There is something strangely hopeful about giving a new Bible to a couple at the beginning of their marriage. Your story has only just begun. And yet we place in your hands, a Book that already knows how it ends.

That is one reason we want you to have it.

You are beginning a life whose chapters are still blank. God has already written all your days in His book. Some of your chapters will be so lovely, that you will wish to live them twice. There will be chapters you would gladly tear up by the pages, if heaven would allow it. You may not know which is which until you turn the page.

May this fresh, clean Bible in your hands remain beside you both. If is does, something curious will happen over the years. You will begin reading passages you thought you knew, and discover that they had been waiting for you to become old enough, or wounded enough, or thankful enough, to truly find them.

Psalm 23 sounds one way at twenty-two. It will sound quite different at eighty-five. “Children are an heritage of the LORD”, will read differently if little feet ever run through your home. “Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another” is pretty to admire. It becomes altogether different at eleven-thirty at night when somebody must say, “Please forgive me.” “Cast thy burden upon the LORD”, has a nectar that will remain hidden, until you actually have a burden too heavy to carry.

That is the wonder of this Book is, the words remain constant. We are the ones who keep arriving at them.

Year after year, providence will bring you to texts that were waiting for you. Somewhere in this Bible there are words you will one day need, and do not know it now. Somewhere in this Bible there are words you have only lightly valued, but one day will find them priceless. You cannot know these verses today. They are waiting for you in the future.

We usually give young couples the things we think they’ll need. A Bible is given for the life only God knows they will have. It is ready for your future joy. It is ready for your sorrow. It is ready for your sin. And ready for your holiness.

And if the Lord gives you fifty years, may this Bible look very different from the one I am holding now. May the spine be worn from opening. May the pages be wrinkled within. May there be handwriting in the margins, dates beside promises, names beside prayers. Perhaps a verse underlined because God once met you there. We read this together when we thought we could not go on. And you did go on. Grace carried you.

This Book has every text you will ever need. And every word eventually gathers around Jesus Christ.

May God keep speaking. And by grace, may you keep listening.

On behalf of your church family and consistory,

Pastor J. Lewis

Isaiah 24-27 is sometimes called Isaiah’s “little Apocalypse.” These chapters widen the aperture from Judah’s more immediate troubles and pan out to see the wider judgment of God upon the great powers of the earth. In the midst of the shakings of this world, we read of the preservation of His people, which will end in final triumph. At the time of this writing, the Assyrian Empire dominated the Near East. Judah lived under a great shadow that seemed too strong to resist.

Chapter 24 is mostly a chapter of judgment. In chapter 25 musical notes begin to appear. Then in our chapter, we read:

> “In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah; We have a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks.”

This sets our text like a jewel in the diadem.

Sung by a people in the midst of trouble. An insignificant, minuscule nation. As worlds shake and cities fall, they shall sing.

What safety is there for the people of God in this troubled world?

Verse 3:  “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, 
whose mind is stayed on thee: 
because he trusteth in thee.”

What comes to mind when we read the words “perfect peace”?

We might think of perfect peace as some kind of oasis. A quiet, settled place. Where troubles are all over. When all is calm, and the skies are clear. Where every problem has been resolved, every question answered.

“There,” you might say, “there, I would have peace.”

Perfect peace.

But that is not the setting of the text, is it?

Neither is it the setting around our own little flock. Pitching our tents up against this Vanity Fair, we live in a nation of rancor and violence. We know that perfect peace is not always our present experience.

But take heart, dear one. Perfect peace is found amidst the shaking.

We mostly look for peace in all the wrong places. Or perhaps we expect to find perfect peace at the end of our troubles.

When my circumstances improve, then I will have it.

We say to ourselves:

I will have peace when this trial has passed.

I will have peace when my health improves.

I will find peace when my children are settled.

I will have peace once this relationship is fixed.

Most spend years anticipating peace, always looking at some future time.

But that is not the peace mentioned here.

That is not a kept peace at all.

That is a longing for peace.

Verse 3 is striking because what we translate “perfect peace”, the original is literally, shalom, shalom.

Double peace.

“Thou wilt keep him in shalom, shalom.”

This peace, dear one, begins with what God does.

He keeps.

The keeping power of God is how His own are kept.

This is important to understand because in the midst of trouble we often look inwardly at the strength or quality of our faith.

Why can’t I trust more?

Why does my mind wander so?

Why am I anxious again?

Why am I afraid?

Why can’t I control my own heart?

These are deeply soulish questions that emerge in the day of trouble.

We do need to take time for self-examination. Especially to discover that we have nothing in ourselves to trust or boast in.

At times you feel like you are holding on by your fingernails.

The truth is, the LORD is holding you, dear one.

We also read these words:

“whose mind is stayed on thee.”

What is the mind?

It is the disposition of the soul, the orientation of the soul. Your frame, purpose, inclination.

So the word “stayed” becomes a very important to this keeping.

It means the one whose inward frame is steadied upon God.

Like leaning against a stone wall.

Steadied.

The mind and heart are steadied in the midst of trouble by His Word and by the means of grace. He is kept by God in shalom, shalom because he leans upon Jehovah.

Now we almost have the full picture of this verse.

But it brings up one unspoken question.

When my soul is in trouble, where is my resting place?

We all rest on something.

Do you know when, where, and how we find out what we are resting on?

When we are troubled.

When we are undone, when our entire world around us collapses,, when life begins to shake, toward what does our soul reach?

Just here, we discover one of the more difficult ways the LORD loves His people.

He tries them.

Like Judah was tried.

Because in each one of us there are false peaces that we must be shaken from.

Judah had them. So do we.

Jeremiah warns that there is a cry of shalom, shalom when there is no shalom:

“Peace, peace; when there is no peace.”

There is a peace that comes from ignorance.

There is a peace that comes from distraction.

There is a deadness or leanness of soul which often feel like peace because sin has dulled the conscience.

But let the trial come.

And it will.

To a person, to a family, to a flock.

And suddenly the thing we leaned upon gives way.

What then?

Whatever it may be, Isaiah commands in verse 4:

“Trust ye in the LORD for ever: 
for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength.”

Everlasting strength.

Do you know what that is in the Hebrew?

I think you do, but perhaps you did not know you knew.

The Rock of Ages.

And our minds immediately go to Toplady:

“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.”

Christ is the Rock of Ages.

Stable. Sure.

Before we were born, He was God.

Before this nation existed, He was God.

“Before the mountains were brought forth...
 even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”

After everything of this earth has passed away, He will still be God.

David said:

“When my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”

Dear ones, that is where perfect peace is found.

Shalom, shalom is found in the Rock of Ages.

And the Rock of Ages was cleft for sinners.

The very One who cannot be shaken became the refuge of His people through His sufferings. The blood that flowed from His wounded side, answers the guilt that has made us seekers, but not finders to peace.

Do you hide yourself in Him?

Sin keeps us from peace with God.

And here we must distinguish carefully:

We must know peace with God before we can truly know the peace of God.

“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

What disturbs your peace tonight, dear one?

Christ said to His disciples:

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.”

And again:

“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”

The people who experience perfect peace experience it in the midst of trouble and uncertainty.

Under our own long shadows.

So, perfect peace can live alongside our tears.

It can live amidst unanswered questions.

Because underneath His people are His everlasting arms.

And underneath those everlasting arms is the Rock of Ages.

“Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength.”

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

If we mean to caution a fellow believer that a modern activity is unbiblical, we owe him more than an appeal to custom, or to our own discomfort with it. The testimony of the church across the centuries, fathered in the appendix to this paper, is old, deep, and unbroken. A consensus of that kind among the godly sends up an important cautionary flag. It is a historical witness. Scripture alone can bind the conscience. This paper asks a narrower question than weather dancing is wrong, right, or of things indifferent. It asks at its root, what does the Word of God say about it. Then it asks, do we have a duty as Christians to take into account the weaker brother when exercising Christian liberty? These are two fair questions to ask as we begin to see the encroachment of the dance upon the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I write as one who holds that it ought not be looked upon favorably. But I also write wanting the reasoning to be logical enough survive scrutiny, and warm enough that someone who disagrees, will recognize a pastor speaking to them not at them.

I. What Scripture Actually Says

The Old Testament’s description of dance consistently speaks of leaping and whirling bound up with exuberant, religious joy. Solomon speaks of “a time to dance” (Eccl. 3:4), and the New Testament has a similar expressions, as when the lame man healed at the temple gate went “leaping” (hallomai) and praising God (Acts 3:8). Both words belong to the same activity of someone given over entirely to gladness before the Lord.

Scripture primarily connects this leaping joy with worship and thanks for the great providences God has displayed. Miriam led the women of Israel in dance after the crossing of the sea (Exodus 15:20,21). David danced before the ark with all his might (2 Samuel 6:14). The women of the cities came out dancing and singing to celebrate David’s victory (1 Samuel 18:6,7). Who can forget the father of the prodigal marking his son’s return with music and dancing (Luke 15:25)? In each of these scriptural snapshots, dancing is an act of worship or of household gladness toward the goodness of God. Without exception, it was practiced by one sex at a time.

Strangely, no biblical passage records mixed dancing. Wherever dancing appears as entertainment, the “entertained” are never known for their godliness. Job lists it among the marks of the household that says to God, “Depart from us” (Job 21:11-14). Herodias daughter danced before his court, which lead to John’s decapitation (Matthew 14:6). At Sinai, the people rose up to play, and Moses came down from the mountain to find them dancing around a golden calf. Later, Paul will excise the passage and tie it to fornication! (Exod 32:19; 1 Cor. 10:7,8). A frivolous household, a lustful court, and an idolatrous camp. Not exactly a sparkling trio.

II. The Pattern’s Seven Conclusions

Read all the passages together, and we see seven emerging distinctions:

1. Dancing was a religious act, practiced by the godly and ungodly alike.

2. Among the godly, it functioned as an expression of spiritual joy for Divine mercy given.

3. Men danced with men, and women with women.

4. We have no instance of mixed dancing.

5. Where dancing focuses on entertainment, it was regarded as revelry.

6. When dancing was purely for amusement, it carried no association with God’s glory.

7. Scripture nowhere examples dancing as a form of entertainment practiced between the sexes.

Honestly recognized…a pattern emerges.

III. The Argument from Silence Answered

The discerning reader will ask if an argument built on silence can bear any real weight. Scripture’s silence about something is not a prohibition all by itself. If it were, we could forbid a great many customs never mentioned in it. So the case for mixed dancing being wrong should not rest on absence. It rests, or rather it should rest, on three lines of converging good and necessary consequences. Only one of which is an argument from silence.

First, the pattern itself contradicts neutrality. Every time we see dance as worship it is single-sexed. Other than that, it is recounted as belonging to worldly, idolatrous, or sinful company. That is a repeated moral pattern that needs to be looked at. When a pattern is repeated in the Bible, it makes sense to ask why.

