Heavenly Springs

Holding Fast The Doctrines of Grace

Reformation Begins With Preaching God’s Word!

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“In January 1519 something shocking happened at the Great Minster in Zurich. Everyone in the city was talking about it. One man said he was so excited he felt as if someone had grabbed him by his hair and lifted him out of his pew.

What was the cause of all this commotion? Simply this: Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), the new pastor of the church, was preaching the Word of God. At the first service in January he opened his Bible to Matthew 1 and began to preach from the Scriptures. At the next service he picked up where he left off in the Gospel of Matthew and kept preaching. He did the same thing at the third service and thereafter, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book, right through the New Testament.

Then Zwingli started preaching through the Old Testament. Amazing! Unheard of! Soon men, women, and children came from all over Zurich to hear the minister explain the Bible in words they could understand.

Zwingli’s systematic Bible exposition was the beginning of the Reformation in Switzerland. To this day there is an inscription over the portal of that church that reads, “The Reformation of Huldrych Zwingli began here on January 1, 1519.” Reformation begins with preaching God’s Word!”

Ryken, P. G. (2001). Jeremiah and Lamentations: From sorrow to hope. Preaching the Word (118–119). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

Lamenting The Untruthfulness Of Our Generation

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The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved. 

“The same might well be said of our own culture. Everything Jeremiah says about his culture is true in these post-Christian times.

Jeremiah lived in a culture of deception. So do we. The title of a 1994 film captures the attitude of postmodern society toward truth and falsehood: True Lies. Is a “true lie” true or false? If it is a lie, then it must be false and not true. But if it is false, then it is truly a lie. We have lost the wisdom to know where truth ends and falsehood begins…

There is even falsehood in the church. Os Guinness’s telling indictment of American evangelicalism is worth quoting again:

Contemporary evangelicals are no longer people of truth.… A solid sense of truth is foundering in America at large. Vaporized by critical theories, obscured by clouds of euphemism and jargon, outpaced by humor and hype, overlooked for style and image, and eroded by advertising, truth in America is anything but marching on. With magnificent exceptions, evangelicals reflect this truth decay and reinforce it for their own variety of reasons for discounting theology. Repelled by “seminary theology” that is specialized, professionalized, and dry, evangelicals are attracted by movements that have replaced theology with emphases that are relational, therapeutic, charismatic, and managerial (as in church growth). Whatever their virtues, none of these emphases gives truth and theology the place they require in the life and thought of a true disciple.

We live in the midst of deception. What should we do?

First, we need to repent for our own untruthfulness. That is what the prophet Isaiah did. Like Jeremiah, he lived in the midst of deception. As a prophet of God, speaking the Word of God, it would have been easy for him to be smug about his own truthfulness. But when Isaiah “saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted,” he cried, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (Isaiah 6:1, 5). We are no better than Isaiah. Our lips are no cleaner, our words are no more truthful—and we should be no less penitent.

Second, we need to be people of the truth. One of the memorable characters in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is called “Valiant-for-truth.” His name is taken from the Authorized Version of this passage: “They are not valiant for the truth upon the earth” (Jeremiah 9:3).

We need to be Valiant-for-truth. We need to speak the truth in all our words and do the truth in all our actions. We must be faithful in our personal relationships, keeping our word even in trivial matters. We must be faithful in our family relationships. We must keep our marriage vows, honor our parents, and be forthright with our children.

We must also be faithful in our relationship with God. We must love him in our hearts so that the praise on our lips when we worship is true and not false. We must be devoted to the truth of Scripture because God’s Word is truth (John 17:17). We must be devoted to reading, meditating, memorizing, and teaching the Bible.

Third, we must lament all kinds of untruth. Jeremiah’s example teaches that one of the chief duties of the Christian in declining times is lamentation. Jeremiah is a prophet for post-Christian times, and post-Christian times call for lamentation from God’s people.

Lamentation does not mean going around wringing one’s hands or living in the nostalgic past. We are not gloomy but joyful, because we know that “those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever” (Psalm 125:1). We are full of hope because we know that our salvation is sure in Jesus Christ, who will bring all things in heaven and on earth under his authority. But at the same time we lament the untruthfulness of our generation. We are moved to tears by the deceptions of our age and the judgment of the age to come. Even as we lament, we ask the Lord to impress us with a still greater sense of the sadness of sin.”

Ryken, P. G. (2001). Jeremiah and Lamentations: From sorrow to hope. Preaching the Word (166–167). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

The Crook in the Lot

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Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked?  (Ecclesiastes 7:13)

This excerpt is a bit longer that what I am accustomed to posting here, but it is worthwhile. In his commentary on Ecclesiastes, Philip Graham Ryken provides a brief biography of the great Puritan Thomas Boston. He then discusses his life in light of his classic sermon, “The Crook in the Lot” which was prepared shortly before his death. For anyone suffering the frustration of life in a fallen world, this will encourage your heart.  It also highlights the difference between the despair of fatalism and the hope that is found in the Sovereignty of a God who is working all things together for our good.

