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Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet...
- Life, Conscience and Judgement
01/04/20 15:00
by Wong Chin Meng
Let me embark with the following citation:
After more than a millennium of the saturation of society by Christian moral precepts and attitudes, ‘man’s devilry’ had become well-disguised, overlaid by a thin but effective veneer of moral respectability and social norms. Too many generations had been ‘born good’, born and baptized into the church with its moral code and expectations. The boundary between the redeemed and the unredeemed, grace and nature, had become difficult to discern. Compounded by a theology which viewed God in essentially aesthetic rather than moral terms and presented Christianity as ‘just human nature at its best’ and the kingdom of God as ‘just our natural spirituality and altruism developed’, the net result was a complete and utter loss of perspective on the reality of the human situation. So much of our religious teaching betrays no sign that the speaker has descended into hell, been near the everlasting burnings, or been plucked from the awful pit. He has risen with Christ … but it is out of a shallow grave, with no deepness of earth, with no huge millstone to roll away.1
These are words of P.T. Forsyth as cited by British scholar, Trevor Hart. If indeed this present pandemic and the ramifications that now weigh upon nations are drumbeats for the spiritual ears of the church, how and what we hear will have lasting implications for now and the future.
Forsyth’s words a century ago was a plea to the church of his time that had lost reality. Reading those words again brings a jeremiad sense that the church of our time is in no lesser way infected with the same malady. When reality is lost, all else is lost. No matter how we dress, shape, build, and stir the church, it remains a church full of human energy and human distinctiveness. Deprived and absent is the uniqueness of the church bearing God’s eternal witness in spirit and in life—that is His Kingdom come, God’s ultimate reality.
Forsyth, in The Cruciality of the Cross, furthers this plea to the church:
The last reality, and that with which every man willy-nilly has to do, is not a reality of thought, but of life and of conscience, and of judgment. We are in a world to act and take the consequences. Action means and matters everything in the world. It occurs in a world constructed for action and for judgment upon it. The question is not about our views; nor is it about our subjective state – how do I feel? but of our objective relation – how do I stand? The last reality is a moral reality… It has to do with a moral situation, with the moral position of the soul to the race and the race to whatever stands for God. There lies the real unity of life. It is the question of the conscience and its Lord, of sin and righteousness, of the unholy and the holy.2
The presence of the Kingdom is the constant surging of God’s governing Presence in life, conscience, and judgment. God’s rule bears down on us and our lives dies a death that only by His command can we rise to live like Him. It’s not a life of imitation, but of transformation. It’s not a life of legalism, but a life free from ourselves.
In addition, Forsyth also writes,
…the first, last, and supreme question of the soul, of religion when it is practical, is not, “How am I to think of God? – He or It?” but it is, “What does He think of me? How does It treat me?” More positively it is, “How shall I be just with God? How shall I stand before my judge?” That is the final human question – how to face the eternal moral power. What is it making of us? What is He doing with us? What is He going to do? That is the issue in all issues. That question of judgment is where all other questions end.
Hence, these questions confront us here and now, and confront us He will. In a climate of such a crisis, our lives and souls are summoned to stand before such a final question—a question of eternal moral power.1 Forsyth, Peter Taylor. Justice the True and Only Mercy, Essays on the Life of Peter Forsyth. Edinburgh. T & T Clark, 1995. Print. Page 22.
2 Forsyth, Peter Taylor. The Cruciality of the Cross. New York. Eaton and Mains. Print. Pages 119-21.
- A Present Word
26/03/20 15:00
(This article was written in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic)
by Wong Chin Meng
What we have in our hands is a crisis, a world crisis. Like all crises, they unfold human failures, human sin, human defects, human greed, and human pride. Nothing despairs man more than hopelessness in the face of an insurmountable pandemic unprecedented in scale in recent times. Every human arsenal and intelligence summoned is to prevent this overwhelming death from claiming more lives. Fragile lives everywhere, at the same time, have pointed out fragile nations. The boast of power in economy, the mastery in technology, the enormous self-assurance in acquired knowledge in every field of science, have all been to look pathetically puny in the spread of an invisible, virulent pathogen.
A world crisis must speak to a world church - the universal church; but the universal church is made up of one and the many members in the one mystical Body of Christ who is the Head of His Body. The one member who hears tells the whole church to heed. For the Head who tells one tells all. The Head who speaks to one speaks to all. All are to hear. He commands our hearing and longs for our attentiveness. The act of God speaking is His claim of a world He created and came to redeem on His Cross. Whatever is the rebellion of the world, His loved and redeemed Body is the beloved of His heart. To His beloved church He brings a word first. In hearing, we perceive, in perceiving, we bear God’s burden – feeling His feeling, grieving His grief, understanding His heart on behalf of a world that is alienated from Him and from His Life. A world deaf to God’s Word has become a world left on its own. A world run by its own power, consumed by its own lust, deceived by its own illusion, and ruined by its own success.
