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February 29, 2004
The Flexibility of God
The Flexibility of God
I Samuel 8: 1-9 / Psalm 7: 1-10
Luke 2: 1-4
February 29th, 2004
This morning I ask that you think with me about the flexibility of God and how we depend on it. One of our wonderful Reformed confessions defines God as “unchangeable” in various ways—in his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, holiness, and truth.
But God is flexible in other ways, perhaps because of His unchangeable wisdom and justice. God is goal-oriented. He works all things according to the counsel of His will toward good ends. Wisdom knows when to bend in the flow of time. Remember, God created time too. Justice responds to need. God is unchangeable in His wisdom and justice that He works out in the flow of time.
There is evidence in the Bible of the flexibility of God.
The most famous incidence of God’s flexibility is described in Exodus 32. There God is about to put an end to his people, Israel, after they worshipped the golden calf Aaron made for them. Moses had been up on the mountain forty days. They were tired of waiting for God and Moses. They told Moses’ brother, Aaron, to make them a golden calf to bow down to and say “Thanks for bringing us out of Egypt.”
Aaron did it, becoming a symbol of the tragedy of compliant religious leaders among God’s people from that time on. It’s so tempting to ask, “What do folk like these days, and then mold for them a golden calf?”
God said to Moses, “I have seen this people . . . a stiff-necked people; now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation.”
But Moses did not leave God alone. He implored God to spare Israel. He offered his own life in exchange for theirs. Moses said to God, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the offer to start again with him. They would be known as the children of Moses, not children of Israel. God relented. The Bible tells us, “And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people.” Moses was still a descendent of Abraham, so in beginning afresh with Moses, He could still fulfill His promise to Abraham. This is the most vivid illustration in the Old Testament of the flexibility of God.
This morning we read a story that illustrates a different kind of flexibility in God. Here God shows how he takes the willfulness of His people and still unfolds the loving purposes of His perfect will.
The people of Israel had not been in the Promised Land long when they told God’s prophet, Samuel, “We want a king like all the other countries have.” God’s intention was that He would be their king. They said, “No, we want a king in the way other nations have kings.” God was flexible and gave them a king. But their request had consequences.
The immediate and apparent reason why Israel wanted a change of government wasn’t all that bad. God had provided spiritual leaders to show His people how to live. These were called “judges.” Judges were like pastors with civil authority. There were moral as well as civil expectations of judges. They did their work with the assumption that if people knew God’s will for how they should live, they’d do it. Some times it worked that way. But what happens if you get a rum judge, a pastor who is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Samuel was a good man and a good judge, but his sons were not like their father. His sons were judges too but they were not good men. They lived in the southern-most city of Beersheba, far away from dad who made a circuit of four towns in the center of the country.
Like the sons of Eli, in whose home Samuel had lived as a little boy, Samuel’s sons were a disgrace to their calling. They were greedy, took bribes and were not fair. There have always been common features to the abuse of spiritual authority. So the elders of Israel came to Samuel and said, “We want a king like all the other countries have.” Might not there have been other options to the problem of two bad judges?
In the last part of their request, “like all the other countries have,” the elders showed that it was not mere disappointment with Samuel’s sons that motivated them. After all, Samuel was still the main judge, and his principal flaw seems to have been his failure as a father.
It seems that what they really wanted was to be like everyone else. Their uniqueness placed demands on them that grated on them. They continually tugged at these demands over the years. Perhaps they were careless in praying “the Shemah.” We know the celebration of Passover and other feasts ceased. Even the spiritual leaders forgot where to find a Bible. All of this happened so gradually no one noticed how things were slipping.
When I think of the way Israel gradually broke their intimacy with God who brought them out of Egypt, it reminds me of how friendships gradually sour, or how a once enchanting marriage drifts into misery. Friendship requires on-going trust, goodwill, time together, the ability to forgive, and an inclination to seek the other’s good above your own. But something happens, and you discover friendship disintegrating. Maybe the dissolution of a friendship begins with a bad day, one moment of misunderstanding that becomes like a snowball rolling down a hill. It is all so gradual. The friend may become your enemy.
