The Wedding of a King (Psalm 45)

The heading for this Psalm calls it a love song, and in it we see a bride and groom prepared for each other. But with Paul’s words in the New Testament I think we can also see Christ and the church.

In large part this is because of verses 1-9, which describe a king. This could just be a king, a king like David or Solomon, but the language points to Christ. Verse 1 is almost a statement of worship:

“My heart overflows with a pleasing theme;

I address my verses to the king;

my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe.”

Here I am to praise the King. The King described here has “grace poured upon his lips” (verse 2) which leads me to think that from his mouth grace is shared, and certainly Jesus’ words are full of God’s grace.

Also in verse 2: “God has blessed you forever.” Verse 3: “Gird your sword on your thigh, O Mighty one, in your splendor and majesty.” These are words that could be describing an earthly king, but they are also fitting to describe the King of Kings.

Verses 4 and 5 begin to blur the distinctions between this King and God. In fact, it seems as if the writer is writing about God here, because the King is doing things God does:

“In your majesty ride out victoriously

for the cause of truth and meekness and righteousness” (verse 4)

God is the one who fights for the weak and the righteous. But this passage is addressed to the king:

“You are the most handsome of the sons of men” (verse 2)

This is about a man, and Christ is a man. This is about God, and Christ is God. If we continue to read Jesus into this text we will find more and more how He fits perfectly. His strength destroys evil:

“Your arrows are sharp

in the heart of the king’s enemies;

the people fall under you.” (verse 5)

Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, uses the same language:

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For ‘God has put all things in subjection under his feet.’” (1 Cor. 15:26-27)

But then (returning to Psalm 45), in verse 6 the writer addresses this King (and I believe he is still addressing the king, because of verse 7) as God:

“Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.

The scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of uprightness” (verse 6)

This can’t be describing David, because he died. This king is righteous, so that rules out a lot of succeeding kings…and they also died. No, this has to about Jesus, who rules by righteousness and whose throne is forever and ever. No other king can claim that.

Also, the writer calls him God, and in verse 7 he makes a distinction in Trinitarian language:

“You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness.

Therefore God, your God, has anointed you

with the oil of gladness beyond your companions”

“God, your God” is addressed to the king the writer just called God. It’s Jesus and the Father. “God, your God has anointed you” – “Christ” means “anointed one.”

“…with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.” The New Testament describes Christ as the most exalted, the most beloved, beyond anyone else – He is given a better seat than anybody else, He is held in a place of honor higher than anybody else. This can’t be talking about God the Father because God the Father doesn’t have any companions, which I mean as “equals” or “contemporaries”. Nobody else is like God, God has no peers or classmates from ’00. But Jesus, having become a man – while staying fully God – He can call other men and women peers and companions, and in Mark 3:34-35 Jesus calls those who do the will of God his brothers and sisters.

One last detail on verses 1-9: “your robes are all fragrant with myrrh” – I need to find out more about myrrh, like what the heck it is, but I can’t help seeing the Jesus connection here.

Now the psalm shifts to a bride and a wedding. Who could this great king be marrying? The language here also points to more than what’s on the surface, it points to the Church.

The writer tells the bride to “forget your people and your father’s house” (verse 10). That seems to be a small detail wedding in a regular wedding, but in Christ-Church language it is a call to the broken, the weary, the sinners. Forget where you came from, because you now belong to Christ.

For some reason the writer ties that into this idea: “and the king will desire your beauty” (verse 10). If we abandon sin and lift our lives and our hearts to God – if we accept Christ – we will be made righteous like Him. We, as a church, will be beautiful and pleasing to our King. And, “Since he is your lord, bow to him” (verse 11).

This leads to a wedding, and the Bible is full of wedding imagery. Jesus’ first miracle is at a wedding. In Revelation, at the end of time those made righteous by Christ (His church) are led to Jesus in the biggest wedding ever. A wedding is happy, and joyous, it’s about a covenant (and Jesus is the new covenant) and commitment. It’s a time of happiness – “With joy and gladness they are led along as they enter the palace of the king” (verse 15). We are happy at weddings because two together made into one are better than two apart. The Church needs Christ, and when He is finally here we will wonder how we ever got along without Him – that is, Him in the flesh, because He is already ever present (Matthew 28:18-20).

