THE WORD OF GOD IS SO SURE AND STRONG that if God wills, all things are done the moment that He speaks His Word. For it is so living and powerful that even the things which are irrational immediately conform themselves to it, or to be more accurate, THINGS BOTH RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL are fashioned and dispatched and constrained in conformity with its purpose. The proof may be found in GENESIS 1: "And God said, Let there be light; and there was light." Note how alive and strong the Word is, not merely ruling all things but creating out of nothings that which it wills. With God there is NO SUCH THING AS PAST OR FUTURE, but all things are naked and open to His eyes. He does not learn with time or forget with time, but with unerring knowledge and perception He sees all things present in eternity. It is in time that we who are temporal find the meaning and measure of longness or shortness. Yet what seems long to us is not long to God, but eternally present. If you think that God often fails to punish a wicked individual or nation, suffering their arrogance far too long, you are completely mistaken, for note they can never escape Him. THE WHOLE WORLD IS BEFORE HIM, WHERE THEN CAN THEY HIDE FROM HIS PRESENCE? Most certainly He will find them. And if you think that He does not punish or save according to His Word you are quite wrong. HIS WORD CAN NEVER BE UNDONE OR DESTROYED OR RESISTED. Oh you rascals! You who are not instructed or versed in the Gospel pick out verses from it without regard to their context, and wrest them according to your own desire. It is like breaking off a flower from its roots and trying to plant it in a garden. But that is not the way: you must plant IT WITH ROOTS AND THE SOIL IN WHICH IT IS EMBEDDED.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Like Breaking Off Flowers From Their Roots to Replant Them
I received my printed edition of new issue of The City, the Journal of Houston Baptist University, in the mail this week. I encourage you to have a look at this periodical, the entirety of which can be viewed online at www.civitate.org. The articles are always engaging and relevant. One of my favorite features is the first page, which always contains some classic piece of Christian writing on an important subject. This issue was no exception. The initial piece was by Huldrych Zwingli, a segment entitled "Of the Clarity and Certainty or Power of the Word of God," from Essays & Sermons of Huldrych Zwingli published around 1522. A full reproduction of this classic excerpt follows:
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Is there any bad news in the good news?
I am holding my tongue about the Rob Bell issue for the most part. I don't mind telling you that I haven't read the book Love Wins. I would read it if I didn't have to purchase it. Unfortunately I think all the pre-pub hype about the book has only stimulated more interest in it, and it will sell wildly, leading the author and publishers to think that the world needs more hamster-cage liners like this. I don't want to add to that. But if you want to send me a free copy, I will read it and chime in on it. Suffice to say that when every like-minded scholar whom I respect and learn from consistently are in lock-step agreement that the book's contents are heretical, I will not likely differ from them (though I did differ from some of them on The Shack, but here I think I would not). But like The Da Vinci Code and other books that have stirred up the waters in recent years, I can give thanks that this one also forces a difficult subject to the top of the agenda in public discourse. This time, one of those subjects is hell, and that of course is part of a larger discussion on the Gospel and what we believe about it.
The word "Gospel", we all know, means "good news." And it is not just good news, but the best news imaginable, that God has reconciled us to Himself in the cross of Christ. The miracle of justification, that a wretched sinner such as I can be covered in the perfect righteousness of Jesus, still brings me to pieces when I meditate upon it. It is unfathomably GOOD NEWS. But I want to ponder the question, "Is there any bad news contained within this good news?" Some would say, "Of course not. God is love and a loving God gives every story a happy ending, so there's no bad news at all. All roads lead to the same place. Or maybe just one road does and we are all on it whether we know it or not. Or maybe some roads lead to a bad place, but it is not going to last long and then it will be over and the only flames that will last forever are the ones at the big campfire in the sky where we will all hold hands and sing 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore' for eternity."
On the flip side, there is the position that says, "Of course there is bad news inherent within the good news." I have said this very thing for years. It goes something like this: "The bad news is that we are sinners, and because God is holy He must punish sin. And if we don't come to Christ, we will spend eternity in hell." That is not just bad news, it is like a trifecta of bad news, isn't it? For almost 20 years, I have said that this is all very bad news. But today I'm thinking that I have been wrong. Not wrong in the sense that I no longer believe these things and I'm going to don some hipster specs and stand out in the cold and make a video about how we are all going to heaven. No, I still believe what I believed before. We are all sinners, and a holy God must punish sin, and if we do not personally turn to Christ in repentance and faith, then there will literally be an eternity of hell to endure. I'm just not sure that any of that is bad news. In fact, I think it is all good news. I'm not sure there is any bad news in the good news.
I think more than ever as I get older that the fact that God punishes sin is not just "un-bad", and not just "good." It is what we long to wake up every morning and read about in the newspaper. The more hurt and brokenness we see in this world, the more we want to know that God is going to do something about it. We want to know that He is holy, He is just, He is righteous, and He is good. In fact, I think more than longing for more evidence that God is loving, we want to see more and more evidence that God is holy and good. After all, the atheist's strongest argument is what? The problem of loneliness? No, the problem of evil. The atheist thumbs his nose at Christianity, not because there is no apparent answer for all the unloveliness or lovelessness in the world, but because there is so much evil in the world and it appears from our vantage point at the moment that God is not the least bit concerned or involved in it. There is a hunger in the human heart to wake up tomorrow morning and read in the news that God has done something about the unspeakable horror that we read about in today's paper. And the Bible tells us that He will. The Bible assures us that God is holy and He is not turning a blind eye toward sin. All sin is going to receive the full justice it deserves, one way or another, directly from the hands of a righteous Judge and King.
But is this good news? After all, if ALL sin is going to receive the full justice it deserves, then that must mean MY sin will as well. And it most certainly means that, but it isn't bad news. It is good news. Because the reality is not that God WILL pour out this judgment, but rather that He HAS poured out this judgment. It happened when Christ died on the cross. He became the substitute for every sinner on the cross, and bore every sin there. And that includes you. And it includes me. So is it bad news that you are a sinner? Only if no one ever loved you enough to tell you. It is glorious news because if you are a sinner, then you are the very person Jesus came to save. I often say, "We have good news for sinners, and nothing to offer anyone else." If you are too proud to confess that you are a sinner and that your sins deserve a just condemnation from a holy God, then I just don't know what to tell you. But if you will confess that, then I can point you to a Savior who died for you, who wore your sins as He bore the wrath of the righteous Judge, so that you might wear His perfect righteousness in exchange.
So, then, is there a place of eternal torment called hell where unrepentant unbelievers will perish forever. Certainly. The Bible makes this so abundantly clear that one has to engage in hermeneutical yoga to avoid that conclusion. No one was clearer about it than Jesus Himself. But is it bad news? Is it bad news even for the ones who will end up there? I am inclined to think that it is not bad news, not even for them. I think even the fact that there is an eternal hell where the unrepentant and unbelieving will be tormented forever and ever is in itself "good news" because it assures us of the holiness and justice of God. And it drives home how awesome His mercy must be to save me from that end. And one of the amazing things about this is that even in hell, those people will realize that this all really amounts to good news.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Receiving God's Word: Nehemiah 8:1-12
This year, 2011, marks the 400th Anniversary of a significant event in Christian History and indeed the history of the world. To fully understand the significance of it, let me ask you some questions:
1) How many of you brought your own copy of the Bible to church today?
2) How many of you own multiple copies of the Bible?
3) How many of you own multiple English versions (KJV, NIV, NASB, ESV, etc.) of the Bible?
Do you understand that 400 years ago, you would have not likely been able to say “yes” to those questions? Do you understand that it took brothers and sisters in the Christian family dying so that you could have what you have today? Do you understand that many people in other parts of the world still do not have in their language what you have in your language today? And you have it, in large part because of what happened 400 years ago. So I want to pursue two questions today: (1) How did you receive the Word? (2) How do you receive the Word? Those are two different questions. The first one deals with historical events that led to you possessing a copy of the Word of God in your own language and being able to hear it taught and preached in your own language. The second deals with what you do when you read it, hear it, or study it. The first, how DID you receive the Word, is historical; the second, how DO you receive the Word, is deeply personal.
The book of Acts describes how Christianity spread from Jerusalem to Rome. While this was going on, the Roman Empire was expanding ever-outward, and by the end of the first century, nearly all of the British Isles were under the control of Rome. In time, Christianity became the dominant religion of the Empire, and as such it began to spread to the far reaches of Roman control. By the middle of the 600s Christianity was becoming established in the British Isles and it is widely believed that Caedmon, a herdsman, monk, and poet, was the first to render any portion of God’s Word into the Anglo-Saxon tongue we now call “Old English.” His work was more paraphrase than translation, but he cracked open a door that would take nearly 1,000 years to open wide – that of translating the Word of God into English.
Over the next few centuries, leading up to the 900s, several others would translate and paraphrase portions of the Bible, including all four Gospels, the entire Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Esther, and a few other portions, into Old English. But all of these attempts to put God’s Word into the language of the Anglo-Saxon peoples had been based upon the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, which was the official Bible of the Catholic Church. That means it was a translation of a translation. There had been no attempt to translate the original Greek and Hebrew Scriptures into the common tongue of Britain to this point. To complicate matters even more, within a short time all of these versions became virtually obsolete as English evolved from “Old English” into “Middle English” following the Norman Invasion of 1066.
The Middle English period saw far fewer attempts to put the Word of God into the language of the English-speaking people. Most notably, Ormin paraphrased the Gospels and Acts around 1200. In the 1300s the Psalms would be translated from Latin into a few regional English dialects. But other attempts were few and less notable. The Catholic Church certainly did nothing to encourage translation efforts. They had a twofold reason for keeping the Bible in Latin. They claimed that they desired to prevent laypeople from misinterpreting the Bible, and thus they sought to protect the church from doctrinal error. But the greater factor was that by keeping the reading and interpreting of the Bible reserved only for the learned, they could maintain control over the people. In that day, clergy were among the most well educated people of society. If a person wanted to know what the Bible said, they had to ask the priest. Most of a person’s Bible knowledge came only from what they learned in church services, and even then biblical exposition as we know it today was rare. Since the printing press had not yet been invented, copies of the Bible, even in Latin, were rare and expensive, being handwritten manuscripts often illuminated with extravagant artwork in the margins. You would not have owned a single private copy of the Bible unless you were extraordinarily wealthy, and to own multiple copies would have been unthinkable. If you had access to a Bible at all, it would have been in Latin. There were no complete English Bibles at this time. But all of this would soon change with the rising of a new star on the horizon.
John Wycliffe was born in 1320, nearly 200 years before Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the Wittenburg Church door. Wycliffe came to be known as “The Morning Star of the Reformation” because he spoke out boldly against the moral degradation, political abuses, and theological errors of the Catholic Church from the parish priest all the way to the top – the Pope himself. This put Wycliffe at enmity with the Catholic Church, and led to the issuing of five papal bulls, official documents of public rebuke, against him. Wycliffe surrounded himself with men known as The Lollards, a group of travelling preachers who went throughout the English countryside preaching the truth of the Bible in the common language of the people. Wycliffe translated the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate into English in 1380 and oversaw the completion of the Old Testament prior to his death in 1384.
