Technos: A review of the march toward a digitalized life.

This article has an interesting recap of recent trends in technology and how are we to adapt socially (& psychologically).

Multiverse: PKD's Android goes missing.

Philip K. Dick's android copy is lost. Check out this article.

ORP & Personal Update: CS Lewis on Bureaucracy

At home, I have engaged in another reading project--this time, I am reading C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Letters" to my family. I am reading a revised edition which includes the additional materials called "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" and an introduction written in 1960. This introduction is fascinating and recounts some of Lewis' motives and why he chose his symbols. In this introduction he shows why he chose a metaphor for how hell is run and shows his attitude, like mine, toward bureaucracy. I have to deal with bureaucracy in my job at the Port of Seattle, SeaTac airport, and since we are undergoing a transformation of our society into an amalgam of Sovietism and Fascism, this is especially relevant. Thus the eternally true adage, "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." Here is the quote in words only Lewis could put together:

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Social Philosophy: Everyday Mind Control

With a nod to Mark Horne, I give you the following link:

You have been assimilated.

Fortunately, for now, the state of Washington has a very good home-school law. So if and when my son gets married and has children, and since he and his spouse will likely have to both work because of the policies of the current administration, I may have the opportunity to teach my grandchildren to protect them from our wonderful Fascist society. LORD willing, of course.

Technos: Linux-fest is coming.

I may edit this entry later, but for now here is the Totem for the Linux-fest (held in Bellingham, Washington):

Personal Update: Chronos, misc.

Life is spinning by fast these days. I have, by the grace of God, managed to survive to the seventh anniversary of my 39th year, calender bench mark being the Ides of March. I had a great time celebrating my birthday this past weekend with my brother Stuart in attendance and drop-ins from a few friends. Janie graciously hosted all us men with superb skill; we had good eats, and I brought out some good drinkables to share and we just enjoyed the company with good conversation and a few movies. In today's troubled economy, it was great to still be able to have a good time at home (and yes to have a home, and a job, etc.).

Many thought provoking events seem to be occurring in quick succession, so much to think about with the collapse of personal liberty and prosperity around the world. I pray that God helps us all to endure. I was today feeling a little tired of pinching pennies, when there are Macs, and music, and books, and travel, and education to buy. My emotions tend to flux like a roller coaster, like the rage at every day's new outrage--during the Clinton years it was a new outrage of the moral failings of the Leader and his betrayal at the security level of our nation, but now we have a regime that is a virtual clone of the last Bush administration, but nobody sees it. And now our military will be betrayed, and the economy, all bruised and bleeding by it's abuse from the banking criminals, will die a death of thousand "stimulus" knife wounds, while the tax cheats and assorted petty criminals running Washington D.C. race their Mercedes' though the park after midnight looking for a few more taxpayers to mug. There is just too much confusion here--I can't get no relief...

Another thing that just frosts my donkey's hind end, is the profound waste of my life energy that I have to piss away only to pay all the creditors, and government thugs, etc. while my personal goals and dreams evaporate before my eyes. There really is nothing sublime and beautiful anymore about life, because just when you start to maybe feel a little joy in the Lord, SIN rears it's ugly head.

Well enough of the whining, it seems I just now forgot how much I have to be thankful for. It's so easy to lose perspective.

Praise to God for His Salvation, for His making possible our communication with Him. Praise to God, that He has given us (those appointed to salvation) the power and ability to choose Him, to enjoy Him, to worship Him.
Praise to God, that though nothing is different between us and any that do not believe in regard to our sinfulness, yet He has given us this salvation.

Theology (The Prince of the Sciences): The correct perspective on God's Judgment

I am completely caught up to real-time in reviewing Dr. Rayburn's sermons on the book of Numbers, and I had to bring attention to his sermon on 02/22/09 which would allow this entry to be filed under Historica because of his excellent short historical analysis about the ancient Canaanite civilization (also variously called the Phoenician civilization) and how the modern Western civilization is a perfect analog of this ancient civilization (with all that that implies--like judgment, etc.). When the sermon is typed up and posted to the church website, I will link to it here and probably excerpt from it here also; until then here is the link to the MP3 of the sermon (I recommend that everyone listen to it immediately.).

