Are You Giving them God?

Are You Giving them God?

By Jay Wegter

What does it mean to give them God? There is a trend in preaching today to set forth principles and to flood people with hyper-grace comfort, security, and assurances. What tends to be neglected is the setting forth of God himself. When was the last time you heard a sermon on the majesty of God and his perfections? It seems that countless pastors have a knew jerk reaction so their default mode is preaching principles. May I suggest that it is harder to preach God than it is principles. In fact, we are asking more of our parishioners when we preach God than when we preach principles or we asking them to think very deeply about the Godhead. We do not approach the subject of God as a set of propositions. For God is made known by how and why he saves. Our salvation is God’s condescension, for he unilaterally makes a covenant with us placing certain claims upon himself. He binds himself to his covenant people in such a way that he commits to harness his own attributes making the exercise of them predictable. This is the manner in which we assures his faithfulness and trustworthiness. The psalmists had an intimate understanding of this, for their worship and meditations focus on personalizing God’s character and attributes. The outcome is that they rest upon God as their rock, bulwark, and refuge. But God harnessing his own attributes in the covenant does not mean he is merely putting himself at man’s disposal. What it does mean is that God is revealing his perfections in what he has decreed in redemptive history and carrying out in divine providence. But many pulpits which are regarded as expository seem to be drawn to endless principalizing of every text. May I suggest, it is possible to give out principles and not the knowledge of God. We can’t see the forest for the trees if we are not exalting God as the hero of every text but that is where the work is involved, how is God exalted in a particular text. If we are merely asking our people to trust a principle and not the person of God himself, we should not be surprised if Christianity becomes formal and mechanistic. God’s works and ways and wisdom and wonders must be set forth so that they captivate our listeners. When our hearers are left with principles only, we may find we have increased their doubts. On the outside they may be saying as they shake our hands, “great sermon pastor.” But on the inside, we have left them with a disturbing question, “In the face of my deplorable corruptions and my fickle truant heart, what is it about our perfect, holy, majestic God that makes him so trustworthy toward an underserving sinner like myself?” I dare say, if you have only preached principles you have not answered that question. The answer to that question is multifold. It is God’s grand purpose to reveal himself in the covenants he makes in redemptive history. This is where our overly principilized approach to the text smashes us against a wall of non-perception. For we do not associate his commitment to his name with his daily care of us. We do not join in our thinking and affections that God has purposed that in Christ he will accomplish together his own glory and our highest good. We have a very difficult time dwelling on that link, between his zeal for his name and his free bestowal of grace, love, and hope. God gives the knowledge of himself in giving us the knowledge of himself in Christ. Pastor is that where your soul feeds? Or are you managing a host of biblical principles and making them march in single file from your pulpit at your command. Principilizing is very reductionistic, it does not give God to your listeners. Principalizing sows to our religious flesh, which is all to eager to commodify the benefits of salvation. By commodify, I mean this, the penitent comes away from a principalized message with the following sentiment, I have cooperated with a set of principles which are guaranteed to produce a reliable set of benefits. Where then are the experiences of God described in the Psalms. His comforting presence, exceeding joy, spontaneous worship, panting after him in spiritual hunger, contrition, devastation, bliss, and ecstasy. Principles alone can leave us with the mechanistic, the detached, and the formal. A gentleman I have been discipling over this last year, seems to be measuring the index of his spirituality by keeping his heart in a place of groveling. I do appreciate his effort at humility, for he is very expressive of that mindset which says, why would God save a wretch like me. But what seems to be missing or lacking is the kind of adoration and spontaneous worship that produces self-forgetfulness. Our adoration of God ought never to be an exercise in the familiar. God’s moral majesty will always slay us with awe. For God’s transcendent holiness is coextensive with the infinitude of his other attributes. Thus the greatest question implied is, “How can the defiled creature become right with God’s righteousness?” The answer is not solely something that squares with our cognition for the mystery of godliness and the mystery of his predestinating grace will of necessity baffle us. It does not square with any earthly experience. Our salvation is the result of this. God makes a unilateral covenant in which and by which his own glory and excellence form gospel promises which showcase and exhibit this glory and excellence. We can never outgrow this incredible formula, namely, that God wills to be known by the satisfaction of his unchanging standard of righteousness through the substitute he appoints that this decree is incredibly personal. For the story of our redemption features the voluntarism and infinite love of the substitute. We cannot say the substitutes love for his bride is greater than his love for his father. For in his infinite love for his father and his bride he accomplishes both the glory of the Godhead and the salvation of the church. I fear that many pulpits have isolated the person and work of Christ from this overarching purpose of the Godhead. This has an effect of giving us a sentimental Jesus, who evokes more sympathy than wonder and awe. Pastor’s need to develop the infinite merits of Christ and as Jonathan Edwards has said, “The glory of Christ is tied to the equipment he earned in order to save.” This bothers people because it makes it sound like Jesus is mutable and had to earn something in order to be a Savior. But it is vastly shortsighted to suggest that Christ was God’s lamb who takes away the sin of the world apart from being sacrificed. When you read the lyrics of Jesu- Joy of Man’s Desiring, God’s purpose and Christ humility are beautifully joined. Pastors, are we preaching manageable truth? There are countless aspects of God which are incomprehensible. That means that an encounter with God’s self-revelation in scripture will affect us in the following ways. At times we will be baffled, staggered, speechless, at a loss for words, no longer glib and garrulous. Is there a single thing in your sermon like this? Or is your sermon all managing and no marveling? Because preachers are not giving their congregations God himself, the fear of God is at an all time low. There is no shuddering and quaking over the fact that God is like a furnace who will consume everything that is not like him in holiness. Have you proclaimed what it is about God that inspires reverential fear and awe? Psychology with its rank humanism has given us a God concept stripped of anything that would unnerve our fragile psyches. So how does this covenantal glory transform those who behold it? If God’s salvation plan is God giving us himself so that the greatest gift of the gospel is God, then we better give them God when we preach. The fall of Lucifer and the fall of our first parents has not caused God to desist from his original purpose. He is still making men and women in his image by restoring them to his own image through Christ.

