Knox
Church
Summer Fellowship 2009
“Seeing
Ourselves as God Sees Us: Eternally Loved”
Romans
8:29-39
I:
-- “For
I am sure that nothing, nothing seen or unseen in the entire creation,
will ever be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus
our Lord.”
Nothing can separate us from God’s love?
Much seems to. Much
intends to. And if we have
ever ministered to people whose faith once flamed and has since
flickered out, people whose faith catastrophe or torment or bewilderment
has extinguished, we shall say that much appears to separate us from
God’s love and seems to succeed in separating us from God’s love.
In the course of my work as a pastor in
Mississauga
I went to the church on a Saturday afternoon to conduct a wedding.
After the wedding I called on a church-member who was dying of
AIDS. He was haemophiliac.
He needed thirteen pints of transfused blood per month.
He had acquired HIV-AIDS through the ‘tainted blood scandal’
involving the Canadian Red Cross. (You
will recall that the Red Cross collected and passed on blood from people
whose sexual history should have disqualified them, as even a child
knows, from donating blood.) While
I was visiting this man and his wife, Maureen phoned to tell me that
Toronto General
Hospital
was trying to contact me. I
phoned TGH, was told what I needed to know, and immediately drove
downtown. There I found a
23-year old woman, mother of two children, who in her suicidal
desperation had drunk as much bleach as she could get down.
When I saw her (specifically her colour) I knew she was dead.
Her chest was rising and falling, to be sure, since she was wired
up to everything that could make her seem alive.
I prayed for her and I prayed with her family, gathered around
the bed. (If you are
wondering what I was doing, praying for someone I already knew to be
dead, we can sort it out later.) As
soon as I said “Amen” the nurse turned off the apparatus.
The oscilloscope went flat. Now
everyone knew she was dead.
Sally was the dead 23-year old.
Sally’s mother had been raised in one of the poorest areas of
England
. Sally’s mother had
worked exceedingly hard at the most menial, low-paying jobs since
immigrating to
Canada
. She didn’t have a spare
dime. Now she was left with
having to care for her dead daughter’s two children.
Sally’s husband? He
was an improvident alcoholic who had distressed Sally and who would soon
cause more trouble for the heartbroken family.
A few weeks later, and it’s Saturday afternoon again in
Mississauga
; another wedding. Ten
minutes before the wedding commences (I’m about to solemnize the
marriage of the Board Chairman’s daughter) the phone in my study
rings. I’m told that a
couple I married five years ago is dead, together with their two-year
old son. Could I go to the
family’s home right away? I
told the caller I’d be over as soon as possible.
I stepped into the sanctuary and married the couple in front of
me wearing my best wedding smile throughout the service.
(You wouldn’t want me to rain on your daughter’s parade,
would you?) Then I went to
the home that death had harassed.
Five years earlier I had married this couple, both of them
schoolteachers. Recently the
husband had become depressed. He
was admitted to the psychiatric ward of
Etobicoke General
Hospital
. On this Saturday afternoon
he had walked out of the hospital, gone home, picked up an axe and
decapitated his two-year old son in front of the boy’s mother.
Then he had decapitated his wife.
Finally he had hanged himself in the basement.
The dead mother’s parents, both 65 now, were left caring for
their two-year old grandson and his dog.
In the aftermath of all of this I ministered to the grandparents
as they were faithful members of my congregation.
One Sunday morning, ten minutes before the service, the
grandfather knocked on my study door.
I don’t like being interrupted ten minutes before worship,
since leading worship and preaching are awesome matters and I’m
getting my head and heart around what I must do.
Still, I couldn’t refuse to speak with this man in his torment.
And what was on his mind, so very important that it couldn’t
wait until after the service? It
was the dog’s bowel movements. At
one time they had been thus and so, but now….
Some of you are fond of dogs.
I’m not. I’m not
eager to talk about their bowel movements – ten minutes before I
conduct worship and preach.
I knew that what had brought his stammering fellow to my door
wasn’t the dog’s bowel movements.
It was his anguish, an anguish that had suspended his judgement.
He was with me because he couldn’t not be there – and I knew
it. I spoke with him, prayed
with him, and together we went into the sanctuary to worship.
