How To Become an Idolater

  • November 3, 2015
  • /
  • Park Forum
2 Kings 16.7

So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, saying, “I am your servant and your son. Come up and rescue me from the hand of the king of Syria and from the hand of the king of Israel, who are attacking me.”

The historic record in 2 Kings 16 provides the background for some of the most significant Messianic prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. Combining this record with Chronicles, Isaiah, and an Assyrian account we understand what was happening to God’s people during time when much of the ancient Near East was being consumed by Assyria.

  • To fight Assyria’s rising power the kings of Syria and Samaria became allies and were joined by Philistia and Edom. Israel also joined the alliance (Israel was divided from Judah, which maintained control of Jerusalem).
  • Judah, led by King Ahaz, refused to join the alliance.
  • When it became clear the alliance would overtake Judah, King Ahaz turned to the Assyrians for help.
The prophet Isaiah attempted to dissuade King Ahaz from aligning with the Assyrians by speaking God’s assurances and warnings for his people. “Syria, with Ephraim and the son of Remaliah, has devised evil against you… It shall not stand, and it shall not come to pass.” Yet the reality of the threat at his door and the assurance of the Assyrians’ power proved more appealing to Ahaz.
For this help Ahaz depleted the treasury, and even stripped the Temple, in order to pay the heavy tribute demanded of him by the Assyrian king. Judah’s king went so far as to install Assyrian cultic furnishings in the Temple. — Craig Evans

The path to idolatry isn’t mystical and faith-filled, but concrete and pragmatic. Ahaz sought counsel in the most proven and mighty voices of his day — though they led him away from intimacy with God. His desired outcome was noble; he wanted to ensure his kingdom lasted through the threat at hand — that peace came to his house and his people.

The solution for idolatry isn’t to ignore concrete realities, but to find a reality beyond them in Immanuel: God with us. Folded into God’s promise for Ahab is one we can draw hope from today:
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. — Isaiah 9.6

Idolatry is exposed in Scripture as transactional — exchanging personal effort for short-term satisfaction. The Gospel, Immanuel, is revealed as a stark contrast to the unpredictability and insufficiency of our own efforts.

Today’s Reading
2 Kings 16 (Listen – 3:46)
Titus 2 (Listen – 2:01)

The Spirit of Hospitality

  • November 2, 2015
  • /
  • Park Forum

Titus 1.7-8

For an overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined.

For Christians, a delight in the guest/host relationship reflects the expectation that God will play a significant role in the ordinary exchange between guests and hosts. This lends to hospitality a sacramental quality. — William Lane

I grew up conflating the practices of community and hospitality. I love long meals with friends. In eating, talking, and laughing together we share life in ways where we all seem to leave better than we came. This is the practice of community.

Hospitality throws a wrench in community — it embraces someone who is out of sync with the community. She might have trouble entering in to the group, or try to do so too fast. She doesn’t know how to engage. Her jokes don’t seem to land. In some ways the presence of the outsider is a sacrifice for the community.

Hospitality works through community and converts the outsider to the beloved.

[Hospitality] especially goes after and welcomes people whom the world excludes. People who are different. People who are unlovely. People who are un-wealthy. People who are unconnected. When you make people like that feel welcome, when you make people like that feel included, you have God’s spirit of hospitality. It’s an attitude of the heart. — Timothy Keller
In a sermon simply entitled, Hospitality, Timothy Keller recovers the spiritual dimension to the practice. Christians do not engage in hospitality because we look down on those who are outsiders, but because we know we were once outsiders.
Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ… having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ… So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. — Ephesians 2.12-13, 19

Though we were outsiders, the community of the Trinity sacrificed greatly to bring us in. Dr. Keller clarifies, “Hospitality is an attitude of heart and a practice. It’s an attitude of heart that seeks to turn strangers into guests, friends, and eventually brothers and sisters.” Sacrifice is the true spirit of hospitality and salvation is its fruit.

