Midweek Meeting October 4 2017

We had our last session on Unseen Realities last night. Eleven of us gathered and we looked again at Satan and the fact he is bound. I think people were happy with the line I took, beginning with Matthew 12:29. We had a full prayer time with mostpeople praying before the close. Four of us present are preaching in various places on the coming Lord's Day.

Bishop Reynolds on Satan

In his commentary on Hosea 14 Edward Reynolds (1599-1676) says

Satan hath three titles given in the Scripture, setting forth his malignity against the church of God; a dragon, to note his malice; a serpent, to note his subtlety; and a lion, to note his strength. But none of all these can stand before prayer. The greatest malice of Haman sinks under the prayer of Esther; the deepest policy, the counsel of Ahithophel, withers before the prayer of David; the largest army, a host of a thousand Ethiopians, runs away like cowards before the prayer of Asa.

Lord's Day 29 July 2012

Yesterday we had the last in the series on Ultimate Realities, looking at Satan again and this time his binding by Christ from Matthew 12:29. Encouraging I hope. In the evening I took another passage about self-denial - Luke 14:25-33. Had some nice illustrations from the Tesla tower (made that too long I'm afraid) and the Battle of Leipzig. Challenging I hope. With the young people back from camp we were a better number though some are away on holiday, at camp and helping with the Olympics outreach. We sang some hymns we don't normally sing including Gordon T Booth's Hear the sound of angels singing, Plunket's Our Saviour has risen and Henry F Lyte's Jesus, I my cross have taken.

Not unaware

A review of Focus on the family radio theatre's DVD of C S Lewis's Screwtape Letters can be found in the latest Themelios here. The review includes this interesting summary of Screwtape's letters to Wormwood about how to defeat the Christian.

1. Make him preoccupied with ordinary, “real” life—not arguments or science.
2. Make him disillusioned with the church by highlighting people he self-righteously thinks are strange or hypocritical.
3. Annoy him with “daily pinpricks” from his mother.
4. Keep him from seriously intending to pray at all, and if that fails, subtly misdirect his focus to himself or an object rather than a Person.
5. Don’t hope for too much from a war [here WWII ] because the Enemy often lets our patients suffer to fortify them and tantalize us.
6. Capitalise on his uncertainty, divert his attention from the Enemy to himself, and redirect his malice to his everyday neighbours and his benevolence to people he does not know.
7. Keep him ignorant of your existence, and make him either an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist who regards his cause as the most important part of Christianity.
8. Make good use of your patient’s series of troughs and peaks (ie “the law of undulation”), and beware that the Enemy relies on the troughs more than the peaks.
9. Capitalise on trough periods by tempting him with sensual pleasures (especially sex), making him content with his moderated religion, and directly attacking his faith as merely a “phase.”
10. Convince him to blend in with his new worldly acquaintances.
11. Understand the four causes of laughter (joy, fun, the joke proper and flippancy), and shrewdly use jokes and flippancy.
12. Don’t underestimate the power of “very small sins” because “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one.” 13. Don’t allow him to experience real pleasures because they are a touchstone of reality.
14. Make him proud of his humility. Use both vainglory and false modesty to keep him from humility’s true end.
15. Make him live in the future rather than the present.
16. Encourage church-hopping.
17. Encourage gluttony through delicacy rather than excess.
18. Convince him that the only respectable ground for marriage is “being in love.”
19. Understand that the Enemy does not genuinely love humans. (But we don’t know what his real motive is.)
20. Don’t give up if your direct attacks on his chastity fail. Try to arrange a desirable marriage.
21. Convince him to use the pronoun “my” in the fully possessive sense of ownership (eg “my time,” “my boots,” “my wife,” and “my God”).
22. Understand that the Enemy has filled His world full of pleasures and that you must twist them before you can use them.
23. Encourage him to embrace a “historical Jesus” and to treat Christianity as merely a means to a political end such as social justice.
24. Confuse him with spiritual pride for being part of an elite set.
25. Replace “mere Christianity” with “Christianity And” by increasing his horror of “the same old thing” and thus increasing his desire for novelty.
26. Sow seeds of “unselfishness” during his courtship.
27. Twist his prayers.
28. Guard his life so that he grows old because real worldliness takes time.
29. Defeat his courage, and make him a coward.
30. Capitalise on his fatigue and manipulate his emotions with the word “real.”
31. His end is inexplicable, but we must win in the end.

Nice Quotation

Going through some stuff recently I noticed I'd jotted down this quotation from Simon Singh's Codebook (p 189). Ths statement was made by Stuart Milner-Barry and is also quoted here and here.

"To feel that you know your enemy is a vastly comforting feeling. It grows imperceptibly over time if you regularly and intimately observe his thoughts and ways and habits and actions. Knowledge of this kind makes your own planning less tentative and more assured, less harrowing and more buoyant."

