How Shall We Kill Sin?

John Owen’s classic The Mortification of Sin includes these words in the preface, where Owen explains why he chose to publish the work:

This was seconded by an observation of some men’s dangerous mistakes, who of late days have taken upon them to give directions for the mortification of sin, who, being unacquainted with the mystery of the gospel and the efficacy of the death of Christ, have anew imposed the yoke of self-wrought-out mortification on the necks of their disciples, which neither they nor their forefathers were ever able to bear.  A mortification they cry up and press, suitable to that of the gospel neither in respect of nature, subject, causes, means, nor effects; which constantly produces the deplorable issues of superstition, self-righteousness, and anxiety of conscience in them who take up the burden which is so bound for them.

In other words, trying to kill sin with the weapon of mere self-effort will get you nowhere.  We cannot kill sin with the law, for sin only hijacks the law and uses it as the occasion to produce more sin (Romans 7:7-25).  

This is why we must go to the gospel.  In fact, one paragraph later Owen refers to a true, biblical attack against sin as “gospel mortification.”  What this means is that our fight against sin is empowered by the gospel, the good news of Christ crucified and risen for us.  The fight against sin is not a fight to make ourselves better.  It is a fight to strengthen our faith in the promise of God.  For all true obedience to God is born of faith (Hebrews 11), and anything that is not from faith is sin (Romans 14:23).

When you fight against sin, where should your focus be?  It should be on God’s promise of a greater joy to be found in Christ than in sin.  Lift your mind to Christ crucified, risen, and now interceding for you at the right hand of God, and know that if he presents his blood before the Father on your behalf, he will save you to the uttermost, not only from the penalty of sin, but also from its power.  Rest in him, and find the power of sin broken.  

This is not an easy thing to do.  It is not a matter of passive resignation.  It is a fight, because the world, the flesh, and the devil are eager to attack our faith and seduce us with false promises.  But constantly coming back to the gospel through Word and sacrament, in the fellowship of the local church, is what stirs our faith and keeps us in the fight.  

Don’t fight sin by trying harder to do better.  Fight it by believing more earnestly that God is for you in Christ.  This is gospel mortification.  

Incarnation

Just as, in aeons past, the divine fiat

pierced the silent abyss of nihil

and actualized all that is . . .

Just as the holy voice heralded,

not just a, but the beginning,

and it was so . . .

Just as, from the womb of time,

he summoned the light,

and, with a word, sent darkness into retreat . . .

So, in the fullness of time,

an infant’s cry pierced the silent Judean night,

and the world was born again,

the story began once more,

and darkness surrendered.

This time for good.

A Christmas Reading, 12/21

After Ralph has been assigned to write a theme entitled, “What I want for Christmas”:

The clouds lifted.  I saw faint gleam of light at the other end of the black cave of golden gloom which had enveloped me since my visit to Santa.  Rarely had the words poured from my penny pencil with such feverish fluidity.  Here was a theme on a subject that needed talking about if ever one did!  I remember to this day its glorious winged phrases and concise imagery:

“What I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.  I think everybody should have a Red Ryder BB gun.  They are very good for Christmas.  I don’t think a football is a very good Christmas present.”

Merry Christmas to all!

A Christmas Reading, 12/20

Have you ever seen that holiday classic A Christmas Story?  Of course you have.  Did you know that it is based on a book entitled In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd (who is also the narrator of the film)?  As I have watched that movie year after year, I have long said to myself, “I’ll bet that book is really funny.  I should get it.”  And yet, year after year, that resolution would go unfulfilled.

Until now.  Got it in the mail yesterday.  Over the next few days I’ll plan to share a few choice passages with you.  Here is one for today.  The scene is when Ralph is at the shopping mall, and he has just been taken up to see Santa.

“AND WHAT’S YOUR NAME, LITTLE BOY?”

His booming baritone crashed out over the chipmunks [Christmas music playing in the background].  He reached down and neatly hooked my sheepskin collar, swooping me upward, and there I sat on the biggest knee in creation, looking down and out over the endless expanse of Toyland and down to the tiny figures that wound off into the distance.

“Uhh . . . uhhh . . . uhhh . . .”

“THAT’S A FINE NAME, LITTLE BOY! HO-HO-HO!”

Santa’s warm, moist breath poured down over me as though from some cosmic steam radiator.  Santa smoked Camels, like my Uncle Charles.

Merry Christmas to all!

Hatred for the Rich

Doug Wilson has a recent piece that should not be missed.  It’s short enough to quote in full here:

You have a button in front of you, placed there by a helpful genie. But instead of giving you the standard three wishes (and why doesn’t anybody ever wish for ten wishes?), the genie has limited your options.

 

If you push the button, the real income of all the “have-nots” in the world will double overnight. Their health care will be twice as good as it is now, their disposable income will be twice as large, their houses will be twice as nice, and so on. But another consequence of pushing this button will also be the fact that the “haves” will see their prosperity increase ten-fold. They will all be ten times richer, thus enabling them to swank around all day.

 

To spell it out, this means that the divide between the rich and poor will widen, but will do so in a way that leaves the poor undeniably better off.