Thoughts from Psalm 19: There is Trauma in Praying the

Way the Psalmist Prays

Why does presumptuous sin lead to great transgression? Well the Hebrew word for presumption in psalm 19 means insolence. It means to thumb your nose at God thinking you can escape consequences in his moral government. And as a Galatians 6 would say, it is a failed attempt to mock God. God’s moral government in the grand demonstration described in Romans 9 go together, hand-in hand. Far from being able to use God, God uses people for his holy ends in the grand demonstration. The sheer weight and gravitas of being his image bearer is stunning. For every individual will be a vessel of wrath or a vessel of mercy; a perpetual object lesson to the rational watching universe. No wonder David prays in Psalm 19, Lord acquit me of hidden faults. The Psalmist is continually conscious of God’s moral government therefore he makes God’s attributes as personal as possible. Yes, God is dealing with me in the safety of a covenant but I am relating to one who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. These omni-attributes mean that God is my environment. I am to live a Godward life in which I share my thought life with the Father. Do we fear God because he has a divine mallet of condemnation? May I suggest that for believers our fear of God ought to be more closely tied to his grand demonstration, which is a plot to display his moral majesty in both justice and mercy. No creature can or will complain. The weight of carrying the image of God means that every person’s creational identity is to reflect their maker. Fallen man does not contemplate what he owes God by virtue of being God’s image.

