The commanding and giving God

Geoff Thomas

There was once an old Christian and she was talking to a young man about the Saviour, commending Jesus Christ to him, pressing him to be saved, but he was far too assured to acknowledge that he needed salvation. So she asked him to turn in her Bible to Romans 3 and read some verses aloud slowly. So he began to read these words from verses 10 to 18: As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one’ [‘Except you’, she interjected quietly, squeezing his arm]. He went on, There is no one who understands [’Except you’, she said], no one who seeks God [‘Except you’, she whispered]. All have turned away [‘Except you’, she said to his growing irritation], they have together become worthless [‘Except you’, she murmured squeezing his arm again]; there is no one who does good, not even one [‘Except you’, she added]. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practise deceit [‘Except yours’, she said to him], The poison of vipers is on their lips. [‘Except yours’, she added]. Then he hurried along louder and louder: Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes [‘Except yours’, she said to him again, squeezing his arm].

He was a quieter student when he had finished reading those words. His was not the exception at all. He was a common sinner like all the rest of us. He was failing to live a life of love as all mankind has failed.

Why do people come on a single occasion to churches like ours, or maybe twice or three times, and then not return? One reason would be that they don’t want to hear us addressing them as ‘sinners’. If I urged them all to live a life of love and never defined what love is they’d be happy, because my preaching would simply be a rearranging of their prejudices week by week, but that is not Christianity. The first step to becoming a Christian is to step into a sinner’s shoes, to get into the place of the sinner, the sinner who is nothing, and has nothing but his failure and sin, and who can do absolutely nothing to help himself. Men protest, ‘Preacher, we are not as bad as that.’ Yes, you are, and far worse than you could ever imagine if you could see yourself as God sees you, not because I say so but because God says so in the Bible.

There is a wonderful verse in the Bible (Colossians 2:14) which speaks of the handwriting that is against us. I worked as a wages clerk for the National Coal Board before I came to Aberystwyth, and there were pay-books we kept on all the miners in every colliery in south-west Wales. My own colliery wages book was Cynheidre anthracite mine near Llanelli. One of the verses in the Bible that has taken on a new meaning to me since then is the one in the book of Revelation, And the books were opened. Once in a while inspectors would come in and check the books, and all our figures, to find out if we were being accurate and honest in all we did. There are the books of God. The file is there of your life, your loving, your forgiveness, your patience, your gentleness, your sweetness, and all the rest! The handwriting is there, as Omar Khayam says,

‘The moving finger writes,
And having writ moves on.
Nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back
To cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.’

God says, ‘Live a life of love, just as Christ loved,’ and those words of the law of God, far from inspiring us and leaving us with a warm glow, search and condemn us leaving us without hope in the world.

However, Christianity, immediately it shows us our sin, presents to us the grace of God in Jesus Christ. That is absolutely crucial to Christianity or it will become a religion of Pharisaism. Adam Laughton of the Southport Baptist Church has just returned from a conference in Nigeria and he listened to a number of African sermons and this is his impression of what he heard in an article he wrote in the GBM Herald: ‘There is a worrying tendency amongst preachers there to overstate our Christian duties whilst under-emphasising the grace of God in our salvation. Several expositions we heard took this pattern: the Scriptures were read, some introductory comments were given before winding up (in volume and earnestness) to the climax of the sermon which consisted of telling us we should be loving more, praying more, giving more, evangelising more etc. All true, but without the encouragements of seeing the grace of God in the face of Christ Jesus, an exclusive diet of such preaching could, over time, only discourage God’s people.’

So Paul is always returning to the extraordinary grace of Christ. He will say that the Lord Jesus gave himself, or humbled himself, or emptied himself. His life was not wrested from him by men. Freely he gave himself. His Father didn’t insist, "Son you do what I tell you to do." It was absolutely voluntarily that he did so. It was genuinely and willingly done. He was not humbled by the Sanhedrin, and by Pilate, and by the execution squad, he humbled himself.

We see examples of such wonderful behaviour in our every day life. On January 14 in 1982 on a freezing evening a 737 plane crashed into the 14th Street bridge as it was trying to land in Washington Airport. There were 79 passengers and crew on board and the plane began to sink in the Potomac River. Only five people were saved. This was done by a single helicopter hovering overhead and pulling people out by a line one by one. A passenger was standing at a door and he attached the lifeline to a passenger and the person was winched away, and then it returned and this man again attached it to another passenger and she was saved, and then he attached it to another, and he was winched to safety, and so on. Five times he did that and then the plane went under. That man gave his life absolutely freely so that those five people might be rescued before him. A man gives his life for others. Someone lays down his life for his friends. We know of such instances. Christ freely gave his life that we might live.

I find the poems of R S Thomas to be generally grim but this poem gives us a glimpse of the self-giving of Christ:

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said,
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; rusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

‘Let me go there’ expresses Christ’s willingly giving himself up. He left the glories of fellowship with his Father, all the perfect delights of heaven’s uncreated and eternal blessedness, and he came to this scorched land where the serpent, the god of this world, exercises his control. Then on Calvary Christ picked up our sin as a filthy stinking robe, with a stench that was revolting, and he covered his spotless self with it. Have you been stopped short by some of the hideous, hellish, manifestations of sin? You know that men will behead a man they do not know on camera and put the video of that gross evil on the Internet. We gasp at such cruelty. Have you seen the ravages of sin in a human life and wanted to draw back from the sight? You turn the face of your child away to something else. If you, a sinner, feel like that, what do you think was the reaction of the Son of God when he was clothed in our depravity? Yet the grace of Jesus Christ constrained him to give himself up so freely and lovingly!