Considering The Prodigal Prophet

Last year at this time I was preaching through Jonah. I wish I had Tim Keller’s latest book at the time. The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy should raise any controversy with the title. I’m sure there will be plenty to annoy some. But I loved reading this book.

The book is dedicated to John Newton whose life and ministry made a big impact on Keller. Those familiar with Newton’s writings will find his influence in many places.

He makes two passes through the book, exploring the themes that are found there. The first pass (9 chapters) handles the text sequentially. The second goes back through thematically to address our relationship to God’s Word, God’s world and God’s grace.

It is in Keller’s typical winsome style that points out where we tend to go wrong whether to the left or the right. He’s an equal opportunity offender, but it is so gentle I don’t understand how people get so mad at him. He’s generally right.

In the introduction he alludes to one of his other books. In the first half of the book Jonah is like the younger brother who goes to the far country to avoid his father. In the second half he’s like the angry older brother who is upset about the Father’s joy in repentance.

Jonah stands out as the willfully disobedient prophet to a willfully disobedient people. He is the representative Israelite. Jonah doesn’t trust God. He doesn’t trust that God has his best interests in mind. He is so like, … us.

“And that is the problem facing Jonah, namely, the mystery of God’s mercy. It is a theological problem, but it is at the same time a heart problem. … The story of Jonah, with all its twists and turns, is about how God takes Jonah, sometimes by the hand, other times by the scruff of the neck, to show him these things.”

Keller starts with the storms of life. “All sin has a storm attached to it.” (btw: I read people who claim Keller never talks about sin, or uses the word. What are they talking about?!) Jonah’s disobedience brought a literal storm not only into his life but the lives of the Gentile sailors. Sin’s storms don’t remain isolated to the particular sinner in question. “Sin is the suicidal action of the will upon itself.” He does clarify that most storms are from the condition of sin, meaning that we live in a fallen world and we don’t need to find the particular sin/sinner behind each hurricane, flood or drought. But know that when we sin, there are often earthly consequences.

For the Christian, the storms of life (afflictions) are meant to produce good. He is at work in this storm to bring Jonah to Ninevah for them to receive mercy. For example, I saw a recent interview with Donna Rice who experienced a storm of publicity due to her affair with Senator Gary Hart. She said that the storm brought her back to her Christian faith.

Next Keller explores the idea of who our neighbor is. These Gentiles are better human beings than the prodigal prophet. God is using the disobedient prophet to lead Gentiles to faith and repentance through his disobedience. Jonah only wants to see himself as an Israelite, as part of a faith community. He needs to also see himself as part of humanity, the broader community. Frankly, Christians have the same problem. We don’t have much concern with those around us as long as our lives are going okay. And so Keller explores common grace.

He then moves into the “other”, the question of identity and those who have a different identity than we do. Jonah’s national identity blinded him in many ways. The early church would struggle with the same problem. We use that identity to exclude other people unnecessarily. We dehumanize people who don’t share our ethnic, national or political identities. We’ve seen this as one of the early steps in the holocaust and other genocides (Rwanda, Armenian etc.). This was very helpful as I preached thru Philippians 3 and the false identities we can boast in.

Keller moves to the pattern of love, and the heart of the gospel with substitution. Jonah is a type of Jesus who would die for our sins instead of sins of his own. The storm of God’s merciful wrath (the phrase I used in my sermons, adapted by a phrase of Luther’s) is stilled.

“To deny God’s wrath upon sin not only robs us of a full view of God’s holiness and justice but also can diminish our wonder, love, and praise at what it was that Jesus bore for us.”

In this context he connects wrath with love too. God’s wrath is directed at actions (and people) who harm what He loves. He again clearly articulates the gospel contrary to what the discernment blogs claim about him.

The Gentile sailors end up offering praise and sacrifices to YHWH after the storm is stilled. Keller notes the irony in that Jonah sought to avoid bringing truth to Gentiles, aka wicked pagans, but actually does anyway.

He then delves deeper into grace as Jonah wrestles with God in the belly of the fish. He’s gone as low as he can go (the literary irony) because he didn’t go up to Ninevah. Jonah “does business” with God only when he can no longer run from God. He’s trapped and finally admits the ugly truth. Often God has to bring us to similar places before, like addicts, we admit we’ve made a complete mess of things by our disobedience and can’t fix it.