Six months later he came to see me again.
He had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
I’m not suggesting that every Saturday afternoon wedding
concludes like the two I’ve mentioned.
But I do agree with Dr Leslie Weatherhead, notable British
Methodist preacher and sophisticated psychologist.
In one of his books Weatherhead wrote, “If you were aware of
the suffering found in the smallest hamlet in
England
, the smallest, you wouldn’t sleep at night.”
I can’t speak for you, but my exposure to people’s suffering
has found me agreeing with Martin Luther.
Luther maintained that if faith is to thrive we have to shut our
eyes and open our ears. We
must open our ears because the gospel is heard, heard with our ears and
heard in our hearts. We must
close our eyes, on the other hand, because what we see whenever we look
out on world-occurrence; what we see contradicts the gospel.
The gospel (heard) assures us that God loves us so very much he
couldn’t love us more. World-occurrence
(seen) shows us that God doesn’t love us at all.
Please don’t think that the incidents from my pastoral ministry
that I’ve laid before you tonight are rare.
If you wanted, I could stand here all night and relate stories
that would leave you aghast.
So what do you think? Does
God love us? Is his love
strong enough, and his love’s grip on us firm enough, that nothing
will ever be able to separate us from an oceanic love vouchsafed to us
in Christ Jesus our Lord?
Tonight my heart resonates with Paul’s.
Like him I am persuaded that nothing can separate us from God’s
love. And like him I have
every confidence in what I hear (the gospel) even as I am horrified at
what I see.
II:
-- At
the same time Paul is aware that much in life aims at separating us from
God’s love and may seem to have separated us.
One such thing is tribulation.
According to scripture tribulation or affliction isn’t the same
as suffering-in-general. Suffering-in-general
is what comes upon us because we are finite, frail, fragile creatures
living in a turbulent world. Disease
victimizes us. Infirmity
threatens us. Pain warps us. In
all such cases scripture mandates us to seek relief.
Throughout his earthly ministry Jesus consistently relieved
suffering.
Tribulation, affliction, however, is different.
Tribulation is pain visited on us on account of our discipleship.
It’s pain visited on us account of our love for Jesus and our
loyalty to him. In short,
tribulation is pain arising from our crossbearing, which crossbearing,
be it noted, Jesus appoints us to and will not relieve us of until we
are in glory. Now we can
always rid ourselves of our tribulation; all we need do is apostatise.
All we need do is renounce faith in Jesus Christ, strangle our
love for him, withdraw the loyalty to him by which we have been publicly
identified. To rid ourselves
of the pain of tribulation all we need do is deny our Lord and refuse to
be identified with him. As
soon as we do this the world will leave us alone.
Since scripture abhors apostasy, however, the Christian response
to tribulation is steadfastness.
Let me say it again: the Christian response to everyday suffering
is to seek relief; the Christian response to tribulation is
steadfastness, since we can’t be rid of it unless we rid ourselves of
our Lord.
Then will the torment of tribulation drive a wedge between us and
God’s love? We should ask
those who have been tormented on account of their love for their Lord.
Ian Rennie, former minister in this congregation and my first
academic dean at Tyndale Seminary; Ian Rennie quietly pointed out to me
one day that for the last 25 years of his life there was a price on
Martin Luther’s head. Anyone
at all could have made himself wealthy by killing the man.
No one in the history of the church, Rennie insisted, had lived
the truth of Ephesians 6:12 as Luther had lived the truth of this verse:
“For we are contending not against flesh and blood but against the
principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this
present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness….”
And amidst it all; on days that were dark, other days darker, and
some days indescribable; on all such days Luther stood steadfast.
And then I think of Edmund Campion, Jesuit martyr in Elizabethan
England. On the morning of
his execution his detractors mocked him on account of his belief in
transubstantiation, the notion that Jesus Christ himself, body and
blood, is in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine.
“How can Christ be exalted in heaven,” his detractors mocked,
“and be in the bread and wine at the same time?”
“Heaven is Christ’s palace”, Campion informed his accusers,
“and you have made it his prison.”