 

This is your ethical “dilemma,” and part of your test is whether or not you even think of it as a dilemma. Would you refuse to push that button out of hard principle? Would you push it, but with a guilty conscience? Or would you, like me, push it while whistling a cheerful air, with your hat on the side of your head?

 

If you would not push it, or if you would push it reluctantly, then that urgent yearning for social justice that you feel all the time in your gut is not compassion at all, but cancerous envy. It is evil. It is a deadly sin that must be mortified. You don’t love the poor at all — you hate the rich, and you want to use the poor as a club. And why would this malevolent genie want to take your precious club away?

The Meaning of the Cross

From D. A. Carson’s book The God Who Is There (p. 210):

 

At the end of the day, what hell measures is how much Christ paid for those who escape hell.  The measure of his torment (in ways I do not pretend to begin to understand) as the God-man is the measure of torment that we deserve and he bore.  And if you see that and believe it, you will find it difficult to contemplate the cross for very long without tears.

An Open Letter to the Person Who Broke into My House Twice in Three Weeks

Dear person who broke into my house twice in three weeks,

First, let’s face the facts here.  I don’t know who you are.  I don’t even know if you are an individual or a group of two or more people.  I have a strong sense that, whoever you are, you are responsible for both break-ins, but I don’t know that for sure.  You are probably not going to read this.  So, this is all an exercise for my benefit and hopefully for the benefit of my blog readers.  There, I’m glad we got that out of the way.

You have taken a lot from me.  I know the handful of electronics you grabbed during the first incident and the $8.00 you removed from a purse on the second incident probably were not the most lucrative grabs you have ever made.  So that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Nor am I talking about the additional money I had to pay to make repairs to my home on these two occasions, as well as security upgrades.  (No, I won’t go into any details about what kind of upgrades I made.  That would be like Janet Napolitano broadcasting American security measures on Al-Jazeera.)

All in all, it wasn’t a small sum of money that I had to pay to recover from your intrusions, but that is not my point here.  When I say you have taken a lot from me, I mean that you have taken away from my family our formerly relaxed approach to the security of our home and our life in it.  You have taken away our ability to leave our doors unlocked for any significant amount of time.  You have taken away our ability to go to bed without running through a mental checklist.  You have taken away our ability to ignore noises we hear at night.  In short, you have taken away our ability to live at any time in a mode of complete relaxation.  Because you have demonstrated a willingness to invade homes (not only ours but others in the neighborhood) when their occupants are present, you have caused us to be on alert at all times.

I think it goes without saying that I pray for the police to catch you soon, and that I have been an active participant in their investigations.  I want you to be stopped, not only for the sake of my family and my neighbors, but also for yours as well.  The danger you pose to me does not begin to approach the danger that this unrepentant sin poses to your soul.  I pray that God, in his mercy to us, will restrain you by having you locked up.  And if he does so, it will be an act of mercy to you, offering you the chance to repent and find forgiveness through his crucified and risen Son.

But my main purpose in writing is not to deliver the (admittedly unsurprising) news that I want you stopped.  It is, rather, to let you know that this new mode of vigilance in which I am living has become for me one of the most teachable moments I have had in a while.  You see, quite often over the last couple of weeks I have caught myself thinking about how much I wish I didn’t have to live this way.  I wish I could relax in the (false?) sense of security that I had before this chapter of our life began.

But then I realize what I am doing.  By wishing for a complete sense of security, I am longing for a blessing that can only be experienced in the age to come.  I am longing to carve out a little space in this fallen world that is not affected by sin.  I am feeling a sense of entitlement to something to which I, a sinner in a fallen world, am not entitled.  God never promised me immunity from earthly dangers like you.

But he did promise me that one day I will live in a city that is so far from the reach of dangers that its gates never have to be shut (Rev. 21:24-25).  He has commanded me to lay up treasures in this city, where thieves like you have no power to break in and steal (Matt. 6:19-20).  And he has assured me in the meantime that nothing in all of creation—including you—will be able to separate me from his love, given to me in Christ (Rom. 8:35-39).

God is for me (Rom. 8:31).  Who can be against me?  You have tried, but there really is no contest.  You are fighting against the omnipotent Creator and Lord of all things.  You are going to lose, unless you give up now and switch loyalties.  But in the meantime, I want you to know that what you have taken from me—my ability to let my guard down and relax—has actually given me a greater longing for Heaven, and a greater sense of how much it will dwarf the sufferings of this age (Rom. 8:18).  God is using your sin against me to help me kill sin in myself, the sin of being too invested in this present life.  That makes me more than a conqueror through him who loved me (Rom. 8:37).

So the next time I catch myself longing for the ability to let my guard down and relax, I will remember once again that there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God (Heb. 4:9), and I will long to enter it all the more.  In the meantime, I rest in the only way appropriate to this present evil age: by faith in the promise of God.

Sincerely,

Aaron O’Kelley

Mitt Romney and Mormon Prophecy

Barack Obama is done.  With little chance of any significant economic recovery before next year’s election, with the inability to run against the establishment (now that he is the establishment), and with the considerably depleted enthusiasm of his voting base, Obama has very little chance of winning a second term.  Who will take his place?

