Josh King

Tolle Lege: Counterfeit Gods

Readability: 2

Length: 177 pgs

Author: Tim Keller

Tim Keller wrote his first book in 1989, Ministries of Mercy. He didn’t publish another title for nearly 20 years; it seems he was saving up. The Reason for God and The Prodigal God were published in 2008, Counterfeit Gods in 2009, and finally this October, Generous Justice is scheduled to release. I think I once heard Keller explain the silent years saying he feels he is much better oral than written communicator. Certainly he is a gifted speaker, but his writing disproves any supposed inadequacies’ Keller may feel he has. Ministers buy Ministries of Mercy, and Christians, buy everything else he has written. It seems God in His providence used those two silent decades build power and pressure, preparing for an anointed eruption. These are earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting, truth-saturated books.

Counterfeit Gods deals with sin at the fundamental level, idolatry. Luther said that if we keep the first commandment we break none of the others. Sin is the failure to love God with all. We do not live in a polytheistic world where we divvy up our hearts and service among the gods. God gets all. And when he doesn’t, idolatry is afoot in our hearts. This book will help you see, root out, and fight against your idolatry.

There is a difference between sorrow and despair. Sorrow is pain for which there are sources of consolation. Sorrow comes from losing one good thing among others, so that, if you experience career reversal, you find comfort in your family to get through it. Despair, however, is inconsolable, because it comes from losing an ultimate thing.

We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the best things in life.

Many, if not most, of these counterfeit gods can remain in our lives once we have “demoted” them below God.

If you want God’s grace all you need is need, all you need is nothing.

Is there any hope? Yes, if we begin to realize that idols cannot simply be removed. They must be replaced. If you only try to uproot them, they grow back; but they can be supplanted. By what? By God himself, of course.

Rejoicing and repentance must go together. … [W]hen we rejoice over God’s sacrificial, suffering love for us – seeing what it cost him to save us from sin – we learn to hate the sin for what it is. We see what sin cost God. What most assures us of God’s unconditional love (Jesus’s [sic] costly death) is what most convicts us of the evil of sin. Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin.

The Doctor: Go Further Back!

Now, in parenthesis, let me say here that when you come across a subsection such as this, or even a verse which seems to you on the surface to be difficult, and you say to yourself, ‘Why does he say that here? What is the connection?’ Then a very good principle to follow is not to spend too much time with the immediate connection. Go further back! Look at the larger context, and very often that will give you the key to the solution of your immediate problem.

Let me use an illustration here. In athletics, if you come up against a particularly high hurdle that you have to jump, you take a longer run! If you want to vault over it, you go further back. You do not try to lift yourself up over this very high hurdle from where you are on the ground. The further back you go, the longer your run, and the momentum will carry you over. That is a very valuable principle in the exposition of Scripture and in the elucidation of some of these problems with which it presents us. – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 10, p. 253

The Unparalleled Love of Christ

I am 258 years removed from Joanthan Edwards sermon, “There Never Was Any Love That Could Be Paralleled with the Dying Love of Christ”, on Romans 5:7-8, and it came on me ministering great grace. It ministered Christ to me in a fresh way. Meditate on these five reasons he gives why the love of our Lord is unparalleled.

Never was there a love that fixed upon an object so much below the lover.

Never was there any instance of such love to those who were so far from being capable of benefiting the lover.

Never was there any who set his love upon those in whom he saw so much filthiness and deformity.

Never was there anyone who set his love upon those who were so far from loving him and so unreasonably averse to him as Jesus Christ in his dying love to sinners.

There never was any love that appeared in so great and wonderful expressions

And lastly, never was there any love that was so beneficial to the beloved.

Genesis 39 & Breadless Sandwiches

After all the shady cats we have dealt with so far in Genesis, Joseph is a welcome breath of fresh air. Joseph is a hero, he is exemplary, we can learn many moral lessons from him, but do not turn this text into a breadless sandwich.