(Did it ever occur to his accusers that if Christ couldn’t be
in heaven and in the elements simultaneously then neither could Christ
be in heaven in their hearts simultaneously?)
Campion, like Luther before him, died proving that tribulation cannot
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Then Paul speaks of famine and nakedness. Famine
is lethal lack of provision inwardly; nakedness (meaning death by
exposure) is lethal lack of provision outwardly.
But didn’t Jesus promise his followers adequate food and
clothing? In the Sermon on
the Mount Jesus said his followers won’t lack adequate food and
clothing just because their Father knows what they need before they even
ask him. Paul is saying here
we can prioritize and
privilege God’s kingdom and righteousness and still
lack what we need. If famine
and nakedness overtake us (make no mistake; they have overtaken
millions), has a wedge been driven between us and God’s love, and
driven twice over, since now we both lack what was promised and have
every reason to be anxious?
I have never been hungry in my life, hungry through having
nothing to eat day after day. But
I’m told that starvation is an exceedingly painful way to die.
When Maureen and I spent a month touring
Ireland
(Maureen is descended from Protestants in the north,
Belfast
; I’m descended from Catholics in the south, Cork) we drove to
Stroketown one Sunday morning. We
went to church there (and, I must add, were startled to hear the local
priest welcome us to the Lord’s Table.)
After the service we visited the famine museum in Stroketown.
We staggered from exhibit to exhibit.
The Irish people who were living in ditches during the famine of
the mid-1800s and who hadn’t been allowed to send their children to
school; those people attempted to survive by eating grass.
Humans, however, can’t digest grass; grass makes us vomit.
They kept trying, their mouths ringed green, only to hasten their
death as their grass-induced vomiting weakened them still faster.
What made the famine all the more horrible was this: the famine
victims had to stand by helplessly and watch their social superiors eat
sumptuously. While the poor
Irish starved by the million (only one crop was affected, potatoes),
rich English landowners living in
Ireland
exported wagonload after wagonload of food to
England
and the continent. Weakened
Irish folk had to languish in roadside ditches while overfilled wagons
rumbled past them to feed wealthy people who were already overfed.
Could any cruelty be crueler?
Next Paul speaks of peril and sword.
To speak of peril is to say that life is shot through with
danger; life abounds in danger. There
is the danger that arises from sheer accidentality. When
Jesus spoke of the tower in Siloam that collapsed and killed a dozen men
he was speaking of a construction mishap, accidentality that is no less
perilous for being unintentional.
And sword? The
apostle means warfare. Once
again I’m surprised when my students tell me how glad they are that
they didn’t live in the Middle Ages.
During the Middle Ages, everyone knows, people were mean to each
other: they disembowelled each other with swords; they ‘brained’
each other with battleaxes. They
burned people at the stake. They
dismembered them on the rack. Weren’t
people barbaric during the Middle Ages?
Alas, the students appear to be ignorant of history subsequent to
the Middle Ages. All of my
students were born in the 20th Century, and they appear to be
wholly ignorant of that century. Tell
me: do you think
Auschwitz
was a human improvement on swordfighting?
When atomic bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki
human beings were vapourized alive, while survivors were condemned to
lethal, lingering agony.
Does the Tyndale Seminary student really think that nerve gas is
a humanitarian advance on spear-chucking?
All the major nations of the world have stockpiled nerve gas.
One lungful of it and every muscle in the body contracts.
Immediately there is intense sweating, blindness, uncontrollable
defecation and vomiting, convulsions, paralysis, and inability to
breathe. In the early 1980s
a whiff – only a whiff – of nerve gas escaped in
Colorado
. Two thousand sheep
perished on the spot, having undergone everything I’ve just mentioned.
Can nerve gas, nuclear explosion, you name it – can any one of
these, or all of these together, separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord?
Neither can “life or death”, Paul announces next.
Death we’ve already said enough about.
Life? How could life,
life at full tide, ever threaten to separate us, ever separate our faith
in such love? Let me ask you
a question. How many
marriages do you think I’ve seen thrive when a couple was financially
challenged, only to fail when the same couple was financially flush?
How many people have you seen appear to possess ironfast faith
when they were needy for any reason only to jettison such ‘faith’
when they were no longer needy? We
should admit that life at its best is no less a spiritual threat than
death at its worst.