Second, and more directly, the Bible does not leave the people unaddressed. The word rendered “rioting” in Romans 13:13 and “revellings” in Galatians 5:21 and 1 Peter 4:3 komos, the party-circles of the Hellenistic world.2 Paul does not condemn dancing by itself. He condemns the komos, where dancing was the recognized centerpiece. He does so in three separate epistles, listing it alongside drunkenness, chambering, and wantonness. This was the expression of the old life a believer had put off. Now, the gap between pattern and command is lessened. The impulse is called out and forbidden. Dancing was simply the vehicle.

Third, Exodus records a case that is paradigmatic. When Israel made the golden calf, “the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play” (Exodus 32:6), and what that “play” included was “the calf, and the dancing” (Exodus 32:19). Paul turns this historical event, and holds it up to the church at Corinth as a warning: “Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them... Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition” (1 Corinthians 10:7, 11). Scripture’s first extended narrative account of dancing outside the worship of the triune God is an ensample. that is, a warning.

Put all three of these strands together, and something closer to a precept appears. I do not think this proves that every conceivable form of mixed movement to music is, in itself and in every culture, wrong. I do think it proves that the specific practice (mixed social dancing as entertainment), is what Paul forbids. If this holds, the burden of proof shifts to those that disassociate the dancing from the scriptural data.

IV. Worldly Conformity

“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). The word translated “conformed”, syschematizo, has to do with rooting out the outward pattern, the schema, of the age. Next, is the exhortation to be “transformed” (metamorphoo), by a renewing of the whole inner disposition. The understanding, conscience, and will that moves the affections. Calvin’s comment on the verse:

The term world has several significations, but here it means the sentiments and the morals of men; to which, not without cause, he forbids us to conform. For since the whole world lies in wickedness, it behooveth us to put off whatever we have of the old man, if we would really put on Christ: and to remove all doubt, he explains what he means, by stating what is of a contrary nature; for he bids us to be transformed into a newness of mind.

— John Calvin, Commentary on Romans

Nowhere do we read the Scriptures condemning styles, traditions, or the ordinary aspects of civil life just because the world uses them. It is more narrow, condemning a mind and affections shaped by the culture. Given what the practice was made to do, enliven a party, stir up romantic affections between the sexes, following this performative element to its root, do we not uncover its purpose?

V. The Company We Keep

“For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries” (1 Peter 4:3). The word “lasciviousness”, aselgeia, conveys a lack of restraint, a wanton and unbridled desire of the flesh. Thayer defines it as unbridled lust manifesting in wanton acts and manners, including indecent bodily movement and the unchaste handling of one sex by the other.3 So, Peter is not inventing a new category of vice. He is identifying the clusters in Romans 13 and Galatians 5, revelling (komos) alongside excess of wine and abominable idolatries. This is the whole structure of pagan festivity the church had promised to renounced. If the dance floor fits this description, then a believer need not search for the word “dance” in the text, anymore than he needs to find the words insider trading, drunk driving, or identity theft.

III. The Argument from Silence Answered

The discerning reader will ask if an argument built on silence can bear any real weight. Scripture’s silence about something is not a prohibition all by itself. If it were, we could forbid a great many customs never mentioned in it. So the case for mixed dancing being wrong should not rest on absence. It rests, or rather it should rest, on three lines of converging good and necessary consequences. Only one of which is an argument from silence.

First, the pattern itself contradicts neutrality. Every time we see dance as worship it is single-sexed. Other than that, it is recounted as belonging to worldly, idolatrous, or sinful company. That is a repeated moral pattern that needs to be looked at. When a pattern is repeated in the Bible, it makes sense to ask why.

Second, and more directly, the Bible does not leave the people unaddressed. The word rendered “rioting” in Romans 13:13 and “revellings” in Galatians 5:21 and 1 Peter 4:3 komos, the party-circles of the Hellenistic world.2 Paul does not condemn dancing by itself. He condemns the komos, where dancing was the recognized centerpiece. He does so in three separate epistles, listing it alongside drunkenness, chambering, and wantonness. This was the expression of the old life a believer had put off. Now, the gap between pattern and command is lessened. The impulse is called out and forbidden. Dancing was simply the vehicle.

Third, Exodus records a case that is paradigmatic. When Israel made the golden calf, “the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play” (Exodus 32:6), and what that “play” included was “the calf, and the dancing” (Exodus 32:19). Paul turns this historical event, and holds it up to the church at Corinth as a warning: “Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them... Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition” (1 Corinthians 10:7, 11). Scripture’s first extended narrative account of dancing outside the worship of the triune God is an ensample. that is, a warning.

Put all three of these strands together, and something closer to a precept appears. I do not think this proves that every conceivable form of mixed movement to music is, in itself and in every culture, wrong. I do think it proves that the specific practice (mixed social dancing as entertainment), is what Paul forbids. If this holds, the burden of proof shifts to those that disassociate the dancing from the scriptural data.

IV. Worldly Conformity

“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). The word translated “conformed”, syschematizo, has to do with rooting out the outward pattern, the schema, of the age. Next, is the exhortation to be “transformed” (metamorphoo), by a renewing of the whole inner disposition. The understanding, conscience, and will that moves the affections. Calvin’s comment on the verse:

The term world has several significations, but here it means the sentiments and the morals of men; to which, not without cause, he forbids us to conform. For since the whole world lies in wickedness, it behooveth us to put off whatever we have of the old man, if we would really put on Christ: and to remove all doubt, he explains what he means, by stating what is of a contrary nature; for he bids us to be transformed into a newness of mind.

— John Calvin, Commentary on Romans

Nowhere do we read the Scriptures condemning styles, traditions, or the ordinary aspects of civil life just because the world uses them. It is more narrow, condemning a mind and affections shaped by the culture. Given what the practice was made to do, enliven a party, stir up romantic affections between the sexes, following this performative element to its root, do we not uncover its purpose?

V. The Company We Keep

“For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries” (1 Peter 4:3). The word “lasciviousness”, aselgeia, conveys a lack of restraint, a wanton and unbridled desire of the flesh. Thayer defines it as unbridled lust manifesting in wanton acts and manners, including indecent bodily movement and the unchaste handling of one sex by the other.3 So, Peter is not inventing a new category of vice. He is identifying the clusters in Romans 13 and Galatians 5, revelling (komos) alongside excess of wine and abominable idolatries. This is the whole structure of pagan festivity the church had promised to renounced. If the dance floor fits this description, then a believer need not search for the word “dance” in the text, anymore than he needs to find the words insider trading, drunk driving, or identity theft.

VI. What Does the World Say?

We should be satisfied to rest the case on Scripture alone. Yet it is worth noting that the world has never been shy about the underlying motive. Fred Astaire, speaking of his celebrated and comparatively tame dancing with Ginger Rogers, said openly that they “accomplished sex through dance”. The Encyclopedia Britannica’s section on the art of dance describes the end product of social dancing, across all time, as “physical pleasure in the activity of dancing and sexual awareness of a partner, whether embraced or half-consciously observed.”4 Collier’s Encyclopedia describes the social dance as, historically, the joint product of “physical exuberance and sex stimuli.”5 None of these sources write as a Puritan.

This is only corroboration, of course. A Christian does not need Fred Astaire’s point of view on social dancing. But when the world’s own definition matches the Bible’s (almost thought for thought), it should at minimum, cause us to reject the temptation to relegate the church’s position to old and crusty history.

Much of what prompts this question is the wedding reception itself in our modern age. Increasingly, a bride and groom are asked to consider hiring a DJ and opening a dance floor at some point in the evening. I want to say clearly that nothing in this paper is meant to cast doubt on the goodness of feasting, music, or bodily joy at a wedding. Scripture rejoices in weddings. The Song of Solomon is rather bold on a husband and wife’s delight in each other, and a wedding feast is Christ’s own picture of eternity (Revelation 19:7-9). Joy, music, and even movement belong at a wedding. The question is is what form? Is dancing the vehicle that our joy should take?

To any who remain unpersuaded, I would press one more point. Paul was willing to never eat meat again (a thing lawful in itself), rather than risk bruising the conscience of a brother (1 Corinthians 8:13). “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth” (Romans 14:21). Even the one who thinks this exegesis is more approximate certain, they should answer the deeper question of what is lost by declining this amusement? What can be done for the sake of the weaker brother? “Abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:22) is a cautionary step, when you don’t need certainty to see the potential danger.

None of this is said to shame those who, out of ignorance, have allowed mixed dancing. Neither do we place this question on the same footing as the articles of the faith. It is to point out the biblical data, along with the near-unanimous witness of the church across the two thousand years of her history.

Conclusion

What do we make of all this? None of this proceeds from a distaste for joy or for the body God made. It comes from taking seriously that the same Lord who commanded Miriam’s timbrel, also commanded His people to no longer live, “in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness” (Romans 13:13), and that these are not two different gods speaking, but One God over all, blessed forever.

Friend, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light” (Romans 13:12). “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Ephesians 5:11). Our Christian heritage wrote as they did on the subject of dancing with these texts open before them. But also with a deep love for the souls entrusted to them. May the Lord grant us the same humility to receive correction if we need it, and the same courage to give it when asked.

Notes

1. The relevant occurrences: Exodus 15:20–21; 32:19; Judges 11:34; 21:21, 23; 1 Samuel 18:6–7; 30:16; 2 Samuel 6:14, 16, 20–23; 1 Chronicles 15:29; Job 21:11; Psalm 30:11; 149:3; 150:4; Ecclesiastes 3:4; Isaiah 13:21; Jeremiah 31:4, 13; Lamentations 5:15; Matthew 11:17; 14:6; Mark 6:22; Luke 7:32; 15:25.

2. On komos as the technical term has an association with professional dancing, see the standard lexical treatment in Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament.

3. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament.

4. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The Art of Dance,” 1979 ed., vol. 5, 455–456.

5. Collier’s Encyclopedia, “Dance,” 1964 ed., vol. 7, 683.

Appendix: A Sampling of Historical Testimony

What follows is offered as corroborating witness only.

From “A Sermon on the Sinfulness of Dancing,” The National Preacher and Village Pulpit, 1867

Let not our youth and maidens deceive themselves. The social dance cannot make proper those motions of the body and that familiarity with the person which are universally condemned... In this view of the matter the Westminster divines placed dancing in the list of things forbidden by the seventh commandment. They understood its tendency and were not under the influence of foolish prudery.

A life of humble piety is a standing rebuke to sin; but is sin rebuked when piety is thus concealed? Let a church become addicted to this pastime. Let the pastor, elders, deacons, and all the members indulge in it, would she not be shorn of her strength and wholly paralyzed?

Thomas Watson

Take heed of mixed dancing. Dances are instruments of wantonness. From dancing, people come to dalliance with another, and from dalliance to uncleanness. ‘There is,’ says Calvin, ‘for the most part, some unchaste behavior in dancing.’ Dances draw the heart to folly by wanton gestures, by unchaste touches, and by lustful looks.