What is God’s critical word to the church, His people? What is He saying to the pastors and shepherds of His flock? Isn’t every crisis, big or small, a crisis of the human heart? For if it concerns the heart, it is then a moral issue. The God who comes from without begins His work from within – at the center of the human self. Israel’s irrevocable relation with her Creator and Redeemer has been the repetition of this one undeterred lesson – until the very center and soul of Israel is put right with God Himself, the circumference is awry.
The Scottish theologian P.T. Forsyth, at the height of the Great War (WWI) pointedly addressed the church of Europe in crisis and its crumbled foundation:
…it is anthropocentric religion, which has displaced theocratic. That is to say, it is man’s preoccupation with humanity and its spiritual civilization or culture. It is the religious egoism of Humanity, i.e. man’s absorption with himself, instead of with God, His purpose, His service, and His glory. It is a greater anxiety to have God on our side than to be upon His. We are willing to owe many things to God, only not ourselves and our destiny absolutely (18).1
Egoism is the growth of the human self without God. Religious egoism is the growth of the pseudo-spiritual self in the guise of God. The appearance is maintained without the reality. The adoption of God in varied forms is the self-assurances of our need for God that affects a sense of God being on our side – “willing to owe many things to God”. “Only not ourselves and our destiny absolutely” is perhaps the crisis of all crises of ourselves the church and the world over. The church is dire perhaps more than any other. Forsyth’s century old discernment of the European church in crisis, in the midst of a brutal war, spoke then and speaks now.
The church then was one that, through lip-service, acknowledged the Reign of God, but gave no heed to the governing of God. All the external trappings were done and accomplished for God, but He was not obeyed in the raising of God’s dwelling place within their hearts.
The Cross of God’s Son is admired and religiously revered from afar. The cross is a theological relic that has courted spiritual diggers and fascinators by Europe’s finest, but the Christ crucified that effectually turns a man and causes him to cry, “I shall give thanks to You with uprightness of heart, WHEN I learn Your righteous judgments” (Ps 119:6. Emphasis mine) is a rarity, if not an abysmal absence.
“When” is the incisive timing and determinative moment – at the point, the Cross as God’s judgment judges sin in a man. This is when a man knows sin in his own person, when he sees sin as in himself more than the wrong he has done. His sin is that which violates the holiness of God and cannot be put right by all of one’s strength. The holiness of God is against the sin of man. Sin cannot be parleyed, it cannot be ameliorated, it must be atoned. A man cannot atone himself. The Holy One of Israel is the initiator. He is the lover, the reconciler, the redeemer, the comer, the Who came to earth in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ. The Incarnated One, God’s Son, Jesus of Nazareth atoned sin by His willing death unto resurrection – an act that enacted and released a mighty power, one moral in nature that ascended as the one only eternal offering to the satisfaction of the Father. Pentecost became the day in divine calendar where this personal power of God was carried by the Spirit and inspirited into men and women.
This Cross’s power was love’s power, the power that met the standard of God’s holiness. This power broke sin and dealt with the consequences of sin. This power imbued with righteousness judges sin and sinner – which in turn cleanses his conscience and frees his heart in righteousness, remaking him in all his days in the righteousness of God.
The righteousness of God imaged through grace by love in man is the righteousness that unites God and man in oneness. The Psalmist’s depiction is prayed inspirationally here: “Lovingkindness and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Ps 85:10). This is the consummation of redemptive love. It is as Oswald Chambers in “My Utmost for His Highest” on 17th January wrote, “... I receive His nature and hear His call, the voice of Divine nature sounds in both and the two work together.”2 The basis of a man’s relation with God is the nature of God’s own person shared and imparted into him. To attempt or concoct any other way is a sure path to idolatry.
This present crisis, as will every crisis to come, is the outworking of His judgment in love reaching us through grace in bringing us to Himself for the purpose of being made one with Him. First, no crisis will end or pass without our utter helplessness confessed and secondly, our unwholesomeness fingered by the ever pressing in of the Kingdom of God. God cannot Reign and yet not govern.1 Forsyth, Peter Taylor. The Justification of God. New York. Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1917.
2 Chambers. Oswald, “My Utmost For His Highest.” Michigan. Discovery House, 1927.
- Love As God’s Governmental Nature
10/08/19 11:00
by Wong Chin Meng
God’s Governmental Intention
Since biblical times through the progress of salvation history, the concept of salvation has consistently been revealed as God’s governmental intention. The psalmist in Psalm 83:18 declares, “That they may know that You alone, whose name is the Lord, are the Most High over all the earth.” The word, “governmental” implies the rule of God. God’s desire to rule is intrinsic to His eternal nature. His rule bears no tyrannical motive, but a relational one in goal and purpose. In short, God rules because God loves.
