Archive for June, 2010

18:3 Pursuing the World’s Contempt

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

The glory is departing.


When the wicked comes, then comes also contempt, and with ignominy reproach. Proverbs 18:3.

Although it is doubtful more than 5 or 10% of Americans have ever been heart-Christians, there have been times when the Judeo-Christian ethic exerted considerable control over the United States. Other nations admired and looked up to us then and sought to imitate our ways.

This is much less true today, for we have become a people that chases every kind of sin, excess and folly. Where once we strove for political and spiritual freedom, today the urge of the masses is for sexual pleasure, degenerate music, vampirism and the occult. We pile excess upon excess and spend money we do not have as though there will never be a reckoning. The Muslims call us the Great Satan and much of the world holds us in contempt.

We have rejected Christ as king, and have lost all restraint. Jesus still calls us to take up our cross daily, warning that anyone who wants to save his life will lose it, but those who lose it for his sake save it. A wicked nation plugs its ears and pursues another round of self-indulgence. How can these once noble states escape reproach when such is the face we turn to the world?

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8:27 In Synch with the Creator

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking in a NASA photo.

When he prepared the heavens I [wisdom] was there; when he set a compass upon the face of the depth. Proverbs 8:27.

I hope I never forget the thrill of insight I experienced as I read Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time. Hawking was one of the great physicists of our age. In Brief History he showed that just a tiny bit of matter less and our universe would have blown apart at creation. A tiny bit more, and it would have collapsed on itself. The amount is so tiny that Christian astronomer Hugh Ross holds up a dime to demonstrate how much we are talking about. Imagine—one dime’s worth of matter is all that stands between a habitable and inhabitable universe. My thrill was because I recognized God at work.

Likewise, science is showing us that many, many things must be just right for the earth to support human life. It has to be the right size, with the right orbit around the right kind of star, in the right region of the right kind of galaxy, with exactly right proportions of carbon and water, metals and gases. Two hundred or more factors are now known which have to be right for a planet to support carbon-based life (the only possible kind in our universe). The discovery of over three hundred planets around other stars in the last decade has shown us just how difficult it is to find those “just right” conditions together in one place at one time. Truly we see God’s wisdom at work in fashioning our world.

This is Jesus’ doing. Scripture is unequivocal that everything we see was made through Christ and for him. Indeed, it is he who is speaking as wisdom personified in Proverbs 8:22-36. The lesson of this is that if anyone of us is not living for him, we are out of synch with the purpose of the universe we live in.

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1:7 Wise Fear

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

Charles Simeon trembled to take the Lord's Supper without repentance.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7

Many of the people we admire as great historical Christians went through severe distress before their conversions, fearing God and his judgment. Perhaps best known of these was Martin Luther, whose agonies have been well documented. But David Brainerd, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Charles Simeon, John Bunyan, Charles Spurgeon and dozens of others might also be cited as examples. Perhaps God permitted them such anguish of soul that he might awaken in them a desire to rescue others from spiritual danger.

Charles Simeon’s dread fell upon him when he learned he was absolutely required to take communion at Cambridge. He knew that anyone who eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks damnation to himself. Many of the godless students did so without regard to their spiritual danger. Simeon quaked at the thought. “Conscience told me that, if I must go, I must repent and turn to God.” That act of repentance was the beginning of a walk with the Lord that led him by degrees to become a zealous college chaplain who captured the souls of many of England’s upper class students.

Jesus exemplified the fear of the Lord more than any person who has ever lived. Absolutely determined to obey God with his whole heart, he refused to cut a single corner or escape a single detail God had planned for him. He accepted hunger, thirst, rejection, cold, and even a cruel death rather than defy God by so much as a thoughtless word.

Among his notable sayings was this, “Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: fear Him who, after the killing of the body has power to throw you into Hell. Yes, I say, fear Him.”

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31:8,9 Justice for the Little Guy

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Open your mouth for the speechless, in the cause of all who are appointed to die. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. Proverbs 31:8,9.

King Louis IX dispensing justice.

King Louis IX of France was named a saint just twenty-seven years after his death in part because he pled the cause of the little guy. He appointed just men to hear grievances throughout his kingdom. There are instances in which he punished powerful lords for contempt of the laws, compelling them to pay compensation to those they had trampled upon. If they were acting on an order from a previous king, he paid the compensation himself. As a consequence of his even-handedness, he was even asked to arbitrate the quarrels of other nations.

No one, however, embodied this dictum more faithfully than Christ, who not only spoke up for all of us, poor and needy in our sin, but died for us and remains our advocate to this hour in heaven.

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