The Far Green Country

“In a certain sense, the first three sacrifices [in Leviticus] are God-directed; they are propitiatory. The last two - the sin and the guilt offering - are sinner-directed. They’re expiatory; they cleanse away the accumulated guilt from the sinner, and it points us to the fact - as John says - the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. It not only placates the anger of God, but it cleanses us. And so anybody who is in Christ who has committed a sin and has confessed that sin has no reason to feel guilty about that sin. He has been cleansed. And that’s the good news. Part of the good news of the gospel is that if the sin’s been confessed, it’s been taken care of, and we no longer have the right (if you will) to beat ourselves up with it. And Satan no longer has the right to beat us up with it, because it has been washed away. God’s anger has been placated, and we have been cleansed.”

(Dr. Benjamin Shaw, “Sacrifices and Festivals in the Old Testament,” Christ the Center podcast, November 6, 2009. Available at http://reformedforum.org/ctc95/.)

Well, today is it. After nearly eight years of writing software, I am officially hanging up the compiler. It’s been a good run, and in many ways it is remarkable to me how much I have learned and was privileged to experience during this time. From an onerous beginning writing technical reports, to a height of creating a standalone 3D rendering API from scratch; from a callow intern in western Pennsylvania, to a plucky engineer giving coding lessons to international visitors; from a certified backwoods bumpkin to a member of a distributed, diverse software team; from a kid riding on backroads in the open back of pickup trucks, to an adult reasonably comfortable navigating the Byzantine honeycomb of the Los Angeles highway system - what an interesting few years it has been!

As most of you know, about a year ago I left full-time engineering to pursue a calling in gospel ministry. During this last year, I have continued writing software in a part-part-time role. Most of you also know that writing and publishing have been amateur hobbies of mine for several years. Well, I have recently been offered a contract from a commercial publisher to write a fiction trilogy for young adults. This has been a personal goal of mine for nearly two decades, and so I have accepted it.

In taking the writing contract, however, I have to face the brute facts of temporality. With my position as a ministerial student and seminarian already occupying a more-than-full-time slot in my life, there is simply no time to continue concurrently in two part-time roles. I can either write novels, or I can write software - but I cannot do both. So I have decided to write novels. (You fellow geeks won’t believe it, but with novels you don’t actually have to end every line with a semicolon. Weird, eh?)

Like my last vocational change, this one doesn’t come with a pay raise. But it does represent an open door that I’ve been knocking at for years, and so I take it as a providential opportunity that I must follow. To all my erstwhile coworkers, I wish you all the very very best. If you are in my neck of the woods, give me a ring and we’ll have a beer. In the meantime, I leave you with the following verse:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
(J.R.R. Tolkien)

“They do not attack us by open violence; but, in proportion as the name of God is more dear to me than my own life, the diabolical conspiracy which I see in operation to extinguish all fear and worship of God, to root out the remembrance of Christ, or to abandon it to the jeers of the ungodly, cannot but rack my mind with greater anxiety, than if a whole country were burning in one conflagration.”

(Calvin, Epistle to the Galatians, 4.29)

“The law is something like chemotherapy. When chemotherapy is used to treat cancer, it does not give life. Actually, it is an instrument of death. The chemicals that are poured into the body destroy healthy tissue as well as cancer cells. During the course of treatment, chemotherapy actually makes the patient feel much worse. But it is all necessary for the patient’s long-term health. In much the same way, the law makes us worse so that Christ can make us better.”

(Philip Graham Ryken, Galatians, 136)

“This brings us back to the point Paul has been trying to make all through this letter, the point recovering Pharisees keep needing to hear: God deals with us according to his promise, and not according to our performance… remember how promises work. It is impossible to earn a promise.  The only way to receive a promise is to trust in it… there is nothing I can do to fulfill the promise. The only thing I can do is to trust him to keep his promise… But I cannot fulfill his promise to me on his behalf. So it is with the promises of God’s covenant.  Only God can fulfill them.  Therefore, when he promises us salvation, it follows that we cannot earn it for ourselves… This brings us to a very practical conclusion: God deals with us according to his promises, not according to our works. And so, writes John Stott, ‘every sinner who trusts in Christ crucified for salvation, quite apart from any merit or good works, receives the blessing of eternal life and thus inherits the promise of God made to Abraham.’… Salvation in Christ does not rest on a law that we inevitably break; it rests on a promise that God cannot break… The Christian life is not a quid pro quo, so that if I do what God wants, then God will do what I want. God simply does not operate this way. Instead, my relationship with God is based entirely on believing his gracious promise… We simply believe that God will make good on his promise to save us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And then, of course, we act on our faith, living like the true heirs of God that we have become through his covenant in Christ… This is the grace of God, that he does not deal with us on the basis of our performance, but on the basis of his promise.”

