The Great Love Triangle

I am preparing a Sunday evening sermon series of the same title of this post that will eventually culminate in a study of the book of Revelation. It has been my discovery throughout this process that the entire Bible is really the story of a love triangle. It is a story very similar, in fact, to the story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, and especially Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. This love story is one of a husband and one wife whom he loves, and one whom he does not.

Of course, when we are speaking about the Bible as a whole, the characters materialize into God, as revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ: the husband, and the church as his favored bride. The unwanted or unloved or unintended wife is unbelieving, covenant-breaking Israel - who is really no Israel at all (Romans 9:6). Revelation is the glorious end to this story, with the destruction of the whore (unbelieving Israel) and the final beatific and fruitful marriage of the lover (the church).

One unexpected outcome of this study has been a heightened awareness of the importance of covenants in the Bible, since marriage is in essence a covenant, and the covenants in Scripture are in essence the 'marrying' of God and his people. I have been warned by some, however, that a passion for seeing the Bible as a developing covenant can lead to an acceptance of infant baptism, since many traditional 'covenant' theologians hold that the circumcision of the Old Covenant is directly analogous to the baptism of the New Covenant.

I find, though, that given the context, this is actually far from the truth. Understanding baptism to be a covenant sign administered only to those who have become members of the promise by faith rather than by flesh (physical birth) actually makes the most sense in the great story of the Bible. It is not the children of the flesh who inherit the blessings of the covenant, but the children of the promise (Galatians 4). There are many who are descended from Israel who are not Israel (Romans 9:6). These children of the slave woman according to the flesh were also marked according to the flesh at their physical birth. But children of the free woman ("Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother" - Galatians 4:26) are born according to the Spirit, and are marked according to the Spirit at their spiritual birth.

Baptism of disciples alone is not contrary to the proper understanding of the blossoming covenant of grace throughout Scripture. It is perfectly consistent with it. Also, the spiritual aspect of it beautifully matches the overall story of the great love triangle that we find in the pages of Scripture.

What the Church Needs Most Right Now

What does the church of Jesus Christ need most right now? That is a good and provocative question! I have had many answers to that question over the years: to read the Bible, to understand God's sovereignty in salvation, a return to church discipline, a biblical church government. But now that I have been a pastor for a while, the real greatest need of the church has been slowly stalking up behind me like a feared predator.

I believe that the church needs most right now for pastors to address specific sins in the congregation through their preaching.

Here's what I've noticed: we love to talk about sins like homosexuality and abortion because there is likely no one in our churches that really deals with either of those things. So we can rant and rave all day long about the evils of these specific sins because no one goes home afterward and starts to put together a clandestine group to get the pastor fired.

We can also talk very high and mightily about 'sin' in general. We can discuss holy living as an amorphous entity. We can talk about the need of the church to get involved in missions and evangelism (a favorite soapbox of mine), but all the while, what people really need is to come face to face with that ugly sin that they hide and walk away humbled and repentant.

Who does this today? Now I can point to a whole bunch of prophets and apostles who did this very thing, but that's not what I see in church pulpits today. On the contrary:

All the flabby moral platitudes that roll off the tongues of hired servants in the pulpits — those vague calls to godliness devoid of concrete guidelines of daily behavior - receive the automatic “amens” from the congregations that do the hiring. Let the preaching become specific, and “the preacher is meddling in areas that he knows nothing about.” What the congregations pay for is a weekly affirmation of their status quo. Of course, their status quo may be somebody else’s revolution, so they may regard themselves as being very, very daring, very hip, very chic, the vanguard of change; always, however, their status quo is left undisturbed. That is what they pay for, just as the people of Israel paid for it in the eighth century, B.C. ( Ezek. 14). The result for the people of Israel was captivity. (Gary North, Introduction to Christian Economics, pg. 3)

I think there are two main reasons why preachers don't touch this with a 10-foot pole: 1) when you tell someone that they are sinning heinously against God where they thought they were not, you make them very angry - angry enough to want you gone, and 2) when you start confronting someone else's specific sins, you have to publicly admit to your own or else you become a hypocrite, with 'woes' pronounced against you (Matthew 23:4, 25-28).

What is needed to get us back on track? Right up front we are going to have to realize that we are all sinners, and we all sin in different ways. What would you rather do, go on sinning placing yourself in danger of God's wrath, or get it out in the open and start to be delivered from it? What would you rather your pastor do, participate in some secret sin that you know nothing about, or humbly confess his sins in public as well and start to be delivered from it? There is no victory in darkness when it comes to sin. Light is needed to bring freedom from the darkness.

These thoughts are terrifying and hopeful. I would love to be transparent about my own sinfulness. I know that I need to preach honestly about sin in our congregation. I know the good - the revival even - that would accompany such actions. But I also know that things will get really ugly. The blood-chilling challenge to pastors is whether or not they will put it all on the line to do the right thing. I'll say this, though: I'm not starting this week...