Some material in this post is taken from Wikipedia ("Archimedes").
Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) was "an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer." He is "[g]enerally considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time." Archimedes "died c. 212 BC during the Second Punic War [Rome vs. Carthage], when Roman forces under General Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured the city of Syracuse [under Carthaginian rule] after a two-year-long siege. According to the popular account given by Plutarch, Archimedes was contemplating a mathematical diagram when the city was captured. A Roman soldier commanded him to come and meet General Marcellus but he declined, saying that he had to finish working on the problem. The soldier was enraged by this, and killed Archimedes with his sword. Plutarch also gives a lesser-known account of the death of Archimedes which suggests that he may have been killed while attempting to surrender to a Roman soldier. According to this story, Archimedes was carrying mathematical instruments, and was killed because the soldier thought that they were valuable items."
In both of these accounts, we see that Archimedes' work was more important to him than anything, even his personal safety. In one account, he was so engrossed in his work that he was oblivious to everything going on around him; in the other, he tried to salvage his tools to the last. As I pondered this the other day, I realized that this man who let nothing distract him from his life's work. To us it may seem foolish that he didn't abandon his study to preserve his life, but when you look at this incident closely, you see that mathematics was Archimedes' life. It eclipsed everything else therein, even his personal safety in the end.
What a great example for Christians! Archimedes let nothing distract him from his mission, just as Paul exhorts us in 2 Tim. 2:4, "No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier." Furthermore, something was more important to him than life itself...another great example for us. Paul said in Acts 20:24, "But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God." To Paul, the word of God was more important than life, just as mathematics was for Archimedes. If a Greek scholar will put his thirst for mathematical truth before his life, shouldn't we also put the word of God, the absolute truth (John 17:17), before ours?
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Dealing with Your Parents, or A Story of Three Kings
(Transcription of a message preached at Faith-Grace Vietnamese Baptist Church, Stone Mountain, GA; 13 July 2014)
Text: 2 Chronicles 29:1-11
In preparing this message, I was amazed yet again about how much the Bible has to help young people. Did you know that an entire book of the Bible is aimed at a young person? Look at Proverbs 1:1, 4: “The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel…To give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion.” Many young people have the mistaken idea that the Bible is a book for grown ups. That’s a big mistake. Paul told his dear friend Timothy, “And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15).
One of the biggest issues in any young person’s life is how to deal with two sets of people: (1) his peers, or friends; and (2) even more importantly, his parents. The Bible is where you need to turn first to learn what God expects of you as a young person still at home and under your parents’ authority. The Bible, especially the old testament, has plenty to say about this, if we will take the time to study through it.
The portion of scripture I’d like us to consider is from one of the historical books of the old testament (Joshua-Esther): 2 Chronicles. This book is a record of kings’ reigns, mainly the kings of Judah after Israel splits in two after Solomon’s death, which we talked about in one of my previous visits, if you remember. Three kings show up in the last chapters of this book that, in my opinion, teach us some great lessons about how to deal with our parents.
Let’s begin with the passage we read earlier. Here we meet a man named Hezekiah, who, for the record, is one of the greatest kings of Israel; the greatest, according to scripture as to his faith in God. Look at 2 Kings 18:5, “He trusted in the LORD God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him.”
To me, that’s an amazing statement. The kings of Judah after him would include the devout king Josiah, and the kings of Judah before him would include David, a man after God’s own heart (1 Sam. 13:14--sought; Acts 13:22--found). But according to God, neither of these men trusted God like Hezekiah did. One of the major events in Hezekiah’s reign was when the greatest army in the world at the time, the army of the Assyrians, invaded Israel and surrounded the capital city, Jerusalem. Hezekiah’s army was very weak compared to the invaders, yet he trusted God for deliverance, and do you remember what happened? One angel went out at night and killed 185,000 of the invaders’ leaders and best soldiers (2 Chron. 32:21). David and Josiah never faced such overwhelming odds: David had a great army once he became king, and Josiah was never invaded in 31 years. So Hezekiah stands out among all the kings of Israel for his faith…
But did you know that he had a wicked father? His father’s name was Ahaz, and you can read about his rule in 2 Chron. 28. It’s an awful story. Ahaz turned away from the God of his father, Jotham, and grandfather, Uzziah, both good kings overall. He desecrates God’s temple with a pagan altar and by marring some of the temple furniture used to worship God. In the end, he even shuts the temple down altogether. A very bad man! Destined to have a bad son, right? Highly likely, it would seem.
But not the case, praise the Lord. No sooner is the man dead and his son, Hezekiah, steps forward as the new king, and in the first month that he’s king, he opens the doors of the temple! What a shock that must have been to everyone. They probably thought that Ahaz’s son would have been even worse than Ahaz, growing up like he did. But just the opposite happens. Why do you think that is? I’d like to give you my thoughts on it, and use this relationship (Ahaz-Hezekiah) and Hezekiah’s relationship with his son, Manasseh, to show you three things God expects of young people regarding their parents.
1. The first thing I see about Hezekiah is his submission to his father. His father was a very bad man, perhaps one of the worst men the southern kingdom ever produced, because he led the entire nation into worshipping false gods, even in the temple of God itself. At some point, Hezekiah comes to believe in the true God of Israel. He was nine years old when his father took the throne from his good father, Jotham, so maybe Jotham’s example inspired the young boy. We don’t know. But in the sixteen years that followed, Hezekiah chose, at some point, not to go after false gods, but cleave to the LORD, despite what his father was doing. Nevertheless, he didn’t rebel against his father, but continued to do what his father told him to do. But when his father was gone, and he was in charge, he bravely stepped forward and set the nation on an entirely different course than the one his father had them on.
In every age, including this one, God expects children to submit to their parents. Let’s look at a few verses aimed at the children of Christian parents. First, Ephesians 6:1-3, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.” Next, Colossians 3:20, “Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is wellpleasing unto the Lord.” Now, even though these verses are aimed at the children of Christian parents, they really apply to all children. Did you notice that the passage from Ephesians quotes the ten commandments? That is God’s holy law, and Paul tells us in Romans 2 that even if a person or a people don’t have God’s written word, it’s written on their hearts (Rom. 2:14-15). One of those laws is that children should honour their parents (Ex. 20:12)—the fifth commandment, as a matter of fact. If you’ve read the letters of the apostle Paul, you notice that in several passages he lists sins, and at least three of those, he mentions “disobedience to parents” as being very displeasing to God, for all families, not just Christian ones.
So Hezekiah had to submit to his wicked father for a time, but God took care of him, just like he’ll take care of you, if you trust him like Hezekiah did. I was not raised by Christian parents. They were churchgoers but they taught me very little about God and set a bad example for me in many ways. But when I came of age, I decided that I really wanted to know God and do whatever he wanted me to do, and it’s the best decision I ever made.
