There is a Higher Throne

During the life of the virus pandemic, and my lock-in on its account,  I have tried to keep abreast of comments in the media. I’m particularly interested in the comments and proposals of those in who regard themselves as Christians. Many who speak and write do so in a situation in which 40,000 or so have died in the U.K. due to the effects of the virus, in about ten weeks. There has been understandable tears and sorrow from the sudden death of a member of a family, usually an older member. Yet these deaths are hardly ‘tragic’. After all, we all have to die. In this sense death is an everyday occurrence, a commonplace. As the Preacher reminds us, ‘there is a time to die’.  

So there have been plenty of remarks about death, and about life after death in which the  loved ones  hope to join their dead relative again. And there is speculation about how society will be like ‘after’ the  pandemic, people not being entirely sure whether it will ‘go away’ in a straightforward sense, or whether it will linger on like a bad dream. Some comfort themselves by the vague sentiment that in the middle of sorrow that death  brings, we can hope. After all, we don’t get much help from a live stream, nor does the radio or television provide a virtual course, or courses, on preparing for death. At least, I haven’t heard one.

A ‘higher realm’

But if we are Christians,  can we get help  from Jesus, and the early Christians, the Apostles?  Maybe we can, and do. For if there is one thing that lingers from Sunday school, and wayside pulpits, and thoughts for the day, is that God is Love, and therefore everything will turn out OK: we shall be safe in the loving arms of God himself.

But Jesus, who is himself God incarnate,  on one occasion delivered this warning:

I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear, fear him who after he hath killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him. (Lk. 2.12)

We are not in the hands of God only in this life. But ‘after that’, having spent our lives,  we enter what the hymn calls a ‘higher realm’. We are all used to earthly realms, with their corruption, indecisiveness, lies, blasphemies, and the limitations of presidents and prime ministers, no doubt reflecting the lives of us the people whom they represent, and have voted them into their office. They are not as bad and disappointing as they could be, but they often pretty bad.

But Jesus in that saying that when we enter the heavenly realm warns the life to come is sure enough, but that it will be a fearful place. There is a serious side,

Jesus also said this to his disciples: 

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever  would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will  it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life’. (Matt. 16.24f.)
 

Is death the end?

It is not innovating when someone holds that when we are dead we are dead. That has been the view of Epicureans  and others since time immemorial. A particular moving expression of this position was given by Philip Larkin in his poem ‘Aubade’, which ends the second verse  by the poet elegantly expressing the view that when we die we face a ‘sure’ extinction. 'We won’t be here or anywhere. Nothing more terrible, nothing more true.' (If you have not read  the whole of ‘Aubade’, you ought to.)

Between the sentimentality of ‘we’ll meet again’ and the ‘when you’re dead you’re dead’ the are is the creedal vie, speaking of Christ, who ‘sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick (i.e. the living),  and the dead. Both Jesus and his Apostle Paul faced the extinction option. In the case of Christ he debated the point with the Sadducees, ‘who say there is no resurrection’, who put a question to him. (Matt. 22.23f.) And in the case of Paul, when he visited The Areopagus at Athens,  met with Epicurean philosophers (Acts 17.18) and when he preached ‘Jesus and the resurrection, to some of them at their invitation,  he said ‘now he [God] commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, [Jesus Christ], and of this he has given assurance to all, by raising him from the dead.’ The reaction later was, that when they heard of the resurrection, some mocked. But others said ‘We will hear you again about this’.  But Paul went out from their midst.’ And there was a division, as there often when the gospel of Christ is preached.  ‘But some men joined and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them’. (v.34)

So people today are not innovating when they scorn the idea of resurrection. It is a common reaction. The Bible refers to the ‘sting’ of death, and that undoubtedly contributes to its fearfulness. Paul said ‘The sting of death is sin,  and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’.(I Cor. 15, 56-7) That victory was obtained by the resurrection of the crucified Christ

Resurrection

Resurrection is not the only thing that is scorned. The idea of a final righteous judgment is also mocked. It is one factor that causes the fear of death, not only the parting from loved one, and from life on the earth. For as we have seen for the Christian death is not the end, for after death we meet our righteous Maker. But if we have grace to trust Jesus while we are still alive in the body, Jesus who while he was here, in the house of Mary and Martha, and said  ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?’ Martha said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.’ (Jn. 11. 27)

There is a higher throne

Than all this world has known,

Where faithful ones from ev'ry tongue

Will one day come.