J. C. Ryle

Concerning dancing, or going to balls, I only ask Christians to judge the amusement by its tendencies and accomplishments... If dancing were taken up for mere exercise, if dancing took place at early hours, and men only danced with men, and women with women, it would be needless and absurd to object to it. But everybody knows that this is not what is meant by modern dancing.

Who would like to be found in a modern dance-hall when the Lord Jesus Christ comes the second time?

Wilhelmus à Brakel

Dancing has always been despised by the saints and held in contempt by civilized heathen. It neither proceeds from God nor is commanded anywhere; rather, it proceeds from the world and belongs to the lusts of the flesh and the lusts of the eyes (1 John 2:16), as well as to the unfruitful works of darkness (Ephesians 5:11).

Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 139

The sins forbidden in the seventh commandment... idleness, gluttony, drunkenness, unchaste company; lascivious songs, books, pictures, dancings, stage plays; and all other provocations to, or acts of, uncleanness, either in ourselves or others.

Thomas Boston

Promiscuous dancing, or dancing of men and women together. This entertainment, however reckoned innocent among many, is evidently an incentive to lust, Isaiah 23:15–17... It is offensive to the grave and pious, is condemned by our church, yea, and has been condemned by some sober heathens.

Chrysostom (4th century)

Where dancing is, there is the devil. For God did not give us our feet for this end, that we might demean ourselves indecently; but that we might walk decently... Dancing is the devil’s invention.

The Councils

The fifty-third canon of the Synod of Laodicea enacts: ‘Christians when coming to weddings must not caper or dance; but dine or sup decently as becomes Christian people.’ The eighth ecumenical council (in Trullo, A.D. 692) enacts: ‘We also forbid and expel all public dances of women, as producing much injury and ruin.’

The Scottish Assemblies

The Westminster Assembly’s Larger Catechism, Question 139, declares lascivious dancing and stage-plays breaches of the seventh commandment. The Scottish Assembly of 1649, ‘finding the scandal and abuse that arises through promiscuous dancing, do therefore inhibit and discharge the same.’ The Assembly of 1701 revived the same discipline.

Matthew Henry, on Judges 21

The dancing was very modest and chaste. It was not mixed dancing; no men danced with these daughters of Shiloh, nor did any married women so far forget their gravity as to join with them.

R. L. Dabney

The Scripture has virtually included the modern dance in an express prohibition in three places, Romans 13:13, Galatians 5:21, 1 Peter 4:3, where it sternly inhibits the komos of the heathen... The dancing of females with males for social amusement would have been regarded as an act so inconsistent with decency that an instance can scarcely be heard of in reputable society.

Commanded Lovingkindness

“Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.” (Psalm 42:8)

My dear congregation,

The week of panting ends in daylight. Psalm forty-two has been night work almost the whole way: tears for meat day and night, the deeps calling to one another, the cast-down soul taken in hand on Saturday evening. Then comes verse eight, the one verse in the psalm where the storm calms, and it belongs to this morning.

Weigh that word command before you come to the table. Lovingkindness is under strict orders. We speak as if mercy drifts, only settling where the weather is good. The psalmist knows better. Mercy in this verse is a servant, commissioned and sent out under authority. It has many names on its list. The centurion understood the grammar: I say to this man, Go, and he goeth (Matthew 8:9). When the LORD commands His lovingkindness, it will arrive.

And He has commanded at a table before. When Israel sneered, Can God furnish a table in the wilderness, the answer came in this same verb: he had commanded the clouds from above, and had rained down manna upon them to eat (Psalm 78:23–24). The bread and the cup before you stand here in that kind of ordering. Lovingkindness was commanded to this house, to this hour, to your seat. The hart that has panted all week finds the brook this morning.

Then the verse looks past sunset: and in the night his song shall be with me. The communicant goes home with a tune assigned for the night watches. The mercy of the daytime becomes the song of the night. Praise Him, dear one. All of it flows to the closing name, the sweetest in the psalm: my prayer unto the God of my life. After the tears, the taunts, and the billows, the possessive comes home once more. Come, and eat, and take the song with you into the night.

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

Preaching to Your Own Soul

“Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.” (Psalm 42:5)

Twice in this psalm, and a third time in the psalm that follows it, the writer stops everything and turns in on himself. He has been listening to his soul all day, its sighing, its arguments, its taunts, from both the flesh and the enemy. Now he stands up and enters the pulpit of his heart: Why art thou cast down, O my soul? Experimental preaching to a congregation of one.

It is Saturday evening, and there may be no better work in all the week than this: stop listening to your soul for a while, and preach to it.

Follow the psalmist’s outline. He begins with a question, so the soul might answer it. “Why?” On what grounds, exactly. Interrogated souls have a way of melting under question. Dejection in the dark is arrogant, with a swelling rage that fills the heart. Is that you tonight? Then sit your Saturday-night heavinesses in the pew, and make them give you reasons. Say to them, out loud, why? Most of that congregation will dissolve under Christ-centered examination. And the ones that remain, the real ones, the sin, the loss, the longing, the trial, every one of them has an answer lodged in the wounds of Christ. Do you not know, dear one? His sufficiency will be spread out before you in the morning.

Then comes the application: hope thou in God! He commands his soul as a master commands a ship. The child of God is at complete liberty to give his soul gospel orders, and see them carried out. And then comes the doxology of faith: I shall yet praise him. That word yet is the bravest little word in all the Psalter. The sky shows nothing this evening. Well, faith writes praise into the forecast, because faith reads the promise, in spite of the circumstances. Take the word yet to bed with you. Whatever this season has been, however the week of preparation has gone, bitter or sweet, shallow or full: I shall yet praise him.

And now a little gem kept for the last evening of the week. Set the two refrains side by side. Verse five hopes in God “for the help of his countenance.” Verse eleven, the same refrain ends, saying “who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” Help crossed the distance and became health. The light traveled from God’s countenance to the psalmist’s face. He began by looking to God for help, and by the end, help had reached him and changed his countenance, and the possessive came home to his heart: and my God. That is what beholding Christ does. “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Tomorrow that countenance will be lifted upon you at His table, according to the old blessing: “the LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace” (Numbers 6:26). Dear one, sit where the light can reach you. Communicants have been known by their faces on sacrament eve. Moses came down from the mount not knowing that his face shone. So end the week as the psalm ends. Preach hope to your cast-down soul, command it to look up. Go to sleep with the last two words of the refrain on your lips, because by tomorrow night, God willing, you will say from experience: my God.

The streams are very near now.

Your friend and pastor,
J. Lewis

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Deep Calleth unto Deep

“Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” (Psalm 42:7)

Verse six tells us where the author is. In the land of Jordan and of the Hermonites, the headwaters country in the far north, where the snowmelt comes off Hermon in falls, into gorges of rushing water. The psalmist stands in that water’s quarrel, and it reminds him of his present life. Flood answering flood. One trouble arguing with the next for supremacy. Some of you know those acoustics. Sorrows rarely come alone. Are there not days when the depths seem to be talking over you, arranging over your next grief?

Now find the comfort in the pronoun. All thy waves and thy billows. These waves have a source, a Name. Heaven has sent them. The psalmist looks above the flood and says these waves, I know. Nameless waves are a terror, but His waves are appointed, counted, weighed, and timed. In a sense they are servants on errands, servants that cease when the errand is done. Read the verb with thanks too: gone over me. Over, and gone, our troubles roll. The waves pass, dear one, the waters calm, even when you cannot believe it. Every believer’s billow has a nether side. He has already brought you out of many. He will not abandon you now.

Think also of who wrote this. The title of the psalm is part of its comfort: for the sons of Korah. Their father went down alive into the deep. The earth opened her mouth and swallowed him up in his rebellion, and then closed over him (Numbers 16:32-33). Scripture adds one precious side note of sovereign mercy: “Notwithstanding the children of Korah died not” (Numbers 26:11). Their line did not end at the pit. Generations on, the sons of that swallowed rebel were standing at the very altar he had tried to seize by force. And God had made them singers there. The children of the man the earth devoured became a choir of praise, kept at the door of the house from age to age. Only grace writes family histories like that. So when the sons of Korah sing about the deep, they sing as men whose whole generation was pulled back from its edge, and set to praising where their father fell.

Centuries later a runaway prophet prayed this psalm from the strangest closet in history: “all thy billows and thy waves passed over me” (Jonah 2:3). Jonah had Psalm forty-two by heart in the belly of the fish. And it held him. Dear one, encompassed in the dark, a greater than Jonas is here. Jesus took the verse all the way down. At the cross numberless waves went over Him. “I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me” (Psalm 69:2). There the deep of our guilt called unto the depths of His mercy, and mercy answered in the loudest Voice, and the floods that should drown us all, passed forever over our Redeemer instead.

So here is Friday’s preparation, with the table now in view. Bring your deeps with you. The shallow soul brings shallow needs and carries away shallow comforts, but the deep bring their deeps. This table was furnished for the drowned pulled to shore, and Everlasting Arms have been under your waves. Deep will call unto deep across that linen on the Lord’s Day. The deep of your need to the deep of His fulness.

His deep is deeper still.

Your friend and pastor,
J. Lewis

I Went with the Multitude

“When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday.” (Psalm 42:4)

The psalmist remembers. Far north in the land of Jordan, within earshot of Hermon’s floods, shut away from the sanctuary, he closes his eyes and walks the old road. He recalls the singing procession going up, the congregation thickening as he goes up the hill, the psalms growing louder as the LORD’s house comes into view. I had gone with the multitude. I went with them to the house of God. And that memory grips him. When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me.

There is a use of memory in preparation, and Thursday is a good day for it. Go back tonight to your own first Lord’s table you ever sat at, and how you got there. How, perhaps, your hands trembled. How your eyes were watered. That first communion season when the Word found you out. When your cold heart caught fire without warning. God Himself keeps such anniversaries over His people: “I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness” (Jeremiah 2:2). If He has not forgotten the day of your espousals, it ill becomes us to lose the memory.

Because to the soul that has wandered since, memory is more than the good old days. It’s a kind of road home, with the father waiting, and his feast of love prepared. The counsel of the risen Christ to the fallen in heart was: “remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works” (Revelation 2:5). The prodigal came to himself in the far country, how? By remembering the abundance of bread in his father’s house. And that memory carried him all the way home. If this communion season has awoken an old memory that shames the present, follow the memory home. The table this Lord’s Day receives returning rememberers.

Notice too, with whom he went: with the multitude. We have to admit that part of the sweetness in memory is the company that we enjoyed it with. He never once went to the house of God alone. And neither have you. Your pew has shoulders next to yours. The psalm rises best in a chorus, than ever by yourself. Because God has bound up the joy of His worship within the communion of saints. And just now, some of you are remembering the many of our number, now gone. There is a voice missing in our chorus, a hand held long, along this road. When you sit at the table Sabbath morning, remember that the communion of saints has an upper and lower part. Our table is in the lower end of the banqueting hall whose far end is out of sight, with a veil in between. They kept holyday with you once. They will keep the Eternal Day with you, world without end. Not long now, and all the elect will be behind that holy veil.

