Josh King

Grumbling at Grace (Matthew 20:1-16)

If you are honest with yourself you cry out with the first hour laborers, “Hey, not fair!” Jesus, as Nathan did David, causes us to indict ourselves. This is what this parable reveals about every fallen son of Adam—we hate grace! Adam wanted to be like God, and he wanted to be like God because he did something.

Douglas Wilson uses the following illustration. Say it is family movie night. Your wife is getting the movie ready, the children are getting situated just right, and you go to the kitchen. You make one of your children a big bowl, the biggest bowl of ice cream they have ever had. What do your other children say? “Hey!” The first child looks at their siblings with a insincerely confused look that asks, “What’s the big deal? The universe is as it should be. Shalom has come.” So you go back into the kitchen to make each of the protestors even bigger bowls. What then does the first child say? “Hey!” The issue isn’t the amount of ice cream in his bowl, but the amount in everyone else’s. The issue is the same as that of the “man” in Matthew 19:16-22, namely, covetousness, which is idolatry (Ephesians 5:5).

The point of this parable isn’t that heaven is a communist regime where everyone gets one scoop. The first hour-ers complain that they have been made equal but really they haven’t. The point here isn’t equality. It’s more radical than that. The point is that the last are first and the first are last. One group gets paid a Benjamin per hour, while another gets seven and a quarter. Things are not equal. But things are just. The first hour-ers think they are demanding justice, but really they are grumbling against grace. They howl, “We deserve grace too, No! we deserve more grace!” But that is as nonsensical as a child throwing a temper tantrum saying, “But I wanted a square circle!” Deserved grace isn’t even on the level of a mythical creature. God could create a unicorn should He desire to do so. Deserved grace however is a logical impossibility. As soon as grace becomes deserved it un-defines itself.

What is the point? Those who receive the most grace, receive the most grace. No one can bark against that. If it is justice you desire, you may have it, hot and eternal. So, next time you worship with God’s little ones, look around. Is there anyone there that it would bother you if they got a bigger bowl of ice cream from the Father?

If you are properly seeking the reward, this means you are seeking the biggest possible thing God could give you—Himself. This means when God glorifies Himself in being gracious to the least, you get exactly what you want—God glorified. It does not matter where the grace is dumped. God is glorified, and thus, you are satisfied. There is no grumble in your stomach. There is no grumble in your mouth. Grace anywhere, is grace everywhere to little ones.

The Pilgrim: When Spiritual Steel Strikes Carnal Flint

‘The law is spiritual, I am carnal;’ therefore every imposition is rejected and rebelled against. Strike steel against flint, and the fire flies about you; strike the law against a carnal heart, and sin appears, sin multiplies, sin rageth, sin is strengthened! —John Bunyan, Justification by an Imputed Righteousness

Our Mutation and God’s Creation (Matthew 19:27-30)

When Adam said, “Hey, you gave her to me,” that wasn’t a good thing. We cannot blame our sin on the Giver or His gifts. Every gift God gives is good. It’s our grimy little hands that mess things up in the reception. Sin mutates. Contra DC Comics and MARVEL, mutations aren’t cool. Sin takes life and makes it death. It perverts good things into bad things.

Awareness of this causes some to be hyper-hesitant to speak of rewards. They feel two tensions; one between God’s glory and idolatry, the other between grace and merit. But does a gift, or a reward given necessarily cause you to love the gift more than the giver? If you have a wedding ring I hope you answer in the negative. Likewise, have you ever received a “reward,” that you thought was so disproportionate to any service rendered that it spoke more to the giver’s generosity than to your greatness?

Any reward we receive will come to us as grace upon grace. Let me show you with a barrage of texts.

[Y]ou yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 2:5)

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)

[W]ork out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12-13)

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. (Hebrews 13:20-21)

And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. (2 Corinthians 9:8)

You are being built by God to offer sacrifices, sacrifices that are then acceptable to God through Jesus, you are given a new heart, a heart that loves God and His law, God prepares opportunities for obedience and sets them before you, He equips you with everything you need to do that work, He works in us that which is pleasing in His sight, and makes His grace abound to us, and then, following and flowing from all of that, when we obey, He rewards it! That smells of merit as much as a Pepé Le Pew smells like an expensive cologne.

Say you get this lavish grace—overwhelmed with God’s generosity you are becoming generous. One way you are generous is that you want your son to be generous. You seek to graciously teach him about grace. You want your little tike to share to the glory of God. By God’s grace, your son shares his favorite Hot Wheel. But the friend destroys the borrowed wheels by eating them or something. Your son responds with grace. In joy you take him to buy a new favorite. Your son might mistake this for merit.

Your son grows in years and grace, and when a visiting missionary comes to town in need of a vehicle, your son offers up his ’96 Ford Tarus. The car gets totaled, and again your son responds with grace. This time you go and buy him one of three Lamborghini Venenos, with a 3.5 million dollar price tag. When this happens there is no chance that your son mistakes this reward for merit. He just thinks that his dad is nuts, but in a way that is really good for him.