Before the Son we'll stand,

Made faultless through the Lamb;

Believing hearts find promised grace—

Salvation comes.

Hear heaven's voices sing;

Their thund'rous anthem rings

Through em'rald courts and sapphire skies.

Their praises rise.

All glory, wisdom, pow'r,

Strength, thanks, and honor are

To God our King, who reigns on high

Forevermore.

And there we'll find our home,

Our life before the throne;

We'll honor Him in perfect song

Where we belong.

He'll wipe each tear-stained eye

As thirst and hunger die

The Lamb becomes our Shepherd King;

We'll reign with Him.

Jesus on the cross. What are we to say?

When it comes to the death of Jesus Christ, there is, I think,  a lack of definiteness in how people describe it. Of course we must respect Paul’s emphasis that ‘great is the mystery of godliness’. (I Tim.3.16). Yet  it is one thing to respect the unfathomableness of the Incarnation, but quite another,for example, to allow ourselves to makethe claim that God died on Good Friday, presumably experiencing  resurrection on the third day. Death of God? Resurrection of God? The oddity and incoherence of these expressions should alert us that somewhere, someone has made an unwise inference.

First clarity, Jesus Christ is God incarnate

Here is Calvin on the Incarnation,

Certainly when Paul says of the princes of this world that they “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8), he means not that he suffered anything, in his divinity, but that Christ, who was rejected and despised, and suffered in the flesh, was likewise God and the Lord of glory. In this way, both the Son of man was in heaven because he was also Christ; and he who, according to the flesh,dwelt as the Son of man on earth, was also God in heaven. For this reason,he is said to have descended from heaven in respect of his divinity, not that his divinity quitted heaven to conceal itself in the prison of the body,but because, although he filled all things, it yet resided in the humanity ofChrist corporeally, that is, naturally, and in an ineffable manner. There is a trite distinction in the schools which I hesitate not to quote. Although the whole Christ is everywhere, yet everything, which is in him is not everywhere. I wish the Schoolmen had duly weighed the force of this sentence, as it would have obviated their absurd fiction of the corporeal presence of Christ. (Inst . IV.17.30)

It has to be borne in mind that the Incarnation, comprised of the divine and the human natures of Jesus Christ, was not a case of fifty-fifty. The human nature was subordinate to his divine nature as befits the creature to his Creator.  In loving grace God the Son, the eternal Logos, very God of very God, took on human nature, the natural progeny of the Holy Spirit and the lineage of Mary. He was ‘clothed in our flesh’ as Calvin puts it more than once. It was not at all a case of the human nature also taking on divine nature. So there was an asymmetry. This is central to his condescension and of his humiliation. When the word become flesh (John 1.14), neither his full deity nor his full humanity were compromised or changed in their natures. He, the Logos,  was  taken of a new relation. He was related to ‘flesh’ at a precise time, the date of the change in  Mary’s life. Eternally he was purely spirit and in the person of the Son took on 'flesh', a instance of human nature. In ‘became flesh ‘ the ‘became’ is not to be understood as the transformation of the Logos into something that was not the Logos, nor of humanity that was not fully that, but of the acquiring of a new relation to something that is the Logos, but was also united to ‘flesh’, human nature.

If evangelical preachers are excited by the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection, to the extent that they allow themselves to talk of the ‘death of God’, this is an exaggeration that they should not allow themselves, but rather discipline their thinking.  