2. That brings me to the second thing that God expects of children. He expects you to learn from your parents lives: both the things they do right, and the things they do wrong. Hezekiah seems to be great example of a young person who learned from the bad things his father did and decided to go the opposite direction. A very wise child! He saw, I believe, that the way his father was living was not working. Something was deeply wrong, he thought, and he wanted to know why. I believe that led him into the arms of God, through his grandfather’s example or his own search, or both.
Now, God also expects young people to learn from the good example of their parents. This brings another character into this drama: Hezekiah’s oldest son, Manasseh. Manasseh was a miracle baby, in a way, since he was born after God miraculously healed Hezekiah from a deadly illness. But sadly, he turns out to the worst king of Judah, even worse than his grandfather Ahaz. But why, you may ask? He had such a good father. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Here’s a boy, Hezekiah, with a wicked daddy, who turns out great, and here’s a boy, Manasseh, with a righteous father, Hezekiah, who turns out awful. What is going on?! Well, the answer is simpler than you might think. Every child, no matter who his parents are, decides his own course in life. He decides whether he will learn from his parents’ successes and mistakes, like Hezekiah did, and benefit from that, or whether he’ll ignore them like Manasseh and suffer. Manasseh ends up losing his power and carried away in chains to imprisonment in a foreign country (Babylon). And there’s been many a man like him that ignored the good example of his parents, even Christian parents, and ends up in jail, maybe even overseas.
Do you see how important this time in your life is, and why it’s so important for you to know what the Bible says about this stuff? Psalm 119:105 says, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” It’s almost impossible not to stumble in the dark without a light, and that’s what this precious Book is. I didn’t start reading it until I was 18, and I wish I had started far earlier than that. My two oldest children started reading the Bible when they were 4 or 5, and God’s truth is already being laid up in their hearts, 13 years before it was in mine. One of the first things God taught me after my salvation was, not surprisingly, to obey and respect my parents. It’s wonderful how that desire, which was not very strong at all before, sprung up in my heart, and it was something I wanted to do rather than had to do. If you truly come to know the Lord Jesus as your Saviour, he can and will produce the same desires in you, if you allow him to, and the results are wonderful. I know that my parents saw the change in my attitude toward them, and I believe that God worked on their hearts through it.
3. The last thing I’d like to mention, in closing, that God expects of young people, I’ve touched on already, but would like to emphasize: following your parents. It’s natural for you to do so, but you have to first submit to them, learn from their examples, then decide to follow them where they are right. Look at Ephesians 5 this time, verse 1: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children.” So it’s natural for children to follow their parents, and the parent-child relationship is so critical because of that. God tells his children, those who have trusted in Jesus Christ as their Saviour, to follow him, because its’ the natural thing to do. But God, unlike our earthly parents, is perfect and sets a perfect example. But since our parents are sinners just like us, we have to study the Bible and compare their lives to it, just like wise King Hezekiah did, and decide what and what not to follow. As a parent, it’s very rewarding to see my children follow the right things I do, but it’s a grief to see them pick up on my faults. My challenge to any parents present is to think about this and be very careful about your walk and example. You cannot set a perfect example for your kids, but you can try, and where you come short, God can use that to show them that you too are a sinner in need of God’s grace, like they are.
So, in closing, I’d like to thank God for the lessons that we can learn from men like Ahaz, Hezekiah, and Manasseh on how to deal with our parents. The Bible is the most holy and the most practical book that you will ever read, and I encourage you to get as deeply in it as you can. Your leaders here, if not your parents themselves, can help you with your understanding of it, either to come to know the Lord personally, or having done that, to grow in grace and knowledge and enjoy the happiest of lives, as young person and as an adult. Thank you so much for your attention, and God bless you all.
Text: 2 Chronicles 29:1-11
In preparing this message, I was amazed yet again about how much the Bible has to help young people. Did you know that an entire book of the Bible is aimed at a young person? Look at Proverbs 1:1, 4: “The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel…To give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion.” Many young people have the mistaken idea that the Bible is a book for grown ups. That’s a big mistake. Paul told his dear friend Timothy, “And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15).
One of the biggest issues in any young person’s life is how to deal with two sets of people: (1) his peers, or friends; and (2) even more importantly, his parents. The Bible is where you need to turn first to learn what God expects of you as a young person still at home and under your parents’ authority. The Bible, especially the old testament, has plenty to say about this, if we will take the time to study through it.
The portion of scripture I’d like us to consider is from one of the historical books of the old testament (Joshua-Esther): 2 Chronicles. This book is a record of kings’ reigns, mainly the kings of Judah after Israel splits in two after Solomon’s death, which we talked about in one of my previous visits, if you remember. Three kings show up in the last chapters of this book that, in my opinion, teach us some great lessons about how to deal with our parents.
Let’s begin with the passage we read earlier. Here we meet a man named Hezekiah, who, for the record, is one of the greatest kings of Israel; the greatest, according to scripture as to his faith in God. Look at 2 Kings 18:5, “He trusted in the LORD God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him.”
To me, that’s an amazing statement. The kings of Judah after him would include the devout king Josiah, and the kings of Judah before him would include David, a man after God’s own heart (1 Sam. 13:14--sought; Acts 13:22--found). But according to God, neither of these men trusted God like Hezekiah did. One of the major events in Hezekiah’s reign was when the greatest army in the world at the time, the army of the Assyrians, invaded Israel and surrounded the capital city, Jerusalem. Hezekiah’s army was very weak compared to the invaders, yet he trusted God for deliverance, and do you remember what happened? One angel went out at night and killed 185,000 of the invaders’ leaders and best soldiers (2 Chron. 32:21). David and Josiah never faced such overwhelming odds: David had a great army once he became king, and Josiah was never invaded in 31 years. So Hezekiah stands out among all the kings of Israel for his faith…
But did you know that he had a wicked father? His father’s name was Ahaz, and you can read about his rule in 2 Chron. 28. It’s an awful story. Ahaz turned away from the God of his father, Jotham, and grandfather, Uzziah, both good kings overall. He desecrates God’s temple with a pagan altar and by marring some of the temple furniture used to worship God. In the end, he even shuts the temple down altogether. A very bad man! Destined to have a bad son, right? Highly likely, it would seem.
But not the case, praise the Lord. No sooner is the man dead and his son, Hezekiah, steps forward as the new king, and in the first month that he’s king, he opens the doors of the temple! What a shock that must have been to everyone. They probably thought that Ahaz’s son would have been even worse than Ahaz, growing up like he did. But just the opposite happens. Why do you think that is? I’d like to give you my thoughts on it, and use this relationship (Ahaz-Hezekiah) and Hezekiah’s relationship with his son, Manasseh, to show you three things God expects of young people regarding their parents.
1. The first thing I see about Hezekiah is his submission to his father. His father was a very bad man, perhaps one of the worst men the southern kingdom ever produced, because he led the entire nation into worshipping false gods, even in the temple of God itself. At some point, Hezekiah comes to believe in the true God of Israel. He was nine years old when his father took the throne from his good father, Jotham, so maybe Jotham’s example inspired the young boy. We don’t know. But in the sixteen years that followed, Hezekiah chose, at some point, not to go after false gods, but cleave to the LORD, despite what his father was doing. Nevertheless, he didn’t rebel against his father, but continued to do what his father told him to do. But when his father was gone, and he was in charge, he bravely stepped forward and set the nation on an entirely different course than the one his father had them on.