Wycliffe’s influence so outraged the Catholic Church that in 1401, some 17 years after his death, an official persecution was launched by the church against all of Wycliffe’s followers. In 1408, the “Constitutions of Oxford” were published, which banned Wycliffe’s writings and made the translation of the Bible into English a crime punishable by the charge of heresy. In 1415 Wycliffe was officially declared by the church to be a “stiff-necked heretic.” His books were ordered to be burned, and in 1428, Pope Martin V ordered that his remains be exhumed from the grave and burned. But Wycliffe’s writings and influence continued to spread, and all the more as new innovations over the coming century fueled the fires of reformation.
Gutenberg’s printing press came into being around 1450, during the height of the Renaissance. Soon the world was filled with books, and many ancient classics became easily accessible. New emphasis was placed on the study of classical sources of information. As a result of these developments, Hebrew and Greek manuscripts which predated the Latin Vulgate became available to the scholarly world. An Englishman named William Tyndale had been classically educated at Oxford and Cambridge during this period, and his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew enabled him to begin the first translation of the Bible into English directly from the ancient original languages. When news of his efforts became known, controversy began to swirl and threatened to bring the project to a halt. But Wycliffe was resilient. He vowed that he would continue so that one day a common boy driving a plow would be more knowledgeable of the Scriptures than the scholars of the Catholic Church. Wycliffe fled from England to the European continent and continued his work, completing the New Testament in 1526, and working gradually on the Old Testament. Before it was finished, Tyndale was condemned as a heretic, kidnapped and imprisoned. In 1536, he was strangled and tied to a stake where he was burned to death. It is said that as he was engulfed in flames, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”
Tyndale’s imprisonment and subsequent death fanned the flames of public demand for an English Bible. In 1534, before Tyndale died and in the same year of the finalization of England’s break from the Roman Catholic Church, English church leaders gathered at Canterbury to demand King Henry VIII to authorize an English translation of the Bible for his newfound Church of England. The following year, Henry allowed the publication of the Coverdale Bible, the first complete Bible in English. Miles Coverdale had been Tyndale’s assistant, and his Bible was for the most part a slight revision of Tyndale’s. Coverdale had omitted many of the critical marginal notes that Tyndale had included in his Bible, making it more acceptable to the church’s officials. Coverdale’s Bible became a favorite of Queen Anne Boleyn, which may have also had something to do with its fast fall into disfavor soon after her execution in 1536.
Another of Tyndale’s assistants, John Rogers, also sought to publish an English Bible around the same time. Out of fear of persecution, he used the pseudonym Thomas Matthew and published with the King’s permission a revision of Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s Bibles in 1537. Though a better translation than Coverdale’s, “Matthew’s Bible” as it had come to be known, was not popular because of its close association with Tyndale and its many marginal notes which some deemed to be inflammatory against the established Church. Just a year after it was published, a royal injunction was passed that forbade the importing of or printing of English Bibles with any notes or prologues that were not explicitly authorized by the King. When the Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne in 1553, Parliament reinstituted many of the old restrictions that had had been in place in Wycliffe’s day, and as a result, Rogers became the first of Bloody Mary’s many Protestant martyrs. But even before his death, his Bible had been eclipsed by another revision overseen by Coverdale. This Bible was known as the Great Bible and it was the first English Bible to bear the Archbishop of Canterbury’s endorsement for use in all of the churches of England.
During Bloody Mary’s reign, many English Protestants, including Miles Coverdale, fled to continental Europe to escape persecution and martyrdom. A favorite city of refuge for many of them was Geneva, where John Calvin was pastoring, preaching, teaching, and reforming a city and a culture to the glory of God. Here John Knox and other exiles from the British Isles were being equipped to carry the Reformation back home to England, Ireland, and Scotland. Several of these exiles in Geneva were preparing an English Bible based strongly on Tyndale’s work. The most notable feature of the Geneva Bible was the ample supply of footnotes, which were strongly flavored by the teachings of John Calvin. The Geneva Bible became the preferred version for the Puritans, and found its way even into the writings of Shakespeare. The Geneva Bible was the Bible brought to America by the Pilgrims, but because of its strongly reformed annotations, it was not viewed highly by Queen Elizabeth.
In order to keep the Geneva Bible out of the Churches of England, a new revision of the Great Bible was produced in 1568 called The Bishops’ Bible. By all accounts it was not as good of a translation as the Geneva Bible (which was banned and had to be smuggled into the country), and so in spite of it being mandated for use in the churches, it did not find a wide audience with the people of England. A growing divide between the Anglican Church and its Puritans threatened national security and stability, and the issue of Bible translation was a contributing factor in the divide. The newly crowned successor to Elizabeth, King James I was determined to have a unified church. He summoned church leaders in 1604 for the Hampton Court Conference to discuss a petition that had been presented to him with 1,000 Puritan signatures calling for reform in the Anglican Church. At this conference, the Puritan John Reynolds suggested that a new English Bible, authorized by the king and translated without a bias or hidden agenda, could bring unity to the Church. Though the King was not sympathetic to Puritans, he wasted no time in appointing a team of 47 scholars to begin work on a new authorized English version of the Bible. Their task was not to create something new, but to build on what had been done before, and to standardize the Bible for all English speaking people. The final product, which we call the King James Version of the Bible, was published in 1611, 400 years ago this year.
As is now evident to all English speaking people everywhere, the King James Bible accomplished the goals that it set out to meet. Within a relatively short time, it surpassed all previous versions in popularity and acceptance. It became THE BIBLE of the English speaking world, virtually without rival for nearly 300 years. Today the King James Version remains immensely popular because of its beautiful language and familiar wordings. Even among those who, like myself, prefer newer English versions, passages are often memorized from the King James, and its influence and importance for the English speaking Church is never undervalued. It is widely recognized as a high-water mark in the history of English literature, yet literary beauty was never the aim of its translators. In their very lengthy preface to the original edition, they make it abundantly clear that their primary goal was to produce a faithful and accurate translation of the Scriptures, based on the best Greek and Hebrew texts available to them at the time, which would be understandable to the most common reader, in their words, “understood even of the very vulgar.” This goal won the King James Version a wide audience, which in turn led to a standardization of the English language as the Bible became the measuring rod of spelling, grammar, and style. The widespread influence of the King James Version also brought the English language into its own among the languages of the world. No longer a secondary language of vulgar and unlearned people, English was now felt to be good enough to communicate the Word of God to the masses, and therefore credible enough to stand on its own two feet in other realms of society as well.
Today, there are many who insist that the King James is still the best choice of Bible for English speaking people to read. However, I cannot go along with those who insist that it is superior to all other English versions available in our day for a number of reasons. First, and most importantly, is the issue of accuracy. Make no mistake, the scholars behind the King James Version made a very accurate translation of the best Hebrew and Greek manuscripts that they had access to 400 years ago. But today, we have access to manuscripts that are far older and far more reliable than the ones that those scholars had. Additionally, the study of these ancient languages has progressed by exponential leaps and bounds over the last 400 years. Therefore, when a team of translators makes use of the tools available to them today, they are able to produce a more accurate English translation in 2011 than was possible in 1611.
Of second importance is the issue of clarity. The fact remains that we simply do not speak the same kind of English that was spoken 400 years ago. This is not simply because we are more ignorant of great literature in our day. We must keep in mind that the King James translators were not aiming for literary greatness. They were aiming for accuracy and clarity, such that the Word of God could be understood by the most common man in the English speaking world. Frankly, the most common man in the English speaking world has not spoken the language of the King James Bible for a couple or three centuries. Consider, for example, Proverbs 11:15, which reads in the King James text: He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it; and he that hateth suretyship is sure. I would imagine that there aren’t many of us here today who would readily recognize that this verse is a warning against co-signing for loans. And so, as Alister McGrath has written, “When a translation itself requires translation, it has ceased to serve its original purpose.” There are a handful of newer translations that are faithful to the original text while being simultaneously understandable to the modern English speaker. And these two hallmarks must be our standard for choosing a translation of the Bible today. It must accurately reflect the wording of the best available Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, and it must be understandable to the average person. I have used for many years the New American Standard Bible because it places a high premium on both. There are others that also aim to meet both of these standards. Some modern versions will emphasize clarity at the expense of accuracy, while others are driven by financial or other less than noble aims. We must acquaint ourselves with the foundational principles behind the various English versions that are available and make wise choices based on these twin priorities of accuracy and clarity. We must also recognize that the English language is constantly evolving, and we must never make the mistake that so many have made with the King James – to canonize one particular translation as the all-time standard. Additionally, we must ask ourselves, is there a need today for yet another English version of the Bible when so many of the world’s unreached peoples do not have a single copy of the most minute portion of God’s Word in their own language? According to the SIL Ethnologue, some 4,400 of the world’s 6,900 languages have no portion of Scripture available. In 2,500 of these languages, the work of Bible translation has not even begun. The Church of the English speaking world needs to say to the publishing industry, “Please do not give us another English Bible until the ones we have no longer serve their purpose. Please focus your efforts and resources on bringing God’s word to those who are today like we once were – those with no portion of the Bible in their heart language!”
Now, I hope that it has not escaped your notice that I have not spent any time at all unpacking the text which I began by reading. I have attempted to answer the question, “How did we receive the Word of God in our language?” I would like to close by returning to Nehemiah 8 and answering the question, albeit briefly, “How do we receive the Word of God?” Meaning, since I have a copy of the Scriptures in my own language which is accurate and clear, what should my response to this Word be?
You must understand that the people of Israel in Nehemiah’s day were very much like the English speakers leading up to 1611. They simply did not speak the language that the Bible was written in. Their Scriptures were written in Hebrew, but they had not been speaking that language for some time. Most of their knowledge of Scripture came from the teachings of the rabbis, and some of that was only loosely based on Scripture. As the exiles who had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon to rebuild the city and its temple were called into a sacred assembly by Nehemiah and Ezra, we see that they “asked Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses which the Lord had given to Israel.” In other words, they desired to hear God’s Word. This, then, suggests to us the first response that we should have to the Word: we should desire it. The people of Israel understood that now, for the first time in most of their lives, they could hear openly and directly the very words that God had spoken to them, and they longed for it. Friends, is there a hunger in your life to hear from God? Do you awake with a yearning to know the truth that God has spoken? Do you come to church hungry with an appetite that can only be satisfied by hearing this divine truth? This desire should issue forth in a demand to whoever stands in this pulpit, “Bring the Book!” We have not gathered to hear a man’s opinion. We have no lack of that. What we need is to hear from God, and this book is the only sure revelation that can declare His words to us. So, first of all, since we have the Word in a language we can understand, we should desire it.