Similarly a marriage that begins with soaring mutual fascination gradually decays so that the face that once would make you happily launch a thousand ships now looks less than ordinary. Two people who have been married a long time will either gradually come closer until they very nearly seem like one flesh, or they will gradually drift apart so that marriage becomes a word synonymous with misery. Once beloved spouses tell stale, crude jokes about marriage because they allowed their own marriage to decay. This was what became of Israel’s relationship with God, who loved and cared for her.
A gravitational pull worked on God’s people then, as it does still. They were called to be a unique people. So are we, if we are Christians. Their uniquenesses evaporated with lack of use. Our has largely evaporated so that Christians are indistinguishable from other people with no religious commitment.
You and I are constantly lured to the way of life of the culture that surrounds us. The steady lure of materialism is a downward pull we do not recognize. It has sucked us in because we have money to spend on ourselves. So the more we have, the more we will spend on ourselves. Our hearts are really cold. We talk more than we respond with generosity.
A gradual loosening of sexual standards has invaded the church at the same pace it has invaded society at large. Pastors like many others today are falling like dominoes.
Sunday as the Lord’s Day has largely lost out to the unchallenged demands of Sunday sports leagues and with the unchallenged assumption that homework takes priority over one hour of Sunday Bible study among high school and college students. How easily we are lured away from a way of life that will make us strong as a congregation, and that will make you strong as a person. The demise of the Lord’s Day is a sign that gratitude to Jesus is fading and mere custom is taking its place.
We say Question 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism with some passion: “In life and in death I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” What’s does “belong to Jesus,” mean? Maybe we really mean that when we die, we trust Jesus will take care of us. But it’s in life too that we say we belong to Him.
Israel could have said their comfort was that they belonged to God too. They wanted to be able to keep saying that, but they wanted the freedom to choose their way of life. They wanted to keep the name brand, “Israel,” and they wanted the perks of name-brand recognition as God’s people, but they wanted to be free of God’s expectations.
God has built into us all a concern with authenticity. We want the real thing and no substitutes. Generic drugs might be OK if they are cheaper and just as good, but not generic cars. We go for upgrades when we can from Fords to a Mercedes, and we won’t stand for a Mercedes symbol on a Ford motorcar. Generic honesty, the kind with lots of flex for convenience may replace explicit honesty for ourselves, though we are intolerant of this in others. Generic faith that claims adherence to a name brand like Presbyterian or Baptist, replaces commitment to Jesus Christ. We use the term “hypocrite” freely when we see mere name brand faith in others. We judge each other where we see our weaknesses in them.
Part of what makes the world go round is our sensitivity to authenticity. This comes from God who wanted authenticity rather than a people content to wear a name brand.
Israel wanted to keep its label, “Israel.” To be Israel meant to have God as King. Yet they wanted a king like every other country had. Why? Couldn’t they see all the defects of a monarchy?
The Lord told Samuel to tell his people that kings are oppressive by nature.
“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, and he will appoint some . . . to plow his ground and to reap his harvest . . . He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants . . . In that day you will cry out because of your king.”
We don’t care, they said, in effect. We want a king, period! So God gave them a king. This was the first major, nation-changing crisis since the Exodus from Egypt. It was the beginning of the downhill slide that ended with exile.
The first king they got was this charming, modest, apparently perfect candidate for royalty, Saul. He was anything but a power-grubbing potentate. But it wasn’t long before cracks developed in his character. I must save till later to speak of King Saul.
God wanted to be Israel’s king. He was a Father-like king, leading them out of slavery in Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey. He forgave their iniquities and healed their diseases. He fought for them in battle so that their reputation before other nations was of an invincible people. But they wanted a king to be like every other nation.
