Clough Genesis Lesson 79
Prayer and appeal (continued)
Let’s turn to Psalm 22, this being Easter and we are in an area of Scripture in the morning service on learning prayer and appeal to higher authority, it will be good for us to realize that the resurrection itself was a response to an appeal; it was a response to a prayer. Fatalism has so infiltrated may Christians that they think that the resurrection occurs spontaneously; that because God prophesied resurrection to take place, therefore it automatically took place. Such is not the case. The resurrection of Christ took place because Christ asked for it and this psalm is His prayer and His petition.
If you’ll notice the first verse [Psalm 22:1], “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me?” often preached during the times of Lent as one of the last words of God, and yet those were not the last words; that’s the first verse of Psalm 22. And when you read in the four Gospels that Jesus Christ said from the cross, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken Me,” you have to be aware of the literary style in which the Gospels were written, and that is than in those days, the days of the first century, the book of Psalms was not divided numerically and referred to by numbers. For example, if I wanted to say that Jesus Christ recited Psalm 22 from the cross I wouldn’t say Jesus spoke Psalm 22 from the cross. The way I had in the first century of indicating that, the way you would have if you had lived then, would be to repeat the first verse of the psalm that you wanted to talk about. And so this is an illustration, Psalm 22, of the person who is referred to, in other words, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me,” that is the title of the psalm. And so we have all indications that Jesus Christ prayed the entire psalm, not just verse 1.
If you look at Psalm 22 with that in mind it changes things considerably because His prayer is for the resurrection to occur. Remember, if He is praying Psalm 22 He is praying it from the cross; Jesus Christ is dying while He is praying Psalm 22. The description is vivid. In verse 6, “I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised by the people. [7] All they that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out the lip,” and they say [8] “He trusted on the LORD that He would deliver him; let Him deliver him, seeing He delights in Him.” And then he goes on to say, [9] “But You are He who took me out of the womb; You made me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts. [10] I was cast upon Thee from the womb; thou art my God from my mother’s belly [body]. [11] Be nor far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.”
He describes what it was like while dying on the cross. Verse 14, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; [my heart is like wax; it is melted within me].” Verse 15, “my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws; [and You have brought me into the dust of death].” [16] “For dogs have compassed me; the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me,” and remarkably a thousand years before crucifixion, “they pierced my hands and my feet.” Verse 18, “They part my garments among them, and they cast lots upon my vesture,” clearly a prophecy of the death of the death of Christ.
Now in Psalm 22:19-21 is the petition section. Now in this section we have the reason why the resurrection occurred. It occurred not just because God prophesied it was going to take place, but as we’ve seen again and again, protect yourself against automatic fatalism. Things take place because people are involved in the process. And Christ, in His humanity, was praying at this point. “Be Thou not far from me, O LORD, O my strength, haste Thee to help me. [20] Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling [only one] from the power of the dog. [21] Save me from the lion’s mouth; [for Thou hast heard me] from the horns of the unicorn [wild oxen].” You’ll notice I skipped a section in verse 21 when I was reading it because there’s a section in there that really ought to be, in English translation enclosed in parenthesis. That enclosure is what we call a confidence section in Hebrew poetic prayer, and that is, “Thou hast heard me.” Notice it’s past tense when all the other verbs in the near context are in the imperative mood. All the other verbs are looking forward to something that’s going to happen; do this, do that, do something else, but then in verse 21, Thou hast, in the past, You have heard me. Jesus Christ knows He’s been heard and therefore He knows that the prayer will take place.
And He knows the results of that
prayer. He says, [Psalm
Now we’ve been studying in the morning service a series of stories in Genesis having to do with the patriarchs. And we stopped last Sunday to just topically review and summarize the wisdom principles that we’ve learned. We’ve said that there are two basic areas that have to be looked at in parallel. One is human appeal and the other is appeal to God or prayer. Both of these can be studied together because both of these are acts by responsible human beings to a higher authority, and that involved us immediately into a biblical analysis of authority. We want to know this because in our day authority is distorted in one way or another and it’s important that we function in all areas of life that we know how to handle authority.
So we said there are certain characteristics about authority and we listed these. We said we can point to three primary characteristics or truths about authority. On of these is that authority expects obedience, Matthew 8 was the illustration of this. Authority expects obedience; it doesn’t ask for it, it expects it; that’s what authority is. Now authority is something that comes hard to rebellious sinners but God has so established the human race that there are spheres of authority and we fight God when we fight those spheres of authority.