Secondly, we see in the passage that we should give attention to the Word. In vv 2-3, we see that the crowd consisted of all the men, women, and children who were able to understand the Word, and that as it was read aloud, “all the people were attentive to the book of the Law.” What has your attention this morning? Are you worried about the traffic you may face as you exit or to the events that will transpire across the street over the next few hours today? Are you concerned about what you will be served for lunch? Are you preoccupied with your work schedule for the week ahead? Are you attentive to the whispers and notes of your neighbor in the pew? Or does the Word of God hold an unrivaled priority in your attention? And this goes not only for the hour you spend in the sanctuary on Sunday. Where is your attention during the remaining 23 hours of this day, and the remaining days of the week? The Psalmist says that the righteous man delights Himself in the Word of God and meditates upon it day and night. It is necessary for us to give attention to many matters as we go through life, but our foremost attention must always be anchored to the truth of God found in this book. It becomes not only our primary focus, but also the lens through which we see all else in the world. Only by giving God’s Word the attention that it demands can we rightly give attention to anything else in life.
Third, we find that there is a reverent appreciation for the Word. In verse 4 we see that there was a wooden podium constructed for the very purpose of delivering the Word of God to the people, and as Ezra opened the Word, everyone stood up. Now, it would be a mistake for us to obey the letter of this word and neglect the spirit of it. This passage does not intend to teach that we must always have a large pulpit for preaching, or that we must always stand when the Word is read. I know of churches where that is the practice, and I have no objection to it, but I think that misses the point. The point is, when the book is opened, do I realize in my heart that something of eternal significance is about to happen? Am I aware that I am about to encounter the very truth of God? My posture is far less important than my perspective. The issue is not whether I am standing, but whether I am giving reverent attention to the Bible as it is being read and proclaimed, and whether or not I appreciate the opportunity I have to hear it. The same goes for when I open it to read privately. Do I approach it no differently than the sports page of the daily paper or the latest piece of fiction on the bestseller list? Or is my heart called to attention by the reality that this is God’s Word, and do I appreciate the awesome privilege I have to encounter His truth for myself in my own language?
Then we notice in verse 6 that as the Word is proclaimed, Ezra “blessed the Lord the great God. And all the people answered, ‘Amen, Amen!’ while lifting up their hands; then they bowed low and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.” Essentially, what we are seeing here is that the people are drawn into the worship of God by His truth. The exercise of hearing the Word is not merely academic. They are not merely listening to the words of a book or an educational lecture. They are encountering the Lord, the great God, who is worthy of our devotion, our worship, and our praise! This is about more than just information, it is about a transaction. You have not come to this place, I trust, to hear words. You can go anywhere and hear words. You have come to this place, at this time on this day to meet God. And when you open your Bible at home, it is not just because you can’t reach any other book on the shelf. It is because you know that through the words of this book you are transported into the presence of God Himself, who both desires and deserves our worship. So the issue is not “what you got out of it,” but what you gave to God in it. Do the truths of God’s Word bring you face to face with Him, where you can worship Him in hearty agreement with what He has spoken, saying “Amen, Amen!”, which means, “I agree! I agree!”, as you bow before Him?
Then notice in verses 7 and 8 the emphasis on understanding. The leaders explained the law to the people while the people remained in their place. They read it, they translated it, they gave the sense of it, with the outcome being that the people understood it. I don’t know of a better definition of expository preaching in all the Bible. Preaching that pleases the Lord is this kind of preaching: it includes the reading of the Word, the translating of the Word, the explanation of the Word, and the giving of the sense of the Word. But you notice that the process of preaching does not stop with the preacher. It entails a responsibility on the part of the hearer, who must apply himself or herself diligently to understand the Word. And they stayed put until they understood it. They were not watching the clock. There is no hint of that at all anywhere in this text. They were not going to leave until they understood what God had to say to them. And so, on a Sunday morning in church, or a Tuesday evening at home, whenever I am brought into contact with God through His word, the task is not complete until I have understood what it is that God is saying in this text, and how it applies to my life. Nothing else on my agenda today or any other day is more important than that I understand what God has spoken to me from His word.
Then finally, notice that there is a response of the will to the Word of God. Verse 9 says that the people were weeping when they heard the words of the Law. Have you wept before the Word of God? When we hear the truth of God’s word it cuts us. It points out to us in one fell swoop both the inestimable holiness of God and the utter depravity of my personal condition. I am left in ruin by what I see and hear in this Word, for I am brought face to face with the inescapable reality that I am a helpless sinner who is utterly deserving of condemnation by the holy and righteous God who made me and before whom I will stand in judgment. But though the Word of God brings us to ruin, it does not leave us there. The leaders spoke to the people in verse 9 and said, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” In verse 10 they say, “Go, eat and drink, and share with others … do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” This same word that cuts us with conviction of our sin also announces to us the grace of God that is our hope and joy. Yes we are sinners who are separated from God. But rejoice in that God has spoken to us to call us back to Himself through repentance and faith. He has not left us to perish in sin! He has spoken words of grace to us! He has proclaimed to us that there is salvation for sinners; there is good news because of His mercy. And subsequent generations of God’s people would come to understand that this good news is found only through the Lord Jesus Christ. He has come to bear our sins for us, and to die the death that we deserve so that we might have life in Him. Weep for your sins! Indeed, mourn over them. But do not stop there. Cast your sins upon Christ and His cross, and know the joy of His saving grace. Yes, rejoice in that God has spoken to rescue us from perishing! The day in which we hear this great news is a holy day, and a day of celebration.
And that brings us to the final response: joy. Rejoice and be glad for you have understood the words which have been made known to you. Verse 12 says that the people went away celebrating that God has spoken to them, and they have understood Him. John Wycliffe’s corpse was burned to powder after his death; William Tyndale was tied to a stake and burned alive; John Rogers was killed; Miles Coverdale and countless others were forced into hiding and paid a costly price. Why? So that today you could open a book and hear God speak in your native language. Because of the sacrifices of these dear brothers and many more, you can hear, and understand, and know that a greater sacrifice than all of theirs combined has been offered to save you from sin. They did what they did so you could know what Jesus did, so that you could read it and hear it for yourself, and understand it and believe it. Rejoice and be glad that you understand this! Give yourself fully to Christ! Trust Him to save you from sin and follow Him in new life through His grace! And devote the rest of your days to doing what Ezra and Nehemiah did, what Wycliffe and Tyndale, Rogers and Coverdale did – live to make known to others this truth that you now understand! And if God should so will it, die for that cause as well.
I once heard Howard Hendricks say something that changed the trajectory of my life and ministry. He said that there are only two things on this planet today that will last forever: the Word of God and the souls of men. Why on earth would you want to invest another minute of your time in things that will not matter for one second beyond your lifetime? Live and die for the things that will matter for eternity – get this Word into the soul of another person. Nothing else is really worth living, or dying, for.
1) How many of you brought your own copy of the Bible to church today?
2) How many of you own multiple copies of the Bible?
3) How many of you own multiple English versions (KJV, NIV, NASB, ESV, etc.) of the Bible?
Do you understand that 400 years ago, you would have not likely been able to say “yes” to those questions? Do you understand that it took brothers and sisters in the Christian family dying so that you could have what you have today? Do you understand that many people in other parts of the world still do not have in their language what you have in your language today? And you have it, in large part because of what happened 400 years ago. So I want to pursue two questions today: (1) How did you receive the Word? (2) How do you receive the Word? Those are two different questions. The first one deals with historical events that led to you possessing a copy of the Word of God in your own language and being able to hear it taught and preached in your own language. The second deals with what you do when you read it, hear it, or study it. The first, how DID you receive the Word, is historical; the second, how DO you receive the Word, is deeply personal.
The book of Acts describes how Christianity spread from Jerusalem to Rome. While this was going on, the Roman Empire was expanding ever-outward, and by the end of the first century, nearly all of the British Isles were under the control of Rome. In time, Christianity became the dominant religion of the Empire, and as such it began to spread to the far reaches of Roman control. By the middle of the 600s Christianity was becoming established in the British Isles and it is widely believed that Caedmon, a herdsman, monk, and poet, was the first to render any portion of God’s Word into the Anglo-Saxon tongue we now call “Old English.” His work was more paraphrase than translation, but he cracked open a door that would take nearly 1,000 years to open wide – that of translating the Word of God into English.
Over the next few centuries, leading up to the 900s, several others would translate and paraphrase portions of the Bible, including all four Gospels, the entire Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Esther, and a few other portions, into Old English. But all of these attempts to put God’s Word into the language of the Anglo-Saxon peoples had been based upon the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, which was the official Bible of the Catholic Church. That means it was a translation of a translation. There had been no attempt to translate the original Greek and Hebrew Scriptures into the common tongue of Britain to this point. To complicate matters even more, within a short time all of these versions became virtually obsolete as English evolved from “Old English” into “Middle English” following the Norman Invasion of 1066.
The Middle English period saw far fewer attempts to put the Word of God into the language of the English-speaking people. Most notably, Ormin paraphrased the Gospels and Acts around 1200. In the 1300s the Psalms would be translated from Latin into a few regional English dialects. But other attempts were few and less notable. The Catholic Church certainly did nothing to encourage translation efforts. They had a twofold reason for keeping the Bible in Latin. They claimed that they desired to prevent laypeople from misinterpreting the Bible, and thus they sought to protect the church from doctrinal error. But the greater factor was that by keeping the reading and interpreting of the Bible reserved only for the learned, they could maintain control over the people. In that day, clergy were among the most well educated people of society. If a person wanted to know what the Bible said, they had to ask the priest. Most of a person’s Bible knowledge came only from what they learned in church services, and even then biblical exposition as we know it today was rare. Since the printing press had not yet been invented, copies of the Bible, even in Latin, were rare and expensive, being handwritten manuscripts often illuminated with extravagant artwork in the margins. You would not have owned a single private copy of the Bible unless you were extraordinarily wealthy, and to own multiple copies would have been unthinkable. If you had access to a Bible at all, it would have been in Latin. There were no complete English Bibles at this time. But all of this would soon change with the rising of a new star on the horizon.
John Wycliffe was born in 1320, nearly 200 years before Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the Wittenburg Church door. Wycliffe came to be known as “The Morning Star of the Reformation” because he spoke out boldly against the moral degradation, political abuses, and theological errors of the Catholic Church from the parish priest all the way to the top – the Pope himself. This put Wycliffe at enmity with the Catholic Church, and led to the issuing of five papal bulls, official documents of public rebuke, against him. Wycliffe surrounded himself with men known as The Lollards, a group of travelling preachers who went throughout the English countryside preaching the truth of the Bible in the common language of the people. Wycliffe translated the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate into English in 1380 and oversaw the completion of the Old Testament prior to his death in 1384.
Wycliffe’s influence so outraged the Catholic Church that in 1401, some 17 years after his death, an official persecution was launched by the church against all of Wycliffe’s followers. In 1408, the “Constitutions of Oxford” were published, which banned Wycliffe’s writings and made the translation of the Bible into English a crime punishable by the charge of heresy. In 1415 Wycliffe was officially declared by the church to be a “stiff-necked heretic.” His books were ordered to be burned, and in 1428, Pope Martin V ordered that his remains be exhumed from the grave and burned. But Wycliffe’s writings and influence continued to spread, and all the more as new innovations over the coming century fueled the fires of reformation.