In every age, including this one, God expects children to submit to their parents. Let’s look at a few verses aimed at the children of Christian parents. First, Ephesians 6:1-3, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.” Next, Colossians 3:20, “Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is wellpleasing unto the Lord.” Now, even though these verses are aimed at the children of Christian parents, they really apply to all children. Did you notice that the passage from Ephesians quotes the ten commandments? That is God’s holy law, and Paul tells us in Romans 2 that even if a person or a people don’t have God’s written word, it’s written on their hearts (Rom. 2:14-15). One of those laws is that children should honour their parents (Ex. 20:12)—the fifth commandment, as a matter of fact. If you’ve read the letters of the apostle Paul, you notice that in several passages he lists sins, and at least three of those, he mentions “disobedience to parents” as being very displeasing to God, for all families, not just Christian ones.
So Hezekiah had to submit to his wicked father for a time, but God took care of him, just like he’ll take care of you, if you trust him like Hezekiah did. I was not raised by Christian parents. They were churchgoers but they taught me very little about God and set a bad example for me in many ways. But when I came of age, I decided that I really wanted to know God and do whatever he wanted me to do, and it’s the best decision I ever made.
2. That brings me to the second thing that God expects of children. He expects you to learn from your parents lives: both the things they do right, and the things they do wrong. Hezekiah seems to be great example of a young person who learned from the bad things his father did and decided to go the opposite direction. A very wise child! He saw, I believe, that the way his father was living was not working. Something was deeply wrong, he thought, and he wanted to know why. I believe that led him into the arms of God, through his grandfather’s example or his own search, or both.
Now, God also expects young people to learn from the good example of their parents. This brings another character into this drama: Hezekiah’s oldest son, Manasseh. Manasseh was a miracle baby, in a way, since he was born after God miraculously healed Hezekiah from a deadly illness. But sadly, he turns out to the worst king of Judah, even worse than his grandfather Ahaz. But why, you may ask? He had such a good father. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Here’s a boy, Hezekiah, with a wicked daddy, who turns out great, and here’s a boy, Manasseh, with a righteous father, Hezekiah, who turns out awful. What is going on?! Well, the answer is simpler than you might think. Every child, no matter who his parents are, decides his own course in life. He decides whether he will learn from his parents’ successes and mistakes, like Hezekiah did, and benefit from that, or whether he’ll ignore them like Manasseh and suffer. Manasseh ends up losing his power and carried away in chains to imprisonment in a foreign country (Babylon). And there’s been many a man like him that ignored the good example of his parents, even Christian parents, and ends up in jail, maybe even overseas.
Do you see how important this time in your life is, and why it’s so important for you to know what the Bible says about this stuff? Psalm 119:105 says, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” It’s almost impossible not to stumble in the dark without a light, and that’s what this precious Book is. I didn’t start reading it until I was 18, and I wish I had started far earlier than that. My two oldest children started reading the Bible when they were 4 or 5, and God’s truth is already being laid up in their hearts, 13 years before it was in mine. One of the first things God taught me after my salvation was, not surprisingly, to obey and respect my parents. It’s wonderful how that desire, which was not very strong at all before, sprung up in my heart, and it was something I wanted to do rather than had to do. If you truly come to know the Lord Jesus as your Saviour, he can and will produce the same desires in you, if you allow him to, and the results are wonderful. I know that my parents saw the change in my attitude toward them, and I believe that God worked on their hearts through it.
3. The last thing I’d like to mention, in closing, that God expects of young people, I’ve touched on already, but would like to emphasize: following your parents. It’s natural for you to do so, but you have to first submit to them, learn from their examples, then decide to follow them where they are right. Look at Ephesians 5 this time, verse 1: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children.” So it’s natural for children to follow their parents, and the parent-child relationship is so critical because of that. God tells his children, those who have trusted in Jesus Christ as their Saviour, to follow him, because its’ the natural thing to do. But God, unlike our earthly parents, is perfect and sets a perfect example. But since our parents are sinners just like us, we have to study the Bible and compare their lives to it, just like wise King Hezekiah did, and decide what and what not to follow. As a parent, it’s very rewarding to see my children follow the right things I do, but it’s a grief to see them pick up on my faults. My challenge to any parents present is to think about this and be very careful about your walk and example. You cannot set a perfect example for your kids, but you can try, and where you come short, God can use that to show them that you too are a sinner in need of God’s grace, like they are.
So, in closing, I’d like to thank God for the lessons that we can learn from men like Ahaz, Hezekiah, and Manasseh on how to deal with our parents. The Bible is the most holy and the most practical book that you will ever read, and I encourage you to get as deeply in it as you can. Your leaders here, if not your parents themselves, can help you with your understanding of it, either to come to know the Lord personally, or having done that, to grow in grace and knowledge and enjoy the happiest of lives, as young person and as an adult. Thank you so much for your attention, and God bless you all.
The Other Side of Hell
Like it or not, hell is a revelation of the love, mercy, and grace of God, indeed all of his beneficent attributes. God does not suspend one attribute when exercising another. He always acts in perfect unity (cf. A.W. Tozer’s Knowledge of the Holy for further discussion of this truth). For example, when God saves a sinner, he does not suspend his righteousness to do so. Paul’s epistle to the Romans (3:24-26) reveals that God never forgave or saved anyone, in either testament, without a righteous basis, which we now know to be the cross of Christ. Old testament saints were saved “on credit,” if you will, until Christ came and actually paid for their sins in full (animal blood was only a temporary, typical expedient; cf. Heb. 10:4). So at Calvary, God not only shows love, mercy, and grace, but also righteousness and wrath. Sin angers God (Ps. 7:11) and requires punishment for this wrath to be pacified (cf. Esther 7:10).
As for hell, the element of love, mercy, and grace associated with it may not be obvious, but it’s there nonetheless. It must be, since, as stated above, God always acts in unity; so even where sinners suffer the pangs of hell, there is something of God’s beneficence present. “How?!” you may ask.
Think about this: what is God to do with his creatures who, after repeated attempts at reconciliation, refuse him and insist upon remaining his enemies? Welcome them into heaven? Save them against their will? Then they’d be robots and not men! Similarly, what is he to do with creatures like Satan, devils, and wicked men who go from wickedness to greater wickedness? Didn’t the world rejoice when Hitler died? What if God had let that terrible little man live 969 years, like he did the patriarch Methuselah (yes, 969 literal years of 360 days apiece)? The whole world would’ve been destroyed, most likely. FYI, large reserves of deadly instruments were found after the Third Reich fell, indicating that the 11-12 million killed in Nazi genocides (Russians, Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, sodomites, et al.) was only the beginning.