The Incarnation and the three offices

Consider, from another strand of Christendom, the idea of the death and resurrection of Christ as a sign of hope, or of the coming of Spring (though not so in the Southern hemisphere), or of the triumph of love over adversity and death, of human life over death. It is a symbol new life. Hence bunnies and daffiodils and chocolate eggs are intrinsic to such a view of Easter.  

Such wide varieties of interpreting Christ’s resurrection suggests that these momentous events, on which the history of the race pivots, are not so much a deep mystery, as a conundrum, a blank, in which we can use their imagination to paint or colour, as we see fit. The person of the God – man is forgotten. What happened on the death of Jesus, was not  the humiliation or the death of the God – man, but the triumph of human nature over death, without any details, or perhaps, more confusedly, of the triumph of God over death.  

Each extreme view that we have sketched also ignores the place of the  offices of the Incarnate Saviour in the events of the Cross. He is the Messiah. He is prophet, priest and king, of which the fundamental office is that of priesthood. The drama of the death and resurrection were actions of the economic trinity, the trinity not in itself  but in its arrangements in respect of the redemption of the church by Jesus Christ.  And it is evidence of the ‘calvinistic’ character of the Westminster Confession and Catechisms that these documents adopt John Calvin’s emphasis. In Chapter VIII ‘Of Christ the Mediator’,  the character of his Mediatorship is that he is, ‘the Prophet, Priest, and King;  the Head and Saviour of his church, the Heir of all things, and Judge of the World…’ (VIII.1). And the Larger Catechism explains it from question 42 onwards, with emphasis on the practical application of these offices of Christ in the Christian life.

All this was to in order for him do the Father’s ‘work’ that he gave his Son to do. (Jn. 17.4) And it is a relationship that, having been made, has no end, for the Logos bears that nature, human nature, as eternally glorified. That these are mysterious matters no one can doubt, for they are intimate and unique relations of the Creator and the seed of the woman. Although Calvin’s three-foldness is that of a prophet, priest and king, yet there is biblical evidence as the office of priest that is the basic, primary office. The duties are the most basic.


Hugh Martin says,

The Divine Spirit does not affirm that His appointment either to his prophetic or His kingly office “glorified” him. But the affirmation is expressly made of His appointment to the sacerdotal office: “God glorified Him to be made an high priest." (Heb. v.5). To inaugurate Him into the office of prophet or of king we read not that the dread solemnity of the Divine oath was had recourse to. “But the Lord  hath sworn and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever, after the order of Melchisedec’ (Psa. cx.4). Four times is this remarkable oracle quoted in terms [i.e. explicitly] in the  New Testament.’ (Heb. vi. 16 – 17,  vii 20-21, 28., vii.17, vii.21) (Hugh Martin, The Atonement, Knox Press, Edinburgh, 1976, 54.

These titles and offices, as Martin insists, are not literary devices to embellish the Incarnate One,   not vague expressions of mere adornment. The are literally true of the Logos, what he became. Indeed we may say that he is the paradigm and perfect example of each office. His offices define his character, selling out his identity. He was truly a prophet, priest and king, particularly a priest who made a real sacrifice, and who was himself the offering. The great high priest  was as a prophet….. and as a king.

The moral is that the work of Christ is essential to his identity, expressed as his  character of prophet, priest and king. The character of Christ as a substitute, offering etc. are intrinsically  related to his character, and not to be a vehicle of human imagination and inventiveness, nor to be forgotten, or re-modelled as the work of Christ the remembrancer of the coming of Spring.

