Below is the text of a sermon I preached on Psalm 25:14 in November 2023. (audio in the link) It’s an “extra” to what I’ll publish on Thursday on a “Christian View of Law.” I thought this might stoke the imagination of us “old folks” for thinking about law, even biblical law, differently than we do today. Perhaps it will be something to listen to in the car.
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So let's turn to the word of the Lord found in Psalm 25, verse 14: “The secret of the Lord is for those who fear Him and He will make them know His covenant.
Now today, I have much to say and I'm going to have to stick to my script a little bit to make sure that I don't go on until the Lord returns, which I don't expect for some time. But you could, right? Because God is eternal and infinite you can't exhaust your knowledge of God. But I want to begin with a little story to tie some things together.
Now most of the time, I have not worn a tie, but today I needed to. Now, I noticed that Archie (aged 8) knew who the character was at the top. Archie, might you help teach today the people of God? Who's at the top of my tie?
Archie: “The Tasmanian Devil.”
See, he's got it. Now, this is going to “tie” into the sermon.
Now, what else is going to tie into the sermon is something I did when our children were congregating outside last week. I came out outside with a can of sparkling water after our fellowship dinner. Anybody remember what I did with it? Come on, I see y'all smiling. You know what I did with it.
I said, “This is special. It's sparkling. And I'm going to pour this water on the grass. And next week, we're going to come back and see if it grew fairies.”
You remember that? I see your giggles. Oh, you remember.
Now, what I'm going to do today is I'm going to expand upon the tie and the sparkling water stories, and two weeks from now, when I preach, I'm going to finish telling a story that began today with the Tasmanian Devil and the sparkling water and the fairies.
Now, for the adults, you may say, “I came here to get some serious theology.” And today, I'm going to give you serious theology out your nose. But if you're not careful, you may not realize it.
Now I'm going to tell another story, because stories are good. It says here in the first part of verse 14, that “the secret of the Lord is for those who fear him.”
Now, the actual word translated there, secret of the Lord, we find in several places. And it typically does mean a secret. But it's really well expressed in Psalm 64:2: “Hide me from the secret counsel of the evil doers.” In other words, the secret is kind of like, “I'm going to let y'all in on something. You're going to be part of this.
Now to appreciate this story, you need to know I was a BMOC. I was a big man on campus.
I was the president of the university choir. I was president of the student government. I was president of the undergraduate alumni council. I was 57th in my class, perhaps out of 1400 people. I was the most outstanding junior man and outstanding senior. I mean, the Apostle Paul had nothing on me.
But when I first got to college, and I flipped through the first yearbook. You know, you always look for a picture of yourself, right? And there was this thing called the Raven Society. Now, I recognized a lot of things: the Blue Key Club, the accounting club, and the Greeks. Everybody knew what they were. There was no big secret.
But the Raven Society was interesting. Its yearbook pictures were always interesting. They were kind of weird. There were five or six people in them. And they seemed to be shrouded in mystery. And when you asked folks, “What's this—these five or six men?” People would say, “I don't know.” Nobody knew what the Raven Society was.
From that moment on, I wanted to be a member of the Raven Society. I wanted in on whatever this thing was that nobody else in the college knew what it was. And lo and behold, my junior year, I was picked to be in the Raven Society by a group of graduating seniors. I was selected to carry forward this mystery organization into my senior year, this secret society called the Ravens.
Now, I have never told this publicly. Linda knows it, but now you're going to know it.
We gathered at a restaurant downtown. The head, the sponsor, faculty head, was a guy named Mr. Conner. He taught literature and English. He should have come from Oxford or someplace. He just had that air that he should be teaching in long black robes.
When we got there, we were all wondering what we were going to find out. It was guys I knew. They were other Big Men on Campus, except for one guy. I had no idea who he was. And that, too, was part of the Raven Society. There would always be someone that you thought didn’t “fit.”
