Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): Benedictus

In the eighth sermon by Dr. Rayburn on the book of Numbers, we have an excellent exposition about the concept of the Benediction in the worship service. We learn what it is, why it is, and the benefits of the practice. The whole sermon is good, but I especially liked this passage from Dr. Rayburn's sermon:

The history of the Christian ministry bears witness not only to the universal practice of bestowing God’s blessing upon his people this way as the conclusion of services of worship but of ministers understanding very well that they were, in so doing, communicating God’s blessing and favor directly to his people. Here is Charles Simeon, the great Anglican pastor in 18th and 19th century Cambridge.

“I feel that in pronouncing [the benediction] I do not do it as a mere finale, but that I am actually dispensing peace from God and at God’s command. I know not the individuals to whom my benediction is a blessing; but I know that I am the appointed instrument by whom God is conveying the blessing to those who are able to receive it.” [Moule, Charles Simeon, 85-86]

I spoke last week of the way worship allows us every Lord’s Day to reenter reality and to have that reality – that counter-reality to the imagined reality that so many accept and believe and which we ourselves are so sorely tempted to accept – I say to have that reality impressed afresh upon our minds and hearts. Here, in the benediction as part of that worship, we are reminded that God alone is the source of all that we long for; he and he alone can give it to us and keep it for us; and that, therefore, the hope we place in other things, in other people is misplaced, futile, and bound to disappoint us, a very important thing to hear and understand as we leave the church and reenter our daily life. We are also reminded that the Lord stands ready to bless his people; that he will bless them if only they are faithful to him. The three-fold repetition of the Lord’s name, the emphasis placed on the Lord’s blessing being in the priests mouth in vv. 23 and 27, all of that is no doubt necessary precisely because we are so inclined to look for our blessing in all the wrong places and because the Devil will be very happy to give us a kind of blessing from other sources that can distract us from looking for real blessing from the only one who can give it to us.

In Jeremiah 2:13 the Lord laments this very tendency on the part of his people.

“My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that hold no water.”

In other words they looked elsewhere for their blessing and found only the cheap and temporary imitation. [Duguid, 88]

In any well-ordered worship service, everything that is done is important and valuable. Everything renews faith, hope, love and our lives in some way. Everything addresses our need in some significant way. But not everything, every Sunday, has subjective power over our hearts. Our sins may be forgiven because we have asked for that forgiveness in Jesus’ name – and that is the truly important thing – our sins may be forgiven but we may not feel the freedom from sin and guilt that is the appropriate consequence of such forgiveness. We may have sung God’s praise and glory – and that is absolutely important for us to do – but we may not have felt the divine majesty in our hearts. Sometimes we come to the end of the service and still our hearts have not been lifted up and our spirits raised, however we may have heard the Word of God and traversed the gospel ground once more. And for the real believer, whose faith is often downcast because of his own sins and failures or because of the afflictions of life, that blessing being granted to him at the end of the service and resting upon him, the Lord’s name being put upon him in that way, is a matter of the greatest conceivable importance whether or not we feel the effect of that blessing in our spirits. Who can possibly say what difference it would make to our lives not to have the blessing that has come to us from the sermons we have heard, the prayers we have offered, the Lord’s Supper’s we have participated in. We cannot know how God pours his help, his forgiveness, his strength, his provision into our hearts by the means that he has appointed to communicate his favor – so many of which are concentrated as parts of the service of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day. And the benediction is another of those parts. No one can say what a difference it has made to countless multitudes and generations of Christian people through the ages to have the Lord blessing them, to have that benediction granted them in that divinely appointed and ordered way, that way the Lord himself promised would be his way of smiling upon, keeping, being gracious to, and blessing his people. Must we not believe, can a believer of the Bible here in Numbers 6 not believe that this benediction as often as it is offered by a minister and received by a congregation is a means of some blessing granted by God to his people every time it is uttered? Have you so much of that blessing that you care to have no more? Are you sated with God’s blessing? Or, rather, do you want as much of it as you can possibly obtain and so are jealous to take the fullest advantage of every opportunity to obtain more of that blessing?