When you get to heaven and hear, “Well done, now what shall I give you? Hmmm… here is a new earth, every inch radiating with the greatest of glory, the only glory there really is, Mine. And here are new eyes so that you don’t miss any of it. Also, that new heart that I gave you before; now you won’t have to worry about sin marring any of its affections. No, your joy will be able to soar without limits and without fear of heights. And here is a new brain to think and meditate on this new creation,”—when you see that your reward isn’t just earth size, that is to say a 6 followed by 21 zeros tons size, but a new earth dense with the glory of God size, which is to say infinite, then you will reply, “We are unworthy servants (Luke 17:10),” and “Worthy are you (Revelation 4:11).”

We render molecular size service and receive cosmic size rewards. The point isn’t our greatness but His. Why does God reward us so? Jesus.

Sin mutates, but God creates, and He recreates, and He always pronounces over His work, “Good!” In the new earth when He rewards, we won’t have to worry about that reward becoming an idol. This is because our hands, and everything attached to them won’t be grimy any more. We will enjoy things fully, and this means enjoying them unto Jesus’ glory.

God himself is the great good which they are brought to the possession and enjoyment of by redemption. He is the highest good, and the sum of all that good which Christ purchased. God is the inheritance of the saints; he is the portion of their souls. God is their wealth and treasure, their food, their Life, their dwelling- place, their ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honour and glory. They have none in heaven but God; he is the great good which the redeemed are received to at death, and which they are to rise to at the end of the world. The Lord God is the light of the heavenly Jerusalem; and is the ‘river of the water of life’ that runs, and ‘the tree of life that grows, in the midst of the paradise of God.’ The glorious excellencies and beauty of God will be what will for ever entertain the minds of the saints, and the love of God will be their everlasting feast. The redeemed will indeed enjoy other things; they will enjoy the angels, and will enjoy one another; but that which they shall enjoy in the angels, or each other, or in any thing else whatsoever that will yield them delight and happiness, will be what shall be seen of God in them. —Jonathan Edwards

The Pilgrim: Unfettered Faith

Faith, then, as separate from Christ, doth nothing; nothing neither with God nor man; because it wants its relative object, but let it go to the Lord Jesus; let it behold him as dying, &c., and it fetches righteousness, and life, and peace out of the virtue of his blood, &c., Acts 10:29, 31, 33; or rather, sees it there as sufficient for me to stand just thereby in the sight of Eternal Justice: “For him hath God set forth to be a propitiation through faith (belief) in his blood, with intent to justify him that believeth in Jesus,” Rom. 3:25, 26. —John Bunyan, Justification by an Imputed Righteousness

The Blessed Brought and the Cursed Comer (Matthew 19:13-26)

In all three synoptic gospels Jesus’ blessing the children is followed by the account of the “rich young ruler”. Noticing that these two incidents are paired is both helpful and hurtful. It is helpful in that it makes you look for a connection. It is hurtful because you prematurely label this man. Matthew wants to grab you with something easily overlooked, “behold, a man.” You don’t learn that this man is young and rich till much later. You only learn that he is a ruler from Luke. You have just seen children brought to Jesus, and now you see a man come.

The other gospels are helpful in creating even more contrast. In Matthew Jesus says, “little children;” how little are they? In Mark He takes them in His arms (Mark 10:16). In Luke it is said that they are “bringing even infants to Him (Luke 18:15).” These children have to be brought to Jesus, they cannot come otherwise, and the kingdom is made of such.

Critically dependent children are brought to Jesus and are blessed. A self-reliant man comes to Jesus and is cursed. If you are truly blessed it is because you were brought.

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day (John 6:44).”

When Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom note carefully the disciples question. They don’t want to know how a rich man then can be saved. They want to know how anyone can be saved. Jesus says that man cannot act; man must be acted upon. Man must be brought. God, by the Spirit must bring you to His Son, and then in the Son, you are brought to God as Father.

Hydrogen to Helium (Matthew 19:1-12)

1 + 1 = 1—this is the formula for marriage. Marriage is God turning two hydrogen into one helium. It’s fusion. But first, marriage is fission. A man must leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife. Family ties are near strongest. They have a-bomb power; fission power. Marriage is stronger. Marriage has star power; fusion power.

Marriage is held together by the strongest glue—Trinitarian strength glue. Only the triune God could be the author of such a mystery as 1 + 1 = 1. God made man in His own image and He made man male and female. One way that man images forth God is in marriage. There are many junk illustrations for the Trinity (water in three forms, clovers, an egg, etc.) but there is only one authorized metaphor. Marriage, though a limited analogy, it is an analogy after all, is a legitimate one, the best one (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:3).

