The Gospel Coalition

This is Part 2 in a series running every Monday. Details at the bottom of the post.

Roland Mitcheson is what one would call the “pastor emeritus” of Middletown Springs Community Church, the church I pastor in Vermont. His retirement opened up the opportunity for my family’s coming to New England. Pastor Roland is a fascinating guy, full of truth and wisdom. He’s one of the most evangelistic men I’ve ever met. Recently in the hospital for surgery, he spent most of his waking time there talking to anybody who’d listen to him about Jesus. And he is constantly doing this. Roland may have retired from vocational ministry but he has not stopped ministering one second. A lot of people ask what it’s like to have the pastor who preceded me remain in the church, and I have to confess it has been a great joy. Roland and his wife Betsy are two of the sweetest, gentlest, and wisest people we are privileged to know. Roland still ministers through our church by providing pulpit supply for area churches, leading the monthly community men’s breakfast and the weekly Sunday evening church prayer meeting, as well as frequently providing offertory music. (He is an accomplished pianist.) And Betsy leads our church’s Operation Christmas Child ministry and other “crafty” service projects. The two of them are frequent visitors of our shut-ins and nursing home residents, and they also lead our annual Vocation Bible School, a unique twist on the traditional vacation Bible school format. Roland is also an elder candidate. I can assure that his assessment process went a little differently than the other guys’! So you can see what an asset he is and they are to our church. And to me. Middletown Springs Church is a very unique community, full of graciousness and the sweetness of the Spirit. This is owed a lot to a decade of Roland’s shepherding. I love Pastor Roland and I’m glad to share some of his remarkable story with you.

Where were you born and raised and how did you come to faith in Christ?

I was born at a very early age in Stockton-on-Tees in the north of England! WW2 started when I was about 3, and Stockton was not too far away from ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) where my Father worked. This was one of the targets of the bombing raids and although we didn’t get hurt, my older sisters and I were taken to a concrete air raid shelter in our yard and joined by one or two neighbors where we became familiar with the drone of Heinkels and Messerschmitts and occasionally the whistle of a “doodlebug” (pilotless robotic plane) of the V1 or V2 variety.
Three times each Sunday we would walk the mile or so to attend the Plymouth Brethren Assembly for morning Worship, Sunday school and Evening Service.

One thing which sticks in my mind during the war years was the singing in German of the familiar hymns by German prisoners of war who were transported on a double-decker bus to the Sunday evening service from the nearby POW camp. One of our elders – an official of a large steel corporation – and his son, both spoke fluent German and preached to the men.

Coming to faith in Christ often involves several steps or links in the chain, and in those formative years these included my Mother going through the Pilgrim’s Progress with my sisters and me each evening, using a pictorial chart. A chart which I saw about fifty years later, incidentally, hanging in the print shop of the “Africa Inland Mission” headquarters in New Jersey.

Another link was a large scroll painted on the front wall of our meeting hall which read “Ye call Me Master and Lord, and Ye say well, for so I am!” John 13:13. I had often drawn that scroll while I sat in the pew but I realized one day that I couldn’t really call Him my Master and Lord in the same way my sisters and parents could.

Another link was when we had a visiting missionary from Jamaica called Harold Wildish – a man who could communicate with children through his vivid Illustrations of the Gospel. Interestingly, I came across a book about 60 years later that this beloved servant of God had written.

These links brought both an initial response to the Lord as I received Him into my heart, and helped me through my doubts. When we moved to the city of Birmingham in 1947 I was baptized as a believer and, with my sister and a friend, we got a pile of those old sixteen inch US radio transcription discs from “The Old Fashioned Revival Hour”, “Revivaltime,” “Showers of Blessing,” and “The Baptist Hour” and played these in nursing homes and hospitals.

When did you know God was calling you into the ministry, and what was your Early ministry like?

I believe the Lord is preparing us for ministry long before we ever realize it. My conscription into the RAF in Malta laid some of the groundwork as I wrestled with the temptations of youth, but also had opportunities to share one-on-one with other guys. I suppose you could say I was like Israel in the desert — facing both ways. Looking forward to the promised land, but looking back to the melons and pomegranates of Egypt. Interestingly enough, I recently got back in touch with six other guys I served with in Malta and we e-mail back and forth to New Zealand, Scotland, and England.