This marriage between Christ and the church, God and man, is celebrated throughout scripture. Isaiah writes:

“Fear not, for you will not be ashamed…

For your Maker is your husband,

the LORD of hosts is his name…

For the LORD has called you

like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit,

like a wife of youth when she is cast off,

says your God.” (Isaiah 54:4, 5, 6)

Finally, the writer of Psalm 45 turns back to addressing the King:

“I will cause your name to be remembered in all generations;

therefore nations will praise you forever and ever.” (verse 17)

Since He was born Jesus has been sought after to worship, His name has always been the most important and He is the most important person in all of history. “Nations will praise you” – just like Rev. 7:9-10 we see:

“…a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (verse 9).

Three Observations in Exodus 6

Three things stick out to me in this first part of Exodus 6 (read it here), before the genealogy. First is the way God identifies Himself. It never really stuck out to me, but God often identifies Himself throughout the Bible as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I think this little detail says a lot about God Almighty (Exodus 6:3).

Other false gods, gods created by human beings, are often the "god of" something. Venus is the goddess of love, Mars the god of war. These gods have power that is specialized and limited to a certain area, often an aspect of culture (Dionysus, the god of wine). Sometimes they are simply the personification of an emotion (Cupid).

The true God is Lord over all emotions or aspects of culture, Lord over all of creation. He controls the seasons, the weather, the planet's rotation and orbit, and He makes the crops grow, and on and on. He has a claim to any number of titles for Himself - any number of ways He can identify Himself to Moses, but He chooses two.

1) "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14). God chooses not to say I am the God of (fill in blank). That right there would seem powerful enough. A god who controls volcanoes would be pretty powerful. But for God, the real God, that association alone limits His power. He is not just a God who controls volcanoes. He does much, much, much more than that and His power is far, far greater. The best way God can describe His greatness is by simply saying "I am who I am." Beautiful and incomparable.

2) God reveals Himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God associates Himself with people. This is incredible! This says volumes about who God is.

First, we see humility. God is far greater than Abraham, yet He identifies Himself with him. This kind of humility is a part of who Jesus is.

Second, we see God's grace. Who were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that the God of the universe identifies Himself with them? They were nobodies! They were sojourners in a distant land (Exodus 6:4). Abraham likely worshipped the moon and other false gods before meeting the true God. Then there's Isaac, a man who makes the same mistakes as his father with his wife (Genesis 26) and we see him playing favorites with his children; Jacob is so messed up that he doesn't get married until he's seventy - which he does after stealing his brother's birthright and tricking his father into a deathbed blessing. These guys were messed up and evil.

And yet God changed them. Because of God we who are in faith are called children of Abraham. The nation of Israel is named after Jacob. These men are some of the most famous men who ever lived because God changed them. When God says He is the God of Abraham, ISaac, and Jacob not only can MOses connect that this is the God of his ancestors but also that this is the God who took these messed up guys and made them into men of God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their changed lives are a testament to God's wonderful, all-powerful grace.

So when God says He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob He is choosing what He will be identified as having dominion over. Now, unlike false pagan gods He does have power over everything, but He chooses here to show that it's people He cares about and His dominion is over their hearts. Praise God!

"I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians." (Exodus 6:7)

This is the second thing that stuck out to me. Here is another big difference between all the world's false gods and the one true God. God is the only God who has ever said, "I will be your God." What an invitation and a promise! Here we see that God is not a distant, uncaring force to be discovered, He is a loving Creator inviting His children back to Him. "I will be your God." He says this throughout the Bible, often talking about the change that happens when we believe in Christ, are regenerated by the Holy Spirit, and changed from the inside out (Deuteronomy 30:6, Ezekiel 36:26-29; 37:23; 37:27). God initiates, we respond. We don't search for God, nobody truly does! It is only by God's Holy Spirit that we come to God, only by His promise that He will be our God that we become His people. In other religions you have to make up your god and appoint them head over you. But with God it's the other way around. He appoints us under Him and as His people.

The last thing I noticed was something I underlined when I first read through Exodus:

But Moses said to the LORD, "Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me. How then shall Pharaoh listen to me, for I am of uncircumcised lips?" (Exodus 6:12).

I wrote down near it 'God is patient'. Moses has already presented this fear to God. Sometimes the same things and fears come back, but God is very patient. We won't realize just how much until we get to heaven. But even now God's patience is seen in the dawning of each new day - because really the world should be destroyed for its evil but -

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)

Thanks God for these revelations of Your character in Your word.

The Everlasting (Exodus 1)

I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while, so let’s do it. God, draw me nearer to You, help me think and meditate on Your beautiful word, for man cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from You (Deut. 8:4).

