Summer Presence | SL 2.9 (June 2021)
In this newsletter
- Summer Presence
- Work & Ministry Update
- Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Perfect Law of Liberty (Exodus 20)
- Pray With Us
You can always read this newsletter in your browser.
While Meghan's mom, Rebecca, was here the bluebells were blooming in the woods and we indulged in some nice family photos.
Summer Presence
It's finally summer here in the Northeast of England, which means the temps have soared to the mid-60s (sometimes even the high 60s!), the sun is out for days at a time (instead of for hours), and it's light out till well past 10PM. We could not possibly be enjoying it more. I like to think of summer as a slow time and a time to be present.
About a month back I re-read C.S. Lewis's rich and wonderful Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer. Here are a couple of passages on the importance of being present in prayer.
We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can. [...] Ordinarily, to be known by God is to be for this purpose in the category of things. We are, like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of Divine knowledge. But when we (a) become aware of the fact—the present fact, not the generalisation—and (b) assent with all our will to be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled His sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view.
To put ourselves thus on a personal footing with God could, in itself and without warrant, be nothing but presumption and illusion. But we are taught that it is not; that it is God who gives us that footing. For it is by the Holy Spirit that we cry 'Father'. By unveiling, by confessing our sins and 'making known' our requests, we assume the high rank of persons before Him. And He, descending, becomes a Person to us.
But I should not have said 'becomes'. In Him there is no becoming. He reveals Himself as Person: or reveals that in Him which is Person. For—dare one say it? in a book it would need pages of qualification and insurance—God is in some measure to a man as that man is to God. The door in God that opens is the door he knocks at. (At least, I think so, usually.) The Person in Him—He is more than a person—meets those who can welcome or at least face it. He speaks as 'I' when we truly call Him 'Thou' (24–26).
Meantime, however, we want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are. And if my idea of prayer as 'unveiling' is accepted, we have already answered this. It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us (27).
The prayer preceding all prayers is, 'May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to' (111).
And then on slowing down to enjoy God.
I do not think that the life of Heaven bears any analogy to play or dance in respect to frivolity. I do think that while we are in this 'valley of tears', cursed with labour, hemmed round with necessities, tripped up with frustrations, doomed to perpetual plannings, puzzlings, and anxieties, certain qualities that must belong to the celestial condition have no chance to get through, can project no image of themselves, except in activities which, for us here and now, are frivolous. For surely we must suppose the life of the blessed to be an end in itself, indeed The End: to be utterly spontaneous; to be the complete reconciliation of boundless freedom with order—with the most delicately adjusted, supple, intricate, and beautiful order? How can you find any image of this in the 'serious' activities either of our natural or of our (present) spiritual life—[...] It is only in our 'hours-off', only in our moments of permitted festivity, that we find an analogy. Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for 'down here' is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment's rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven (124–25).
Here's to being present to God, ourselves, and joy this Summer.
Little Janie is three months old.
You are Training Pastors to be Faithful to Scripture & Strengthening the Global Church
- I'll be teaching Exegesis of Proverbs for the MDiv students at GraceLife Seminary in Monrovia, Liberia with Training Leaders International in November. I'm truly thankful for this opportunity and eager to get back out there. Please pray for global stability re: COVID and the travel corridors to open responsibly, so that we can pull this off.
- I'll also be teaching a course on the Torah/Pentateuch for a new cohort of students at William Tennent School of Theology in Colorado in November. Same prayers as above.
- In the meantime, I'm teaching Hebrew to a new cohort of students at Tennent through Zoom. Lots of fun. Hebrew is great.
- More essays from this newsletter are coming out on TGC Quebec (sola.org): La crainte + le Seigneur : un regard sur Proverbe 1.7. I'm thrilled that some of my writing could be valuable in that context.
- I finished another chapter of my dissertation, which is about how humor works in the Hebrew Bible. It was a massive topic but a lot of fun to work out. This will form the foundation for writing up my commentary on Proverbs 30 over the next few months since I think that many things in the chapter are meant to be humorous. More to come...
- Writing every day. I'm up to about 80,000 words now. Will probably write to 120,000ish and edit back down to the required 100,000.
Thank you. Your prayers and support empower everything we do.
Bed in Summer
by Robert Louis Stevenson
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
Exodus 20: The Perfect Law of Liberty
(Part VII in The Theology of the Pentateuch)
An Abstract System of Oppressive Rules?
The Old Testament laws are one of the most difficult portion of Scripture to engage with. These laws can feel arbitrary and disjointed or even harsh and backwards. An abstract moral code of 613 laws dropped on us from above. A heavy system of morality that is old-fashioned and oppressive. It can be difficult for us to understand how this laws is good, and yet Scripture presents it in the most glowing terms (Ps 19:7; Prov 30:5).
The Ten Commandments in Exod 20:1–17 stand as a summary and introduction to the law. To unlock their freedom and beauty, we must see that they flow from who God is. God is our system of morality. And he is not abstract. Right and wrong flow from God’s character and promote relationship with him. That’s what the Ten Commandments are about: they liberate you to live with the LORD.
Establishing a Relationship
Perhaps the thing that is most often misunderstood about the Ten Commandments is that they are not a law code as we might think of it. Instead they are part of a story—the unfolding narrative of the relationship between God and his people.
