I. Textual Design of First Samuel:

A. Author:

1. There are many theories about the authorship of First Samuel¹ including the Deuteronomic history held by many scholars today²

2. It must be admitted that with the current evidence one cannot affirm without reservation who wrote the book.

3. The Talmud names Samuel as the author,³ but this is hardly probable since he dies in chapter 25
The naming probably relates to the role he played in the first 25 chapters of this history

4. The Hebrew cannon places the work under the former prophets giving a possible clue to at least the role of its author, if not also its sources

a. It is possible that Samuel was compiled from the writings of the prophets Samuel, Gad, and Nathan whose works were preserved within the nation (1 Chron. 29:29; cf. 1 Sam 10:25; see also the “book of Jasher” 2 Sam 1:18)

b. It is also possible that Samuel wrote chapters 1--25 and then Gad and/or Nathan completed the remainder of the book

c. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that the books of Samuel were written after the death of Solomon (cf. 1 Sam. 27:6)

d. Johnson writes, “The books of Samuel were composed after the death of David from court records, eyewitness accounts, and the writings of the prophets Samuel, Nathan and Gad. The actual author or prophetic historian is unknown. But it bears the marks of a prophetic revelation.”⁴

e. In any case, there is certainly a tone of warning to the kings from the point of view of the prophet who proclaimed the word of God to the king.

B. Date:
The textual clues seem to place the writing of the book sometime during the divided monarchy and yet before the fall of the northern kingdom.

1. Israel and Judah are distinguished (11:8; 17:52; 18:16)

2. Ziklag, the city of Philistia where David is sent by Achish, is described as belonging “to the kings of Judah to this day” (27:6)
This not only speaks of a time after the divided monarchy, but of a time when there had been “kings” in Judah.

3. However, there does not seem to be any indication in the text that the northern kingdom had fallen

4. Therefore, it seems best to place the writing of Samuel sometime after the divided monarchy (931 B.C.) but before the fall of Samaria (722/21 B.C.).

C. Design of 1 Samuel:

1. In view of the prophetic tone and the time period of the divided monarchy, it seems very possible that Samuel was written to historically instruct the kings of Israel and Judah to cease placing their confidence in the natural strength of their military, possessions, and even alliances (as the prophets so often proclaimed), and to trust in YHWH who has raised up over the nation all of those before them and disposed of those who continued to trust in their own strength

2. Through the selected, vivid examples of history, the writer was predicting a similar path for the nation in his day.
To trust in natural strength would lead to a fall while trust in YHWH would lead to victory over the enemies which surrounded them

II. Theological Themes of Progressive Revelation:

A. What Does the Book Say about God?

1. His Names:

a. Just as the message of the book is contained in seed form within the first two chapters of First Samuel, so is the writer’s theology of God seen in the revelation provided through the use of His names

b. Within the first chapter God is presented as:

1) The Lord of Hosts (1:3, 11)

2) YHWH (1:12, 14, 19, 20, 21, 26, 28)

3) The God of Israel (1:17)

c. All of these titles portray ways in which He will demonstrate Himself to resolve the tensions of HIs people in battle, in covenant relationship, and as Ruler of the nation.

d. However, there are some workings of the Lord which are not in agreement with what might be expected when these titles are employed.

1) The Lord of Hosts is brought into the battle against the Philistines but does not defeat the enemy because He is being treated as a magical weapon by the nation and its profane priests, Hophni and Phinehas (4:4ff.)

2) YHWH remembers Hannah (and thus the Nation) by providing a child in answer to her earnest prayer (1:19), and yet it is He who defeats Israel before the Philistines (4:3)

3) Nevertheless, it is the “ark of YHWH” who, while in captivity, defeats the pagan god Dagon (4:3-4), and YHWH as well as “The God of Israel” who brings about plagues upon the Philistines (4:6-11)

e. The key to the significance of these titles for God is in the “purpose of God” which is being expressed in each incident:

1) While YHWH is the covenant God of the Exodus, the Lord of Hosts would be expected to defeat the enemies of Israel, and the god of Israel would be thought of as the One who cares for the nation’s well being (10:18), the expression of all of these acts may at times involve the downfall of the nation and even the placement of Israel into a relationship with the Lord that may appear to be distant (cf. elohim as the title used to describe the experience of Israel and the Philistines after the ark has been lost in 4:11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22; 5:1)

2) All of this is because YHWH is still aligning Himself with the nation but with the purpose of increasing their dependence upon Him so that He might work out HIs covenant promises within the context of obedience (cf. 12:22-25).

3) Therefore, even though the glory has seemingly departed form Israel with the capture of the Ark, it can be seen to be fighting the Philistines all of the while it is in their land (cf. kbd in 5:6, 11; 6:5).

4) Nevertheless, it is YHWH who strikes down the irreverent men of Israel when the Ark is returned to the nation (6:19-21).

f. There are times when God’s relationship may well be derived from the name chosen:

1) Saul is never identified with YHWH.

Samuel may say that the spirit of YHWH will come upon Saul, but when the incident occurres it is the spirit of God who acts (cf. 10:6 with 10:10).

2) Samuel often employs the name of YHWH, but the only time that YHWH is connected with Saul is at the end of his anointing when it is written that “the Spirit of the Lord departed form Saul...” (16:14).

3) In contrast to Saul, it is YHWH who is identified with Hannah, Samuel, Jonathan and David throughout the work

4) It is only when God’s people are trusting in Him that they are allowed to experience the character of God as is manifested in His names, however, these names reflect the outworking of God’s hand for the nation even if they force it to be hidden at times.

2. God’s Reversal of the Natural:

From Hannah to the death of Saul there is a proclamation that the Lord reverses the natural order of life to exalt His people from the hand of evil as they place their trust in Him

a. Hannah is exalted over the ridicule of bareness and Peninnah as she seeks YHWH’s help (1)

b. Hannah Proclaims YHWH’s way of reversing the natural orders of life in her song of praise for the birth of Samuel (2)

c. Samuel is exalted over Eli and his wicked sons even through they are the religious power of Israel in his day

d. The Philistines are exalted over Israel even through YHWH is the nation’s God because of Israel’s spiritual condition (4)

e. Dagon, the fertility god of the Philistines who is accredited with the defeat of the Israelites, is made low by the Ark of YHWH (5)

f. Israel defeats the superior Philistines because they are trusting in YHWH (7)

g. Saul, through insignificant and fearful, is exalted to king of Israel (9-11)

h. Jonathan, through the son of Saul, is exalted over his father in battle, wisdom, and the eyes of the people because of Saul’s confidence in natural strength (113--14)

i. Saul, though the king of Israel, is made low by Samuel the prophet as he proclaims that the Lord has taken the kingdom from his hand (15).

j. David, through the youngest of the house of Jesse is exalted to the position of king (16).

k. David, though only a shepherd boy is exalted over the mighty Goliath (17).

l. David, through only a musician and soldier under the rule of Saul, is exalted over the might of Saul--the king of Israel--As YHWH foils Saul’s natural plans (17--30)

m. Saul, the king of Israel, dies and is mocked by the Philistines at Gilboa (31).

3. YHWH as the Ruler of Israel:
YHWH is the One who holds the life of the nation in His hand:

a. He provides life in bareness (1)

b. It is He who determines the continued leadership of the nation in that He made a covenant with Aaron, but exalts Samuel over Eli and his sons as they dishonor Him (2:29--4)

c. He chooses to deliver the nation through Saul (9--1), Jonathan (13--14), and then David (17; 27; 30)

d. He allows for a king but demands that both the nation and her king must fear and serve Him in order to obtain life (12:19-25).

e. He is the one who either delivers the nation into the hands of their enemies or provides for its deliverance (f. 4:3 with 7:9-13; 11:13; 14:6-10; 17:46; 28:19).

f. It is He who knows the heart of his people (2:3 states this generally and then the lives of Eli, Hophni, Phinehas, Saul, Jonathan, and David demonstrate this specifically).

g. Therefore He is the one to be served, feared and trusted whether the nation’s rule is mediated through judges or a king because it is YHWH who is the true ruler of the nation.

B. God’s Purposes and Their Administration:

1. The Purposes of God:

a. John Martin understands obedience to the covenant of Deuteronomy 27--28 to be the explanation for the way in which the Lord blesses (or curses) the nation in Samuel⁵
He supports his argument by explaining the reversals which occur in the Hannah and Samuel pericopes as being based upon “the covenant relationship these people had with Him.”⁶

b. Although there is a clear correlation with Hannah and Samuel, the concept of obedience to the Deuteronomic covenant does not explain some of the other reversals which the Lord brings about in Samuel:

1) Saul, and for that matter David, are exalted from lowly position to that of king without any reference to their being obedient (9; 16).

2) Jonathan, who is continually placed in a flawless light, dies on the battle field with Saul never experiencing what might be considered earned blessing from Deuteronomy 27--28.

3) David who is constantly demonstrated to be spiritually beyond Saul (although not flawless like Jonathan) panics under the pressure of being pursued and lies to Ahimelech, the priest at Nob (21:1-9), and to Achish the king of Gath (21:10-15).

This was enough to cause Saul to lose the kingdom (13:13-14), but nothing close to that happens to David⁷

4) Therefore, it does not seem best to understand God’s purpose in First Samuel to be solely around the covenant of Deuteronomy 27--28.

c. It seems as though God acts primarily in accordance with the Abrahamic covenant of promise when He exalts in the nation:

1) No one has lived so uprightly as to require YHWH to bless

a) Samuel is not able to pass on his faith to the next generation

b) Saul trusts in his own natural ability

c) David has not trusted YHWH completely.

2) Nevertheless, the Mosaic law gave YHWH the right to judge evil in the nation even if it did not give the nation the right to demand of YHWH.