This concept is vividly demonstrated in the history of Israel as God’s chosen people—a people redeemed, called out, taught, and led into covenant relationship that was to increasingly manifest the Presence of God in the earth both in their private and national lives. In the experience of such a relational reality, Israel invariably fulfilled her call as a witness nation in the midst of the nations. She was not to pattern her existence like the nations around her that were built and sustained through military and economic might. Her pursuit was not to be territorial expansion or the conquest of nations. Israel’s exclusiveness as a chosen people was embedded in a faithful and obedient relationship with Yahweh—a relationship that was to determine the nature and purpose of her existence.
God’s Governmental Presence
“And you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel” (Exodus 19:6).
The design God created for Israel in the practice of a continual relationship with Himself was the priesthood. The choice of a Levitical priesthood was for the purpose that an entire people would gradually enter and embrace the priestly state and practice of serving God in an obedient relationship. Priests were to stand before God first (ministering to Him), after which comes the confronting of men with God. The order was irrevocable. The very foundation of God’s relationship with man is foremost theocentric before it is anthropocentric – God first and man follows.
In the habitual function and mentality of a priest, the children of Israel were called upon to a single hearted, undivided love and devotion to God Himself: “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6: 4-5).
The SHEMA (the Hebrew word for Hear) was God’s governmental love in demonstration for the sole purpose of governing the hearts and minds of the children of Israel. The love that governs is God’s kind of love. It’s the love that establishes and orders the affection of a man in totality. In responding to His love, a man’s nature is brought into the transforming process where behavioral changes are made real. Sin in its essential working in human hearts produces and forges an appearance that is false. It is far from reality. Much of our human relationships that have gone through breakdown, sorrow, and pain have in one way or another been due to false appearances. Jesus’ indictment of the Scribes and Pharisees rings still: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt 23:27). The absence of reality is the fermentation of death that follows all that we eventually do or say.
The Love That Governs
The Apostle Paul’s conception of the nature of God’s love corresponds precisely to the SHEMA. Writing to the Corinthians he declared, “For the love of Christ controls and urges and impels us, because we are of the opinion and conviction that (if) One died for all, then all died; And He died for all, so that all those who live might live no longer to and for themselves, but to and for Him Who died and was raised again for their sake” (2 Cor. 5:14-15. AMP). The love that controls, urges, and impels is the nature of the love of God. It is in the nature of God to rule. The deity of God is His rule (Pannenberg 55)1. God would not be God if He does not rule, but His rule is fused in His nature – His love. His love comes with His rule. Paul was persuaded that being loved by God was the beginning of the governmental Presence of God in a man.
The Corinthians, like so many in the early days of the church, was not lacking in spiritual gifts. What was starkly missing was the behavior that is pivotal in ordering, directing, sustaining, and dispensing these Spirit-given gifts. Personal behavioral failures had resulted in corporate disharmony. Thus, was the state of the church at Corinth.
At the center of a church so present with a rich variety of gifts yet accompanied by dilapidating behaviors, Paul dynamically and assuredly proclaimed, “But earnestly desire and zealously cultivate the greatest and best gifts and graces (the higher gifts and the choicest graces). And yet I will show you a still more excellent way (one that is better by far and highest of them all –love)” (1 Cor. 12:31. AMP).
What followed in the 13th chapter of I Corinthians was the revealing of the nature of the love of God that was divinely inspired. It is the “highest of them all” because it is the deepest of God’s foundational Trinitarian Being – The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit is Love. Love that is behavioral in nature, that is patient, is kind, is not jealous, does not brag, and is not arrogant. Paul profoundly saw that the love that redeems man is the love that governs man.
From Shema To Shalom
“Of the increase of His government and of peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from the (latter) time forth, even forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this” (Isa 9:7. AMP).
The Father’s purpose of SHEMA was towards the ultimate realization of His SHALOM. Shalom, the Hebrew word for “peace,” intriguingly is connected with two Hebrew verbs – “leHashlim,” which means, “to fulfil that which is lacking” and “leShalem” which means, “to make a payment.” Peace was to be more than the cessation of war and strife; it was more than just the absence of troubles. Peace, the Father’s Shalom, is the fulfillment of something lacking and a paid bill on our behalf.
Both actions point to God’s redemptive love in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ. The Father’s love in His Son poured into our hearts (Shema) begins the process of restoring our broken humanity; first by paying our debt to sin through His sacrificial death followed by His resurrection life that brings wholeness into every part of our being. The love of God, in an increasingly experiential way, bears the rule of God into every area of our lives. Where darkness once inhabited in motives and desires, light progressively invades. Where corrupted will and conduct once pervaded, the conviction of the Spirit turns insistent. Where He reigns is His peace. Obedience must follow. The Father’s love waits until our yielded will opens to the Prince of Peace that perennially comes again and again.1 Pannenbeg, Wolfhart. Theology and the Kingdom of God. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969. Print.