With Jonah finally going to Ninevah, the discussion moves to repentance. They repented of their injustice, and moved toward justice. They were a violent, oppressive people. Repentance meant turning away from their violence and oppression. When the gospel calls us out of sin, it also calls us out of injustice. This is Keller’s connection between the gospel and “social justice”. He’s not preaching a social gospel, but the gospel of Christ’s penal, substitutionary atonement with implications for justice in society. He’s not preaching a privatized faith nor a civil faith or religion. Personal faith is lived out in society as well as the community of faith.

With God relenting another storm arises, this time in Jonah’s heart. He’s beyond angry. In Jonah’s mind, relenting from destruction means the inevitable destruction of Israel. He’s blind to Israel’s sin, apparently, just as we tend to be to our sin and the sin of our communities.

God responds with patience and instruction. He is not only concerned about Israel, but all these people who also bear His image. He even cares about the livestock. That’s who He is. Unlike Jonah, Jesus wept over Jerusalem over the impending destruction for its wickedness.

“They want a “God of love,” but a God of love who does not get angry when evil destroys the creation he loves is ultimately not a loving God at all. If you love someone, you must and will get angry if something threatens to destroy him or her.”

Both God’s righteousness and His love are functions of His goodness! We don’t play them against one another but embrace them both as grounded in His goodness. So, this same God can justify the wicked because He loved them in sending His Son as a propitiation for their sin. Jesus satisfied His righteousness and His love. He didn’t satisfy His righteousness so God was then free to love.

Keller then moves to the three final themes of his book. Like Jonah (following Adam and Eve) we struggle to believe God’s Word is good for us. We minimize His wisdom and magnify ours. We trust our word over His.

“Sin always begins with the character assassination of God. We believe that God has put us in a world of delights but has determined that he will not give them to us if we obey him.”

Keller defends the substitutionary atonement from the charge of “divine child abuse” as infamously made by Steven Chalke. That charge does damage to the Trinity, not simply atonement. The one God in three persons works to save us. Jesus is not some lesser being offered to change the mind of an angry deity.

In terms of our relationship to God’s world he returns the question of our neighbor. Calvin, he notes, reminded us that all our neighbors bear the image of God and we must remember that. Keller applies this to politics. We must find a way between the erroneous beliefs that we should just preach the gospel and avoid politics, or that politics is all-important. The two party system tries to push a “package deal” on us instead of allowing us to vote “a la carte”. Pro-life Democrats are going the way of the dodo. But this doesn’t mean that Jesus is a Republican. They have anti-Christian views too. The gospel of the One who died for us when we were His enemies, calls us out of our partisanship and demonization of the other side. Loved by One we hated, we can begin to love ones we hated.

Keller moves into how privileged status can play out in perverting justice. The same laws should apply to all within a society. He mentions “citizens over immigrants” without any mention of their legal or illegal status as immigrants (I think this matters in light of Romans 13). But immigrants and other vulnerable groups should not be taken advantage of by the powerful. Christians, who worship a just God, should care about justice.This is not at the expense of the God but on account of the gospel.

“We must realize that since all our social problems stem from our alienation from God, the most radical and loving thing you can do for a person is to see him or her reconciled to God.”

In our relationship to God’s grace Keller clearly puts a changed life as a result of salvation, not the cause of salvation. In this it differs from every other religion. Here he explores Lewis’ The Four Loves to discuss our attachment to our people and culture. Lewis affirms a love for our people, but notes “We all know now that this love becomes a demon when it becomes a god.” Love of country is not the same a fascism or racism. Lewis rejects anti-patriotism as extremism just as he rejected any nationalism that begins to denigrate and destroy those who are different. [It is important to understand what is meant when someone uses the term ‘nationalism’. It can simply refer to the love of country that is normal for most people, and not the political movement used to justify the supremacy of a nation.] When do you know love of country has gone toxic? When it ignores the blemishes of its past. EVERY country has very ugly blemishes in its past. In the present, every country is full of “good” and evil people (law abiding vs. criminals). Lewis notes that when a country begins to intentionally suppress or erases its misdeeds they begin to express racial/national/ethnic superiority. We then find ourselves on the doorstep of racism and oppression. This is a very helpful section. This is pertinent because it helps us to understand what Jonah experienced in himself. Turning from grace he was in the throes of a toxic nationality that wanted to withhold God from other people groups.

