Teach me your statutes

Paul — 2012-04-30

When I told of my ways, you answered me; Teach me your statutes!
                               - Psalm 119:26

I've been so blessed by Psalm 119:25-32. I've prayed through these 8 verses and meditated on them almost daily for nearly a year and new treasure comes forth all the time and they show no sign of being exhaustible. So much! Let me say one small thing for now.

In my Christian life I've always tried hard to fight sin, embrace Christ, to change and be transformed by the Holy Spirit. But... with limited success. It's so slow! "My soul melts away for sorrow" (verse 28) because of this, and it has done for 17 years. My Christian life has been like a "1001 ways to motivate yourself and grow as a Christian" book - one of those books that doesn't actually work. The progress I've made has been in spite of myself rather than because of any these strategies, human precepts and mental gymnastics. I've come to see that all these human strategies to motivate and change come under what the bible calls "Quenching the Holy Spirit". All my attempts to "help the Holy Spirit along", actually quench him.

When I pray that God will "Teach me your statutes!", what are his statutes?

Statutes (Hebrew: choq and chuqqah) are God�s regulations that must be strictly obeyed.
They are binding ordinances. The idea is of eternal truths that are fixed. They are
unchangeable.  To serve God a person must pursue and observe exactly what the Lord 
commands, therefore they are rules of conduct for His servants.

His statutes do not resemble any human strategy of change or framework for growth, so anything we try is not going to get even close. So what are God's eternal truths/rules of conduct for us? It is very, very simple in 3 or 4 words.

Firstly, obey. Set yourself to determinedly obey whatever you know God wants for you. Keep nothing back, don't plan a strategy for obedience, just have a 100% fixed intention to obey.
Secondly, repent. Each and every time you fail, take it to God. Not a general repentance which covers everything, but specific sorrow and remorse over each specific failure of the day that you know about. This is continual, but specific.
Thirdly, trust. Each time, in the face of the failure you repent of, your response is to swing back to number one, obedience, and the motive force is trust and only trust. Childlike trust. Not a trust that God will help you, but that God will be all in all.

Of course we know all this already, but the point is that to go beyond these three simple precepts will be to quench the Spirit. To only obey, repent and trust is exactly what the Holy Spirit wants to produce in us. It is the method and the goal all in one. To give up our own strength, to reach the end of ourselves and fully embrace child-like trust. Oh Glory! Then what might God do through us and we may not even be aware of it?

Grace in Early Greek Poetry

Paul — 2011-10-12

I've just read "The Age of Grace" by Bonnie MacLachlan about the history of the word "Charis", translated in the bible as "Grace".

Charis means a gift, and the root of the word is 'pleasure'. Charis is a gift that gives pleasure. If it doesn't give pleasure, then it's not charis. For example an athlete or a great warrior gives charis through their excellent performance. We would say they are "full of grace" or "graceful". She gives the example of Achilles in the Illiad. Achillies wins the battle and so gives everyone charis (grace). In return he expects some charis back in the form of a share of the loot. But Agamemnon gives him only a tiny portion. Achilles goes off in a huff saying he hasn't received charis from Agamemnon. Agamemnon then sends him a huge share of loot, more than he would have got before, but now Achilles says because he's upset at the earlier humiliation, he takes no pleasure in it, so it doesn't constitute charis. So, charis must be received with pleasure or else it's not charis.

The aspect of charis that is even more fundamental to the concept is that it must be reciprocal. A bit like if you invite someone round to dinner, you expect to be invited round to dinner by them in return. So Achilles expected charis in return for the charis he gave everyone in fighting so well. To not give return-charis was truly scandalous in the Greek culture, even immoral.