A holyday is coming. Three days from now you will, Lord willing, rise, dressed for a wedding, and go with a multitude (small as we are), to the house of God. And there, the thing your exiled, thirsty soul longs for, will freely be given to you. Do everything this week except take it for granted.

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

Tears for Meat

“My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?” (Psalm 42:3)

Here is a strange diet. Meat in the old tongue meant food, and the psalmist says he has been living on tears like others live on bread. Day and night. Tears at appointed mealtimes, and tears in between. Some of you know the menu well. There are times when sorrow is served three-square, and you sit down to it because it’s all you have.

And over the exotic meal comes the old taunt: where is thy God? Does it come from within or without? The enemy has always asked afflicted believer this, with a particular satisfaction in it that it troubles them. If your God is so real, why this, why now, why you? Jesus’ enemies asked it in its most potent form at Golgotha: “He trusted in God; let him deliver him now” (Matthew 27:43). But it comes from within too. Which is worse. Unbelief will speak to your conscience at two in the morning, in your voice. And the question is never better asked, and knows no better time to ask, then over a weeping saint. Where is He, then? You prayed. You waited. Where is thy God?

But look closely, the answer is hiding in plain sight. Notice these tears have a direction. The psalmist weeps toward a face; the whole psalm is spoken to the very God he is taunted about. Grief without God falls in many directions. This man’s grief fell somewhere precious, and he knew it: “put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” (Psalm 56:8). God keeps the tears of His people the way vintners keep wine. Personally known; remembered, bottled, labeled year by year. And not one drop has reached the ground. The mocker asks where is your God. The direction of your weeping answers, near enough to catch them all.

Yet look at what the tears did for him. They were his very food. They kept him alive until better fare came. Dear one, there is a kind of sorrow that starves the soul, the sorrow of the world that worketh death (2 Cor. 7:10). All bitter and no sustenance. And there is a sorrow that nourishes: grief over sin, longing after an absent God, the missing of love toward Christ at a time you can’t quite describe. Many a soul has lived on that diet. But only for a time. Until the good manna falls. If your preparation week seems to be more lament than loveliness, take heart; you are dining on psalmist food. And it carried him to the sanctuary.

Then remember who else ate at this table. He offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears (Hebrews 5:7). He wept at a grave in Bethany and over a city that would kill Him. Your Host this coming Lord’s Day knows the taste of tears for food, and He has pledged Himself to the mourners: “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). Tears for food for now. Bread and wine on Sunday.

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

For the Living God

“My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?” (Psalm 42:2)

The psalmist seems to love saying His name. My soul thirsteth for God. And then, as if his first words were too small for the parch, he retraces it...for the living God. He will not be religiously ambiguous. And in those words, he gives us the third day’s examination, because the great rivals of the living God are, in fact, our broken cisterns.

Jeremiah drew the picture: “they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). A fountain rises of itself. Fresh every moment, fed from depths unknown. A cistern is what man makes from clay to carry a little water in. It’s small, it contaminates, degrades and stales. And sooner or later every one of them will break. Intellect is a type of cistern for many. Better educated, higher IQ, etc. Looks, money, reputation, are gilded bright, but broken cisterns. Health, strength, the little kingdom of our plans, family, retirement: broken cisterns all. Yes, some of them are lawful to sip from. None of them able to slake a soul. The question for Tuesday night is, where have I been drinking from? A man’s thirst always knows the path to his favorite well. Trace the path of your desires, and you will find out where you’ve been drinking.

Then the second half of the verse. Here, thirst somehow turns into homesickness: when shall I come and appear before God? That is actually festive language in Hebrew. Three times in the year Israel went up to appear before the Lord on a festal day (Exodus 34:23). This man, exiled far to the north, is counting time. And he’s doing so by counting the days it would take to get there. He measures his time by distance. Let me ask you a practical question: do you love the Lord’s Day? In the early church, days were never counted by Greek god’s names (Sun, Mon, Tues, Wed…). They counted from Lord’s Day to Lord’s Day. Monday, first day after the Lord’s Day. Then two days after the Lords Day, and so on. Do you love the Lord’s Day? Does the day mark your week? Do you look forward to the means of grace? How thirsty, really, are you for Him? There’s a mark of grace worth searching for. What is the coming Sabbath to you, right now? An appointment your soul leans toward, or leans from? The psalmist could think of nothing sweeter than what we are now five days away from. Ask for this desire to be increased.

And a word for the providentially hindered, because this psalm was written by one. A few of us long for the table and cannot be sure our health, or circumstances, will allow it. Remember then, that the man who gave the church this verse, was himself providentially hindered when he wrote it. His words have helped the people of God for three thousand years. Where the feet are bound, God reads the appetite as attendance. The desire itself rises as worship, and He has never despised it.

Last of all, remember what awaits us. The living God spreads a living table, before a living church, for living life. Remember, the One set forth there in bread and wine “was dead, and is alive for evermore, and hath the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18). Living water, living bread, a living High Priest with a living intercession. Cisterns hold no such thing.

Drink accordingly.

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

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The Panting Hart

“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” (Psalm 42:1)

My dear flock,

The hart in this verse has a tiresome past. You can hear it in her breathing. And she pants for one of two reasons: either a drought has dried up the stream, or the dogs have been chasing her since dawn. Either way, the thirst was created mile by weary mile. Under inspiration, when the sons of Korah, wanted to capture an image of a soul’s desire after God, they thought on a deer, pictured in her exhaustion. Sides heaving, legs trembling, nose stretched in the direction of refreshment she can smell, but can not see.

Our week of preparation begins with noticing our breathing. Simple breathing. We rush strait way to questions of worthiness, and self-examination. But there is a better approach. Everything else this week can build on it: what does your soul pant for, dear one? Every soul pants in some direction. The past will show you if you look closely. Dear one, notice your daily breathings. What troubles you. What consumes you? What has exhausted you? Notice in what direction your breathlessness lies. It’s the most honest assessment you will make all week.

Now, notice the object in this verse: so panteth my soul after thee, O God. Panting after Thee. Did you know there can be a thirst for the things of God that never once touches Him? A soul may even thirst for the table itself, the elements, the reflection, the beauty of the act, and never thirst for the ‘Thee’. Remember, the deer wants nothing from the brook except the brook. She would ignore a painting of a stream, nor drink form a memory. Preparation is the slow work of moving up from the thought of Christ’s table, to His face. That’s the refreshment of our text, the ‘Thee’.

Here is one comfort for the shy soul drawn from the image. What is panting? It is proof of life! How much, or how hard is not the point right now. If there is in you this week so much as a shallow sigh after Jesus, even a wishing that you thirsted more, that is in the smallest way, a panting after Him. May it grow this week.

One thing more before you go to sleep. There is another hunted deer in the psalm of the cross, Psalm twenty-two. It has a very odd title: upon Aijeleth Shahar, the hind of the morning. The old writers saw Jesus in this title, and I think they saw rightly. Because our Savior was a deer at first light (as it were), run all day by the feral hounds of hell. Verse sixteen says, “dogs have compassed me”. Indeed our Lord was hunted from Nazareth, to Judea, to Samaria, to Gethsemane, to Gabbatha, and at last, to Golgotha. At the end of the running He cried “I thirst!”, “my tongue cleaveth to my jaws” (v.15). The Hind of the Morning panted, so that our panting hearts might know the way, drink deeply, and live. Whatever else this week has in store, it holds a fountain open for sin and uncleanness at its end.

“Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37).

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

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“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” (Psalm 42:1)

A week of preparation opens before us, and the Lord’s table, we pray, waits at its end. Before we ask whether we are fit to come, the psalm asks something else: what does your soul thirst after? The hart (deer) in this verse has a history, and you can hear it in her breathing. Either the dry season has emptied the brooks, or the hounds have run her since dawn. She stands at the end of her strength, reaching toward water she can smell and cannot yet see. That is the creature the sons of Korah chose to picture this holy desire.

Every soul thirsts, and to one degree or another, this week will show you what. Watch where your mind runs when your work sets it free. Watch what your hand reaches for when the house grows quiet. There is your panting, silent as it is. Then look at the object of the psalmist’s thirst: so panteth my soul after thee, O God. A man may thirst for the old days. He may thirst for the sweet frames of past communions. He may even thirst for the season itself, full of reflection and solemnity. All this, and never once thirst for the Water. The hart wants nothing else from the brook, except the brook.

Take one thought into the week before you. This is a thirst only the living have. The dead pant after nothing. If there stirs in you this week an longing beneath the cold, even if it is a longing to long, it didn’t rise of itself. Grace plants every desire it afterward satisfies, and He has never yet required any soul to reach the brook already refreshed.

May you come to these meditations panting. Or perhaps, a panting to pant after Christ. Six mornings lie between us and the table. May they be thirsty.

The brooks is coming nearer now, opened for the parched by a nails and a spear.

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

Next: The Panting Hart

Farewel happy Fields, where Joy for ever dwells:

Hail horrours, hail infernal world,

and thou profoundest Hell receive thy new Possessor.

Milton places those words in the mouth of the fallen archangel, lying on the burning lake with his legions around him, “thunder-struck and astonished,” the light of heaven fading on him even as the darkness closes in. It is one of the most stunning moments in English prose. Milton had studied the subject deeply and put into words what the rest of us could not. These were not always monsters. They were, as he says elsewhere, “the flower of Heaven,” the brightest of God’s creatures, beautiful beyond description, standing nearest the throne, the first to behold the glory of God.¹

And then they fell.

In the full weight of that word. A catastrophic, irreversible plunge from the highest dignity, into an estate from which there is no recovery, no repentance, no Mediator to undo what was done. Whatever else we say about the fall of the angels, we need to feel the staggering distance between what they were and what they are now.

———

We have already established, earlier in this series, what the angels are. They are the first creatures, made on the first day, before the sun and stars existed, “Let there be light.” They are the host of heaven, ordered and ranked, created by the will of God before He ever spoke of man. They are senior to us in every way a creature can be senior to another: created first, possessed of greater knowledge, greater power, a nature unencumbered by three-dimensional space and time, standing in direct apprehension of the glory of God. Whatever majesty we ascribe to the unfallen angels who remain, we must understand that the ones who fell once had that same majesty. Satan did not begin as a monster. He began as one of the most glorious beings God ever made.

The underlying question remains. What could move a creature of that intelligence and majesty, standing in the very presence of an all-wise and all-good God, to rebel against Him?

Augustine’s answer is pride. Superbia. The will, capable of standing, choosing instead to exalt itself, to love itself rather than God, to prefer its own glory to the glory of the One who made them. This is correct as far as it goes, and it is without question the root explanation. But pride has an occasion. A creature does not simply decide, for no reason, to hate his Maker. Something was shown to him, something was commanded of him, some purpose of God was disclosed, and in that disclosure, pride found its provocation, and broke into open rebellion.2

Many have been told that Satan wanted absolute supremacy. That he became jealous of his Maker and wanted to take His place. This is a stretch. It imports into the event a heavenly competition between two nearly equal powers, which is neither good theology nor good exegesis. Satan knew perfectly well that he was a mere speck before the Triune God. However glorious he was, even he hid his face before that glory. Augustine diagnoses it differently. He proposes that it was Satan’s ambition to become like God, a refusal to remain a creature. That is a more defensible reading, and better than the popular one.