Although fourteen months is an eternity in politics, and some kind of catastrophic event could change the entire the game, my prediction at this point is that Mitt Romney will be the next president.  Rick Perry effortlessly took over the front runner status from him a few weeks ago, but ever since the Texas governor has demonstrated that he is, at this point at least, not very capable of maintaining that kind of position.  Michelle Bachmann (the other leading candidate) continues to lack the quality of electability that would propel her to the nomination, and as she continues to go on the attack against Perry, she will end up bloodying herself a bit in the process.  With none of the other candidates (for better or worse) able to get traction at this point, that leaves Romney to emerge once again as the leading contender.  The early New Hampshire primary, which he is almost certain to win, should set him on the path to the nomination.

I have mixed feelings about Mitt Romney.  On the one hand, he is not Barack Obama.  Although he has held more liberal positions in the past, I will take him at his word and trust that he will govern as a conservative.  At best, he is a true conservative who has taken some time to develop his mature convictions.  At worst, he is a political chameleon who is riding the conservative bandwagon because conservatism is on the rise in the wake of the Obama nightmare.  Either way, he will govern as a conservative, and that is a good thing.

On the other hand, he is a Mormon.  Let me say two things at the outset on this point.  First, Mormons are not Christians, in spite of the way the Latter Day Saints (LDS) church seeks to package itself these days.  Their understanding of God, man, Christ, salvation, and a host of other issues is light years away from biblical Christianity.  They deny the Trinity, the qualitative distinction between Creator and creature, the hypostatic union (union of a fully divine and fully human nature in the one person of Christ), and justification by faith.  The LDS church teaches that God was once a man who, through his own adherence to Mormon teaching, including celestial marriage, has now ascended to godhood, where he lives with his many wives and engages in constant sexual intercourse in order to populate this world with his spirit children.  This is not Christianity.  It is a moralized paganism dressed up with Christian terminology.

Second, the fact that Romney is not a Christian is not my primary concern.  A man does not have to be a Christian to be a good president.  There are varieties of non-Christians that would not raise the main issue of concern that I have with Romney.

And that main issue is this: on May 6, 1845, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism) issued this prophecy:

You will see the constitution of the United States almost destroyed.  It will hang like a thread. . . . A terrible revolution will take place in the land of America. . . . [T]he land will be left without a Supreme Government, . . . [Mormonism] will have gathered strength, sending out Elders to gather the honest in heart . . . to stand by the Constitution of the United States. . . . In these days . . . God will set up a Kingdom, never to be thrown down. . . . [T]he whole of America will be made the Zion of God.

Do Mormon politicians pay any heed to these words?  Mormon Senator Orrin Hatch, during his own presidential campaign, famously said in 1999,

I’ve never seen it worse than this, where the Constitution literally is hanging by a thread.

We will side-step the misuse of the adverb “literally” for now and focus instead on the fact that in 1999, toward the end of the Clinton years, Senator Hatch interpreted events on the American landscape in categories derived from Joseph Smith’s prophecy and presumably viewed himself as a major player on the stage of Mormon eschatological expectation.  It was not to be for Hatch, who never came close to the Republican nomination.

Enter Mitt Romney, twelve years later.  If the Constitution was (literally, though not really literally!) hanging by a thread in 1999, what should we say about it now?  Barack Obama’s pinky is thicker than Bill Clinton’s thigh (1 Kings 12:10).  Does the LDS church see the events unfolding before us as the fulfillment of Smith’s prophecy?  Does Mitt Romney view it that way?  If elected, will Romney view himself as the primary agent in the long-awaited establishment of the Kingdom of Zion on earth, right here in America?  And if so, how does that intersect with his understanding of the US Constitution and the freedoms it guarantees (especially to non-Mormons)?  Will the LDS church assume that he has gone to Washington to do their bidding?  If so, how will he respond to such assumptions?

I am just raising questions here.  It may very well be that these kinds of questions are quite remote to Romney himself.  And even if a gung-ho Mormon became president, that does not mean we have an automatic theocracy.  As much as Barack Obama has expanded executive power, there remain considerable limits on what a president can do.  But it is worth thinking about.  These questions probably cannot and will not be answered until we have the opportunity to witness a Romney presidency for ourselves.

Prayer Support

Tomorrow (Tuesday, Sept. 6) begins the second year of the pastoral apprentice program that I have started at our church, a program whose goal is to help prepare men to serve Christ’s church throughout the world.  For the next ten months I will participate in the task of leading a handful of young men through a program of reading, writing, discussing, praying, preaching, teaching, and serving our church in various ways.

Please pray for the Lord’s blessings upon our apprentices: Bob, Brody, John, and Keiler.  Please pray as well for the role of our elders in this task: Lee, Tom, Nathan, and Ray.  And pray for me.  We have seen the hand of God at work in bringing this ministry into existence, and we strongly desire his blessing upon it.

Something to Ponder

My laptop computer was recently stolen.  So I was thinking today…what are the chances that the thief might read my dissertation?  And if so, would he find it persuasive?  I really hope he would.