During my time in the RAF I got to travel some of the route Paul took from St.Paul’s Bay in Malta to Syracuse, the Straits of Messina, The Appian Way and Up to Rome. After my service time, I took a job in London and started attending Duke Street Baptist Church in Richmond .My Pastor there was Stephen Olford and he became a good mentor to me and challenged me to think biblically and to set my sights on future ministry. Stephen’s successor was John L. Bird, and it was during his ministry that the call on my life became clearer and more urgent. I can remember sitting in the choir facing the congregation and — although being a rather stoic Englishman — the tears would stream down my cheeks as I felt every message and song was directed at me.
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“The devil had, as it were, swallowed up Christ, as the whale did Jonah — but it was deadly poison to him, he gave him a mortal wound in his own bowels. He was soon sick of his morsel, and was forced to do by him as the whale did by Jonah. To this day he is heart-sick of what he then swallowed as his prey.”

– Jonathan Edwards, The Excellency of Christ

Sick to death, the devil is.

The Christian life is going to God. In going to God Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breathe the same air, drink the same water, shop in the same stores, read the same newspapers, are citizens under the same governments, pay the same prices for groceries and gasoline, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground.

The difference is that each step we walk, each breath we breathe, we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God; and therefore no matter what doubts we endure or what accidents we experience, the Lord will preserve us from evil, he will keep our life. We know the truth of Luther’s hymn: “And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us. The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him; his rage we can endure, for Lo! his doom is sure; one little word shall fell him.” We Christians believe that life is created and shaped by God and that the life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which God’s grace and love are experienced.

– Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (IVP, 1980), 40-41.

Today Justin Taylor highlighted a two year-old post from Phil Johnson, in which Johnson responds to a question about the process of turning a preacher’s sermons into a polished book manuscript. Justin called Phil’s post a “reality check,” and it is. There is good, hard advice there to anyone interested in what it might take to do this sort of editorial work. But as one of the commenters in that old post pointed out, Phil didn’t exactly answer the question: How does it work? So I’ll be your huckleberry.

Over the last 6-7 years, I have worked on numerous book projects for pastors, some you’re familiar with and some you aren’t. I’m not new to the work. (Matt was just the first guy to put my name on the cover; I’ve never ever asked for that recognition.) I have worked on bad books and good books — which is to say, I’ve worked with bad sermons and good sermons. So the level of work it takes sometimes to turn a sermon transcript (the word-for-word script of what a preacher said from the pulpit) into a book chapter (a polished work of composition suitable for submission to a publisher) changes from project to project, but the process itself is fairly standard. Here’s sort of how it breaks down.

1. Know what good writing sounds like and how to produce it. This is the first hardest step, and there are a billion little details involved in getting there. Lots of guys write books who have no business doing it. And anybody with a basic grasp of grammar — and plenty of people who don’t — can take a transcript and noodle it around to look like a book chapter. But it will sound less resonant than the original sermon, not more. I call this the “toaster manualization” of Christian literature. You know, when you pick up a book by a famous Christian preacher and it doesn’t sound much like their preaching? And in fact, it doesn’t sound like a particularly interesting book at all? And you’re like, but I love this guy’s preaching! Why is this book so . . . bland? It’s because some guy with good technical writing skills but little familiarization with the white-hot furnace of essential speech (to paraphrase Lewis, natch) has hammered the sword into a ploughshare. That’s why. He made a toaster manual. If that’s you, you can probably eke out a good living doing it. That’s the good news. But if that’s not you, or if that’s you and you stared at my toaster manual lines like a dog at himself in a mirror, it’d be equally awesome if you decided to do something else. We don’t need any more toaster manuals.

Pardon the manifesto. Ahem.

