Thankfulness - Part 2

The main thing that Bible says to give thanks for is the goodness of the Lord and his enduring love. “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever” is repeated so often it is practically the definition in the Old Testament of how to give thanks. When we read about Jesus taking the bread and cup at the last supper and giving thanks before he gave it to the disciples, I wonder if that was how he did it?

At the highpoint of the Old Testament, when the glory of God fell at the dedication of the temple with such intensity that the priests couldn’t enter, the priests and Levites took the instruments David had made for praising, and which were used when David gave thanks, saying “his love endures forever.” A generation later their worship was with David’s instruments and David’s instructions on how to worship - give thanks to God for his eternal love (2 Chr. 7:6).

At the end of his life the great king himself worshipped God:

 David praised the Lord in the presence of the whole assembly, saying,

“Praise be to you, Lord, the God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting.
Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, or everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, Lord, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.
Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things.
In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all.
Now, our God, we give you thanks, and praise your glorious name.

1 Chr. 29:10-13

He rehearsed who God is, his nature and character, his attributes, kingdom and the gifts he gives. And, therefore, gave thanks and praised him for his glory.

Of course this is repeated throughout the Psalms, most obviously in Ps. 136, which is a Bible overview of God’s redeeming acts with thankfulness woven through every single couplet. But perhaps the highest point of all is Ps. 100:

A psalm. For giving grateful praise.

1 Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.
2     Worship the Lord with gladness;
    come before him with joyful songs.
3 Know that the Lord is God.
    It is he who made us, and we are his;
    we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving
    and his courts with praise;
    give thanks to him and praise his name.
5 For the Lord is good and his love endures forever;
    his faithfulness continues through all generations.

Thanksgiving, praise, thanks, praise, he is good, his love is eternal and his faithfulness never ends. The heart of thankfulness, the core of glorifying with thanksgiving, is: “give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever.”

However, God’s goodness and love are not the only things that attract thankfulness:

• His righteousness Ps 7:17

• That he lets people in through his righteousness and himself becomes salvation Ps 118:18-21

• His righteous laws Ps 119:62

• His wonderful deeds for mankind Ps 107

• The revelation of his glory - eg at the completion of the temple 2 Chr 7:3

• And then starting to head towards the New Covenant passages like Jer. 11 or 33 thanking for future fulfilment of his promises

People gave thanks in all circumstances - including trouble. When King Darius was led to forbid prayer, we read of Daniel:

Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God just as he had done before (Dan. 6:10)

In the Bible, believers pray with thankfulness regardless of circumstances. Whether we face possible calamity like Jehoshaphat or Daniel or victory like Nehemiah, the thankfulness is just the same, because God is just the same. Our thankfulness is not dependent on our victory but on his. We do not give thanks because I was rescued or I was successful” but because “he is good, his love endures forever”.

Satan would love to use the pain of calamity, especially at the present time, to stop us feeling like giving thanks. He destroys our security through pain, thereby stopping us giving thanks in all circumstances and thereby stopping glory going to God, which is his chief aim.

Next blog: thanksgiving in the New Testament

Thankfulness - Part 1

Have we ever seen a time when it was more important to count our blessings? Or - for Western people at any rate - when we were more likely to write God off as uncaring, absent or non-existent? This will probably the first of several posts that I hope may encourage us to do the first, not the second, of these.

A group of African Christian leaders who had recently suffered torture for confessing Jesus as Lord once said to me: “when you western people suffer it is unusual for you. You think you need to know why. This reveals your temptation to rationalism. When you can't find out why, you are tempted to question, doubt and then dismiss God. When we suffer, on the other hand, it is normal to us. We don't think we need to answer questions about why. It is common in a fallen world. So our instinct is to seek God, humble ourselves and worship.”

They were among the most vibrant, thankful disciples I have ever met. I wanted to bow to them.