Social Philosophy: Economics, part 2: Solutions to the Financial Market failure

In the interest of finding the sublime and beautiful in all of life, I thought I would give mention of a good article offering an elegant solution to some failures in the financial market. I came across this article in the March 2009 (dead tree version of) Wired Magazine. Among other things, there is an interesting application of the idea of Open Source. Read the whole article, you will all find it edifying.

Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): Faith vs. unbelief; life vs. death

As I review Dr. Rayburn's series on Numbers I continue to feel compelled to share some of them here. Sermon number 16, concerns itself with Numbers 14 and Israel's unbelief. The first part of the sermon I want to quote is the part where certain verses of the passage are analyzed, so get the context here is the scripture followed by the sermon quote:

11 And the Lord said to Moses, “How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them? 12 I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they.”

The Holy Bible : English standard version. 2001 (Nu 14:11-12). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.

The Lord’s remark about Israel’s refusal to believe in defiance of the signs and wonders performed before their eyes immediately cannot help but remind us of many similar statements made by the Lord Jesus during his ministry. In any case, there is it in black and white: “they refuse to believe in me.” The issue is a lack of faith. It is always faith in the OT as it in the NT, the presence of it or the want of it, that tells the tale.

Here is the central part of the sermon, but again read (or hear the whole thing):

I. Well, first we can say that this unbelief in the church is worse than the ordinary, simple unbelief of the world because the lack of true and living faith is masked by the appearance of spiritual life. It is, therefore, deceptive in a way that naked unbelief in a world is not and so it has the power to undermine the faith of members of the church in a way that unbelief outside of the church never can.

This is what makes this unbelief so pernicious and why the Bible is warning us against it at every turn. Unbelief can do so much more damage in the church than it can do in the world because in the church it can be disguised. It can beguile. It can appear as an angel of light. Israel in the wilderness was certainly not a community of atheists; it was not even yet a community of polytheists, though that would come. We read in v. 3 that it occurred to these people in their despair over the report of the ten scouts to ask “Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword?” They were still reckoning with Yahweh; still accepting that he had brought them to the borders of the Promised Land. We might well have thought, surely we should think, “If these people had the sense to say that the Lord had brought them to this land, why would they not realize that the Lord would give them the land no matter the impressive military obstacles in their way?” By invoking the name of Yahweh they were as much as reminding themselves of the ten plagues by which the Lord had delivered them from their slavery in Egypt, the parted waters of the Yam Suph, water from the rock, the manna and the quail, the thunder and lightning at Mt. Sinai, and the pillar of fire. After all that had happened, seen and experienced how could a people invoke Yahweh’s name and yet have no confidence in the power of that name? It seems bizarre to us.

And it is not simply that churchly unbelief is masked by adherence to certain articles of faith. There are also laws such people presume to keep among the others that they do not and will not. So they not only believe things real believers believe, they do things that real believers do. These folk who turned away at Kadesh still worshipped at the sanctuary and still observed the Sabbath. There is a kind of churchly activity that likewise masks a fundamental spirit of unbelief.

In this case they sent an army into Canaan. It was not what they were supposed to do when they did it but it was what they had been told to do previously. They knew it was what the Lord had expected them to do. They did it at the wrong time and in the wrong way, but the difference wasn’t apparent to them. They were still invading the Promised Land and that was the whole point wasn’t it? But despite many similarities, there is a great deal of difference between the activity of a spurious faith, a faith that doesn’t really get it, and true and living submission to and confidence in the Lord, his presence, power, and promise. These people presumed; they did not believe. They did their will, not Yahweh’s. And they found themselves in Canaan without the Lord and, left to their own devices, they were mauled. Nevertheless, they did certain things precisely because of their relationship with Yahweh, broken as it was.