Archive 3 Desert Island Books

Some while ago I sent my very good friend Darby Gray to a desert island to see what books he might like to read there. The Bible, Calvin's works, Matthew Henry's commentary and Pilgrim's Progress were already provided he just had to add five more. He wrote

Narrowing down to just five books is no easy task. One is thankful to have the Bunyan, Henry, and Calvin available. In thinking about this, a number of great favourites have had to be by-passed, such as Spiritual Disciplines by Don Whitney, a book I have very much enjoyed more than once.
1. Like many other castaways I am keen to take a biography with me. Reading the lives of others is both pleasant and instructive. The two volumes by Iain Murray on Dr. Lloyd-Jones instantly spring to mind as does Roland Bainton's volume on Martin Luther. Dallimore's two volumes on Whitefield or even his single one on Spurgeon are attractive possibilities too. Dallimore and Murray are superb biographers. The latter's large work on Edwards and his smaller one on John Murray are also contenders. However, I think I will plump for Ned B. Stonehouse's wonderful Biographical Memoir of J. Gresham Machen. There is a slight degree of hagiography involved here no doubt and much of the attraction is the atmosphere the book breathes - leisurely, verbose, refined, from a bygone age. Machen's life was no easy one, however, as he struggled with the attractions of German liberalism, served in France in the Great War and defended the faith in face of a vicious onslaught from modernism, being instrumental in founding Westminster Theological Seminary. His attitude to fundamentalism, temperance, Billy Sunday, church relations, the Sabbath, etc, are interestingly revealed. It is hard to think of a more moving or a more challenging 20th century biography.
2. The 'Princeton' atmosphere is so fine that I really would like more than just one smattering for my desert island reading. I did think of trying the trick that others have used and ask for a set of works, namely 10 volumes of B B Warfield. However, some of that would involve hard work on my part and so I will instead take the easy option and go for the next best thing to biography, Church history, and order the two volumes by David B. Calhoun on old Princeton Seminary, Faith and Learning 1812-1868 and The Majestic Testimony 1869-1929. Partly it is the writing but chiefly it is the subject matter of these lovely descriptions of experiential Calvinism that hooks me. From log college to premier university, the story is a fascinating one on many fronts. The glimpses of the Alexanders, the Hodges, Machen, Warfield, as well as a host of lesser known men, is fascinating. The persistent re-emergence of vital godliness amid thoroughgoing and painstaking theology is no small part of the attraction that the books hold.
The one snag with such a book would be the references to other books just out of reach. There is an interesting description, for instance, of J A Alexander beavering away in a New York hotel during the summer months on his commentaries on Psalms, Acts, and Mark, lost deep in thought or getting frustrated and breaking for a half an hour of Dickens or a walk in the streets. 'Well, this is the most delightful and exciting occupation I can conceive of,' he said, 'it is better than any novel that I ever read.'
3. At the risk of wallowing and basking even more in the glory of old Princeton and Westminister let me add a third less obvious choice. If I wanted another obvious one I would have gone for J W Alexander's Thoughts on Preaching. However, I want something doctrinal. I know little of the late Edwin H Palmer except that he was a Christian Reformed pastor, a lecturer at Westminister Seminary and executive secretary of the committee that produced the NIV Bible. The same clarity he brought to that project is found in the two books he authored, one a study guide on The Five points of Calvinism and the other (my choice) on The Holy Spirit, His Person and Ministry. Here are 16 clear, well set-out, warm-hearted, simple studies that it would be a joy to re-read and to study again.
4. My final two choices would both be by Puritans. I notice too that like two out of my last three choices these have both been published or republished (these two as Puritan paperbacks) by the Banner of Truth Trust. How thankful we ought to be to God for the Trust's continued commitment to the Reformed faith.
First, I mention John Flavel's Mystery of Providence (as it is known). I will never forget reading it for the first time and being introduced to the whole idea of providence. It led to my seeing things and discovering things about God's goodness that I never would have seen otherwise. Originally published in 1678 there is not a book like it for opening up the subject of God's providence. What a joy it would be to contemplate, even if banished to a desert island, the goodness of God revealed in providence. The book is in three parts. Firstly it deals with the evidence for Providence; then the duty, method, and advantages of meditating on it; and finally the practical implications and problems and the advantages of keeping records.
5. My final choice was written just over 25 years earlier. Another Puritan work, Thomas Brook's Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices was first published in 1652. The very title teaches a lesson and the contents pages themselves contain more lessons than many books produced since, for all their boasts. I believe he lists some 41 devices and over 200 remedies. Obviously time has moved on and written today such a book would no doubt have different things to say, but as a manual for the daily fight with Satan (from which a desert island would offer no rest) nothing can beat it. Perhaps the section warning against the false inferences from the cross actings of Providence would begin to come alive on a lone desert island. Brooks would help me to see that many things contrary to our desires are not contrary to our good and that God's hand against me does not mean his love and heart are not set on me. He would help me to see that such a cross providence would do me good (no doubt through reading these books) and help me on my way to heaven.

This article originally appeared in The Evangelical Library Bulletin, Banner of Truth Magazine and elsewhere.