In Romans, Paul talks about the grace of God and says, "What then? Shall we carry on sinning to increase grace all the more?" That would have been obviously false and scandalous to Greeks. If you get a gift, the response is not to beg for more, or increase your need for more grace, but instead to do what you can to give something back that will give pleasure to the one who gave you grace. This is embedded in the concept of charis and engrained in the culture. So we receive grace from God and it is expected that we will return to him something that gives him pleasure. This is not a payment for grace, because grace is a free gift, but in the Greek concept of grace, it would be absolutely expected. How do we give God pleasure? God delights in us when we grow up into Christ. When we glorify God through Christ in us.

One way the Greeks would do it was to sing praise songs for e.g. an athlete, to keep their name alive. I think this is where the tradition of Christian praise songs comes from. Since I read about this, when I sing at church I turn over in my mind the comparison of our praise songs for Christ to the forgotten praise songs of forgotten Greek heros. Christ's praise outlasts civilisations and peoples and will truly last forever!

The Spiritual Life of Old Testament Prophets

Paul — 2011-08-23

I've always wondered what it looked like when God spoke to an old testament prophet. I've had an image of some kind of ecstatic drug-fueled and extreme ascetism fueled visions, as is common in primitive religions, but I had a feeling that the Jewish visionaries used different methods. I found the answer in 1 Peter 1:10-12:

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be
yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in 
them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It 
was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have 
now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the 
Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

According to Peter, the prophets were aware of the "Spirit of Christ in them" and searched and inquired carefully of that Spirit. This language evokes a long-term commitment to study and meditate, to discover God through a kind of introspection. But it's not introspection because although it's looking inside yourself, it's looking at something that is not yourself. Do you know from experience this kind of study and prayer? Imagine the Spirit of Christ in you like a thing you can inspect, inquire of and search for, to commune with, in order to discover God's character over the course of years and decades.

More than that, as in Psalm 119:27: "Make me understand the way of your precepts, and I will meditate on your wondrous works". As we discover God's character, and his precepts, even the way of his precepts, we discover more about his way or working. Does this tell us about the devotional life of the old testament prophets? Is it a high water mark for us? Can we aim at it to encourage ourselves of what is possible?

Living according to God's word

Paul — 2011-06-13

Douglas Moo quotes one of the church fathers (I can't find the place again unfortunately), to the effect that when we talk about living according to God's word, it's not primarily about living according to God's rules, but according to his promises. This puts a much more encouraging perspective to a lot of the psalms, particular ones like Psalm 119.

The central theme of Romans

Paul — 2011-06-13

I'm only a third of the way through Douglas Moo's commentary on Romans, but wanted to record some initial thoughts. Since Luther it has been almost taboo in protestant circles to question the meaning of "justification by faith". If one questions it's meaning, one is suspected of having an insidious unstated motive which will end up in denial of justification by faith. Justification by faith is clearly taught by the bible, and not just in Romans nor just in the New Testament, but throughout. The question is, when Paul insisted on it in Romans, what was the alternative that he was denying? Was it justification by works, or justification by ethnicity? Clearly again, in Romans Paul challenges both those beliefs. A third point of critical difference between Paul and non-Christian Jews would have been that Paul taught that the effects of justification begin right now whereas non-Christian Jews believed that they would be justified only on the day of judgment.

So we have three beliefs that Paul's gospel of justification by faith was refuting. The question then is about emphases. Most protestants following Luther say that Paul was almost entirely opposing justification by works, ignoring the other two issues. This could be because the other two issues were won long ago; they're not a matter of debate now for anyone. But if we're considering what Paul's emphasis was, we need to think about what the issues were in his day. It seems to me that opposing justification by works would have been the least offensive to Jews of Paul's day; faith vs works in the OT was open to debate. The other two, on the other hand, would have been extremely challenging, that is, 1) not justified by being a Jew and 2) not justified only on the day of judgment, but right now. If we acknowledge them all as true, and still see opposition to justification by works the most important in our day, then how is it "theologically dangerous" (Moo) to shift the emphasis in our reading of Paul? It's only theologically dangerous if the shift in emphasis is followed up by a shift in actual doctrine. If a doctrine is true, it doesn't matter what emphasis it had in the original times or what emphasis it has now - it's still undeniably true!