Increase Mather offers a possibility that deserves serious attention. He passes over it rather quickly, but the weight of it is considerable. He suggests that the occasion of the fall was the disclosure to the angels of God’s purpose for man: specifically, that they would be ministering spirits to this small, flesh-bound creature, and that this creature, by every heavenly standard the weaker, would be made after the very image of God Himself. The purpose of all creation, heaven and earth together, belonged to this little race. The angels, senior, glorious, mighty and wonderful, the first creation by every measure, were shown that the inferior race, made of dust, formed last, lower than themselves in every created respect, would be the race the eternal Son would join to His own Person. And the angelic host, for all its dignity, would be appointed to serve them. “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14).3

What they were not shown was the full mystery. Paul tells us that “none of the princes of this world knew” the hidden wisdom of God, for “had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). The demonic powers did not understand what the cross would accomplish. They saw the Son take flesh. They did not see what that flesh, dead and raised, would mean for the race they despised and for themselves. They moved Judas. They moved Pilate. They moved the crowd. And in doing so, they walked straight into their own trap. The revelation that provoked their pride was real. The mystery that sealed their doom was hidden from them. Until it was too late.4

For a creature already capable of pride, that revelation is unbearable. Servanthood to an inferior race, chosen by God, is the precise wound that pride cannot handle. Mather’s thoughts on the fall are most helpful here.

———

Lest we make more of this than we should, Scripture does not recount the fall of the angels. It simply affirms it. Jude tells us they “kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation” (Jude 6). Peter tells us God cast them down and delivered them into chains of darkness (2 Peter 2:4). Many other passages drop secondary hints about their condition. But the event itself, the exact reason of the temptation, the timing relative to the six days, none of this is given to us directly, nor does the silence bear any eternal weight. Mather is reasoning. He is doing what good theologians do with the data Scripture gives: following the implications of what is revealed into territory Scripture leaves blank, while being honest that this is exactly what he is doing. So am I, I suppose. But we have such a low grade understanding regarding these things that a bit of corrective thought might be helpful.5

Now follow the implication for a moment, because if Mather is right, it explains things that are otherwise difficult to account for.

It explains, for instance, the particular character of the enmity. The demonic hatred of mankind is personal, sustained, and aimed with peculiar intensity at the very things that mark humanity as the object of God’s special purpose. The serpent does not simply try to kill Adam and Eve outright. He is far too intelligent for that. He attacks the image of God in them, which results in the death of body and soul. If Mather’s thought is correct, the fall of the angels and the ruin of mankind are connected at the root. The angels’ rebellion was provoked, at least in part, by God’s intention for man.

It explains why we are never told the angels who fell are offered redemption. Hebrews is explicit, and startling once it lands: Christ “took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16). There was no plan of redemption for the angels who sinned, because the entire economy of redemption was, from before the foundation of the world, fitted to mankind only. We have a Mediator who shares our nature. They have none who shares theirs. We were given a reprieve purchased at infinite cost. They were given nothing. No provision was made for their kind of creature. They sinned once, and the judgment fell at once and finally.6

It explains what Satan and his host hate most about us. We bear the image of God and carry His own breath (Genesis 2:7). God never breathed into angels. That distinction cuts deeply. Angels were first. They are more beautiful, more powerful, more brilliant, exceeding mankind in every natural way. But they do not carry His breath. We do. Our souls do. And if Mather’s idea holds, the fallen angels understood, from the very moment of their rebellion, that this lesser creature, this race of red dust, was being given something they themselves were never given: the image of the very God they were rejecting (Genesis 1:26–27). The separation of light from darkness on the first day may well mark the very moment the lines were drawn in heaven.7

It explains, perhaps most movingly, the peculiar grief that must have attended the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

When Satan stood before the incarnate Son, he was testing the creature part of Him. But he was also standing face to face with his Creator, and with the very purpose he had once rebelled against. The kingdoms he offered Christ were offered in full knowledge that this was the race he had refused to serve, the flesh he had despised, when he first heard of it in heaven. Every word out of his mouth stunk of the bitterness of a being who had surrendered everything, glory, blessedness, habitation, estate, rather than bow before the One he was now looking at in flesh he despised.

Let me offer you a thought on what that bitterness was made of. Satan was not created bitter. Created in the light of God, he was made for felicity, oriented by nature toward the good. What the fall did was corrupt it. And this is the thing that popular treatments of Satan almost always miss: the opposite of love is not hate. It is pride. Hate is the fruit of pride. Pride is love rotting inward, the will curving back upon itself, refusing to move outward toward God and toward the other. What comes out the other side of that inward rot is a hot, ancient, purposeful bile that we call hatred. Luther saw this. He described the condition of fallen man as the soul turned in upon itself (incurvatus in se), and what he said of man is likely true of the angels. The same energy made for worship, when turned inward by pride, sours. It curdles. It becomes the most concentrated toxin the universe has ever known.8

Satan is a creature in whom love has been rotting for millennia, and getting worse. Every assault the demonic host has ever made upon the human race, elect or reprobate, flows from that source: pride that became hatred, hatred that has had all of history to deepen, in a creature who knows, with the full clarity of an angelic mind, exactly what he lost and exactly why he lost it.

———

This brings us to a question that troubles many sincere believers, and we will pass through it directly.

Genesis 6 tells us that “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” Many readers, ancient and modern, have taken “the sons of God” to mean fallen angels conjoining with human women and producing the Nephilim, a race of giants, before the Flood. The reading has real antiquity behind it, present in some Second Temple Jewish literature and early patristic sources. It is not invented out of nothing.9

But it cannot be right. Wilhelmus à Brakel states the reason with characteristic clarity in his treatment of angels in The Christian’s Reasonable Service. Angels cannot reproduce. That simple. They have no bodies. No biological apparatus. They were not endowed with the capacity for procreation, because they are spirits. Christ himself says as much when the Sadducees question him about the resurrection: in the resurrection, the redeemed “neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). The point of that comparison only works if angels, as a matter of their fixed nature, do not marry and do not generate offspring. Whatever the sons of God in Genesis 6 were, dynastic rulers exalting themselves to divine status, or as I believe, the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the corrupted line of Cain, they were not angels fathering giant men with human women.10

There is a deeper reason to reject it, and it follows directly from everything Mather’s thought has shown us. If the angels fell once, decisively, in a single rebellion on day one, there is no room in that account for a second fall. A second rebellion centuries later, brought on by an entirely different temptation, lust for human women rather than contempt for God’s purposes, would mean the angels fell twice, for two unrelated reasons, at two different points in history. That is not what Jude or Peter describe. Both speak of a single, completed apostasy, angels who “kept not their first estate,” already “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6). The fall was total and final at its first occurrence. The Nephilim of Genesis 6 remain a difficult text. But they are not evidence of angels behaving as men, and whatever explanation they require, it is not one that demands a second angelic fall.11

———

What remains, after all of this, is a picture far more sobering than the cartoon devil of fork-tail and red horn fame.

The demonic host arrayed against us is the wreckage of the most glorious creatures God ever made. They were offered no reprieve. They bear no image of God. They carry His breath in no sense whatsoever. And to crown their misery, they watched the Word become flesh, not as an angel, but as the seed of Abraham, and they have hated that above all else. They have exchanged everlasting glory for everlasting darkness, and they know, every day, without the mercy of forgetting, exactly what they lost.

No wonder Peter tells us to be sober and vigilant. Our adversary, once the flower of heaven, walks about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8). He does not hunt us out of mindless instinct. He hunts the race that took the place he would not stoop to occupy.12

———

Now, what should all of this do in the child of God?

It should produce a sober and settled realism. The world is not what the news says it is, a stage for political theater or economic forces doing battle for supremacy. It is a contested place, yes, but a contest older than Eden. The demonic host that moves against you is older, smarter, far more powerful, and personally invested in your ruin. It hates you with a hatred that has been curdling since before you were born.

It should also produce a piercing gratitude. You have what they do not. You bear the image of God. You carry His breath. You have a Mediator who shares your nature, who took not the nature of angels but the seed of Abraham, and who went to a cross the principalities did not understand until it was too late. They sinned once and heard the door close forever. You have sinned ten thousand times, and the door is still open, because the Son became what you are so that you might become what He is. If that does not break something in you, nothing will.13

It should produce vigilance without obsession. Peter does not tell us to study the devil. He tells us to be sober and watchful, and then points us straight back to God: “the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you” (1 Peter 5:10). The answer to a roaring lion is not to spend your life analyzing his roar. It is to know who holds the chain around his neck.14

And it should produce wonder at the mercy of God. That He looked upon this frail, dust-born, breath-sustained race, this junior creature that the angels thought beneath them, and set His love upon it from before the foundation of the world. That the fall of the highest creatures He ever made did not alter His purpose for the lowest. That out of the wreckage of that first catastrophe before history, God was already moving toward a cross. The angels who fell despise grace. You are its recipient. Do not treat that lightly. Do not treat that casually. It cost more than we can possibly imagine.

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Next: The Elect Angels — Their Vocation and Their Joy

Notes

Welcome back.

The division of light and darkness on the first day seems to prefigure a basic division that runs through all of creation and scripture. Light representing all things good, the elect angels, those who remained steadfast in their worship of God, who have kept their first estate by the power of God. Light also representing those who have been redeemed from destruction, and taken from darkness into His most marvelous light. Darkness representing fallen angels, those who did not keep their first estate, turned from God, were lifted up in pride, who chose themselves instead of their Creator.14 Chiefly among them stands Satan, the prince of “the rulers of the darkness of this world” (Eph. 6:12). Darkness also representing those reprobate sons and daughters of Adam, who loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil (John 3:19). The decree of which, belongs to the eternal counsel of God; but the historical fall belongs to the fallen. Light was separated from darkness. It is not lost on me that this distinction between darkness and light is present from the opening moment. It seems to be written into the very element of natural and spiritual things.

The visible creation is good. The sun, the stars, the earth, the seas, all came from the hand of God and bore His own verdict: “it was good.” Yet the first distinction in creation was light from darkness. Before land was parted from sea, before the starry lights were set in their courses, God divided all light from darkness. That division becomes, in time, a prophetic emblem of another division within the invisible creation. The angels were made good, yet mutable. From the first moment of their creaturely beginning, they stood upheld by God, capable of continuing in holy obedience, yet capable also of falling by proud rebellion. Many kept their first estate. Others left their own habitation and became spiritual and intellectual depravity. Thanks be to God, their fall did not corrupt the whole race as Adam’s fall corrupted ours. Heaven, therefore, was struck, but not wounded. The elect angels at this very moment, still shine in radiant obedience before the throne. They are presently ascending and descending to earth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation. The fallen angels rage beneath judgment, bending all their malice against God, His Christ, His church, and His providence. One day, eternity itself will display this separation forever: light forever with God in Christ, and darkness under wrath; the holy angels serving the redeemed, and demons shut up at last in utter darkness Who, along with the reprobate are cast “into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41).