Imagine trying to eat a breadless sandwich. It’s so messy if makes a Carl’s Jr. commercial look polite. How do we make this text breadless? We turn it into a fable, and when we do, it gets messy. Sadly I wonder how much daily Bible reading is nothing more than going to the text to glean a few moral maxims and life principles. Our daily Bread ironically becomes breadless. Simply, many go to the Bible just to know what to do. Surely the Bible contains commands, and we should desire to obey and follow God, but when you read the Bible seeking only law, you lose the Bread of life. When this story is read as a fable the meaning is no more than, “Keep your clothes on, and if you lose them, lose them running away from sex and not toward it.” What I am proposing is not that we make less of the text but more.

So where is the bread? Look at the phrase repeated twice for emphasis at the beginning and the end, “The LORD was with Joseph” (Genesis 39:2, 3, 21, 23). These are the loaves that hold the meat of this sandwich together making it edible. We have seen this kind of language before in Genesis at “Jacob’s Ladder” (Genesis 28:13-15). What is the context there? It is God renewing with Jacob the covenant made with Abraham and Isaac. God is sovereignly orchestrating the events of the Patriarch’s lives in faithfulness to His covenant.

Now we see Joseph as only a hero, but God as the hero. God is not blessing Joseph because of his moral superiority, but in faithfulness to his covenant with Abraham. John Sailhammer put it this way, “This is not a story of the success of Joseph; rather it is a story of God’s faithfulness to his promises.”

Here is the Bread of Life. It is not about what we do, it is about what He has done, is doing, and will do. The Bible is a story more about God’s action throughout history than how we are to act. Our acting is and effect of His action in Christ. The Bible becomes breadless when we read it void of its redemptive story. Let me close with an example from Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy 30:11-13 God tells His people,

For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.

What? The law is not too hard for you? This sounds nothing like Paul. Are Paul and Moses in opposition? Not at all. Why is it that the law is not too hard for them? Because it is in their hearts. How did it get there?

And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. – Deuteronomy 30:6

Put the law in its proper context, God’s redemption of a people onto Himself. They were not redeemed because they kept the law. They received the law because they were redeemed. Put the Bread back on the sandwich and know life instead of death.

Reasons Why God Blesses Earnest, Constant Prayer

In a sermon taking Genesis 32:26-29 as his text, Jonathan Edwards gives four reasons why God chooses to bestow His blessing on fervent, persistent prayer. I found these so refreshing and encouraging.

1. ‘Tis very suitable and becoming that before men have the blessing they should this way show their sense of their need of it and of the value of it. ‘Tis very suitable that before God bestows his blessing upon them, persons should be sensible they need it. And ‘tis by their importunity and earnest seeking of it – their not listening God go except he bestows it – that they show their sense of their need of it.

‘Tis very suitable that before God bestows his blessing persons should be sensible of the great value of the blessing and the advantage it will be to them. They show also a sense of this by the not letting God go except he bestows it.

2. God’s seeming to deny persons the blessing for a while when they seek tends to lead persons to reflect on their unworthiness of the blessing. They have that seeming denial to put them upon thinking what they have done to provoke God to withhold a blessing from them. While Christ seemed to deny the woman of Canaan what she sought, she was put in mind of her unworthiness. Jesus said, ‘It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and cast it to dogs” (Matt. 15:26). The leads them to seek in a more humble manner.

3. ‘Tis very suitable before God bestows the blessing upon a person that he should this way acknowledge him to be the author of the blessing. This earnestly seeking of it of God so as not to let him go ’til he bestows is a becoming acknowledgement that God is the fountain of blessing and that no other can bestow it but he.

4. The person by such seeking of the blessing is prepared for it. He is put into a suitable disposition to receive it, to entertain it joyfully and thankfully, and to make much of it when it is obtained and to give God the glory of it.

Tolle Lege: The Bookends of the Christian Life

Readability: 1

Length: 154 pgs

Author: Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington

The Bookends of the Christian Life is a short little book for the whole of life. John Wesly once wrote

He breaks the power of canceled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His blood availed for me.