Exodus chapter one: our favorite family returns in the sequel to Genesis. God told Abraham in the book of Genesis everything that would happen to his descendents (the nation of Israel) in the book of Exodus and the following books of the Bible:

“Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nations that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.” (Genesis 15:13-14)

One reason we can know that God is God and trust that He is in control is that He knows the future. At the end of the Bible Jesus says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13). There, I just quoted from the beginning of the Bible and the end. God knew the very words that would be in Revelation when He spoke to Abraham in Genesis. He knew the events of the world and the Bible in between, He knew every person that would live, how that person would act, how all those actions would lead to the birth of His Son and He knew how people would react to all these events now, 2,000 years after His Son was born. This is incredible! He also knew every name that would be added to His kingdom, He knew our names before He even spoke to Abraham. In Paul’s words:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundations of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. (Ephesians 1:3-4)

Before God made Mount Everest He knew my name and that Jesus Christ would die in my place, also dying in many others’ places; so that I could stand blameless before Him, so that my heart’s purest desire – to be with my Lord Jesus Christ – may be fulfilled. Praise God! Why does He do this? Paul goes on: “In love.” God does this in love for us, so that we may be blessed and so that He may be glorified. Before the sun was lit, He knew He would save me so that I may delight in Him forever.

Praise be to God! Our God is in heaven, He is in control forever! Never will His throne be shaken, never will He be defeated or overthrown, never will He be anything less of value than He is now, has been, and forever more will be.

In comparison the universe – all of God’s creation – is always expanding, according to astronomers. If the universe, which is simply God’s creation, is always growing, stretching to infinity, how much more infinite is its Creator! How much farther His power and might expands beyond the beyond, beyond the farthest reaches of space.

This reminds me of an old fear I had: What if God isn’t that great? Let me rephrase, I don’t mean to say, “not great at all”, but what if He is only great to a degree, and then it levels off? What if His power does cap off, even if (if God can be “measured”) it is at the millionth zero? Even at that power God would still have a number, a cap that He could not surpass. To me this is extremely unsatisfying – even if God still was the greatest Being in the universe, if He wasn’t infinite, but finite, only powerful and great to a certain degree, that would be disappointing (to say the least!).

Thankfully, this is not true. The Lord is as great as your feeble imagination can imagine, and He is infinitely more so! Our brains can’t even handle how deep and beautiful our God is, how many mysteries of His character have yet to be revealed, how unending He is!

Lord, you have been our dwelling

place

in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth,

or even you had formed the earth and

the world,

from everlasting to everlasting you

are God. (Psalm 90:1-2)

From never-beginning to never-ending. This is hard for me to grasp at times simply because I’m human and have a very limited perspective. Everything humanity knows has a beginning and an end, the houses we live in, the food we eat, even our own lives have a start and end date. History has a beginning, time itself has a beginning. And God created it all, so He gave creation its start date. Its hard and unnatural to imagine something without age – but God is! He tells Moses, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). He is who He is. He cannot be compared to anything. In fact, that may be why its hard to understand Him sometimes, because He is incomparable.

We often understand something by comparing two things. If, for example, I am looking for new music and find a band that looks interesting, I can get a quick understanding of what they are like if someone tells me, “They are like the Beatles” – a comparison helps me understand. Of course, once in a while you run into a band that is unexplainable, you simple have to listen to the, think about them, study them if you want to understand them. We like this, it is a rare thing to find something that is unique. But ultimately the bands we do think are unique aren’t, somebody else will sound like them (and, if nothing else, they are still playing music, which is not unique for a band). If it is the unique we are looking for, the only truly unique thing that has ever existed is God. Nobody is like Him. Nobody ever will be! If there was anybody else who has been around “from everlasting to everlasting” then they would already exist right now because they’ve always existed. But nothing besides God has existed forever. If somebody were to arise now to compete with God for His uniqueness and character they would automatically be disqualified from such a useless competition because they have a starting date. God does not and never will. And He never will have an ending date.

“I am who I am.” (Exodus 3:14)

So back to Exodus. God, the Lord of history, brings the whole house of Israel to Egypt. Jacob, the father of Israel, knows God and is a believer. At the beginning of Exodus his family has become a part of a foreign culture with different gods and different beliefs. One of the themes of Exodus and one of the reasons I love it is because God uses the country, these people, these events, to show Egypt and the world who the true God is. How many Egyptians came to believe in the Lord at this time? I’ve never thought about that before, but in Exodus God is not only saving His chosen people from physical slavery and oppression He is also saving many Egyptians from slavery to idolatry and paganism by simply revealing Himself for who He is: “I am that I am.”