The Romans 9 Reset

In a world of men deluded by their imagined sovereignty God says, “I alone am sovereign.” (John 1,3,6, & 17, Corinthians 1, Romans 9). There is no seeing grace apart from divine sovereignty. Men are self-deceived in their imagined autonomy, thinking they can placate God and protect themselves from him. They imagine that their status before God is self-directed and self-determined. Thus, sovereign grace is the most humbling doctrine in the bible. It brings low because it states that God makes distinctions out of his own good pleasure. As the lone sovereign, he is the lone distinction maker. Therefore, what distinguishes you from your reprobate neighbor must be credited to sovereign pity alone. His gracious choice is designed to eliminate all boasting. We ought to frequently read Romans 9 with the intent of having our perspective reset. As it says in Proverbs, “though a fool is ground in a mortar and pestle, his folly will not depart from him.” Our folly is that the autonomy lie is wedded to our flesh. Prayer and the gospel make God big and people small. The themes of Romans 9 have the power to reset our thinking. Those themes are: God’s purpose is realized by election, God the potter has the absolute right to select his objects of mercy and compassion, the cause of grace is not due to man’s willing or running but to God who has mercy, God recognizes no merit on earth for reward, God uses people, people do not use God, as the sovereign potter he has the right to harden whom he desires and have mercy on whom he desires, He has the absolute right over the clay to make vessels of honor or to make vessels of dishonor from the same lump, his intent is to pour out the riches of mercy on vessels of his glory and pour out his wrath upon vessels of dishonor, He will call every elect vessel through faith. We desperately need a regular Romans 9 reset because public education, the media, entertainment, culture, politics, and psychology all operate with the full assumption that we live in a man centered world in which humanism is normalized. The message of God’s sovereignty crushes man’s trust in his own righteousness, in his own will, and his imagined autonomy. This brings a man so low that his is finally made to see that he desperately needs the exercise of God’s sovereign pity. If that truth were not enough to baffle us and bring us low, the parallel truth is that God never violates the will of the creature, whether the Pharaoh of Egypt or Saul of Tarsus. God’s intent according to 1 Corinthians 1-3 is to publicly destroy all human wisdom. I picture God lowering the cross onto this planet like an immense wedge of carbon steel. Every time it touches human wisdom it reduces it to dust and rubble. God has two great ways of destroying carnal wisdom. God’s wisdom has two parts 1) Christ himself and 2) Him crucified. God’s wisdom is not esteemed by men as wise or strong, yet it is cherished as the wisdom of God and the power of God by those who are being saved. The first point of God’s wisdom is the mystery of Christ himself, the hypostatic union. God’s infinite wisdom is shown in his giving of Christ. The glory of our Savior is seen in his fittedness to be our perfect substitute (Hebrews 7). That the God man should be the propitiatory sacrifice in order to be the God approved righteousness and covenant of his people, is not comprehendible to the natural mind. No person who clings to a single speck of self-righteousness has ever really understood the 2 aspects of God’s wisdom. For the message of the cross, believed and applied, completely destroys a legal spirit. Another way which God destroys carnal pride is by choosing people that are not esteemed as wise or noble. God establishes his purpose by choosing the foolish, the unwise, the base, and the poor born and he does this to accomplish his purpose of what the world regards as wise and mighty. This is astounding, God seeks to shame what the world esteems. 1 Corinthians 1 terminates with this statement, “That by his doing you are in Christ Jesus, not by your doing.” God’s wisdom is Christ and him crucified and his distinguishing, redeeming love of his elect. God is eliminating the possibility of even one instance of boasting when it comes to salvation. His purpose is that our faith may rest in divine wisdom and not in the wisdom of men (1 Corinthians 2). Christ and him crucified is where our faith should rest. This object of divine wisdom, Christ and Him crucified is where our knowledge of God must reside. For the giving of Christ to those who are elected unconditionally, the knowledge of which gives us God himself. But further, how does the proclamation of this message of Christ and him crucified and sovereign grace, how does that give us God?