In his beneficence, God created hell to contain Satan, his spiritual minions (Mt. 25:41), wicked men, and the impenitent (Rom. 2:4-5) from doing further damage to themselves and others. Dear reader, our hearts have the potential for desperate wickedness (Jer. 17:9), and without God’s beneficent restraints, we would all live like Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Amin (never repented), and Genghis Khan (enjoyed hearing his enemies suffer) and self-destruct after killing everyone around us, a la Littleton, Virginia Tech, etc. The tongue is set on fire of hell (James 3:6) because the heart of man is! Only a beneficent God stands in its way of absolute destruction (Rom. 3:15-17).
Thank you, wonderful Lord, for creating hell! You desire all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), but you’re far too righteous to justify the impenitent and go against their free will to reject you. You’re also kind to those who choose you by containing forever those who will not submit to you and would, if they could, harm you and those who love you forever. Beware the heart of man!
I’d like to close this essay with a poem from C.S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress. I think that this poem captures both sides of hell as discussed above and was my partial inspiration for this essay (along Tozer, etc.):
‘God in His mercy made
The fixèd pains of Hell.
That misery might be stayed,
God in His mercy made
Eternal bounds and bade
Its waves no further swell.
God in His mercy made
The fixèd pains of Hell.’
Friday, August 1, 2014
The Ministries of Angels and Devils in the Church Age
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In the church age, following the close of Paul's ministry, angels are invisible (Acts 27:23; Col. 2:18), passive, and learning (Eph. 3:10). Devils in this age (post-Acts 19:16) are invisible, active, and teaching (1 Tim. 4:1). The more I study dispensational truth, however, the more skeptical I am of accounts of visible satanic activity in the church age. It's clear from 1 Timothy 4:1 and other passages that evil spirits are at work in this age. But I'm doubting more and more that they manifest themselves visibly in this age, as movies and even testimonies have alleged (remember 1 Thes. 5:21 and 2 Pt. 1:18-19). While there is no passage in Paul’s epistles that would rule out the possibility of diabolical manifestations, like there is angelic (Col. 2:18), I'm confident that most if not all of the accounts of such things are false. Satan’s primary weapon in this age is spiritual deception (2 Cor. 11:3; Eph. 6:11; 1 Tim. 4:1; etc.). Paul didn’t give the body of Christ any instructions on how to exorcise devils, like he did the kingdom apostles (cf. Mt. 17:18-21), but he did exhort us to "put on the whole armour of God" (Eph. 6:11, 13), which is spiritual, that we may stand against spiritual wickedness (Eph 6:12). His emphasis is on defensive warfare in this age, rather than offensive (i.e. exorcisms), which is more characteristic of the kingdom program (Mt. 4:24, 10:1-8; Luke 10:17-20; Acts 5:16, 8:7). One final thought is that occupation with alleged visible manifestations of angelic and diabolical activity can blind believers to the true activities of angels and devils in this age, as spelled out for us through Paul, and hinder our occupation with the Lord Jesus Christ and his body (Col. 2:18-19).
Special thanks to Bros. David O'Steen and Eli Caldwell for their contributions to this post.
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Saturday, July 12, 2014
Pride, Humility, and Humiliation
(Transcribed from a lesson taught at Landmark Baptist Church on June 29, 2014)
Text: Acts 8:26-33
The word “humiliation,” which triggered this study, appears only once in the AV, in Acts 8:33, and the context is Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. Philip, likely the evangelist rather than the apostle, is speaking with the Ethiopian eunuch, who reads a passage from Is. 53:7-8, with slightly different wording in Acts 8:32-33. Since the eunuch obviously doesn’t change the scripture, I believe that Acts 8:33 sheds light on the sense of Is. 53:8. What Isaiah is describing is interpreted as “humiliation” in Acts 8, and since this word only appears once in scripture, it’s worth a second look. Also, it made me think about humility: is it the same as humiliation or different? Likely different, since it’s a different word, but also likely similar, since it’s a similar word. Finally, I thought about pride, the opposite of humility, and a vice rather than a virtue…no matter what the world says!
I believe that there is a progression from this vice, which we’re all born with, to humility, which is a divine virtue and part of our new nature (Col. 3:12), and finally to humiliation. I see humiliation as even deeper than humility, and although it’s not so much a grace as an experience. We’ll begin with the terrible vice of pride.
PRIDE
Pride is part of the sinful nature that we inherited from Adam. Job 41:34 says that leviathan, another name for Satan (Is. 27:1; Rev. 12:9), is “a king over all the children of pride.” Now, this could apply to those who reject God in the great tribulation period, which the book of Job typifies (42 chapters/42 months), but I think that it fits natural men in general, since we’re born with this vice woven deeply into our spiritual constitution.
Lucifer fell through pride (Ezek. 28:17), and Adam and Eve, his successors as regents of earth, were made with the possibility of pride (cf. Gen. 3:6; 1 John 2:16). Note the revelation of their capacity for pride in Gen. 3:5-6. Satan offers them knowledge that God had withheld from them. They wanted more than God had chosen to give them, just like Lucifer before them (Is. 14:14). They, like Lucifer, wanted a glory that God withheld for himself.
I think that the very first chapters of scripture help us understand the essence of pride. Pride is wanting glory for yourself that God reserves for himself (or to himself). From beginning to end, the great concern of the Bible is the glory of God. Lucifer wanted it for himself, Adam and Eve wanted it for themselves, and all of their offspring, to varying degrees, crave it for themselves, except for one, the Lord Jesus Christ, who divests himself of all glory so that God the Father may ultimately receive universal glory and elect angels and men may rejoice in and even partake of that glory.
Here are some verses that capture the essence of pride:
• Ps. 115:1. Pride is to crave glory for your name, not God’s, as the psalmist longs for here.
• Prov. 25:27. Pride is to “search [your] own glory” rather than God’s.
• Rom. 1:21. Pride is to refuse give God the glory “due unto his name” (Ps. 29:2). Paul reiterates this in vv. 23 and 30 (pride is the root and fruit of man’s devolution).
• Acts 12:22-23. Glory was on the table here, but Herod wants it for himself, not God, and God strikes him down. “Pride goeth before destruction [not just contention], and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).
A word of clarification on feeling “proud,” with help from C.S. Lewis (broadly paraphrased from the chapter on "Pride" in Mere Christianity (hereafter, MS)), to give us a balanced view of pride’s essence. To say that you’re proud of your children is really saying that you’re pleased with them in the sight of others, not that you value them more than God. It’s simply a figure of speech. It might be better to say, “I’m thankful for…or I’m pleased with…,” but the heart in these cases isn’t wrong like it is when you say therein, “Look at me, and make much of me; I don’t care if God gets any credit or not.”
That’s real pride, folks, and something that must be warred against and mortified in all of its forms. Politicians talk about the “War on Poverty,” but how about a “War on Pride”? Beloved, if you don’t watch out for pride in your life and seek God’s grace to mortify it, it will kill you, i.e. it will steal your spiritual life and growth, to varying degrees.
