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August 28, 2005
The Holy Spirit and the Prophets of Old
Psalm 145 / Jeremiah 14: 11-16
II Peter 1: 16-21
August 28, 2005
The Bible is a pretty important book, we’d all agree. I don’t know if the Bible is still the number one best seller every year, but it sells by the millions. Many people own more than one copy of the Bible. We have taught generations of our children a little chorus, “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that’s the book for me.”
There are so many translations now of the B I B L E that people who are curious to know what it “really” says buy more than one translation, comparing one with another as they try to figure out what it “really” says. Once we just had the old King James Version. Then everyone knew exactly what it said.
There are some of us kooks who even think it’s important to study the Bible in the languages in which it was written—in order to know what it really says. Here at Faith our Christian education includes classes in Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New Testament. The Bible must be a pretty important book for all of this attention and money to be spent on Bibles.
The Bible is a very important book. Even though the Bible as we have it today is not the same that Joshua had twelve hundred or so years before Jesus was born, what the Lord said to Joshua about the Book of the Law pointed in the direction of the Bible’s importance to us. We read in Joshua 1: 8:
This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.
Do what the Bible says and your way will be prosperous; you’ll be successful. Of course, this success and prosperity will be of the kind God thinks is important. This may not be the same as Wall Street’s idea of success and prosperity.
When Christians think about how important it is to instruct their children in the Bible they often call to mind what Moses wrote in Deuteronomy 6: 4 ff.
. . . these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise . . . And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
This suggests a Bible-saturated home. We update what Moses said about the words that God commanded then to include the New Testament. At every worship service here we always read significantly from both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Our worship is saturated with listening to the Bible. I insist on this because this is how we listen to God speak to us most basically.
The Bible is very important. I have heard Christian friends say wistfully, “If only people would live by the Bible . . .” It is an expression of longing that assumes we’d all be better people if we lived by the Bible.
I bring up these matters about the Bible this morning because we have come to that phrase in the Nicene Creed that continues to describe the work of the Holy Spirit. The Creed reminds us that the Holy Spirit “spoke by the prophets.” This is the only place in this ancient Creed, the first complete statement of faith composed by Christians, in which something is said pertaining to the Bible. By contrast how VERY much more we find in later statements of faith about the Bible in our Book of Confessions.
For those of you who might not be aware of the books we consider important in the Presbyterian Church, let me remind you that there are three of them. First is the Bible. Second is the Book of Confessions. Third is the Book of Order that is a wise and biblical guide to doing our church business, offering worship, and caring for disciplinary problems. The Book of Confessions includes a record of the thinking of Christians since the Reformation about important matters to our faith. And nearly all of these confessions include detailed remarks about the importance of the Bible. “The Westminster Confession of Faith,” written in the 17th century, is perhaps most basic to how we Presbyterians think of the Bible.
But soaring high above the other any other authority that we accept is the Bible. It is our authority because it contains the books inspired by God the Holy Spirit.
The two key New Testament passages that underscore the centrality of the Bible for us are II Peter 1: 21, which we just read together, that ends with saying, “no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved [or carried along] by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” We assume that this pertains to the New Testament as well as to the Old Testament.
The benefit of Scripture is outlined by the Apostle Paul in II Timothy 3: 16: “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
Now I would be less than forthright if I didn’t remind us all that when the Nicene Creed speaks of the Holy Spirit speaking by the mouth of the prophets it does not refer only to the written words we find in the Bible. There were prophets in Old Testament times that never wrote a thing, but what they said carried the punch of the Holy Spirit’s authority.
You remember a prophet named Nathan who spoke to King David after his sin of adultery and murder involving Bathsheba and her husband, Uriah. There is no book in the Old Testament telling us all Nathan said under the Holy Spirit’s impulse. Elijah and Elisha were prophets who spoke but didn’t write anything. Not all prophets were like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the authors of the twelve Minor Prophets. What these non-writing prophets said as the Holy Spirit moved them was as important then, and very much more specific, as what the Bible says to us today.
When we think about the Holy Spirit as the One who breathed through the words the prophets spoke, or as the One who “carried them along” as they wrote, we don’t all think the same thing, and some of us may think quite inadequately about what this means.