Finally Paul speaks of principalities, powers, angels, things
present, things to come, height and depth.
He has in mind cosmic powers; any and all cosmic powers, some of
which we can identify and some of which we never shall.
Paul’s point is this: regardless of the nature, scope and
virulence of cosmic forces, no one of them, nor all of them together,
will ever be able to separate Christ’s people from Christ’s love.
III:
-- What
reason does Paul have for his exuberant exclamation?
What’s the ground of his impregnable confidence?
His ground or reason is twofold; namely, what God has done for us
in Jesus Christ, and what God is doing in us through the Holy Spirit.
What God has done for us in Christ is the ‘outer’ foundation
of his confidence; what God is now doing in us is its ‘inner’
ground.
Now every Christian is aware that the work of Christ for us and
the work of the Spirit within us are always to be distinguished but
must never be separated. Therefore
the one ground of Paul’s confidence is the one work of God in its
twofold nature as outer and inner.
Let’s look first at the outer aspect of Paul’s confidence.
In this regard the apostle puts five unanswerable questions to
us.
Question
#1:
“Since God is for us, who can be against us?”
Plainly, nothing and no one can be against us finally,
conclusively, effectively, because nothing and no one is going to
overturn the Creator himself.
If Paul had simply said, “Who or what can be against us?”
we’d be ready with a hundred replies: famine, peril, sword, disease,
death, betrayal, treachery, accident.
If we thought a minute longer we’d also mention intra-psychic
booby traps, those psychological fissures and deformities that distress
us and pain others. If the
apostle had simply said, “Who or what can be against us?”, and we
thought two minutes longer, we’d mention sin, the old man/woman who
continues to haunt us, even Satan himself.
Not only can Satan be against us; he is; he is by nature, and
therefore is without let-up.
Paul, however, doesn’t ask, “Who is against us?”
He asks, rather “Since God, the living, lordly sovereign
creator of heaven and earth; since God is for us, who or what could ever
rival him or threaten us?” Nothing,
obviously.
Question
#2:
“Since God didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us
all, won’t God also give us all things with him?”
Note that Paul hasn’t simply asked, “Won’t God give us
everything (i.e., everything we need)?”
If he had asked that, I at least would be ready with my retort:
“I’ve seen countless people live and die who appeared not to be
given everything they need.”
The apostle’s question, however, is more profound than this.
“Since God didn’t stop short of giving up his Son, would he
ever stop short of giving us what we need to be his people, the apple of
his eye?”
There’s an allusion here to Abraham of old; Abraham and Isaac;
Abraham and Isaac trudging with leaden foot and breaking heart up
Mt.
Moriah
. Abraham’s faith is to be
tested by the summons to offer up Isaac, his long-awaited son, his only
son, only son, (the text in
Genesis drives home to us.) And
then, when obedient Abraham raises the knife above Isaac, a ram appears
and Abraham’s son is spared.
Does God love you and me less than Abraham loved Isaac?
He loves us more. After
all, when God’s love for us met our profoundest need God’s
long-awaited Son, his only Son, wasn’t spared but rather was given up for us all.
Abraham’s love for Isaac was ultimately spared the most
terrible heartbreak. God’s
love for you and me didn’t spare God heartbreak.
Instead God loves you and me at the price of incomprehensible
anguish.
Question
#3:
“Since it is God who justifies us, who is going to accuse
us?” Justification is one
of Paul’s favourite descriptions of God’s people.
Here’s what he has in mind.
You and I are sinners. We
are covenant-breakers. We
repeatedly, characteristically, break our promise to God that we are
going to live as his people. Instead
we live as if we were sons and daughters of another parent, the devil.
In his mercy God has given us Jesus of Nazareth, the covenant-keeper. Jesus
of Nazareth is the only instance anywhere in the world of a human being
who keeps humankind’s covenant with the Father.
As you and I cling by faith to Jesus Christ, our faith binds us
to him. In fact our faith
binds us so very closely to him that we are identified with him.
Identified as we are with him, when the Father now looks upon
that Son with whom he is ever pleased, he sees you and me included in
the Son. When the Father
looks upon the Son with whom he is pleased he looks upon you and me as
those with whom he is now pleased too.