HUMILITY
The basic nature of natural man is pride. He may “humble” himself or put himself down, but it’s not in a godly sense. There’s a selfish root to it, since he has only the Adamic nature and not the Spirit of God (Jude 19). Paul warns of carnal humility in Col. 2:18 (“a voluntary humility”) and 2:23 (“willworship…humility). So there is indeed a selfish humility.
A few examples:
• Mike Pearl (No Greater Joy Ministries) said that plain people (Amish, Mennonite, et al. ) impressed him as being proud of their humility (pride of grace, vs. pride of face (Prov. 21:4) and pride of race). You must realize that self-deprecation is a covert pride: “I’m such a sinner…I’m so dumb.” But what did you just do in both cases? You called attention to yourself. If you were really humble, you wouldn’t talk about yourself at all, your virtues or your vices.
• Evan Roberts, who was a key figure in the Welsh revival of 1904, was interviewed during the revival and described by the writer as “a man totally unconscious of himself.” What bliss, to forget oneself, even for a moments! what a foretaste of glory, when we’ll lose ourselves in adoration and service to Christ!
• C.S. Lewis asks in MC (paraphrased), what would a humble fellow look like? He’d probably be kind and pleasant and really interested in what you had to say.
o Inattention is pride too. If you really understood your need of people, you’d listen to them intently, lest you miss what God has for you through them. Remember, you have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice as much as you speak, right? Wherefore let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath (Jas. 1:19).
Humility, then, is giving up glory—to God and men. It rejoices in God getting the glory, not itself (Ps. 34:1-2; 115:1). Christ gave up the glory he could have rightfully had among men, seeking God’s glory instead. God was glorified by his cross and will be for all eternity, and Christ will share in that glory (Phil. 2:5-11). The same will be true of us, as his children, if we humble ourselves and serve and suffer with Christ (Rom. 8:17-18; 2 Tim. 2:12; etc.)
By comparing Col. 3:12 and Phil. 2:3, we see that humility equates to lowliness, i.e., taking the lower position before God and men. Jesus Christ’s entire life was one of humility, from cradle to grave. Take his last days for example: he (1) rides into Jerusalem, as the son of David, on an ass-colt (Zech. 9:9), not a horse (symbol of pride; Ps. 20:7); (2) dines at a healed leper’s house (Mt. 26:6); (3) washes his ambitious apostles’ feet as they argue about “which of them should be accounted the greatest” (Luke 22:24) and overlook the common courtesy due him (Luke 7:44); (4) forgives Israel on the cross; and (5) allows the two thieves to revile him (Mt. 26:44; Mk. 14:32), then forgives the penitent one, promising him eternal glory (Luke 23:43).
That same humility resides in us by the Spirit, and should be manifest in our lives per Phil. 2:3. Besides lowliness, notice two other words in the verse: (1) strife--: Solomon said that “Only by pride cometh contention (Prov. 13:10); and (2) vainglory—a composite of vanity and glory; vainly seeking one’s own glory, like we saw in Prov. 25:27. That’s pride.
I used to look at “esteeming others better than [myself]” like this: even if you were better than someone, say more spiritual, you’d try to look at others as better than you. But God wants us to esteem others better than us, not as if we’re pretending, but in truth, since they are, in reality, better than us. How is that? Well, when you consider that all of us are members of one another (Eph. 4:25), and that “the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Cor. 12:21), it makes sense: I can truly esteem Bro. John Doe as better than myself, because he IS—God has made him something different than me, something that I need to be complete, and if I ignore or, even worse, despise him, I will miss out on part of the life of Christ.
O, if believers only understood how much they need each other, not just in theory, but in fact! Understanding how the body operates, in practice, will drive you to the body to complete yourself. Just as you feel a longing to marry and complete yourself in the physical sense, don’t you feel the same longing for other believers to, in a practical sense, complete yourself spiritually? In a positional sense, you are complete (Col. 2:10), but notice the verse before that—the completion is connected with a body, which is called “the fullness of him that filleth all in all” in Eph. 1:22-23. You cannot be practically complete in Christ without the body, folks, and I believe that the more tightly compacted you become with the other members of the body, the more you will personally experience and demonstrate the life of Christ for God’s glory.
Some fine books have been written on humility. I see Andrew Murray’s in Christian bookstores from time to time in the classics section (you can get it at LifeWay), but the one that book I’ve read on it I highly recommend: Humility, by C.J. Mahaney. Mahaney is a Reformed (Calvinistic) Baptist pastor in Louisville. This is an excellent treatise on humility that gives you, from cover to cover, practical tips on fostering humility in your life, with God’s help. Why don’t these limelight Christian celebrities write books on humility? Easy, they’re proud. Humility doesn’t make money. It mortifies the self-life and puts God in the limelight, not you.
Only God know the heart, but when a man doesn’t put an emphasis on humility, something is wrong with him. D.M. Lloyd-Jones, the famous British preacher in the mid-twentieth century, said that the most dangerous man is the man who emphasizes the wrong things. There’s a lot of truth to that. That’s how Satan got Eve and Adam. He emphasized what God was apparently withholding from them, with not a word about God’s goodness, righteousness, and truth (Eph. 5:9), which were at back of God’s command for them to refrain from eating the forbidden fruit.
HUMILIATION
As we grow in the Lord, pride is mortified and replaced with humility. But there’s an even deeper work that God wishes to do, I believe, and that’s the work of humiliation. Christ not only “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8), but he was humiliated as well, according to Acts 8:33. He initiated the humbling, but I think that God initiated the humiliation. It’s a two-sided thing. One side is man’s—humility. The other side is God’s—humiliation. On Christ’s side, he puts himself down. On God’s side, he puts Christ down. The unity is that Christ submits to God’s ordering. Look at 1 Pt. 2:21-25, which also cites Is. 53 also and may shed even more light on Is. 53:8/Acts 8:33, esp. v. 23. Christ did not stand up for himself (humility); he let God put him down (humiliation) for his own righteous purpose or judgment.
The glorious outcome of all of this: Christ subjected himself to God’s judgment by bearing men’s sins like a transgressor, and God promptly took him out of prison (the lower parts of the earth) and judgment by raising him from the dead, proving his righteousness and sinlessness! Note Acts 8:33, “In his humiliation his judgment was taken away…” By being put down at the pleasure of God, God was able to take his judgment away when he raised him from the dead. The resurrection was a universal, eternal testimony to the righteousness of God (for justifying sinners) and Jesus Christ (as the sinless substitute for those sinners); cf. Rom. 3:25.
CONCLUSION
So I think there is scriptural support for the progression I’ve described above: the vice of pride needing mortification by God’s grace and replacement with the virtue of humility. Deepening humility, however, prepares one for humiliation, as seen in the life of Christ. Only a life of steadily going lower can prepare one to properly respond to crises where God sovereignly puts you down in humiliation, with the ultimate goal of glorifying himself and blessing you through it. I posted on Facebook recently that the competition in Christian circles should not be on who can go the highest (visible results, attendance, fame, etc.), but on who can go the lowest. Didn’t Christ say that “whosover will be great among you, let him be your minister” (Mt. 20:26)? F.B. Meyer said that he thought God’s gifts were waiting for him as he attained higher levels of spirituality, but he later realized that God’s gifts were waiting for him as he stooped to lower levels of humility (from One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp). That must be our mission, beloved, since the life that’s in us wants to carry us lower and lower, just as it carried our Saviour lower and lower, to the point that he looked like one under God’s judgment, but ultimately through that shown to be righteous.