Having a king meant claiming all else that went with it besides power. Idolatry came with royalty. Even wise King Solomon didn’t know how to keep idols out of Israel. He married foreign princesses who brought their gods with them into Israel. Because as a king, he had to marry a princess. Princesses are often glamorous. Each Israelite king who married a foreign princess welcomed her entourage of gods and ideas into Israel. That’s part of why God wanted to be Israel’s only royalty. The ideas that use us are powerful. They change into gods.
But the story does not slide into unending tragedy. God took Israel’s rejection of Him as king and made of it a means of grace. We read from Luke 2 this morning, that Jesus was born in the City of David. David, you remember, was Israel’s greatest king. But God did not give up on Israel for wanting a king. He sent His Son through David’s legal family line.
The humility of God is evident in this. Do you realize how the prestige of King David’s ancestry added to the prestige of God’s Son, even though God did not want Israel to have a king at all? Using the line of Davidic kings, God once again assumed the position of King over His people.
We love to hear the refrain in Handel’s Messiah, “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. And He shall reign forever and ever.” We think of the charming Christmas story where Joseph and Mary come to Bethlehem, King David’s birthplace, as a sign of the fulfillment of God’s promise that his family line would always have a king. How humble of God to regain His place of loving royal authority over His people using their own willfulness, turning it on its head. The King over all kings would come from the line of kings Israel wanted instead of God as their king. No wonder God is at home in a humble and contrite heart. God is humble.
Israel’s history is like a parable. Not only do we see how God worked His purposes out through Israel’s veniality, but God regularly does the same thing with us. Most of you know the remarkable line that Joseph spoke when his father had died and his brothers were afraid that he would use his power to hurt them, getting even for how badly they had treated him as a boy. Joseph said, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
You too may be making choices now motivated only by self-interest. You think to shape your future in keeping with goals that primarily have in mind your own happiness and financial security. Maybe you use people, circumstances, and even God as pawns in your personal game of chess, where you look forward to some glorious checkmate, with you the new and improved Donald Trump.
But maybe in your past there was a time when your parents claimed God’s guiding Holy Spirit for you in presenting you for baptism. Or there was a moment under finer impulses than you now think about when you prayed that God would take your life and let it be consecrated for a high purpose. God has not forgotten what you have forgotten. And God may even now be working with your self-centered choices along the way so that He will accomplish the good through you, in spite of you, that you once asked him to do.
This is the kind of God we worship. This one who took the chaos of unshaped matter and created this glorious world, sees your self-centered confusion as the raw material from which to shape a life of great usefulness and contentment. But do not, for that reason, persist to live selfishly, treating your time, your abilities, your imagination, and your money as though it was yours to squander or use well as you please.
Give your life to God freely. In the end you will see as everyone has always recognized who freely gave themselves to God for His use, that this is the secret of a happy life. It is no secret that a self-indulgent life is a dead-end street. But a life deliberately given over to God is a life of purpose, that satisfies our longing for significance. God is flexible with you, but don’t test his flexibility. Why would you want to? I pray you will give your life to God in deed, and not in word alone.
Let us pray: O Sovereign Lord God, who from the beginning unfolded your loving purposes in this world, take our restless wills and make them freely bend to yours. Allow us the holy confusion of thinking we have freely given to You what has all along been yours—as we will all one day know has been true all along. And all this for your glory as we find our happiness in the center of Your will. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2004
The Power of God’s Presence
The Power of God’s Presence
Psalm 5 / I Samuel 5: 1-9
Acts 19: 11-20
February 15th, 2004
This morning I want to speak to you about the power of God’s presence. Isaac Watts wrote the great hymn we love to sing,
I sing the mighty power of God that made the mountains rise,
That spread the flowing seas abroad, and built the lofty skies.
But this power of God that we sing about is an over-arching power, in a sense a distant power exercised over all creation. This morning I have in mind the power of God’s presence, His presence in you and me as well as in the air surrounding us, not only in His seemingly distant, over-arching power.