What we know about Egypt today is that they used to worship many gods. There were gods for the sun, moon, stars, life, death. It is interesting that this belief system has consistently been around in human history. Today people will pray to a stone god who is the patron god of (fill in blank) with sincerity the same way that people did thousands of years ago.

We are made to worship, we are made to glorify our Creator, but when we stop worshipping the Everlasting and start worshipping something with a beginning and an end date we are creating idols. And we do this all the time, whether we are bowing down before a carved statue or we are bowing down to the thing we love the most (like alcohol or sex.) We need to worship the right God, the One, the true God, who exists in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God who frees and redeems lives, as we will see in Exodus.

7/4/09

The Existence of God and the Problem of Evil

A common argument against the existence of God (or at least the Christian God, or a benevolent God) is the presence of evil in the world. If God is benevolent and omnipotent how could He allow evil? That is, if God is good and all-powerful why is there evil? This leads to many questions – we know that evil is real, therefore if we assume God is real and good, then what does the the presence of evil say about God's omnipotence? Is He simply a God with good intentions but unable and incapable of stopping evil? Or, in a more horrifying situation, is God malevolent?

This problem begins with five assertians, assertians about the character of God (and God here is often defined in the Christian sense) and the presence of evil. The problem is that they can’t all be true because they contradict one another (which is a narrow way of thinking, often times in nature we see things we qualities A,B, and C that should by no logic exist, but they do!). The five assertians are 1) God exists, 2) God is perfectly good, 3) God is omniscient, 4) God is omnipotent, and 5) There are instances of evil in the world. Let’s take this apart piece by piece. It is my argument that they are not only incompatible but all true, even in paradoxically. In fact it makes less sense that less than all of these are true. Either they are all true or only one is true (number five).

The first assertian that is undisputably true is number 5: “There are instances of evil in the world”. Only a fool would argue otherwise. In a city like London all you have to do is turn on the news. So, with this one assumed as true, let’s move on to the other pieces, where philosophers begin to have problems.

The next important assertian is that God exists. Throughout human history the question of the supernatural has existed, it is still relevent today and (as far as I’m concerned) as long as we’re human it will be. What is meant by God? Many people from televangelists to men in clean shirts on bicycles going door-to-door would love to offer you an answer, but for now let’s define God by that definition that’s in our guts (the one we have when think of God), that is, the idea of a higher being who is much different than us. So, if we accept – for the sake of argument – that assertian number one is true, then we know two things: God is real, and there is evil in the world. Which leads us to the qualities of God.

“God is perfectly good” - this idea belongs to Judeo-Christian traditions and has not always been part of a culture’s conception of God (the Greek and Roman gods could hardly be called “perfectly good”, in fact, interestingly, they were as bad as humans). So now we are narrowing our definition of God, saying that He is not partly good, or not a cosmic mixture of good and evil, but all good. As in, there is no evil in Him. But an easy objection is raised: if this is true, how does that fit in with assertian number five (“There is evil”)? Assertian number five is undisputably true, it is the assertians that “God exists” and “God is perfectly good” that are a logical climbing further out on a tree limb. For now, let us continue along this tree limb and assume that somehow assertians one, two and five are all true (which is still concievably possible).

“God is omniscient.” To be omniscient is to be all-knowing, or infinitely knowing. In short, if God is omniscient He not only understands all things but is infinitely aware of them. If God is omniscient then He knows where I am as I write this sentence, and He also knows where a small pebble on the surface of Mars is, and what it’s doing (is it being blown upon by the wind?), but on top of that He’s also aware of information like how many pebbles and rocks there are on the whole planet of Mars, or how many neurons are in my brain and how they are sending commands to my fingers to type. If you think about it, there is a lot that could be known and a lot that could be observed. We are limited in both thought and observation, the moment we think of something we are excluding everything else we could be thinking of, the moment we observe something, say, the moment I fix my eye on Big Ben it makes it impossible for me to observe the Eiffel Tower (in fact, I can’t even observe all of Big Ben, but only one side or angle at a time out of an infinite number of sides or angles). But God, if He is omniscient, is both all-knowing and all-observing and conscience of everything in this universe, from this planet to the sun to the stars in the furthest galaxy.

If this is true, then God would be fully aware of every evil action in the world, in fact, He would be aware of every evil action ever. If we wanted a record of every evil thing ever done He could easily give us one. The alternative is that, assuming our previous assumptions are true, God isn’t omniscient. This is often an attempt to find an “easy” answer to evil and God by saying that if God exists and is good, He simply doesn’t know about it. This is comforting if we are trying to prevent ourselves from considering the idea that God is good and all-knowing of evil yet there is still evil. If God is God, aware of evil and benevolent, wouldn’t that mean that He would stop evil? This leads us to the final assertian.