I’d like to close with an old poem by a French preacher named Theodore Monod, entitled, “None of Self and All of Thee.”
Oh, the bitter shame and sorrow
That a time could ever be,
When I proudly said to Jesus,
“All of self, and none of Thee.”
Yet He found me; I beheld Him
Bleeding on th’ accursed tree,
And my wistful heart said faintly,
“Some of self, and some of Thee.”
Day by day his tender mercy,
Helping, healing, full, and free,
Brought me lower while I whispered,
“Less of self, and more of Thee.”
Higher than the highest heaven,
Deeper than the deepest sea,
Lord, Thy love at last has conquered:
“None of self, and all of Thee.”
Text: Acts 8:26-33
The word “humiliation,” which triggered this study, appears only once in the AV, in Acts 8:33, and the context is Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. Philip, likely the evangelist rather than the apostle, is speaking with the Ethiopian eunuch, who reads a passage from Is. 53:7-8, with slightly different wording in Acts 8:32-33. Since the eunuch obviously doesn’t change the scripture, I believe that Acts 8:33 sheds light on the sense of Is. 53:8. What Isaiah is describing is interpreted as “humiliation” in Acts 8, and since this word only appears once in scripture, it’s worth a second look. Also, it made me think about humility: is it the same as humiliation or different? Likely different, since it’s a different word, but also likely similar, since it’s a similar word. Finally, I thought about pride, the opposite of humility, and a vice rather than a virtue…no matter what the world says!
I believe that there is a progression from this vice, which we’re all born with, to humility, which is a divine virtue and part of our new nature (Col. 3:12), and finally to humiliation. I see humiliation as even deeper than humility, and although it’s not so much a grace as an experience. We’ll begin with the terrible vice of pride.
PRIDE
Pride is part of the sinful nature that we inherited from Adam. Job 41:34 says that leviathan, another name for Satan (Is. 27:1; Rev. 12:9), is “a king over all the children of pride.” Now, this could apply to those who reject God in the great tribulation period, which the book of Job typifies (42 chapters/42 months), but I think that it fits natural men in general, since we’re born with this vice woven deeply into our spiritual constitution.
Lucifer fell through pride (Ezek. 28:17), and Adam and Eve, his successors as regents of earth, were made with the possibility of pride (cf. Gen. 3:6; 1 John 2:16). Note the revelation of their capacity for pride in Gen. 3:5-6. Satan offers them knowledge that God had withheld from them. They wanted more than God had chosen to give them, just like Lucifer before them (Is. 14:14). They, like Lucifer, wanted a glory that God withheld for himself.
I think that the very first chapters of scripture help us understand the essence of pride. Pride is wanting glory for yourself that God reserves for himself (or to himself). From beginning to end, the great concern of the Bible is the glory of God. Lucifer wanted it for himself, Adam and Eve wanted it for themselves, and all of their offspring, to varying degrees, crave it for themselves, except for one, the Lord Jesus Christ, who divests himself of all glory so that God the Father may ultimately receive universal glory and elect angels and men may rejoice in and even partake of that glory.
Here are some verses that capture the essence of pride:
• Ps. 115:1. Pride is to crave glory for your name, not God’s, as the psalmist longs for here.
• Prov. 25:27. Pride is to “search [your] own glory” rather than God’s.
• Rom. 1:21. Pride is to refuse give God the glory “due unto his name” (Ps. 29:2). Paul reiterates this in vv. 23 and 30 (pride is the root and fruit of man’s devolution).
• Acts 12:22-23. Glory was on the table here, but Herod wants it for himself, not God, and God strikes him down. “Pride goeth before destruction [not just contention], and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).
A word of clarification on feeling “proud,” with help from C.S. Lewis (broadly paraphrased from the chapter on "Pride" in Mere Christianity (hereafter, MS)), to give us a balanced view of pride’s essence. To say that you’re proud of your children is really saying that you’re pleased with them in the sight of others, not that you value them more than God. It’s simply a figure of speech. It might be better to say, “I’m thankful for…or I’m pleased with…,” but the heart in these cases isn’t wrong like it is when you say therein, “Look at me, and make much of me; I don’t care if God gets any credit or not.”
That’s real pride, folks, and something that must be warred against and mortified in all of its forms. Politicians talk about the “War on Poverty,” but how about a “War on Pride”? Beloved, if you don’t watch out for pride in your life and seek God’s grace to mortify it, it will kill you, i.e. it will steal your spiritual life and growth, to varying degrees.
HUMILITY
The basic nature of natural man is pride. He may “humble” himself or put himself down, but it’s not in a godly sense. There’s a selfish root to it, since he has only the Adamic nature and not the Spirit of God (Jude 19). Paul warns of carnal humility in Col. 2:18 (“a voluntary humility”) and 2:23 (“willworship…humility). So there is indeed a selfish humility.
A few examples:
• Mike Pearl (No Greater Joy Ministries) said that plain people (Amish, Mennonite, et al. ) impressed him as being proud of their humility (pride of grace, vs. pride of face (Prov. 21:4) and pride of race). You must realize that self-deprecation is a covert pride: “I’m such a sinner…I’m so dumb.” But what did you just do in both cases? You called attention to yourself. If you were really humble, you wouldn’t talk about yourself at all, your virtues or your vices.
• Evan Roberts, who was a key figure in the Welsh revival of 1904, was interviewed during the revival and described by the writer as “a man totally unconscious of himself.” What bliss, to forget oneself, even for a moments! what a foretaste of glory, when we’ll lose ourselves in adoration and service to Christ!
• C.S. Lewis asks in MC (paraphrased), what would a humble fellow look like? He’d probably be kind and pleasant and really interested in what you had to say.
o Inattention is pride too. If you really understood your need of people, you’d listen to them intently, lest you miss what God has for you through them. Remember, you have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen twice as much as you speak, right? Wherefore let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath (Jas. 1:19).
Humility, then, is giving up glory—to God and men. It rejoices in God getting the glory, not itself (Ps. 34:1-2; 115:1). Christ gave up the glory he could have rightfully had among men, seeking God’s glory instead. God was glorified by his cross and will be for all eternity, and Christ will share in that glory (Phil. 2:5-11). The same will be true of us, as his children, if we humble ourselves and serve and suffer with Christ (Rom. 8:17-18; 2 Tim. 2:12; etc.)