A second characteristic is that authority causes us to have to learn obedience. Obedience is not automatic. It wasn’t for Jesus Christ. We said in Hebrews 5:8 that though He was sinless, yet nevertheless He had to learn obedience. Now I suggest that if Jesus Christ had to learn obedience that we all need to learn it too. So obedience is a learned response and where does it start? It starts in the home. And so the commandment, “Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother,” what is that in there for? Because the first encounter we have on the face of this earth with authority is with our parents and so as we learn authority in the home, so we spread it in other areas. If we do not learn authority and we’re rebellious in the home we spread that all over the place also.
And then we said a third thing about authority is that defiance of authority is defiance of God. Now why do we say that? Because who is it that is the source of all authority? When Jesus Christ was being tried by Pontius Pilate, Pilate got a little arrogant and started making a few remarks in the courtroom and Jesus stopped him and He said whatever authority you have, you have from above, and if you didn’t have that authority you couldn’t do what you’re doing now. In other words, Jesus reminded a key human authority that his authority was derivative. And so we refer to the divine institution. Every sector of life has some authority structure to it. It’s inescapable; wherever you are you are under some authority at some point. In the marriage situation we have authority; in that situation God has designed it so the husband is the authority in the home. In the family, the father and the mother are authority over the children. In the state the leaders of that society are authorities. Wherever we have life we have authority and that authority is given by God. We call these divine institutions. We mean that they come from God; God instituted these authorities.
Or this morning maybe we could define it a little differently for variety’s sake and maybe added insight, and that is, where you see these spheres of authority what you are looking at here is delegated authority. Each one of those spheres is an authority God has in His being, which He has delegated it to human beings and they will be judged on how they responded. So these represent all areas of human authority.
Now we said last time, in addition to the characteristics of authority, we said there’s got to be a balance. God does not ask blind obedience. And so we have difference between authority and obedience and appeal. And this is where… we’re not talking about obedience and rebellion, we’re talking about obedience and appeal, or prayer, and God wants us to appeal.
But we want to look at balances. When we have a human authority situation, we have some human authority here and we are down underneath that human authority, then we have to look at it this way; this is the biblical way of human authority. Here is God, and God has designated that human authority in that sphere. So that human authority is held accountable to God for us. And if we are going to disobey and we are going to rebel against that authority, then God will require it of us because we are not just disobeying that authority, we are actually disobeying God who is behind that authority.
I’ll give you an instance of this, turn to Romans 13:2, Paul refers to this quite clearly when he’s talking about the authority of the state officials and he goes so far as to say, “Whosoever, therefore, resists the power, resists the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” So it’s not just a simple case of a son rebelling against his father; it is a case of the son rebelling against a father who has been mandated by God to be father of that son. So when the son turns around and rebels against his father, actually that rebellion is deeply spiritual and it’s rebellion against God who stands in back of that father. And it’s the same thing in a home situation, contrary to ERA, when we have a situation involving a wife and she goes and she maligns her husband or goes all over town telling what a creep he is and so forth, this sort thing, this undercutting of her husband’s authority, is not just undercutting his authority, it is undercutting the God who has mandated that the husband have that authority.
That’s one side of the balance; we obey human authority because we are obeying God who stands behind the human authority. But now let’s look and balance it because everything in the Bible is balanced, and that is that we have this human authority over here and we’re under the human authority and so the human authority tells us to do certain things. But we stand down here as one who is going to be judged by God and we stand under an authority that is going to be judged by God. So therefore, since we know that God, though He has given this authority, He has delegated it to a father, to a husband, to a state official, to an employer for example, whatever the structure may be, we have God giving the authority to this person, nevertheless, we have comfort and we have the right to come back here and appeal because that authority isn’t the highest authority. The highest authority is the God over the authority.
So there’s the balance. On the one hand we obey because God has instituted the authority; on the other hand we can appeal because God stands behind that authority and wants that authority to adhere to His word.