So if we bring together his humanness and his deity, and enumerate  the offices, these marvellous changes fill in the essential detail of the work of Christ on the cross, and so determine what it means and why it matters. We are not to shun detail when we think of the cross and Christ on it. This act was not a blank outline waiting for descriptions from ‘religious writers’ using their imaginations. He was really a priest, as well as being a king and a prophet and real himself the offering. As a prophet he expressed in revealed language the character of his priesthood. (55) And as  king he rules his kingdom. (Eph.5.5)

NOTE, Hugh  Martin, (1822 – 85)  from whom I have borrowed some of the material used above, was a nineteenth-century Scottish theologian, who left the ministry due to ill health. Besides The Atonement, among the other books he  wrote  were The Prophet Jonah (1866), The Shadow of Calvary (1865), and Christ’s Presence in the Gospel History,(1865) and was the author of articles in The British and Foreign Evangelical  Review.

See also  https://donaldmacleod.org.uk/dm/hugh-martin/

Coronavirus19 – What’s It for?

What do Creed–reciting  Christians have to say about the plague? ? They believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. How do they relate sudden evils such as we are presently enduring, to God’s almightiness? Many different theological and religious approaches are able to say the same Creed, reflecting  the varieties of theism (and deism) extant. Some say that in the Apostles’ Creed we find ‘mere Christianity’, a universal set of Christian beliefs.  Others will have met the Creed earlier in life, its importance gradually waning over the tears.

A Reluctance

What is surprising is that there has not any bringing together of God Almighty and the Coronavirus plague. Asking the question, what does the common Christian creed say to us about the plague? A least not to my knowledge. (Since writing this I have  heard  Hugh Palmer, Rector of All Souls, London, "What is God saying through the Virus?" on  22^nd March. No doubt there are others by now.)

 Of course, perhaps this reluctance is the result of reading  endless opinions, written and spoken, on 'the problem of evil', that people have become tired with any implausible answers.  Despite this,  I thought I would have a try.

There are two types of answer, three if ‘silence’ is a possible answer. The first, let us call it ‘the public problem answer', is to have something positive and intelligible to say to people in general, relating what evils are apparent to the goodness of God. The other is the personal or individual case of evils and God’s goodness. I have a suggestion about each type of answer, relating them to Jesus’s own teaching.

The Public Case

In Luke 13 Christ comments on the fall of the Tower of Siloam, a tower near a reservoir of Jerusalem, whose fall, a contemporary tragedy, which killed eighteen people. What does Jesus say to this ‘hard question’.

Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam  fell and killed them: do you   think that they were worse offenders than all who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent , you will all likewise perish. (13.5)

This follows his answer to those Galileans who had been killed by Pilate, who then mixed the shed blood with  the blood of a sacrifice, to whom Jesus gave a similar response. Perhaps this was is a case of anti-Semitic action on the part of the occupying Romans, including governor Pilate, and perhaps those who asked Jesus about this did so to try in turn  to stir up anti-Roman feeling in Jerusalem. This prompted the following retort of Jesus, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you, unless you repent. You will all likewise perish’. (Luke 9, 1-3)

 There are some Creed-repeaters who esteem Jesus for his actions and teaching of the primacy of selfless love and community, will find these words disappointing. The references to sin and guilt and repentance will put them off. But a contemporary Jesus – follower, who values Jesus’s words, should he not value these words? But no one, or scarcely one, of his followers today, quotes them, but shuns them. Jesus is silenced. When there are references, to sin, evil and judgment to come, there is a deafening silence. A person who respects Jesus' words  sees the purpose of the Coronavirus plague and other such evils as prompts to reflection and penitence, for Jesus calls all people are called to penitence for their evils even if, outwardly respectable, they convince themselves that they have no such need.

The individual, personal case

The second example  is the account of the young man who was  born blind,  in John 9.  Jesus healed him on the Sabbath. This prompted a controversy between Jesus, the man’s neighbours, his parents, and the Pharisees. At the beginning of this encounter, his disciples asked  him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ To which Jesus answered ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the  works of God might be displayed in him’. So this could be called a theme of Jesus’s ministry, could it not?