“God is ominpotent”, He has unlimited power. Here all of our previous assertians come together and we can go one of two ways: we can believe that God is omnipotent, that all five assertians are true, even if they are at first glance difficult to reconcile, or we can believe that God is not omnipotent. This is what many philosophers argue. If God exists and is good and is omnipotent then there (according to their logic) would be no evil in the world. But there is evil in the world, so this undoes (for these philosophers) any notion that a an able, powerful, and benevolent God exists. But there is a flaw in this logic, in that it is logic.

Very often we find in nature things that should not, in a logical world, exist. Yet they do. For example, in chemistry there is a very logical order to the different states of matter: matter is (at any time) either a solid, a liquid, or a gas. They teach this very early on in school because it is highly logical and understandable, and its easy to understand the relationship between the three; if you increase an object’s temperature it will proceed from solid to liquid to finally a gas, and so on. But what doesn’t makes sense is the highly illogical but completely real nature of “triple point”. The “triple point” of a substance is when the “three phases [solid, liquid, gas] are in equilibrium” (Gold Book). For example, it is when H₂O is at the same time ice, water, and steam. I am told this is true and I believe it (because people much smarter than I believe it) but I can not for the life of me concieve of it. But this does not change its truth or its validity, it only means that I have a small mind and a small imagination.

To apply philosophical arguments on the existence of God based on the question of evil to an empircal discovery of something like “triple point”, it would seem impossible for something like “triple point” to exist, though it does. I do not pretend to know how it exists (logically), but I do know that it does. To argue against it would be against the human spirit of discovery, in fact, such phillistine attitudes are against all areas of discovery: they do not ask questions to seek the truth, they ask the questions to get better answers. If we applied such logic to all areas of discovery in biology, chemistry, and physics, or geology or space exploration we would never learn anything if our first assumption was that whatever we found must fit in with what we already know. Science is always contradicting itself as new discoveries are made that make no logical sense, but, do exist.

Now, to apply the “triple point” metaphor in a new way, we have the same paradox with these five basic assertains about God and evil, that some philosophers (with a small imagination) say cannot all be true. If all are true, that is, God exists, He is perfectly good, He is all-knowing and all-powerful, and there is evil in the world, how does evil exist? And if evil exists, does that mean God doesn’t? Philosophy says the discussion ends here, there are no logical alternatives, but what if we have another “triple point” on our hands? What if all five assertians are true, even though it may be hard to explain, even to comprehend?

Let us focus on Christianity, for the sake of simplicity and because it is the Christian notion of God (benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent) that is being discussed. Christianity believes in a God who created the universe, who is all powerful, who is all-knowing, and is all-loving, and who wants to call Him “Dad”. How does Christianity reconcile such a wonderful and hopeful portrait of God with the reality of evil, or suffering, or pain? First, Christianity’s response is that evil does not come from God, but it is still not outside of His control. He does not lose the quality of “perfect goodness” if He cannot twist evil for good, in fact, He loses His omnipotence if He cannot. In the Old Testement a man named Joseph says to his brothers who betrayed him: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20, ESV). Here is a profound theoligical claim of the Christian God: He is so powerful that evil is bent to His will and changed forever.

I would argue that if one were to inspect closely the claims of Jesus and the Christian God one would find the most satsifying answers of any philosophy in the world. The entire Bible is about the hope of hopes, a time in the future when God will return to earth and destroy evil forever, so that one day it will be a vague memory. In fact the promises of the Bible are that every evil ever done will be undone, because here is God’s true omnipotence, His power to undo every evil we have ever commited. We have ravaged the earth with deforestation and pollution, God will restore it in a new earth, we have destroyed our bodies through overeating, misuse and poor care, He will give us new bodies that will not wear out; we have blackened our hearts with evil actions and thoughts, God will give us a new heart and a new mind, one free from committing evil. If this is true, then this “triple point” is more exciting and hopeful than anything in the world, even if it is paradoxical. But sometimes that’s what’s needed to explain the truth: a paradox.

I’ll end my argument with the central paradox to Christianity: the image of Christ on the cross. Nothing could be more brutal and depressing, yet nothing is more hopeful. A symbol of death as well as life, a point at which evil seems victorious yet is sorely defeated. It really is fascinating to comprehend, and perhaps one of the greatest problems of philosophical thought today is a lack of imagination, a lack of considering the truth to be true in light of contradiction, nay, because of contradiction.