A Sermon for the President

From Blog and Mablog:

 

Ascension Sunday 2009
This Lord’s Day is Ascension Sunday, the day we have set apart to commemorate the exaltation of Jesus Christ to the right hand of the Ancient of Days. This was the day upon which He was given universal and complete authority over all nations and kings, when He was given all rule and authority, dominion and power. Our Lord’s name is the name which is high above every name, and His is the name that, when spoken, will cause every knee to bow, and every tongue to confess, that He is indeed Lord of heaven and earth. And, as we cannot emphasize too much, or say too often, this is no invisible spiritual truth. It is simply, undividedly, true. This means it is true in a way that makes it true on the most practical levels. It is true when church is over.

"It came to pass also in the twelfth year, in the fifteenth day of the month, that the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, wail for the multitude of Egypt, and cast them down, even her, and the daughters of the famous nations, unto the nether parts of the earth, with them that go down into the pit. Whom dost thou pass in beauty? go down, and be thou laid with the uncircumcised. They shall fall in the midst of them that are slain by the sword: she is delivered to the sword: draw her and all her multitudes. The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of hell with them that help him: they are gone down, they lie uncircumcised, slain by the sword" (Eze 32:17-21).

One of the visions that the prophet Ezekiel was given was that of a parliament of dead kings, assembled in the nether regions of Sheol—the Greek word for this place is Hades. The prophet was speaking of nations which had had their time of great glory under the sun, but which, inevitably, had descended below to an empty governance of shades and shadows, the empty governance of nothing that mattered. This reality is inescapable—in Augustine’s trenchant phrase, among the nations of men, the dead are replaced by the dying, and however splendid an empire might be for the moment, there is no future for any nation outside of Christ. History occurs on the inexorable conveyor belt of moving time. There is nothing that will shut this conveyor belt off, and so there is no device to allow one nation’s day of glory to be forever fixed. Glory cannot be kept or retained in that way at all. There is no future glory for any king or president, for any nation or people, outside of Christ. So for those who reject Christ, below the earth in the nether regions, we find nothing but wisps of lost glory, and above ground at some future date talented archeologists might be able to find the remnants of an Ozymandian ruin.

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Speaking in Tongues

There is, however, another dimension to this unusual phenomenon of speaking in tongues, if the tongues in view here and in the church at Corinth were in the nature of foreign languages. In discussing the question of tongues-speaking in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul cites Isaiah 28:11-12 ('Through men of strange tongues and through the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people, but even then they will not listen to me') and indicates that tongues are 'a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers' (1 Cor. 14:21-22)

Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit - Contours of Christian Theology, 61.

Sainte-Cêne

The Bible bids us come and eat. “Take, eat, this is my body”. Jesus gave the bread, not only to his disciples, but also to Judas. They were all one in Christ, and Christ bid them all come. But eleven were blessed, and one was cursed. In his letter to Corinth, Paul is giving directions for how the Supper is to be taken, and he tells the church of Corinth not to take the Body of the Lord in an unworthy manner lest they bring judgment upon themselves. What is Paul saying? First of all, the Supper is to be taken when the saints, the Body of Christ gather. Secondly they are to exemplify the unity represented by the Supper in their conduct, for if not their conduct lies about the nature of the body of Christ which is unified. God is One, and the Body of Christ must be One with each other and with the Father. If a man is not in communion with his brother, then he ought to be reunited, lest he lie about the meaning of the Supper he is about to partake. What a more fitting opportunity to repent of faction than before the Table which represents the unity of the church? What is the last thing for a saint to do before the table of the Lord? Abstain.
To abstain is to cut oneself off from the people of God, which in affect fulfills Paul’s warning. He reproached them for coming together with lack of unity, how much less unified is the Body of Christ when certain members are watching, and “partaking in heart”? The point of the Supper is the remembrance of the death of Christ. That death, because of the breaking of Christ’s body on the cross, now unites together believers who have been washed through baptism in the blood of Christ. Christ’s body was broken so that many might be un-broken and unified with Him. The command to all that are in the body is to come, eat, and drink. As a father invites his children to the Sabbath Meal, so Christ invites us to his table. May no child say, “No thanks dad, I’ll just watch you all eat.” Let us first of all obey the clear command to come, and secondly, let us do so in a worthy manner.


January 8, 2007
Lyon, France

Written early Monday morning after reflecting upon a Baptist worship service from the day before.