I am beginning an exploration of the theme of the fear of the LORD in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, starting with the book of Job. I will be writing in Google Wave, so this post will continue to develop and be updated over time as I go. Please feel free to join in the conversation within the wave as you see fit.

Here is the address of the wave: https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BOJ47qtx4A

I am beginning an exploration of the theme of the fear of the LORD in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, starting with the book of Job. I will be writing in Google Wave, so this post will continue to develop and be updated over time as I go. Please feel free to join in the conversation within the wave as you see fit.

Here is the address of the wave: https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BOJ47qtx4A

I think there’s a sense in which one’s systematic theology must be an organic outgrowth of one’s experience and understanding of their life on the one hand, and the Word of God on the other, specifically as that Word speaks into and about their life. You cannot simply cut and paste a whole system of doctrine that has been formulated by someone else, based upon their own interaction with the Word, into your own personal system of theology and philosophy. It just won’t stick unless it has grown up organically.
That is not to say that one cannot learn from another, or that learning systematic theology is a futile practice altogether. Rather, at this point, my sense is that a teacher (in whatever sense of the word) ought to use the elements of their own system of theology to nudge others in the right direction, suggesting paths to pursue and dangers to be avoided. Otherwise, in my experience, you end up with an empty set of propositions and assertions to which one either assents or dissents, but there is no real linkage to the person’s heart - what truly moves and drives them and what will make a real difference in their lives and in the lives of those around them.

I think there’s a sense in which one’s systematic theology must be an organic outgrowth of one’s experience and understanding of their life on the one hand, and the Word of God on the other, specifically as that Word speaks into and about their life. You cannot simply cut and paste a whole system of doctrine that has been formulated by someone else, based upon their own interaction with the Word, into your own personal system of theology and philosophy. It just won’t stick unless it has grown up organically.
That is not to say that one cannot learn from another, or that learning systematic theology is a futile practice altogether. Rather, at this point, my sense is that a teacher (in whatever sense of the word) ought to use the elements of their own system of theology to nudge others in the right direction, suggesting paths to pursue and dangers to be avoided. Otherwise, in my experience, you end up with an empty set of propositions and assertions to which one either assents or dissents, but there is no real linkage to the person’s heart - what truly moves and drives them and what will make a real difference in their lives and in the lives of those around them.

What! Sirs, shall we despise the blood of Christ? Shall we think it was shed for them who are not worthy of our utmost care? Oh, then, let us hear these arguments of Christ, whenever we feel ourselves grow dull and careless: “Did I die for these souls and wilt not thou look after them? Were they worth My blood, and are they not worth thy labor? Did I come down from heaven to earth, ‘to seek and save that which was lost;’ and wilt thou not go to the next door, or street, or village, to seek them? How small is they labor and condescension compared to Mine! I debased Myself to this, but it is thy honour to be so employed.” Every time we look upon our congregations, let us believingly remember that they are the purchase of Christ’s blood, and therefore should be regarded by us with the deepest interest and the most tender affection.

- Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, 131-132.

Our actions in and reactions to the quotidian life are far better indicators of our philosophical and theological tenets than any creeds we confess or theological systems we espouse.

Our actions in and reactions to the quotidian life are far better indicators of our philosophical and theological tenets than any creeds we confess or theological systems we espouse.

The way to get your kids to want to eat vegetables is not by promising desert afterward or by threatening to punish them, but by making tasty vegetables. Similarly, the best way to get yourself or anyone else to want to pray, read the Bible, go to church, or interact with the living God in any other way is not by holding up promises of worldly rewards (comfort, friends, money, success, etc.) or threats of punishment (failure, disappointment, depression, eternal torture in hell, etc.); but by giving yourself and others a healthy helping of the gospel of our gracious and loving God himself - “Taste and see that YHWH is good!” (Ps. 34).  The savor of his love makes all other foods taste bland.

The way to get your kids to want to eat vegetables is not by promising desert afterward or by threatening to punish them, but by making tasty vegetables. Similarly, the best way to get yourself or anyone else to want to pray, read the Bible, go to church, or interact with the living God in any other way is not by holding up promises of worldly rewards (comfort, friends, money, success, etc.) or threats of punishment (failure, disappointment, depression, eternal torture in hell, etc.); but by giving yourself and others a healthy helping of the gospel of our gracious and loving God himself - “Taste and see that YHWH is good!” (Ps. 34).  The savor of his love makes all other foods taste bland.

The way to get your kids to want to eat vegetables is not by promising desert afterward or by threatening to punish them, but by making tasty vegetables. Similarly, the best way to get yourself or anyone else to want to pray, read the Bible, go to church, or interact with the living God in any other way is not by holding up promises of worldly rewards (comfort, friends, money, success, etc.) or threats of punishment (failure, disappointment, depression, eternal torture in hell, etc.); but by giving yourself and others a healthy helping of the gospel of our gracious and loving God himself - “Taste and see that YHWH is good!” (Ps. 34).  The savor of his love makes all other foods taste bland.