Interestingly, the pool of Siloam figures in this also, as Jesus bids the man (or boy, perhaps) go and wash in the pool of Siloam. He did, as an act of faith in Jesus' command, and thereby gained his sight.

The mind set.

There is a common mindset in both examples, that evils occur as God’s punishment for evil. One difference between these stories and (as we are seeing) the reactions of the contemporary liberal and secular mindset, are obvious. Who needs to repent and to come to Christ for forgiveness? We must not forget that the call to repentance was prominent at the beginning of Jesus’, and of John the Baptist’s, ministries. (Matthew 3) For ignorance of the need for repentance is in sharp contrast to that of Jesus attitude.  For a modern person, plagues have a cause, of course, but their occurrence seems random. They elicit a response, hundreds of responses, of loss and of fearfulness, as we are seeing, but they are otherwise mute.They are not to affect us spiritually.

For Jesus and those who trust him, like the beggar lad of John 9, the occurrences of evils speak. More precisely, for Jesus they speak, like the tragedy of the fall of the tower of Siloam. And what they say is of importance to him. Somehow, they too, are to elicit faith. The boy, we are not told how, had learned that this rabbi was, ‘Jesus’ (v.11). He was  granted the grace of  faith in Jesus the Christ. The blindness that had plagued him from birth , immediately vanished. And that remarkable physical change was the sign of a deeper, spiritual change.

His  faith in the rabbi aroused various reactions. The Pharisees, not able to deny the evidence, made a legal point. They objected to Jesus’s alleged violation of the Sabbath. They  said that Jesus was a ‘sinner’, a Sabbath-breaker. By contrast the boy believed that he was a prophet. (v. 13f). All they knew was what they saw, blindness and then seeing. The boy’s parents, fearing that they would  be excommunicated from the synagogue if they opened their mouths in criticism of the Pharisees, were too scared to say anything, so passed on the problem to the boy who was old enough to speak for himself. He seems rather stroppy, ‘I have told you already, and you would not listen….Do you want to be his disciples?’ (v.34) The Pharisees did not pay any sympathy to his story, and alleged that he was illegitimate. That explained his blindness. They cast him out after all.

When a little later Jesus sought him out, having heard of all this, and found him, who was who interested to know more about him, confessed Christ, and worshipped him, perhaps kneeling. Jesus sought the boy and told dim that he was  more than a prophet, he was the Son of Man.

Jesus had a final word: ‘For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind’. The judgment was a division, not any more about blindness and sightedness, but the separation between those who are poor and needy, like the young man, and those who were self-sufficient and self-satisfied, like the Pharisees. No more was heard of the boy. The incident ends:

Some of the Pharisees near Jesus got to hear what he had been saying, and asked him. ‘Are we also blind?’ Jesus said to them,  ‘If you were blind, you would have no guilt: but now that you say, “We see”, your guilt remains’. (40-1). Terrible words.

The current plague

Prompted by the current plague, we have turned to some of the words of Jesus. You’ll find that at such time some emphasise this and that bit of the Bible. Here I have gone to the very words of Christ about  affliction and loss, the words of him who was ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Pontius Pilate, was crucified , dead, and buried’. We have looked at two sorts of affliction, public and individual. Jesus did  not react as the Puritans, who thought of the occurrence of plagues (including the London plague of 1645), as a society-wide divine punishment.

Here surely they forgot that whatever purpose plagues played in the O.T., we should hold to the fact that now the people of God are no longer  ‘slaves’ but ‘sons’ (Gal. 4.3), Jesus taught that evils  act as ‘reminders’ or as warnings of human mortality and weakness and need, and of the personal accountability before God of each of us. As we get older, such reminders are gradual, and increasingly persistent, occasional; at other times they are spectacular, as currently. As Paul said when he was in Athens, ‘He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead’. (Acts 17.31) We should judge that like then, as now, some people will mock, while others reacted like those mentioned by Luke,  ‘some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman Damaris and others with them.’ (Acts 17.34)