To say that the angels were created as light, on the first day, is at least a reasonable venture. I think it says something quite clear about the structure of reality. The invisible world precedes the visible. The spiritual world encompasses the physical world, all within God’s created order. We live in a world which was likely shaped in the presence of Angels, for purposes that will involve them deeply. Scientists ask, “Are we alone in the universe?” No. We are fellow creatures in a universe populated by untold millions upon millions of intelligent creatures, vastly superior to us in power and knowledge, created before us, and witnesses of the purposes of God.

To say we understand this is pure foolishness. To try to understand this is soul medicine. Perhaps if I thought on this more, I would glorify God more.

What if to understand our own place in this world better, we would first understand something of the place the angels keep? (unfallen and fallen). I clearly see now that we are ‘the juniors’ of creation week. We are the later creature, made in the image of God, yes, but also made a little lower than the angels15. How will we ever judge the angels!? (1 Cor. 6:3). I can only believe that by faith. We entered into a world already inhabited by beautiful spiritual beings who had known and loved God before Adam walked with God in the cool of the day. Perhaps if we can recover this understanding, if we can see the world as it actually is, populated right now by angels, ordered according to the wisdom of God, structured from the beginning around the division between light and darkness. Perhaps then we will begin to understand what it means to live as children of God in a universe that is far larger, far more populated, and far deeper than the naturalistic world we have learned in school. I’ve wept over the beauty of a river at sunset. Now I’ve wept over creation’s first day. There is more beauty to see in God than we could possibly fathom, if we would but meditate on his Word.

On this reading, part of the light that God spoke into existence on the first day was likely personal: rational, holy, majestic, beautiful, powerful, responsible creatures, who would stand in his presence and behold his glory. So, no, we are not alone in this universe.

Now, what should this do in the child of God? I fear that for many, this is all just interesting trivia. If that is all I’ve done is awaken your curiosity, then I have miserably failed in my attempt.

It should produce reverence. God is unfathomably deep. He is holy, holy, holy. We live before the LORD in a creation far larger than our telescopes. The universe is not empty space filled with matter and dark matter. It is the workmanship of the living God. It is full of life. If angels stood at the beginning, if they watched the heavens stretched out and the earth complete, if they in fact rejoiced when God laid the foundations of the world (as Job says), then creation is far more majestic than we have been led to believe. Only the child of God can see any of these things. And even then, it is just a beginning.

It should also produce a greater degree of humility. We are not the first creature, or the strongest, or the smartest, or the most beautiful, or the most ancient. We are dust with breath. We are latecomers (as it were) into a world already filled with the praise of God. But this shouldn’t degrade us either, because the same Scripture that says we are made a little lower than the angels also says that we are crowned with glory and honor (Psalm 8:5; cf. Hebrews 2:7,9). And more unfathomable still, the Triune God showed fallen angels no mercy. No, the Son did not take on the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham (Heb. 2:16). The angels are older, stronger, and brighter; yet Christ became the Son of man, died for men, rose for men, and is gathering a bride into fellowship with him.

It should defiantly produce more alertness. If this division between light and darkness on day one is accurate, then Earth’s ground is not neutral. I am constantly guilty of looking at this world through natural eyes. But Satan is busy. He is behind the machine of this world, pulling whatever lever he can for evil. Our fellow creatures are not innocent bystanders. They are participants, as was I. “Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2). There are intelligences in the unseen world that hate God, hate Christ, hate the church, and hate the image of God in mankind. They hate us because they see in us the imprint of their own Creator. Therefore, “Be vigilant,” Peter says, “because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet. 5:8).

It should also produce comfort in ordinary providence. Let’s stop thinking of holy angels as spiritual butlers. They are ministers. They are “sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation” (Heb. 1:4). They serve at the command of God. They do not draw attention to themselves. They certainly do not mediate Christ. They are part of the Father’s care for His children, servants of the Captain of the LORD of Hosts, for whose glory they were created. Created as instruments of that providence by which God keeps His people in all their ways (Ps. 91:11,12). How often have we been kept, redirected, restrained, or delivered, and never knew what angels Christ had sent?

Finally, it should produce courage. The true believer does not walk alone in this world. He walks beneath the keeping of Christ, with the ministry of heavenly angels surrounding his precious purchased possessions. The fallen angels are real (as we will see), malicious, and mighty, but they are defeated creatures. The holy elect angels, unfallen (thus stronger), serve the Lord who has all power in heaven and in earth.

We can at least say that the light of creation still teaches us hope. God divided the light from the darkness, and He does so in every heart broken by the law and healed by the gospel. Do not lose heart, child of God. Darkness does not inherit this world. The children of light do. “For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light” (Ephesians 5:8). All events, times, and places belong to Jesus; and in the end, both holy angels and redeemed sinners will dwell together where “the glory of God” lightens the city, and “the Lamb is the light thereof” (Revelation 21:23).

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14 For “elect angels,” see 1 Timothy 5:21. For fallen angels, see 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6. The contrast is biblical, but the timing of the angelic fall should not be dogmatic.

15 Psalm 8:5, quoted in Hebrews 2:7.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day (Genesis 1:1-3).

There is something strange about that passage. Something more seems to be going on.

Stay with me here. God creates the heavens and the earth. Darkness is upon the face of the deep. Then God creates light and separates it from darkness. But wait, just four verses later, on day four, he creates the sun and the stars, the actual orbs that produce light in our physical world? How can there be light on the first day when there is no sun, moon, or stars?¹

Our forebears knew this problem, and took it seriously. Their answer to this conundrum was to look deeper into what Scripture calls “light.” For instance, Augustine suggested that “light” in this passage, at least in one framing of it, means something in addition to photons. Our own physical light (if we can call it that) is not made of traditional matter. It is actually tiny packages of pure photonic energy.² Light in scripture means many more things than photons. Augustine suggests that this was the moment of the creation of the angels. Brakel agrees, and adds that this was also the creation moment of the third heaven, and all the hosts of it.³ Which brings us to another interesting tidbit in Genesis 2:1.

When all six days draw to a close, it says, "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them" (Genesis 2:1). The word "host" catches the eye. The Hebrew word is tsaba, which is actually a military word (Numbers 1:3; Numbers 31:14; 1 Samuel 17:45; Isaiah 40:2; Job 7:1; 1 Kings 22:19; 2 Chronicles 18:18; Psalm 103:21; Psalm 148:2; Nehemiah 9:6). It is the word for an ordered army under leadership. It is the word that stands behind the great divine title repeated throughout the Old Testament, the LORD of hosts, YHWH Tsebaoth. A quick read of this verse make us think it’s a tallying up the contents of the universe. Actually, it is announcing that by the close of the sixth day, a host has been made, ordered, and brought to completion. In heaven as well as on earth. The earth's host will become the sun and stars. The heavens' host, from the first day, is the complete angelic army. The Sabbath rest that follows is the rest of a sovereign who has set his whole kingdom in order, visible and invisible together, and found it all very good.

But is there any actual traction in the Word of God for associating angels with light? Well, for one, in Matthew 28:2-3, the angel at the tomb: “his countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow.” Luke’s adds that they appeared in “shining garments” (Luke 24:4). Let’s not forget the angel who appeared to the shepherds was surrounded by “the glory of the Lord” shining round about them (Luke 2:9). Daniel 10 actually gives us one of the most vivid examples. Daniel’s angel has a body that was “like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire” (Daniel 10:6). Revelation uses similar language more than once. The angel in Revelation 10:1 is “clothed with a cloud” with “a rainbow upon his head,” his face “as it were the sun.” The angel in Revelation 18:1 comes down from heaven, and “the earth was lightened with his glory.” There appears to be scriptural reason to at least consider whether angels were created on day one of creation week.⁴ In other words, the angels, likely created on the first day, represent a whole spiritual realm that precedes the physical. They could also be called light because they are the first intelligent beings, created to behold and then reflect the Light that is God himself, for “God is light.”⁵

It is an interpretation, I know. Augustine and Brakel are careful not to dogmatize, so I must follow suit. But you have to admit, it has Scriptural weight (not to mention theological coherence).

Because, the principle that governs this gives us an outline of order in creation. God does everything orderly. Always (1 Cor. 14:33). He creates according to wisdom, beauty, authority, and function. For instance, we know that the intellectual precedes the sensual. The spiritual precedes the physical. So it make sense that the heavenly precedes the earthly. Since God is indeed sovereign and wise, his creative acts follow an order that reflects his nature.⁶

This means that the angelic creation, being purely spiritual and intellectual, comes before man. Yet they are still creatures, not little or demigods. They have neither eternity of themselves nor life in themselves. They are made things, called into being by the Word, the eternal Son. Yet they appear to be the first things he made. He is the Captain of them (Josh. 5:14, 15). Just like us, they possess personality, intellect and will. They have agency. They each have a name, a place, a history. They stand in direct relation to God before any physical universe existed.⁷

I have already mentioned our beloved à Brakel, who took up this question with strength. He also suggests that angels were created on day one, and that they are creatures of a higher order than man, but a lower order than God. They are not made up of any material. You can’t touch an angel. They have no physical bodies.⁸

The Apostle Paul, writing in Colossians 1:16, establishes the principle: “By him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.” This is not to suggest that Paul is giving chronology; his point is Christ’s absolute creatorship over every aspect of created beings, heavenly and earthly, visible and invisible. The angels, and whatever those thrones and dominions and principalities are, belong to the invisible creation that is made by Christ, upheld by Christ, and ordered for Christ.⁹

This has consequences for how we understand where we fit into it.

If the angels were created on day one, with light, then they existed before the world was fully formed. They also witnessed the next five days of creation. They saw God the Son speak the universe into being. We can imagine the angels standing in heaven, watching as the Triune God unfolds the days one after the other, each more glorious than the next. And then they watch in wonder as God, on day six, creates a little beautiful creature called man. And in own image no less?! After His own likeness. It is perfectly reasonable that they beheld the mystery of the creation of this creature. Made after God’s own image, made of both spirit and matter, soul and body, immortal essence inside mutable flesh.¹⁰

And then something happens that Scripture tells us the angels themselves did not fully grasp. The God who created both angel and man, becomes, not an angel, but a man. Think of it! The Word through whom all things were created, both visible and invisible, took on our flesh forever. They would be astonished that He becomes subject to the very laws he created, including hunger and pain and death. The angels beheld the incarnation, and the Scriptures say they desire to look into these things (1 Peter 1:12). It is more than amazing that even the first creatures, who stood closest to God, leaned forward to understand God becoming flesh.¹¹

If this is all true, then it means that the angels are our seniors in creation.¹² The world was made in their presence. Adam, then Eve were created in their sight. And then in the fullness of time, the God they worshiped in heaven, took on human flesh and came to earth. This was the goal toward which the entire created order moved from the first millisecond of light on the first day.¹³

(This is longer than I had anticipated. I will try to be briefer in the next post)

End of Part One.