Thankfulness is a huge theme in the Bible, and one of the clearest purposes God has for our lives:

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Jesus Christ (1 Thess 5:18)

Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him (Col. 3:17)

God has all kinds of purposes for our lives, many of which we may never understand or even know about. But we do know that his will for us is thankfulness. Not only does it display our dependence on his goodness, thereby magnifying his glory, it is also how we are helped to be creatures who exist in right relation with him. It nourishes us as disciples and causes us to grow roots that are deep and strong. I would go so far as to say that it is impossible to be a disciple without thankfulness. Another verse that nails this is 2 Cor. 4:15:

Grace is reaching more and more people, and it causes thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God

Receiving the grace of God (which is the Gospel) causes thanksgiving to overflow. And God is glorified when thanksgiving overflows. If thanksgiving is not overflowing in us, it is a barometer of whether we are alive and attuned to the grace of God in Jesus.

There is, unsurprisingly therefore, a really close connection between thanksgiving and worship. We are redeemed by God to worship. As God says to Pharaoh through Moses: let my people go, that they may worship me. There are other passages that are almost identical but that substitute worship with thanksgiving:

Cry out, “Save us, God our Savior;
    gather us and deliver us from the nations,
that we may give thanks to your holy name,
    and glory in your praise.” (1 Chron. 16:35, repeated in Ps. 106:47)

Where Moses says we are redeemed to worship, the Chronicler and the Psalmist say we are redeemed to give thanks and to glorify. That’s the same thing. To worship is to glorify with thanksgiving:

I will praise God’s name in song
    and glorify him with thanksgiving. (Ps.69:30)

Worship is giving thanks for God’s holiness, goodness and love, and glorying in his holy name. And that is also how to pursue happiness in God. When you read things like “come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song”, does that sound unhappy to you? Like something you want to avoid? If so, you aren’t a Christian yet.

There is a similarly close connection between thanksgiving and prayer. One of the chief Levites had the glorious job title of Director of Thanksgiving and Prayer, In Charge of the Songs of Thanksgiving. It makes mere “worship leader” sound a bit passe!

And there was a similarly close connection between thanksgiving and sacrifice. The fellowship or peace offering of thanksgiving gave outward expression to delighted thankfulness of heart (Lev. 7). And the Psalmist makes it clear that the thankfulness is more pleasing than the sacrifice (eg. Ps. 69:31). The one should be the expression of the other, or it is just empty and pointless deeds, which is what went wrong with Cain - sacrifice without thanksgiving.

We find thankfulness in times of victory, such as Nehemiah’s choirs of thankfulness at the completion of the wall “Rejoicing because God had given them great joy” (Neh. 12). Or when the new temple was finished with a great shout of praise in Ezra 3. But we also find it before God has given victories in much less certain and more difficult situations as a means of exhorting faith by thanking for past grace. A personal favourite was when Jehoshaphat faced a hard and by no means certain battle. He exhorted faith by putting people at the front of the army to praise God for the splendour of his holiness with these words: “give thanks to the Lord, his love endures forever”.

We can picture an army being drawn forwards behind a bow-wave of thankfulness. And isn’t that what we want and hope our job as Christian leaders is all about? I wonder how much gospel advance happens with that kind of up-swell of thankfulness. And how many apparently good initiatives bear little spiritual fruit because they are just well-managed human effort, lacking the sense of glorifying God with thanksgiving?

One things is for sure, which is Jehoshaphat knew that the people loudly giving thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love was a pretty good way to face uncertainty and fear. Maybe that is something we need to hear especially in these uncertain and troubling times.

Patience

For many reasons Psalm 27 has been deeply precious to me over the last year. Who hasn’t been touched and helped by King David’s Great Desire - to dwell in the house of the Lord forever, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple (v4)? Even more when we read on and find that this dwelling with God is what he knows will keep him safe in the day of trouble, as God sets his feet upon a rock, safe in his dwelling, hidden in the shelter of his tabernacle (v5).

His confidence in God rises as he expresses this desire. But his experience of release and relief doesn’t by the end of the Psalm. It finishes with him confident that he will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, but not seeing it yet. And therefore he has to preach it to his heart and wait patiently for God:

Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait patiently for the Lord (Ps 27:14)

The idea of waiting for the Lord or waiting with patience occurs many times in the Bible. And of course patience is highlighted as part of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5. Perhaps the most neglected and unwanted fruit among busy, frenetic, activist Western evangelicals (like me). Bible patience is not merely that we don’t mind waiting if someone is late, or have no aversion to queuing. It is actually part of what God’s love in our lives looks like, manifested to other people. I wonder if one thing God might do during this period of globally enforced stopping is reset some of us more towards Holy Spirit fruitfulness in our characters - including patience - and away from merely finding our satisfaction in activity and achievement?