I think this passage really captures the biblical definition of the “fear-of-the-LORD”, particularly the last two lines of verse 12.

2 Chronicles 20:1-12 (ESV):

¹ After this the Moabites and Ammonites, and with them some of the Meunites, came against Jehoshaphat for battle. ² Some men came and told Jehoshaphat, “A great multitude is coming against you from Edom, from beyond the sea; and, behold, they are in Hazazon-tamar” (that is, Engedi). ³ Then Jehoshaphat was afraid and set his face to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. ⁴ And Judah assembled to seek help from the Lord; from all the cities of Judah they came to seek the Lord.

⁵ And Jehoshaphat stood in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem, in the house of the Lord, before the new court, 6 and said, “O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not God in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. In your hand are power and might, so that none is able to withstand you. ⁷ Did you not, our God, drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel, and give it forever to the descendants of Abraham your friend? ⁸ And they have lived in it and have built for you in it a sanctuary for your name, saying, ⁹ ‘If disaster comes upon us, the sword, judgment, or pestilence, or famine, we will stand before this house and before you—for your name is in this house—and cry out to you in our affliction, and you will hear and save.’ ¹⁰ And now behold, the men of Ammon and Moab and Mount Seir, whom you would not let Israel invade when they came from the land of Egypt, and whom they avoided and did not destroy— ¹¹ behold, they reward us by coming to drive us out of your possession, which you have given us to inherit. ¹² O our God, will you not execute judgment on them? For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”

You wouldn’t be so surprised by your sin if you didn’t think so highly of yourself.

- Steve Brown

An idol is something you rely on instead of God for your salvation. One of the religious idols is your moral record: “God accepts me because I’m living a good life.” I’m a Presbyterian, so I’m all for right doctrine. But you can start to feel very superior to everyone else and think, God is pleased with me because I’m so true to the right doctrine. The right doctrine and one’s moral record are forms of power. Another is ministry success, similar to the idol of achievement. There are religious versions of sex, money, and power, and they are pretty subtle.

- Rev. Tim Keller, author of Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters, from an interview with Christianity Today (complete interview at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/november/1.71.html)

Quote quoted from here.

An idol is something you rely on instead of God for your salvation. One of the religious idols is your moral record: “God accepts me because I’m living a good life.” I’m a Presbyterian, so I’m all for right doctrine. But you can start to feel very superior to everyone else and think, God is pleased with me because I’m so true to the right doctrine. The right doctrine and one’s moral record are forms of power. Another is ministry success, similar to the idol of achievement. There are religious versions of sex, money, and power, and they are pretty subtle.

- Rev. Tim Keller, author of Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters, from an interview with Christianity Today (complete interview at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/november/1.71.html)

Quote quoted from here.

So you feel distant from the Lord, cold, and unmotivated by the gospel. You would not openly say that you disbelieve what God says in his Word, it’s just that your life and actions show that you don’t believe it wholeheartedly - like the man in the mirror in James 1:22-25, you assent to its teachings but walk away unchanged in any deep way that will affect your future behavior or thoughts. You know that you need to avail yourself of the “means of grace”, to read the scriptures more, have them preached to you more, and to preach to yourself, to participate in the Lord’s Supper, to come to the Lord in prayer and ask for the grace to change and to grow.

But what do you do when you can’t even bring yourself to do these things? What do you do when you know that the only reason you come to church and take communion is because you are more afraid of what other people think and say than what God thinks and says and you don’t want them asking questions or criticizing or offering lame advice?

What do you do when you feel like the Bible has nothing new or helpful to say (or at least not to you - like maybe you’re not the intended audience), and most of the time you can’t do anything to make yourself read it, or at least read it with attentive hopefulness?

What do you do when it seems like your prayers are nothing but echoes into a big dark empty room, or maybe a room filled with the members of someone else’s family all crowded around someone else’s loving father, and you can no longer even bring yourself to open your mouth to speak to him for fear of somehow confirming your suspicions.

What do you do when people tell you what you need is just to pray more and read the Bible more, but you have run out of all motivations to do so (even the wrong motivations, like trying to make yourself and others think that you’re better than you really are)?

What do you do when you know that your biggest problem is that you don’t love and fear God enough (if at all), and that fact (and its very recognition) has effectively eviscerated your impulse to do anything else for the right reasons?

What do you do when the sluggard of Proverbs 26:14-16 and Israel as described in Jeremiah 2:25 both sound like you?

What do you do when the Bible tells you to change, and then also says that there’s nothing you can do to change yourself? Do you sit and wait? Do you do whatever you can do and hope that God will maybe give you the grace to do more?

Please, give me your thoughts, responses, and counsel.

When a given sentence has been artificially taken out of context…the features of the world that we take to be normal, and our usual expectations of our world (as far as [we may think] these are relevant to the utterance) serve as an implicit context (the default frame) determining our interpretation.