Gutenberg’s printing press came into being around 1450, during the height of the Renaissance. Soon the world was filled with books, and many ancient classics became easily accessible. New emphasis was placed on the study of classical sources of information. As a result of these developments, Hebrew and Greek manuscripts which predated the Latin Vulgate became available to the scholarly world. An Englishman named William Tyndale had been classically educated at Oxford and Cambridge during this period, and his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew enabled him to begin the first translation of the Bible into English directly from the ancient original languages. When news of his efforts became known, controversy began to swirl and threatened to bring the project to a halt. But Wycliffe was resilient. He vowed that he would continue so that one day a common boy driving a plow would be more knowledgeable of the Scriptures than the scholars of the Catholic Church. Wycliffe fled from England to the European continent and continued his work, completing the New Testament in 1526, and working gradually on the Old Testament. Before it was finished, Tyndale was condemned as a heretic, kidnapped and imprisoned. In 1536, he was strangled and tied to a stake where he was burned to death. It is said that as he was engulfed in flames, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”
Tyndale’s imprisonment and subsequent death fanned the flames of public demand for an English Bible. In 1534, before Tyndale died and in the same year of the finalization of England’s break from the Roman Catholic Church, English church leaders gathered at Canterbury to demand King Henry VIII to authorize an English translation of the Bible for his newfound Church of England. The following year, Henry allowed the publication of the Coverdale Bible, the first complete Bible in English. Miles Coverdale had been Tyndale’s assistant, and his Bible was for the most part a slight revision of Tyndale’s. Coverdale had omitted many of the critical marginal notes that Tyndale had included in his Bible, making it more acceptable to the church’s officials. Coverdale’s Bible became a favorite of Queen Anne Boleyn, which may have also had something to do with its fast fall into disfavor soon after her execution in 1536.
Another of Tyndale’s assistants, John Rogers, also sought to publish an English Bible around the same time. Out of fear of persecution, he used the pseudonym Thomas Matthew and published with the King’s permission a revision of Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s Bibles in 1537. Though a better translation than Coverdale’s, “Matthew’s Bible” as it had come to be known, was not popular because of its close association with Tyndale and its many marginal notes which some deemed to be inflammatory against the established Church. Just a year after it was published, a royal injunction was passed that forbade the importing of or printing of English Bibles with any notes or prologues that were not explicitly authorized by the King. When the Catholic Queen Mary came to the throne in 1553, Parliament reinstituted many of the old restrictions that had had been in place in Wycliffe’s day, and as a result, Rogers became the first of Bloody Mary’s many Protestant martyrs. But even before his death, his Bible had been eclipsed by another revision overseen by Coverdale. This Bible was known as the Great Bible and it was the first English Bible to bear the Archbishop of Canterbury’s endorsement for use in all of the churches of England.
During Bloody Mary’s reign, many English Protestants, including Miles Coverdale, fled to continental Europe to escape persecution and martyrdom. A favorite city of refuge for many of them was Geneva, where John Calvin was pastoring, preaching, teaching, and reforming a city and a culture to the glory of God. Here John Knox and other exiles from the British Isles were being equipped to carry the Reformation back home to England, Ireland, and Scotland. Several of these exiles in Geneva were preparing an English Bible based strongly on Tyndale’s work. The most notable feature of the Geneva Bible was the ample supply of footnotes, which were strongly flavored by the teachings of John Calvin. The Geneva Bible became the preferred version for the Puritans, and found its way even into the writings of Shakespeare. The Geneva Bible was the Bible brought to America by the Pilgrims, but because of its strongly reformed annotations, it was not viewed highly by Queen Elizabeth.
In order to keep the Geneva Bible out of the Churches of England, a new revision of the Great Bible was produced in 1568 called The Bishops’ Bible. By all accounts it was not as good of a translation as the Geneva Bible (which was banned and had to be smuggled into the country), and so in spite of it being mandated for use in the churches, it did not find a wide audience with the people of England. A growing divide between the Anglican Church and its Puritans threatened national security and stability, and the issue of Bible translation was a contributing factor in the divide. The newly crowned successor to Elizabeth, King James I was determined to have a unified church. He summoned church leaders in 1604 for the Hampton Court Conference to discuss a petition that had been presented to him with 1,000 Puritan signatures calling for reform in the Anglican Church. At this conference, the Puritan John Reynolds suggested that a new English Bible, authorized by the king and translated without a bias or hidden agenda, could bring unity to the Church. Though the King was not sympathetic to Puritans, he wasted no time in appointing a team of 47 scholars to begin work on a new authorized English version of the Bible. Their task was not to create something new, but to build on what had been done before, and to standardize the Bible for all English speaking people. The final product, which we call the King James Version of the Bible, was published in 1611, 400 years ago this year.
As is now evident to all English speaking people everywhere, the King James Bible accomplished the goals that it set out to meet. Within a relatively short time, it surpassed all previous versions in popularity and acceptance. It became THE BIBLE of the English speaking world, virtually without rival for nearly 300 years. Today the King James Version remains immensely popular because of its beautiful language and familiar wordings. Even among those who, like myself, prefer newer English versions, passages are often memorized from the King James, and its influence and importance for the English speaking Church is never undervalued. It is widely recognized as a high-water mark in the history of English literature, yet literary beauty was never the aim of its translators. In their very lengthy preface to the original edition, they make it abundantly clear that their primary goal was to produce a faithful and accurate translation of the Scriptures, based on the best Greek and Hebrew texts available to them at the time, which would be understandable to the most common reader, in their words, “understood even of the very vulgar.” This goal won the King James Version a wide audience, which in turn led to a standardization of the English language as the Bible became the measuring rod of spelling, grammar, and style. The widespread influence of the King James Version also brought the English language into its own among the languages of the world. No longer a secondary language of vulgar and unlearned people, English was now felt to be good enough to communicate the Word of God to the masses, and therefore credible enough to stand on its own two feet in other realms of society as well.
Today, there are many who insist that the King James is still the best choice of Bible for English speaking people to read. However, I cannot go along with those who insist that it is superior to all other English versions available in our day for a number of reasons. First, and most importantly, is the issue of accuracy. Make no mistake, the scholars behind the King James Version made a very accurate translation of the best Hebrew and Greek manuscripts that they had access to 400 years ago. But today, we have access to manuscripts that are far older and far more reliable than the ones that those scholars had. Additionally, the study of these ancient languages has progressed by exponential leaps and bounds over the last 400 years. Therefore, when a team of translators makes use of the tools available to them today, they are able to produce a more accurate English translation in 2011 than was possible in 1611.
Of second importance is the issue of clarity. The fact remains that we simply do not speak the same kind of English that was spoken 400 years ago. This is not simply because we are more ignorant of great literature in our day. We must keep in mind that the King James translators were not aiming for literary greatness. They were aiming for accuracy and clarity, such that the Word of God could be understood by the most common man in the English speaking world. Frankly, the most common man in the English speaking world has not spoken the language of the King James Bible for a couple or three centuries. Consider, for example, Proverbs 11:15, which reads in the King James text: He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it; and he that hateth suretyship is sure. I would imagine that there aren’t many of us here today who would readily recognize that this verse is a warning against co-signing for loans. And so, as Alister McGrath has written, “When a translation itself requires translation, it has ceased to serve its original purpose.” There are a handful of newer translations that are faithful to the original text while being simultaneously understandable to the modern English speaker. And these two hallmarks must be our standard for choosing a translation of the Bible today. It must accurately reflect the wording of the best available Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, and it must be understandable to the average person. I have used for many years the New American Standard Bible because it places a high premium on both. There are others that also aim to meet both of these standards. Some modern versions will emphasize clarity at the expense of accuracy, while others are driven by financial or other less than noble aims. We must acquaint ourselves with the foundational principles behind the various English versions that are available and make wise choices based on these twin priorities of accuracy and clarity. We must also recognize that the English language is constantly evolving, and we must never make the mistake that so many have made with the King James – to canonize one particular translation as the all-time standard. Additionally, we must ask ourselves, is there a need today for yet another English version of the Bible when so many of the world’s unreached peoples do not have a single copy of the most minute portion of God’s Word in their own language? According to the SIL Ethnologue, some 4,400 of the world’s 6,900 languages have no portion of Scripture available. In 2,500 of these languages, the work of Bible translation has not even begun. The Church of the English speaking world needs to say to the publishing industry, “Please do not give us another English Bible until the ones we have no longer serve their purpose. Please focus your efforts and resources on bringing God’s word to those who are today like we once were – those with no portion of the Bible in their heart language!”
Now, I hope that it has not escaped your notice that I have not spent any time at all unpacking the text which I began by reading. I have attempted to answer the question, “How did we receive the Word of God in our language?” I would like to close by returning to Nehemiah 8 and answering the question, albeit briefly, “How do we receive the Word of God?” Meaning, since I have a copy of the Scriptures in my own language which is accurate and clear, what should my response to this Word be?
You must understand that the people of Israel in Nehemiah’s day were very much like the English speakers leading up to 1611. They simply did not speak the language that the Bible was written in. Their Scriptures were written in Hebrew, but they had not been speaking that language for some time. Most of their knowledge of Scripture came from the teachings of the rabbis, and some of that was only loosely based on Scripture. As the exiles who had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon to rebuild the city and its temple were called into a sacred assembly by Nehemiah and Ezra, we see that they “asked Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses which the Lord had given to Israel.” In other words, they desired to hear God’s Word. This, then, suggests to us the first response that we should have to the Word: we should desire it. The people of Israel understood that now, for the first time in most of their lives, they could hear openly and directly the very words that God had spoken to them, and they longed for it. Friends, is there a hunger in your life to hear from God? Do you awake with a yearning to know the truth that God has spoken? Do you come to church hungry with an appetite that can only be satisfied by hearing this divine truth? This desire should issue forth in a demand to whoever stands in this pulpit, “Bring the Book!” We have not gathered to hear a man’s opinion. We have no lack of that. What we need is to hear from God, and this book is the only sure revelation that can declare His words to us. So, first of all, since we have the Word in a language we can understand, we should desire it.
Secondly, we see in the passage that we should give attention to the Word. In vv 2-3, we see that the crowd consisted of all the men, women, and children who were able to understand the Word, and that as it was read aloud, “all the people were attentive to the book of the Law.” What has your attention this morning? Are you worried about the traffic you may face as you exit or to the events that will transpire across the street over the next few hours today? Are you concerned about what you will be served for lunch? Are you preoccupied with your work schedule for the week ahead? Are you attentive to the whispers and notes of your neighbor in the pew? Or does the Word of God hold an unrivaled priority in your attention? And this goes not only for the hour you spend in the sanctuary on Sunday. Where is your attention during the remaining 23 hours of this day, and the remaining days of the week? The Psalmist says that the righteous man delights Himself in the Word of God and meditates upon it day and night. It is necessary for us to give attention to many matters as we go through life, but our foremost attention must always be anchored to the truth of God found in this book. It becomes not only our primary focus, but also the lens through which we see all else in the world. Only by giving God’s Word the attention that it demands can we rightly give attention to anything else in life.