2. Underneath the ability to write well, however, is the foundation of good mechanics. Could you turn out a decent toaster manual, if you had to? Know yeself some grammer, duh. Are your word processor’s spell and grammar check functions your first line of defense? Then this work is not for you. If you’re a good writer, you can fudge on this a little bit. For instance, I like to make words up. And play with sentence fragments. Et cetera. If you happen to be an excellent writer, you can even convince the publisher’s editor(s) that that’s okay. It’s art, for Pete’s sake! But as my 11th grade English teacher Mrs. Woolley once taught us when we objected to Faulkner’s getting away with all the same stuff she marked up with her red pen on our papers, once you know what you’re doing, you can not do it now and then. But you gotta know the laws before you can play around with them. And knowing them means knowing which ones not to play with. Like, for instance: Its/it’s. Their/there/they’re. What commas do. What semicolons do. What exclamation points do. (That last one was a trick question. Don’t use exclamation points!)

3. Take the transcript and delete any “church business” or prayers that appear in the introduction or conclusion. You may have to also delete the entire introduction and conclusion, because preachers don’t often introduce or conclude sermons the way book chapters are introduced and concluded. The guys who tend to manuscript their sermons often do; but most guys don’t. If the transcriber is a legalist, you’ll also have to delete a bunch of “uh”‘s and “um”‘s. But most transcribers know not to include those.

4. Listen to the actual message, perhaps several times, to get an ear for the fellow’s voice. This is less necessary if you’re already familiar with his preaching voice. As an example, I only listened to a couple of the audio versions of the messages Matt preached that became The Explicit Gospel. I’ve been listening to Matt’s preaching for several years now, so I hear him when I read him already. And some of the material in the book, as others have noted, is not new to those who are familiar with the theme of his ministry. A couple of other guys I worked for I had never heard or even heard of, so it was a lot more work. But knowing the preacher’s voice will help you find the holy grail of this entire process: making the sermon read like a quality book while simultaneously sounding like the preacher, not the editor. So find some fairie dust or scrounge up some magic beans if you need to, but get into the preacher’s voice as best you can.

5. Know what to add and what to subtract. We’re talking editing now. Many good sermons have decent illustrations but books require better ones. And documented ones. This is probably the chief work of actual writing I do. There is also the fleshing out of existing points and the shaving down of unnecessary tangents. Preaching and writing are related arts, but they are also quite different. What may fly from the pulpit may not from the page, and vice versa of course. Sometimes you’ve got an extraordinary bit of preaching that sings extra well from the page — I felt that Matt’s “Jesus wants the rose” bit was like that. I didn’t want to mess with that too much. It was near-perfect as it was, plus it had the added benefit of being so iconic, so widely-recognized that to mess with it seemed anathema. This is why it’s an art, not a science. But you will also need to know the science of research. Sermons don’t often come with documented quotes or lengthy passages from secondary sources. In most respects, this process is about making the sermon better — not as a sermon, but as a message. You’re allowed more length, so there’s more room to develop engaging narratives in illustrations, defend claims with research, do more exegesis, and the like. You also have to work at weaving into every chapter a continuity that often doesn’t exist in individual sermons, even if they’re in the same series. Many times, the preacher’s attempts at creating continuity between sermons in a series are just plain clunky in a book. The continuity is more explicit in a sermon; in a book you want to get into the “narrative” of the work. Even non-fiction books tell a story. That’s what you want to find and ride like a hawk on thermal wind. When you get better at this, you can take a 4-page sermon transcript and a 14-page sermon transcript and turn them both into subsequent 20-page book chapters without losing the preacher’s voice or adding too much of your own.

6. Don’t ghostwrite unless you want to feel dead inside. I define ghostwriting as actually writing a book or most of a book for somebody who then contributes little more than their name to the project. Ew. If you’re fine with ghostwriting, you’re probably already dead inside.

That’s a start, practically speaking. Go revisit Johnson’s piece for the Scared Straight version. Phil says this work is “literally harder” than writing your own material from scratch. That isn’t always true in my experience, but it is at least equally hard. And many times, the actual physical labor in this work is less time-consuming than writing my own stuff, but the emotional toll is heavier. As a writer, it is wearying trying to write in someone else’s voice.

