I end with this question. What kind of food can we take? Are we still only capable of taking milk, or are we beginning to develop a taste for meat? Are illustrations and analogies still essential, or do we know that our minds are expanding under the illumination of the Spirit and rejoicing in the deep things of God? ‘The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.’ I must confess that there is nothing which ever happens in my experience which depresses me more than the following. Sometimes when I am preaching away from him, and have preaches what I would have thought were the mere elements and beginnings of the Christian faith, people come to me and say, ‘You were making rather heavy demands upon us this evening’. They add, ‘We are not accustomed to these deep things’. Deep things! and I thought I was being elementary! That occurs among Christians, and evangelical people. – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Volume 5, p. 253
Author: Josh King
Genesis 4:1-16 & The True and Better Elder Brother
Growing up I had two Collies named Charlie and Linus. They were brothers. They were different. Early on Linus tried to off Charlie like Cain did Abel. They were riding in the back of the pickup and Charlie fell out the back; we are pretty sure we saw Linus push him. From that day on Charlie had a slew of health issues. Charlie chased cars. He was ‘bumped’ so many times we quit counting and was straight up ran over once. This messed up his back legs such that if you would slap him on the rear on a cold day he would just gently fall over on his side. He had a tumor on his back and three ears. Some varmint got a hold of one of his ears and split it down the middle. Oddly though death seemed to follow Charlie he lived a couple of years longer than his brother. Linus was lazy and loved to eat. He loved peanuts. He would crack the shell himself, spit everything out, then eat only the peanuts. They gave him gas. Same litter – very different.
Cain and Abel, same parents – very different. Too often we read this ‘little story’ of sibling rivalry and fail to see ourselves in it. This text smells of heaven or hell – for you. You are one of these brothers. My contention is that unless Jesus has done something to you, you are Cain.
You are the spawn of Satan. Two seeds make up all of humanity, the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. They are opposed to one another. Don’t flatter yourself that you are the humble, pious worshipper who is a victim. Everybody is a victim these days anyway, it doesn’t make you special. If you really want to stand out today and be unique, fess up that you are the villain. You are Cain. Oh, you may look very religious, so did Cain, so did the Pharisees (John 8:34-47). Yes, you bring your offerings, but like Cain you are not after God, but after some kind of blessing. And when you don’t get it, you get angry just like Cain. Your anger, just as powerfully as your love, will show your true gods.
But there is hope. Everything that Cain failed to be Jesus was. He is the true and better Elder Brother. His blood cries out salvation instead of condemnation, even though we are guilty of it all the same (Hebrews 12:24). Instead of taking our lives, which He unlike Cain, would be just in doing, He gives His life in order to give us life, and in such a way that He remains just (Romans 3:26). Jesus is cursed, but not for His sin, he is cursed for ours. He is driven “away from the presence of the Lord” crying out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me” so that we might enter into His presence where there is joy evermore.
The Doctor: Against Mere Moralism, Emotionalism, or Intellectualism
What I desire to emphasize at the moment is the greatness of this change. It is not enough for us merely to know that we have been changed, or that a Christian is a man who must undergo a change; we must have some inadequate conception of the greatness of the change which is undergone. We see the greatness in this way, that it is a change which affects the whole of a man’s personality. Look at it again. ‘Ye have obeyed’ – there is you will. ‘From the heart’ – there is you emotion. What have you obeyed from the heart? ‘The form of doctrine delivered you’. How do you apprehend doctrine? You do so with you mind. So the change a man undergoes to become a Christian is a change that affects him in his mind, in his heart, and in his will; the entire personality is involved. – D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Romans Volume 5, p. 207
Healthier Trinitarianism
Much better than liquid, ice, gas…
One biblical picture of the Trinity is that the Father is the speaker…, the Son is the word he speaks (John 1:1-14; Rom. 10:6-8 [alluding to Deut. 30:11-14]; 2 Cor. 1:20; Heb. 1:1-3; 1 John 1:1-3; Rev. 19:13), and the Spirit is the breath that carries the word to its destination (Ps. 33:6…) – John Frame in The Doctrine of God
Genesis 3:7-24 & Better than Morgan Freeman’s
My wife loves the game show network. This is ok with me until a certain dude’s voice comes through the speakers. A man should not sound like that, it makes me cringe. Really it makes me want to vomit. My response is an alloy made with more sin than grace. Here is likely another man who never had a real father and has likely never had the gospel radically revamp his idea of manhood, and rather than feeling sorrow and compassion I just get angry. The gospel he needs I deny him in my self-righteousness. Nevertheless, for illustration purposes, his voice is irritating; to me.
In contrast I love Morgan Freeman’s voice. He really should be the only one allowed to do TV and radio commercials. If an audio Bible ever comes out with Morgan as the voice, be assured I will buy it.
Still greater is God’s voice, His Word. ‘Greater’ is an adjectival understatement of colossal size. His voice is majestic. It can come to us in awesome thunderous booms (Exodus 19:19), or in the softest whisper (1 Kings 19:12-13). His voice both causes (Psalm 29:3-5) and calms (Mark 4:39) storms. No one talks like our God (Psalm 33:6).
Sadly sin causes us to run from His voice. Adam hides when he hears the sound of the LORD God. The word translated sound here is more often translated voice. It is dense in the Pentateuch, especially Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 5:25; 8:20; 15:5; 18:16; 26:14; 27:10; 28:1, 2, 15, 45, 62; 30:8, 10). In Deuteronomy we see that the voice of the LORD is something to be obeyed. When Adam hears it he is further disobeying. He does not come forward in broken repentance, he hides. Sin makes us to vomit with fear at His Holy voice, its purity makes us cringe. How evil is the evil that could make me hear such a golden tongue in this way?