ORP: TP: Gravity's Rainbow, part "n"

Haven't had much time to read this novel, but I knocked off a few more pages and I have to say that I am disappointed with Thomas Pynchon. There is material in this novel that is profoundly obscene. I think one could (I won't, but...) use a restrained amount of borderline material and still get across the cesspool-like nature of the average human. I will still continue on with the book for the sake of examining post-modern novel writing in detail, and TP has some brilliant passages. It is a shame when someone so excellent in the skill of writing pours out material that is unworthy of their talent.

Update: After a little consideration, I have decided to shelve this book until after Lent and Easter. So the only literary work I'll be likely to mine any loftiness & beauty from will be the on-going tome that is Les Misérables.

W: General: Another Great Writer Dies

As everyone is now announcing, Philip Jose Farmer died yesterday. He may not have been as socially significant as Solzhenitsyn, who died last August, but he was an imaginative writer and I appreciated some of his works.

Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): God is both Immanent and Transcendent

In the fourth sermon on Numbers by Dr. Rayburn, we have this excellent summary of the proper dialectic about God's "nearness" and "farness" (if you will); here is the quote:

I cannot stress the importance of our grasping the uniquely Christian view of God that is demonstrated to us in these regulations that we might otherwise take to be boring and irrelevant. Do you see how utterly different this view of God is that we are given here. It is not the view of our culture, to be sure, but it is also not the view of any other religion in the world. In every other worldview God is either immanent, near to us, or he is transcendent, far above us. In Buddhism to the extent there is a god, he is in everything. God is absolute immanence. In Islam God is high above us and cannot be known by us. God is absolute transcendence. In corruptions of Christianity, again it is one or the other. In deistic forms of Christianity God is distant and far above his creatures. In popular forms of secular and sentimental Christianity, now so common in our land, God is a harmless, avuncular figure standing nearby to help but never to provoke fear or even awe.

It is only in biblical Christianity that we get both: the living and true God, the maker of heaven and earth, the judge of all men, whose glory no man has seen or can see, who inhabits eternity and dwells in unapproachable light, on the one hand, and, on the other, the God who draws near to us, to love and care for and concern himself with his people and their small and ordinary lives. Here you have the living God in the camp of his people, right near to them to help them and guide them; but he remains the holy God of infinite glory to whom his people owe great fear and reverence and whose approach they must take care to make only in those ways appropriate to his holiness.

And let me remind you this does not change in the NT. There too God is a God of fearful majesty and faith in him requires that we live in godly fear. It is the transcendence of God that makes his immanence so wonderful and amazing and it is his immanence that makes his transcendence so glorious and so wonderful to behold and admire. We have a God who is worthy both of our fear and our love at one and the same time. And it is because and only because he is worthy of both that he is a God who can save us and deliver us to the Promised Land. It is only because he is a God who made the vast universe and rules the wheeling galaxies with absolute sovereignty that we can utterly rely on his word and his power. And it is because he is a God of love and fatherly affection that we can count on his caring for us no matter that our lives, in so many ways, seem too small to be of any consequence to even other human beings, much less to Almighty God. People are usually either sympathetic or strong, but rarely both. But the living God offers both company and help, sympathy and power, affection and sovereign rule. Our God lives in a high and holy place, we read in Isaiah 57:15, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit. He offers salvation to sinners and promises indescribable joys to those who trust in him, but he threatens the impenitent and the unbelieving with doom. He rules over this world to such an extent that every single thing that happens is in some respect his will, so that no one will finally get away with disobedience to him, but he feelingly and tenderly sympathizes with his children as a loving parent. He pitched his tent in the midst of Israel, but that tent was surrounded by guards, by mystery, and by danger. [Duguid, 61]

That is your God, Christian. Not the sentimental and toothless god of American civic religion and not the distant and unapproachable God of deism and Islam, but the God who must be loved and feared at one and the same time. There is no other God but the true and living God who is also our Savior and father in heaven. “Behold the goodness and the severity of God!”

Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): On Ritual

I am reviewing some of the earlier sermons of Dr. Rayburn on this current series on the book of Numbers. In the introduction to this series, Dr. Rayburn makes some very good points about ritual in the Christian faith and in society in general.
While I recommend reading (or listening while it is still available) the entire sermon, I do want to draw your attention to this large section that I quote below:

But not only is there precious little proof, real proof, of this evolutionary understanding of Israelite religion, not only does the OT itself give us completely different view of things – for example, in the OT the regulations and rituals were given early to Israel as the explicit provision of God for her life as his people – but all through the Bible we are taught that law and ritual are vital to a truly faithful life and a truly fruitful church. Laws and rituals are as limiting and stifling in the Bible as wings are limiting and stifling to a bird! Nevertheless, no matter that we protest this whole theory of the literary origin of the Pentateuch, nowadays among American evangelicals, the same prejudice against ritual and organization can be seen almost everywhere we look. [Ian Hamilton made a very perceptive comment at the 30th anniversary celebration the other evening. Remember he said that the great divide between Christian believers in our time may not prove to be between different theological outlooks – for example, Calvinists and Arminians or Cessationists and Charismatics – but between believers who understand the role of historic Christian worship and are committed to that worship and believers who do not and are not.]
For many, if not most American evangelicals the sacraments are virtually an incidental feature of their religious life. Most flagship evangelical churches in the United States today which are typically the mega-churches almost never or never have the sacraments in their Sunday services. Amazing! Rituals seem to them far removed from the free expression of the soul and they have been taught to believe that such expression is all that matters. That that is what is the authentic Christian experience. Churches are independent of one another, the Christians in them related to the church only in voluntary ways, and a hue and cry goes up whenever an attempt is made to enforce some kind of order upon the life of God’s people; the sort of order that is imposed by God himself on the people of Israel in the book of Numbers. You probably have experience yourself of how such ritual acts as kneeling to pray or dressing ministers in robes or having the Lord’s Supper more frequently have proved controversial and divisive in evangelical churches of your acquaintance. The new American evangelical church service – twenty to thirty minutes of singing, an offering, and a sermon – is intentionally a service, at least so it is thought, shorn of ritual. The congregation does almost nothing. There is little to no sense of an order of acts relating the visible to the invisible world. The congregation sings (though in some of the churches I have attended recently I couldn’t tell that the congregation was singing; I couldn’t hear the voice of the congregation over the amplified voice of the singer or singers in front). The congregation may sing but it does not act. There is certainly very little resembling the worship of the book of Numbers in American churches today.
And this is supposed to be a virtue. American evangelicals in particular have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing ritual from ritualism. Ritualism is an unhealthy confidence in rituals in themselves, in the acts of worship themselves, as if these acts had some intrinsic power, apart from the worshiper’s faith or the blessing of God. But however sternly the Bible condemns ritualism, it is full of ritual from beginning to end. It commands it. It celebrates its importance, and has no fear of an ordered, even strictly ordered life for the people of God.
What we find in Numbers – the ritually ordered life of God’s people and the importance of a rightly ordered worship – we find in the New Testament as well and nowhere more emphatically than in Revelation and its picture of the ideal worship of God’s people as that worship goes on in heaven. That worship as it is described for us in the first half of the book of Revelation is clearly some picture of how early Christian congregations were worshiping the Lord on their Lord’s Day and John is drawing from his own experience of the worshiping community in his day, but it is also clearly understood by John to be a heavenly pattern that the earthly church is imitating, following, copying. Remember how we are told that the sanctuary Moses built was built as a copy of the sanctuary in heaven (Heb. 8:5) and that the rites of the ancient tabernacle and temple were “copies of heavenly things” (9:23)? I debated whether to read this to you it is a rather long reading, but give your best effort at capturing the point that is being made in this description of worship as John gives it to us, heavenly worship, in the opening chapters of Revelation.