The texts before us this morning show us more immediate displays of God’s power. When I read these accounts of events that happened long ago they seem so different from what we expect today. In fact, I suspect many of you, even the most literally minded of you, read these accounts and chalk them up if not to myths at least to ways that God no longer uses today.
So I wonder how you and I expect to see evidences of God’s direct power with us today. We believe that God sees all and knows all, and that He “moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.” What are these mysterious ways?
Does God still work beyond the power He unleashes in nature? I think it is probably easier for God to still a storm than to change a human heart. The power you and I hold in our attitudes is a challenge to almighty God. How very much of God’s power waits for a change in the attitude of Christians who claim to believe in God’s power—but it is a power they think will work quite independently of the will of God’s people!
Each time we pray for the sick we are asking God to unleash power against illness. Meanwhile we know much illness is due to imprudent ways of living—over-eating, over-drinking, lack of exercise and rest. We want God to control the things that are beyond our will. We don’t want Him to change our will or ways. The solution is often easy to find for which we ask God’s power but we pray instead as though God must circumvent the means He has put at our disposal. We underestimate God’s economy. He is not wasteful. God is waiting for the resources He has lavished on us to become available for His use.
We pray for those in need. Meanwhile how much of God’s power to help we keep locked in our bank accounts! How often I heard thanks to God expressed this past week in Colombia for providing the means to build dormitories and classroom buildings, student scholarships and a library for the seminary. But the agents of this supply were people who saw God’s supply lurking in their substantial means. We pray because we believe God can do anything if it is His will, while we put our wills in a parenthesis under our control alone. God is efficient. He waits to use all that we piously say belongs to Him.
We limit the arena in which we expect God to work. How much of God’s power lurks right in this room this morning, held in check by your attitude and mine toward our time, our talents, our imaginations, and everything we say we own?
I assume that God does not waste energy on needless display. I assume that when God acts it is for a reason, and mostly with the goal of fleshing out His Kingdom in this world. We pray, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We are praying for an exhibit of God’s power. But in my soul I sense we have largely bracketed out ourselves from realistic participation in God’s Kingdom except for the salvation of our souls.
In I Samuel we read of the fearful power God demonstrated in the temple of the Philistine deity, Dagon. The Philistines had captured the Ark of the Covenant in battle. Steven Spielberg taught many Americans about this Ark with the help of Indiana Jones’ “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” But this Ark, as we know, had a history long before Steven Spielberg turned his imagination loose.
God told Israel to make this box of acacia wood, a wood not susceptible to decay, as the Septuagint described it, to overlay it with gold, and to put golden angels with outstretched wings on either end. These angels, called Cherubim, were replicas of the highest angelic servants of God in the heavens. Though God had told Israel not to make any graven image and worship it, there was no doubt that these Cherubim were pictures of reverence, bowing before God. God told Israel He would come to the place between the wings of the Cherubim on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant.
Apparently God continued to reside there quietly as the spiritual life of Israel spiraled downward. We read of God speaking to little Samuel in the early morning to call him as God’s special servant. But apart from that, “there was no frequent vision” in those days. God remained silent to those who had no interest to listen.
The people of Israel ignored God, and He left them alone. But God remained with them, quietly present on the lid of the Ark. When the war was going badly with their old enemies the Israelites remembered God was with them and brought the Ark with them into battle. They hoped that the presence of the Ark would give them success in battle. But God continued to rest quietly on the Ark and did nothing as the Philistines cleaned up on the Israelites. 30,000 Israeli troops were slaughtered and the Philistines carried away the Ark of the Covenant as a trophy, little knowing that God remained with the Ark.
They brought the Ark of the Covenant into the temple of their god, Dagon. The name is related to the Hebrew word for fish (gdæ-- dag), which may suggest he was a fish-headed God. Maybe the Philistines planted fish as fertilizer with their seeds as the Native Americans showed the Pilgrims to do. Dagon was probably a fertility god.