“Thomas Boston was a melancholy man, prone to seasons of discouragement in the Christian life. He was often in poor health, even though he never missed his turn in the pulpit. His wife suffered from chronic illness of the body and perhaps also the mind. But perhaps the couple’s greatest trial was the death of their children: they lost six of their ten babies.

One loss was especially tragic. Boston had already lost a son named Ebenezer, which in the Bible means “Hitherto hath the Lord helped us” (1 Samuel 7:12, kjv). When his wife gave birth to another son, he considered naming the new child Ebenezer as well. Yet the minister hesitated. Naming the boy Ebenezer would be a testimony of hope in the faithfulness of God. But what if this child died, too, and the family had to bury another Ebenezer? That would be a loss too bitter to bear. By faith Boston decided to name his son Ebenezer. Yet the child was sickly, and despite the urgent prayers of his parents, he never recovered. As the grieving father wrote in his Memoirs, “it pleased the Lord that he also was removed from me.” 

After suffering such a heavy loss, many people would be tempted to accuse God of wrongdoing, or to abandon their faith, or at least to drop out of ministry for a while. But that is not what Thomas Boston did. He believed in the goodness as well as in the sovereignty of God. So rather than turning away from the Lord in his time of trial, he turned toward the Lord for help and comfort.

Boston’s perseverance through suffering is worthy not only of our admiration but also of our imitation. One way to learn from his example is to read his classic sermon on the sovereignty of God, which is one of the last things he prepared for publication before he died. Boston called his sermon The Crook in the Lot. It was based on the command and the question that we read in Ecclesiastes 7:13: “Consider the work of God: who can make straight what he has made crooked?”

Here the Preacher invites us to consider God’s work in the world. Then he asks a rhetorical question: Who has the power to straighten out what God has made crooked? The answer, of course, is no one. Things are the way God wants them to be; we do not have the ability to overrule the Almighty.

When the Preacher talks about something “crooked,” he is not referring to something that is morally out of line, as if God could ever be the author of evil. Instead he is talking about some trouble or difficulty in life we wish we could change but cannot alter. This happens to all of us. We struggle with the physical limitations of our bodies. We suffer the breakdown of personal or family relationships. We have something that we wish we did not have or do not have something that we wish we did. Sooner or later there is something in life that we wish to God had a different shape to it. What is the one thing that you would change in your life, if you had the power to change it?

According to Ecclesiastes, God has given each of us a different situation in life. Thomas Boston explained it like this: “There is a certain train or course of events, by the providence of God, falling to every one of us during our life in this world: and that is our lot, as being allotted to us by the sovereign God.”

We all have our own lot in life. Furthermore, we all have things in life that we wish we could change. Boston continues:

In that train or course of events, some fall out cross to us, and against the grain; and these make the crook in our lot. While we are here, there will be cross events, as well as agreeable ones, in our lot and condition. Sometimes things are softly and agreeably gliding on; but, by and by, there is some incident which alters that course, grates us, and pains us.… Every body’s lot in this world has some crook in it.… There is no perfection here, no lot out of heaven without a crook.

When some people hear Ecclesiastes say this, they assume that the Preacher is being fatalistic. Some things are straight in life, other things are crooked; but whether they are crooked or straight, there is absolutely nothing that we can do about it. It all comes down to fate, or maybe predestination. Therefore, this passage is about “the powerlessness of human beings over against God”—a powerlessness that can only lead to fatalism.

There is another way to look at these verses, however—not as an expression of fatalism but of Calvinism! In other words, the Preacher is telling us that whether things seem crooked or straight, we need to see our situation in terms of the sovereignty of God. According to Thomas Boston, if God is the one who made the crook in our lot, then we need to see that crook as the work of God, which it is vain for us to try to change. “What God sees meet to mar” we “will not be able to mend.” “This view of the matter,” said Boston, “is a proper means, at once to silence and satisfy men, and so to bring them unto a dutiful submission to their Maker and Governor, under the crook in their lot.”

“We cannot change what God has done unless and until God wants to change it. We are under the power of the sovereign and omnipotent ruler of the entire universe. We do not have the power to edit his plan for our lives. But far from driving us to despair, the sovereignty of God gives us hope through all the trials of life. We do suffer the frustration of life in a fallen world. But the Bible says that we suffer these things by the will of a God who is planning to set us free from all this futility and who is working all things together for our good (see Romans 8:20, 28).”

Philip Graham Ryken, Preaching the Word, Ecclesiastes: Why Everything Matters, Wheaton: Crossway, 2010, pages 162-166. (Logos)

Click here to read Thomas Boston’s The Crook in the Lot in it’s entirety.