At first what was most important was that people listened and obeyed what the prophets said. It would have seemed worse than odd if the ancient Israelites examined every word of the prophets to discover how the Holy Spirit moved them to speak, and then put these words up on a pedestal to be looked at as an icon. No. Listen to the prophets and obey them.
Increasingly in the past four centuries other issues have clouded the importance of obeying the Bible. These issues have arisen as Christians argued about how the Bible was inspired, and the most “conservative” elevated the Bible as an icon to talk about and look at. But meanwhile the authority of the Bible over the lives of Christians became less and less evident. I find it interesting that the Bible now seems mostly seen as a law-book pertaining to sexual matters of a certain kind and a guide to prosperity. Does God now say nothing more than this in His Word?
We don’t know exactly how the Holy Spirit inspired the prophets of old. Christians sometimes argue about the level of involvement of the writers in what they wrote. Did the Holy Spirit dictate every word? Were the prophets only stenographers? What are we to make of the evidence of different personalities in the various writers in the Bible? Apparently it isn’t important that we know this because the Bible doesn’t tell us.
It is quite possible to be very fascinated with the Bible as a God-breathed book and rarely read it. Its authority is actually lost in a fog of ignorance.
In fact, the remarkable ignorance of the Bible among many “Bible-believing Christians” suggests that these good folk are more concerned about making clear that they believe “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” than in reading what God said that they believe that settles it--in the Bible. Ironically, although the Bible sells well, it remains a closed book for many Christians. If I am very concerned to emphasize that the Bible is completely inspired by God but if I don’t read it, of what use is it to me?
I know there are good reasons for not reading it. Many of the books of the Bible are hard to understand. Some are loaded with ancient history or obscure symbolism or lists of names and details of the sacrifices that are very uninteresting. But instead of generation after generation wading through it all, often being surprised with nuggets of guidance found here and there, generation after generation we have not read it so that it becomes more obscure with time. At one time the Bible and the works of Josephus that paraphrased the Old Testament were the two books on many bookshelves in English Puritan homes.
I would urge you to try to begin a systematic reading of the Bible, even the difficult parts. My older brother, a Presbyterian deacon, began this two years ago. How often our Saturday morning conversations begin with something new he’s discovered.
I might say that the trickle-up effect of Christians who believe the Bible is the Word of God but don’t read their Bibles is that we pastors can get away with murder in what we say from the pulpit.
It started out that the purpose of the sermon was to explain more deeply, to teach more deeply than the ordinary Bible-reader could learn from her daily reading of the Bible. Once upon a time, and I suppose ideally, the reason why pastors studied the Bible in the languages in which it was written was to provide this deeper teaching to their hungry people. But as Christians stopped reading their Bibles, we pastors were let off the hook.
Pastors too stopped reading their Bibles—even in English. Pastors read magazines instead. All that came to be expected of pastors was that they be interesting, that they give entertaining religious discourses that inspire their people to go out during the week and get one for the Gipper.
Even though the Bible is not widely read, selected portions of it that inform certain points of view, have led Christians to argue and to separate from one another on the basis of their differences. This points to a kind of problem illustrated in the short passage Will read to us from the prophet Jeremiah. Strong personalities often dominate the points of view that make Christians argue and separate from one another. Strong personalities can take a quotation from the Bible and make it say whatever they want. This is not the same thing as hearing the authoritative Word of God in the Bible.
Jeremiah describes a problem that the Jews faced in the latter days of the Kingdom of Judah. People respected prophets then in the way people respect pastors today. There were prophets whose words carried a lot of influence because of the strength of their personalities.
In the last day of the Kingdom of Judah, even though the Assyrians were surrounding them, powerful enemies who had been successful in crushing countries larger and more powerful than the Kingdom of Judah, some popular prophets put their ears to the wind to find out what people wanted to hear, and told them what they wanted to hear. People wanted to hear the prophets say, “Don’t worry. The enemy will not win against us.” These prophets quoted Scripture, reminding the people how God fought successfully all their battles for them—in far different times.
