waltharrah.com :: Manna

God? Who Needs Him?

2013-05-31 19:48:33 UTC

Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold. Matthew 24:12

Jesus may have had our day in mind when he spoke these words. Charles Taylor in A SECULAR AGE, writes….

“I would like to claim that the coming of modern secularity in my sense has been coterminous…”

(NOTE: Had to look this word up. Means having the same boundaries or extent in space, time, or meaning)

“….coterminous with the rise of a society in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.”

“Of no previous society was this true.”

So here is the most encouraging thing I can think of to checkmate the reality of our age:

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Hebrews 13:8

Imago Dei

2012-09-12 00:05:13 UTC

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

The son of a Presbyterian minister and biblical scholar, Robinson Jeffers was a Northern Californian poet who died in 1962. At the height of his fame, Time Magazine featured him on their cover. He was invited to read from his works at the Library of Congress, and his image was even made into a U.S. postage stamp.

You have set your glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

His poetry revealed a preference for the natural world over what he saw as the negative influence of civilization. He even coined the phrase “inhumanism,” holding to the thought that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things."

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

The National Endowment For The Arts claims that Robinson Jeffers questioned the uniqueness of humankind.

“As extraordinary as humans might be, from his perspective they are not qualitatively superior to other beings, they are not essential to the universe, and they are not the special concern of a man-like God.”

You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.

How did this play out in his poetry. The poem HURT HAWK includes the controversial line “I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.”

You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

In his collection of poems titled A BOOK OF LUMINOUS THINGS, Czeslaw Milosz says that Jeffers felt that the human species was a “destructive plasm on the surface of the globe,” and that in time mankind would exit this planet, when everything would “once again be perfectly beautiful.

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Psalm 8

Why Can't I Pray?

2012-08-18 17:36:53 UTC

The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9

Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) preached a sermon titled THE DECEITFULNESS OF THE HEART. And one key proof of its existence can be found in the ongoing struggle that is the human experience to pray.

We put on strange fire, and put out the fire upon our hearths by letting in a glaring sun-beam, the fire of lust, or the heats of an angry spirit, to quench the fires of God, and suppress the sweet could of incense.

The heart of man does not have strength enough to think one good thought of itself; it cannot command its own attention to a prayer of ten lines long, but before its end wanders after something that is to no purpose; and no wonder than that it grow weary of a holy religion, which consists of so many part as make the business of a whole life.

And there is no greater argument in the world of our spiritual weakness, and falseness of our hearts in the matters of religion, than the backwardness which most men have always, and all men have sometimes, to say their prayers; so weary of their length, so glad when they are done, so witty to excuse and frustrate an opportunity: and yet there we do not trouble ourselves in the duty, or weary ourselves, or labor violently.

We do not beg a blessing and rarely rejoice in receiving it. There is not the sense of having the greatest honor of speaking to the greatest person and greatest King of the world.

And that we should be unwilling to do this! We are unable to continue in it, and we are so backward that we cannot return to it. Where is the gust and relish in doing it? We are unable to comprehend the value of the nature of the thing within us. We have a strange sickness of the heart, a spiritual nauseating of loathing of Manna, something that has no name. What else could explain all this but a weak, a faint, and false heart?

Yet you have not called upon me, O Jacob, you have not wearied yourselves for me, O Israel. Isaiah 43:22

It's Not Rocket Science

2012-07-23 17:57:45 UTC

"Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit," says the Lord. Zechariah 4:6

William Law wrote some helpful thoughts down for pastors. I think he knew the universal temptation we all have to minister in the "strength" of our natural abilities. And his warning is just as useful today as at any stage in church history.

The necessity of a continual inspiration of the Spirit of God, both to begin the first, and continue every step of a divine life in man, is a truth to which every life in nature, as well as all scripture, bears full witness.

A natural life, a bestial life, a diabolical life, can subsist no longer, than whilst they are immediately and continually under the working power of that root or source, from which they sprung. Thus it is with the divine life in man, it can never be in him, but as a growth of life in and from God.

Hence it is, that resisting the Spirit, quenching the Spirit, grieving the Spirit, is that alone which gives birth and growth to every evil that reigns in the world, and leaves men, and churches, not only an easy, but a necessary prey to the devil, the world, and the flesh.

And nothing but obedience to the Spirit, trusting to the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, praying with and for its continual inspiration, can possibly keep either men, or churches, from being sinners,or idolators, in all that they do. For everything in the life, or religion of man, that has not the Spirit of God for its mover, director, and end, be it what it will, is but earthly, sensual, or devilish.