Another balance that we have learned, we won’t have time to go into it all, but one balance that we’ve said is that when you obey blindly, again over-emphasizing obedience to authority, what you do is you destroy conscience. And as you destroy conscience you destroy the person. An example of this, in doubtful things of 1 Corinthians 8 Paul refuses to make Christians blindly follow apostolic authority. So the argument is very simple; if an apostle can’t do it, if God doesn’t do it, then what right does a husband, a father, and a state official have to do what God Himself doesn’t do, and that is demand absolute total 100% blind obedience. If God and the apostles can’t do it, then no lesser official can do it. Therefore, no human official can demand 100% blind obedience. So there’s the balance.
On the other hand, too much appeal destroys society. God has designed those divine institutions to function and where you constantly have people maligning, criticizing, rebelling, and all the rest, you are going to terminate that social order. It’ll just disintegrate and then decay within itself. These commandments are not lightly given in the Bible; they represent our whole life as corporate mankind.
Then last week we began to describe parallels between prayer and appeal; prayer again being appeal to God, and then we used the word appeal to refer to human appeal. And we say that those two actions are very, very similar and we’re trying to teach them as similar. Here’s prayer, here’s appeal to human authority and you can bring them across each other and they are congruent, they are very close.
Now let’s look at what we’ve done so far. We’ve said, using the acrostic F-I-G, there are four principles in prayer and human appeal. Last time we dealt with one and a half; we said the first principle was that fatalism is to be avoided. That is, just sitting down and being a doormat. God does not run the universe expecting you to be a doormat, that’s why we have something called prayer. We are to appeal to God and we gave the instances, biblically, where this took place. Moses, in Exodus 32 we said, when he went to appeal to God he not just appealed, what he did was he threw down the moral gauntlet; he said God, if You are going to damn Israel, send me to hell with them. That’s what Moses said in that prayer; a very strong appeal. If You are going to send this nation into damnation, send me along with it and wipe out my name from the book of life. Now why do we emphasize this here? Because an appeal must be a strong appeal and to be a strong appeal it has to have conviction behind it; it has to have backbone behind it, not in a defiant attitude, but out of real concern. And so when Moses goes to God he goes with concern.
Another example we gave last time were the two women prostitutes that came to King Solomon, one of the most famous wisdom decisions of all history. They both had babies, one of them died, both women claimed the living child for their own, and Solomon being the wise man that he was, he knew how he could tell which was the real mother. And so he said well, here’s a sword, let’s cut the baby in half and give half to one woman and half to the other. Now that wasn’t gross, that was a very shrewd maneuver because he knew that the real mother would have enough maternal instinct in her that she would give up possession of the child, give up the right of possession in order to gain the right of existence, and the woman who was faking it wouldn’t care that much for the child; she either wanted a child or she wouldn’t have anybody else have the child and that was it. So Solomon exposed the spirit and the motive of those two women by that little maneuver with the sword. Now the same thing; when the real mother appealed to King Solomon her appeal had strength. How did that mother’s appeal have strength? Because she was willing to give up what was her right to have that appeal answered. That shows moral conviction.
Then we went on to say the second principle in prayer and appeal is that there’s an immutability of God’s purpose. That is, God’s purpose does not change with time. God changes, He responds to history in one sense and yet in another sense his plan goes on forever and ever. And for an adequate appeal to be made we have to know something of God’s mind in the matter. Let’s look at how this might work in a situation involving a child and their parents. Turn to Ephesians 6; here’s a human appeal but it’s parallel to a divine appeal using this principle: the principle is that if I’m a son and I’m going to appeal to my father, or a daughter is going to appeal to her father or a daughter is going to appeal to her mother and so on, whenever you have the child to parent appeal, if it is a godly and wisely designed appeal it is going to appeal to what God wants for that authority. So the immutability of God’s plan for God and for human authority too; so we have the divine institutions and we know enough Scriptural passages, say in this case we’re looking at the third divine institution, we have a child and he’s going to his father or his mother and he’s making an appeal, on what basis? Ephesians 6:4, here is a verse that tells what the mother and the father are mandated to do before God. And if the child wants to make a wise appeal then he’s going to have to make that appeal on the basis of what God has told his parents they have to do so his appeal won’t be fighting God’s.
“And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” The word “nurture” is the word for physical training, in other words that’s the thing that a father would do physically, either by way of punishment, this was the days before all the child abuse people got on the moment you paddle somebody now you’re abusing someone. But the point was that in the Bible physical punishment was mandated, the book of Proverbs. It still is, incidentally; they haven’t changed the Bible yet. And then the other side of the physical provision would be the food and so on for the positive rewards, or just going out with a child and showing them how to play baseball, soccer, just taking him out showing him how a carburetor works and the engine in a car, whatever; those would be the physical things that a dad would do for his children. That’s “nurture.”
