Sabbath Meditation

The Grace of A God Bound and Obligated

We have noted in earlier posts that the Reformers developed the concept of the Means of Grace. This understanding of how Jerusalem or the Church was to work has largely been lost today. It needs to be recovered.

The concept of the means of grace is important because it tells us how God works in our lives, conforming us as individuals, and the Church as a whole, more and more into the image of Christ. Once we are clear on how God works in our lives, we can willingly co-operate, thus making the means of grace even more powerful and blessed. Our responsibility is to take up these means of grace, use them, and believe that the Lord will use them to bless us with His presence and transforming power.

The means of grace are not magic talismans. They do not manipulate the Lord in any way. They are not a kind of incantation. They are rather institutions put forth and established by God Himself as the means by which He comes to His people and blesses them, accomplishing His salvation within them, their families, and their communities.

We have said that the greatest means of grace is the Sabbath day—greatest because the first. On that holy day, as we observe and celebrate the Sabbath all the other means of grace are available to us as well, and on the Sabbath all the other means of grace are especially effective and powerful. It has pleased the Lord that it should be so.

A second means of grace is the Word of God. God's Word not only constitutes reality out of nothing, it also shapes, governs and conditions that reality once created. Once again, the Word of God is not a magical talisman. Rather, it is God's revelation of Himself, His plan and accomplishment of redemption, and His promises.

The Word of God, and in particular the promises that God has made in His Word, are the foundation and ground of all faith. We can believe because what is said in His Word is absolutely certain; it is absolutely certain because God has said it. The Word of God is more real, more solid, more dependable than anything else in the universe. Heaven and earth may pass away, but His Word will never pass away. His people are thus to live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

God binds Himself to His Word—He cannot be or do otherwise, since He is the God of truth and truthfulness. Once spoken, never forgotten. Because of His Word, God allows Himself to be bound to us. His Word creates a binding obligation upon God to do as He has promised, to be what He has declared, to accomplish what He has foretold. As the Word of God is opened to us, as we believe it and take it seriously with all reverence, so God becomes obligated to be and do as He has spoken to us.

So, for example, as our Lord has promised, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” and we believe that, so it proves true indeed: He never does leave nor forsake us. Our whole lives are transformed in principle by that one promise (and it is just one amongst many, many promises). As we take up that promise and build our lives upon it and in terms of it, so we are transformed more and more into the image of Christ Himself. We progressively become the people that we are meant to be.

God's Word comes to us in ways that are particularly powerful on the Sabbath day, in public worship. Here His Word is opened and proclaimed to us. Here we are exhorted to believe and obey. The binding and transforming nature of the Scripture is vividly evident in the lives of the community, of those with whom we join in worship. The Spirit of God moves over the congregation, opening ears and understanding, increasing faith, hope and love in each heart.

It is particularly true that on the Sabbath day, in the midst of the congregation of the Lord, the Word of God, in the hands of the Spirit, becomes living, effective, and sharper than a two edged sword, piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, judging the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4: 12).

It is significant, is it not, that this utterance, the word concerning the Word, is given to us in the very passage that speaks of the Sabbath rest of God's people.

On this holy day, may the Word of God, by His Spirit, live amongst us in great power and blessing. As the Emmaus disciples professed: “were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?”