3) The Lord acts out of promise and blesses in the context of obedience to the Law (Hannah, Samuel, David), but not because of obedience (Jonathan).

d. In the context of the nation’s sinful rejection of YHWH as their king, Samuel states God’s purpose toward the nation when he proclaims that, “the Lord will not abandon His people on account of His great name, because the Lord has been pleased to make you a people for Himself” (12:22)
This is the reason the nation is not destroyed for their rejection of the theocracy, the reason Saul is chosen at all (perhaps as poetic justice for the rebellion of the nation) and the reason David is permitted to continue as YHWH’s anointed in spite of his own sinfulness

2. The Administration of God’s Purpose:

a. Although blatant sin is permitted for a time under a corrupt leadership,⁸ YHWH uses their very strength to judge their evil⁹

b. YHWH then delivers the weak from the oppression of the strong by placing them in their former position of strength
Hannah describes it this way: He brings low the boastful, arrogant, mighty, full, rich, wicked, and those who contend with God; and He exalts the feeble, hungry, barren, poor, low, needy and godly (2:3-10)

In view of God’s permission of evil to eventually make its own pathway for the rise of the weak, a comparison of Hannah and of Saul might be insightful in predicting the future of Saul from his call to kingship:

c. Even in Saul’s call we are led to see that the absence of Hannah’s spiritual character will be his own downfall as the way is prepared for David.
Yet YHWH permits his rise as a king in order to graphically teach the nation that their only hope is to trust in the strength of the Lord over natural ability.

d. YHWH then delivers from oppression through the weak who are trusting in His strength:¹⁰

1) It is the ridiculed woman who prays to YHWH that is exalted over her rival Peninnah with the birth of a son (1)

2) It is the boy who is placed in the care of Eli and who serves the Lord that replaces Eli (1:28--4; 7).

3) It is the son who goes to fight the Philistines with only his arm bearer and his confidence in YHWH that leads the nation in the defeat of the Philistines in place of Saul and his 600 men (14:1-23).

4) It is the youngest son of Jesse, a shepherd who trusts in YHWH who defeats Goliath, out maneuvers and then replaces the King (16--30).

e. YHWH then blesses His people as they learn to depend upon Him:

1) Hannah has a child (1) and then five more (2)

2) Samuel leads the nation to victory against the Philistines (7)

3) Saul leads the nation to victory against the Ammonites (11)

4) Jonathan leads the nation to victory against the Philistines (14)

5) David leads the nation to victory against the Philistines (17; 23), the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites (27)

6) As the nation and especially its leaders attempt to fear YHWH, serve Him and obey His word, he uses them to bless; but ultimately He does so because He has promised
Hannah signifies Old Covenant theology
The central purpose of the Law was to bring men low
In this this book to today one needs to see the administration of God’s purpose under New Covenant priorities

C. God’s Providential Rule and Mediatoral Purposes¹¹
The stories find the ultimate control in the providential and mediatoral purposes of God:

1. Providential Rule:

a. “In God’s Providential rule, God permits the presence of evil in the Tabernacle, in conflict with Saul and David.

b. The atmosphere of the spiritual conflict is very evident in the repeated struggles with the power of evil in the second generation of Eli and Samuel and in the position of king for Saul and David.

c. The power of evil is accentuated as it overwhelms Saul in spite of his better judgment and as it repeatedly attacks David in spite of his repeatedly calling upon God.

d. In His Providential rule God determinately judges the presence of evil in the priestly family, in the treatment of the Tabernacle and ark as a fetish, in the people’s flawed call for a king, in Saul’s fearful panic, rash vow and unrealistic view of himself, in David’s deceit at Nob and fearful attempts to escape the enemy”

2. Mediatoral Purposes:

a. “In His Mediatoral purposes, God raised up Samuel to stand in contrast with the priestly family, to judge the nation in the transition and to introduce the kingship.

b. In addition God raised up Jonathan as a foil to Saul and as the legitimate heir who recognizes God’s call of David.

c. In climax and focus God raised up David to be His king yet allowed him to struggle in conflict with Saul and Nabal realizing his greatest blessing in being restrained.

d. In spite of a second and final defection to the Philistines, David finds strength in YHWH and grows in his faith struggling against the evil one.”

D. The Institution of the Monarchy:

1. The human king was supposed to be a representative of YHWH their divine king (Gen 49:18; Num 24:17; Deut 17:14-19)

2. The people did not seem to understand this because the Lord evaluates their desire for a king as a rejection of Him and not of Samuel (1 Sam 8:7)
It is also possible (probable) that Samuel was disappointed because he expected the people to consider him as their candidate for king:

a. His sons’ evil is noted (8:4-5)

b. The statement in 8:7

3. The people seemed to assume that they were being oppressed because they had no king rather than because of their own evil
Having a king would not resolve their difficulties. It would only increase them:

a. They lost their freedoms with the centralization of power in a king (8:11-13)
Their sons and daughters would serve the king’s interests
The king would take the best

b. The king and his court created an elite class since they lived off of the people
Before this the people lived in social equality

4. Even though the people’s choice of a king was evil, YHWH acted for the good of Israel and Himself:

a. He used Saul to bring temporary deliverance for Israel as He had other judges

b. He used Saul to effect repentance among his people (1 Sam 12:19)¹²

c. He used Saul to expose Israel to the consequences of a weak king (15)

d. He used Saul to prepare Israel for God’s ultimate solution--Messiah

It is significant that the kings are no different than the judges who preceded them in terms of their evil! Messiah will be Israel’s only hope!

¹ Good evidence exists that the books of Samuel were considered one book. The Masoretic postscript is at the end of 2 Samuel. Esdras and Josephus refer to Samuel as a single work. The translators of the Septuagint divided the books due to their length when the vowels were added and renamed them 1 and 2 Kingdoms. Jerome followed the same divisions but changed their names to 1 and 2 Kings, but later versions of the Vulgate reverted to Samuel again.

² Ralph W. Kline, I Samuel Word Biblical Commentary, xxvii-xxxii. This view deduces a post-exilic author from an imposed purpose of compiling and editing a history of Israel on the basis of the theology of a late Deuteronomy.

³ B. Bat. 14b.

⁴ Elliott E. Johnson, 1 Samuel: Synopsis and Selected Analysis, Unpublished class notes in 327 Seminar in Old Testament Historical Literature, 1.

⁵ John A. Martin, Studies in 1 and 2 Samuel Part 4: The Theology of Samuel Bibliotheca Sacra, 141:4 (1984): 303-14. He states specifically that, The author of 1 and 2 Samuel was showing the outworking of the Deuteronomic Covenant for Israel (p. 132).

⁶ Ibid., 136.

⁷ While it is true that Saul does slay the eighty-five priests of Nob and David recognizes that he was responsible for their death (23:22), David is still not stripped of the kingship. And what is more, the talonic justice which may have been met out to him at Ziklag for his responsibility at Nob (30) is not even camparable since, David recovered all that the Amalekites had taken, and rescued his two wives (30:19).

⁸ Eli is spiritually blind. He sees Hannah but thinks she is drunk (1:13-14). He does not see his sons' wickedness (2). His eyesight is growing dim as the lamp of God is growing dim in the temple (3:2-3). He cannot see when the ark of God is taken from the nation (4:15).

⁹ The sons of Eli die at the hands of their own misuse of religion as they take the ark of the Lord into battle (4:11). Eli dies of his own heaviness (cf. kbd throughout the following section where YHWH's greatness has gone. Here Eli dies of his own greatnesses.

¹⁰ John A. Martin, Studies in 1 and 2 Samuel Part 2: The literary Quality of 1 and 2 Samuel, Bibliotheca Sacra 141 (1984): 131-45. He identifies this deliverance by YHWH as the reversal-of-fortune motif wherein Samuel is placed over Eli (1--3), the Ark is placed over the Philistines (4:1--7:1), Samuel is over Saul (7:2--15:35), and David is placed over Saul and Jonathan (21--24).

¹¹ This material is taken from Elliott E. Johnson's Recognition of Theological Themes. Unpublished class notes in 327 Seminar in Old Testament Historical Literature, 1.

¹² Note: Saul looked for donkeys and found a kingdom. The people looked for a king and found ________!

There’s no way to get around it. Knowing God is the most exhilarating experience a man or woman can ever be graciously invited to enjoy! His very nature defies adequate description and yet, through his indwelling Spirit, he has flooded our hearts with his love and majestic beauty (Rom 5:5). The sheer force of his presence calms our fears and assures us draw near in holy, humble adoration. There are times in prayer, I believe, that he may actually let us stretch out a hand so as to almost touch his face:

Prayer is that rare privilege in which we soar to the very throne of God himself, quite literally I mean, and fellowship with the one who is all powerful, all knowing, and lives everywhere at once with his whole being. We meet God himself!

We said in the last article that prayer has more to do with gaining access to his presence and knowing God personally than it does making endless requests of him. To grow in our prayer lives, then, we must grow in our personal knowledge of God, our relationship with him. He is not a machine, we said, though much of the way we treat him reveals that we secretly possess vestiges of this pagan conviction; such ignorance still lingers in our hearts.

But treating God as an automaton or mindless robot—as revealed by mindless petitions, rote prayers, and in some cases chanting—is as ridiculous as it is dangerous, especially when we’ll have to give account to a jealous God. On the contrary, in Scripture we are introduced to the super-personal Being who has made himself known to Moses and to us (in Christ) as the great “I AM.”

Thus God is indeed personal and possesses the qualities we normally think of when we think of “personality.” This is not to say, however, that God exists simply on a super-human level, however glorified that might be. The awesome truth is that quite unlike us he is self-existent, eternal, lacks for nothing, and is accountable to no one. Yet he is nonetheless the God who abides always with his covenant people and persists in utter faithfulness to his word. God is eternal, personal, and faithful.

God is shrouded in majestic greatness, the depths of his being have never been—nor will they ever be—plumbed by human understanding. Not now, not even in heaven (cf. 1 John 3:2-3).

Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), the famous Italian, medieval theologian, created one of the greatest intellectual achievements of Western civilization in his Summa Theologica. It’s a massive work: thirty-eight treatises, three thousand articles, ten thousand objections. Thomas attempted to gather into one coherent whole all of known truth. What an undertaking: anthropology, philosophy, science, ethics, psychology, political theory, and theology, all under God.

On December 16, 1273—so the story goes—Thomas abruptly stopped his work. While celebrating Mass in the Chapel of St. Thomas, he caught a glimpse of eternity, and suddenly he knew that all his efforts to describe God fell so far short that he decided never to write again.

When his secretary, Reginald, tried to encourage him to do more writing, he said, “Reginald, I can do no more. Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as so much straw.”¹¹

And so it is when we come face to face with God in prayer. It’s not that what he has revealed in his Word is wrong or that human language is completely inadequate. Certainly not. It’s just that we are finite, and so is language, and thus we will never be able to finally—once and for all—bend our minds around his infinite greatness. In contrast to the practical conviction of most theologians, there is no “BOX” big enough for God. We will never get past God, if you will, to see what’s on the other side. Indeed, there is no other side. He’s the all in all, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end—God for eternity!