(Philip Graham Ryken, Galatians, 127-129)

“Traditionally, this process of ‘gospel-realizing,’ especially when done corporately, is called ‘revival.’  Religion operates on the principle: I obey; therefore I am accepted (by God).  The gospel operates on the principle: I am accepted through the costly grace of God; therefore I obey.  Two people operating on these two principles can sit beside each other in church on Sunday trying to do many of the same things – read the Bible, obey the Ten Commandments, be active in church, and pray – but out of two entirely different motivations.  Religion moves you to do what you do out of fear, insecurity, and self-righteousness, but the gospel moves you to do what you do more and more out of grateful joy in who God is in himself. Times of revival are seasons in which many nominal and spiritually sleepy Christians, operating out of the semi-Pharisaism of religion, wake up to the wonder and ramifications of the gospel. Revivals are mass eruptions of new spiritual power in the church through the recovery of the gospel… This is not a new program or something you can implement through a series of steps. It is a matter of wonder. Peter says that the angels always long to look into the gospel; they never tire of it (1 Pet. 1:12). The gospel is amazing love.  Amazing grace.”

(Tim Keller, “The Gospel and the Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World,” in The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor, pp. 112-113)

“The core problem is that we are inviting men and women to come under the power of the gospel without having first come under it ourselves. Frankly, I know of very few confessing Christians who have ever shed tears over their sins. Or if once they wept over their sins, they are careful never to do it again; they see no one else doing it, and they quickly become convinced that people who shed tears are not normal Christians.”

(C. John Miller, Repentance, pp. 86-87)

“So in your confession to God you fight to name your sin - and to give your sin its right name. Then you hand it over to Christ by faith and taste the happiness of guilt forgiven (Ps. 32:1) and find the deliverance from hypocrisy which comes through honest confession (Ps. 32:2-5).

What you now know is almost beyond words, but has the feel of clear shining rain, sunshine after tears. Grace is for sinners, and you have felt grace make a clean sweep of your repentant heart. God loves you where you are, not where you have been pretending to be. There is a natural transition now to start loving other sinners where they are, not where they pretend to be - or where you think they should be.”

(C. John Miller, Repentance, pp. 85-86)

“Since saving power comes from Christ alone, it has seemed increasingly important to me of late to emphasize to those under conviction of sin that they retire and pray privately in coming to Christ. My reasons for this are twofold: First, prayer in private makes it more difficult for people to use the counselor as a priest and hopefully brings them to rely on Christ alone for salvation; and second, prayer alone brings the glory of Christ into sharp focus by moving the counselor out of the sinner’s line of vision.

Later, when repentant sinners recall their turning to Christ, they will have things on a solid basis. They will find their confidence in Christ and the gospel, not in the presence or absence of another person, and spontaneously they will give the Lord of glory credit for what He has done through the gospel message.”

(C. John Miller, Repentance, p. 82)

“In another instance a woman was plunged into depression for over two years, apparently with no hope of relief. More than once she had a complete nervous collapse. She had attempted suicide. The psychiatrist and his tools - tranquilizers and shock treatments - had not helped. But the gospel did.

At first she refused to pray with us. ‘It won’t work,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried and it doesn’t help.’

However, we insisted upon reading Isaiah 53 to her. Again and again my wife and I came back to one central theme: ‘You are doing penance for your sins. You are despising the cross of Christ by trying to reenact Calvary in your life as though you were Christ.’

Using verses 1-4 of Isaiah 53, we stressed that her guilt was set forth here. She was despising and rejecting Jesus, the ‘Man of sorrows’ (Isa. 53:3).

‘But,’ we added, ‘here is the great mystery of the love of God. It is too big to take in except by faith. The mystery is that Christ’s sacrifice includes in it payment for our despisal and indifference - and you repent of such a sin by trusting in Jesus’ blood for cleansing.’

Of course, human relationships also have to be set right. But having doen this, that night the woman was able to sleep normally for the first time in months, and within a short time she returned to a full work schedule. Back in church, she now gives God full credit for what He alone has done by the power of His Spirit. She says that she could not have imagined that God could so swiftly revive and restore to her the Christian joy which had been formerly hers.

Her experience is worth further reflection. It points up the danger which constantly faces both new believers and long-time Christians. It is the temptation to think of the first conversion as everything and to forget that repentance and faith include a continuing, radical reorientation of the life toward God. Hear what John Murray says: ‘Christ’s blood is the lavery of initial cleansing but it is also the fountain to which the believer must continuously repair. It is att the cross of Christ that repentance has its beginning; it is at the cross of Christ that it must continue to pour out its heart in the tears of confession and contrition.’”

(C. John Miller, Repentance, pp. 76-77)