Humans who are wrongly related to God and chargeable as such;
humans wrongly related to God who now cling to Christ in faith are
deemed rightly related to God and therefore are beyond accusation.
Formerly capsized in our relationship to God, in Christ we are
turned right side up, ‘rightwised’, rightly related to God.
God now declares us righteous in Christ; we are now
‘justified’ and can’t be charged.
Question
#4:
“Since Christ died, was raised, sits at the right hand of the
Father, and now intercedes for us, who is going to condemn us?”
Will Christ condemn us? He
went to hell and back for us. His
ongoing intercession for us is effectual.
He pleads on our behalf the ongoing efficacy of his atoning,
pardoning sacrifice. Since
the efficacy of his sacrifice he pleads effectually, nothing and no one
can negate his forgiveness and find us condemned.
Question
#5:
“Then who shall separate us from the love of God in Christ
Jesus our Lord?” We’ve
already answered this question.
In these five unanswerable questions we have dealt with the outer
aspect of Paul’s confidence. “Since…,
since…, since…, since…therefore no one can be effectively against
us; no will deprive us all that we need to be God’s people; no one can
lay a charge against us, and no one will condemn us.
We must look now at the inner ground of Paul’s confidence;
namely, the Spirit, and the Spirit’s work within us.
The Holy Spirit is God, God in his utmost immediacy, intensity,
intimacy. The Spirit is God
in his immediacy, intensity and intimacy surging within us, rendering us
certain that we are God’s child now and shall never be forsaken.
The Spirit is God within us making us vividly aware of his
presence and power and purpose.
Paul, we know, was angered at the congregation in
Galatia
. The Galatian Christians
were warping the gospel into an anti-gospel legalism.
When Paul cools off enough to begin correcting them, he doesn’t
begin by developing a theological argument against legalism.
Instead he appeals to their Christian experience; specifically,
to their experience of the Holy Spirit.
Bluntly he asks them, “Did you receive the Spirit through
hearing and believing the gospel or by submitting to legalism?”
When he asks, “Did you receive the Spirit…?”,
he’s referring to their experience of God, experience that they
can no more deny than they could deny a headache if they had one, since
no one can deny experience. If
we were in intense pain right now it would never occur to us to deny
that we were.
“Did you receive the Spirit through….?”
It’s as if Paul were asking the Galatian Christians, “That
raging headache you have: did you get it because a brick fell on your
head this morning or because you drank too much red wine last night?”
They could then answer the question as they saw fit.
Any answer they gave, however, would presuppose their present
headache, undeniable experience. “Did
you receive the Spirit through embracing the crucified in faith or by
slavishly adhering to rule-keeping?”
The apostle knows two things: one, their experience of God they
can’t deny; two, they came to it through faith in the gospel.
In Romans 5 Paul exuberantly exclaims, “Since we are justified
by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ….”
He concludes his exuberant exclamation with “God’s love has
been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given
to us.” When Paul says
“Spirit” he has mind believers’ experience of God’s love
flooding them.
When we bring together the outer and inner grounds of Paul’s
confidence we understand why he is able to say with conviction that
nothing will ever separate us from God’s love.
The outer ground of his conviction is the truth and reality of
all that God has done in Christ for him.
The inner ground of his conviction is his experience of what God
the Spirit is doing in him.
The experience of the simplest Christian is identical with
Paul’s. It all leaves us
exclaiming with the apostle in Galatians 2:20, “He loved me, and gave
himself for me – and I know it as surely as I know my own name.”
IV:
-- “Nothing
in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord.” The
immediate ground of Paul’s confidence is his awareness of what’s
been done for him and his experience of what’s being done in him.
The ultimate ground of his confidence, however, is God’s
eternal purpose for his creation.
[a]
First Paul says God “foreknew” us who are his people.
Everywhere in scripture, when God is said to ‘know’ someone
(Amos, Jeremiah, Abraham, Hannah) it means that God has put his hand on
someone and singled out that person for a special purpose and made that
person the beneficiary of a special promise.