Jesus purchased people from every tribe, tongue, nation and language. The gospel mission focuses on loving other people groups, not just your own. This is the heart of Jonah’s struggle and ours. Will we embrace the mystery of God’s mercy or will we try to bottle it up as exclusively for people just like us? Jonah doesn’t resolve that question in his life, because it isn’t fully resolved in the readers. The question is, what will you do next knowing that God cares about those people too?

In the future I hope to read Anthony Carter’s book on Jonah,Running From Mercy: Jonah and the Surprising Story of God’s Unstoppable Grace, which was released at about the same time.

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Considering the Gospel on the Ground

I really like Matt Chandler’s preaching. He’s a little edgy, and has that Baptist almost screaming thing at times. But I benefit from much of what he says. He also experiences similar reactions to the gospel as I did in small city Florida. He just experiences it on a much larger scale in the Big D. His frustrations with people being inoculated to the gospel ring true in my time in Florida.

I’ve read Jared Wilson’s blog for some time now. I like how he tries to keep the gospel central. You have to like a guy who moves to Vermont to pastor a church, especially when he adopts the local sports teams. That’s good missional thinking, right?

Well, they wrote a book together. Matt was the primary author, and Jared helped him out. The book is The Explicit Gospel, and it has blurbs filled with praise from the likes of Rick Warren, D.A. Carson, Mark Driscoll, David Platt, Ed Stetzer and more. A literal hodge-podge of famous (and some might say infamous) pastors. Incidentally, CavCorollary #167 is don’t believe the blurbs.

I am half way through the book, and thought this would be a good time to process it. The first half focuses on “the gospel on the ground.” The second focuses on the “gospel in the air”.  Think trees versus forest. It is the same gospel, but from different perspectives, or angles. On the ground you see the trees, but from the air you see the forest.

“If the gospel on the ground is the gospel at the micro level, the gospel in the air is the story at the macro level. … One crucial thing that viewing the gospel on the ground helps us do is distinguish between the gospel’s content and the gospel’s implications. … On the ground, the gospel comes to us as individuals.”

The gospel on the ground, according to Chandler, distinguishes between the gospel and its implications. It focuses on the personal aspects of the gospel instead of the cosmic aspects of the gospel. We need both. But we need to distinguish them or we get all messed up. This is one of the problems that he mentions in some “gospel” preaching- they talk as if the implications of the gospel (social justice, good works, community etc.) were the gospel itself. So they distort and obscure the gospel as a result.

But let’s get back to the beginning.

Chandler’s main point is that many churches are not explicit about the gospel. They mention Jesus a lot, but they are not clear about the content of the gospel. People aren’t hearing about God’s glory, their sin and Christ’s redemptive and reconciling work. His premise is that churches need to explicitly preach the gospel, to consistently show these things from the Scriptures lest we lapse into the common moralistic therapeutic deism that fills so many churches today. They are to make it explicit instead of assumed.

“We carry an insidious prosperity gospel around in our dark, little, entitled hearts.”

So, he starts with God’s glory and sovereignty so we know who we are dealing with in the gospel. There is a focus on God’s incomprehensibility, as well as His revelation of Himself to us in the Scriptures. In terms of His omniscience, he hits both the macro (God’s transcendent knowledge) and the micro (God’s immanent knowledge). He explains the folly of us trying to play God’s counselor with a story of his 4 year-old daughter claiming they are lost on a trip to San Antonio. We easily, and arrogantly, forget that God’s knowledge far exceeds ours and that He could benefit from our help. The gospel is God’s plan for our salvation. We don’t and can’t improve it. His work in our lives is the result of His wisdom- it is the absolute best way for Him to accomplish His purposes in our lives.

In this context, he alludes to what John Gerstner called the problem of good. We question all the time about the difficulties and afflictions we experience as though the Judge of all the earth has failed to do right. We don’t question why good things happen to such pathetic sinners as ourselves. We are not amazed at both common and saving grace. Spiritually, we are part of the moocher class. We’ve become the Occupy Heaven group. We want it be to all about us, not God. But God is passionately committed to His glory. Unlike us, God is no idolator!