What is more, these unbelieving Israelites even felt some things that real believers feel. When they heard the Lord’s judgment pronounced against them and when they saw the ten scouts die we read that they mourned bitterly. They even felt driven to confess their sin! They weren’t, of course, truly repentant; there was no change in their posture toward God. They were sorry for the consequences of their sin, not for the sin itself. But there is something so real, so right about the Christian faith that a great many people circle its periphery precisely because they sniff its reality and are drawn to the glory of its truth. They feel its authenticity. Why does an unbeliever go to seminary and enter the ministry? That is something that has often puzzled real Christians. We think: if you don’t really believe the Bible, why be a student of it and why devote your life to being a pastor and a preacher? But the answer, I think, lies here in vv. 39-40. There is a partial belief, a partial acceptance, a partial recognition of reality that is powerful enough even in its partiality to shape a person’s life.

Throughout the history of the church this phenomenon of churchly unbelief has appeared and reappeared. It is born in some real semblance of belief and continues in some real appearance of belief and does its deadly work in the congregation precisely because it looks so much like the real thing it is not recognized for what it actually is until it is too late.

II. Second, we can say this about churchly unbelief: it never prospers, it may die slowly, but it always dies. It has no principle of life and so cannot sustain itself through the generations.

What is explicitly pointed out in our text is that, when in v. 20 the Lord told Moses after his intercession for the people that he had forgiven them, the Lord meant only that he had stayed the immediate punishment that he had threatened. He would not destroy the people then and there. But he had not restored them to true and living fellowship with himself. That is not what he meant by saying he had forgiven them. They remained after this pardon a wicked community as we read in vv. 27 and 35. They had no more faith after the Lord’s pardon than they did before. They would, we read in v. 34 “suffer for their sins” and know what it is like to have the Lord against them. And so it would be. Israel remained in the wilderness for forty years, actually some 38 plus years after her rebellion at Kadesh. They spun their wheels. They went nowhere in particular. And through those years the generation of Israelites responsible for the rebellion died out. The people got older and died.

It is intended to be a perfect picture of what happens in such communities of unbelieving Christians. The churches die. The Christian families die. All over Europe you see the evidence of once living congregations of Christians that have now completely disappeared. And you are seeing that more and more in our land. We know what to expect of such denominations and churches. They grow smaller and older year by year until they can no longer pay the light bill and must sell the building to the hospital next door.

One of the greatest challenges facing mission churches in our day is the immense cost of land and church buildings. Now that we are planting churches more regularly in the Pacific Northwest Presbytery we have wondered: how will these mission churches ever be able to afford to buy sufficient land in Seattle or Redmond or Kirkland upon which to build a house of worship? Ah, but all is not lost. There are empty church buildings coming available here and there; perhaps one of those can be bought. And in virtually every case the church building now or soon to be for sale once housed a congregation of unbelieving Christians who were dying out in the wilderness for want of true and living faith in God.

The Lord can be against a people and they still continue as a church for years, even for a generation or two, but they get smaller and smaller and eventually there is nothing left. But given their unbelief, the lack of any true spiritual understanding and commitment, such people do not usually ask why they are dying. They never draw the connection between their own unbelief and the judgment of the Lord. Unbelief being what it is, I don’t suppose that over the coming thirty-eight years that Israel wandered in the wilderness the Israelites who had been condemned to die in the desert were ever found carefully, humbly counting down the number of survivors left from the disaster at Kadesh, remembering and taking to heart funeral after funeral the consequence of their unbelief. These people, in fact, as we will read later in this same book, would be quite prepared to commit other sins of unbelief against the Lord.

Which brings us to the third thing we can say about this phenomenon of churchly unbelief.

III. The greatest danger of unbelief in the church is its power to harden the heart against the possibility of conviction of sin, faith, and repentance.

What is most frightening about Israel’s experience in the wilderness is that they never got it. They never wised up. They never learned their lesson. They never really repented and they never really believed. After all they suffered, after all they lost, they were at the end as spiritually dull and stupid and sermon-proof and sickness-proof as ever.