Patience might seem like a strange thing to be included in the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Why not hospitality? Or mercy? Well, look at this verse:

Bear in mind, dear friends, that our Lord’s patience (the same word as in Galatians, makrothymia) means salvation (2 Peter 3:15)

God is holding back judgement until everyone who is going to be saved is saved. He is patient, even though there is evil going on in the world. Paul knew that if Jesus hadn’t been patient, he would personally have had it:

I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience, as an example for those who would believe on him and have eternal life (1 Tim 1:16)

Jesus is patient so people get saved. And saved sinners display how wonderful he is by being like God in this. Their patience, don’t forget, was patience in the face of painful, fiery persecutions. Christians were getting hauled off to prison and worse and they had to do two things:

1.    Wait patiently for salvation
2.    Patiently forebear with each other

The word has both connotations. Endurance and bearing with:

 Brothers, as an example of patience in the face of suffering, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord (James 5:10)

Or see Colossians 1:11 where Paul prays that the believers might be strengthened with all power so that they might have great endurance and patience

It is telling that the first thing 1 Corinthians 13 says about love is that it is patient, before it says love is kind. Patience and forbearing is what love in action looks like

Patience is a Holy Spirit characteristic of people who wait in hope. “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation” says Romans 12:12. We wait for our hope, doggedly keeping on trusting God, loving others and doing the work of the gospel. Looking for that day when God puts all things right and, in the meantime, being humble and bearing with one another in love as we are all under trial together.

Patience is one of the things God is doing to make us more like Jesus, full of love and joy, at peace with God and patient in affliction. Patience is the attitude that says “I am going to bring my hope of that day into today”.

The Nephilim

It’s tempting during the global pandemic to limit Christian Bible reflection merely to matters to do with the virus, suffering and how God is involved with it and with us. That would be a mistake. God is speaking no less through everything else in his word than he does at any other time. So here is a virus-free post.

My personal Bible study at the moment is all in Genesis. It’s my “book of the year”. I think it is very common for us to read chapters 1-3 - the Creation through to the Fall - and then get to the genealogies from Cain and Seth, skip them and pass straight on to Noah in chapter 6, perhaps with a brief, bemused, glance at the Nephilim on the way. The more I read chapters 4 and 5 the more I think we need to pause over them.

From Genesis 3 onwards THE question that hangs over the rest of the book - indeed the whole of the rest of the Old Testament - is “who is going to be the promised offspring of the woman, the one who will finally crush the serpent?” The first candidate is Cain, quickly dismissed not only because of his murder of his brother, but because of his disregard for God. Cain’s and his descendants are, humanly-speaking, an impressive bunch. They build cities, they create technology, music and culture, and their daughters are renowned for their beauty. The penultimate member of the line, Lamech, is a powerful, violent and boastful man who introduces polygamy. Is there a sense that if Adam had a single helper in Eve, why would two Eves not be even better? Wherever the promised seed is going to come from, it clearly isn’t the line of Cain, but it doesn’t stop them trying to create man-centred alternatives.

Eve then gave birth to Seth. We aren’t told much about the character or achievements of people in his line, except for the notably godly Enoch and the penultimate person in the line, who is another Lamech. It’s easy to imagine they are all a bit jealous of the accomplishments of Cain’s descendants, not least because they name a number of their children after their cousins. Seth’s Lamech is still clearly hoping for the promised seed because he names his son Noah - comfort. He is looking for the consolation of God and desperately hoping that it might be his son. He isn’t, of course. The repeated refrain that haunts both lines and both chapters is “and he died”. Over and over again.