Yet, here I found some factual errors. Are there not editors who are supposed to catch these things. I challenge anyone to find “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever” in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Show me! It is in the Westminster Standards, but it’s the first answer of the Shorter Catechism (slightly different from the first answer of the Larger Catechism). I don’t know why this stuff irritates me so. But this is a simple fact to check, but some guy new to the Confession will look in vain and conclude that either Chandler is lying or the reader himself is an idiot. Things like this undermine one’s credibility. Been there when I haven’t done enough fact checking for a sermon illustration.

Which leads us to our sinfulness. Chandler is a bit too reductionistic here. It calls all of it idolatry, the quest to worship something other than God. Oh, we are idolators! All idolatry is sin, but all sin is not necessarily idolatry. A minor point.

He balances the kindness and severity of God. Our tendency is to default to one or the other. Liberals the former and fundamentalists the latter. He doesn’t mention Rob Bell here (he alludes to Bell’s first book later), but that is part of the background. God is ruthlessly severe toward sin. The Bible contains both promises and warnings, or in covenantal terms- blessings and curses. While he continually affirms the horrible reality of hell, there are times when he is less than clear. The particular issue that is unclear is whether or not God is present in hell. His presence (if He’s not, He’s not omnipresent) is what makes it hell. He is present to execute justice, the curses of the covenant. Hell is intensely personal, not just some impersonal and bland place apart from God.  Perhaps I’m being overly charitable. “There is a chasm between us and presence of God that manifests the withdrawal of God’s presence and goodness from the reality of hell.” Such a concept is a theological impossibility, like the pseudo-tasks people ponder. Can God create a place where He isn’t present? Nope.

“Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.” Thomas Watson

The gospel makes no sense apart from the reality of sin’s punishment. God’s love, rightly understood, does not rule out God’s wrath. He protects His glory, and those He loves, from all that seek to destroy them. That is what love does- it hates evil and loves good.

He then moves into the redeeming, reconciling work of Christ which is the answer to God’s goodness meeting our sinfulness. He rightly wants to keep the cross central to Christianity. He focuses on the one controversial area- the penal satisfaction. Here he alludes to Chalke and McLaren’s claim of it as child abuse. I applaud him for this.

But there are passages in the chapter whose meaning is uncertain. For instance, what law did the high priest write (pp. 56)? He seems to deny that the Father forsook the Son by referring to Psalm 22 which starts with, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He says “God does not turn his back on Jesus, ever.” Odd to me. He seems to confuse the ontological Trinity with Christ as our Redeemer who became sin for us (2 Cor. 5).

There are more unclear statements, like ” the plan known about within the Godhead since the beginning.” This plan was not merely known by God, but made by God. Yet later he affirms that the Cross was God’s idea. The editors should be noticing these things. In one place there is a sentence that makes no sense.

“The other goat, the scapegoat, is vanquished into the wilderness, carrying away the sins of Israel.”

Vanquished makes no sense. It means “to conquer or subdue by force; to defeat; to overcome.” Banished is the word they are looking for in this context.

“No, the invitation is bound up in the gospel message itself. The explicit gospel, by virtue of its own gravity, invites belief by demanding it.”

He ends with the response for which the gospel calls. He has a very good section here that talks about our focus on faithfulness instead of fruitfulness. The problem is that we look for fruitfulness. But Isaiah 6 and the Parable of the Sower indicate that fruitfulness are not guaranteed. Often the gospel hardens people. That God’s word does not return void does not mean everyone (or anyone) will convert. Mentioning this in a small group 21 years ago got me in lots of trouble with a pastor who didn’t want to start the Calvinism conversation yet. Faithful preaching is the goal, and there is no guarantee of the results. All pastors struggle with this. I see relative fruitlessness at times and wonder if I’m being faithful. Not a bad question to ask- am I being faithful. But faithfulness is not determined by the presence or lack of fruitfulness. The Spirit works according to the purposes of God, not according to ours.

“One of the things we don’t preach well is that ministry that looks fruitless is constantly happening in the Scriptures. … The power in the gospel is not the dynamic presentation of the preacher or the winsomeness of the witness, although the Spirit does empower and use those things too.”

Chandler, with Wilson, make some much needed corrections for the church in the first section of The Explicit Gospel. In that sense, this is a book that should be read. But it is not a perfect book. So far there are errors of fact, theological faux pas and some very fuzzy thoughts. These don’t undo the positives of the book, but they do make it harder to read. And that is unfortunate.

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