The next word, “admonition,” refers to verbal conversation and counsel. This is sitting down and talking a thing out and advising and directing verbally. Now it says that fathers are to carry out the nurturing and admonition function. So if the child is in a situation where the father has exercised his authority, and maybe the child has a little problem and dad hasn’t really done it the way he’d like to see it done, and maybe there’s another way, all right, appeal but you’d better realize that the appeal ought to be such that the father still exercises his God-given responsibility. Maybe we can change a little bit the application but the principle must still remain that the father has been given the right of training in this situation. The child, in other words, doesn’t have the right to alter verse 4. Verse 4 is an absolute, it is given to all fathers and mothers, and that being the case, then whatever appeal the child does it must fall within God’s laws for that institution. That’s what we’re saying by this second point in human appeal.
And it can work outside of the family situation. We can go to all sorts of other things. Let’s, for example, take Daniel 1 and watch an appeal made to a state official. Here again Daniel is a wise illustration of this. In Daniel 1 Daniel is a young teenager, he’s a prisoner of war, he exists in a foreign culture, under a foreign state and its officialdom. And in this situation, here is a young man and he’s go to make an appeal to the state. What does he do? Well, he doesn’t just say hey, I’m not going do what you told me to do. What Daniel does is, he’s been told that they’ve got to eat a certain diet, that’s the context of the situation, but he’s a Hebrew and it’s a non-kosher diet. So now what do I do now; now my state official, I’m supposed to be obedient to him, he tells me I’m supposed to eat a non-kosher diet and God tells me I’m not supposed to eat a non-kosher diet, now what do I do? What I do is I make an appeal to the state official, wisely.
Daniel in Daniel 1:11 talks to them, and he says: “Then said Daniel to Melzar, whom the prince of the eunuchs had set over Daniel,” you notice something interesting in verse 11, he doesn’t go over the guy’s head, he talks to his immediate superior, not his ultimate superior. Daniel spoke “to Melzar, whom the prince of the eunuchs had set over” him, he doesn’t go to the prince of eunuchs, he goes to his immediate superior first. Then he says, “Test thy servants, I pray thee, ten days, and let them give us vegetables to eat, and water to drink. [13] Then let our countenances be looked upon before thee, and the countenance of the youths that eat of the portion of the king’s food; and as you see, deal with your servants.”
What does that show about appeal? It shows that he knows the purpose of that state official was to protect the health of these teenagers, all these teenagers. Daniel wasn’t with just any teenagers, Daniel was with a group of boys who were the nobility, the upper aristocratic class of the city of Jerusalem and the point is that that chief of eunuchs, the prince of eunuchs in verse 11 had delegated to him the job of raising a healthy crop of young noble boys that could one day be used in administrating Jewish affairs. So Daniel recognizes that, so he doesn’t pitch his appeal in verses 12-13 oh, we’re not going to do that; that’s not how he responds to the authority. He recognizes that the authority has a job to do so the question isn’t we’re going to oppose the whole thing, what we’re going to try to do is adjust it, so that he can get his job done and I can obey the Word of God. So that’s why he makes his proposal in verse 12 and he challenges him to test it, let’s just give it a try for ten days, nobody is going to die in ten days so let’s just see if we eat kosher food what difference it will make.
Now there is a way he has of appealing on
the basis of the fact that he knows God’s plan for the higher authority. It could be used innumerably, it could be
used, for examples of marriage, it could be used in examples of family, it
could be used in examples of employer/employee relationships. Here, for example, let’s take the employee
appealing to his employer. Let’s look at
Colossians
Now what’s God’s purpose for the employer? We could go to many passages of Scripture. Genesis 1:26-28; production. Why? Why is that God’s purpose for the employer to produce? Because that’s how the human race is sustained, isn’t it? In other words, ask this question sometimes when you’re struggling to correct something that you think the employer has done wrong: what would happen society wise, all over the world, if every employer in your field did what you propose your employer do? Would it really have a net gain or would it be a net loss? Does it fit the structure of what’s supposed to take place here, namely men are supposed to be subduing the earth and producing wealth out of it. And then in verse 24-25 there are some additional principles which we won’t get into, [“Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance; for ye serve the Lord Christ. [25] But he that does wrong shall receive for the wrong which he has done, and there is no respect of persons.”] But Colossians 4:1, “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing you also have” an employer “[a Master] in heaven.”