Dr. Mohler’s recent article “Is the Megachurch the New Liberalism?” is thought-provoking along several fronts, but one in particular struck me. He writes:

What about theology? This question requires a look at the massive shifts in worldview now evident within American culture. Trends foreseen by researchers such as James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia and others can now be seen in full flower. The larger culture has turned increasingly hostile to exclusivist truth claims such as the belief that faith in Christ is necessary for salvation. One megachurch pastor in Florida recently told me that the megachurches in his area were abandoning concern for biblical gender roles on a wholesale basis. As one pastor told him, you cannot grow a church and teach biblical complementarianism.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pushback I got for this half-serious post at The Thinklings blog last week, specifically on the #8 point in that list, where I reveal my position against women in pastoral authority. The comments became an exercise in vain disputations, and while the vast majority of the feedback was positive, the still sizable portion that wasn’t, was quite vitriolic. I’ve been called more “choice words” in the last two weeks in public than my whole life combined. (But, remember, I’m the graceless one.) Those disagreeable sorts who weren’t angry, were at the least flummoxed.

The post has been reprinted on a few other sites and was even mentioned on a radio show, and the questions it’s received are revealing. It’s not the accusations of misogyny or sexism that bug me — those are understandable and not unexpected. It’s the question behind the question — “Wait. What’s wrong with female pastors?” — that reveals something, and it’s not simply egalitarianism. Many egalitarians I know are theologically robust thinkers; they are familiar with the relevant texts, they know the complementarian arguments, and they have rejected them on exegetical, logical, and cultural grounds. Of course, I disagree with their conclusions, but I know they’re getting to them with some thought and consideration. But the majority of egalitarians out there have never ever heard the word egalitarian. (Nor have the functional complementarians heard that word.) And this is what they are revealing in their questions.

When they say “What’s wrong with female pastors?” they are not just reacting from a place of cultural sensitivity about the equality between the sexes — which, by the way, complementarians agree with — they are reacting from a place of theological illiteracy. And while many churches that practice egalitarian governance preach and teach the texts, most egalitarian churches do not. But this is just a test case. Most churches with functional-but-not-educated-egalitarians are not simply theologically illiterate when it comes to this issue; they are theologically illiterate — or, more accurately, mediocre — on just about everything else.

Attractional megachurches have surveyed themselves on their discipleship cultures and found themselves lacking. But I wonder how they’d also fare in testing their average congregants on the difference between justification and sanctification, the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity and the incarnation, or more basic still: an accurate definition of the gospel. The other day I saw a pastor on Twitter say belief in the Trinity was not essential for salvation. He had no doctrinal basis for that, simply a concern that to say otherwise was not “grace.” The pushback I get whenever I jab at Joel Osteen reveals a basic ignorance about what’s wrong with his message. These days all it takes for someone to be considered Christian is to simply say they are (which is basically the basis for Osteen’s validation of Mormon Mitt Romney’s salvation).

“Wait. What’s wrong with female pastors?” This question is the tip of the iceberg of evangelicalism’s pervasive theological mediocrity. And it’s not limited to a megachurch problem. It’s an all-church problem. Nor is it simply a problem of raising functional egalitarians — which I object to as a complementarian, of course — it’s more a matter of raising evangelicals who have no idea there’s actually Bible verses to go to that address that issue — which I object to as a brother in Christ. And I believe my theologically-minded egalitarian brethren would agree with me there.

There’s lots of reasons for this problem, and I don’t mean to explore them here. Better minds than I have already done that and will continue to do that, but if I could pinpoint one root cause it would be this: Evangelicals aren’t preaching the Bible. They are putting Bible verses into their preaching. And there is a difference.

I am late to this conversation, but I want to put my 2 pence in anyway. Earlier this month, Al Hsu published a piece at Christianity Today just in time for Easter that lamented the caricature of Christ’s crucifixion as cosmic child abuse. In He’s Calling For Elijah! Why We Still Mishear Jesus, Hsu elucidates the meaning of Christ’s words from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34), writing:

This line horrifies me. It calls into question the very nature of God. Is God the kind of God that turns his back on his Son? Does God abandon those who cry out to him? How could God forsake the perfect God-man, the only one who has ever served him perfectly? Because if Jesus was truly forsaken by God, what’s preventing God from forsaking any of us? How could we ever trust him to be good?