Today’s Reading
2 Kings 15 (Listen – 6:21 )
Titus 1 (Listen – 2:24)

The Heart of the Reformation :: The Weekend Reading List

  • October 30, 2015
  • /
  • Park Forum
On October 31, 1517 Martin Luther, then a Catholic Priest, pounded his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Posting topics for debate on the church door was commonplace, and wouldn’t have felt monumental that particular day, but Luther’s confrontation of Catholicism would ultimately spark the Protestant Reformation.
While we want to fasten on the Word, we also want to show how we’re part of a chain in history that goes back, and back, and back. We’re not trying to be so innovative that we’re the first generation to get it all right. — D.A. Carson

Reading the language of Luther, John Calvin, and the other Reformers can be disheartening today. In addition to calling the Pope the “antichrist,” Calvin also hurled names like “pigs,” “riffraff,” and “asses” at his opponents.

“When you read Luther and Calvin, a lot of their polemical statements, a lot of the ways in which they talk about the Papacy, and so-on, you look at them and say, ‘you shouldn’t talk that way,’” concludes Timothy Keller. “But that was a different situation… It was life-and-death.”

The tension of orthodoxy and ecumenicism is the foundation for understanding how the Reformation affects faith today. In an article on the tendency to overuse the label “heretic,” Episcopal Priest Justin Holcomb observes, “We may be tempted to think that since theology so easily divides, we are better off simply agreeing to disagree.”
We must remember that the sum of what Christians should believe is not identical to the essentials we must believe for salvation. We need to leave room for believers to grow in their understanding of the faith. We believe in justification by faith in Christ, not justification by accuracy of doctrine. We are saved by grace, not by intellectual precision. — Justin Holcomb

This doesn’t mean the abandonment of disciplined and thoughtful faith, however. Holcomb reminds, “In order to love God aright, and to be assured of the salvation he offers, we must know who God is and what he has done for us in and through Jesus Christ.”

Modern believers won’t handle the relationship between the Protestant and Catholic Churches the same (even Dr. Keller admits, “I don’t own all that rhetoric”), but we can grow in our understanding of the gospel through the words of the Reformers.
The reason we believe the Reformation is so important is because we think they did get the Bible right. You had a massive movement in which people sought to look at Scripture and find out what the biblical gospel truly was. — Timothy Keller
Integrating the gospel-centrality of the Reformation with a humble and winsome unity with Christians from various theological backgrounds is critical today. And there may be greater opportunity as Protestant support of the Pope soars. For his part, Pope Francis has extended an olive branch. In a letter to Evangelicals and Catholics in Chicago the Pope writes:

We know that the visible unity of the Church is the work and gift of the Holy Spirit, who will bring it about in His time… The division among Christians is the fruit of our sin, and it is a scandal and our greatest impediment for the mission for which the Lord has called us: announcing the Good News of the Gospel.

Today, the blood of the many Christians slaughtered in diverse parts of the world cries out to heaven. The one that persecutes does not make a mistake, he doesn’t ask if they are Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox… they are Christians, followers of Jesus Christ, and that is enough. This blood challenges us: Do we have the right to make our divisions a priority while the blood of our brothers is shed for the testimony of Jesus Christ?

This is the moment of reconciliation, to accept “the unity in reconciled diversity,” an expression of Oscar Cullman. We know very well what divides us, let us be more strengthened in what unites us: the common faith in Jesus Christ as the only Lord and Savior, the Word of God, and Baptism. — Pope Francis

Luther’s intention wasn’t division, but renewal. The heart of the Reformation is the recovery of the gospel, inside the Church, for the good of the world. The Reformers teach us that waywardness in the Church — whether theological heresy or structural division — is overcome by the work of Christ, and that by joining this work we plant seeds of faith for future generations.