Third, we find that there is a reverent appreciation for the Word. In verse 4 we see that there was a wooden podium constructed for the very purpose of delivering the Word of God to the people, and as Ezra opened the Word, everyone stood up. Now, it would be a mistake for us to obey the letter of this word and neglect the spirit of it. This passage does not intend to teach that we must always have a large pulpit for preaching, or that we must always stand when the Word is read. I know of churches where that is the practice, and I have no objection to it, but I think that misses the point. The point is, when the book is opened, do I realize in my heart that something of eternal significance is about to happen? Am I aware that I am about to encounter the very truth of God? My posture is far less important than my perspective. The issue is not whether I am standing, but whether I am giving reverent attention to the Bible as it is being read and proclaimed, and whether or not I appreciate the opportunity I have to hear it. The same goes for when I open it to read privately. Do I approach it no differently than the sports page of the daily paper or the latest piece of fiction on the bestseller list? Or is my heart called to attention by the reality that this is God’s Word, and do I appreciate the awesome privilege I have to encounter His truth for myself in my own language?
Then we notice in verse 6 that as the Word is proclaimed, Ezra “blessed the Lord the great God. And all the people answered, ‘Amen, Amen!’ while lifting up their hands; then they bowed low and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.” Essentially, what we are seeing here is that the people are drawn into the worship of God by His truth. The exercise of hearing the Word is not merely academic. They are not merely listening to the words of a book or an educational lecture. They are encountering the Lord, the great God, who is worthy of our devotion, our worship, and our praise! This is about more than just information, it is about a transaction. You have not come to this place, I trust, to hear words. You can go anywhere and hear words. You have come to this place, at this time on this day to meet God. And when you open your Bible at home, it is not just because you can’t reach any other book on the shelf. It is because you know that through the words of this book you are transported into the presence of God Himself, who both desires and deserves our worship. So the issue is not “what you got out of it,” but what you gave to God in it. Do the truths of God’s Word bring you face to face with Him, where you can worship Him in hearty agreement with what He has spoken, saying “Amen, Amen!”, which means, “I agree! I agree!”, as you bow before Him?
Then notice in verses 7 and 8 the emphasis on understanding. The leaders explained the law to the people while the people remained in their place. They read it, they translated it, they gave the sense of it, with the outcome being that the people understood it. I don’t know of a better definition of expository preaching in all the Bible. Preaching that pleases the Lord is this kind of preaching: it includes the reading of the Word, the translating of the Word, the explanation of the Word, and the giving of the sense of the Word. But you notice that the process of preaching does not stop with the preacher. It entails a responsibility on the part of the hearer, who must apply himself or herself diligently to understand the Word. And they stayed put until they understood it. They were not watching the clock. There is no hint of that at all anywhere in this text. They were not going to leave until they understood what God had to say to them. And so, on a Sunday morning in church, or a Tuesday evening at home, whenever I am brought into contact with God through His word, the task is not complete until I have understood what it is that God is saying in this text, and how it applies to my life. Nothing else on my agenda today or any other day is more important than that I understand what God has spoken to me from His word.
Then finally, notice that there is a response of the will to the Word of God. Verse 9 says that the people were weeping when they heard the words of the Law. Have you wept before the Word of God? When we hear the truth of God’s word it cuts us. It points out to us in one fell swoop both the inestimable holiness of God and the utter depravity of my personal condition. I am left in ruin by what I see and hear in this Word, for I am brought face to face with the inescapable reality that I am a helpless sinner who is utterly deserving of condemnation by the holy and righteous God who made me and before whom I will stand in judgment. But though the Word of God brings us to ruin, it does not leave us there. The leaders spoke to the people in verse 9 and said, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” In verse 10 they say, “Go, eat and drink, and share with others … do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” This same word that cuts us with conviction of our sin also announces to us the grace of God that is our hope and joy. Yes we are sinners who are separated from God. But rejoice in that God has spoken to us to call us back to Himself through repentance and faith. He has not left us to perish in sin! He has spoken words of grace to us! He has proclaimed to us that there is salvation for sinners; there is good news because of His mercy. And subsequent generations of God’s people would come to understand that this good news is found only through the Lord Jesus Christ. He has come to bear our sins for us, and to die the death that we deserve so that we might have life in Him. Weep for your sins! Indeed, mourn over them. But do not stop there. Cast your sins upon Christ and His cross, and know the joy of His saving grace. Yes, rejoice in that God has spoken to rescue us from perishing! The day in which we hear this great news is a holy day, and a day of celebration.
And that brings us to the final response: joy. Rejoice and be glad for you have understood the words which have been made known to you. Verse 12 says that the people went away celebrating that God has spoken to them, and they have understood Him. John Wycliffe’s corpse was burned to powder after his death; William Tyndale was tied to a stake and burned alive; John Rogers was killed; Miles Coverdale and countless others were forced into hiding and paid a costly price. Why? So that today you could open a book and hear God speak in your native language. Because of the sacrifices of these dear brothers and many more, you can hear, and understand, and know that a greater sacrifice than all of theirs combined has been offered to save you from sin. They did what they did so you could know what Jesus did, so that you could read it and hear it for yourself, and understand it and believe it. Rejoice and be glad that you understand this! Give yourself fully to Christ! Trust Him to save you from sin and follow Him in new life through His grace! And devote the rest of your days to doing what Ezra and Nehemiah did, what Wycliffe and Tyndale, Rogers and Coverdale did – live to make known to others this truth that you now understand! And if God should so will it, die for that cause as well.
I once heard Howard Hendricks say something that changed the trajectory of my life and ministry. He said that there are only two things on this planet today that will last forever: the Word of God and the souls of men. Why on earth would you want to invest another minute of your time in things that will not matter for one second beyond your lifetime? Live and die for the things that will matter for eternity – get this Word into the soul of another person. Nothing else is really worth living, or dying, for.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Let the Nations Be Glad! Psalm 67
Here is the audio of the message I preached on the Sunday following my return from Nepal.
Monday, February 07, 2011
The True Grace of God - 1 Peter 5:12-14
There was a piece on the evening news recently about the dangers of walking and texting. We’ve all heard and seen the danger of driving and texting, which is now illegal in many cities and states, but now the attention has shifted to careless pedestrians who pay no attention to their surroundings while blistering their thumbs in communication with others. My son offered his commentary on this news story by saying, “Texting is for people who don’t know how to spell.” While that may be an overstatement, purists of our day have lamented at how electronic communication, beginning with email, then chatting, then texting, now tweeting, is killing the art of written communication. When there is a limit on words and characters, one cannot be superfluous with words. This may have some advantages for efficiency, but one consequence is the loss of saying a proper goodbye.
Life is short, and none of us knows that when we conclude our correspondence or conversation with someone, we may have just uttered our last words. In our day, we don’t like to think about the imminence of death, but in olden times, one could not avoid the subject. I think that may have something to do with why our ancestors were better at goodbyes than we are. People who knew of the nearness and inevitability of death were careful with their closing words, knowing that they may be remembered as their last. The careless texter probably gives no thought to the possibility that their dying words may be something as uninspiring as “LOL” or a “colon-dash-close parenthesis” smiley-face. If we considered the possibility that every word we communicate could be our last, we would want to speak of the things that mattered most to us. We would want to be like that passionate French grammarian who died just after uttering, “I am about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is correct.”
As Peter brings this letter to a close, he speaks words of great importance. Peter is not under a death sentence as Paul was when he wrote 2 Timothy, though he would be in the future. But, with persecution intensifying, he knew that this may be his last opportunity to correspond with Christian brothers and sisters whose fellowship he had cherished. One very compelling reconstruction of the historical background of this letter suggests that Peter had been the pastor of these Christians in Rome before they had been exiled to Asia Minor. And it is with pastoral tenderness that he closes this letter, issuing a reminder of the one thing that means the most to his heart: the true grace of God! It is this subject that Peter says has occupied his mind as he has written briefly to these friends. Now, the word “briefly” in verse 12 may seem out of place, especially having been studying this letter for some 32 weeks or so. But, the letter contains just short of 2,500 words in its 105 verses. The President recently gave a 17-minute speech of the same number of words; you could fit them on four typed pages, single-spaced. But as we have seen in these months of studying this great book, the divinely inspired nature of this brief letter is such that every word is loaded with meaning. It was a brief letter to write, but not to study. I have written some 130,000 words on over 200 single-spaced pages to expound this letter, and I can say that we have barely scratched the surface of its truth.
The reason Peter wrote this letter, he says, is to exhort and testify to the true grace of God. Every word in every verse in every chapter served this purpose. And now he closes with some reminders of grace.
I. The Testimony of Grace
On Wednesday evening I introduced some of you to a little book I have found so useful to me over the years as I have studied the Bible: Halley’s Bible Handbook. And I shared with those there how on page 814, Halley’s words are printed in bold capital letters at the top of the page: “THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THIS BOOK IS THIS.” And that most important thing is for pastors to preach systematically through the Bible and for the congregation to follow along in their own Bible reading during the week. Now there is something humorous and tragic about that. The humorous thing is that one has to read 813 other pages of Halley’s book to get to the MOST IMPORTANT THING. The tragic thing is that the newest edition of the book omits this information entirely. It added glossy pages and color pictures, but it left out what Halley himself considered THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in the book.
Now, Peter says that he has written “testifying that this is the true grace of God.” But unlike Halley’s Handbook, he didn’t wait until the end to reveal the most important thing. He reminds us in the end that he has already written the most important thing. But, what is it? This is the true grace of God, but what is THIS? Having nothing in the immediate context to limit the definition of this, we must understand it to mean the entire letter. The entire letter is a testimony to the true grace of God. Everything Peter has written has been a testimony to grace. Those who received this letter, like many who have read it and cherished it over the last two millennia, were Christians who were struggling to live out their faith, far from their homeland, in a hostile environment. And Peter has set forth to them a testimony of the true grace of God.
He has spoken to them of the living hope into which we, as believers in Jesus, have been born again through His resurrection from the dead. It is grace that birthed us anew into this hope. He has spoken of how Christ has conquered all evil through His own suffering for our sins. It is grace that gives us this victory. He has written of how Christ calls His people to follow His footsteps through this life. It is grace that beckons us to follow Jesus. Peter speaks of Christ’s blessing and presence with those who endure hardship, how He brings them through death and into glory just as He has also first gone. This is grace to the undeserving that Christ may guide us in this way. He has spoken promises of how Christ will vindicate and glorify those who are faithful to Him through the hardships of this life. That is grace! He has promised a judgment to come that will right every wrong and restore every loss. This is grace!
When we sing that favorite old hymn of John Newton’s, “Amazing Grace,” we sing about how grace “saved a wretch like me.” That’s saving grace. We sing about how grace teaches our hearts to fear and at the same time relieves us of fear. That is sanctifying grace. We sing in the third stanza that the Lord has promised us good things and fixed our hope upon His word by His grace. That is satisfying grace. We go on to sing about how grace brings us through many dangers, toils, and snares. That is strengthening grace. We don’t sing Newton’s original words after that. We omit two stanzas that he penned, and sing one that he didn’t write. But if we were to sing the original, we would sing a fifth stanza that speaks of grace providing joy and peace even though the flesh and heart begin to fail and mortal life comes to an end. That is sustaining grace. And in Newton’s original final stanza, we would sing about how grace binds us to the Lord for eternity, though the earth dissolve like snow and the sun cease to shine. That is a secure grace. Instead, we sing a different final stanza that speak of grace leading us to our eternal heavenly home where we will worship the Lord forever. That is all-surpassing grace.