So the servant can appeal, the employee can appeal to his employer, that he is going to be held accountable to do with the resources that he’s given. Maybe he’s a manager in a company; okay, who’s given the money to that company? Investors; doesn’t that make, therefore, the manager and the employer, doesn’t that make him responsible? He hasn’t got it all himself; he’s go the pressure of hey, these people loaned me money, on thousands of dollars borrowed capital to make this company go and I’ve got to or I’m gypping the people who have invested in this company so I’m in turn going to profit. So when the employee makes his pitch up he ought to take that into serious consideration; that’s God’s plans and structures for that situation and that relationship.
Let’s go to the third thing and that we
call grace orientation. We’ve studied that before under prayer. What do we mean grace orientation? Well, before I can pray to God, before I can
make any appeal to God I have to make sure I’m on listening terms with Him,
don’t
Turn to Luke 15; this is the passage on the prodigal son. As I say, we’re going to skip around to the various verses of the Scripture because we’re just studying the Bible topically right now. Luke 15:18, we won’t go into the parable in detail, we just want to look at one verse of that parable. Remember the on rebelled against his father, he knew more than the old man; he probably was somewhere around 18 when that usually happens, and he went out and decided that the old man didn’t know what he was doing and so he took his inheritance and wound up in the pig pen; it turned out the old man wasn’t so stupid as he thought. So he comes in verse 18, he realizes that he kind of fouled up the situation, but notice what he says. This is your link between oriented to God’s grace and oriented to your listening acceptance with a higher authority.
He says, “I will arise and go to my father,” he’s resolving this to himself, and I’m going to tell him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,” notice the juxtaposition… notice the juxtaposition! “I have sinned against heaven” means I have sinned against God, now how did he sin against God? At no point in the parable of the prodigal son do you ever have, earlier in any of those verses where he shakes his fist ostensibly in God’s face? Nowhere earlier in those verses do you ever have: Well God, I don’t like the situation, I’m leaving. No-no, in the early verses of the parable of the prodigal son you have him saying, basically, I’m discontent with my father and my parents, and so therefore I’m going to turn tables and to heck with them, I’m going off. Now he identifies it in verse 18 as “sin against heaven.” How can he make that conclusion if he first doesn’t see that God was in back of his parents? If defiance of his parents is defiance of God then there has to be a corollary that follows, that God is the One who is behind the authority of his parents, whose authority he’s violated. When he does this, then in verse 18 he says, “I have sinned against heaven, and before you,” my earthly father.
So he ties the two together and from this we can see how grace orientation applies to both God and man. Here’s how; let’s look at how it applies. Let’s look at how it applies before God and then how it applies before man. Here’s God as my authority; here’s man as a higher authority. Now before I can have acceptability with God two conditions have to be met. These two conditions we rehearse over and over and over and over and over and over every communion service; once a month in the Sunday evening communion service we go through this rigmarole. Why do we go through this rigmarole? Because God told us to do that and in this course of the service what two things do we always say that you’d better be sure of before we pass the bread and the grape juice around? When we pass this around what two things do we always say you’d better get straight? One is that you’re a Christian, that you’ve personally trusted in Jesus Christ because if you’re not a Christian this isn’t for you; this is a family supper and if you’re not in the family, obviously you’re not invited. So the first thing hat has to be made clear is what we will call the official legal position. That, theologically, is called justification in the Bible. I have to be justified before God before I have a right to open my mouth before His throne. Now He may hear me or He may not, you don’t have to listen to Clough, unless Clough is justified. So that’s legally and the official position.
The second thing that has to be taken care of is have I confessed my sin; confessed the known sin that He’s making an issue of in my life at that point. So we’ll call that my present rapport. So I have to have a legal position and I have to have present rapport, and if I don’t have those two then I don’t care what the cause is, I’m not going to be successful in my appeal, because Psalm 66:18 says, “If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me,” He will throw out the appeal, even though the appeal may be according to His plan. So I need to have those two things.
Now do you see the correspondence; those two things correspond to all human
relationships, don’t they? Let’s think
of the divine institution; divine institution number two, what’s the
corresponding of justification, the official legal position? Marriage.
