Heavenly Springs

The Crook in the Lot

Christina — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:22:09 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recovering Community

Christina — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:07:42 +0000

It’s very popular these days, even among professing Christians, to resist membership at a local church. While this thinking might initially sound right, it actually flies in the face of everything the Bible teaches. While finding the right church can take time and prayer, NOT joining a church is never an option.

In his book, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace? James Montgomery Boice talks about recovering community. As someone who was nurtured back to spiritual health by a community of believers, I can only concur with the statements that are expressed here. May God help us to get beyond our individualism — the individualism that is so deeply ingrained in our culture, and free us to love and care for others.

“A fourth area in which we need to seek renewal is for our churches to become true spiritual communities: “community” because it is only as a community that we can model relationships, and “spiritual” because what we want to model is the unique qualities of life that being Christian brings.

The church of Jesus Christ can model community as no secular organization can – not businesses, not schools, not the centers of entertainment or social life, not government or city agencies- only the church! Because the church gets us outside of ourselves as those who together have been made into the one body of Jesus Christ, we can think about and care for others. Churches have an extraordinary opportunity for reaching people for Christ through their communities at a time when other forms of community have broken down. There is no better place than the fellowship of Christians for embracing those suffering from ruptured marriages, fractured homes, and other destroyed relationships.

Christianity offers something different at this point. God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). Jesus said, “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18). Both of these statement concern relationships and show how necessary and desirable relationships are.

What makes a community? A community holds together because of some higher allegiance or priority. Christians are the community of those who are formed by Scripture alone and who, because of that, know that they are all sinners saved by grace alone because of Christ alone. They are not wrapped up in themselves. Therefore, they love each other and are able to stand together and welcome all types of people and races to their fellowship. They have a commitment that goes – or should go- beyond mere individualism; and if they do, they inevitably model genuine community in church settings. Such communities provide an unsurpassed opportunity for reaching the unsaved world for Jesus Christ.”

James Montgomery Boice, Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace? Rediscovering the Doctrines that Shook the World, Illinois: Crossway, pages 177-179.

The Protestant Work Ethic

Christina — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:03:28 +0000

Peter Lillback, President of Westminster Theological Seminary and author of George Washington’s Sacred Fire, discusses the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism. I thought this was a good follow-up to my earlier post on vocation.

The Christian Doctrine of Vocation

Christina — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:25:37 +0000

Gene Edward Veith, Jr. explains the Reformation doctrine of vocation:

“When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And He does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meal. We might today add the truck drivers who hauled the produce, the factory workers in the food processing plant, the warehouse men, the wholesale distributors, the stock boys, the lady at the checkout counter. Also playing their part are the bankers, futures investors, advertisers, lawyers, agricultural scientists, mechanical engineers, and every other player in the nation’s economic system. All of these were instrumental in enabling you to eat your morning bread.

Before you ate, you probably gave thanks to God for your food, as is fitting. He is caring for your physical needs, as with every other kind of need you have, preserving your life through His gifts. “He provides food for those who fear him” (Psalm 111:5); also to those who do not fear Him, “to all flesh” (136:25). And He does so by using other human beings. It is still God who is responsible for giving us our daily bread. Though He could give it to us directly, by a miraculous provision, as He once did for the children of Israel when He fed them daily with manna, God has chosen to work through human beings, who, in their different capacities and according to their different talents, serve each other. This is the doctrine of vocation.”

Gene Edward Veith Jr., God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life, Illinois:Crossway, 2002, pages 13-14.

The Role of the Church in the Civil Rights Movement

Christina — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:58:27 +0000

For many, yesterday was the start of a 3-day weekend, to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr, the leader of the Civil Rights movement, and those who stood against racial segregation and inequality. History is replete with men and women of faith who, in the struggle to lay hold of the eternal, broke human tradition and brought about revolutionary change. Indeed, our own American history is testimony to that. We cannot speak of the founding of this great nation without acknowledging the relationship between independence from Great Britain and freedom of religion. The founding fathers understood that the very root of independence is respect for others. Yet, the actors on the stage of human history are imperfect men who, despite their greatness, sin and “fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). Had the founding fathers acted in accord with conscience when the issue of slavery presented itself, this evil and all its ugly repercussions would have been dealt the death-blow. Instead it spread like cancer. Unconfessed and unrepented sin doesn’t just go away. I believe that if the founding fathers could speak today, they would confess this as their greatest failure. Yet, the grace of God is greater and the eternal purposes of God, in the affairs of men and of nations, cannot be thwarted. God, at the frontline of every quest for freedom and justice, always has a people.

It is absolutely impossible to talk about the Civil Rights movement without acknowledging the church. Even the secularists agree. The church was the engine that powered the revolution. More than just a meeting place where strategy sessions were held, the community itself was a picture of the freedom being sought. There was unity among the members (Eph 4:3), direction from the pulpit (Tit 2:1), prayers for deliverance and protection (Phil 4:6), songs to rejoice in the God of their salvation (Eph 5:19), encouragement to persevere in the face of opposition (Heb 3:13), reminders to keep looking forward by faith to the city with foundations “whose builder and maker is God” (Heb 11:10). Men, women, and children received grace to be humble before God and bold in Christ. The church was the place where the principles of the Kingdom of God were up and running. Is it any wonder then that the church was the target of great white supremacist opposition? More important, should it be any surprise that it was Christians, motivated by faith and Scripture, who were not only among the most ardent supporters of this movement, but who made up most of the leadership?

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is more than just another Federal holiday. It is a time to thank God for the Civil Rights movement and the brave men, women, and children who understood that it was “for such a time as this” (Est 4:14) that they had been called. May we give glory to God for His providential hand in American history and for the members of the body who, by faith, stood for truth at great cost.

Without the guiding force of religion and more principles rooted in faith and Judeo-Christian ethics, the Civil Rights movement, and the broader freedom struggle, would not have become the cornerstone of social change in modern America. Indeed, for the better part of a century the faith-based struggle to eradicate racial discrimination and injustice in the United States has been a major source of spiritual and more regeneration, of hope and renewal, for oppressed people across the globe. Though much work is left to be done, both at home and abroad, doing God’s work in Alabama, Mississippi, and other parts of the South through such worldly pursuits as sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives has spread the power and the glory of faith and righteousness to the end of the earth, giving a measure of hope to us all. 1

1 Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr, The Role of Religion in the Civil Rights Movement. Presented at the Faith and Progressive Policy: Proud Past, Promising Future Conference, sponsored by the Center for American Progress, June 9, 2004.