Prophets and the rest of God 2: The Church at Rest Jer 31:1-9; Heb 3:7-4:11
Introduction
Last week I spoke about the content of the rest of God in Christ. That after enduring the judgement of God in our place during his life, and especially his death, Jesus returned as a glorified human being to the eternal glory of God in heaven (John 17: 5 cf. Rev 13:8). This is the rest which we are exhorted to enter.
The rest of God actually occupies a key place in a recurring biblical pattern. After the creation of the world God rests in advance of establishing Eden as a place for his habitation (Gen 1-2), the occupation of the Promised Land would provide a rest for the kingdom activities of the Lord (Josh 1:15), the building of the Temple of Solomon comes after a rest from enemies (1 Ki 8:56ff), and Jesus commences the building of his Church (Matt 16:18) after his sitting in heaven with his earthly work completed (Acts 7:55; Heb 1:3). Despite this prominent biblical pattern, teaching on the rest of God is a dreadfully neglected aspect of discipleship. There are reasons for this neglect.
Restless people are often high achievers. Famous nineteenth century evangelist D. L. Moody said about himself, “The world has yet to see what God can do with a man fully consecrated to him. By God’s help, I aim to be that man.” (D.L. Moody). Moody seems to have forgotten that Jesus was that consecrated man on our behalf (John 17:19)! To my shame I used to teach a “total commitment” spirituality. Which in the end can only lead, as I quoted from David Wilkerson last week, “My days are done….I didn’t do enough.”
This mighty man’s lack of peace contrasts strikingly with the testimony of the famous pioneering Protestant missionary to China, Hudson Taylor, who after striving for more faith through prayer, fasting, repeated resolutions and strenuous Bible reading, entered into joyful rest in Jesus. He longed to abide in the Vine, then a breakthrough came when he realised he was already in the Vine (John 15). He had a revelation from 2 Timothy 2:13, “If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.”
Hudson Taylor’s “spiritual secret” isn’t that hidden. David Wilkerson said, “I didn’t do enough” but Taylor said, “he (Christ) abideth faithful”. Only in the latter case is the I at the centre Christ. Hudson Taylor shared Paul’s insight. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal 2:20). By grace these men realised that it’s all about the all-sufficiency of Christ (Eph 3:8). Entry into the rest of God depends on abiding more intensely in the reality that our egos/selves have already been crucified with Christ, “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal 6:14 cf. Rom 6:6). This understanding makes sense of the failure of the old covenant people of God to enter into God’s rest and the prophetic Old Testament prophetic hope for a future rest.
Old Testament: Disobedience and Vision
Sometimes there are end-time (eschatological) truths hidden in places where we forget to look for them. After the creation accounts of each of the first six days we read, “it was evening and morning, the xth day” (Gen 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31). But after the announcement of the blessing of God’s rest on the seventh/sabbath day there is no mention of evening and morning. The sabbath day is open to an endless duration, which will eventually be proclaimed as having arrived in the gospel. Indicators that this promised of rest could never be annihilated by sin appear throughout the Old Testament. After Noah emerges from the ark and offers animal sacrifices, we hear, “And the Lord smelled an (literally) aroma of rest.” (Gen 8:21). Hebrews teaches us that the word which came to the people delivered from Egypt promising God’s rest in the Promised Land was “good news” (Heb 4:2,6). They failed to believe and obey this gospel-word about a God given victory over their enemies in Canaan (Num 14). They allowed the Lord to deliver them by miraculous signs and wonders from Egyptian slavery, but turned aside from working with God (cf. 2 Cor 6:1) in a conflict against the “giants” in Canaan (Num 13:32-33). The miraculous is never a substitute for the daily slog of discipleship.
Always under the old covenant there are prophetic pointers to a final time when everything will be different. Terrified by Jezebel’s threats to kill him Elijah flees to Mt Sinai where the Lord sends wind, earthquake and fire, but the Lord is not “in” any of these. Finally, there is “the sound of a low whisper/still small voice” (1 Ki 19:11-12). The Lord will soon shake Israel down to the point of destruction, but afterwards will speak to her quietly, like a husband to his wayward bride (Hos 2:14-20). The contemporary Church often seems to have no greater wisdom than that of Elijah.
Many today are speaking of COVID 19 as a global shaking and citing Hebrews 12:25-26, “See that you do not refuse him who is speaking. For if they did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape if we reject him who warns from heaven. 26 At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” Symptomatically, this is fair enough. Even in easy going prosperous Australia workers comp claims increased by 80% over last 3 years, 3 in 5 Australian employees have experienced a mental illness this year (Weekend Australian 10.10.20). My sister in Victoria said to me during the week that people there are going out of their minds. Where is the prophetic voice of the Church in all this?
Forget for a moment what COVID means to the world economy, suspend concerns about the US elections and global mortality; what does this shaking have to do with Jesus? We must recognise the voice which shakes all things in Hebrews 12 is, just a verse earlier, “the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (v.24). This blood generated voice speaks from behind the curtain from God’s intimate presence in the holy of holies (Heb 6:19; 10:20). It speaks…“the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, (which) will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Phil 4:7). In Christ, no pandemic can touch us; as in 1 John 5:18, “everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.” Speaking of the end-times Zephaniah promises the Lord will “rest in his love” (Zeph 3:17) and Isaiah sees in the Spirit a glorious day when lions and lambs will dwell together (Isa 11:6). New covenant believers are in the presence and power of that Day.