God’s Awesome, Infinite Power

One of the attributes of his greatness is his infinite and awesome power, particularly displayed in creation.¹² In a children’s book entitled Is A Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? Robert Wells gives us a taste of God’s power in creation; he takes us from a size we can grasp to one we can’t.¹³

The largest animal on earth is the blue whale. Just the flippers on its tail are bigger than most animals on earth.

But a blue whale isn’t anywhere as big as a mountain. If you put hundreds of blue whales in a huge jar, you could put millions of “whale jars” in a hollowed out Mount Everest.

But Mount Everest isn’t nearly as big as the earth. If you stacked a hundred Mount Everests on top of each other they would only be a whisker on the face of the earth.

And the earth isn’t anywhere as big as the sun. You could fit over one million earths inside the sun.

But the sun, which scientists tell us is a medium size star, isn’t anywhere as big as the red supergiant star called Antares. Fifty million—that’s right, count them all—fifty million of our suns could fit inside Antares.

But Antares isn’t anywhere as big as the Milky Way galaxy. Billions of stars, including supergiants like Antares, as well as countless comets and asteroids, actually make up the Milky Way galaxy.

But the Milky Way galaxy isn’t near as big as the universe. There are literally, billions of other galaxies in the universe. And yet, filled with billions of galaxies, the universe is almost totally empty. The distances from one galaxy to another are beyond our imagination. It defies exhaustive comprehension. And so does the One who made it! To think that he did all that with just a spoken word. Incredible! “Righteous”…as some younger members of the race are wont to say these days. But if the truth be known, it was only an infinitely limited expression of his power.

So when we approach a God of this magnitude in prayer, let us come humbly, knowing that he is awesome in power, that there is good reason the Hebrews referred to him as El Shaddai, the Almighty!

God is omnipotent; there is no end to his power. Jeremiah the prophet said, “Ah sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched hand. Nothing is too hard for you!” Jesus understood this truth well. In Mark 14:36 he said: “Abba father, everything is possible for you….” Elizabeth’s miraculous pregnancy brought forth the praise that “nothing is impossible for God” (Luke 1:37).

The good news is that the same God who is all powerful, is also the same God who is holy, loving, and wise. When contemplating, with frightening awe, a God with such unending, limitless power, the opposite is unthinkable. If God were a capricious, totalitarian despot…. Think for a moment of what has generally happened in human history when certain individuals have acquired enormous political power. Has anything good ever come of it? Have they not left a mark on history we’d rather not remember, let alone think about. I don’t even have to mention names….What I am saying is that God’s will is tied to his nature and he, therefore, cannot do anything against his nature, i.e., anything unwise, anything unloving, anything that does not exude with his infinite perfections and holiness.

God’s infinite power means that his good and holy plan will be accomplished in history (Eph 1:11) and no one can thwart it. The thought of God being stifled in some way, is absolutely impossible and pagan. Even a child knows that! The category of God—the Biblical God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—precludes that he should “lose” at anything. Besides the book of Revelation tell us that he wins once and for all. The great news is that all those who are joined to Christ by faith win too—big time, if you will (Rev 21:3-4)!

It is intriguing that in western culture, where technology has produced machines of enormous and unthinkable power, that we have virtually lost the truth of God’s almighty power. In Who Needs God, Harold Kushner writes:

The next time you go to the zoo, notice where the lines are longest and people take the most time in front of the cage. We tend to walk briskly past the deer and the antelope, with only a passing glance at their graceful beauty. If we have children, we may pause to enjoy the antics of the seals and the monkeys. But we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to the lions, the tigers, the elephants, the gorillas.

Why? I suspect that without realizing or understanding it, we are strangely reassured at seeing creatures bigger or stronger than ourselves. It gives us the message, at once humbling and comforting, that we are not the ultimate power.

Our souls are so starved for that sense of awe, that encounter with grandeur which helps remind us of our real place in the universe, that if we can’t get it in church, we will search for it and find it somewhere else.¹⁴

When you pray to God realize that you are coming to an omnipotent sovereign who actually desires your presence and is able to receive your praise and answer your requests. His arm is not too short, as the prophets say. Do not let your guilt stand between you and God. Come to him in contrition and you will find a profoundly gracious heart.

God’s Infinite Knowledge

Tom Allen tells the story of a large bowl of Red Delicious apples, placed at the front end of the cafeteria line at Asbury College. The note attached read: “Take only one please, God is watching.” Well, some prankster attached a note to a tray of peanut butter cookies at the other end of the line that said, “Take all you want. God is watching the apples.”

We laugh. Why? Because we instinctively know that God sees both the apples and the cookies! Of course, the biblical God is of a different genus, another God altogether. Infinite knowledge is intrinsic to any understanding of the sheer greatness of God. He is all knowing. He knows the apples and the cookies, equally well. God is not simply all powerful—as we said above—he is also omniscient. This is good news if you’re an obedient Christian, it’s not so good if you’re a Christian who thinks they can get away with sin, and it is down right terrible news if you’re trying to avoid God altogether. So when you come to God in prayer, understand that he already knows everything about you—what you did today, where you went, what you thought, your dreams, aspirations, sins.

Peter declares in John 21:17 that Jesus knows “all things” and the writer of Hebrews says that “nothing in creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give an account” (4:13). Therefore, our prayers are not done in order to inform God of anything. This is a carnal, pagan approach to God. Jesus said in Matt 6:7 not to run on endlessly—I believe the word is “babble”—like the pagans because God already knows what you need before you ask him. In fact, God knows all things, whether actual or possible, equally and effortlessly well. Jesus said in Matt 11:21 that if Sodom and Gomorrah had had his miracles performed before them, they would have repented in sack cloth and ashes. Only God can know that. Indeed, God knows all the limitless options and human choices and what would happen in each case. Try that one on for size! As the psalmist says, “His knowledge has no limit” (Ps 147:5) and our response is to “sing to the Lord with thanksgiving and make music to our God with the harp” (v. 7).

It has been said that nothing, with the possible exception of a fire, or the whistle to end a work day, can break up a conversation quicker than a fellow who actually knows what he’s talking about. Well, God has stopped a lot of useless conversations in his day! He’s the only one who always knows what he’s talking about, 24 hours a day without end. God never has to study, he just knows everything. We, on the other hand, are quite different. The famous theologian/medical doctor Albert Schweitzer summed up our situation quite well: “As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.” Fewer statements have proved more prophetic.

The fact is, however, that we live in an age characterized by information explosion, doubling, even tripling our knowledge at an alarming rate. The half-life of any college degree now makes the paper it’s written on almost useless. But, people appear to be more confused than ever about the important questions of life. What is happiness? What is meaning? Why am I so given to materialism? It’s like were building a world of automation of which we, by virtue of our very nature, will have little or no part.

Some argue that we are just at the beginning of the knowledge explosion. In many respects and in comparison to years past, the fields of astrophysics and mathematics—two fields which are inextricably bound up, one with the other—demonstrate the rapid advance in scientific knowledge.

Astrophysicists now generally agree that while the actual center of the universe cannot be known, it had an actual beginning and is finite. This is due in large measure to the ground-breaking work of the famous German physicist Albert Einstein and his theory of general and special relativity. Others such as Stephen Hawking later developed the solution of Einstein’s equations even further to include not just matter and energy, but also space and time. Thus Einstein opened the door and paved the way for studies in unified field theory.

Studies as recent as the late 1990s have shown that the four forces of physics (namely, electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and gravity) can be unified. At first, the theory of supersymmetry demonstrated that electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces can be unified. That left only gravity to be integrated into the model. This occurred as recently as 1994, when in the wake of certain breakthroughs in mathematics and science, gravity was added to the unified field theory in a consistent way. One of the most significant advances in thought which made these discoveries possible was the idea that perhaps there are more dimensions than just the four readily apparent to us. The unified theory with its understanding of “strings” and “massless blackholes” makes sense in a ten-dimensional realm.¹⁵

The point I wish to make from all this is that whether or not the science being done is completely accurate, it nonetheless calls to mind a very important theological point concerning God: by looking closely at his creation we may surmise that the infinitude of his power and knowledge are ultimately beyond description. No matter how much information we acquire, scientific or otherwise, we have obviously not begun to make a dent in God’s infinite knowledge, let alone his wisdom (something the world could use a heavy dose of). We need to bow before the God who simply spoke and created the universe, who created something from nothing, fit for ordered and purposeful existence. We need to bow in humility before a God who possesses such unimaginable depths to his knowledge that he would even be able to dream (pardon my anthropomorphism) of such a cosmos. It boggles the mind to say the least. Who knows how great he really is? This is the God who loves us and has called us into fellowship with him (1 Cor 1:9).

We must hasten to add that the inscrutable depth of God’s knowledge and understanding does not entail the idea that his knowledge is so qualitatively different from ours that his truth may be totally different from ours. Not at all. We know from the nature of Scripture, from the incarnation, and from the image of God in us, that this cannot be so. His knowledge operates at levels and dimensions well beyond ours to say the least (Isa 55:10-11), but what he has told us in his Word is as true for him, as it is for us.

But the most important fact about God’s knowledge, as far as we are concerned, is that he knows us. Paul straightened the Galatians out on this matter. He told them that it was more important that God knew them than that they knew God. His theological point was that God’s knowledge of us is prior to and the cause of our knowledge of him. Once again, the Bible doesn’t head down some purely theoretical road when discussing the wonderful attribute of God’s limitless knowledge, but rather relates it to our salvation, our participation in knowing him personally. The apostle says essentially the same thing to the Corinthians (1 Cor 13:12): “For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known” (NET Bible).

J. I. Packer, as insightful as he is clearheaded, has summed it up well:

What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis the fact that I know God, but the larger fact that underlies—the fact the he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.¹⁶

Too bad we couldn’t approach this subject with as much amazement as the youngster in the Sunday School class who had some problems reciting the Lord’s prayer: “Our father, who art in heaven, how’d you know my name?”

When God teaches us about his incomprehensible knowledge he does so by relating it to our well being under his watchful and competent eye. This is in keeping with his jealousy, that he has “eyes for us only” and that we have our hearts set on him alone. Jesus told the disciples in their time of need that not even a single sparrow falls to the ground apart from his knowledge and permission, and that all the hairs on their head are numbered (Matt 10:29-30). As my good friend repeatedly says: “How cool is that?”