And then the seniors got up in front of us, and one-by-one each began to explain to someone in our group why that person had been picked. A senior that I had admired, who had seemed to have taken me under his wings, began to explain my whole college career to me.
“You see, David, when you were a freshman, you were picked to be a part of the Undergraduate Alumni Council, just like I was part of it when I was a freshman. I became the president of that council, just like you became the president of that council.” And he began to recount to me all these amazing coincidences between his life and my life.
And then he told me the most amazing thing: I had won the Chapin Thomas Scholarship to the University of Cincinnati College of Law, even as he had, because I was destined to a greatness I had never imagined. And I don't even remember now what it was. But that kind of story went on with everybody.
Now, there is a point to this story.
After dinner we went to the staid and stoic professor Connor's home. We were put into this little room. And we couldn't see anything outside, because it was dark. And one by one, they would come in and say, “So and so, it's your turn.” And you got up, and you went outside. And you had no idea what happened to your friend. He never came back.
And then came my time. I don't remember where I was in the list. There were like two that came after me. But they came in, took me outside, and blindfolded me. And then they said, “You just have to trust us, okay?”
They said, “Here's what I need you to do. We need you to start flapping your arms like a bird and making the sound of a raven and run down the hill.” Well, of course I was going to do that. These people control the universe, right?
And so I run down the hill. I didn't know what a raven sounded like to you, but I was going, “cah, cah, cah,” all the way down the hill.
I get to the end (apparently) and they said, “Now David, take off your socks and shoes.” So I did. And they said, “Now lift one leg up and put it down.” And I did. And it was cold. It was wet. And then they said, now put the other one in. And I realized I was standing in a wash tub of water.
And then they said, “Now roll up your sleeves and hold your arms out.” So I did.
And they placed this slimy, wet, big, heavy thing in my hands. And they took the blindfold off. And there was this huge, monstrous fish, cold, dead, and wet.
They said, “Remember, Fowler, you're just a big fish in a small pond of water. Don't get the big head.”
These Ravens picked the folks who thought had the big head, and they would believe anything. And we're going to humiliate them by reminding them that they're just like the big, dead, heavy, ugly fish in a small pond. UTC is a small pond, and the world's big.
And that was the secret.
I tell you that story because God is saying right here, “I'm going to tell you a secret. But I'm only going to tell it to those who fear me.”
Now, I'm going to tell you what the secret is in just a minute when we get to the second part of the verse. But I've got some I want to read to you first, because sometimes the secret doesn’t sound so special if we don't even realize the nature of the world that we live in.
And, now I'm not going to use the word “cosmology,” which some may be shocked that I’ve not used yet. 😊 The question in cosmology is what kind of place is this? And what's it for?
You see, I was put in my place by that story: You're just a small fish. And you can think of yourself in great ways, but you're a small fish.
Now, here's what I want to do today, and I'm going to tell you up front in case you miss it. The goal of this morning's sermon is to transport us from the world moderns have made up in their heads to the real one that we couldn't have even made up; to awaken us from the dream world in which we wander about to the real one we seem to have lost sense of in our intellectual slumber; to lift our eyes from the world's problems to its possibilities.
The word “transposition” that I'm thinking of is one that C.S. Lewis used. We need to be transported from what I will call a made up, unreal world to the real one.
And the reality is, we seem to live in the made up one. And I'm going to demonstrate that for you. And tell you why the little children are so important.
It begins with this in the wonderful little book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. It’s for adults to read, but I'm going to read you some sections, and you'll get it. It’s written by Carl Becker, an atheist, prominent, influential historian in the early 1900s. And he speaks of “the transformation of the ideal image of nature” that begin in the 1700’s
Now what does he mean by “ideal image”? He's talking about this idea that nature is some kind of ideal. There's something bigger out there and mysterious. There's an “ideal” behind what we see.