By comparing Col. 3:12 and Phil. 2:3, we see that humility equates to lowliness, i.e., taking the lower position before God and men. Jesus Christ’s entire life was one of humility, from cradle to grave. Take his last days for example: he (1) rides into Jerusalem, as the son of David, on an ass-colt (Zech. 9:9), not a horse (symbol of pride; Ps. 20:7); (2) dines at a healed leper’s house (Mt. 26:6); (3) washes his ambitious apostles’ feet as they argue about “which of them should be accounted the greatest” (Luke 22:24) and overlook the common courtesy due him (Luke 7:44); (4) forgives Israel on the cross; and (5) allows the two thieves to revile him (Mt. 26:44; Mk. 14:32), then forgives the penitent one, promising him eternal glory (Luke 23:43).
That same humility resides in us by the Spirit, and should be manifest in our lives per Phil. 2:3. Besides lowliness, notice two other words in the verse: (1) strife--: Solomon said that “Only by pride cometh contention (Prov. 13:10); and (2) vainglory—a composite of vanity and glory; vainly seeking one’s own glory, like we saw in Prov. 25:27. That’s pride.
I used to look at “esteeming others better than [myself]” like this: even if you were better than someone, say more spiritual, you’d try to look at others as better than you. But God wants us to esteem others better than us, not as if we’re pretending, but in truth, since they are, in reality, better than us. How is that? Well, when you consider that all of us are members of one another (Eph. 4:25), and that “the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Cor. 12:21), it makes sense: I can truly esteem Bro. John Doe as better than myself, because he IS—God has made him something different than me, something that I need to be complete, and if I ignore or, even worse, despise him, I will miss out on part of the life of Christ.
O, if believers only understood how much they need each other, not just in theory, but in fact! Understanding how the body operates, in practice, will drive you to the body to complete yourself. Just as you feel a longing to marry and complete yourself in the physical sense, don’t you feel the same longing for other believers to, in a practical sense, complete yourself spiritually? In a positional sense, you are complete (Col. 2:10), but notice the verse before that—the completion is connected with a body, which is called “the fullness of him that filleth all in all” in Eph. 1:22-23. You cannot be practically complete in Christ without the body, folks, and I believe that the more tightly compacted you become with the other members of the body, the more you will personally experience and demonstrate the life of Christ for God’s glory.
Some fine books have been written on humility. I see Andrew Murray’s in Christian bookstores from time to time in the classics section (you can get it at LifeWay), but the one that book I’ve read on it I highly recommend: Humility, by C.J. Mahaney. Mahaney is a Reformed (Calvinistic) Baptist pastor in Louisville. This is an excellent treatise on humility that gives you, from cover to cover, practical tips on fostering humility in your life, with God’s help. Why don’t these limelight Christian celebrities write books on humility? Easy, they’re proud. Humility doesn’t make money. It mortifies the self-life and puts God in the limelight, not you.
Only God know the heart, but when a man doesn’t put an emphasis on humility, something is wrong with him. D.M. Lloyd-Jones, the famous British preacher in the mid-twentieth century, said that the most dangerous man is the man who emphasizes the wrong things. There’s a lot of truth to that. That’s how Satan got Eve and Adam. He emphasized what God was apparently withholding from them, with not a word about God’s goodness, righteousness, and truth (Eph. 5:9), which were at back of God’s command for them to refrain from eating the forbidden fruit.
HUMILIATION
As we grow in the Lord, pride is mortified and replaced with humility. But there’s an even deeper work that God wishes to do, I believe, and that’s the work of humiliation. Christ not only “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8), but he was humiliated as well, according to Acts 8:33. He initiated the humbling, but I think that God initiated the humiliation. It’s a two-sided thing. One side is man’s—humility. The other side is God’s—humiliation. On Christ’s side, he puts himself down. On God’s side, he puts Christ down. The unity is that Christ submits to God’s ordering. Look at 1 Pt. 2:21-25, which also cites Is. 53 also and may shed even more light on Is. 53:8/Acts 8:33, esp. v. 23. Christ did not stand up for himself (humility); he let God put him down (humiliation) for his own righteous purpose or judgment.
The glorious outcome of all of this: Christ subjected himself to God’s judgment by bearing men’s sins like a transgressor, and God promptly took him out of prison (the lower parts of the earth) and judgment by raising him from the dead, proving his righteousness and sinlessness! Note Acts 8:33, “In his humiliation his judgment was taken away…” By being put down at the pleasure of God, God was able to take his judgment away when he raised him from the dead. The resurrection was a universal, eternal testimony to the righteousness of God (for justifying sinners) and Jesus Christ (as the sinless substitute for those sinners); cf. Rom. 3:25.
CONCLUSION
So I think there is scriptural support for the progression I’ve described above: the vice of pride needing mortification by God’s grace and replacement with the virtue of humility. Deepening humility, however, prepares one for humiliation, as seen in the life of Christ. Only a life of steadily going lower can prepare one to properly respond to crises where God sovereignly puts you down in humiliation, with the ultimate goal of glorifying himself and blessing you through it. I posted on Facebook recently that the competition in Christian circles should not be on who can go the highest (visible results, attendance, fame, etc.), but on who can go the lowest. Didn’t Christ say that “whosover will be great among you, let him be your minister” (Mt. 20:26)? F.B. Meyer said that he thought God’s gifts were waiting for him as he attained higher levels of spirituality, but he later realized that God’s gifts were waiting for him as he stooped to lower levels of humility (from One Thousand Gifts, Ann Voskamp). That must be our mission, beloved, since the life that’s in us wants to carry us lower and lower, just as it carried our Saviour lower and lower, to the point that he looked like one under God’s judgment, but ultimately through that shown to be righteous.
I’d like to close with an old poem by a French preacher named Theodore Monod, entitled, “None of Self and All of Thee.”
Oh, the bitter shame and sorrow
That a time could ever be,
When I proudly said to Jesus,
“All of self, and none of Thee.”
Yet He found me; I beheld Him
Bleeding on th’ accursed tree,
And my wistful heart said faintly,
“Some of self, and some of Thee.”
Day by day his tender mercy,
Helping, healing, full, and free,
Brought me lower while I whispered,
“Less of self, and more of Thee.”
Higher than the highest heaven,
Deeper than the deepest sea,
Lord, Thy love at last has conquered:
“None of self, and all of Thee.”
Saturday, June 28, 2014
A Tale of Two Tables: Solomon and Nehemiah
In reading through Nehemiah 5 this morning, I was struck by the difference between Nehemiah's table (5:18) and Solomon's, as described in 1 Kings 4:22-23. True, it was an entirely different set of circumstances: on the one hand is Israel's wealthiest monarch at the height of his power; on the other hand is the appointed governor of the feeble Jewish remnant from Babylon. Nonetheless, the last phrase of Neh. 5:18 was very illuminating to me. Nehemiah is very conscious and conscientious that "...the bondage was heavy upon this people." Hence, he is sparing with the amount of food that he accepts for his sustenance and that of those attending him.