God’s Infinite Presence

So God is all powerful and all knowing. But have you thought recently about his relationship to space. Not to outer space per se, but his relationship to everywhere in the universe. The God whom you worship is omnipresent. Jeremiah said it well: “Can anyone hide in secret places, so that I cannot see him?” declares the Lord. “Do not I fill heaven and earth?” declares the Lord (23:24 NIV).

This means that wherever we are, God is there. This means that right now God is with you. He is present with you with his whole being and in absolutely undivided attention. And yet, at the same time, and in the same way, he is with me. Thus there is an intimate relationship between his infinite knowledge and his infinite presence. The psalmist knew this and marveled at God’s wonderful nature:

In Psalm 139:1-4 the psalmist is quite aware of God’s knowledge of everything about him…

139:1 O LORD, you examine me and know. 139:2 You know when I sit down and when I get up; even from far away you understand my motives. 139:3 You carefully observe me when I travel or when I lie down to rest; you are aware of everything I do. 139:4 Certainly my tongue does not frame a word without you, O LORD, being thoroughly aware of it. 139:5 You squeeze me in from behind and in front; you place your hand on me. 139:6 Your knowledge is way beyond my comprehension; it is so far beyond me, I am unable to fathom it.

…the psalmist then relates God’s intimate knowledge of us to his presence with us:

139:7 Where can I go to escape your spirit? Where can I flee to escape your presence? 139:8 If I were to ascend to heaven, you would be there. If I were to sprawl out in Sheol, there you would be. 139:9 If I were to fly away on the wings of the dawn, and settle down on the other side of the sea, 139:10 even there your hand would guide me, your right hand would grab hold of me. 139:11 If I were to say, “Certainly the darkness will cover me, and the light will turn to night all around me,” 139:12 even the darkness is not too dark for you to see, and the night is as bright as day, darkness and light are the same to you.

…then the psalmist marries God’s knowledge and presence with his power in creation. God is the One who created us and determined the plan for our lives:

139:13 Certainly you made my kidneys, you wove me together in my mother’s womb. 139:14 I will give you thanks, because your deeds are awesome and amazing. You knew me thoroughly, 139:15 my bones were not hidden from you, when I was made in secret, and sewed together in the depths of the earth. 139:16 Your eyes saw me when I was a fetus. All the days ordained for me were recorded in your scroll before one of them came into existence (see Jer 1:5).

Is it any wonder that the psalmist ends up with a penetrating clear realization of his own limitations and creaturely-ness in contrast to God’s infinite knowledge, presence and power…

139:17 How difficult it is for me to fathom your thoughts about me, O God! How vast are their sum total! 139:18 If I tried to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. Even if I finished counting them, I would still have to contend with you.

…The net result is that we should desire the establishment of God’s kingdom both in the world and in our own lives as well!

139:19 If only you would kill the wicked, O God! Get away from me, you violent men! 139:20 They rebel against you and act deceitfully; your enemies lie. 139:21 O LORD, do I not hate those who hate you, and despise those who oppose you? 139:22 I absolutely hate them, they have become my enemies. 139:23 Examine me, and probe my thoughts! Test me, and know my concerns! 139:24 See if there is any idolatrous tendency in me, and lead me in the reliable ancient path!

God’s omnipresence means that Jesus will be with us as we set out on our mission to make disciples of all nations. He told the disciples that all authority had been given to him and that they were to go and share his message of faith and obedience to all peoples on the globe and then added, “And surely I am with you always, even to the very end of the age” (Matt 28:19-20). His omnipresence also means that when people do come to Christ, and there are problems in relationships, Christians can get together to work out those problems with the full knowledge that he is there present with them. In Matt 18:20 he said—in the context of church discipline I might add—that “whenever two or three come together in my name (i.e., to restore a sinning brother or sister), there am I with them.” Now the truth is that Jesus is with Christians whether there’s one person present or one hundred, but he wants us to know that he will not abandon us in the difficult things he has called us to do. We can count on his presence when we have to deal with a sinning brother, confront a spouse, question a wary teenager, fire an employee, meet the expectations of our children, face difficulties at work, deal with irate customers, etc. We know his “empowering presence” when we pray.

Therefore, the truth of God’s omnipresence is good news because it assures us that no matter what God calls us to do or what he permits to happen in our lives, he will be there with us. He will never leave or forsake us.

The hammer is a useful tool, writes A. W. Tozer, but the nail, if it had feelings and intelligence could present another side of the story. For the nail knows the hammer only as an opponent, a brutal, merciless enemy who lives to pound it into submission, to beat it down out of sight and clinch it into place. That is the nail’s view of the hammer, and it is accurate, except for one thing: The nail forgets that both it and the hammer are servants of the same workman. Let the nail but remember that the hammer is held by the workman and all resentment toward it will disappear. The carpenter decides whose head will be beaten next and what hammer shall be used in the beating. That is his sovereign right. When the nail has surrendered to the will of the workman and has gotten a little glimpse of his benign plans for its future it will yield to the hammer without complaint.

The file is more painful still, for its business is to bite into the soft metal, scraping and eating away the edges till it has shaped the metal to its will. Yet the file has, in truth, no real will in the matter, but serves another master, as the metal also does. It is the master and not the file that decides how much shall be eaten away, what shape the metal shall take, and how long the painful filing shall continue. Let the metal accept the will of the master and it will not try to dictate when or how it shall be filed.

As for the furnace it is the worst of all. Ruthless and savage, it leaps at every combustible thing that enters it and never relaxes its fury till it has reduced it all to shapeless ashes. All that refuses to burn is melted to a mass of helpless matter, without will or purpose of its own. When everything is melted that will melt and all is burned that will burn, then and not till then the furnace calms down and rests from its destructive fury.¹⁷

Suffering is no fun. Sometimes God uses a hammer—at least it seems that way—and at other times he uses a painful file. He even uses a furnace, though perhaps not as often, being ever mindful that we are made of dust. Suffering is gut wrenching and drawn out at times, but the one thing that you must know Christian, is that God is with you through the whole ordeal. He has focused all his energies on you and has never left your side, though for a moment it may seem as if he’s abandoned your heart and fled from your thoughts. You may come to the throne of grace to find mercy and grace to help in time of need for in truth God has never left your side. Where ever we are, as the psalmist has said, there is our Father.

In our first study on prayer we learned that it was essential to deepen our personal knowledge of God if prayer was not to sink into some form of paganism. In this way we would come to appreciate that prayer is more than petition. So we looked at God’s personality and his faithfulness. We meditated on the fact that God is not a robot or an impersonal cosmic machine, but instead was super-personal. We learned that he chooses people and enters into covenant relationships with them and will prove himself faithful through thick and through thin. In this study, we were essentially asking the question, what kind of God can make these promises of covenant faithfulness on such a grand and otherwise impossible level? Now we know. He is a God who is omnipotent, he can do anything; he is a God who is omniscient, he knows everything; he is a God who is omnipresent; he is everywhere with his whole being. Behold your God!

10 John Gillespie Magee Jr., as quoted in Charles Swindoll, The Tale of the Tardy Oxcart and 1,501 Other Stories (Nashville, TN: Word, 1998), 234-35.

11 See Edward K. Rowell, ed., Fresh Illustrations for Preaching and Teaching from Leadership Journal (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 91.

12 Normally we would also speak of redemption here as well. We will save that discussion for the following article.

13 Robert Wells, Is A Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? (Morton Grove, IL: Albert Whitman, 1993).

14 Harold Kushner, Who Needs God (New York: Summit, 1989).

15 See Hugh Ross, Beyond the Cosmos, rev. ed. (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1999), 27-46.

16 J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973), 41-42.

17 A. W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous, as quoted in The Tardy Oxcart, 581.

Marsha Kaitz, a psychology professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, did a test to see how well mothers know their babies. According to the Associated Press, the forty-six mothers chosen for the test had all given birth in the previous five to seventy-nine hours. They had all breast-fed their newborn.

Each mother was then blindfolded and asked to identify which of the three sleeping babies was her own. Nearly seventy percent of the mothers correctly chose their baby. Most of the mothers said they knew their child by the texture or temperature of the infant’s hand. The women apparently learned the identifying features during routine contact, said Kaitz, because they weren’t allowed to study their babies to prepare for the experiment.²²

God’s Deep Love for People

To what extent does God love us? “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem…,” Jesus cried out, “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings…” (Luke 13:34). Like a mother’s love and affection for her child, so is the Lord’s love for his children. He is passionate about his kids! Prayer and communion with God is entirely built on this truth.

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See I have engraved you on the palms of my hands….” So says Isaiah (49:15-16 NIV). The Lord does not forget his people, even in times of personal and corporate failure, gross and wanton infidelity. He keeps us permanently before his watchful eye; he has engraved us on the palms of his hands. The closest comparison of such a perfect and unfailing love is that between a mother and her infant child. The total need of the infant is so great that only the watchful eye of the ever-caring, cautious mother is equal to the task. But though the best of human love may fail—a mother may do the unthinkable and abandon her child, as the prophet Isaiah above implies—the Lord will never leave or forsake his children. Indeed, God literally yearns for his people (Jer 31:20). Remember Jesus and the painful tears he shed over Jerusalem.

In 1973 a California newspaper carried a story about a discovery made by astronomers in the giant observatory at the University of California. The scientists picked up radio signals from a body in space that they estimated to be about fifty million light years from earth. Prior to that the most distant object known was about ten million light years from earth. Distances such as these go well beyond our comprehension, much like the infinite boundaries of God’s love toward us: “For as high as the heaven is above the earth so great is his love for those who fear him” (Ps 103:11).

God’s love is breath-taking. Like the starry universe on a clear black night, it possesses limitless character. It has limitless intensity and will not be defeated. The apostle Paul was convinced that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, would be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). The love of God secured us and the love of God keeps us. It will never run out.

A young woman grew up in dire poverty in the heartland of the country. A benefactor made it possible for her to take a trip to the coast where for the first time she saw the ocean. Enraptured, she stood gazing at its vastness. In awe she was heard to say, “Thank God for something for which there is more than enough!” So it is with God’s love!