And this bizarre phenomenon has occurred through the ages. Individual churches and entire denominations invoke the divine name, offer him worship on the Lord’s Day, presume by various ways and means to further his kingdom in the world, and yet they openly disagree with much of what he has revealed in his Word – that same Bible they read in their services and in which they propose to find the parts of the faith they agree with –, they openly disobey some of his laws, and all the while they seem utterly unconcerned that in their unbelief and their disobedience they are parting company with not only the teaching of Holy Scripture but the long tradition of Christian faith in the world. How is this not the same contempt for Yahweh that Israel displayed at Kadesh? Any why can they not see that?

Social Philosophy: Obamanation: Making Bush43 look like a kindergartner 01

Take a look at this article about our new emperor's plans for suppression of fellow Americans. I have been saying in person to everyone I know that the new administration's corruption and disregard for the rights of citizens will make George Bush (43) look like a kindergartner. And everyone was whining about the patriot act, and while it has provisions in it that I have had a problem with, it will pale in comparison to what is coming in this next 1,418 days.

Humor: Mathematica: Fermat anyone?

Ephemera: Les Information: Lies, Damn Lies, & Statistics

(Nods to Mark Horne for the Link): This is another reason why I tend to talk back to the media (on those rare occasions when I get stuck watching the news or listening to NPR). Trying to convince the innumerate is like trying to explain reading to the illiterate.

Social Philosophy: Obamanation: The unintended consequence of misguided policy

Here is an example of how the social engineering that is the IRS tax code accelerates the economy's dive to the bottom.

Ephemera: Les Information: The fall of newspapers

This is old news--newspapers are falling on hard times, but with the internet, et al there are no lack of information sources and we get the privilege of filtering out the noise for ourselves. Take a look at this article.

Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): The dialectual nature of God's Law

The sermon on Numbers 9:1-14 (No. 11 in the series) by Dr. Rayburn gives us a great exposition on the Biblical Dialectic as it pertains to the regulations concerning the Passover celebration. For a more thorough treatment of the concept of the biblical dialectic see this series of sermons especially the first two. Here is an excellent section from this sermon on Numbers that shows the dialectual contrast between the strictness and leniency of God's Law:

Here in this chapter the emphasis falls on obedience to the regulations that governed the observance of the sacraments, in this case, the Passover. Things had to be done a certain way. This is clearly the burden of these 14 verses. These verses contain law and regulation. But two very different things are said about the law of the Passover and, in this way, we have two very different perspectives given on the Law of God in general. True enough, this law concerns the Passover, but this law is just like any other divine law in this respect. There is always this double aspect to the Law of God. And, once again, these are two perspectives that we often find difficult to maintain together; two perspectives that want to fly apart in our thinking and our living; two perspectives that we are very likely to choose between rather than hold at once.

In the first place we have God’s law as demand and requirement to be strictly obeyed.

This is clearly the emphasis of the opening verses of the chapter where Israel was told to observe the Passover at the appointed time and to celebrate it in accord with all its rules and regulations. We have that same necessity of strict obedience stressed again in vv. 11-14. Even those who observed the Passover a month later had to observe it precisely as instructed in the Law of God. They had to observe it on the right day, they had to eat the specified food, they couldn’t leave any of the food uneaten, they couldn’t break any of the lamb’s bones, and so on. What is more if they violated these stipulations they received not a slap on the wrist, not a “tsk, tsk” from the unIsrael activities committee, but they were to be kicked out of the community: that is, executed, or left to fend for themselves in the desert, or made subject to the judgment of the Lord.

Then, in the final verse, Israel was reminded that an alien could participate in the Passover but only according to the laws governing such things, including, as we read in Exodus 12:48, the demand that he first be circumcised.

Passover was a gift Yahweh gave to his people, a wonderful gift celebrating and remembering a still more wonderful gift. It was Christmas for the Israelite family and how much poorer our lives would be without Christmas! But no matter how happy the gift and the celebration, it still had to be done in the prescribed way! There is a strictness here that is undeniable.