So you’ve got the covenant bond that establishes the official position
of husband and wife; the Bible takes that very seriously. But then, as every married person knows, you
can either have present rapport or present non-rapport with the one you live
with. In that situation what about
appeal? The appeal can’t take place
until there is present rapport in that relationship. After there is present rapport, then we talk
about appeals. You see, the appeal
process can’t take place until the guilt problem is solved because the higher
authority isn’t going to listen. An
example in a married situation: the wife is all over town telling what a creep
her husband is, well no man I know is going to listen to anything from her
because why? He’s threatened by her;
she’s not coming to him to make an appeal, she’s coming in the name of
revolution, overthrow his authority. So
therefore the only option the guy’s got is to hold on with claws, clamp down,
lock in. Why? Because he’s got to protect his position
first and after he’s protected that, then we’ll talk about appeals. The same thing with God; God isn’t going to
hear us if we have unconfessed sin; it’s the same principle. Appeals don’t work if there’s no present
rapport.
Let’s take an employee/employer relationship. What is the official legal position? That I’m employed by the person; it may be a labor contract, I’ve gone to work for somebody, I have a position in the firm or I’m part of the company. There’s my official position, that’s one of my two preconditions for an appeal to the boss: that I be under him, obviously if I’m Joe Snodgrass the janitor and I’m just doing my thing outside on the sidewalk I’m not going to have too much rapport with the guy that’s inside. The second thing that he has to have, I have to have present rapport with my employer. Ah, there’s where a lot of labor/management problems get started, because the employee, maybe, has been disloyal, maybe he’s been pilfering on the side or maybe he’s been getting out of time, stealing time from the company. In other words, there’s a little tension in the relationship; there is no present rapport. Then in a very nasty situation, now we start the appeal process and the appeal process gets rejected and torpedoed. Why? Because the precondition wasn’t met.
So you see, our relationships with God
aren’t that different than our relationships with men. Let’s see a wise biblical example of a woman
who was in a position where she would eventually make appeal, but let’s watch
this woman and how she got herself to have present rapport with her
authority. Turn to Ruth
Ruth
Now let’s go to the fourth parallel. We did F-I-G-G, now we’re on the fourth “G” and that is the glory of the authority. Prayer that does not have as its objective the glory of God, ultimately, is wrong. Turn to Revelation 4. At this point we have a great hymn that’s sung by the redeemed. The importance of this hymn is that it tells you the goal of history. Philosophers have speculated for centuries on the goal and purpose of history. In fact, many philosophers have speculated whether there is a goal for history. But here is one of the biblical sources where you can obtain a philosophy of history. Here, stated in a nutshell, is what history is all about: why God permitted evil, why God permitted death, why God designed the redemption process the way He did; why Christ has not come back for over 1900 years, all these why, why, why questions. The ultimate purpose of history is encapsulated in this lyric.
Revelation 4:11, “Thou art worthy, O Lord,
to receive glory and honor and power; for Thou hast created all things, and for
Thy pleasure they are and were created.”
“Thou art worthy,” no creature now can really say that with full
assurance. Only when God has placed every
card in his hand, only when every act of history has been played, when everything’s
laid out on the table of history, then this song will start… then this song will start. This is why
it talks about this song not being until toward the end of history because it
can’t be sung right now; we can sing it sentimentally but we can’t sing it with
conviction because there’s lots of unanswered questions. You know, why does God permit Hitler’s to
exit in history; that’s an unanswered question.
Why does God permit Judas Iscariots to live and die and betray
Christ? That’s an unanswered question of
history. We have faith, as Christians,
that there is a sufficient cause; there is a morally sufficient reason for
it. We had a baby die in the
congregation this week. Why? People ask the question, why does this take
place? It’s a very practical
situation. We have confidence that it
will be answered some day but this song can’t be sung until the answer is
visible. And when the answer is visible,
then the response of all the redeemed is yeah, we see it now: You are
worthy!