Generally speaking, I appreciated Hsu’s article for what it set out to do. It says a lot, and certainly should have said more — a 6-page article on the prophetic grounding of the crucifixion that doesn’t mention Isaiah 53 even in passing seems odd, to say the least, and no clear affirmation of the penal substitution view of the atonement is an effective denial, as many pointed out — but this is its gist:

That’s what’s happening in Psalm 22. It starts out with the psalmist feeling forsaken and abandoned. “Why have you forsaken me? … I cry out by day, but you do not answer.” But he’s not literally forsaken, any more than the other psalms mean that God was literally forgetting the psalmist forever. It’s expressing how the psalmist felt at the time.

But that’s not the end of the story. Like the other psalms of lament, there’s a pivot point. Several, in fact. Verse 9: “Yet you brought me out of the womb … from my mother’s womb you have been my God.” Verse 19: “But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me.” The psalm is not a psalm of forsakenness. It starts out that way, but it shifts to confidence in God’s deliverance. Verse 22: “I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you.” And here’s the key verse, verse 24: “For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.”

Here is a direct refutation of the notion that the Father turned his face away from the Son. But the refutation is not as important as the pivot. Jesus is declaring: Right now, you are witnessing Psalm 22. I seem forsaken right now, but my death is not the end of the story. God has not despised my suffering. I will be vindicated. The Lord has heard my cry. Because death is not the end. Verse 30-31: “Future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!”

Jesus is not saying that God has forsaken him. He’s declaring the opposite. He’s saying that God is with him, even in this time of seeming abandonment, and that God will vindicate him by raising him from the dead.

This is a minority view, I believe, but it is one I defended (briefly) in my book Your Jesus is Too Safe. Consequently, it is the portion of that book that I still receive the most questions about.

Phil Johnson chalked Hsu’s article a “stupefyingly inept” attack on penal substitution. I am not so sure. Daniel Wallace’s fuller response is helpful, I think. Wallace writes:

To Hsu’s question, “if Jesus was truly forsaken by God, what’s preventing God from forsaking any of us? How could we ever trust him to be good?” Paul gives the decisive answer: “he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, freely give us all things?” (Romans 8.32 [NET]). It is precisely because Jesus has suffered in our place that God is now free to give us all things, to do good to us at all times.

There is so much more in the New Testament that reveals a righteous and holy God who loves sinners, but a God who cannot permit them in his presence without death of an innocent substitute, for “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin” (Hebrews 9.22).

As A. T. Robertson wrote long ago, “no one of the theories of the atonement states all the truth nor, indeed, do all of them together. The bottom of this ocean of truth has never been sounded by any man’s plumb-line. There is more in the death of Christ for all of us than any of us has been able to fathom…. However, one must say that substitution is an essential element in any real atonement” (A. T. Robertson, The Minister and His Greek New Testament, 40-41).

Yes and amen. I believe that as the cross is the center of Christ’s atoning work, penal substitution is the center of the cross. (I have a chapter in a forthcoming book dedicated to the centrality of penal substitution in Christ’s atoning work, surveying it as found in the biblical narrative from beginning to end.) So I don’t believe one has to jettison or even minimize the doctrine to track with the view that the Father did not forsake the Son at the crucifixion—at least, not in the way it is often described.

I think we need to clarify what is meant by the Father’s forsaking. Everyone assumes that the Father’s forsaking of the Son is in his pouring out of his justified wrath upon the Son for the sin he is bearing on the cross. And with that, I agree. Thabiti Anyabwile ran a recent series on what it meant for the Father to forsake the Son on the cross; here are his major points:

1. The Father Allowed Jesus to Suffer Social Abandonment

2. The Father Allowed Jesus to Suffer Emotional Desertion

3. The Father Allowed the Son to Suffer Spiritual Wrath

I cannot say that Dr. Anyabwile agrees with my view; I will only say that I agree with his (as stated). And I would sum it up this way: The crushing was the forsaking.

For there is another caricature that pops its head up, one on the other side from “divine child abuse,” and it is this: “God cannot look upon sinners.” This is the way many speak of the Father’s forsaking of Christ on the cross: That because God is perfectly holy, he can’t look at sin, and so must depart, or “look away.” He “abandoned” Christ on the cross, goes this view. I am not sure where it comes from exactly, but it is kindred spirits with the notion that “God is a gentleman.” It posits God’s holiness as more of a weak constitution, and I think, like the worst caricatures of free will theists, it makes God a cosmic pushover.