Many larger churches nowadays offer a Saturday evening service to their parishioners to make it more convenient for them to attend church. If they have Sunday obligations a Saturday evening service makes it possible for them to attend church. What is wrong with that? Well, what is wrong with it is that God has appointed the Sabbath as the day of Christian assembly, the day for the worship of his house, the day of the remembrance of his great salvation. The day of Christ’s resurrection has become the new Sabbath and the new holy day. We aren’t free to alter those regulations. God has spoken and we are obliged to obey his law. So the answer to the man who has Sunday obligations is that unless they are of the sort that God allows to keep a man from worship – and there are very few such activities – they must be cancelled and he must be at worship no matter the inconvenience. It is never an inconvenience to be called into the presence of the Almighty!

Other large churches, especially evangelical mega-churches are virtually eliminating the sacraments from their Lord’s Day public worship. Heavily skewed to the unbeliever and to reaching him for the gospel as their Sunday service is, a Lord’s Supper at the end would be counter-productive. It would advertise the difference between the Christians and the non-Christians in the service, exactly what the church does not want to do. They want the unbelievers to feel welcome and comfortable; precisely what a strange ceremony that they could not participate in would not make them feel. So why don’t we do the same thing and take the Lord’s Supper out of our Sunday morning worship and observe it instead on Wednesday night or perhaps only in the Sunday evening service when unbelievers are less likely to attend? Well, the reason is that we are not free to alter the regulations laid down for our worship. The Lord’s Day worship of the Christian Church is supposed to be sacramental and the Lord’s Supper is supposed to be, as John Calvin once put it, the central act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day.

The point is: there are laws and regulations that we are obliged to observe; obliged because God has laid them down in his Law. We are not free to alter that law no matter the reason. Now fallen human beings do not like to take orders, still less to take orders from God. It is a fact of life that goes a long way toward explaining what we observe in the world every day. As one wise man has put it,

“Man’s self-centeredness, aware that it is being attacked and called in question by God’s claim to man’s [obedience], seeks feverishly to defend itself and to assert its inviolability.” [Cranfield, “Paul and the Law,” as printed in New Testament Issues, 151]

That is man. He has a passion to disobey God, no matter how harmful, how unreasonable that disobedience. But we are reminded in no uncertain terms in v. 13 that God will enforce his will and man cannot keep him from doing so no matter his arguments, his excuses, or his justifications. The Lord has published his law and because he is the Lord, the King, and the Judge, he demands that his law be obeyed. Failure to obey will bring his punishment. That is a brute fact of divine revelation that we encounter on virtually every page of Holy Scripture; it is also a brute fact of human reality, clear enough now, but to be made so much clearer at the end of the age. The way of the transgressor is and will be hard.

And lest anyone think that this strictness in demand and the threat of judgment for disobedience is peculiar to the OT, as if the Lord were harsher in the ancient epoch than he is today (an idea that continues to find supporters no matter how clearly it violates the teaching of the Bible), the same emphasis is found in the NT. There are a great many texts I could cite, but since we are talking about the sacraments let me remind you of 1 Cor. 11:27 and 30 where Paul tells the Corinthian church that some among them had already suffered the judgment of the Lord because they had profaned the sacrament. Some were sick and some were dead because they had not carefully observed the requirements the Lord had laid down for the proper observance of the sacrament – sickness and death just as in Numbers 9. They also had been cut off from the people.

But that is not the whole story. There is another pole on the continuum of the Bible’s teaching about the law. The Bible tells us something else about God’s law that is not easily reconciled with this emphasis on its strict and inflexible demand, the requirements that cannot be broken, and the forbidding of all deviations.

In the second place there is in God’s Law a wonderful accommodation and concern to meet the real-life situations of human beings. Requirements are tailored to help, not to hinder the life of God’s people.