Today’s Reading
2 Kings 11-12 (Listen – 7:38 )
2 Timothy 2 (Listen – 3:17)

This Weekend’s Readings
2 Kings 13 (Listen – 4:33) 2 Timothy 3 (Listen – 2:21)
2 Kings 14 (Listen – 5:06) 2 Timothy 4 (Listen – 2:48)

The Weekend Reading List

How to be Filled with the Spirit :: Throwback Thursday

  • October 29, 2015
  • /
  • Park Forum
2 Timothy 7, 14

For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control… By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you.

By Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981)

Any holiness teaching or any doctrine of sanctification which begins by saying, ‘Now about getting rid of that particular sin of yours,’ is in itself starting in the wrong way. The scriptural method is positive; the way to deal with these things is to be filled with the Spirit.

The scriptural way of dealing with them is to clarify our thinking about these various sins, and it says: Can you not see that those things are incompatible with this great truth? If you want to avoid the pestilences and diseases that arise out of the swamps down in the valleys, the best thing to do is to walk to the top of the mountain.

Far too often, it seems to me, we tend to think of being filled with the Spirit in mechanical terms. The idea seems to be conjured up in our minds of an empty vessel and of something being poured into it. But clearly that must be wrong, because the Holy Spirit is not an influence, nor a power. We must not think of him in terms of electricity or of steam, for the Holy Spirit is a Person; he is described everywhere in the Scriptures in a personal manner. So when we think of being filled with the Spirit what we really mean is that the blessed Person of the Holy Spirit is controlling us, dominating and influencing us.

We often speak about being ‘full of life’. Or we say of certain people that at the moment they are really full of something. When a man becomes interested in some special person he is absolutely full of that person. It does not mean that the person is poured into him, but it does mean that the person is controlling his thoughts, his desires, and his activities, dominating the whole of his life and especially his thoughts. He is thus under the influence of and is being mastered by that person.

Most of the excesses and errors into which people have fallen with regard to this doctrine of being filled with the Spirit are almost invariably due to the fact that they think of the Spirit as some force or power that can be injected or transfused into us, instead of thinking of him in terms of this relationship to the Person who has been given to us and who dwells with us.

*Excerpt from “Growing in the Spirit.” Republished in The Assurance Of Our Salvation: Exploring The Depth Of Jesus’ Prayer For His Own: Studies In John 17, Crossway Books, 2015.

Today’s Reading
2 Kings 10 (Listen – 6:30)
2 Timothy 1 (Listen – 2:37)

Infinite Happiness

  • October 28, 2015
  • /
  • Park Forum
1 Timothy 6.17

As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.

*Editor’s Note: Today we hear the voice of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. (The Park Forum’s Scripture reading plan is based off his design.) In this sermon from 1848, M’Cheyne affirms our life in Christ as much as he rebukes our love for the world.

By Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813-1843)

We know very little of God; but we know that he is infinitely happy. You cannot add to his happiness, nor take from it. The Bible shows that his happiness mainly consists in giving, not in receiving:
  1. His giving food to all creatures is very wonderful — not one sparrow is forgotten before God.
  2. He gives to the wicked: “He makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and unjust.” Just think for a moment how many thousands God feeds every day who blaspheme his name, and profane his Sabbaths.
  3. But, most of all, he gave his own Son. Although he was emptying his own bosom, yet he would not keep back the gift.

Now, some of you pray night and day to be made like God: If you will be like him, be like him in giving. It is God’s chief happiness, be like him in it. [And yet, you will object:]

My money is my own.

Christ might have said, My blood is my own, my life is my own; no man forces it from me: then where should we have been?

Would you have me give to wicked people, who will go and abuse it?

Christ might have said the same, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet; that most would despise it; that many would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave his own blood.

God gives to wicked people, who go and abuse it; yet that does not diminish his happiness. God makes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and pours down rain on the just and on the unjust.

Oh, my dear Christians! if you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and the poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy, and so will you be. It is not your money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own word: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

*Abridged and language updated from Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s sermon, More Blessed To Give Than To Receive.

Today’s Reading
2 Kings 9 (Listen – 6:32)
1 Timothy 6 (Listen – 3:16)