And then a great tragedy occurs. The lines intermingle. The sons of Seth go to the daughters of Cain because they are beautiful. The result is Nephilim - mighty heroes of old, people of renown. (I’m well aware of the alternative explanations for the Nephilim and don’t believe any of them make sense in context or from anywhere else in the Bible). Science fiction is full of stories of people trying to create humanity 2.0, some positive, others like Frankenstein’s creature horribly negative. The underlying reality started in Genesis 6 with the Nephilim, and what mighty figures they were. Thematically, they are the greatest human attempt so far to produce a human version of the promised, serpent-crushing seed. As people tried to recover, replicate, replace or improve on what was lost at the Fall, or to mitigate the judgement, they replaced God’s garden with a city, a single Eve with multiple ones and divine beauty and relationship with human culture. So now they try to replace the seed with mighty people of renown. The Nephilim are counterfeits of the promised seed, and very impressive-looking ones at that. Who now needs the promised redeemer from God when you can have these astonishing Nephilim?

The contrasts therefore shifts with the intermingling from the juxtaposition between the lines of Cain and Seth, to Nephilim directly juxtaposed with Noah. Mighty people of renown vs “a righteous man who walked with God”. In chapter 6:5 God’s verdict on humanity producing the Nephilim is that it is wickedness on a scale deserving of the judgement of The Flood.

However, we are told that the Nephilim are on the earth not only before the Flood but also afterwards (6:4). How they survive the Flood is interesting. My money is on the wife of Noah’s son Ham. After the Flood their grandson Nimrod sounds awfully Nephilim-ish, and he sets up Babylon and Assyria, forever after the great centres of power, culture and enmity towards the people of God.

The two most obvious post-Flood Nephilim narratives (apart from Nimrod) are when the leaders who are sent by Moses to survey the land report that they have encountered Nephilim in Numbers 13 and, almost certainly, Goliath. In both cases the people of God, like the line of Seth, seem like they don’t stand a chance (and believe that they haven’t got a chance) against the seemingly invincible humanity 2.0. It is not just that Goliath is a 9 feet tall human tank that makes them faint with fear, it is his challenge that they haven’t got a proper man to fight him. If your definition of a “proper man” is Nephilim, he is right. Ordinary people, however godly or numerous, don’t stand against Nephilim themselves. They always need a saviour from God who is able to defeat them.

Is it too much of a stretch to say that the fundamental conflict from Genesis 6 onwards is that between a world desperately seeking mighty human people and mighty human power, and “a righteous man who walked with God?” Nephilim-ishness vs godliness? Is it too far to say that human systems and structures and ingenuity that aim to save and glorify ourselves, whether obviously dubious (like totalitarian power, or ever more sophisticated weapons or the idea of complete self-definition of what it means for individuals to be human or Las Vegas) or far less obviously so (beautiful architecture, technology, art harnessed to the glorification of humanity), are Nephilim-culture? And, in some sense, perpetually at odds with the godly because their aim is to demonstrate that you don’t need God or the seed of the promise in order to maximise our potential and redeem ourselves. (I am not a strongly anti-culture type, but neither am I persuaded by some Christians initiatives that assume that culture is all redeemable to the glory of God. Some culture, at least, is deliberately an attempt to make God unnecessary).

In Mark 1:1 Jesus is introduced as the Christ, the Son of God. In Luke 3 Jesus is “the Son of Adam, the Son of God”. In Luke 22, before the Sanhedrin Jesus claims to be the Son of Man, the human figure of with divine authority in the book of Daniel, but also full of resonance of THE Son of Adam, ie the promised seed. The Sanhedrin immediately get the implication. In response to his claim to be the Son of Man they reply “are you the Son of God?” That is, are you claiming to be not only the promised seed of Adam, but a new Adam? (and by implication of that title, also the King of Israel and the World). When he agrees it is considered so blasphemous as to merit death.

Here, then, is the irony. Humanity producing counterfeit promised seeds in the Nephilim was what drew down the judgement of God and the death of humanity in the Flood. Whereas the true seed from God drew down the wrath of the mighty people of renown, both religious and secular power, and died himself. But he is the ultimate saviour from God, he is the promised seed, that is needed to rescue and redeem both from the judgement of death due to humanity for the Fall and from our attempts to mitigate it by gaining might and renown for ourselves. The judgement of God and the hubris of Mankind are both dealt with by the real Human 2.0, firstly by his humility on the cross, then by his resurrection that silences all human-centred pride and self-confidence. And, finally, by his triumph and ultimate victory at the end of time when he will defeat Babylon (Rev 19) and all Nephilim-like attempts to deify ourselves.