E. F. Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure

(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987), 55-59.

One of the things that has become clearer to me over this summer is the fact that each of us is always declaring some gospel - with our words, with our actions, with our tone of voice, etc… Whenever we interpret (to ourselves or to others) the significance of the circumstances of life (our personal lives, politics, relationships, etc.) and set a value on those circumstances (”good”, “bad”, “hopeful”, “hopeless”) we are locating those circumstances within a larger narrative - a big picture story of how we understand life in general and our own lives in particular.

For instance, if Laura and I come home from the grocery store and she runs in the house carrying one little bag and leaves me to carry in the rest, and then on the way up the stairs I badly stub my toe and trip and spill all the groceries I am carrying down the stairs, I am now presented with a set of life circumstances which I now have to (and will) interpret, and I will most likely proclaim my interpretation of these circumstances right then and there. If I am angry it is because I have opted for a particular interpretation of the events, not because I have simply responded to circumstances in the only way conceivable. From one perspective, my plight is morally neutral - you could say that nothing more is involved than bodies and matter in motion, and such things merit neither a positive or negative response. But as Cornelius Van Til has helpfully pointed out, for us, there are no “brute facts” - all facts must be and are interpreted in some way.

So then, why do I choose anger as the “appropriate response”? The answer to that question will extend far into the way I understand thing like the meaning of life, God’s sovereignty and attitude toward me, what people are for, justice and fairness, and so on. Likewise, my response to these circumstances will proclaim or “preach” the answer to these questions to myself and to those around me. If I let loose a string of profanity and complain to Laura that she hasn’t helped me like she should, or if I just quietly pick up the mess and am cold to her for the next couple of hours, I have just declared to her and myself what I believe to be the significance of what has just happened in the grand scheme of things.

The painful conviction that has struck me more and more is that the “gospel” I preach to Laura and to my friends and family by the way that I choose to interpret and respond to the circumstances of life is usually either the antithesis of the real gospel or some deceptive and twisted perversion of that gospel. I am rightly (albeit insufficiently) ashamed of this fact and brought once more to the place where I must say, “I am way worse than I thought, and way more in need of God’s grace and help to change than I thought”. Praise God for his merciful provision through Jesus Christ, who not only freed me from the eternal consequences of my sin, but has also set his Holy Spirit to the work of transforming me to the likeness of his Son!

The pastor who mentored me during my internship this summer challenged me by asking me to articulate the gospel of Christ in a way that is not only technically accurate but also winsome; in a way that shows that it really is “good news” to all who will embrace it; in a way that gets at the wonderful “old old story” that never gets old. This has proved a difficult task for me for a number of reasons. 1. Right now I am in a place where I am not particularly inspired or gripped by the gospel. 2. I feel like I don’t really have all of the details of it sorted out in my head in an accurate biblical way and I am prone to leaving out important details. 3. I’m having a hard time figuring out what makes it a “good story” that goes beyond either “pie in the sky by and by” or “Jesus came to fix up my day-to-day life”.

So I’m hoping that you will take a shot and give me your two cents. What is so great to you about the story of salvation?

(Colin’s going to say I’m cheating by asking you all this, but I don’t care )

In a discussion with a couple of pastors this morning on the topic of Christ-centered preaching/teaching it occurred to me that one can bring the accomplished and applied work of Jesus Christ to bear on any passage of scripture, but do so in a way that flatly and simplistically portrays Him. It is good to remember that, for whatever reason, God brought his people Israel down a very long road before fully unveiling the glorious salvation found in Christ. When the Messiah did come, everything that he did and said was pregnant with a profound significance that wove itself through every story of the Jewish scriptures. It is for this reason that we must continually dive back into the world of the Old Testament in order to properly understand and teach others about Christ. To sum up the identity and saving work of Jesus without reference to the story of His people as presented in the OT is to miss who He really is. In a sense, whether we are studying for ourselves or teaching others, we must continually retrace the lines of redemptive history in order to properly place any given element from God’s story.

In a discussion with a couple of pastors this morning on the topic of Christ-centered preaching/teaching it occurred to me that one can bring the accomplished and applied work of Jesus Christ to bear on any passage of scripture, but do so in a way that flatly and simplistically portrays Him. It is good to remember that, for whatever reason, God brought his people Israel down a very long road before fully unveiling the glorious salvation found in Christ. When the Messiah did come, everything that he did and said was pregnant with a profound significance that wove itself through every story of the Jewish scriptures. It is for this reason that we must continually dive back into the world of the Old Testament in order to properly understand and teach others about Christ. To sum up the identity and saving work of Jesus without reference to the story of His people as presented in the OT is to miss who He really is. In a sense, whether we are studying for ourselves or teaching others, we must continually retrace the lines of redemptive history in order to properly place any given element from God’s story.