All right, that’s the situation; how does that apply to a human relationship. The glory of the authority in my prayer, if I design a prayer request it ought not to be just a silly little thing, not that God isn’t interested in details, He is. But we ought to have as our motive that this ought to further the reputation of God. Let’s look at an example of a human relationship where this takes place. Esther 1:11, it takes place in one of the most famous Oriental courts of the ancient world, the king of Medo-Persia. And in verse 11 the king, being very proud of his wife, the queen, and after he has paid for all her jewelry, and he has paid for her perfume, and he has paid for her wardrobe and he has paid for her hair stylist, and he has paid for this and paid for that so that she can be a properly decorated woman, he wants to show her off. That’s verse 11. So he has a party and he wants the queen to do her thing. “To bring Vashti, the queen, before the king with the crown royal,” that means in her regalia, now I mean she had jewels all over the place, just amazing, you read archeology and you realize the wealth of these courts, it is just unbelievable … unbelievable the extravagant wealth . So Vashti is asked to come out. Why? “to show the people and the princes her beauty; for she was fair to look on.” There’s nothing off color about this; he just is proud of the queen and he wants to show her off.
But what happens, verse 12, “But the queen, Vashti, refused to come,” oh-oh, see gentlemen, you’re not the only ones, kings had the same problem. So now the problem is how does the king respond to this situation. Verse 13, “Then the king said to the wise men, who knew the times,” and there’s a big long parenthesis down to verse 15, “What shall we do unto the queen, Vashti, according to law, because she has not performed the commandment of the king. [16] Then Menucan answered before the king and the princes, Vashti, the queen, has not done wrong to the king only, but also to all the princes, and to all the people who are in all the provinces of the king, [17] For this deed of the queen shall come abroad to all women, so that they shall despise their husbands in their eyes,” they were on the alert for a women’s lib movement to start, “when it shall be reported. The king commanded Vashti, the queen, to be brought in before him, but she came not.” Can’t you see all the women saying well, the queen didn’t have to do it and I don’t either? That’s a great, great precedent started for the whole kingdom. Now what’s the appeal? This man, this wise man quoted in verse 16, Menucan, he’s being asked for advice but for the purposes of our discussion this morning I’m just going to treat it as an appeal; he’s appealing for the king to set a new policy. But do you see how he appeals? Do you see the reason, the rationale in this wise man’s appeal? It’s for the good of the king.
Notice the wording in verse 16, she’s done
wrong “not to the king only but to the princes and to all the people in all the
provinces of the king.” Now what does he
mean by that last part? It means this
woman has just undermined the whole kingdom by this act because the news media
and everybody else was sitting there when she refused. So now it’s all over, it was on the
Now this just grates with some people that authorities, even human authorities, have a glory. Now if you find yourself, something inside saying oh, I’m not going to do that kind of thing, you get that attitude, you’ve just got to come back here and look at some basics. Here you are; here’s that… we’ll leave it unknown, private, between you and the Lord, but that human authority that you can’t stand. Then you’ve got to see this process. Whose authority is that person trying to represent, or at least what he’s trying to represent, how is that authority set up? Where’s its source? Its source is in God. God is going to judge for the wrong things; again, we’re not saying blind obedience without appeal, but even the appeal has to be made with the attitude that I recognize this in back of the authority and if there’s not that respect, if you visualize the problem just in those terms, that it’s just a human authority, you are unbiblical in your thinking. I don’t care if you’re a Christian or not, you’re not thinking in a Christian way because you’re not using biblical materials to shape your attitude. This is the proper attitude and it can only be shaped when you realize that God is behind that authority.
Let’s conclude with an example of this and then we’ll turn back to the psalm that we started with this morning. Let’s take a wife and her husband situation; here’s the wife, and she’s down here and this guy is really screwed up. I’m not going to ask for a list of examples but nevertheless this has happened. She’s in a position where scripturally he is her authority, no way about it, he hasn’t got into heaven yet. So therefore God is here, her husband is here. Let’s see what happens when we apply these four principles. First, the first principle says that that wife has the right to make an appeal. She is not to… ah, shut up. God doesn’t say that. Did you ever hear Him say that to you when you started to pray to Him, shut up in a big booming voice? God never says that to us. All right, therefore any human authority ought not to say that either. Now there are times when something has to happen, when the mouth is in high gear and obviously you’ve got to pull the plug out just to get relief but I mean when there’s a serious appeal being made, then we’re talking about the right of appeal.