But Adam is not allowed to hide; the divine words confront and interrogate him. Yes, they expose his nakedness and his guilt, but keep listening, they also hold out promise. The thunder of judgment turns to a whisper of promise.
God has thundered against the Son, so you might hear the whispers of His eternal love for you.
Hymns I’m Angry I didn’t Learn As a Child (9)
I discovered this little gem reading Keller’s The Prodigal God. I especially love the last stanza of this hymn, let me know what you think.
We Were Sinners Once as You Are By John Newton
Shall men pretend to pleasure
Who never knew the Lord?
Can all the worldling’s treasure
True peace of mind afford?
They shall obtain this jewel
In what their hearts desire,
When they by adding fuel
Can quench the flame of fire.
Till you can bid the ocean,
When furious tempests roar,
Forget its wonted motion,
And rage, and swell, no more:
In vain your expectation
To find content in sin;
Or freedom from vexation,
While passions reign within.
Come, turn your thoughts to Jesus,
If you would good possess;
‘Tis he alone that frees us
From guilt, and from distress:
While he, by faith, is present,
The sinner’s troubles cease;
His ways are truly pleasant,
And all his paths are peace.
Our time in sin we wasted,
And fed upon the wind;
Until his love we tasted,
No comfort could we find:
But now we stand to witness
His pow’r and grace to you;
May you perceive its fitness,
And call upon him too!
Our pleasure and our duty,
Though opposite before;
Since we have seen his beauty,
Are joined to part no more:
It is our highest pleasure,
No less than duty’s call;
To love him beyond measure,
And serve him with our all.
Tolle Lege: The Deliberate Church
Readability (1-3): 1
Length: 202 pgs
Author: Mark Dever and Paul Alexander
There is an ocean of contemporary books being written about the church. They are an ocean. They are ever changing, never steady, constantly fluctuating. If things appear calm from the surface there is either turbulence underneath, or a storm approaching. In this ocean of pragmatic, novel, faddish, and often unbiblical approaches to church there are a few solid islands to set your feet on, islands that are grounded and steady. Mark Dever is one such Island. If someone were to ask me who was a good contemporary author to read on the church, I would first think of Mark Dever. Mark’s concept is very simple and sadly radical to the western church – that is the Word of God which should shape our church. Here are the first six paragraphs of the introduction.
What are we building?
It would be patently stupid to start construction on a building without first knowing what kind of building we plan to construct. An apartment complex is different from an office complex, which is different still from a restaurant. They all have different blueprints, different kinds of rooms, different materials, uses, and shapes. So the process of building will be different, depending on what kind of structure we’re planning to build.
The same goes for building a church. A church is not a Fortune 500 company. It’s not simply another nonprofit organization, nor is it a social club. In fact, a healthy church is unlike any organization that man has ever devised, because man didn’t devise it.
It only makes sense, then, for us to revisit God’s Word to figure out what exactly He wants us to be building. Only then will we understand how to go about building it. Negligence here will result in both temporal and eternal futility. Temporally, a church is a spiritually heavy thing to build, and it is designed for heavy relational use. It requires the strongest materials, and those materials must be placed in the correct, load-bearing positions specified on the biblical blueprint so that structural integrity is built in. No matter how beautiful the facade, our structure will crumble if we build on a sandy foundation or with shoddy materials.
Eternally, our work will withstand the fire of the last day only if we build with the “gold, silver, precious stones” specified on the biblical blueprint (1 Cor. 3:12). Building without that blueprint will virtually guarantee that we will build with the cheaper and more abundant resources of “wood, hay, straw,” all of which will burn in the end (vv.
13-15). Ignoring God’s plan for the church and replacing it with your own will ensure the eternal futility of your work. Here at the outset, then, it is critical to reflect biblically on this foundational question: What is a local church?
Fundamentally, God intends the local church to be a corporate display of His glory and wisdom, both to unbelievers and to unseen spiritual powers (John 13:34-35; Eph. 3:10-11). More specifically, we are a corporate dwelling place for God’s Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22; 1 Cor. 3:16-17), the organic body of Christ in which He magnifies His glory (Acts 9:4; 1 Corinthians 12). The Greek word for church is ekklēsia, a gathering or congregating of people. The church is God’s vehicle for displaying His glory to His creation.
The uniqueness of the church is her message—the Gospel. The church is the only institution entrusted by God with the message of repentance of sins and belief in Jesus Christ for forgiveness. That Gospel is visualized in the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, both instituted by Christ. The distinguishing marks of the church, then, are the right preaching of this Gospel and the right administration of the biblical ordinances that dramatize it.
The Doctor: The Great Breakup
Because of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done, and because of what has happened to Him, and because of our union with Him, it is true to say of us that our whole relationship to sin and all it can do has been fundamentally changed. We are no longer in the position in which we were when we were born as the children of Adam. We were under the dominion, under the reign, and the rule of sin. That is no longer the position, we have been ‘translated’ out of that ‘into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son’ (Colossians 1:13). – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 5, pp. 124-125
Genesis 3:1-7 & Take and Eat
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. – Genesis 3:6
She took… and ate: so simple the act, so hard its undoing. God will taste poverty and death before ‘take and eat’ become verbs of salvation. – Derek Kidner
Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ – Matthew 26:26
The Doctor: A Help in Interpreting Romans 6
As we come to this detailed outworking of his argument by the Apostle it is essential that we should hold clearly in our minds what he is setting out to do. He is refuting the charge brought against his teaching stated in the first verse, ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?’ He is not giving an exposition of the way of holiness and of sanctification, as is commonly suggested; he is simply refuting the charge that is brought against the doctrine of justification by faith, and against the finality and certainty of our salvation in Christ. – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 5, p. 42
No Other Boast 