I do not see much strong biblical warrant for this understanding of the forsaking of Christ. Isaiah 59:2 casts God as unbending toward sin, not as one with delicate sensibilities about it. In Habakkuk 1:13 where we see the notion that God’s eyes are too pure to look on sin at the same time says he is looking at it. (Both are the perspective of the disgruntled Habakkuk, anyway, not doctrinal declarations.) We have to be careful about what we say, and what we mean by what we say. If by “forsaken” we mean punished, tormented, even “cast out,” we see this as God’s active wrath on the Son. But if by “forsaken” we mean the Father abandoning or shrinking back from the Son because he “can’t stand” to be there, we are on shaky biblical ground. That view has several other things going against it.

1. It casts sin as God’s kryptonite, making sin more powerful than he. But holiness does not mean frailty or delicateness. The Father is no shrinking violet. When we say God cannot abide sin, we mean that it cannot exist in his presence. When the Father and sin exist in the same space, he will destroy it in furious vengeance, not run from the room mortified.

2. It posits a breach in the Trinity that is a doctrinal bridge too far. Christ did not begin as our substitute when he took to the cross, but was our sinless substitute all along, and indeed was bearing our sins through his sinless birth, his sinless temptation in the wilderness, and the rest of his sinless life. Christ’s active obedience in his real, tempted, tiring life is the grounds for the perfect righteousness imputed to us when we trust him. He was at the beginning of his ministry the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). And during this time, the Father says “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). The way some describe the Father’s forsaking of the Son sounds tantamount to hatred of him. But we must always maintain simultaneously, the Father’s eternal love for the Son and the Father’s timely killing of the Son in propitiating sacrifice. To say the Father poured his wrath upon his Son is not to say he was divorced from him. He was ever-present, abandoning him to suffering but not to excommunication from himself. John Calvin is instructive here:

Though the perception of the flesh would have led him to dread destruction, still in his heart faith remained firm, by which he beheld the presence of God, of whose absence he complains. We have explained elsewhere how the Divine nature gave way to the weakness of the flesh, so far as was necessary for our salvation, that Christ might accomplish all that was required of the Redeemer. We have likewise pointed out the distinction between the sentiment of nature and the knowledge of faith; and, there ore, the perception of God’s estrangement from him, which Christ had, as suggested by natural feeling, did not hinder him from continuing to be assured by faith that God was reconciled to him. This is sufficiently evident from the two clauses of the complaint; for, before stating the temptation, he begins by saying that he betakes himself to God as his God, and thus by the shield of faith he courageously expels that appearance of forsaking which presented itself on the other side. In short, during this fearful torture his faith remained uninjured, so that, while he complained of being forsaken, he still relied on the aid of God as at hand.

And in the Institutes:

[C]ertainly no abyss can be imagined more dreadful than to feel that you are abandoned and forsaken of God, and not heard when you invoke him, just as if he had conspired your destruction. To such a degree was Christ dejected, that in the depth of his agony he was forced to exclaim, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The view taken by some, that he here expressed the opinion of others rather than his own conviction, is most improbable; for it is evident that the expression was wrung from the anguish of his inmost soul. We do not, however, insinuate that God was ever hostile to him or angry with him. How could he be angry with the beloved Son, with whom his soul was well pleased? or how could he have appeased the Father by his intercession for others if He were hostile to himself? But this we say, that he bore the weight of the divine anger, that, smitten and afflicted, he experienced all the signs of an angry and avenging God. (II.16.xi.)

3. It blurs the lines between Christ as sinless sacrifice and Christ as sin-bearer. Following from point 2 above, whatever 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:13 mean, they cannot mean that the incarnate Son of God was a sinner, or else he could not have been our substitute. Our sin was laid upon him that our suffering for sin should be laid upon him, and in this he received the wrath of the Father but in his sinless divinity, at no point diminished, he maintained the love of the Father.