We have been saying, since the first lesson, that knowing God is integral to prayer, lest our prayers degenerate into babble or the like. Therefore, we talked about God’s personality, his greatness and infinity, and his holiness, righteousness and justice. It is time now to meditate on his love, holy love as I prefer to think about it. We will touch on several aspects of this amazing attribute, including its grace, mercy, and indefatigable persistence. And further, in this study, we will look at how God’s holiness and his love come together to purchase his “presence in peace” for the Christian.

God’s Love and Our Sin

The truth of God’s love belongs together with the truth of his holiness, like partners in a perfect marriage. They must never be divorced, though I fear our churches have oft times plotted the couple’s demise. Therefore, since holiness is integral to a proper, biblical understanding of love, so is the realization of our sinfulness. Indeed, the sheer bottomless depth of God’s love can only be appreciated when seen in the light of how unlovely, irreverent and undeserving we are. I am not saying that we are worthless, but we are indeed unworthy. Listen to Paul:

2:1 And although you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2:2 in which you formerly lived according to this world’s present path, according to the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the ruler of the spirit that is now energizing the sons of disobedience, 2:3 among whom all of us also formerly lived out our lives in the cravings of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath even as the rest…2:4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us,

Did you see the juxtaposition of the truth about who we are and the truth about who God is? Verses 2:1-3 is about us and our depravity. Such words—“dead,” “transgressions,” “sins,” “according to the world,” “sons of disobedience,” “cravings of the flesh,” indulging the desires of the flesh,” “by nature children of wrath,”—present our condition before a holy God as seemingly hopeless and irreversible. “But”—and it is the most important “but” in Scripture—verse 4 is about God and his great love. The point is as profound as it is simple: God loves the unlovely! God loves sinners, people who are consistently falling short of his standard of holiness—sinners, who are spiritually dead, and on their own could never do anything to achieve a right standing with their Maker and Judge.

But as we have said throughout this series, we tend to downplay sin in our lives. But God measures our hearts and hands by his Law, the perfect standard of his holiness (James 1:21-25). We may take the ten commandments as the ten suggestions, but they will be our judge today and in the end. A cartoon in the Hong Kong Tattler showed Moses just come down from the top of the mountain with the tablets in hand. He’s reporting to the children of Israel and says, “It was hard bargaining—we get the milk and the honey, but the anti-adultery clause stays in.” Unfortunately, unlike certain tax laws, there are no loopholes in the ten commandments! But such is fallen human nature to be looking intently for them.

This is painful truth, but truth nonetheless. We have a propensity to exchange the ethical truth and righteousness God requires for some substandard of our own making. Under the deluding influence of pride, we step across lines designed for our spiritual and physical health, and protection. We suffer the consequences and generally blame God for allowing us to get into this mess. In truth, if you think disobedience is attractive, just ask anyone whose paying for it now. Make no mistake about it, sin is attractive, but underneath that sparkling bait, is a hook. Bite and….

In order to help the church in her struggle against sin, believers throughout church history—the early church fathers, the Reformers, the Puritans—have been inspired by Scripture to reduce spirituality to two lists known as “the seven deadly sins” and “the seven virtues” of saintliness. The former includes pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. The latter includes wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, faith, love, and hope.

Mahatma Gandhi, though not a Christian, also had a list of “seven deadly sins, stated in the form of contrasts: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.

The truth of the matter is that all have fallen short of God’s glory and all are responsible to him (Romans 3:23). All of us have committed in some fashion—but nonetheless truly committed—some or all of the sins mentioned in the above “list.” “Each of us,” as Isaiah said, “has turned to own way” (Isaiah 53:6).

“During my hitch in the marines back in 1958,” writes Chuck Swindoll, “I was stationed on Okinawa where there was a leprosarium. At that time I was playing in the third division band in the Marine Corps and we were to do a performance on that north part of the island of Okinawa.

I had read about leprosy, but I had never seen a leper and I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw. We went over a bridge or two and got into the interior of this compound. I saw stumps instead of hands, I saw clumps instead of fingers. I saw half faces. I saw one ear instead of two. I saw the dregs of humanity unable even to applaud our performances. I saw in the faces of men, women, and some teenagers an anguish crying out. We could play music for them, but we could not cleanse them of their disease.

In scripture leprosy is a picture of sin. And we see that it is cleansed rather than healed. Only Jesus’ blood has the power to cleanse us of our condition of sinful corruption. Now I understand when the Scripture says, ‘He was moved with compassion.’”²³

Indeed, we are all spiritual lepers in God’s sight. And the truth about our wretched condition—while highly unpopular today—is prior to any real life-changing understanding of his love. Each of us knows what it is to hurt someone intentionally, to curse God, to gossip against our neighbor, to lift a brazen arm to the Almighty, to act out of malice toward someone created in God’s image, to use God to our own selfish ends, to hate others, to tread underfoot the blood of Christ by willfully and consistently sinning against him presuming he’ll simply grant forgiveness, to connive plans for your own advancement all the while ignoring the injury caused to colleagues, to demand God come through for you, to allow your wife to go to sleep with a heavy heart, to use grace as a fire escape, to curse the man in traffic, to hold God in contempt, to verbally dismantle your spouse in front of people—and on and on the list goes.

“The true problem lies in the hearts and thoughts of men,” says Albert Einstein. “It is not a physical, but ethical one. What terrifies us is not the explosive force of the atomic bomb, but the power of the wickedness of the human heart.” Einstein was right.

Who understands better the depth of God’s unconditional love? The one who has been forgiven much? Or, the one forgiven little? Well, in truth—and Jesus would agree—the latter category does not really exist. We are all deeply offensive to God’s holiness and an affront to his perfections. We all need unimaginable pardon. We understand his love when we understand that fact! Otherwise, we denigrate his love into some form of soft sentimentalism. But it is a holy love.

God’s Love Is His Grace and Mercy Abounding to Us

It is quite a simple step, then, to move from our sinfulness to God’s love in terms of his grace. For if he is to love us at all—and he most certainly does—it must be a love grounded in his graciousness. He could have demanded that we meet certain expectations and then showered us with everything good his benevolent heart could dream of. But, if this were the case, we should never have known the love of God. For “there is no one righteous, no, not even one” (Rom 3:10). But the love of God is manifested brilliantly in his grace toward undeserving sinners. And that is exactly what grace is: God’s love freely given to the unlovely.

In Pursuit, author and evangelist Luis Palau writes:

Thank God his grace isn’t “fair.” A couple of years ago, one of my nephews (I’ll call him Kenneth) was near death. He had AIDS. During a family reunion in the hills of northern California, Kenneth and I broke away for a short walk. He was a hollow shell, laboring for breath.

“Kenneth, you know you’re going to die any day,” I said. “Do you have eternal life? Your parents agonize. I must know.”

“Luis, I know God has forgiven me and I’m going to heaven.”

For several years, since his early teens, Kenneth had practiced homosexuality. More than that, in rebellion against God and his parents, he flaunted his lifestyle.

“Kenneth, how can you say that?” I replied. “You rebelled against God, you made fun of the Bible, you hurt your family terribly. And now you say you’ve got eternal life, just like that?”

“Luis, when the doctor said that I had AIDS, I realized what a fool I’d been.”

“We know that,” I said bluntly, but deliberately, because Kenneth knew full well that the Bible teaches that homosexual behavior is sin. “But did you really repent?”

“I did repent, and I know that God has had mercy on me. But my dad won’t believe me.”

“You rebelled in his face all your life,” I said. “You’ve broken his heart.”

Kenneth looked me straight in the eye. “I know the Lord has forgiven me.”

“Did you open your heart to Jesus?”

“Yes. Luis! Yes!”

As we put our arms around each other and prayed and talked some more, I became convinced that Jesus had forgiven all of Kenneth’s rebellion and washed away all his sin. Several short months later he went to be the Lord at age twenty-five. Says Palau, “My nephew, like the repentant thief on the cross, did not deserve God’s grace. I don’t either. None of us do. That’s why grace is grace—unmerited favor.”²⁴

Grace is the theme of the New Testament and the key to understanding its message. For the New Testament writers speak of salvation and always connect it to the grace of God. Our salvation from sin and wrath was God’s gracious idea before the beginning of time (2 Tim 1:9) and was brought to fruition in history according to his gracious plan and call (Romans 8:30). We are saved by the grace of God, not by works, (Eph 2:8-9), and the grace of God teaches to live out our salvation before God in an honorable way (Titus 2:11-12). The praise of the glorious grace of God is the final goal of salvation (Eph 1:6).²⁵

And just so that we would understand the extent of God’s grace he gave many examples in the Bible, in particular, the example of the apostle Paul. Isn’t it amazing that God should take one of the greatest legalists of all time and make him the greatest spokesman for his grace? Paul said that God had chosen him so the people might learn in him—a murderer and persecutor of the church—the true meaning of the grace of God:

1:15 This saying is trustworthy and deserves full acceptance: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” and I am the worst of them. 1:16 But here is why I was treated with mercy: so that in me as the worst, Christ Jesus could demonstrate his utmost patience, as an example for those who are going to believe in him for eternal life.

While we were at war with God—enemies as Paul says in Romans 5:10—he was making a way to extend his grace to us. What incredible love.

During WWII a man died and his two friends desperately wanted to give him a decent burial. They found a cemetery in a nearby village. It happened to be a Roman Catholic cemetery and the dead man had been a Protestant. When the two friends found the priest in charge of the burial grounds, they requested permission to bury their friend, but the priest refused because the man had not been a Catholic. When the priest saw their disappointment, he explained that they could bury their friend immediately outside the fence. This was done.

Later, they returned to visit the grave, but couldn’t find it. Their search led them back to the priest and, of course, they asked him what had happened to the grave. The priest told them that during the night he was unable to sleep. He got up and moved the fence to include the dead soldier.

And so it is with God’s love. He has found a way to include us in his love. He has found a way to extend the fence of his love to take in the unlovely. What is more amazing is that he did so without compromising the just demands flowing from his holiness. His love is his grace and his mercy flowing freely toward us. The natural question is, “How?” and, “On what basis?”

