritual/moral zone of my life, for I will choose what is convenient and often corrupt and I am consistently self-excusing.  I cannot put ultimate trust in anyone else for their moral mechanism is often as dysfunctional as mine.  But the Lord is always at hand to caution and guide, and to correct and protect, when missteps are made (he permits these to humble and help me).

We must bring ourselves before the divine investigation and yield to his course of treatment, so that through Jesus Christ, the true healer of hearts, the rewards of his free grace will fit us for life enduring and everlasting.  Jeremiah’s conviction is that God can make well the incurable.  That is the prerogative of his sovereign omnipotence.  That is the incentive for our prayer.

RJS

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