When Israel was young and still finding its way, God defended them miraculously. Gideon used a small force of three hundred men to route the fearful Midianites. Joshua toppled the walls of Jericho with the blast of trumpets—because God was the great force behind those trumpet blasts.
But times had changed. And God’s people had let themselves succumb to spiritual and moral decay. Every time this happened God would say, in effect, “OK, so you have no interest in Me? Then I’ll leave you to care for yourselves.” And they’d get pounced on by their enemies like mice before cats. Then they would pray to God, “Lord, what’s wrong?” And true prophets would say, “Get right with God again.” And they would, for a time. And on and on the cycle went.
In the days of Jeremiah there were many prophets who told lies, but the people believed the prophets that knew which side of their bread was buttered. They knew people like to hear nice things. So they told them what they wanted to hear. But what they wanted to hear was false. It was a pack of lies. They said, “Peace, peace, when there was no peace.”
Peace is a good word. The Apostle Paul calls God, “the God of peace.” But there are times when peace is not God’s message. What is important for us is to obey what God says to us. Not everything is equally clear. But what is clear is for us to obey.
In the movie, “Chariots of Fire,” Eric Liddell’s dad says to a friend as they walk back home from church, “The Church is not a democracy. God is an autocrat.” In a way this is true. The opinions of the people are not the words of God. It is understandable that we should want to hear pleasing words Sunday after Sunday rather than to be confronted with the Word of God that points out where we are falling short of living out the way of Jesus. But it is the prophet’s duty, and the pastor’s duty to say, “Thus says the Lord.” It is my duty to say this based on faithful study of the Scriptures in which the timeless truth of God as it bears on our lives is made plain. It is then our duty to take this to heart and appropriate to ourselves the correction and guidance we hear.
I sometimes become weary with earnest Christians who are greatly fascinated with talking about the importance of the Bible, about how God inspired it, about how it is God’s very Word to us—but who linger in disobedience. It is our chief duty to hear and to obey. It’s remarkable how trying to hear and obey arouses humility in us, while lingering on matters of controversy arouses arrogance as we defend our points of view.
I pray that we may be hearers of the Word of God, and then doers of it—so that we may be prosperous and have good success—as God sees prosperity and success.
Let us pray: O Lord God, thank you for making known your will through people for the benefit of people like us. Give us ears to hear and hearts to obey that we may find the pleasure and prosperity of your ways.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2005
One Word that Divided the Church
One Word that Divided the Church
II Kings 2: 5-11 / John 20: 19-23
August 14th, 2005
Three weeks ago Thursday I had the arthritic knees God gave me that I wore out with much use replaced with steel and plastic ones. Yesterday I took a two-mile walk with Bonnie. I marvel at the skills of Dr. Hagen and even more at the healing properties God has put into our bodies.
Not the least of what I learned in this ordeal is how pleasant it is to be connected to other people when I was hurting. The avalanche of cards, flowers, emails, visits, phone calls, and meals made me inclined to say, paraphrasing Patrick Henry, “I regret I have only two knees to give.” Dr. Gerhard Schmidt reminded me to be glad I’m not a centipede.
As I thought about the situation of undergoing such a radical surgery with the care that followed it from so many people, the analogy of the body to larger matters often came to mind. It’s a wonderful analogy for the Body of Christ in particular. Our New Testament teaches us that in Christ we are like a body, each one members one of the other. We often think of this teaching of the Apostle Paul with regard to using the different gifts we have for the good of the whole. But it also has to do with the healing of the body, which is as important as the healthy functioning of the body.
Now I did not begin on this theme merely to tell of how well I’m doing and how much I appreciate your care. The theme before us this morning is “One word that divided the Church.” The one word I have in mind you will find in the Nicene Creed in the back of the Psalter Hymnal. There you read that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The word meaning “and the Son” was added to the Nicene Creed much later in the Western Church even though the Eastern sector of the Church did not agree.
When this word was tacked on to the Creed, even though it was added to fight a heresy that had developed, it had the effect of driving a wide wedge between Christians in the East and Christians in the West. Already they were divided culturally, by the language they used, by when they celebrated Easter, and by a sharply different view of how the Church was to be governed. But it was when the foundation of Christian doctrine was changed that a great mistrust and anxiety arose in the East that was to lead eventually to a formal split of the Church into the Catholic West and the Orthodox East.