This is the message of this gospel saturated book. In Christ my sins are done with, I am cleansed from them and stand clothed in His righteousness. But not only am I cleansed, the Holy Spirit now indwells me to break the power of the sin that Jesus cancelled. Don’t look here for any amazing originality. Come here to be reminded about the very core of living the Christian life. Here the most vital of doctrines are applied to your everyday living.

The Doctor: Christians are Non-Reptilian

So you do not become a Christian in cold blood, unmoved, undisturbed. You do not sit down in a detached manner and say, ‘Well, I have agreed with that doctrine, and therefore I am a Chrsitian.’ Not at al! You have been through these stages – conviction, repentance, fear, desire for deliverance, recognition of Him, casting yourself upon Him, thankfulness and praise, glorying in Him, greeting His truth, desiring to know more and more about it! – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 10, p. 174

Genesis 38 & Promiscuous Providence

Oh the tension between the tender and the terrifying that is this passage.

This is not a flannel graph friendly passage. Sister Sue never taught this in children’s chapel. If your pastor preaches expository messages and is going through Genesis this might be the only time you hear him say “semen” in the pulpit. But beware, Moses is not trying to titillate your senses. Do not use this text as a basis for explicit material as the subject of art. One could use Moses as a proof for realism, but not sensualism. Sin is not romanticized here.

So one could misread this text by handling it wrong, treating it more like a romance novel, or a racy drama; or one could misread it by making light of the sins presented here. Yes, here God’s providence works such that from all this sin comes the Savior. God’s plan is not thwarted to work all things together for good, not even by the saints own sins. Yet there is a tension here. We may not presume upon God’s grace. Some sinners die, some live. We are not even clued into the wickedness that was Er’s, God need not give any justification to us. He would be just to condemn us all to such a sentence for any one minute of our lives.

It is precisely this tension that makes God’s gracious providence so astounding, so outrageous. God loves and works things, all things, for the good and salvation of such despicable depraved souls. His providence seems promiscuous. But alas, these are the only kind of humans for God to love, darkness loving, sin wrecked, cursed, and depraved enemies. Yet God’s love toward them is holy, for the Son of Perez, our Lord Jesus, would bear the wrath for our sins.

Here at the cross tension between the terrifying and the tender is revealed most powerfully. Concerning those crucified beside Christ, one was saved that all may have hope, but only one that none might presume. It is only in this tension that God’s love truly floors us. If we lose sight of His terrifying Holiness we may no longer sing that God’s grace is amazing.

Tolle Lege: The Case for Life

Readability: 1

Length: 243 pgs

Author: Scott Klusendorf

Looking to be a better voice for the unborn? Buy Klusendorf’s The Case for Life. Klusendorf wisely calls us to narrow the debate to one question: What is the unborn? Here we have the advantage. The burden of proof lies upon pro-choice advocates to prove that the unborn are not humans. At the very least they must admit they are potential humans. Intellectually ours is not the weaker position, this book will help you demonstrate that.

Why should you want to be a better advocate? In the introduction Klusendorf recalls a mentor’s signature quote that haunts him to this day, “Most people who say they oppose abortion do just enough to salve the conscience but not enough to stop the killing.” Are you comfortable with the death of the innocent? I am, but I hope to be less so in the future. This book has pushed me out of my comfort.

In short, you didn’t come from an embryo. You were once an embryo. At no point in your prenatal development did you undergo a substantial change of nature. You began as a human being and will remain so until death. Sure, you lacked maturity at that early stage of your life (as does an infant), but you were human nonetheless.

Next time somebody says you shouldn’t impose your beliefs on other, ask, ‘Why not?’ Any answer he gives will be an example of imposing his beliefs on you!

If you’ve had an abortion, you don’t need an excuse. You need an exchange – his righteousness for your sinfulness.

The Doctor: Believe In Your Innermost Citadel

[I]n the vast majority of instances, the word heart in Scripture means the centre, the very innermost citadel, of the personality. Or, if you like, it means the whole personality. So when the Scripture says that with heart we believe that God has raised Him from the dead, it means that with the whole of our being we believe that. ‘With the heart man believeth unto righteousness’: with the whole of his personality, not merely his feelings, not merely his intellect, but the totality of everything that he is. – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 10, p. 14