When we consider what it is about God that moves us to admiration and worship and awe, it is not the mere academic study of his attributes. Though there is rich spiritual food in studying God’s character and perfections (see Charnock), if we merely study God’s attributes as an academic exercise, we might find ourselves admiring but not exulting. For God’s attributes are showcased and exhibited in their exercise as God plans and obtains our salvation. This is featured up close in 2 peter 1:2-4. God’s own glory and excellence are harnessed and then cast into glorious and magnificent gospel promises. These promises make us partakers of the divine nature and escapees of the corruption that is in the world by lust. So how does God’s wisdom in Christ and him crucified give us God? We are to view God’s attributes from the vantage point of union with Christ, for our Savoir is both our observatory and the object of beholding. When the eyes of my heart focus on him by faith I understand that he restores everything I lost in Adam and infinitely more. God in giving his Son to those who were dead in sin receive the gift of God himself. Now back to how we are to think upon his attributes, consider that at the cross the full spectrum of God’s attributes were put on display. Christ being bent in agony on Calvary’s cross was like a crystal prism bending light to enable us to see all of the colors of the rainbow. All of God’s attributes were put on display in our salvation. Think of it, our salvation includes the glory we will gain in Christ at our glorification. Our cleansing, righteousness, sonship, justification, all of these wonderful salvific blessings are traceable to God making us the objects of his attributes exercise. Therefore, the question, “what is God like?” Must be joined to how he saves. What is there that rocks me, staggers me, fills me with wonder, love and praise, reverential fear and adoration? The answer is the fact that he should make his glorious self-revelation take place through the manifestation of his attributes in our salvation. The true believer is a beholder and a possessor both. The true believer can say, “I will never be able to exhaust all that God is toward me in Christ.” The world sees no value in the dereliction of the son of God. They see no wisdom there. But this is wisdom that towers over the human intellect. For the sinner cannot be beautiful to a holy God but by the cross. And the holy God cannot be beautiful to the sinner but by the cross. There is no endless life but for those who are right with God’s righteousness. Believers are united to Christ who is their life (Col 3). Just a word again about God’s non-violation of the human will. This is a stunning truth both of the reprobate and the believer. Though the sinner is in a state of spiritual deadness and depravity and has total spiritual inability, his will of desire is not violated by God. This begs the question, “What is the created purpose for the image of God?” Is there an immense conjunction between the image of God and salvation and reprobation? (JRW will develop later). If you can be saved by trusting human wisdom, then it would primarily be the wise who would be saved. Preachers of the first and second great awakenings, new how to preach total depravity, original sin, the bondage of the will, and urgency of salvation. They knew how to shine an exposing light on the chains that held the unregenerate sinner fast. They could preach the dire urgency of salvation without preaching human ability. They never flattered sinners. They actually believed that the new birth was sovereignly and monergisticly disposed. These doctrines are certainly a paradox when considered together. In theology, we refer to this as an antinomy. But God does not violate a man’s will even when he grants the new birth. On judgment day it will be publicly revealed that those who love and desire Christ belong to him and will be with him forever. But it will also be revealed that those who do not desire Christ will have a Christless eternity. The challenge of preaching this way today is opposed by man centered psychology and the enthronement of reason. We have lost the ability and the desire to preach the antimony. We have refused to take pages from Moses’ sermons in which through him God commands his hearers to circumcise their own hearts. How is a command like this to be perceived it we have removed the antimony? If we have dismissed the antimony, then men will imagine that they can do what only God can do. And yet what Moses commands, something that is humanly impossible, is consistent with Jeremiah’s assessment that a leopard cannot change his spots. Jeremiah goes on to say that your sins are indelibly written on your heart by an iron stylus containing a diamond point. Your sins are more dear to you than your own children. But today’s preachers see the antimony as counterproductive as a discouragement to sinners, even an insult to them. Why would God command what is beyond our power and capacity? That would be foolish and silly. But as packer points out in his introduction to Owen’s Death of Death the sinner, hearing about his inability, is actually advantageous to his conviction of sin and thus to his awakening by the spirit (example of playing poker in a burning warehouse). Preaching the antinomy has been used throughout church history to produce the desperation factor for as long as sinners think they possess the golden key to their salvation resting in their pants pocket, they will presume that salvation is within their own power. When the spirit is going to save someone, he introduces true desperation so that the cry for mercy is not only the cry for compassion and pity but also is the cry for the ability to believe and repent. George Whitefield preached what we fear to preach today that the gospel is dead apart from the Holy Spirit. The Gospel is good news because of the Holy Spirit, it is the power of God because of the Spirit because the gospel comes bringing with it the ability to comply with what it demands. It has the power to grant faith and repentance and to resurrect the dead sinner from his tomb of total depravity that resurrection finding its source in Christ’s resurrection. How salvation begins sets the believer on a path in which he can consciously and rationally say, no good thing dwells in my flesh (2 Cor 3), not I but Christ (Gal 2:20), And Christ also said apart from me you can do nothing (John15). So how God saves puts us on a path of how we are to walk (Col 1).