Nowadays we’re used to all sorts of differences on details of doctrine and ways of worship and government between the churches so maybe you’re thinking this was much ado about nothing. Who cares whether we say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son? Who knows for sure about this kind of thing? In point of fact it is not clear that the Bible teaches that the Holy Spirit came to us from the Father and the Son.
In our New Testament reading Jesus breathed on the disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This makes it seem that Jesus gave them the Holy Spirit right then. But earlier in John’s Gospel we read that Jesus said, “I will pray the Father and He will send you another Comforter . . . the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name.” Perhaps what Jesus meant in saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit” was a command that they receive the one who would soon be given to them by the Father at Pentecost. At the moment John tells us Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” there was no sudden change in them as would happen at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit “blew” on “all flesh” in fulfillment of the prophecy of the Old Testament prophet Joel.
But more than the question of what the Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit was at issue here. Though what we believe, our doctrine, is very important, it is as important how we arrive at the details of our beliefs. It is never right for an idea to be strong-armed onto other Christians by a powerful personality, or by political means. While we never arrive at matters of doctrine by the democratic method, it is vital that discernment of the Bible’s teaching should be something that we study together and compose particular doctrines with great humility and caution.
Indeed, there is something risky about forming doctrines that are not clearly and unmistakably taught in the Bible. Very often it is the doctrines we have derived from what the Bible teaches that divide Christians.
Since the Reformation a strong urge to systematize the unsystematic information the Bible gives us on many things has splintered the Church again and again. How wise the Bible is in simply telling us what Jesus said at various times, what the Apostle Paul wrote at various times in response to problems in the Church. We must read the Bible with humility, receiving the ambiguities that are there just as they are. We do not know the mind of God on many things and ought not to assume that we can figure them out. How I wish that more humility were evident in the spelling out of Christian doctrine by those who by reason of high intellect, much schooling, and strong personality presume to know the mind of God—and speak with great confidence.
I found it very comforting to learn that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whom we now know as Pope Benedict XVI, at the time he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, published on August 6th, 2000 a document quoting the Nicene Creed leaving out the word filioque. This was a remarkable gesture of fellowship with the Eastern Church hopefully leading to the joining once again the Eastern and Western branches of the Church into one Church.
Why does this matter? An assumption that many of us take for granted that matters of faith are strictly personal. Our Bill of Rights tells us that our government may not establish religion. As America has become a melting pot of nations it has become a melting pot of religions. We rightly believe that people should have complete religious freedom. You and I would protest if the government said we had to become Muslims, or required that Hindu prayers be said in our schools. But this is an entirely secular matter. As Christians, members of the Body of Christ, a very different principal is to govern us whose origin is very old, dating back to ancient Israel.
We read this morning of Elijah being taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. It was a great loss for God’s people because Elijah had worked hard to keep their focus on God, the creator of heaven and earth, the One who told Moses, “Israel is my son.” The first of the Ten Commandments said, “You shall have no other gods before me.” But this was hard for the Israelites to remember.
The Israelites then were much like people today. They thought that in matters of religion they would not be bound by the authority of Moses. Perhaps the seed of this challenge not only to Moses but also to God began when Moses’ brother and sister led a rebellion against Moses.
Miriam and Aaron ridiculed Moses personally, referring to his wife with a racial slur. His wife was not from the nation of Israel. Then they asked, “Has the Lord indeed only spoken through Moses?”
This challenge echoed through Israel’s history. The people of Israel continually looked around them and chose to worship the gods of neighboring peoples, that seemed more attractive than the God who had revealed Himself to their ancient forebears. Time does not change God even though ideas about God are often changing. But more than theology was involved in the worship of Israel.