Perhaps the Philistines put the Ark of the Covenant into the temple of their god at Ashdod as a sign of respect. I notice that the text says they put the ark near (lxa) the image of Dagon., which may mean beside rather than beneath it. Or perhaps it was an insult, rubbing it in that their god was more powerful than Israel’s God. But in any case, the Creator God of Israel Who did nothing to help His rebellious people in battle showed a very small token of his power in Dagon’s house. God knocked the lifeless statue of Dagon off its pedestal, so that it lay face down on the floor before(ynpl) the Ark of the Covenant. The Philistine priests replaced their deity the next day. But on the second night Dagon was not only on the floor again, but his head and hands were broken off on the threshold of the temple.
Not only that, but the people of Ashdod discovered they were breaking out with tumors on their bodies as when the bubonic plague hits. Many people died and others were infected with these tumors. For seven long months this kept on and the cities of the Philistines were in a panic. They thought it was a plague spread by rats.
The wisest of the priests told them to send back the Ark of God to Israel with gifts to appease Israel’s God. They made golden figurines that looked like rats and like the tumors that were on their bodies. They put the Ark with these gifts on a new cart hitched to two heifers that had recently given birth. If the heifers went toward the Israelite town of Beth-shemesh instead of turning around to go to their calves, then they knew it was the God of Israel that caused the terrible things that had happened in their land. The heifers bawled for their calves, but went straight toward the Israelite town. The Philistines knew they did the right thing in sending the Ark back home with the propitiatory gifts.
We read this story and some modern folk are tempted to say it’s the stuff of legend. David Copperfield might seem to do this, but not the Creator of heaven and earth.
I don’t take this point of view. I believe that “impossible,” as I read in an Adidas ad at the barbershop this week, is a big word used by people with small imaginations who presume to know what God can or cannot do. It was very suspicious to the Philistines why terrible things were happening to them. All their difficulties began when they brought the Ark of the Covenant into Dagon’s temple.
Why didn’t God work some magic on the hearts of His people instead of tormenting the Philistines? Why didn’t God force His people to live in ways that would have made them strong in battle, with Him mighty over their enemies as He had been against the Egyptians? God leaves to the heart of His people how they will respond. How very much the human heart is a factor in how God exercises His power. No wonder. Human beings were created in His image and likeness, and God has great expectations of His image and likeness.
It was not very long before this that God had acted powerfully to gain Israel’s release from Egypt. “Remember this!” He commanded them. But their memory was short. He allowed the great symbol of His presence to be desecrated only so far. The Ark came back to Israel but they had forgotten how to respect the presence of God. Tragedy struck the Israelites when they handled the Ark casually.
I sometimes think as I see fish symbols on cars and crosses dangling from ears and necks that we have domesticated God too. God never commanded Christians to display the symbol of the Fish or the cross. The early Christians displayed these cryptic symbols not so much as a witness but as a secret means of identifying themselves to other Christians when to be known as a Christian was perilous. If God were to respond with force every time someone who presumed to declare with the sign of the Fish that he is a member in what is now an in-group, a declared follower of Jesus Christ, behaved as though Jesus had no sovereignty over his life, how many tumors would break out on Christians?
But let’s move to the second account of God’s powerful presence in the Book of Acts. We read that God did extraordinary miracles not only by the hands of Paul, but by means of cloth that had been in contact with Paul as he did his work as a tent-maker. People took his work apron and sweat bands he tied around his head to people who could not come to him, and they were healed.
This grabbed the imagination of those who saw the power that spread from contact with Paul! Even Jewish exorcists claimed the authority of “Jesus whom Paul preaches,” but it didn’t work. It soon became clear that only Paul whose life was wholly given over to Jesus had the authority over sickness and demons that Jesus had exercised. It was God’s power not Paul’s.
