WISDOM FROM THE SPROULS

In the Exodus issue of Every Thought Captive, Denise Sproul calls my bluff. She writes about having the tendency to always want to be involved in the adventurous, the exciting things. Our spoken and unspoken desires tend to betray our unbelief in God's sovereignty in what He has appointed for us. I don't live in a place that requires worship of a false god or else I'll be martyred. Sometimes we wish we lived in a time and place of great excitement where our faith would really be tested. But Denise hits a home run when she says this ~

"The trouble is, martyrdom is the easy calling. Obey Pharaoh, kill the babies and live, or protect the little babies and die is the easy choice. It is the little compromises that truly tempt us, tire us, turn us. It is either the slow, slogging steps of obedience that cause us to grow in grace, or the slippery, small steps of compromise that cause our very vines to wither. It is only as we are faithful in the small things that He begins to show us that they were the big things all along."

In the latest ETC, RCjr. talks about God giving us stories and our tendency to construct abstract systems of thought out of them. He accuses us Reformed folk of gravitating to only the parts of Scripture that fit into our nice neat categories. He then quotes his father as saying ~

"Whenever you are reading your Bible, and you come upon a passage that you find particularly troubling, your temptation is to pass it by. The truth is, we ought to make a special habit of devoting our attention to these passages, for wherever the bible troubles us, it show us where we are in trouble."

Amen to that! When we come to the Bible with the goal of getting our systems of thought all sewn up, we've missed the point. It's so easy for me to read the Bible, especially my favorite parts, and get smug and puffed up in my theological self-sufficiency. RC begins his article with a story he has told many times, but one that I never get tired of. The short version of the story is this ~ One of RC's professors asked this question, "What does it mean when the Scripture says that God has a strong right arm?" RC answered by explaining the hermeneutical principle of anthropomorphic language. The professor replied just as class ended, "The Bible doesn't say, R.C., that God is omnipotent. It says that He has a strong right arm." RC says he went away from that conversation with more questions than answers. He goes on to explain why he thinks God uses this kind of language and also speaks in stories and parables. It's not so we can disect His words and fit them neatly into our theological abstracts. He says ~

"We do ourselves, and the Word of God a grave disservice when we immediately turn a parable into a proof text for a doctrine. The parable of the foolish virgins isn't simply the story version of 'Faith without works is dead,' wherein we could save ourselves a great deal of time and effort if we all just agreed that faith without works is dead. It is richer, and includes in it the very real anguish and horror of being left out in the cold. That's what I missed with God's strong right arm...rather than being a primitive approximation of an abstract truth, God having a strong right arm is actually more clear, more full, more rich, indeed more powerful than 'God is omnipotent.' Omnipotent tells us nothing about the direction or use of the power. Strong right arm tells us that that strength is used in the defense of His people. Indeed it tells us there isn't just a will connected to that arm, but a heart, and a heart that loves us. Omnipotence is something you read on a potency meter. A strong right arm is something you rest under."

These two things were some of the best things I've read in ETC lately. I'm very thankful for the folks at the Highland Study Center.