God’s Love and His Holiness: The Infinite Sacrifice of His Son

The heart of God is filled with love and in its center stands a cross. The cross—the ignoble means by which God has satisfied the just demands of the Law (i.e., his own holiness) and freely embraced us as sinners. The law stipulates that the penalty of sin is death. So Christ paid that penalty in our place. The apostle John says: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Paul says: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Peter also says the same thing: “For Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

Jesus Christ lived a perfect, sinless life (Heb 4:15) and obediently offered himself to God as a ransom for people (Mark 10:45). The full and just demands of the law have been met in him and his death pays the penalty for our sins (Heb 9:28). God’s wrath has been fully satiated and his love flows freely upon this blood-stained ground. God’s love is his mercy and grace abundantly showered on his elect in Christ (Ephesians 1:4).

Therefore, we must trust him and him alone for our salvation and Christian life. As Paul said: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). He died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Corinthians 5:15; see also John 14:21-23; 15:10).

When Louis Lawes became the warden of Sing Sing Prison in 1920, the inmates existed in wretched conditions. This led him to introduce humanitarian reforms. He gave much of the credit to his wife, Kathryn, however, who always treated the prisoners as human beings. She would often take her three children and sit with gangsters, the murderers, and the racketeers while they played basketball and baseball.

Then in 1937, Kathryn was killed in a car accident. The next day her body lay in a casket in a house about a quarter of a mile from the institution. When the acting warden found hundreds of prisoners crowded around the main entrance to the prison, he knew what they wanted. Opening the gate, he said, “Men, I’m going to trust you. You can go to the house.” No count was taken; no guards were posted. Yet not one man was missing that night. Love for one who had loved them had made them dependable.

So I too must respond to the love of Christ for me. I cannot continue in my wayward ways and sinful paths. It is his love that draws me to believe and accept what he says about my sinful condition. It is his deep love that sent him to the cross on my behalf, to pay the penalty of my sin. Have I trusted him and him alone for forgiveness? Or, am I still putting that decision off? “Now is the day of salvation,” says Paul. Won’t you trust Christ today? Right now?

Some people say that they have responded to Christ in faith, but in reality they have not. They still believe they are sufficient for life and will take their chances on eternity. In reality they only “toy around” with believing in Christ. They’re like the young woman who was being pursued by a young man truly in love with her. As the two sat together overlooking a beautiful lake, the young man proposed to her: “Darling,” he said, full of affection, “I want you to know that I love you more than anything in the world. I want you to marry me. I’m not wealthy; I’m not rich. I don’t have a yacht or Rolls-Royce like Johnny Brown, but I do love you with all my heart.” She thought for a minute, and then replied, “I love you with all of my heart, too, but tell me more about Johnny Brown.” Jesus calls us to total commitment, that rare kind that does not look to the left or to the right.

Francis Thompson’s early life was one dead end after another. He studied for the priesthood but did not complete his course; he studied medicine and failed; he joined the military and was released after just one day; he finally ended up an opium addict in London. Yet he never did escape the pursuit of God, the hunter and initiator, For God loved him. In the midst of his despondency he was befriended by someone who saw his poetic gifts—and as time went on, Thompson was able to put his experience in verse. The poem is “The Hound of Heaven,” which Coventry Patmore has called one of the finest odes in the English language. Thompson says it for all of us:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I his from Him, and under running laughter
Up vistaed hopes, I sped;
And shot, precipitated
Down titanic glooms of chasmed fears
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

God’s love for us is gracious; he gives all of himself to us where we’re at. God’s love for us is merciful; he pities us in our helpless estate. His cross secures a permanent forgiveness for us. And, as Francis Thompson’s life demonstrates, God’s love for us is persistent; he wrestles with us untiringly.

This lesson is the fourth in a series on knowing God and prayer. “Why” you ask, “have we then spent so much time on God’s holiness, his love, and Jesus’ death on the cross for us?” The answer is simple. If you’re a Christian, you need to grow in your understanding of who your heavenly father is, for prayer is just an expression of your relationship with him. Remember, we said at the outset that prayer is more than just asking for things—it is communion with a holy and loving God who cares deeply about you. Growing in our understanding of God’s nature and attributes can only foster a deeper prayer life in the willing heart. As you pray to the Lord, then, be conscious of the truths of his greatness (no prayer is too big or too small), his holiness (prayer must be offered with a clean heart [Psalm 66:18]) and his love (he enjoys your presence and no prayer goes unheard).

If you are a non-Christian, that is, you have never trusted Christ personally, then that is the first prayer God wants you to make. You can personally confess your sins to Christ and receive him as Lord and Savior. You know now that God loves you and desires that you turn to him in faith and complete trust. He will receive you freely apart from any good works you may or may not have ever done. Just come to him. Jesus said: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

22 “Even Blindfolded, Mothers Show Touch for Newborns,” Chicago Tribune as quoted in Craig Brian Larson, ed., Contemporary Illustrations for Preachers., Teachers & Writers (Grand Rapids: baker, 1996), 118.

23 Charles R. Swindoll, The Tale of the Tardy Oxcart and 1,501 Other Stories (Nashville, TN: Word, 1998), 524.

24 Luis Palau, “God’s Ocean of Grace,” Pursuit, vol. 4, no. 11.

25 J. I. Packer, Key Bible Themes: Studies of Key Bible Themes (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 94-95.

You’ll be happy to know that Sonny Bono is alright, that he’s doing just fine. You ask me how I know that. Well, I know that because of an interview TV Guide recently conducted with Cher. The actress told the interviewers that she had made contact with her former, now deceased husband. She claims to have spoken with Sonny through a medium—a well known individual—James Van Praagh, author of Talking to Heaven: A Medium’s Message of Life after Death. Sonny was quick to encourage her that he was happy and doing just fine. No one was to worry about him.

Ah yes, my friends, welcome to the New Age—or, in the words of Ruth Tucker, the Occult made respectable.¹ To see just how much certain segments of the movement have taken from orthodox Christian categories and reinvested them with Biblically antithetical ideas one need only peruse the book A Course in Miracles.²

New Age religion: a virtual kaleidoscope of “fads, fantasies and follies.” The movement boasts such well-known celebrities as Shirley MacLaine, Judy Knight, and the late John Denver. You may recall such popular selling books as Out on a Limb and The Global Brain. Al Gore himself couldn’t miss out on the chance to capture what these gurus refer to as “global consciousness” when he published his environmentally correct book, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. The New Age has been aptly described as “a luscious jungle of exotic spirituality,” including the use of crystals, the channeling of spirit entities, the use of holistic health remedies, and a fascination with UFO’s and astrology.

According to L. A. Times religion writer Russell Chandler, in his 1988 book Understanding the New Age, over 42% of Americans believe that they have been in touch with someone who has died. 67% of Americans said they have had some form of ESP and 14% endorsed the work of spirit mediums (by the end of the 1980s).

In 1988, former white house chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, got the press all up in arms when he revealed in a book that the President and Mrs. Reagan regularly read astrology forecasts and that Nancy Reagan consulted astrologers to help plan her husband’s schedule. But this shouldn’t have upset Americans since, according to Chandler, 67% of Americans read astrology reports anyway and 36% believe they are scientific.

The New Age, with its blend of American marketing, Eastern mysticism, and the inclusive nature of its belief paradigm, is growing rapidly in the US. People are starving for reality and it appears to offer them what they’re looking for. It proclaims definitive answers—in a less than definite world—to profound questions about what it means to be spiritual and to enjoy the spiritual/mystical life.

But if all this New Age stuff with its crystals and spirit mediums is too much for your sensibilities, you can always choose from the myriad of other options in American religious life. The smorgasbord includes Mormonism, Jehovah Witnesses, Christian Science, New Thought and Unity, The Worldwide Church of God, The Way International, The Children of God, The Unification Church, Hare Krishnas, The Baha’i Faith, Scientology, a host of mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, etc.³

All these religions, including the New Age, while they have many differences, promulgate on one common assertion, namely, they claim to offer knowledge about final reality. They all claim to offer true and lasting spirituality. “As scarce as truth is, the supply always seems to be in excess of the demand.” But while the essential tenets of these religions shift with the tides of culture, a fact few people recognize in a history-less America, Jesus speaks into our darkness with the eternal truth of God. There is a big difference, perhaps as large as the Grand Canyon itself, between the “mediums” in Hollywood and the Jesus of Scripture. And it is not just in the realm of ethics.

We live in a country where people’s lives are ripping apart at the seams. Families are in disintegration. “Mom hates dad and dad hates mom.” They sue each other. In certain states the kids sue each other too. And speaking of kids, what are we to make of the school violence, such as Columbine High School and the numerous other incidents before and after that? The list of societal ills infecting our country is lengthy. Sociologists and psychiatrists have much to be concerned about, as well as the rest of us. My point is not to articulate the various socio-economic/political/spiritual reasons for the present state of the union, but simply to point out that people are searching and they are hungry—hungry for a taste of reality. The New Age and other religions are attempting to speak to those needs.

Yet, is it any wonder, in light of the dissolution of the family, etc., etc. etc., that people are longing for true spiritual connections—connections which transcend our hurried existence and from which we secure a sense of the permanent and unchangeable. And we want something personal too. But the problem is, we live in a culture that, though it seeks spiritual realities—as the popularity of the New Age suggests—is nonetheless quick to argue that “there is no truth,” even if that very statement betrays such an illusion. We revel in our openness and relativism—“opening our minds” under the guise of liberality, only to find out that our brains have become more like marsh mellow than muscle. We also found that liberalism wasn’t quite as neutral about its claims either! It was only a shifting of the navet. Should some “prophet, whoever he or she might be, stand up and say that “the truth about us is this and not that,” he/she is branded a heretic and swiftly singled out for a prophet’s “reward.” Yes, for the prophets of the world, we find hidden strength, akin to Popeye after the spinach. The point is we long for a meaningful spiritual experience, but only as our imagination tames it and dumbs it down. We have little time for truth, especially the truth about ourselves. We simply cannot countenance someone speaking to our own sinfulness. But surely in the face of such radical evil in society and in personal relationships we cannot deny such honest indictments any longer. Surely we should want to come to grips with our own personal contribution to the mess.

But we are as hopelessly foolish as we are incurably religious. We seek the light, but when we get close, we protest that the truth is too much for us. So we retreat. We turn back into the darkness in order to feel comfortable. Ah, yes…back in the darkness—where no one can see, not even God—we are busy inventing some new therapy, some new hope, some new concoction or religious belief—a panacea so to speak, invested with divinity and thus guaranteed to give us the relief we incessantly lust. And we’re willing to throw whatever money at it we might have, or don’t have, as the case may be (There’s always plastic!). But when the agony comes to the surface again, like the shark in the movie Jaws, as swimmers within its grasp we are once again caught in the grip of its teeth. We are hauled under by the struggles with family in general, teenagers, bosses, government taxes, etc. Why doesn’t life work like we were promised. We are terrified by the bankruptcy of the gods our own hands have fashioned. But there is another way.