The Old Testament is realistic in saying, “O LORD, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works. 13 O LORD our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone we bring to remembrance” (Isa 26:12-13). The other “lords” are false gods which according to the New Testament as demonic powers (1 Cor 8:5; 10:20) who induce shame and guilt by their endless accusations of failed performance stirring up dis-ease and driven-ness in immature consciences. How many hours do you have to work to be a “good provider”? How big does “your church” have to be to satisfy God? Hordes of sincere Christians are in spiritual depression because they feel they are not living up to the spiritual standard God expects (not praying long enough etc.). https://www.mljtrust.org/free-sermons/spiritual-depression/
Thankfully the vision of lions and lambs together has been fulfilled in the person of Jesus, (Rev 5:5-6), and our call is to fight with him to enforce his completed victory over the monsters of this age (cf. Rev 13) is a call to conflict within his peaceful victory of faith.
Jesus’ Victory of Faith
A classic text here is Hebrews 12:1-2, “let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” The victory of Jesus through faith was enacted in his fully human struggle (Heb 4:13) against the world, the flesh and the devil (John 7:7; 14:30; Rom 8:3).
The peace of “deep rest” (Tim Keller) comes in enjoying the pure pleasure of the Father’s love free from working for the approval both of our own conscience or the approval of others. Jesus’ soul never drove him to work for self-recognition or the recognition of others. Abiding in such peace made him untouchable to Satan’s enticements for him to do public of miracles (Luke 4:9-11) and his own disciples’ insistence that he not go to the cross (Mark 8:31-33).
This popular exhortation, “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”” (Matt 11:28-30), depends on what Jesus says immediately before it. “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” (Matt 11:27). If you know Jesus as the Son of the Father then in the plan of God (Eph 1:4) you were there when the Father declared, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11). The rest of God is the Father’s delight in the work of his Son and all who belong to him.
The perfection into which the human Jesus (1 Tim 2:5) has entered for us (Heb 6:20; 9:12,14) as he maintains in us his heavenly fellowship with the Father is much vaster than feeling good about ourselves. We have entered the victory of the Lord over all the powers which stress guilty humanity. In Jesus, the purpose of space, time and matter has been perfectly completed and all things are unavoidably moving to a harmonious whole in him (Eph 1:10; 3:10). This reality is as solid as the death and resurrection of Christ. The rest of God is a gospel reality.
Church
With Christ being “our wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor 1:30) we lack nothing before God. In his typical style, Luther said that the cross of Christ takes away the possibility of doing something, “While I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends…the Word…greatly weakened the pope/papacy…” He was a man knew that knew the gospel is the only announcement where we get the verdict before the performance; “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom 5:1). Having forsaken the wanderings of the wilderness we are by faith sinners in the hands of a resting God. Knowing such glories Paul proclaims, “I do not even judge myself” (1 Cor 4:3). In the victory of Christ he has left behind his opinion of himself.
Seated with Christ in the heavenly places (Eph 2:6) we have free access to “most holy place” (Heb 9:24) “before the throne of God” (Rev 7:9) and are one with Christ in his rebuilding of the cosmos by judging of all evil powers. We are on the side of reality from which the shaking comes that brings fear and restlessness to the human soul. Why then is there so much unease and striving in the Bride of Christ?
Hebrews 4:11, “Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.”, isn’t a call to self-effort but to join with Paul, “I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” (Col 1:29) by submitting to his exhortation, “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:11). Andrew Murray rightly says, “entering the rest of God is the ceasing from self-effort, and the yielding up one self in full surrender to God’s workings.” (The Holiest of All p.152). To enter the rest of God is to cease working for God and allow him to work in us his resurrection life (Heb 13:20-21).
This is all above reason and sense (Phil 4:7) but its fruit is an ego/self filled with the presence of God (Eph 3:19; Col 2:9-10). Tim Keller puts it brilliantly, “gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or less of myself, it is in thinking of myself less.” Only “self-forgetfulness” brings “blessed rest”. The rest of God liberates the soul from working for its own approval or that of others because instead of trying to fill up our own emptiness we are saturated with the adequacies of Jesus.
Faith rests in what Christ has promised to do for me, faith looks beyond my own affections and efforts. By faith we yield to the death of self in the death of Christ. The rest of God brings an end to the demonically inspired “jealousy and selfish ambition” ravaging the Church (James 3:13-18).
Conclusion
The God and Father of Jesus is always working (John 5:17), working from his centre in the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13:8). The trinitarian mystery which brings infinite undisturbed rest to God and the new creation is the self-forgetfulness of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. This mystery must be and is the cross. If the key to God’s rest in redeemed humanity is faith looking beyond itself and yielding to the energetic working of divine power, this is exactly what didn’t “work” as Jesus bore our guilt on the cross (2 Cor 5:21). The dreaded cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), means the Son of God has been shut off from the power of the Spirit of the Father. He is left alone with such an intense sense of his self/self-consciousness that he is driven to the edge of spiritual madness i.e. the pains of hell. We cannot understand such profound things but we can believe in the finished work of the cross and claim our place with our Priest-King in heaven and rest in whatever happens knowing he is Lord of all. “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, “Today, if you hear his voice, 8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness…” (Heb 3:7-8). “Today” is now.