Friday Communication - 8th September 2023
Have you ever reflected on the frailty and power of God’s word, the difference between its reality and its appearance? This has been on my mind this week as I have been preparing to preach on Jeremiah 36. The words of God that Baruch writes in ink on a scroll at Jeremiah’s dictation come in such an ordinary and frail dress. They are in a scroll like any other, a scroll that can be put on a shelf, or picked up and carried around wherever the human bearer wants to go. They can be burnt in a fire by a proud king. And our Bibles can be left on the shelf, ignored or forgotten, unable to open themselves or shout their contents – yet the words of God.
And how easily those written words can lose their place amongst God’s people. I was reminded of this by the arrival this week of “Principle and Principal”, a book written about the ‘heresy trial’ of the Rev Dr Peter Cameron that took place in NSW in 1992 and 1993. Here was a learned doctor of the church who dismissed Paul’s teaching in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 with a ‘so what’, and could later say “I regard the bible as a purely human document or collection of documents.” His views were commonplace in the colleges and pulpits of many established churches in the northern hemisphere, churches where God’s people had lost God’s word. Some were even seeking to install him as the New Testament lecturer at the NSW Theological College and we would have been drawn back into the destructive theological liberalism of the pre-union church which had reigned for the last fifty years. It was only by the great effort of many, including the present principal of our theological college, Peter Hastie, that Cameron’s teaching was rejected and condemned. But we are always threatened by the dismissal of the Bible from the life of God’s people for other authorities that are thought to be more in tune with the spirit of the age.
God’s words in God’s word, the Bible. So easily dismissed, marginalised, rejected by the powerful and proud, mocked by its critics both ancient and modern, and often forgotten and neglected by those who confess it to be the word of their God. A sad old book, once influential in shaping the thinking and morality of Western societies, but now being left behind, safely forgotten. That is the way the Bible appears to many.
The Powerful Reality
But the reality? It is the Word of the living God, the word men wrote as they were carried along by the Spirit to write what the Spirit wanted them to write [2 Pet. 1:20-21]. Let me give you three passages from Isaiah that speak of Scripture’s reality, passages that will encourage you to keep reading God’s Word for yourself so you know it, understand it, and believe it; and which will also encourage you to keep on teaching it and sharing that word with others.
Isaiah 40: 6 A voice says, “Cry!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
7 The grass withers, the flower fades
when the breath of the Lord blows on it;
surely the people are grass.
8 The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.
Where we are so frail and transient, flourishing for a time and then gone in a moment, the word of God stands forever. It never loses its power and vibrancy, is never superseded, never fails. It is and remains true and sure, the living and abiding word that gives new birth [1 Peter 1:23-25]. It can be relied on, and by its promises tie us to eternity, draw us into the never failing life of the eternal God. What other word endures forever? No human word, for our promises perish with us, our knowledge soon revealed as partial and incomplete.
And in chapter 55 God says
Isaiah 55: 10 “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
11 so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
God speaks for a purpose, and that purpose, whether judgement or salvation, is always achieved. We can be confident that where we make God’s word known, it will achieve God’s purpose. It will never be fruitless, and the context of Isaiah 55 is wonderfully God’s invitation to seek Him and find Him, to find forgiveness from Him. Spoken to save, the gospel word will save [Romans 1:16-17] all who believe it. What a contrast with our words which are so often words powerless to change minds and behaviours, ineffectual in bringing about the outcome we desire. Not God’s word. By it He brought the world in to being, a world that was very good, fit for purpose. By it He will raise the dead [John 5:24 ff], and through it He is even now saving His people throughout the world.
And the third passage.
Isaiah 66: Thus says the Lord:
“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool;
what is the house that you would build for me,
and what is the place of my rest?
2 All these things my hand has made,
and so all these things came to be,
declares the Lord.
But this is the one to whom I will look:
he who is humble and contrite in spirit
and trembles at my word.
By the word we can have relationship with the living God, and this relationship is a relationship of grace. God needs nothing from us. There is nothing we can do for Him, no temple we can build, that can make Him present amongst us, present to bring peace. But where His Word, coming in the humble clothes of frail human words, is received with the open hands of faith, the open hands of the needy, received as it is – the Word of the living God, the enduring, powerful word, the word that judges and saves, the penetrating word that reveals our hearts [Hebrews 4:12-13] – a word to tremble at and repent before, He will dwell. He will have regard for the humble and contrite, for those who rely on the grace and mercy His word speaks to repentant sinners and who are guided by the light of its truth, not their own wisdom, through life.
The Scriptures – so frail, so human, so apparently weak. But the powerful word of the powerful God, always true, always trustworthy, spoken to give life to those who receive it, and to judge those who despise it. The Word that brings us to know the God who speaks it through the eternal Word, the Son of God, Who Himself was once so easily despised and dismissed, but is now the exalted Lord of all. Treasure the Scriptures in your hearts – informing your mind and guiding your will, and tremble with joy and awe that here you and I, who are just like the grass of the field, can hear the living and abiding, eternal, God.