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1 Slight clarification: Genesis 1:2 says darkness was “upon the face of the deep.” Darkness here is the condition over which God speaks His creation. This is not the creation of darkness, but the absence of light.

2 Augustine is deliberately cautious: “Where Scripture speaks of the world’s creation, it is not plainly said whether or when the angels were created,” yet he argues that if the angels are mentioned in Genesis 1, they are implicitly mentioned either under “heaven” or under “light.” See Augustine, City of God, XI.9.

3 Wilhelmus à Brakel states that “it is most probable” the angels, as the heavenly host, were created on the first day with the third heaven, while also saying that the exact day cannot be stated with certainty. See Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 1, chap. 9, “Angels and Devils.”

4 The angelic brightness texts are cumulative and I find them most interesting, but they do not by themselves prove that the light of Genesis 1:3 is angelic. They work best as supporting resonance from Genesis 1 and Job 38.

5 1 John 1:5. This statement should be read analogically. Angels are not divine light by nature. They are creatures illumined by God, who alone is light essentially. Augustine’s language is useful here: angels become light by participation in the unchangeable Light, not by possession of deity.

6 Historic Christian doctrine affirms the goodness of matter and the body, even while acknowledging an order of being among creatures.

7 Scripture clearly teaches that angels are creatures and that they existed before the foundation of the earth was laid, as Job 38:4-7 indicates. It does not explicitly narrate the moment of their creation in Genesis 1.

8 À Brakel defines an angel as “an incorporeal, personal being which God has created and gifted with an extraordinary intellect, will, and power.”

9 The KJV phrase “visible and invisible”does not say “invisible before visible.” Paul’s main concern in Colossians 1:16 is not chronology but Christology. His preeminence over every order of creaturely power.

10 Job 38:4-7 is the strongest biblical support: when the Lord laid the foundations of the earth, “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” The language strongly suggests angelic witness and praise at creation.

11 1 Peter 1:12 says that the angels desire to look into the things now reported through the gospel. “Did not fully see coming” should be understood phenomenologically, not as though God’s revealed promises were absent or as though the holy angels were ignorant in a crude sense. The point is that redemption in Christ is a mystery into which even angels long to gaze.

12 This point is offered cautiously. Much of it is inferential. I do not wish to press beyond the measure of Scripture. Yet there is considerable confusion about angels in our day drawn from general ignorance, novels, films, podcasts, social media feeds,, and the overall atmosphere of western culture. This is an attempt to bring the subject back under the light of Scripture, so that our thoughts might be shaped less by ignorance, imagination and assumption, and more by the Words of God.

13 See John 1:1-14, Colossians 1:15-20, and Hebrews 2:5-18.

I used to read Frank Peretti.

All of it. This Present Darkness, Piercing the Darkness, The Visitation, the whole world he built, where angels and demons clashed over souls in the air above small-town America, and the oblivious humans below, praying or failing to pray, held the balance of power in their hands. I was in my early and late teens, deep in charismatic Christianity, and Peretti felt like he was unlocking a secret door. I also listened to Bob Larson on the radio (so embarrassing!), with his theatrical voice cataloguing demonic activity with the confidence of a man who clearly had the devil’s number. He was afraid of no devil! I was fascinated by the supernatural, genuinely so, and the fascination was not entirely wrong. But mostly. There is a real world behind the visible one. Scripture says so.

But the framework I was given to understand the supernatural was a jumbled mess. It was mostly subjective sensationalism, salted and peppered with isolated scripture texts. The invisible world was mainly interesting insofar as it could be felt, or seen, or manipulated directly by us! Regular life was boring. And who does not like to be involved in secret earth-changing things? To be ‘an insider’ in the outcome of a cosmic battle? Spiritual warfare was dramatic. Demons spoke to people. Angels manifested. Everything was alive and present and electric. But the problem was that almost none of it was biblical.

Once I left for college, things began to change. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. To save time, let me just say that I believe the Lord saved me. He opened my heart, and then my spiritual eyes to my sinful heart, and the depravity of my fallen mind, and the powerful beauty of Jesus’ atonement. Eventually, my new bride and I left the mainstream charismania, and became Reformed in our Christian convictions.

The beauty of the Reformed tradition was that it gave me the footing I desperately needed: the sovereignty of God, sinfulness of man in Adam, the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, the closed canon, the covenant of grace, and especially the blessedness of the ordinary means of grace. This meant that all experiential and sensational elements of the Christian life were subjected to the Word of God, and rightly so. The charismatic circus lost its hold on both my wife and me. We are deeply grateful to God for that to this day, thirty years later.

Yet what I did not take into account, for decades, was what I had unwittingly discarded along with evangelical-charismaticism.

Ephesians 6:12 remained. I read it often. I preached from it occasionally. But somewhere in the settling of my Reformed convictions, this whole idea had been imperceptibly relocated. The text, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” had practically become a description of phenomena that strictly belonged to the Old and New Testaments and apostolic age. The canon was closed. The extraordinary gifts had ceased. All direct and dramatic encounters with the supernatural were behind us now that the Church had been given all things pertaining to life and godliness in the Scriptures.¹ And in that entirely correct set of convictions, I had without meaning to, put the subject of angels behind us. Angels were real, obviously, but detached from us in practice since we have the Word of God and the indwelling Holy Spirit. My world became, functionally, Sadduceeical (Mather’s idea). I lived in a two-storied house in which the upper floor was all but empty.

I did not know this about myself until I read Increase Mather.² It’s rather troubling, and at the same time encouraging, that in the later stages of my Christian walk, I am learning something new in my own experience.

The Angelographia, published in Boston in 1696 (I read the North Hampton Press reprint: The Ministry of Angels), is a collection of sermons on the nature and ministry of holy spirits, with an appended discourse on angelical apparitions.³ Mather was a careful, learned, thoroughly Reformed Puritan divine, president of Harvard, and a man deeply suspicious of fanaticism in all its forms. He was, in fact, a principal reason the Salem witch-trial panic began to come to its senses.⁴ Mather would be a prime candidate to relegate the subject of the supernatural to the confines of the apostolic and post-apostolic age or crypto-romanism. Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History has descriptions of supernatural events that occurred in the early church that leave the naturalistic modern Reformed Christian scratching his head!⁵

But Mather’s opening words stopped me: “Angels, both the good and evil ones, have a greater influence on this world than men are generally aware of.”⁶ I realized at that moment, meditating on that thought, that if it was true, I was probably guilty of it.

The Reformed tradition has never been shy about angels. Calvin treats them carefully in the Institutes, steering between scholastic rationalistic dismissal, and what Scripture says about them.⁷ Wilhelmus à Brakel devotes a nice section of The Christian’s Reasonable Service to the angelic host and writes with pastoral warmth about their ministry to the heirs of salvation.⁸ The Westminster Standards state clearly that God executes his providence through angels.⁹ The new (old) tradition I had come to love always had a solid doctrine of the celestial realm. Why did I never see it? I had received the tradition and somehow missed that part. It’s not a major subject. It’s not a salvation issue whatsoever. But living at a time that stands far closer to Antioch in Acts than Geneva¹⁰, it seems quite relevant in a world that seems to be teaming with evil.

Augustine prepared the way.

Reading the City of God is a true education in how large the world actually is. The Bishop of Hippo sees the whole of history as a drama played out between two cities, the foundations of which began before Adam and Eve. As we will see, the fall of the angels precedes the fall of man. The elect angels who maintained their first estate, and the reprobate angels who fell by their own will, these two companies represent the first and most fundamental division in all of creation. The church militant on earth is caught up in an ancient conflict, vaster than any man-made dynasty, empire, or political history, and moving toward a consummation in which angels and saints together will inhabit the City of God forever. That is the frame within which Augustine reads everything.¹¹

Luther is much the same. His world was dense with spiritual presence, and his sense of the demonic was personal. He had a doctrine for it. He preached about it. He fought it from within, and without.¹² But I digress.

I came to see that I had exchanged the evangelico-charismatic abuse for something cleaner and truer. But in cleaning house, I had also thrown out the furniture that belonged there.

This series of meditations is an attempt at recovery.

The subject deserves careful handling because for every mile of road, there are two miles of ditches. On one side is the ditch I came from: angels and demons as a species of special spiritual experiences, virtually detached from Scripture, feeding the appetite for the supernatural. Mather saw the same danger and wrote his Disquisition Concerning Angelical Apparitions as a warning against it. The Bible itself is severe on the point. An angel who preaches another gospel is accursed (Galatians 1:8). John fell at an angel’s feet in worship and was rebuked for it (Revelation 22:8,9).¹³ The ditch is very real.

The other ditch is an atrophied practical theology of angels. I had settled into this without knowing it. A Christianity in which the invisible world is real, and given the nod on paper, but generally ignored. The spiritual warfare of Ephesians 6 and the ministering spirits of Hebrews 1:14 were doctrinal categories with no practical weight for the Christian life.¹⁴ That ditch is less steep. It certainly feels more respectable, more rational. But a theology that formally confesses something, and practically forgets it, has lost something meaningful.

What I am after in this series is the angelic world as Scripture actually describes it. A world in which the providence of God is carried out by intelligent, manifestly holy, personal, powerful beings whose assignment is the welfare of the heirs of salvation. A world in which the fall of Satan and the ruin of the demonic host is the darkness against which the mercy of God in Christ toward sinners blazes. A world in which “are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14)¹⁵ is a living question with a living answer. It touches the way the believer understands his own life history, his own sufferings, his own safe keeping (because I would have gone lost long ago), and yes, his own death.

I am a Reformed minister. I subscribe to the Three Forms of Unity. I believe in the ordinary means of grace and the closed canon and the cessation of the apostolic gifts.¹⁶ That’s my house, the household of faith. None of that is at stake here. What is at stake is whether or not the historic faith I confess (and perhaps you as well) includes what Scripture describes. I want it to. I think I had simply stopped inhabiting the upstairs of that house.

These articles are an attempt to move back in.

——

Next: The Nature of Angels: Created, Personal, Spirits

1 The allusion is to 2 Pet. 1:3. Sufficiency of Scripture regulates faith and practice; it does not cancel providence.

2 Increase Mather (1639-1723), New England Puritan and Harvard president, published Angelographia in Boston in 1696.

3 Mather’s Disquisition Concerning Angelical Apparitions is useful here because it joins belief in angels to warnings against credulity.

4 Mather was a significant moderating voice, especially through Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1693), rather than the sole cause of Salem’s reversal.

5 Eusebius is a historical witness, not an authority equal to Scripture.

6 Increase Mather, Angelographia, or A Discourse Concerning the Nature and Power of the Holy Angels (Boston, 1696), opening sermon.