4. It fails to account for the context of Psalm 22. Jesus is quoting this song, and so the text of Psalm 22 should have the greatest bearing on our understanding of Christ’s lament. You can feel forsaken and not be forsaken. (This is good pastoral encouragement, if anything.) For all of the weaknesses of Mr. Hsu’s article, this is its strength: it seeks its understanding of Christ’s words in their inspiration. And in that psalm, we see David’s lament of forsakenness but his confessions of faith. That David felt forsaken does not mean he saw the disposition of the Father clearly. But as the song progresses we learn where his trust is found:

For he has not despised or abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted,
and he has not hidden his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.

– Psalm 22:24

This is a messianic psalm, the prophecy of the penal work at the cross there in vivid detail, and we do it no dishonor to note that if God would not hide his face from David, he certainly would not from his only begotten Son. And on the flip side, because the Son took the place of the forsaken, we who trust in him can know that we will never be (2 Corinthians 4:9; Hebrews 13:5). The sacrifice of Christ was propitious.

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
– John 16:12

These words of Christ really ministered to me last week in my study time. The immediate context is this: Jesus has resurrected and he is issuing warnings and promises to his disciples. He is consoling them about his soon departure, saying he is going to send the Holy Spirit to guide them into all truth. He’s going to keep speaking to them, only now through the Holy Spirit, primarily through the Spirit-inspired new covenant Scriptures.

But I love Jesus’ pastoral heart. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Jesus is patient with his people. He plods. He knows how to hand out bread day by day. He doesn’t overcook his sermons like us dumb pastors, thinking we’ve got to hit everybody with everything all at once. He does not “turn on the firehose.” He does not inundate. Of course, Jesus has the benefit of omniscience — he knows how things will play out tomorrow — and we do not. But he is so gentle in this moment.

These words remind me that Jesus is committed to giving me all that I need at the times I need it. It has been said that all our knowledge of God at any given moment is merely a thimble of water compared to the ocean of water available. And yet the thimble is a daily supply, more than enough, just the right amount. Jesus is so good. He knows my limits and condescends to fill them and minister to me within them.

We undershepherds should take note.

Starting a new series today that will run every Monday. Details at the bottom of the post.

Steve Benninger is the lead pastor of New Life Church in Gahanna, Ohio (just outside of Columbus) and a recent friend of mine. I admire Steve tremendously, not just because he loves Jesus so much but because he’s one of the few men who have at great strain and risk sought to lead a rather large church in a rather new direction, toward gospel-centrality. (It reminds me a bit of Joe Coffey’s story.) I will let him tell that story in our interview below, but if for this tremendous pastoral work alone, Steve is a jewel among men. He is also one of the most pastoral pastors I’ve ever met (and this characteristic will be a common thread among all the men I’m featuring in this series), if you catch my meaning. He is patient, kind, gentle, and yet rock-solid in the gospel of Jesus Christ. For these reasons and more, I wish I was more like Steve. I think you will be blessed by his story.

Where did you grow up and how did you come to faith in Christ?

I was born and raised in Southern California back in the wild 1960′s. However, my parents were from Iowa so I was also raised with strong midwestern, Depression-era values. As a result I grew up as a kind of ‘cultural misfit.’ Also, our family attended a fairly legalistic Baptist church, which added to my sense of being out of step with my peers. Looking back though, I must admit that I was given many spiritual advantages from my parents and my church, including a deep respect for the Bible.

Despite a supposed ‘salvation experience’ during VBS at the tender age of 8, I basically lived for myself up through my high school years, seeking validation and significance through athletics and academics. But everything changed in an instant on June 18, 1979—truly a defining moment for me. Traveling with a buddy down to Los Angeles to catch a baseball game, my vehicle was struck by a drunk driver in a head-on collision. Everyone involved was killed … except me. I walked away with a few cuts and bruises and two broken teeth. Two months later I found myself at a fledgling Bible College in Virginia, housed in a dormitory full of guys who were on fire for Jesus. I had never before been around peers who were genuinely devoted to Christ, and the impact on me was immediate and lasting. The campus atmosphere was electric, the passion was genuine, and the spiritual reality was contagious. I was invited to a nightly Bible study group where for the first time I was shown how to study the Bible for myself. Then my RA started to disciple me. Classes on the Christian life were eye-opening. Through all of these things the Lord was graciously opening my eyes to Christ’s beauty and my sinfulness. One night that fall His working in my heart was so strong that I felt compelled to get alone with God. I drove up the mountainside and found a clearing. There, looking up into the night sky with tears streaming down my face, the Father showed me my pride and ungratefulness and the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice for me. Repentance and faith filled my heart and I believe to this day that I was genuinely converted that night by the wonderful grace of God.
Continue