“At the beginning of the book of Revelation, St. John tells us that he ‘was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’ (1:10). [Interpreters of Revelation] commonly hold that the visionary’s ensuing account of life and events in the heavenly Jerusalem reflect in some ways the worship practices in the churches of his time… By divine inspiration St. John’s experience of contemporary Christian liturgy was heightened into the vision of worship in the city of God.
The historical function of the early Church finds its fulfillment in worship. John, the liturgist among the apostles, indicates the place that the worship of the Church has in universal history. The Church on the mainland of Asia assembles for worship on the Lord’s Day, while John is…on the island of Patmos. But then all earthly limitations are removed and the heavenly temple itself is opened to the inward eye, as once it was opened to Isaiah. John saw ‘the tent of witness,’ the ‘ark of the covenant,’ the ‘altar,’ the ‘seven lamps,’ the ‘censer of sacrifice,’ whose smoke filled the whole temple. Men and beasts alike prostrate themselves before God and the Lamb and adore. Angels and martyrs play on their eternal harps. The lonely figure on Patmos is both witness of and sharer in the worship of heaven itself. The heavenly trumpets sound. The Trisagion [the “Holy, Holy, Holy”] is sung. The praises sung by the creatures, the stars and the worlds surge around the Creature like some fugue of Bach’s [sic] that knows no end. The heavenly choir sings the Agnus Dei. The drama of salvation rolls onward like Palestrina’s Marcellus Mass. The 144,000 voices sing a new song in words no human ear can learn. The angel proclaims an eternal gospel in unearthly glory like the final chorus of Handel’s Messiah. The final Church comes together for the ‘great Eucharist,’ a Church of priests who are to serve God throughout eternity. That is the liturgy of universal history that the seer of Patmos knew and shared in. But the brotherhood is also gathered around him, invisible, here and now a Church of priests. It receives the heavenly epistle and shares in the heavenly worship with its solemn ‘yea’ and ‘amen’ and ‘Maranatha,’ ‘even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.’ So the apocalyptic liturgist understands the doxology of the persecuted church in the framework of a liturgy that embraces all worlds and times.” [Geoffrey Wainwright, “The Church as a Worshipping Community,” Pro Ecclesia (1994) 57 and Ethelbert Stauffer, New Testament Theology, 202, cited in J. Meyers, The Lord’s Service, 132-133]
In other words, the ritual of the Christian church, the acts that believers perform in their worship in the presence of God, from ancient times to the modern day, in those acts our faith has been expressed and our understanding of our lives, their meaning, their future given shape and invested with power. John tells the entire story of the history of the world by describing Christians at worship! Their rituals reveal and express not only their most fundamental convictions but also the most fundamental of all realities: the connection between God and man; heaven and earth; the meaning and the nature of the progress of history; its coming consummation; the glory of God. So it was in the days of the book of Numbers. This explains the place and the importance of ritual acts and rules of organization we find given so solemnly in the book Numbers and other books of the Pentateuch. These rituals, that organization, create, nourish, sustain and direct the life of the community of God’s people in that way that enables their worship, not only to please God, but in fact to be an instrument of binding the community together as the people of God directing them in the service of God and indeed directing history to its appointed end.
One scholar puts it this way:
“Rituals reveal values at their deepest level…men express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is conventionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the group that are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies.” [M. Wilson in Wenham, 26]
Well the essential society of the human race is the Christian church and its ritual is its essential constitution. The importance of ritual and organization was not lost on Moses’ contemporaries, but it is much harder for modern Americans to appreciate. We are a culture that has moved so far in the other direction – from the communal to the individual, and from a ritual-shaped life to one now virtually devoid of rituals (at least intentional rituals) – that we now face the very real threat of actual depersonalization. We have so exalted the individual and his freedom to live in whatever way he chooses, even alas in the Christian church, we have so romanticized freedom that not only have we lost a sense of community in Western culture, we are now in very great danger of completely losing any sense of personhood as well. As God made man to be a person in relationship, a personhood in community, to lose the community – and community is shaped and sustained by ritual – is finally to lose the personhood as well. We now are thinking and speaking more and more of human beings as simply exalted machines or as simply higher animals and the result is that more and more we are treating other human beings