Grace truly is amazing! And Peter says that he wrote this letter to testify to the true grace of God: how it saves us; how it sanctifies us, satisfies and strengthens us; how it sustains us, secures us, and how it surpasses all else in existence, binding us to Christ forever more. To read the precious words of this letter is to be presented with a rich testimony of the true grace of God.
II. The Exhortation of Grace
Now Peter says he has also written, not just to testify, but to give an exhortation concerning this true grace of God. What is the difference? To testify is to tell someone about something, but to exhort is to tell someone to do something. The New Testament epistles are often divided cleanly at some point near the middle by a shift from testimony to exhortation. Peter, like the other writers, wants to inform us all of some truths that we must know and believe; but that knowledge and those beliefs must then shape what we do. Belief determines behavior. Is that true? What you believe determines how you act. Agreed? Well, if that is true, then a corrolary truth is that behavior demonstrates belief. If what I believe determines how I act, then how I act demonstrates what I believe. We find these principles stated in various ways on nearly every page of the New Testament. So is Christianity about what I believe or is it about what I do? The answer is yes, for what I believe determines what I do; and what I do demonstrates what I believe. I am not saved by my doing, but by my believing; however my doing demonstrates the genuineness of my believing.
Now Peter says he has testified of the true grace of God. He has taught us about this grace and how it saves us, sanctifies us, sustains us, and so on. But he has also given us an exhortation. There is something or some things we must do because we believe in this true grace of God. Throughout each chapter, he has spoken about how this grace should affect our attitude and our actions. Here at the conclusion of the letter, he summarizes all of those exhortations with this one: “This is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it!” It is one thing to say that I believe in the true grace of God, how He saves us through the blood of the cross and sanctifies us to make us more like Jesus, and strengthens us to endure the trials of life, and then brings us to Himself forever in heaven. It is easy to say that I believe all of those things. But I will have countless opportunities every day to demonstrate how firm my belief in this grace of God and this God of grace really is. The proof will be found in whether or not I stand firm in grace.
When our mind is assailed with doubts and questions that leave us second guessing our faith, will we stand firm in the grace that has saved us? Will we preach the gospel of grace to ourselves afresh? When we are faced with someone who we consider to be a vile sinner, will we remember that we are as desperately wicked as they are, and that we would be with them in the folly of their sin if not for the grace of God? And will we testify to them of the grace that saved us in Jesus Christ, just as someone else did for us? When someone has wronged us, will we reply to them in grace, or will we harbor resentment and hatred in our hearts? I am glad that God does not harbor grudges in His heart toward me when I wrong Him; and I don’t want His grace to be wasted in me, I want it to flow through me. And when the going of life gets tough, and the pressure is applied to me, what do others see in me? Do they see grace? When this very grace that saved me and is sanctifying me becomes the cause of my suffering, when I am hated and mistreated for my faith in Christ, and when it appears that all will improve if only I back down, what will I do? Peter is saying to his readers and to us that in all of life’s circumstances, including and maybe particularly in the difficult ones, we must stand firm in the true grace of God.
Christ has satisfied the righteous demands of God’s law for us; He has borne our sins on the cross; He has conquered death; He has birthed us anew into His family and His kingdom; He has shown us the path through suffering into glory, and promised that in the end all wrongs will be made right by a righteous judge. Therefore, on the basis of this true grace of God, we can fix ourselves immovably and not waver when hardships, crises, trials, or other types of suffering come our way. This is grace’s exhortation: once you know of this grace, you must stand firm in it.
III. Examples of Grace
In ancient days, when a person wrote a letter, they put their own name first, as Peter does in 1:1. It makes sense, really, because you don’t want to have to read through the whole letter to find out who it is from. So, when they close the letter, they typically don’t sign their own name again, but rather pass along greetings to certain individuals or from certain individuals who are with the person at the time the letter is written. So, it is no surprise to find several names and personal greetings here at the close of 1 Peter. That was customary. Yet, we Evangelicals make strong claims about the verbal plenary inspiration of Scripture. We claim that every single word of Scripture was inspired by the Spirit of God and is therefore inerrant, infallible, authoritative, and profitable for teaching and guiding us in the Christian life. So what profit is there in us having these names and greetings preserved for us through the centuries? I believe that they provide us with examples of the true grace of God of which Peter has testified and upon which he has exhorted those of us who read this letter.
Peter himself is an example of grace. When he first met Jesus, he recognized his unworthiness to be in the Lord’s presence. He said in Luke 5:8, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” But the Lord didn’t go away. He called Peter to follow Him, and Peter even became part of the inner circle of disciples who were with Jesus constantly. There was grace working in Peter’s life. And this grace proved to be effective on that day in Caesarea when Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” And Jesus told Peter that flesh and blood had not revealed this to him, but that God the Father had revealed it to him. That is grace, revealing truth to Peter and drawing him to confess Christ as Lord. By grace alone, over time, Peter became the leader of the apostles. And then in famously tragic episode when Jesus was on trial, Peter denied even knowing Jesus. He failed to stand firm in grace, but he never fell from grace. Jesus came to Peter and restored him to right fellowship and commissioned him to shepherd the flock of God. And here, a couple of decades or so later, Peter writes this very pastoral letter to the flock he has tended well for Jesus, and he testifies and exhorts them to stand firm in grace. Peter is an example of this grace.
And so is Silvanus. In the book of Acts, Luke calls him Silas, but in their letters both Peter and Paul call him Silvanus. Like many in his day, he had a Roman name and a Semitic name. We first meet him at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, where the church leaders had gathered to determine what should be required of Gentiles who desire to believe in the Lord Jesus. Silas was there. At some point grace had brought him under the Lordship of Christ, and he is described as a prophet, indicating that grace had also made him a preacher of God’s Word. But now he found himself at the most monumental gathering of the first century, surrounded by the men whose names we all know: Paul, Peter, Barnabas, James, and others. And when that council broke, they needed a messenger to deliver the verdict to Antioch. Silas was one of two chosen because he had gained a reputation as one of the “leading men among the brethren.” He was now, by God’s grace, the courier of the most important church gathering since Pentecost. Arriving in Antioch, he even had opportunity to preach to the brethren there, and before long, he began traveling with Paul as a partner with the greatest missionary who ever lived. He suffered alongside of Paul in the Philippian jail where they sang hymns together through the night. Grace had provided unbelievable opportunities for this preacher to be involved in some incredible things. And now, he finds himself along side of Peter in Rome. Some have said that he may have even been the amanuensis, or scribe, who wrote this letter as Peter dictated. That could be what is meant by the phrase, “Through Silvanus … I have written.” While this is uncertain, it is surely the case that Silas would be entrusted to deliver this letter to the Christians across Asia Minor. He was trustworthy because Peter regarded him as a faithful brother. He had proven himself so over the years. But it was all of grace. Every opportunity that came his way was by grace, and the ability to rise to those occasions was of grace as well. Silvanus, the faithful brother, is an example of grace alongside of Peter.
And then we find Mark, whom Peter calls his son. This is certainly the same Mark, or John Mark, who wrote the Gospel According to Mark. But long before this, the grace of God had been at work in Mark’s life as he grew up with a godly Christian mother. Nothing is known of his father, perhaps he had died when Mark was a child or a young man. But there was a godly cousin in his life by the name of Barnabas who encouraged young Mark to join him and Paul on the first missionary journey. The first missionaries on the first mission trip, and here Mark is right in the thick of it. There is grace involved in this opportunity. But at some point in that missionary journey, for a reason that the Bible does not tell us, Mark turned back and went home. Whatever the reason, it was enough for Paul to refuse to take him on the second journey. Mark was the cause of one of the first divisions in church history as the missionary team of Paul and Barnabas divided over him. Paul took Silas and Barnabas took Mark, but the grace of God was still working for now there were two mission teams instead of one. Mark could have gone through life sulking about being a fatherless failure, but by God’s grace, he had a cousin who encouraged him, and along the way he crossed paths with Peter. History ties him closely to Peter, and even suggests that the Gospel of Mark is a transcript of Peter’s preaching and teaching about the life and ministry of Jesus. If many scholars are correct, his gospel was the first one to be written, and the first of its kind in the world. No longer a fatherless failure, the grace of God had transformed Mark into a mighty servant of God, and united him with a brother in the Lord who became for him a father-figure. Peter calls him here “my son.” Peter understood that the true grace of God means that there is always a second chance. He had one, and he made sure Mark got one too. Even Paul would come around later, telling Timothy in 2 Tim 4:11, “Pick up Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me for service.”
Then there is one final person mentioned here: she who is in Babylon. Who is she? When we compare this wording to that of the opening and closing of 2 John, we notice a similarity. There he addresses the “chosen lady and her children,” and sends greetings from “the children of your chosen sister.” It seems that when hostilities in the Roman Empire began to rise against Christianity, this became a cryptic way of identifying a church. So the she of whom Peter speaks is a church. He says that she is in Babylon. Of course we know Babylon was that great city of the Middle East, capital of the domineering Babylonian Empire, and site of present day Baghdad, Iraq. But at the time Peter wrote this, that city was a wasteland. A first century historian said that Babylon was so desolate that it was no longer a great city but a great desert. And there is no evidence of a Christian church there until far beyond the Apostolic period. But there was another Babylon, in Egypt near present-day Cairo. But there has never been a shred of evidence to suggest that Peter was ever there, and no serious biblical scholars have made a case for that. So where is Babylon if it isn’t in Babylon? I agree with the majority of interpreters who conclude that Babylon is a cryptic reference to Rome.
Most of our knowledge of the history of the early church comes from the book of Acts and a few pieces of evidence we find the Epistles. Since Paul wrote most of the epistles, and since Luke traveled with Paul on his missionary journeys, most of what we know concerns the ministry of Paul. But Peter was at work during those years of Christianity’s expanse as well. We know that he was in Jerusalem for a while, and then he traveled throughout the entire region of Judea, Galilee and Samaria, visiting Lydda, Joppa, and Caesaria. And then he came back to Jerusalem, got himself arrested, and escaped by way of an angelic jailbreak. Now, keep in mind that at this point, he is a fugitive. So, it is no surprise that Luke does not tell us anymore of his travel plans. He is a wanted man. Luke simply says in Acts 12:17 that he left and went to “another place.” We know from some statements made by Paul that Peter and his wife passed through and visited some other churches over time, including Antioch and Corinth, but we don’t know much else except that Peter died in Rome. It is therefore entirely plausible that the fugitive Peter and his wife journeyed secretly from church to church across the Mediterranean region until he got to the metropolis of Rome where he could easily blend into the crowd of 1.2 million people who lived there. Tradition says that he pastored a flock of Christians here, and we have expounded this letter on the assumption that the Christians in Asia Minor who received it were originally members of that church who had been kicked out of Rome and exiled to Asia Minor as unwilling colonists there. Somehow Peter managed to lay low, as he had been doing for a while, under the radar. And he stayed in Rome to continue to shepherd the remnant of believers there, some of them perhaps family members, certainly many of whom were close Christian friends with those who received this letter. And to protect their identity and location should Silas encounter trouble and have the letter confiscated, he uses veiled language when giving these greetings.