Those of you who've read Plato or remember him talking about the forms, you'd say, “Yes, there are really bushes out here (pointing outside0, but there's some kind of real thing behind these bushes.” Remember? There's something out there, beyond them. Don't just look at this stuff. Look at the bigger thing that's out there.
And Becker says the transformation of the “ideal image” of nature was the result of the scientific discoveries of the 17th century. The ideal changed.
“Galileo,” Becker writes, “observed that the pendulum behaved in a certain manner and then formulated the law of the pendulum in terms of mathematics. . . . Newton did not doubt that the heavens declared the glory of God, but he was concerned to find out, by looking through a telescope and doing the sum in mathematics, how they managed it. This was a new kind of law of nature.”
Now, as a lawyer, I speak of the “law of nature,” but it no longer means what it means to the people of the Reformation, to Martin Luther, even to the Thomas Aquinas of the Middle Ages. Here's what the moderns mean by it, and I return to Becker:
“Newton himself noted the difference” –this change of the world, of its cosmology. Newton wrote, “These principles,” the ones of motion and optics, “I consider not as a cult quality.”
Now, let me interpret the quote. When we read the word “cult,” we think of bad things, but it was used by him in the older sense of mysterious, unknown. He’s saying that the things we learn by science are a revelation of some “forms” of things, but there is no mysterious thing out here. He’s not concerned with that; just the stuff. It's just the laws of nature that form things. This was the new way to knowledge, opened up by natural philosophy.
Now how did this work itself out? It's important; we'll get to it in just a moment.
So Becker now writes of the transformation that was taking place: “Nature, it seemed, after all, was just the common things that common men observed and handled every day.” In other words, the sun rises because there's this law of this and that and gravitation. And the tides move because there's this law of the moon and gravitational pull.
And notice how he describes those common things: “Steam bubbling from the spout of a kettle. Smoke whisking up the chimney. Morning mist lifting from the meadows. Here was nature all about. Moving in ways not mysterious her wonders to perform.”
No, says Becker, everything is “performing” according to the laws imposed on all things.
Now you see, that's really evolution. There are just these laws that have shaped you into who you are. The laws just operate on things, and they become what they are. The secret, the mystery, the “cult-ness of the cosmos? Finished!
We can't enjoy the Tasmanian Devil cartoons, because we know he not only doesn’t exist, but couldn’t exist. I mean how many of you adults get up on Saturday morning like you might have as a child and run into the bedroom or wherever the TV is because you can't wait to watch the cartoons? I remember I did it.
Why I could play soccer by myself with just a sloped bank. All I needed was a ball and a bank of earth in our yard. I would kick the ball up one side of the bank and I'd run over to the other side to kick it before it went past me. And if I got there in time, I'd try to kick it back and run over to the other side again.
Could you do imaginative things like that as a child? Yes. Do you do things like that as an adult? No. Our imagination grows weak, tired, and dies.
So I'm going to read from something now for just a moment, and then I'm going to tie it back to the scripture. I haven't lost my place!
What’ I’m going to read is “The Ethics of Elfland.” If you're an adult and you've not read it, let me encourage you to read it. It's a chapter in G.K. Chesterton's book, Orthodoxy.
I read it a year ago and it didn't make a whole lot of sense. And last Sunday, I read it again, and I've been reading it all week. It gets more amazing as I read it. I pray it makes sense. From the ‘Ethics of Elfland”:
When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. . . .
They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.
Modern poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not “appreciate Nature,” because they said that Nature was divine. [Singers of old epics and fables] do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; [Interrupt the reading: “The old people might have said, ‘There might be elves pop out of the grass if we just water them with sparkling water.’ You see, if you're young enough you might have shown up this week to see if there were fairies dancing in the grass. But because we've gotten old and we've gotten to know the laws of nature, we know here could never be fairies in the grass, right?]
Chesterton goes on.
But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elf land, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.