This is the real interest of this passage; verses 1-5 really simply set the scene. The question concerns people who couldn’t observe the Passover because they found themselves ceremonially unclean at the very time they would have had to offer their sacrifice. Most of the chapter concerns instructions God gave to Moses in regard to such cases. And, while we might have supposed that the Lord would simply have said that the Passover, being a commemoration of an actual historical event had to be observed on its proper date, the Lord in fact bends to meet the need of his people to ensure they would not miss his blessing. He doesn’t want anyone left out. He wants everyone to have the blessing of the feast. Before this, of course, the Lord in effect had as much as said that if his people could not participate because they were providentially hindered, he would not hold it against them. There is a great deal of difference between the person who doesn’t go to church because he doesn’t want to and the person who can’t because he is sick or infirm, or a soldier in the field, or, like Robinson Crusoe, marooned on a desert island. The Lord knows the difference! Some, for no fault of their own would not be able to participate but the Lord would not for that reason accuse them of a fault.

But he goes still further. He makes an accommodation for those who couldn’t participate.
He allows this group of people – and all subsequent folk like them – to take the Passover a month later. That is a remarkable concession when you think about it; when you think about what Passover commemorated and about how strictly it was to be observed according to the regulations laid down, one of which stipulated the date on which it was to be observed. But the law is an expression of God’s goodness and his love and so it should not really surprise us that he makes even his law to accommodate the difficulties of his people’s lives. In fact there are other evidences of this in the material. In the regulations governing Passover given in Exodus 12 we are told that the people were to take the blood of the Passover sacrifice and smear it on the doorframes of their homes. No one had a home in the wilderness when the second Passover was eaten. The people were on pilgrimage; their lodgings were temporary. So presumably they smeared the blood on the flaps of their tents or the posts that held them up. The Lord didn’t intend for his laws to be impossible to keep. And he was happy to leave quite a bit up to his people to arrange according to their situation. He was happy with whatever they did so long as it honored the interest of his Law. He paid his people the compliment of giving them freedom to operate within the outline of his will.

In all these ways the Law bent to meet human beings where they were. The Lord was happy to accommodate real life situations. The Lord by his Law was after something in us and didn’t necessarily care how that thing was got if only it was got. There is a spirit to these laws, a basic interest, and it is this spirit that matters most.

C.S. Lewis gave expression to this principle that we find everywhere in the Law of God when he wrote:

“The order of the divine mind embodied in the divine law is beautiful. What should a man do but try to produce it, so far as possible, in his daily life?” [Reflections on the Psalms, 59]

This is the thought behind all of those expressions of delight in God’s law and desire to keep it wholly and sincerely that we find in the Bible. Think of life as a dance and the law as the steps of that dance, the rules of that dance. Think of one of those dances in one of the movies made recently from Jane Austen novels. Think of them dancing some minuet. The dancers – both men and women – want to get it “just so.” The beauty of the dance, the pleasure of it is only complete when the partners dance it correctly: they don’t step on one another’s toes, they don’t get turned in the wrong direction and clumsily have to find their way back, they don’t move too fast or too slowly for the music or the movement of others, and so on. Perhaps in this life we will never dance perfectly, but the law teaches us how to dance and the more closely we obey its rules the more beautifully we dance. God gave us his law not to make us miserable, not because he’s a spoilsport who doesn’t want us to enjoy life, but because he loves us and as our heavenly Father he knows what makes for a good and noble life. To live by his law is the right way to live, the best way, the happiest way.

The reason people break God’s commandments is because they don’t believe that. They do not trust the Lord’s goodness in giving us his commandments. It is that mistrust that lies at the root of man’s transgression of God’s law. They turn away from trusting God for their good and, depending upon themselves, they seek happiness in some other way, which is to say, they seek their happiness by doing what God forbids and not by doing what he commands.

This is exactly how we ought to think about so much of what is happening in our culture today. We are watching people attempting to find happiness in every possible way except that way the living God, the creator of all these people has published in his Law. And it is inevitable that they will fail. The law of God is proved by the misery that eventuates when it is disobeyed. But so determined has the culture become to find another way to happiness and fulfillment, or, better, to permit every man or woman to find his or her own way, that it is now adamant in refusing to allow anyone to press upon society enduring standards of human behavior, the sort of standards one finds in the Law of God. To admit such a law is to let a divine foot in the door and human beings recognize instinctively that once the foot is in the rest will come in behind. So, even at the cost of their own unhappiness, they refuse to bow to the law of God, refuse to permit God to regulate their lives, refuse to follow the steps God has ordered for the dance of life.