The truth and perfection of the gospel state could not show itself, till it became solely a ministration of the Spirit, or a kingdom in which the Holy Spirit of God had the doing of all that was done in it.

Theological Steak

2012-04-10 00:34:40 UTC

P. T. Forsythe, in the middle of a lecture on the work of Christ, gets to preaching, and it's pretty wonderful:

To deliver us from evil is not simply to take us out of hell, it is to take us into heaven. Christ does not simply pluck us out of the hands of Satan, He does so by giving us to God.

He does not simply release us from slavery. He commits us in the act to a positive liberty.

He does not simply cancel the charge against us in court and bid us walk out of jail, He meets us at the prison-door and puts us in a new way of life.

His forgiveness is not simply retrospective, it is, in the same act, the gift of eternal life. Our evil is overcome by good. We are won from sin by an act which at the same time makes us not simply innocent but holy.

In speaking of the reasons behind Christ's work, Forsythe has this insight....

This obedience (of dying on the cross in our place) was the Holy Father's joy and satisfaction. He found Himself in it. And it was also the foiling and destruction of the evil power. And it was farther the creative source of holiness in a race not only impressed by the spectacle of its tragic hero victorious, but regenerate by the solidarity of a new life from its creative Head.

The work of Christ was thus in the same act triumphant on evil, satisfying to the heart of God....He subdued Satan, rejoiced the Father, and set up in Humanity the kingdom — all in one supreme and consummate act of His one person. He destroyed the kingdom of evil...by actually establishing God's kingdom in the heart of it.

Describing the Indescribable

2012-02-11 06:30:08 UTC

What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived” - the things God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2:9-10

Describing the glory that is our God in syllables is an impossible task, but the great wordsmith Jeremy Taylor in a sermon on the Holy Spirit makes a noble attempt:

For what power of human understanding could have found out the incarnation of a God, that two natures - one finite and the other infinite - could have been concentered into one hypostasis or person...

that a virgin should be a mother...

that dead men should live again, that the ashes of dissolved bones should become bright as the sun, blessed as the angels, swift in motion as thought, clear as the purest noon...

that God should love us, as to be willing to be reconciled to us, and yet that himself must die that he might pardon us...

that God's most holy Son should give us his body to eat, and his blood to crown our chalices, and his Spirit to sanctify our souls, to turn our bodies into temperance, our souls into minds, our minds into spirit, our spirit into glory...

that he, who can give us all things, who is Lord of men and angels, and King of all the creatures, should pray to God for us without intermission...

that he, who reigns over all the world, should, at the day of judgment, "give up the kingdom to God the Father," and yet, after this resignation, himself and we with him should for ever reign the more gloriously...

that we should be justified by faith in Christ...

that charity should be a part of faith, and that both should work as acts of duty and as acts of relation...

that God should crown the imperfect endeavors of his saints with glory, and that a human act should be rewarded with an eternal inheritance...

that the wicked, for the transient pleasure of a few minutes, should be tormented with an absolute eternity of pains...

and, after all this, that all Christian people, all that will be saved, will be partakers of the divine nature, of the nature, the infinite nature, of God, and must dwell in Christ, and Christ must dwell in them, and they must be in the Spirit, and the Spirit must be for ever in them?

Be still my beating heart....

Making Sense Of It All

2012-01-30 00:37:08 UTC

James Orr was an Old Testament scholar in that first part of the last century, and came up with a concise explanation where history is headed in an essay titled THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF GOD AND THE WORLD.

The Old Testament has "at its root is the idea of a holy, spiritual, self-revealing God, the free Creator of the world, and its continual Preserver."

"As correlative to this, and springing out of it, is the idea of man as a being made in God’s image, and capable of moral relations and spiritual fellowship with his Maker; but who, through sin, has turned aside from the end of his creation, and stands in need of Redemption."

"In the heart of the history, we have the idea of a Divine purpose, working itself out through the calling of a special nation, for the ultimate benefit and blessing of mankind."

"God’s providential rule extends over all creatures and events, and embraces all peoples of the earth, near and remote. In view of the sin and corruption that have overspread the world, His government is one of combined mercy and judgment; and His dealings with Israel in particular are preparative to the introduction of a better economy, in which the grace already partially exhibited will be fully revealed."

"The end is the establishment of a kingdom of God under the rule of the Messiah, in which all national limitations will be removed, the Spirit be poured forth, and Jehovah will become the God of the whole earth. God will make a new covenant with His people, and will write His laws by His Spirit in their hearts. Under this happy reign the final triumph of righteousness over sin will be accomplished, and death and all other evils will be abolished."

I say, "let's get to the last chapter." Enough already.