People who recognized that it was God and not their magic they really wanted brought their books of spells and burned them, even though it cost them dearly—fifty thousand drachmas. There is a cost, after all, to discipleship—as Dietrich Bonhoeffer told us twice—once in his book and once in his death. Luke writes, “So the word of the Lord grew and prevailed mightily.” That is, people were attracted to Jesus in a life-changing sweep.
The power of God was evident in the numbers of people drawn to trust in Jesus in a way that changed their lives.
How interesting is the timing of our exposure to these Scriptures that speak of the power of God’s presence.
A week ago Friday I was in one of the darkest, most wretched, most violent spots on Planet Earth—in the Bellavista Prison in Medellin, Colombia. I may have looked calm but I was nervous when I was fingerprinted and my body searched for weapons and drugs before entering the prison. Not many years ago men who still live in this prison committed murders within it at an average rate of two a day. Wars between rival cellblocks multiplied that number. Gruesome graffiti was scrawled in blood on the walls. Mutilated bodies would be left in the halls and courtyards for hours.
How long is long enough for enough change to come into such a place to make it safe for an American visitor? If it were one hundred years ago that might seem long enough. But ten years? In this prison I saw remarkable evidence of the life-changing power of God’s presence. And it impressed me deeply.
A major question I have lingered with for the past thirty plus years of my ministry is that I see so little evidence of the life-changing power of the Gospel. Every problem I see in society I find in the church. Pastors and people plod along in powerless living, powerless over their attitudes and behavior as though the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in us is a fairy tale. The power I have in mind has nothing to do with political power; it has everything to do with evidence of the presence of God shaping the contours of character and personality. I have wondered if it is possible that the devotion we sing about can create a community where the goodness of God shapes the character of people in the community in an unusual way—beyond ordinary human decency.
I saw glimmers of this in Bellavista Prison and it stirred hope in me that this is possible. The name “Pablo Escobar” doesn’t mean much to most of us, but this evil man dominated Colombia and brought untold misery to the world until this drug tycoon was murdered in December 1993. Escobar’s power to control lives was the reason most of the men in Bellavista Prison were there. But when the lives of a growing number of men were brought under the deliberate control of Jesus Christ, a power for change, amazing change, was let loose in that prison. I walked safely through a courtyard inhabited by men who were multiple murderers, led around by a murderer. How could this be? It was because of the life-changing power of God in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. How amazing are the Gospel’s effects when it is stripped of its domestication, and is allowed to actually shape the lives of those who confess Jesus Christ as Lord as well as Savior!
The most recent issue of Christianity Today contains a good article about this prison. I have put photocopies of this article on the narthex table, and I encourage you to read it. The challenge I put to you this morning is that if you and I will become restless with the gap between our profession and our practice, and deliberately devote ourselves and all we possess to the One we say is Lord of our lives, we will discover the power of the presence of God that we never thought to dream was ours.
We have no murderous pasts to overcome. God only has to take the lethargy of our confidence in our wealth, in our luxurious living, in our belief that our time belongs to ourselves, in our imaginations that we have not realized are instruments of God—and He be given the right to use them. In short, God waits to change and use our attitudes. The results we will see will compel us to acknowledge that the power of God is available in and to His people. And this is an immense power.
I pray God may display this beautiful power in this place, in and through you and in me—to our great joy and His glory.
If you sense the Spirit of God tugging at your conscience, will you pray, asking God’s wisdom. And then call me this week so that we can talk together and perhaps pray together about how you may enjoy usefulness to God. You hold in your attitude a leash that you can use either to restrain God’s ability to use you or to turn loose His power invested in you. Your body, your attitude, your calendar, your financial means, your talents are all gifts of God. They have been given you to use for a time. Use them well.
Let us pray: Grant O Lord, that your greatness may be allowed access in us, and that your power displayed in the universe may be unfettered in us, created in your image and likeness, who claim your will is what we desire. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)