At the beginning of the book of Exodus the people of Israel are enslaved to a tyrannical ruler. Pharaoh is the ultimate symbol of oppression. He does not remember past relationships (Exod 1:8) and he imposes impossible tasks on his people (Exod 5:6–8). But the LORD remembers his relationship with Abraham and his children and he hears the cries of his people (Exod 2:24–25). So he moves to save them. In an incredible display of power the LORD dominates Pharaoh and all the gods of Egypt in order to deliver his people (Exod 15). He brings them into the desert to his Holy Mountain and makes a unique commitment to them (Exod 19:4–6). This is the context where God reveals the Ten Commandments (Exod 19:9; 20:1–21). It is not an arbitrary moral code to earn a deity’s approval, but a set of characterizations to establish a relationship.
The Ten Commandments show us how to be a community that reflects God’s character. To put it in contemporary terms, if we want to live in his house and rep his brand, we have to absorb his “DNA.” They illustrate his fundamental qualities of holiness, wisdom, and justice and invite us to live in keeping with who God is so that we might experience true freedom (Exod 34:6–7).
The Perfect Law of Liberty
So, if we read the Ten Commandments this way, what do they teach us about God and ourselves?
The first five commandments of the law relates to our relationship with YHWH, while the second five commandments turn to consider our relationship with others. Church Fathers like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine have tied these two tables of the Ten Commandments to the way that Jesus summarizes the law with a the pair of commandments, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:17; cf. Matt 22:37; Mark 12:30; Deut 6:5; Lev 19:18).
Viewed in this light, the Ten Commandments become an interwoven whole that summarizes righteous living. Peter Leithart has this excellent mini-exposition:
“Each of the Ten words addresses an area of human life: worship, time-keeping, family, violence, sex, property, speech, desire. Yet they overlap and interpenetrate. Each word implies all the others. To obey the First Word, you must also refuse images; bear God’s Name; keep Sabbath; honor parents; and refrain from murder, theft, adultery, slander, greed, and lust. We keep the Sabbath to honor the one God, to glorify his Name, to give life and protect property, to cultivate contentment and thankfulness. Idolatry is a kind of theft, a form of material infidelity to the divine Husband, false witness about the living God. Every commandment is a window through which we view the whole Decalogue” (Leithart, 17).
If we restate the Ten Commandments as positive affirmations, it might help us to see this in a new way.
First Table: Love God
- Honor YHWH exclusively.
- Honor YHWH properly, in keeping with his true character and nature.
- Honor YHWH’s name, that is, his reputation.
- Honor YHWH by protecting the holiness of the Sabbath.
- Honor and glorify your parents as representatives of God’s authority.
Second Table: Love your Neighbor
- Protect innocent life.
- Protect pure relationships and families.
- Protect security and prosperity.
- Protect trustworthy communication.
- Protect your heart/desires.
Imagine a person who lives this way. They would be a pillar of their community, a boon to all who knew them. Who wouldn’t want that person for a friend? You can think of this description as the results of God’s StrengthsFinders test or his Myers-Briggs profile. But because he made us and the world we live in, it’s also a theological mirror, a profile of your best self, the goal of righteous living. Conforming to God’s character brings us into contact with our best humanity.
As Peter Leithart emphasizes, “A community dominated by disrespect for parents, workaholism, violence, envy, theft, and lies isn’t free” (Leithart, 5). We are not free when we can do whatever we want, we are free when we are doing what we were made to do (Ps 119:45).
This is why the Apostle James calls the law “the perfect law, the law of liberty.”
Jas 1:22–25
22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25 But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
Keeping the Law Perfectly
The person that we described when we stated the Ten Commandments positively is Jesus Christ. St. Ireneaus said, “Christ fulfills the law that he spoke from Sinai.” This is crucial for us to live the Ten Commandments. You see, the problem with the Old Covenant is not the law—the law is a reflection of who God is—the problem with the Old Covenant is the sinful human heart (Jer 17:9; Ezek 36:26). Israel was called to look to the law giver and embody the law, but at Sinai Israel could not bear to hear God’s voice and pulled away. Their hearts remained hard, they were a stiff-necked people, a rebellious son. Although YHWH was dwelling among them, it was as if he was still too far away. So the LORD himself embodied his law in Jesus Christ, the faithful son of Israel. He came and dwelled with us to model the life of holiness for us. By doing this he unlocked a level of access to God’s presence through faith that ancient Israel did not know. The difference between the Old and New Covenants lies chiefly in the fact that Christ has fulfilled the law and poured out his Spirit. The Spirit transforms our hearts so that God writes his laws on them. Our hearts become the two tables of the law (Jer 31:33; 2 Cor 3:3). We do not aspire to law keeping, but rather living in keeping with the law—in keeping with God’s character because he has transformed us.
By living with Christ in faith we live in relationship with God. Thus we press into keeping the law as a grace and a freedom and a life-giving call.
LORD, we thank and praise you for teaching us how to live. Thank you for the liberty we find in living toward you and toward your character. Guard us from trusting in our own power and thus experiencing your law as a weight or a burden rather than a joy. May we trust and follow your Son faithfully and experience your freedom.
Peter Leithart's little book on the Ten Commandments is excellent, short, and accessible without sacrificing theological depth. Highly recommended!
Pray With Us
- Praise God for steady progress on my dissertation. It is really starting to feel finishable. Will you pray toward my goal of finishing a draft by Christmas?
- Pray for travel and ministry to continue to open up and against a resurgence of the pandemic in the Fall.
- Pray for guidance and direction for us as we begin to see our time in England coming to a close over the next year or so. Where would God have us exactly? What things can we focus our energies on?
Notes:
- C. S. Lewis. 2017 [1963]. Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer. San Fransisco: HarperOne.
- Peter J. Leithart. 2020. The Ten Commandments. Bellingham, WA: Lexham.