When God not merely knows you and me but even ‘foreknows’
us it means that God’s purpose and promise come before
he has even created the world. In
other words, God wants a people for himself even before he has fashioned
the universe. In Ephesians
1:4 Paul declares that God “chose us in Christ before
the foundation of the world.” Even
before he created anything God wanted a people who live to glorify him.
[b]
Then Paul says in Romans 8:29, “Those whom he foreknew he
predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”
God’s people are to glorify him by being conformed to Jesus
Christ, our elder brother. In
Colossians
1:15
Paul maintains that Jesus Christ is the
image of God. You and I were
created in that image. Sin
has marred it. Now, however,
the image of God in you and me is to be re-engraved because God had
pre-appointed his own people to resemble his Son incarnate.
[c]
But God’s plan and purpose to know us, foreknow us, bring us to
resemble his Son; God’s plan and purpose in this regard has to be
implemented in time and space. Therefore
God now calls men and women;
he invites them, summons them. We
who are Christ’s people have heard and heeded that call; we have
‘RSVPd’ the invitation; we have fallen in love with someone who long
ago fell in love with us.
[d]
Next, says Paul, those who have responded to God’s call God has
justified. We’ve already
seen this word. To be
justified, righteous, is to be declared rightly related to God through
faith in the Son who is rightly related to his Father.
[e]
And such people, the apostle declares, God has glorified.
Has glorified ? Has already
glorified? We aren’t
going to be glorified until we are ‘in glory’, in heaven, and we
manifestly aren’t there yet. (We
are in Knox church on a summer Sunday evening.)
But, you see, so very confident is Paul that God’s
undeflectable plan and purpose and promise are going to be realized that
he speaks of a future event as though it had already happened just
because it’s ‘as good as happened.’
Christ has already been glorified, hasn’t he?
Then his people, whose future glorification is certain, are as
good as glorified now. It’s
as good as done.
V:
-- And
then, lest we be so thoroughly swept up in Paul’s exuberance that
we’ve lost touch with our present existence, Paul brings us down to
earth by insisting that on the basis of everything he’s said we are
right now, at this moment, “more than conquerors.”
It’s wonderful to be a conqueror –
i.e., victorious, resilient. But
it’s always possible to be a conqueror (we haven’t been defeated by
anything) yet be grim or sour or bitter or resentful or suspicious or
simply as “edgy” as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
To be more than a conqueror is surely to be victorious,
resilient, yet also radiant.
I had listened to
African-American spirituals for years, had enjoyed them (as everyone
seems to) but had never reflected on them at any depth.
Then one day a man in the small, rural congregation I was serving
pointed out to me that that there was no trace of bitterness in the
spirituals. Think of it: slavery, with its brutality, degradation,
suffering, and seeming hopelessness – and yet no bitterness in its
music, no incitement to revenge, no zeal for vicious vindictiveness;
only a patient waiting for God’s vindication and his people’s
victory. The music is
radiant.
A woman with advanced neurological disease
began to tell me of an incident that had recently befallen her and her
husband, himself ill with the same neurological disease.
Her story sounded grim. My
face sank. She saw my face
and laughed, “Oh, it’s really quite funny.”
Here’s her story.
Needing to use the toilet in the night, she
transferred herself from bed to wheelchair to toilet.
In attempting to pull herself up from the toilet she lost her
balance at the same time as she jammed her arm between the handrail and
the wall. She fell down onto
the floor with her arm up, wedged between the handrail and the wall.
Her husband heard the commotion.
He transferred himself from bed to wheelchair and set off to help
her. In his excitement he
capsized his wheelchair. Now
he was on the floor too (in a different room), couldn’t get up, and
therefore couldn’t get to a phone.
“What on earth did you do?” I asked the woman weakly.
“I knew no one was going to come along to help us until
morning”, she said, “and so I spent the night reciting over and over
again Psalm 34: “I will bless the Lord at all times.
His praise shall continually be in my mouth.
Look to him and be radiant.”
Just because nothing can separate us from
God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord (we are loved eternally), we are
certainly conquerors. More
than conquerors, however, we may ever look to him and be radiant.
Victor Shepherd
Knox Presbyterian Church,
Toronto
24th June 2009