Let’s go to the second one; here the wife is and she says how am I going to make this appeal to whatever she calls him at that point. She’s got to figure out, what is God’s plan for that man, in other words, think a little bit ahead of time before the appeal is designed and think, what does God expect my husband to do and start reflecting on whether or not he might be following quite a few of the Lord’s instructions that he ought to be doing. So where you might think, because it’s the problem that a lot of women have, if he screws up in one area everything is wrong kind of response, exaggeration. And it can kind of calm things down to just think well now, you know, he’s not such a clod after all because he does this right, he does this right, he does this right, he’s all screwed up here and all screwed up here, he does this right and this right and you say hey, there are some things the guy finally does that are right. And you realize that over and above those God has a plan for his life; He wants him to do this and this and this and this and this, and he lays down a lot of responsibilities on the man. People forget, you always like to rebel against an authority but you always forget, the authority himself has a lot of things he’s responsible to. The thing slows uphill. So the second point is what would God hold my husband responsible for. What is He, right now, holding my husband responsible to do, and start thinking in those terms. All right, and then make your appeal accordingly.
This one, obviously in the husband and wife relationship the first official relationship is solved; now the second one, present rapport. Now if you’re in trouble if you’ve got a situation happening here and there’s been just a disloyal spirit against your husband because he senses this and therefore that chills him off from any suggestions from below because he can’t really trust you. So that has to be taken care of first, then the appeal dealt with. So do I have present rapport with him?
And then finally, the fourth thing that the wife would consider in this situation would be what I’m proposing, this alteration, this suggestion or something, this shift, is it going to glorify God through my husband and his life? Think of it that way. Is what I’m asking going to glorify God’s plan through my husband’s life. That’s one example, we could, if we had time, go to an employer/employee thing, do the same thing F-I-G-G, go through the same set of principles. We could go through it with a state situation, go through the same set of principles and so on. You can apply these all across the board but we’re going to conclude by turning back to Psalm 22 for this is Easter and we want to realize that the greatest event of history, the resurrection, came about because of an appeal.
Notice some of the elements in this appeal. First of all, it’s an appeal so there is “F.” Fatalism is avoided, Jesus just doesn’t sit there and bleed on the cross and say well, the resurrection is supposed to happen so so be it; it’s not that attitude at all; there’s an active entering in and a desire for the resurrection to take place. So you’ve got your first element in the appeal; it is an appeal and it’s vigorous.
A second form we said that it had to fit with God’s plan. Verse 4-5, notice what he’s doing there? He’s saying now God, what’s your normal way of working with people, aren’t you a God that normally rewards those who trust in You; our fathers trusted in You, they trusted and You delivered them. In other words, he cites historical precedence; he says that You are a prayer-answering God and later on he’s going to blend it in with his purpose, verse 26 and following, at the end he certainly ties it in with a great plan of God. He ties it in with verse 30-31 with the result so the appeal or this prayer fits the second principle, the immutability of God’s plan; it’s linked to it.
What about is He acceptable in God’s sight, and of course this involves a special theological problem in Psalm 22 because at the time He was bearing the sin of the world. You notice a hint in this, incidentally, if you look at verse 1 you’ll see, usually in praises to God in the Old Testament it’s a trilogy. For example, when Isaiah looks up and he sees in the temple the vision of God sitting on the throne, you remember what the angels say: “Holy, holy, holy,” three times. It’s interesting in this psalm, this is one of the rare pieces where somebody addresses God and God’s name is only twice, one is missing and that’s the theology of what’s going on here in the cross; you see the Second Person of the Trinity is involved here with this redeeming process so He drops out. So we have “My God, My God,” but nevertheless He claims that somehow He is acceptable because He says, verse 9, “You are He that took me out of the womb, you made me hope…. [10] I was cast upon Thee from the womb; and thou art my God from my mother’s belly [body].” So He says I have acceptability with you, I’ve done everything You wanted me to do, so I ought to be acceptable in Your sight. There’s the third principle, the F-I-G.
Now what about the glory of God? Jesus says if You will get Me off this cross and we’ll finish thing, verse 22, “I will declare Thy name unto My brethren; in the midst of the congregation will I praise Thee.” Now what’s declaring a name; just don’t read over that quickly. What does it mean to declare a name? Do you know what it means biblically? It means to take the nature and the essence of God, looking at the character of God through what He’s done here, here, here and here, and say look people, this is the kind of God God is; He did this, He did this, He did this, He did this; that’s declaring His name. It’s showing all of his attributes illustrated by historical action. And so what greater historical action do we have than the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ? So therefore He says God will get the glory.
As a result of praying this prayer, as a result of the resurrection, now Christ Himself is elevated to a position of glory and so this is why we’ll now sing…..