7 Calvin’s main treatment is Institutes I.xiv.3-12 on holy angels and I.xiv.13-19 on devils: careful, anti-speculative, and pastorally serious.

8 See Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 1, on angels as creatures, servants, and ministering spirits.

9 WLC Q. 19 says God employs angels in administrations of His power, mercy, and justice. WCF 5.3 also confesses God’s use of means in providence.

10 This is a cultural comparison, not a historical equivalence: missionary context in Acts, ordered Reformed commonwealth in Geneva.

11 See Augustine, City of God, books XI-XIV, on angels, the two cities, pride, love, and the division of rational creatures.

12 Luther’s demonology belongs to his pastoral theology of temptation, accusation, conscience, prayer, and the Word.

13 Gal. 1:8 and Rev. 22:8-9 fence the subject: angels serve Christ; they do not mediate another gospel or receive worship.

14 This is a diagnostic claim: formal supernaturalism can become pastorally weightless if it never helps shape Christian perception.

15 Heb. 1:14 is the constructive center: angelic ministry stands under the supremacy of the Son in Hebrews 1.

16 Cessationism rejects continuing revelatory gifts and apostolic signs as ordinary church possessions; it does not reject angels, demons, providence, or spiritual conflict. We also believe that the Holy Spirit is most free, and can and does perform miracles today as He pleases.

This is the Word of God.

If it had ears, it would hear the vows you made today, and the vows you will struggle to keep. It would hear the prayers that come easily, and the ones that come with tears. It would hear laughter in your home, and hear the grief of silence.

If it had eyes, it would see you as you are today, young, hopeful, and full of promise. It would see you older, slower, and beautified by that which only suffering and grace can make. It would see a child brought home for the first time. It would see a chair left empty. It would see a hand held in a hospital room. It would watch you learn one another across a lifetime, in all those small and hidden ways that belong only to a husband and wife.

If it could speak, it would say that you are known and loved by the One who was there before you met, who ordained this day, and who will be present in every tomorrow. It would say there is forgiveness here. Blood enough here. Mercy enough. Grace sufficient for whatever comes.

But this Book has no ears.

It has no eyes.

It does not breathe.

Or does it?

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Christ who IS the Word, hears you. He sees you. He speaks. May He never be a guest in your home. He is the Savior of sinners, the Bridegroom of His church, the Shepherd who leads through green pastures and dark valleys, the Redeemer whose blood cleanseth us from all sin.

Husband, as you take your wife across your threshold, So take the Word.

Let it live near the places where ordinary life happens.

Open it when joy is easy.

Open it when obedience is costly.

Open it when sin must be confessed,

when forgiveness must be sought,

when children must be taught,

when burdens must be carried, and when hope must be rediscovered.

Let its promises keep your hearts. Let its warnings guard your lives, let its Savior be your treasure.

And years from now, may this Bible look less like a gift, and more like a witness:

worn from use,

marked by prayer,

stained with tears,

opened in trouble,

loved in peace,

and radiant with Christ.

Because when you open the Word in faith,

Jesus hears,

He sees,

He Speaks.

Listen to Him, dear

couple, all the days of your life.

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After the resurrection, Jesus ate.

Not because He needed to, but because he wanted to. He had passed through death and come out into a mode of bodily existence the curse had no hold on. When He ate broiled fish in the upper room, and when He made a charcoal fire on the beach at dawn and laid fish and bread upon it and called His disciples to come and dine, He did so because He chose to. Because it pleased Him. Because He could.

A man who eats because he must, is under necessity. The risen Christ at the breakfast fire is the Lord of life demonstrating, in the most ordinary way imaginable, that His body is real, the resurrection is physical (material), and that He is still, gloriously and freely, Himself.

He cooked for them.

With all authority in heaven and earth now His, with death conquered and the powers of the age to come fully resident in His person, the risen Son of God bent down in the early morning and made a fire, and put fish on it, and waited for His tired disciples to bring in the boat. He made them breakfast. “Come and dine,” He said.

The disciples had been fishing all night and caught nothing. They were cold and tired and had not yet found their footing in the new world Christ’s resurrection had made. Their Lord, who needed nothing from that fire, chose to meet them at the level of a warm meal on a cold morning.

That choice is grace distilled.

He stooped to the breakfast fire the way He stooped in the Jordan, the way He stooped to wash twelve pairs of dirty feet the night before He died. Everything in His character is inclined toward His people. The resurrection freed that desire in a new way.

The same Lord who fed five thousand, who turned water into wine because a family was embarrassed, who stopped a funeral procession because a widow was weeping, that Lord came out of the grave. And His first recorded act on that shore was to make sure cold and discouraged men had a warm, home cooked breakfast, before He said another word to them.

The fire was already burning when they arrived.

He had prepared it before they landed.

Every mercy that reaches us before we knew we needed it, every grace already waiting when you arrived at the hard place, every kindness burning on the shore before your boat came in, is the same risen Lord doing the same kind of work.

Come and dine, He says still.

Because it pleases Him to.

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Dear congregation,

When Thomas put his finger into the print of the nails in John 20, the Greek word describes the hole itself. The wound had been glorified, not filled in. There is a difference between a wound that closes and a wound that is taken up into glory still open, still touchable, still preaching.

The body of Jesus Christ, seated at the right hand of the Father, bears the marks of the cross as an eternal living reality. Revelation 5:6 shows John the Lamb in the midst of the throne; it describes Him: “And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain.“ Present tense is what John saw. Permanency written into the flesh of the Son of God.

This adds such beauty to what the intercession of Christ means. It is a wounded Redeemer standing before the Father on behalf of His bride. The pleading of Christ for your soul is inseparable from the body in which He suffered for it. Think of it! He carries the price of the cross in His glorified flesh. He is the Priest and the sacrifice in one Person.

Dear soul, the wounds are still open. They have not closed against you. They were glorified before they could close, because God intended them to speak forever. They spoke peace to Thomas’s doubt. They speak peace to yours.

They have been glorified, but not healed shut. They never will.

Your friend and pastor,

J. Lewis

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Job says this from the ash heap.

The ash heap.

His children are all dead. His body is covered in sores. His wife has told him to curse God and die. And his friends, who came, we believe, to comfort him, have spent their time building the case that Job is secretly wicked, and that God is paying him what he’s owed.

Everything that gave him standing in this world is gone.

His reputation. His vast estate. His health. His dear children. His understanding of how God works.

All either stripped or shaken.

And from an ash heap that say as much about his destroyed life as it does his destroyed stuff, he says:

“I know that my redeemer liveth.”

My Redeemer Liveth

The word is goel. Kinsman-redeemer. That is the same word family used throughout Ruth.

A relative by blood and covenant who redeems a ruined relative by taking up their hopeless cause before their accuser. So, it’s a legal word as much as a family word.

This helps us, because Job is crying out for vindication before the accusations of his friends in Chapter 19. His reputation has been blackened, and he doesn’t know why. His friends have judged him a secret sinner, and his suffering has been God’s proof. And he wants someone to stand up and say, Job was right and you were wrong!

That is the goel’s work.

And Job says his goel, lives.

Everything around him is death. Death is the one argument Satan has been pressing from chapter one. Job smells death. And he drives a stake into death’s ground and says:

There is a living God above all this dying. A living God who is bound to me and will act.

My Redeemer lives.

He prepends the confession with, “I know.”

In Hebrew “I know” is bedrock. It’s the one solid thing left when everything else has sunk. When flesh fails and friends accuse, and the heavens are brass, this is what Job says:

“I know that my redeemer liveth.”

That must be faith in its most stripped-down form in all of scripture

Faith without feelings. Faith without answered prayer. Faith without a single ray of sunlight. A faith that confesses what it knows, rather than what it sees.

And what it knows is this one thing:

My Redeemer lives.

There are souls reading this who have lived in Job’s country. Your dark providences have been very long. Your prayers seemed to pop on the ceiling. No helpful explanations have come in your circumstances. Your well-meaning friends, though sincere, have not known how to help.

What does saving faith say in that condition?

It says what Job does.

“I know that my redeemer liveth.”

He Shall Stand

Then Job presses further, and farther, in the next words.

“He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.”

Now, we must be careful here. Job is describing a Second Advent hope here, not a firsts.

The latter day in prophetic use, carries the weight of the end of the age, the day of last accounting, when all that has been hidden will come to light. And the word “stand” pictures one rising to take a legal position, to appear as vindicator.

The Redeemer will rise and stand upon this earth on that last day!

Job has spent enough time listening to man’s paltry words. By the time we get to this chapter, Job has made peace with the fact that God may not ever clear the whole matter up for him. What he is waiting for is the final day when the Judge of all the earth will appear openly, when God’s hidden counsels will be revealed, every false verdict is overturned, and when Job’s own personal cause is settled forever.

That is what is keeping him alive, so to speak.

The Last Advent hope.

We know so much more than Job knew. We know the name of this Redeemer.

It is the Lord Jesus Christ, who came in the flesh as our Kinsman-Redeemer, and shall appear the second time in power and great glory (Heb. 9:28; Mat. 24:30).

When Job says his Redeemer shall stand upon the earth at the latter day, he spoke more than he grasped, but he spoke truly. And the Redeemer who will stand on that day is the same One who will say,

“I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen…” (Revelation 1:18).

In My Flesh Shall I See God

Then Job turns inward, and his words become almost unbearably beautiful.

“And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”

He looks at his rotting skin and says:

This will not be the final me.

He anticipates. He sees it clearly now. The grave is coming either today or soon after. This flesh will be dissolved. He grants the enemy at least that much.

And then he says:

“In my flesh shall I see God.”

In Job’s own flesh.

This same body, rotting while living, will stand up on that latter day and see his Redeemer face to face. The worms do not have the final say over the body of one whose Kinsman-Redeemer lives. The grave is only temporary.

Fascinating that we read such future bodily resurrection language, from the oldest book of the bible. The hope has always been a bodily hope. The early church received it, recognizing it in the Jesus’ empty tomb and glorified body.

And then Job says the most amazing thing of all.

“Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.”

Mine eyes, not other’s.

I shall see Him with these eyes, in this body, on that day.

There are many who have spent their whole lives hearing about the Redeemer others have seen with the eye of faith. They know the testimonies of others. But there is something missing that no second-hand testimony can satisfy.

They want to see for themselves. They want the thing itself, not the description of it.

That longing is holy, dear one.

And Job says it from his ash heap. Will you?

The Kinsman-Redeemer Lives

Dear friend, that final day is coming.

For every soul sitting on an ash heap of some, every believer whose body is giving out, every aged saint whose hands tremble and whose eyes have dimmed, every one who has carried a grief with no bottom and found no satisfying answer in this life, hear this ancient man speak from his ruin:

I know that my Redeemer liveth.

Job didn’t know the full story. We do.

The Redeemer came. He suffered. He rose. He ascended.

He is coming again.

And on that last great day He will stand upon this earth, every ash heap will give up its dead, and every ruined saint will rise and see Him and know that their goel kept His word.

The latter day is coming.

And the Kinsman-Redeemer lives.

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