Had to find my copy of George Herbert’s poems today to check a citation in a manuscript, and as often happens when I open up this collection of beauties, I couldn’t put it down without reading beyond my duty. Here’s one of my favorites called “The Holy Scriptures”:

I.

OH Book! infinite sweetnesse! let my heart
Suck ev’ry letter, and a hony gain,
Precious for any grief in any part;
To cleare the breast, to mollifie all pain.

Thou art all health, health thriving till it make
A full eternitie: thou art a masse
Of strange delights, where we may wish & take.
Ladies, look here; this is the thankfull glasse,

That mends the lookers eyes: this is the well
That washes what it shows. Who can indeare
Thy praise too much? thou art heav’ns Lidger here,
Working against the states of death and hell.

Thou art joyes handsell: heav’n lies flat in thee,
Subject to ev’ry mounters bended knee.

I I.

OH that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glorie!
Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the storie.

This verse marks that, and both do make a motion
Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie:
Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion,
These three make up some Christians destinie:

Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good,
And comments on thee: for in ev’ry thing
Thy words do finde me out, & parallels bring,
And in another make me understood.

Starres are poore books, & oftentimes do misse:
This book of starres lights to eternall blisse.

The late, great John Updike waxes poetic on his personal history with — and the collective personality of — the New England church world:

“Like Mr. Mutrux, I came late to New England. The first regional church of which I had experience was Harvard’s Memorial Chapel, that splendid but slightly cold reproduction of the Colonial manner, with its immaculate box pews and huge dark choir screen. Attending, I would sit back on the left-hand side near a small bronze plaque that seemed to me the epitome of New England fair-mindedness: opposite the great wall covered with the names of Harvard alumni killed fighting for the Allies, the plaque gave the names of four German graduates . . . Harvard has not forgotten her sons.

“Returning some years later to live north of Boston, I would attend the Congregational church in Ipswich, a handsome, town-dominating example of “carpenter Gothic” exactly contemporaneous with the First Parish Church in Brunswick, Maine, and like it, tipped wooden pinnacles and walled with boards and battens. The interior posed a delicate white-painted heaven of shapely roof trussing; the light came through tall pointed windows of old gray-glass lozenge panes. Some winter mornings, hardly a dozen of us showed up, while the minister shouted across the empty pews and the groaning furnace in the basement sent up odorous warmth through the cast-iron grates and the wind leaned on the crackling panes. I have never felt closer to the bare bones of Christianity than on those bleak and drafty Sunday mornings, with the ghosts of frock-coated worshippers and patient carpenters making up for our sparse attendance . . . Through its hushed and graceful spaces, so different from the colorful and stolid Lutheran interiors of my childhood, I entered into the spiritual life of my adopted region.

“Can this life be distinguished, even minutely, from that of other regions? It is tinctured by the Puritan beginnings and the stony soil, the four sharp seasons and the nautical outlook of the indented shore. To Calvinism, Irish Catholicism added its own austerities and wit . . . ‘Live free or die’ runs the motto of one of our six states, and there does seem to be an extra tang of the free, of the voluntary, in our chilly, salty local air. The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves. And our churches, classically, tend to seek through their forms, so restrainedly adorned, their essence as houses for the inner light.”

– John Updike, “Foreword,” in Great New England Churches: 65 Houses of Worship that Changed Our Lives by Robert H. Mutrux (Chester, Connecticut: Globe Pequot Press, 1982), xii-xiii.

Previously:
What are New Englanders Like?
Church Replanting in New England
10 Reasons New England Suffers for Mission
Why New England is the New Missional Frontier (Resurgence post)