I do not think that this was the case with Solomon. When Israel first desired a king to rule over them, the prophet Samuel warned them of the burdens that would accompany such rule (1 Sam. 8). Although those burdens may not be so evident in David's reign, they are deeply felt in Solomon's, as evidenced by the people's complaint through Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:3-4). This is no surprise to me, in light of Solomon's vast projects, even beyond the construction of the temple (e.g. a palace which took 13 years to construct; cf. 1 Kings 7:1; 2 Chron. 8:1). It seems that the people were heavily taxed, though enjoying a general national prosperity (deja vu? Eccl. 1:9-10), and Solomon did nothing to lighten their burdens, nor does his foolish son Rehoboam (1 Kings 12:12-15), with terrible consequences.
Contrarily, Nehemiah makes every effort to ease the remnant's burdens (cf. 5:1ff.), including frugality at his table, with positive consequences. His leadership and example inspire the remnant to complete the great work of reconstucting Jerusalem's walls and provide stability "in troublous times" (Dan. 9:25), in contrast to Solomon's lifestyle, which ultimately severs his nation in two for centuries. I wonder if Solomon ever heeded the counsel that his attendants gave to Rehoboam, "If thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, and wilt serve them...then they will be thy servants for ever" (1 Kings 12:7)...
I do not think that this was the case with Solomon. When Israel first desired a king to rule over them, the prophet Samuel warned them of the burdens that would accompany such rule (1 Sam. 8). Although those burdens may not be so evident in David's reign, they are deeply felt in Solomon's, as evidenced by the people's complaint through Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:3-4). This is no surprise to me, in light of Solomon's vast projects, even beyond the construction of the temple (e.g. a palace which took 13 years to construct; cf. 1 Kings 7:1; 2 Chron. 8:1). It seems that the people were heavily taxed, though enjoying a general national prosperity (deja vu? Eccl. 1:9-10), and Solomon did nothing to lighten their burdens, nor does his foolish son Rehoboam (1 Kings 12:12-15), with terrible consequences.
Contrarily, Nehemiah makes every effort to ease the remnant's burdens (cf. 5:1ff.), including frugality at his table, with positive consequences. His leadership and example inspire the remnant to complete the great work of reconstucting Jerusalem's walls and provide stability "in troublous times" (Dan. 9:25), in contrast to Solomon's lifestyle, which ultimately severs his nation in two for centuries. I wonder if Solomon ever heeded the counsel that his attendants gave to Rehoboam, "If thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, and wilt serve them...then they will be thy servants for ever" (1 Kings 12:7)...
A "Sore Thumb" in Nehemiah 3
In reading through Nehemiah 3 this morning, one verse in the chapter stood out, as we say in the States, "like a sore thumb" (noticeably and painfully): verse 5. I will comment on this verse at the close of this, but first, I'd like to provide some background and general thoughts on the chapter as a whole.
The chapter begins with Elashib the high priest and his brethren (v. 1) rising up to begin the work of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, under Nehemiah's oversight. The clear subject of the chapter is the zeal of the Jews (cf. 3:20--"earnestly repaired"), from all stations of life, to complete this great work. Noblemen work (e.g. vv. 14-19), along with goldsmiths (vv. 8, 31-32), apothecaries (v. 8), and merchants (vv. 31-32). Even the two rulers of the city itself get involved (vv. 9, 12), one joined by his daughters! Humility is shown, as well as zeal, where one ruler, Malchiah, willingly chooses to repair the dung gate (v. 14), perhaps the least honourable of the gates.
To make a spiritual application to the church age: just as it took people from all stations of life to build that structure, it takes both leaders and followers to build the structure known as the body of Christ (Eph. 4:8-16)! And just as building that structure took both zeal and humility, building up the body of Christ will require both of those graces as well. A saint may be zealous, but if he's proud, it will hinder him from edifying the body; also, if he is humble and lazy, rather than zealous, the lack of zeal will hinder the building up of the body as well.
What stood out to me in v. 5 is that which concerned the Tekoite nobles--"...but their nobles put not their necks to the work of the Lord." Tekoa was a town in Judah, the home of Amos the prophet (Amos 1:1) and the "wise woman" employed by Joab to influence David (2 Sam. 14:2, 4). For some reason, the nobles from this town refused to support the work of rebuilding the wall, in contrast to everyone around them, and God takes note of it...forever! And I don't think that it's coincidental that this citation occurs in the fifth verse of the chapter, five being strongly associated with death from the beginning to end of scripture (cf. Gen. 5:5, the first recorded death in scripture).
Were the nobles too "high and mighty" to bow their necks to this work? Their subordinates willingly collaborate, repairing not just one, but two sections of the wall (vv. 5, 27), which God also takes note of...forever! What a shame that the nobles would not humble themselves, so that they could be exalted like their subordinates were (Luke 14:11; 18:14)! And finally, what a lesson for us in this day (Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11; 2 Tim. 3:16-17), to willingly join in the great work of building up the body of Christ, no matter our station in life. Don't let it be said of you, beloved, at the judgment seat of Christ, that you put not your neck unto the work of the Lord (1 Cor. 15:58).
The chapter begins with Elashib the high priest and his brethren (v. 1) rising up to begin the work of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, under Nehemiah's oversight. The clear subject of the chapter is the zeal of the Jews (cf. 3:20--"earnestly repaired"), from all stations of life, to complete this great work. Noblemen work (e.g. vv. 14-19), along with goldsmiths (vv. 8, 31-32), apothecaries (v. 8), and merchants (vv. 31-32). Even the two rulers of the city itself get involved (vv. 9, 12), one joined by his daughters! Humility is shown, as well as zeal, where one ruler, Malchiah, willingly chooses to repair the dung gate (v. 14), perhaps the least honourable of the gates.
To make a spiritual application to the church age: just as it took people from all stations of life to build that structure, it takes both leaders and followers to build the structure known as the body of Christ (Eph. 4:8-16)! And just as building that structure took both zeal and humility, building up the body of Christ will require both of those graces as well. A saint may be zealous, but if he's proud, it will hinder him from edifying the body; also, if he is humble and lazy, rather than zealous, the lack of zeal will hinder the building up of the body as well.
What stood out to me in v. 5 is that which concerned the Tekoite nobles--"...but their nobles put not their necks to the work of the Lord." Tekoa was a town in Judah, the home of Amos the prophet (Amos 1:1) and the "wise woman" employed by Joab to influence David (2 Sam. 14:2, 4). For some reason, the nobles from this town refused to support the work of rebuilding the wall, in contrast to everyone around them, and God takes note of it...forever! And I don't think that it's coincidental that this citation occurs in the fifth verse of the chapter, five being strongly associated with death from the beginning to end of scripture (cf. Gen. 5:5, the first recorded death in scripture).
Were the nobles too "high and mighty" to bow their necks to this work? Their subordinates willingly collaborate, repairing not just one, but two sections of the wall (vv. 5, 27), which God also takes note of...forever! What a shame that the nobles would not humble themselves, so that they could be exalted like their subordinates were (Luke 14:11; 18:14)! And finally, what a lesson for us in this day (Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11; 2 Tim. 3:16-17), to willingly join in the great work of building up the body of Christ, no matter our station in life. Don't let it be said of you, beloved, at the judgment seat of Christ, that you put not your neck unto the work of the Lord (1 Cor. 15:58).
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