Now, why the history lesson at this point? Because we are talking about examples of grace. And this church in Rome at this time in history is a great example of grace. In a hostile environment, where the powers that be were already threatening to erase every trace of Christianity, the church of Christ and the testimony of the gospel remained. And though external pressures had forcibly removed many of that church’s members from the region, they could not sever the bond of fellowship. The grace of God had made this band of strangers into a family of brothers and sisters. Think about it … in a country that desires to eliminate all Christian presence, the “just” thing for God to do may be to smite them, or else to withdraw His people and the testimony of His grace from that area altogether. But God doesn’t do that. Instead, he strengthens His church to remain and abide there, enduring those external pressures and persecutions, and continuing to show and tell the gracious offer of salvation through the gospel of Jesus Christ. A church in area, especially in the hard places of the world, is an example of the grace of God.
So, whether you have rebelled against the Lord as Peter did; you have wavered in your commitment like Mark did; you feel like an insignificant person like perhaps Silas had felt at some point in his life; you find yourself surrounded by hostility because of your faith in Jesus; the grace of God is sufficient for you. By grace, you can be restored like Peter was, and go on to do great things for the Lord. By grace, you don’t have to be a fatherless failure like Mark perhaps had considered himself; you can have a family of fellow believers and go on to be useful for God’s purposes. By grace, you may find God placing ordinary little you in extraordinary circumstances where He demonstrates His glory through you -- like He did with Silas. Or, like the chosen lady of Babylon, the oppressed Roman Church, God may use you to demonstrate His grace and His glory, even to those who are most hostile toward Him and His truth. And in all of these circumstances, you are the examples of the true grace of God for the world to see.
But the greatest example of His grace is this: that God would become one of us in the person of Jesus Christ, and live the sinless life of perfect righteousness that God requires, but that we cannot deliver, and yet die as a sacrificial substitute to bear the wrath of God for our sins, and then conquer death on our behalf through His glorious resurrection. And because of this, God calls out to sinners and beckons them to come to Jesus to be saved. And He promises to fill them with His Spirit and transform them into the likeness of Christ until He takes them into His presence forever in heaven. Who among us can say that we are entitled to that from the Holy God of the Universe? Who can say it is deserved, or that we are good enough to earn it? No, not one. This offer comes to us by grace. This is the true grace of God. You are surrounded today by examples of grace. You have heard today a testimony of grace. You have also been presented with an exhortation of grace. Come to Christ and be saved. Experience this true grace of God and then stand firm in it until He calls you home.
These were the last words Peter wrote in this letter, not knowing that it may be the last words he ever said to these friends. They were important enough to say in the event that they were his final words. Friends, we have no guarantees. And if these are the last words I ever say to you, I could say nothing better. I have testified to you of the true grace of God. I exhort you to stand firm in it.
Life is short, and none of us knows that when we conclude our correspondence or conversation with someone, we may have just uttered our last words. In our day, we don’t like to think about the imminence of death, but in olden times, one could not avoid the subject. I think that may have something to do with why our ancestors were better at goodbyes than we are. People who knew of the nearness and inevitability of death were careful with their closing words, knowing that they may be remembered as their last. The careless texter probably gives no thought to the possibility that their dying words may be something as uninspiring as “LOL” or a “colon-dash-close parenthesis” smiley-face. If we considered the possibility that every word we communicate could be our last, we would want to speak of the things that mattered most to us. We would want to be like that passionate French grammarian who died just after uttering, “I am about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is correct.”
As Peter brings this letter to a close, he speaks words of great importance. Peter is not under a death sentence as Paul was when he wrote 2 Timothy, though he would be in the future. But, with persecution intensifying, he knew that this may be his last opportunity to correspond with Christian brothers and sisters whose fellowship he had cherished. One very compelling reconstruction of the historical background of this letter suggests that Peter had been the pastor of these Christians in Rome before they had been exiled to Asia Minor. And it is with pastoral tenderness that he closes this letter, issuing a reminder of the one thing that means the most to his heart: the true grace of God! It is this subject that Peter says has occupied his mind as he has written briefly to these friends. Now, the word “briefly” in verse 12 may seem out of place, especially having been studying this letter for some 32 weeks or so. But, the letter contains just short of 2,500 words in its 105 verses. The President recently gave a 17-minute speech of the same number of words; you could fit them on four typed pages, single-spaced. But as we have seen in these months of studying this great book, the divinely inspired nature of this brief letter is such that every word is loaded with meaning. It was a brief letter to write, but not to study. I have written some 130,000 words on over 200 single-spaced pages to expound this letter, and I can say that we have barely scratched the surface of its truth.
The reason Peter wrote this letter, he says, is to exhort and testify to the true grace of God. Every word in every verse in every chapter served this purpose. And now he closes with some reminders of grace.
I. The Testimony of Grace
On Wednesday evening I introduced some of you to a little book I have found so useful to me over the years as I have studied the Bible: Halley’s Bible Handbook. And I shared with those there how on page 814, Halley’s words are printed in bold capital letters at the top of the page: “THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THIS BOOK IS THIS.” And that most important thing is for pastors to preach systematically through the Bible and for the congregation to follow along in their own Bible reading during the week. Now there is something humorous and tragic about that. The humorous thing is that one has to read 813 other pages of Halley’s book to get to the MOST IMPORTANT THING. The tragic thing is that the newest edition of the book omits this information entirely. It added glossy pages and color pictures, but it left out what Halley himself considered THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in the book.
Now, Peter says that he has written “testifying that this is the true grace of God.” But unlike Halley’s Handbook, he didn’t wait until the end to reveal the most important thing. He reminds us in the end that he has already written the most important thing. But, what is it? This is the true grace of God, but what is THIS? Having nothing in the immediate context to limit the definition of this, we must understand it to mean the entire letter. The entire letter is a testimony to the true grace of God. Everything Peter has written has been a testimony to grace. Those who received this letter, like many who have read it and cherished it over the last two millennia, were Christians who were struggling to live out their faith, far from their homeland, in a hostile environment. And Peter has set forth to them a testimony of the true grace of God.
He has spoken to them of the living hope into which we, as believers in Jesus, have been born again through His resurrection from the dead. It is grace that birthed us anew into this hope. He has spoken of how Christ has conquered all evil through His own suffering for our sins. It is grace that gives us this victory. He has written of how Christ calls His people to follow His footsteps through this life. It is grace that beckons us to follow Jesus. Peter speaks of Christ’s blessing and presence with those who endure hardship, how He brings them through death and into glory just as He has also first gone. This is grace to the undeserving that Christ may guide us in this way. He has spoken promises of how Christ will vindicate and glorify those who are faithful to Him through the hardships of this life. That is grace! He has promised a judgment to come that will right every wrong and restore every loss. This is grace!
When we sing that favorite old hymn of John Newton’s, “Amazing Grace,” we sing about how grace “saved a wretch like me.” That’s saving grace. We sing about how grace teaches our hearts to fear and at the same time relieves us of fear. That is sanctifying grace. We sing in the third stanza that the Lord has promised us good things and fixed our hope upon His word by His grace. That is satisfying grace. We go on to sing about how grace brings us through many dangers, toils, and snares. That is strengthening grace. We don’t sing Newton’s original words after that. We omit two stanzas that he penned, and sing one that he didn’t write. But if we were to sing the original, we would sing a fifth stanza that speaks of grace providing joy and peace even though the flesh and heart begin to fail and mortal life comes to an end. That is sustaining grace. And in Newton’s original final stanza, we would sing about how grace binds us to the Lord for eternity, though the earth dissolve like snow and the sun cease to shine. That is a secure grace. Instead, we sing a different final stanza that speak of grace leading us to our eternal heavenly home where we will worship the Lord forever. That is all-surpassing grace.
Grace truly is amazing! And Peter says that he wrote this letter to testify to the true grace of God: how it saves us; how it sanctifies us, satisfies and strengthens us; how it sustains us, secures us, and how it surpasses all else in existence, binding us to Christ forever more. To read the precious words of this letter is to be presented with a rich testimony of the true grace of God.
II. The Exhortation of Grace
Now Peter says he has also written, not just to testify, but to give an exhortation concerning this true grace of God. What is the difference? To testify is to tell someone about something, but to exhort is to tell someone to do something. The New Testament epistles are often divided cleanly at some point near the middle by a shift from testimony to exhortation. Peter, like the other writers, wants to inform us all of some truths that we must know and believe; but that knowledge and those beliefs must then shape what we do. Belief determines behavior. Is that true? What you believe determines how you act. Agreed? Well, if that is true, then a corrolary truth is that behavior demonstrates belief. If what I believe determines how I act, then how I act demonstrates what I believe. We find these principles stated in various ways on nearly every page of the New Testament. So is Christianity about what I believe or is it about what I do? The answer is yes, for what I believe determines what I do; and what I do demonstrates what I believe. I am not saved by my doing, but by my believing; however my doing demonstrates the genuineness of my believing.
Now Peter says he has testified of the true grace of God. He has taught us about this grace and how it saves us, sanctifies us, sustains us, and so on. But he has also given us an exhortation. There is something or some things we must do because we believe in this true grace of God. Throughout each chapter, he has spoken about how this grace should affect our attitude and our actions. Here at the conclusion of the letter, he summarizes all of those exhortations with this one: “This is the true grace of God. Stand firm in it!” It is one thing to say that I believe in the true grace of God, how He saves us through the blood of the cross and sanctifies us to make us more like Jesus, and strengthens us to endure the trials of life, and then brings us to Himself forever in heaven. It is easy to say that I believe all of those things. But I will have countless opportunities every day to demonstrate how firm my belief in this grace of God and this God of grace really is. The proof will be found in whether or not I stand firm in grace.
When our mind is assailed with doubts and questions that leave us second guessing our faith, will we stand firm in the grace that has saved us? Will we preach the gospel of grace to ourselves afresh? When we are faced with someone who we consider to be a vile sinner, will we remember that we are as desperately wicked as they are, and that we would be with them in the folly of their sin if not for the grace of God? And will we testify to them of the grace that saved us in Jesus Christ, just as someone else did for us? When someone has wronged us, will we reply to them in grace, or will we harbor resentment and hatred in our hearts? I am glad that God does not harbor grudges in His heart toward me when I wrong Him; and I don’t want His grace to be wasted in me, I want it to flow through me. And when the going of life gets tough, and the pressure is applied to me, what do others see in me? Do they see grace? When this very grace that saved me and is sanctifying me becomes the cause of my suffering, when I am hated and mistreated for my faith in Christ, and when it appears that all will improve if only I back down, what will I do? Peter is saying to his readers and to us that in all of life’s circumstances, including and maybe particularly in the difficult ones, we must stand firm in the true grace of God.