as machines and as animals. But animals and machines cannot create true community and they cannot form a community that actually will bless and save the world. Accordingly, the acid of individualism has eaten away at our communities, at marriage, at family, at national cohesion – I don’t know the extent to which you realize this but it is an extraordinary thing that we are talking about the United States of America nowadays as red and blue states – we are coming apart as a people. Our sense of a shared life and a shared community is disappearing in our time and before our eyes. And, alas, and even more important it is eating away at the church, where, again, everyone does what is right in his own eyes. I’m not sure if many of us in this congregation know how individualism and subjectivity rules in American Christianity in our time. Little holds us together, little gives us a sense of our life as the life of a single community to which we are bound, in which we serve the Lord, whose community is the instrument of God’s work in human history, whose acts together are the ultimate acts of Christ’s presence – of Christ’s body – in the world.
Now, it needs to be observed that human beings, being what they are, cannot escape ritual. Man’s communal nature, his craving to embody his internal states, leads to a life of ritual. It cannot be helped. And so, even in anti-ritual cultures like our own, rituals proliferate. What we have done is simply to replace divinely ordered rituals that reflect eternal reality for our own: rituals that express, wittingly or unwittingly, the diminished and debased values of our post-enlightenment world. People would never sit through an hour and a half church service, regulated and created and formed of rituals, but they will gladly sit through a three hour football game and do the wave at the appropriate time. Our community has been transformed from a community of faith to one of entertainment; our rituals have redirected our attention from heaven to earth, from God to the self.
The modern evangelical thinks extemporary prayer is more spiritual than the written prayers of the liturgy but what is the result? We end up with prayers that are empty of any reverence for God, are overly familiar which is to say they are anti-elitist even when speaking of God. They are the expressions of our subjectivist and individualist culture even when speaking to God. I am sure the ordinary Christian who prays this way does not understand this or appreciate it but it is obviously true. And the prayers are often little more than a list of almost selfish expressions of desire for this or that. Our way of praying brings God down to our level whether or not this is our intention. It shows you how fabulously important rituals are for the maintenance and preservation of a right understanding of unseen things. It is our modern way of prayer, a ritual that expresses the modern Zeitgeist or spirit of the age. “Lord we just want to…” And this has become the church’s prayer! “Lord, we just want to love you, or to ask you…” That prayer, brothers and sisters, will not conquer the world. It does not trade in the power and reality of heaven and the glory of God! Or the robe is taken from the minister – too formal, stuffy, elitist, too P and not enough J and E – but a new uniform is put in its place – either $1000 suits and $100 ties, or a Hawaiian shirt and sandals – but is this the organization of the people of God that will confront the powers of darkness and the present world system? Is this the form of God’s people and community that will carry human history forward to its consummation? School children are freed from uniforms but immediately adopt the official uniform of their peers, but a uniform that expresses now a very different set of values, one that doesn’t threaten the world at all and conveys nothing important about our convictions as the people of God or even the calling of a young student. House churches spring up that dispense with liturgy and ministers but very soon have created their own idiosyncratic worship and forms of leadership because without them they would soon wither away. But their forms are not the Bible’s forms and they lack the authority and the power that comes from a form being a copy of what is in heaven.
The question is not whether we will have ritual and organization but whether it will be the ritual and organization that God has taught us in his Word, the ritual and organization that will shape us into his “divisions,” the military term used so often in the Pentateuch to describe the people of God on the march through the wilderness of this world and doing battle with their enemies as circumstances require. In the army one is taught to salute higher ranks on every occasion. It is done all through the day, day after day. The point is that the ritual shapes the soldiers view of himself, his life, and his relationships. Those realities become so much a part of him that when they are tested in battle, they continue to rule his life. Rituals and principles of organization convey values at a deep level. Outsiders are always more conscious of them than insiders but at a deep level they convey, they reinforce, and they direct the moral, spiritual convictions of a people.