How permanent is marriage supposed to be? As permanent as the Triune God. One man, one woman, forever, till death do them part and usher them fully into the eternal reality of which their earthly marriage was just a shadow. Anything less isn’t marriage, it’s “mar-age.”

Let not man do fission where God has done fusion. When you toy with divorce you need to know you are playing with a nuclear warhead. You can’t seek to undo God’s work without the effects being cataclysmic.

The Implosion of the Tilt-A-Whirl

The earth is rotating at approximately 1,000 mph on its axis, while revolving around the sun at an estimated 67,000 mph. The sun, and thus our solar system, is revolving around the center of the milky way at roughly 500,000 mph. On top of this the Milk Way is skipping through the universe at roughly 60,000 mph. As N.D. Wilson says, we live on a tilt-a-whirl.

What is it all revolving around? The true center of all the universe is God. He created and upholds it all, and all that, for His glory. “The heavens declare the glory of God.” But we are glory thieves. We, want to take God out of the center and make everything revolve around us—even God.

We don’t have enough mass to pull it off. Imagine trying to replace the hub of one of those huge wind turbines with the hub from one of your ceiling fans. Now magnify that by the galactic specs I just gave you. If you think this would only throw a slight wobble into the mechanism recompute.

Sin tries to play god and build a universe to revolve around self. But that universe implodes like a black hole because we aren’t that big a deal.

When we keep our place in this tilt-a-whirl, when the lap-bar is in place and we follow the directions given to us, there is no greater joy. This is life. When we lift the bar, there is only death.

The Pilgrim: A Big Difference

[T]here is a difference betwixt growing worse and worse, and thy seeing more clearly how bad thou art. —John Bunyan, Come and Welcome to Jesus

Beyond 2 × 10 to the 30th Power (Matthew 18:21-35)

1 denarius = 1 days wage.

1 talent = 6,000 denarri or over 16 years of labor.

10,000 talents = over 160,000 years of labor.

Our debt is cosmic, our sins so weighty they make galaxies look miniscule. Your smallest sin is more weighty than the sun. The sun’s mass is estimated at just shy of 2 × 10³⁰ kg. That is a 2 followed by 30 zeros! The sun is so massive it accounts for approximately 99.8 percent of the mass in our solar system. Yet, the sun is finite. Your sins are infinite. They are committed against a God who is infinitely worthy of glory, of obedience, of love. Sin is that big a deal because God is that big a deal.

Whatever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23). Think how many seconds of your existence you live without faith. That is how often you live in sin. Ponder how even your every good work is only purified as it is offered up to God through Christ (1 Peter 2:5). You have committed galaxies of sins, with each sin more weighty than a star. Feel the weight of your sins that make the universe comparatively shrink to the size of spinning electrons.

But this is a weak effort to show you the scale of our sins. The best place to look is not up into heavens, but down here on earth at a tree and a naked bleeding Christ hanging on it, under a dark sky.

Truly it [the gospel] is the greatest and purest testimony against sin. Though sinners find favor from the Gospel, sin finds none. The Gospel is not the least indulgent to the least sin. —Ralph Venning

How massive are our sins? The only possible way that our debt could be cancelled, is if the infinitely glorious and beloved Son of God takes on human flesh, achieves all righteousness in our place, and suffers the full wrath of God for our sins. For God to create a star is easy. He need only speak. But to ransom man, God must bleed.

At the cross now you see not only the expanse of your depravity, but the exhaustiveness of God’s grace. And if you say you’ve tasted of this grace, you will be forgiving (1 John 3:10, 15; 4:7, 11; 4:19-21).

More than someone will ever sin against you, they sin against God. God is always the most offended party in sin. When against you, man’s sins are all earth size. Most are pebbles, you should generally just overlook those in forbearance and love. Sometime our brother’s sins are boulders. When boulders are tossed you should confront your brother per the house rules Jesus had just given. If they repent, you must forgive them, for this is beyond comparing boulders to stars.

The Pilgrim: Let God Give Like God

Thus, I say, doth the greatness of the things desired, quite dash and overthrow the mind of the desirer. O, it is too big! it is too big! it is too great a mercy! But, coming sinner, let me reason with thee. Thou sayest, it is too big, too great. Well, will things that are less satisfy thy soul? Will a less thing than heaven, than glory and eternal life, answer thy desires? No, nothing less; and yet I fear they are too big, and too good for me, ever to obtain. Well, as big and as good as they are, God giveth them to such as thou; they are not too big for God to give; no, not too big to give freely. Be content; let God give like himself; he is that eternal God, and giveth like himself. When kings give, they do not use to give as poor men do. Hence it is said, that Nabal made a feast in his house like the feast of a king; and again, “All these things did Araunah, as a king, give unto David” (1 Sam 25:36; 2 Sam 24:23). Now, God is a great king, let him give like a king; nay, let him give like himself, and do thou receive like thyself. He hath all, and thou hast nothing. —John Bunyan, Come and Welcome to Jesus