Christ has satisfied the righteous demands of God’s law for us; He has borne our sins on the cross; He has conquered death; He has birthed us anew into His family and His kingdom; He has shown us the path through suffering into glory, and promised that in the end all wrongs will be made right by a righteous judge. Therefore, on the basis of this true grace of God, we can fix ourselves immovably and not waver when hardships, crises, trials, or other types of suffering come our way. This is grace’s exhortation: once you know of this grace, you must stand firm in it.
III. Examples of Grace
In ancient days, when a person wrote a letter, they put their own name first, as Peter does in 1:1. It makes sense, really, because you don’t want to have to read through the whole letter to find out who it is from. So, when they close the letter, they typically don’t sign their own name again, but rather pass along greetings to certain individuals or from certain individuals who are with the person at the time the letter is written. So, it is no surprise to find several names and personal greetings here at the close of 1 Peter. That was customary. Yet, we Evangelicals make strong claims about the verbal plenary inspiration of Scripture. We claim that every single word of Scripture was inspired by the Spirit of God and is therefore inerrant, infallible, authoritative, and profitable for teaching and guiding us in the Christian life. So what profit is there in us having these names and greetings preserved for us through the centuries? I believe that they provide us with examples of the true grace of God of which Peter has testified and upon which he has exhorted those of us who read this letter.
Peter himself is an example of grace. When he first met Jesus, he recognized his unworthiness to be in the Lord’s presence. He said in Luke 5:8, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” But the Lord didn’t go away. He called Peter to follow Him, and Peter even became part of the inner circle of disciples who were with Jesus constantly. There was grace working in Peter’s life. And this grace proved to be effective on that day in Caesarea when Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” And Jesus told Peter that flesh and blood had not revealed this to him, but that God the Father had revealed it to him. That is grace, revealing truth to Peter and drawing him to confess Christ as Lord. By grace alone, over time, Peter became the leader of the apostles. And then in famously tragic episode when Jesus was on trial, Peter denied even knowing Jesus. He failed to stand firm in grace, but he never fell from grace. Jesus came to Peter and restored him to right fellowship and commissioned him to shepherd the flock of God. And here, a couple of decades or so later, Peter writes this very pastoral letter to the flock he has tended well for Jesus, and he testifies and exhorts them to stand firm in grace. Peter is an example of this grace.
And so is Silvanus. In the book of Acts, Luke calls him Silas, but in their letters both Peter and Paul call him Silvanus. Like many in his day, he had a Roman name and a Semitic name. We first meet him at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, where the church leaders had gathered to determine what should be required of Gentiles who desire to believe in the Lord Jesus. Silas was there. At some point grace had brought him under the Lordship of Christ, and he is described as a prophet, indicating that grace had also made him a preacher of God’s Word. But now he found himself at the most monumental gathering of the first century, surrounded by the men whose names we all know: Paul, Peter, Barnabas, James, and others. And when that council broke, they needed a messenger to deliver the verdict to Antioch. Silas was one of two chosen because he had gained a reputation as one of the “leading men among the brethren.” He was now, by God’s grace, the courier of the most important church gathering since Pentecost. Arriving in Antioch, he even had opportunity to preach to the brethren there, and before long, he began traveling with Paul as a partner with the greatest missionary who ever lived. He suffered alongside of Paul in the Philippian jail where they sang hymns together through the night. Grace had provided unbelievable opportunities for this preacher to be involved in some incredible things. And now, he finds himself along side of Peter in Rome. Some have said that he may have even been the amanuensis, or scribe, who wrote this letter as Peter dictated. That could be what is meant by the phrase, “Through Silvanus … I have written.” While this is uncertain, it is surely the case that Silas would be entrusted to deliver this letter to the Christians across Asia Minor. He was trustworthy because Peter regarded him as a faithful brother. He had proven himself so over the years. But it was all of grace. Every opportunity that came his way was by grace, and the ability to rise to those occasions was of grace as well. Silvanus, the faithful brother, is an example of grace alongside of Peter.
And then we find Mark, whom Peter calls his son. This is certainly the same Mark, or John Mark, who wrote the Gospel According to Mark. But long before this, the grace of God had been at work in Mark’s life as he grew up with a godly Christian mother. Nothing is known of his father, perhaps he had died when Mark was a child or a young man. But there was a godly cousin in his life by the name of Barnabas who encouraged young Mark to join him and Paul on the first missionary journey. The first missionaries on the first mission trip, and here Mark is right in the thick of it. There is grace involved in this opportunity. But at some point in that missionary journey, for a reason that the Bible does not tell us, Mark turned back and went home. Whatever the reason, it was enough for Paul to refuse to take him on the second journey. Mark was the cause of one of the first divisions in church history as the missionary team of Paul and Barnabas divided over him. Paul took Silas and Barnabas took Mark, but the grace of God was still working for now there were two mission teams instead of one. Mark could have gone through life sulking about being a fatherless failure, but by God’s grace, he had a cousin who encouraged him, and along the way he crossed paths with Peter. History ties him closely to Peter, and even suggests that the Gospel of Mark is a transcript of Peter’s preaching and teaching about the life and ministry of Jesus. If many scholars are correct, his gospel was the first one to be written, and the first of its kind in the world. No longer a fatherless failure, the grace of God had transformed Mark into a mighty servant of God, and united him with a brother in the Lord who became for him a father-figure. Peter calls him here “my son.” Peter understood that the true grace of God means that there is always a second chance. He had one, and he made sure Mark got one too. Even Paul would come around later, telling Timothy in 2 Tim 4:11, “Pick up Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me for service.”
Then there is one final person mentioned here: she who is in Babylon. Who is she? When we compare this wording to that of the opening and closing of 2 John, we notice a similarity. There he addresses the “chosen lady and her children,” and sends greetings from “the children of your chosen sister.” It seems that when hostilities in the Roman Empire began to rise against Christianity, this became a cryptic way of identifying a church. So the she of whom Peter speaks is a church. He says that she is in Babylon. Of course we know Babylon was that great city of the Middle East, capital of the domineering Babylonian Empire, and site of present day Baghdad, Iraq. But at the time Peter wrote this, that city was a wasteland. A first century historian said that Babylon was so desolate that it was no longer a great city but a great desert. And there is no evidence of a Christian church there until far beyond the Apostolic period. But there was another Babylon, in Egypt near present-day Cairo. But there has never been a shred of evidence to suggest that Peter was ever there, and no serious biblical scholars have made a case for that. So where is Babylon if it isn’t in Babylon? I agree with the majority of interpreters who conclude that Babylon is a cryptic reference to Rome.
Most of our knowledge of the history of the early church comes from the book of Acts and a few pieces of evidence we find the Epistles. Since Paul wrote most of the epistles, and since Luke traveled with Paul on his missionary journeys, most of what we know concerns the ministry of Paul. But Peter was at work during those years of Christianity’s expanse as well. We know that he was in Jerusalem for a while, and then he traveled throughout the entire region of Judea, Galilee and Samaria, visiting Lydda, Joppa, and Caesaria. And then he came back to Jerusalem, got himself arrested, and escaped by way of an angelic jailbreak. Now, keep in mind that at this point, he is a fugitive. So, it is no surprise that Luke does not tell us anymore of his travel plans. He is a wanted man. Luke simply says in Acts 12:17 that he left and went to “another place.” We know from some statements made by Paul that Peter and his wife passed through and visited some other churches over time, including Antioch and Corinth, but we don’t know much else except that Peter died in Rome. It is therefore entirely plausible that the fugitive Peter and his wife journeyed secretly from church to church across the Mediterranean region until he got to the metropolis of Rome where he could easily blend into the crowd of 1.2 million people who lived there. Tradition says that he pastored a flock of Christians here, and we have expounded this letter on the assumption that the Christians in Asia Minor who received it were originally members of that church who had been kicked out of Rome and exiled to Asia Minor as unwilling colonists there. Somehow Peter managed to lay low, as he had been doing for a while, under the radar. And he stayed in Rome to continue to shepherd the remnant of believers there, some of them perhaps family members, certainly many of whom were close Christian friends with those who received this letter. And to protect their identity and location should Silas encounter trouble and have the letter confiscated, he uses veiled language when giving these greetings.
Now, why the history lesson at this point? Because we are talking about examples of grace. And this church in Rome at this time in history is a great example of grace. In a hostile environment, where the powers that be were already threatening to erase every trace of Christianity, the church of Christ and the testimony of the gospel remained. And though external pressures had forcibly removed many of that church’s members from the region, they could not sever the bond of fellowship. The grace of God had made this band of strangers into a family of brothers and sisters. Think about it … in a country that desires to eliminate all Christian presence, the “just” thing for God to do may be to smite them, or else to withdraw His people and the testimony of His grace from that area altogether. But God doesn’t do that. Instead, he strengthens His church to remain and abide there, enduring those external pressures and persecutions, and continuing to show and tell the gracious offer of salvation through the gospel of Jesus Christ. A church in area, especially in the hard places of the world, is an example of the grace of God.
So, whether you have rebelled against the Lord as Peter did; you have wavered in your commitment like Mark did; you feel like an insignificant person like perhaps Silas had felt at some point in his life; you find yourself surrounded by hostility because of your faith in Jesus; the grace of God is sufficient for you. By grace, you can be restored like Peter was, and go on to do great things for the Lord. By grace, you don’t have to be a fatherless failure like Mark perhaps had considered himself; you can have a family of fellow believers and go on to be useful for God’s purposes. By grace, you may find God placing ordinary little you in extraordinary circumstances where He demonstrates His glory through you -- like He did with Silas. Or, like the chosen lady of Babylon, the oppressed Roman Church, God may use you to demonstrate His grace and His glory, even to those who are most hostile toward Him and His truth. And in all of these circumstances, you are the examples of the true grace of God for the world to see.
But the greatest example of His grace is this: that God would become one of us in the person of Jesus Christ, and live the sinless life of perfect righteousness that God requires, but that we cannot deliver, and yet die as a sacrificial substitute to bear the wrath of God for our sins, and then conquer death on our behalf through His glorious resurrection. And because of this, God calls out to sinners and beckons them to come to Jesus to be saved. And He promises to fill them with His Spirit and transform them into the likeness of Christ until He takes them into His presence forever in heaven. Who among us can say that we are entitled to that from the Holy God of the Universe? Who can say it is deserved, or that we are good enough to earn it? No, not one. This offer comes to us by grace. This is the true grace of God. You are surrounded today by examples of grace. You have heard today a testimony of grace. You have also been presented with an exhortation of grace. Come to Christ and be saved. Experience this true grace of God and then stand firm in it until He calls you home.
These were the last words Peter wrote in this letter, not knowing that it may be the last words he ever said to these friends. They were important enough to say in the event that they were his final words. Friends, we have no guarantees. And if these are the last words I ever say to you, I could say nothing better. I have testified to you of the true grace of God. I exhort you to stand firm in it.
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