There is someone who knows you and loves you. There is someone who has spoken definitively into our darkness. He knows the games we play and blind alleys we prefer. Nonetheless, for those who want to listen, Jesus wants to speak. His voice is heard by the humble, those ready to lay down the hammer and nails of self construction (or destruction), and hear what he has to say. Those who have an ax to grind concerning their own self-goodness will never hear him speak. So go, put away your ax, if you need to, and listen to him. Ironically, the first words he says are: “You’re right!” “You are right” to turn to spiritual realities to give sustenance to your parched and wearied soul. But you are wrong to skip over your sinfulness. First, I need to talk to you about “you.” Indeed, this is where Jesus begins one of his most impressive sermons, referred to as The Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew 5-7. I want to focus particularly on the first four beatitudes in 5:1-6 en route to answering the question about true spirituality. You are right to seek it, but I encourage you to listen to what Christ has to say about it. Buckle your seat-belt. The road is rough, but I think you’ll find it true. Finally, some place to land your heart’s feet.

When it comes to understanding true spirituality, it begins first, at least according to Christ, with a deep understanding of ourselves as we stand before God. For Jesus God is the one who is not only holy, righteous, and distinct from his creation (he upholds and loves it), but he is also the God who is with the humble in heart, the one who loves the unlovable. In Matthew 5:1-2 Jesus saw the crowds so he went up on a mountainside and sat down. The posture of a rabbi sitting down indicated that he was going to teach. Recognizing this, his disciples went to him to listen. Once again Jesus is trying to get an audience with us, to “sit with us” as it were, so that he might talk to us about our condition and the hope he offers. The first beatitude is in Matthew 5:3 and would have hit his original hearers—who suffered under Roman oppression—like a scud missile out of nowhere.

He says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The word blessed in this beatitude means to possess and participate in the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God in your daily experience. It is to marvel in the “life-giving” transforming power of God in your every day walk-about world. “But,” says Jesus—and this is the part where every good preacher sharing this truth ought to have one foot in the stirrup—this kind of power and personal experience of God comes only to a certain kind of individual. Only those who are poor in spirit participate in the kingdom of heaven. So what does he mean when he says “poor in spirit?” This is the difficult news.

Let me begin by answering that question with a negative. Being “poor in spirit” does not mean being diffident, highly reticent, or lacking in courage. No, not by any means. Courage is that quality that gives allegiance to truth, and brings forth valiant action in the world. No, poor in spirit cannot be translated as “lacking in courage.” Those who take it this way, and many have, make themselves the mouse. These people ought to remember those words of caution from Aneurin Bevan: “Don’t make yourself the mouse, or the cat will eat you.”

But neither is “poor in spirit” a reference to some sort of Christian (or otherwise) false humility. You’ve undoubtedly heard the guy who says he can’t find time to eat, sleep, or even watch TV with his family. All he has time to do is read his Bible and pray. This kind of false humility is not at all what Jesus has in mind by “poor in spirit.”

To be “poor in spirit” is to come to grips with a crucial, yet disturbing fact. It is the very painful recognition of my spiritual condition before God. I might have been made for a garden but I’m living in a desert! Of my own making!

The Associated Press, on June 4, 1961, told the story of a soviet nuclear sub in trouble. The K-19, as she was named, was conducting routine training missions in the North Atlantic when a pipe carrying coolant to the reactor broke. Immediately the temperature in the reactor raised to 140 degrees and was in imminent danger of exploding and causing a nuclear disaster. The captain Nicolai Zateyev immediately called for volunteers. Armed with only raincoats and gas masks the first volunteers went in. After five minutes the first one came out, threw off his mask, fell on the floor, and vomited. Several crews were sent in and eventually the pipe was sealed.

But the radiation had done its harm. The appearance of the men who had gone into the reactor changed. Their skin reddened and swelled. Their faces bloated to huge proportions. Dots of blood appeared on their foreheads. The faces of the sailors were so disfigured that within two hours they were unrecognizable and repugnant to their shipmates. They were disfigured beyond recognition.

That’s what Jesus is talking about. In the sight of God, our spiritual bankruptcy, diametrically opposed to what Shirley MacLaine thinks, is abominable and repugnant. We are not gods. We are the farthest thing from it. We are bankrupt. Sin has disfigured our souls and wreaked havoc in our lives.

The word “poor” here conjures ideas of the blind beggar hiding in the shadows of the streets in the various towns of Palestine. Before God, so go I. I am bankrupt, pure and simple. It is just as the prophet Isaiah agonizingly cried out, “Lord, I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.” Or in the words of the apostle Paul, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is in my sinful nature.” Jesus says that true spirituality and participating and possessing the kingdom of God means recognizing my radical condition.

“If we knew our wretched state we might think twice about the little games we play with God and our self-help programs. The cross—and by that I mean the whole death/resurrection/ascension/coming of the Spirit—is the only solution. God is not in the business of making good men better, but making dead men alive! We see the kind of sinfulness to which Jesus refers in our own experience. We see it in our own personal lives and in our relationships with others which are usually so filled with stress one hardly even wants to call them relationships.

Some time ago one of our friends was in a real jam. She told us of her stepson who had been in a significant amount of trouble. Her husband, the boy’s biological father, realized the thin ice upon which his son walked, but felt impotent to do anything about it. Further, the son had had bad debts as well as an overwhelming amount of credit card debt for a person in their early twenties. Further, he simply could not be trusted. On one occasion he took his step mom’s car without asking and damaged it—all the while claiming it wasn’t his fault. But, he then turned around and went to both of them and asked them to co-sign a lease agreement so that he could get an apartment. Oh, I forgot to tell you that he was evicted from his previous apartment because he had recently lost another job. Would you co-sign the lease? Exactly. Yet he couldn’t figure out, for the life-of-him, why they wouldn’t sign the lease, not to mention the fact that if he had quit on them, they would not have been able to afford the apartment for the duration of the lease. And so goes the litany of examples about relationships.

Our confusion about the nature of true spirituality is just as revealing as the confusion about relationships evidenced by my friend’s stepson. For us spirituality is more a matter of superstition, a la the New Age, or some hocus-pocus religion, rather than genuine faith. Against this transient culture stands the claims of scripture that Christ has risen from the dead and offers life and a truly spiritual experience, but it begins with the realization that not only in my human relations am I bankrupt, but also in my relationship to God. If God were to call his loans, my charade would be exposed for what it really is—a house in ruins. I am in a desperate condition. Don’t let any sense of well-being from living in comfortable, corporate America lull you into thinking all is well. All is not well; something is awfully wrong between you and God, between me and God. Even if you are already a Christian, there is a sense in which you enjoy God now, and you should, but sin, insofar as it still has sway, reminds us that salvation is not yet complete. Its completion awaits a glorious future day when Christ will put an end to sin once and for all.

But true spirituality doesn’t end here. It doesn’t end with the recognition of my hopeless estate before a holy God. This is just the beginning, but an important beginning it is. Get it wrong here, and you’ll get the whole thing wrong. This is why the central tenet of the New Age philosophy with its focus on “we are gods and don’t know it” is so incredibly wrong. It’s nothing more than gnosticism made a little more public. It has no explanatory power when it comes to the shambles of our lives. One wonders if the New Age and popular religion isn’t just another form of escapism. In any case, this is where Jesus begins, but as I said, he doesn’t end there. Thus Jesus moves on in v. 4 with another blessing formula.

In Matthew 5:4 Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Do you see the connection to what Jesus has just said about our bankrupt condition in v. 3? Those who recognize the insidious nature of their spiritual condition before God will mourn. But what in particular do they mourn about? Mourning is consistent too with loneliness or the loss of something. First of all, let it be said, that we are not talking about sadness of the sort that I will have if the Dallas Stars lose in the playoffs…again. Remember Babylon the Great in Revelation 18 and how the world mourns her destruction in the Great Tribulation. This is not the kind of mourning we’re talking about either.

We are talking about the mourning of my spiritual state before God. It is saying Oh, God, don’t look upon me. It’s like Peter, “Depart from me Lord for I am an unclean man!” All of us resonate with the words of the apostle Paul: “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. Lord I don’t understand what I do. I do not do what I want and I do what I do not want!” This is the kind of mourning Jesus has in mind.

Dwight D. Eisenhower has been quoted as saying, “There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.” Someone once said, “When at first you don’t succeed remember the last four letters of American!” We live in a “can-do” world, but when it comes to altering our spiritual condition we are helpless. We can only mourn. No fig leaf will cover the guilt of our sin and yet we’re commanded not to hide. No more hiding. The truth is “We have fallen and we can’t get up!” But note: It’s not simply a matter of being broken, but being broken in the right place, that is, experiencing our corruption in the sight of holy God.

There is a haunting photo by Alain Keler in the October 1993 issue of Life magazine. It is of a boy playing a flute. And though the boy, named Jensen, is only ten years old, he can nonetheless play some very sad songs. For when you look at his eyes—or where his eyes should be beneath his long, dark bangs—you see only redness, empty sockets. Jensen lives in a charitable institution in Bogot, Colombia.

Blindness is always tragic, but the cause of blindness in this case only multiplies the sorrow. In the caption next to the photo, Robert Sullivan explains that the boy was likely the victim of “organ nappers.” Eye thieves.

When Jensen was ten months old, reports his mother, she took him to the hospital with acute diarrhea. The next day when she returned, bandages covered Jensen’s eyes. Dried blood was spattered on his body. Horrified, she asked the doctor what had happened.

He answered harshly, “Can’t you see your child is dying?” and dismissed her.

She rushed Jensen to another hospital in Bogot. After examining him, the new doctor gave the chilling news: “They’ve stolen his eyes.” Undoubtedly his mother was engulfed in sorrow. A truly tragic story.