But, the fact is, there is a Law for human life. It is a law published by man’s creator and enforced by man’s judge. And, the fact is, every human being knows it. Every human being knows that right and wrong are realities; inflexible, undeniable moral standards woven into the very fabric of human life. But it is impossible to justify that knowledge without God; without both a giver and enforcer of that right and wrong. Those standards come from somewhere and mean something and that is true and can be true only if the law is God’s Law.

Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): On Giving

Dr. Rayburn's sermon no. 9 is about the collection of all the utensils made out of precious metals that Israel would be using in the temple worship, but in this sermon Dr. Rayburn makes an excellent case for the generous spirit of a Christian when it comes to giving. Again I recommend the whole sermon, but here is a good part of it:

It is certainly worth our remembering that all of this reappears in a New Testament form. We offer sacrifices to God in our worship together – different kinds of sacrifices but sacrifices nonetheless, worship is called the giving of sacrifices in the NT; we eat a fellowship meal in the presence of the Lord – remember it is the fellowship offering or peace offering that we said was the true OT counterpart and anticipation of the Lord’s Supper – we bring our gifts to support the worship and work of the Lord’s house because we are grateful to him for what he has done for us.

And we do this for the same reason the twelve tribes did what they did in Numbers 7. We know how much we have been blessed and we know how precious is the presence of the Lord that is mediated to us in the church’s worship and introduced to others in the church’s ministry. We give what are in fact little gifts because we have received stupendous gifts. We give a little something of ourselves to God because he has given his Son for us. We give to the church because it is his church and the body of Christ his son.

How many times in Holy Scripture this principle of giving cheerfully and generously to God gifts to his house and his work is set before us. Abraham’s tithe, the Israelites generous donations first to the tabernacle and later for the building of the temple, Zacchaeus’ half of all his possessions to the poor (he no doubt gave the money to the church to be distributed to the poor) ( (and that on top of the four times the amount he had unfairly extracted from people as a tax collector), the entire bottle of perfume Mary poured over the Lord, the widow’s mite which was all she had, the generous donations of the churches of the Apostle Paul to the poor Christians in Jerusalem. The extravagance in all of this is one of the most powerful and practical embodiments of the principle of a gospel-ordered and gospel-driven life: we love him because he first loved us. Love is demonstrated in your life and mine by the giving of gifts. It always has been and always shall be.

I remember reading of a traveler in Africa years ago who wrote home of seeing a nun dressing the wounds of a leper. The wounds were revolting, disgusting. As he watched her work, he said to her, “I wouldn’t do that for ten thousand dollars.” She looked up at him and replied, “I wouldn’t either.” Love and gratitude give where the hope of reward will not.

There is something very beautiful about gratitude and about its expression and all of us instinctively recognize this. Our hearts go out to people in a very powerful way when they show gratitude to us for something we have done. I read not long ago an interesting piece of the biography of Ulysses S. Grant. You may remember that in the years before the Civil War Grant had left the army. He was never very good with money and once found himself in New York penniless, without even the funds he needed to get home to Ohio. In his embarrassment and desperation he approached a West Point classmate and comrade in the Mexican War, Simon Buckner and Buckner generously gave him the money Grant needed for the trip. Eight years later Grant won his first great victory as a general of the Union Army: the capture of Fort Donelson on the Tennessee River. The confederate fort was surrendered by its commander, General Simon Buckner. In a speech delivered years later at a birthday dinner for then President Grant, Buckner related what had happened there at Fort Donelson. “I met him on a boat [tied to the river bank],” Buckner said, “and after the formal surrender he followed me when I went to the quarters to which I had been assigned. He left his own officers behind and followed me until it was just the two of us alone in the hallway and there he handed me some money.” No words of explanation; just a gift given when it was most needed and most appropriate as a response of love for a gift given when it was desperately needed. A kindness was being repaid from the heart. Generosity was being returned.