The reason why God demanded of Israel no other gods before Him was not mere jealousy, but also concern for their wellbeing. The prophet Elijah had the burden throughout his ministry of calling Israel back to worshipping the One God who called them as a special people. But they fought against him. Leading the protest against God was the king and the mob of false prophets that he infested into the nation to persuade them to worship the much more alluring God Baal. When Elijah was taken from Israel, perhaps God swept him up in the storm cloud as a sign of giving up on His people for now. The effect was the complete disintegration and weakening of the nation and would lead to their defeat and exile.
And it was one of the chief purposes of our Lord in coming to this earth to reunite God’s people in the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ high priestly prayer “that we may be one as He and the Father were one,” revealed the momentum of Jesus longings. Part of the wonder of Jesus’ plea to the Father was that this unity would include more than just the people of Israel. Jesus commanded His disciples to tell the Gospel to the whole world. Thus, included in this One Body for which Jesus prayed were people of every nation and language. This prayer came toward the end of His ministry, at a time when the things most important to him were uppermost in His mind.
But if it was impossible for the people of Israel to hold together under God, it would be even more so to hold together a much broader communion from all over the world. This is why Jesus prayed so intensely, with heaviness of heart. To maintain unity among those who are drawn to God through Jesus Christ is a goal to be achieved. It is not something that could happen automatically.
And essential to achieving this goal would be the work of the Holy Spirit of God. So that when, many years later, Christians were splitting into sectors that did not even recognize the other as Christians over a definition of the Holy Spirit, it was a great tragedy. It is the Holy Spirit who quietly works in our hearts to teach us to trust in Jesus and to want to follow Him in our way of life. For us to argue about the person of the Holy Spirit is a great tragedy. It reveals an immodesty, a lack of humility which keeps us unavailable to God.
Of course, it was unthinkable that as the years rolled on after Jesus left His disciples to continue His work that the church would look and think exactly the same as the small community that gathered around Jesus at the start. As the disciples obeyed the Great Commission and the Gospel reached all parts of Judea and Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth it was inevitable that the way people thought and lived in response to the Gospel in one place would differ in ways from how people responded in other places.
Variations naturally appeared from town to town, from nation to nation, and even from one small circle of believers in town to other circles of believers in the same town. The way they held together was by keeping focus on Jesus Christ and by a process of mutual submission when it came to answering questions that arose in the churches.
We live in a day when much more emphasis is placed on our religious freedom than on any kind of obligation we might have to the One Lord of the Church. If there is any legitimacy to the existence of the sector of the Church we are in, the PCUSA, it is as we are in fellowship with other sectors of the One Body of Christ. It is my duty as a pastor to be in fellowship with other pastors, with all of us in deliberate submission to each other and to the Lord. But what about all of us in the local church?
In the second-century an elderly pastor on his way to martyrdom taught a principle that was fundamental for the cohesion of the local church. I think that in my now completed nineteen years as pastor of this congregation I have demonstrated that I have no interest in exercising personal authority over this congregation. But I need to remind us of the principal that Ignatius of Antioch pounded home to the seven churches in Turkey that were apparently torn by conflict. In some mysterious way a congregation is to be united with its pastor as the Church as a whole is one in Christ.
Whereas I believe it is a mistake how many pastors have taken on great authority over their congregations, making of their congregations little empires, it is vital to the health of a congregation that it live in harmony with the pastor, accepting pastoral authority when it is offered in a clear sense of submission to the Lord.
Nowadays many churches live in disharmony. The opinions that divide us often seem to be greater importance than the Lord who unites us. It is my duty to live with a sense of the Lordship of Christ in a spirit of submission to you. And it is your duty to live with a sense of the Lordship of Christ in a spirit of submission to the pastor. When we live together like this, the sovereignty of God over our lives will be evident in the peace, the harmony, the joy we have.
And when we live together in joy, we will grow in grace. And when we are growing together in grace the Lord will add to our number those who can share our joy. We are one Body in Christ or we are nothing at all.
I pray that you may ponder these things as we head into the new year together. And as we gather around this table and I administer to you the bread and the wine, the Body and Blood of our Lord, receive it in gratitude that you have been welcomed into this fellowship with the Son of God.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we have heard your voice inviting us to you. We are grateful to be included in the number beloved to you. By your grace grant us to live so as to reveal our gratitude to you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)