May I suggest to you that, while we may not have had this happen to us, we nonetheless share in this story in at least two ways. First, we are like the young boy who had his eyes stolen. The fact is we cannot see and sin has robbed of us of that ability. Second, we’re like the mother who undoubtedly mourned for her son, so we too ought to mourn with the same kind of pathos over our spiritual condition. We are spiritually blind and unable to comprehend the extent of our depravity. When we are faced with our bankruptcy and by God’s grace come to see our desperate condition, we should mourn, not rejoice. We definitely should not run and hide behind religion, Christian or otherwise.

You say, “Well, I’m a Christian, God has taken care of all of that and you’re minimizing the cross and the work of the Spirit to deny such a truth!” Really, then, why do you still struggle with sin? Why is it that all of the NT gospels and letters are written to churches who struggled with sinful thoughts, attitudes and ways of relating? Are we necessarily better than they were? Why does church history testify to more struggles than victories? Let me show you something in the beatitudes that perhaps you haven’t seen before. The first and last beatitude in vv. 3 and 10 are in the present tense. As those who have trusted in Christ, those who have admitted their bankruptcy and turned to him, they possess the kingdom of heaven now. But inherent in the concept of the “kingdom of heaven” is its future realization in fullness (cf. Matt 8:10-12). While we possess the kingdom now in a limited measure, we will someday experience the consummation of the kingdom and it is then that every tear will be removed and the old order (under sin) will be finally dealt with (Rev 21:3-4). Thus we still struggle in the present. Certain of the blessings such as “inheriting the earth,” “seeing God,” and realizing our full rights as “sons of God” can be clearly seen to have a significant future realization in God’s kingdom. Indeed, they all do!

Jesus says that those who mourn over their sinfulness will be comforted. When we admit our sinfulness, Jesus says there is “comfort.” To the one who acknowledges his/her sin and spiritual bankruptcy, and mourns over it, this person will experience the first aspect of the kingdom, namely, comfort—comfort from God through the Holy Spirit that truly meets our desperate need. It is here that we find the benefit of the cross anticipated in the sermon on the mount. It is here where the idea of forgiveness enters. “Forgiveness,” says Mark Twain, “is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” We will experience through the forgiveness of our sins. In the Bible, there is no other way.

Let’s review. True spirituality, says Jesus, begins by embracing our spiritual bankruptcy before a holy God. That’s Matthew 5:3. There is nothing we can do to either make ourselves spiritually acceptable to God, nor is there anything we can do to satiate his wrath. Jesus says that mourning befits those in this condition and that then, God will comfort us. That’s Matthew 5:4. Those who know their sinfulness and mourn over it will be meek. This is the point of

In Matthew 5:5 Jesus says blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. But what does meekness refer to? A pastor was greeted at the door of the church after the service by a women who thanked him for the good sermon to which he responded quite piously: “Don’t thank me, thank the Lord.” That’s not meekness. In fact, I think the lady realized that his smuggness wasn’t genuine meekness, for she quickly responded, “Well, it wasn’t that good!” Meekness and gentleness are close ideas as long as gentleness is characterized as power under control. There are several examples of this sought after trait in scripture.

The first example comes from the life of Abraham. In Genesis 13 he and Lot had a conflict. Actually their herds and livestock were becoming too large and the land could not support them both. Besides, the Canaanites and Perizzites were also living in the land at that time. A dispute ensued between Abraham’s herdsmen and those of Lot. Now Abraham could have gone to Lot, being his elder, and said, “Don’t you know that has God promised this land to me. Therefore, I get this land (i.e., the best land) and you can have whatever I don’t need. But that is exactly what Abraham did not do. Instead, he went to Lot and requested that there not be quarreling between the two because they were brothers (13:8). Abraham basically said to him, in 13:9, “take whatever you want and I’ll have what’s left.” So, naturally, Lot took the well-watered plain near the Jordan. Abraham’s attitude, as a result of his trust in God, was meekness. He chose not to exercise what would appear to have been his prerogatives.

Think also of the example of David when he had ample opportunity to destroy his enemy Saul. Yet he chose not to do it. There is also the profound example of Jesus himself who proclaimed in Matthew 11:28-30:

Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

When Jesus refers to himself as gentle, it is the same Greek term as is found Matthew 5:5. Jesus is meek and humble in heart. When Matthew wants to characterize the person and ministry of Jesus he cites Isaiah 42:1-4 where the text says:

Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight. I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations. He will not quarrel or cry out, no one will hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, nor a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, until he leads justice to victory. In him the nations will put their hope.

What a beautiful picture of our Lord and his way with people. Jesus enjoins this kind of meekness upon us and this is the meaning of meekness as spoken by our Lord in Matthew 5:5. Thus meekness is the result in the lives of those who can be described by the first two beatitudes. And to those who are meek, they will inherit the earth. Ultimately this probably refers to the new heavens and the new earth, as for example anticipated in 19:28, the regeneration of all things. The idea that those who were meek would inherit the kingdom in this fashion would have dumbfounded Jesus’ hearers, as much as it dumfounds us when we hear it. God’s kingdom and his ways are in many respects alien to our thinking.

But Jesus moves on from there with yet another beatitude and the last one we will look at in this discussion: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Hungering and thirsting is a powerful metaphor carrying the richest of fair. It expresses the inward cry of every soul for its very life. Here the master takes an experience from everyday Palestinian life (indeed life common to all ages and times to one degree or another), that is, the painful experience of hungering and thirsting, and uses it as a light with which to elucidate the longings of the soul for meaningful contact with God and his will in their lives. Jesus has already related the desire for food with one’s desire for God in Matthew 4:4. “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” It is a painful experience to really hunger and thirst. But, Jesus says to the person who has realized their bankruptcy, mourned over it and received forgiveness, that person will be meek and hunger for more of the same, more righteousness, both in their own lives and the in lives of others. The psalmist cried out “My soul thirsts for the living God (42:2; 63:1) and Amos in chapter 8 talks about hunger for the Word of God.

We see this attitude in the apostle Paul in Philippians 3:7-11:

3:6 In my zeal for God I persecuted the church. According to the righteousness stipulated in the law I was blameless. 3:7 But whatever was gain to me, I consider these things as loss because of Christ. 3:8 More than that, I now regard all things as loss compared to the far greater value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things—indeed, I regard them as dung!—that I might gain Christ, 3:9 and be found in him, not because of having my own righteousness derived from the law, but because of having the righteousness that comes by way of Christ’s faithfulness—a righteousness from God that is based on Christ’s faithfulness. 3:10 My aim is to know him, to experience the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and to be like him in his death, 3:11 and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

What passion for God! What zeal to know him through his Son! What a hunger and thirst for God’s righteousness, the righteousness that comes through Christ and is imputed and imparted through faith.

After two years of marriage my wife and I were ready to have a child. Like every new couple we learned later that we only thought we were ready to have a child. Anyway, it wasn’t long before our seven pound, two ounce bundle of joy came into the world. I’ll never get over watching the birth (and the other three since). What a miracle of God! We named our little pink-cheeked-individual Emily. Well, one day—a Saturday actually—“mommy” needed a break so she decided to go shopping with her mother-in-law. I stayed home to watch Emily, now a thriving three week old!

Now don’t misunderstand me, I love my kids; I have since the day they were born. But this was my first child. So when my wife wanted to leave me alone with her, I thought to myself, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. I mean, I’m not an expert at this sort of thing, you know.” But my wife calmed me down and eventually I reasoned, “What could it hurt?” After all, Emily sleeps all the time anyway. Surely I can’t mess up and do something wrong. So my wife gave me all the instructions, bid me farewell, and left me alone with Emily. I pulled the tiny bed she was in near my chair, clicked the TV on, and proceeded to watch golf. It was a slow Saturday afternoon and I thought that I would just sit there and watch golf. I love to watch golf. Doesn’t everyone?

Anyway, about 30 minutes after my wife left, I heard a little chirp come from Emily’s bed. A chirp like newborns make, I guess. About a minute later I heard another chirp. Soon the chirps were coming closer and closer, one on top of the other. They began getting louder and louder, and sounding more like full-fledged cries. I reached down to pick up Emily to console her. I held her in my arms and gently motioned up and down. Well, that made it worse. So I motioned side to side. Well, that didn’t work either. Soon she was crying so hard, her lips were purple, and they were actually “doing the wave.” Finally it dawned on me what was going on. She was hungry (da?). And there was nothing I could do for her. My wife had fed her earlier thinking that Emily would be fine until she returned from shopping. But she wasn’t and in Emily’s eyes, I was affectionately named “not-the momma.” I wasn’t going to do.

I look back on that experience, glad to say that both Emily and I lived through it, and I remember the passion Emily had for her “food” from “mommy.” I wonder how many of us have that kind of passion when it comes to longing for “food” from God, to hear his voice and desire that he create in us a righteous heart. Peter says that we should be like newborn babies craving the pure spiritual milk of the word so that by it we may grow up in our salvation, now that we have tasted that the Lord is good. (1 Peter 2:1-3). Let us hunger and thirst for righteousness that we may receive God’s ample supply. He will fill us with righteousness if we desire it (cf. Matt 6:33).

So what is true spirituality according to Jesus and his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, i.e., the first four beatitudes? Well, in short, it involves a relationship with a holy God who loves us. But, this love cannot be experienced apart from certain recognitions. First, we must embrace our helpless condition before him. I am not saying that you cannot be a good banker, lawyer, doctor, engineer or whatever apart from Christ. You can. But you cannot enjoy knowing God personally except through Christ (John 14:6). And, this comes by first recognizing our spiritual bankruptcy. I cannot take God on my terms. I must come to him on his terms.

Second, according to Jesus, the spiritually natural thing to do when I recognize my sinful estate is to mourn over it and not to try and hide in some way—i.e., being a good person, going to church, giving up on the whole thing, dismissing Christ, or whatever. God help us to face who we are and respond appropriately in faith.

Third, the embracing of who I am before God leads to meekness and a further hungering and thirsting after righteousness. We cannot divorce true spirituality from ethics of meekness and personal and corporate righteousness.

This is true spirituality. At least the beginnings of it. Jesus also goes on to talk about being “pure in heart,” “showing mercy,” “being peacemakers” and “being persecuted for the faith.” Perhaps we can discuss these next time.

1 Ruth Tucker, Another Gospel: Cults, Alternative Religions and the New Age Movement (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989), 319.

2 Helen Schucman and William Thetford, A Course in Miracles, 2d ed. (Glen Ellen: Foundation for Inner Peace, 1992).

3 Tucker, Another Gospel.