But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened—dawn and death and so on—as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. [Interrupt the reading: Think about imagination here, for a moment. What are we told to do as Christians in 2 Corinthians 10:5, “Tear down the vain imaginations that are contrary to the knowledge of God.” I have begun to realize I have had an imagination formed more by atheistic evolutionary laws of nature than the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Chesterton continues:
These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling.
If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike.
We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five.
In fairyland we avoid the word “law”; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. It is the man who talks about “a law” that he has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none.
I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet.
[Fairy] tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us re- member, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
[And this is the killer statement for those with reformed theology.] “The modern world [—the one ruled strictly by laws of nature—] was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are.
And here's the point in that regard. What does the Psalmist say at the second half of verse 14? He says the secret is God will make those who fear Him “know his covenant.”
Now I would suggest and submit to you that we [Presbyterians] become so comfortable with the idea of covenant and our mechanical dissecting and pulling apart of it—all its “pieces”—that we lose the amazing mystery that the world runs by a covenant.
You see? It's the same thing. This world is not just random stuff happening and moving according to strict laws, and it can't be other than it is. We can become so used to thinking that way that the thought that the cosmos operates by a covenant isn't surprising anymore.
We've lost the mystery of the cosmos. You see what I'm saying?
And that's why I said that today I want to transport you out of the cosmos in which we tend to live—thinking law is how the world really works—when that's the world we've made up because we can't otherwise explain it. There is mystery.
The lack of mystery is why people can't believe the Christmas story. It's impossible. Why? Because we were made to die. Well, what if we were actually made to live? What if we were made to live an even fuller life than what we live now? You see? That's what I mean by cosmology.
Now here's why I think Chesterton said this law of nature cosmology was ready-made for Calvinism. Covenant theology can sound like God has a plan, and that's that. It can take on a kind of tenor that makes the sovereignty of God sound like Christianized fatalism. When that creeps into our thinking, we are no different from the scientists, you see.
You may say, “Well the grass must be green because Blah blah blah blah blah blah.” And I'll submit that when we say that we have planted the sovereignty of God in the wrong cosmological soil. It is more akin to fatalism than the idea of a superintending work of a personal God whose is triune and in whom we live and experience change, and in whom all things have their being.
That grass must be green may be an indication that we think of the cosmos more as a machine run by laws and shaped by laws than a living organism full of wonder and beauty to be appreciated, developed, and further adorned.
It may be an indication we think of the cosmos more as machine than a living organism full of wonder and beauty to be appreciated, developed, and further adorned for the glory of God if:
We think the way to change our society is to enact laws that would stop bad things.
We think that replacing certain politicians who vote the “wrong way” on various issues with politicians who will vote the “right way,”
We think getting our civic laws right is bring in a righteousness society
We think we have to have political power to change things
This not a biblical cosmology but a Machiavellian one.
Other signs we may see the cosmos more as machine than symphony is:
Not knowing how to think of the sovereignty of God without it sounding as fatalistic as that of the strict materialist or
Tending to reduce the understanding of the covenant to law. The covenant does entail law, right?
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind and strength.” That can come across as a mechanical command we need to keep, but when you see the world rightly, how could you not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength?
There's a tendency on our part as Presbyterians to reduce the understanding of the covenant just to law. To knowing and keeping the law.
And that’s because we've lost the wonder of the cosmos, that it operates according to a covenant that I'm going to explain in two weeks. So if you didn't like today's sermon, don't come in two weeks. But if you're curious what the real secret is, come back next week.
Now I'm going to close with a little verse of scripture I’ve thought about this a week that ties into what I said earlier about children and to talk of imagination. Turn with me, please, to Matthew 11. I hope I've not gone too long, but in Matthew 11 there's something really important to what I’ve trying to say.
“At that time Jesus answered and said, ‘I praise thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth That thou didst hide these things from the wise and the intelligent And didst reveal them to babes. Yes, Father, for thus it was well pleasing in my sight.’”
Now that's a strange thing. God is hiding something. And notice who he's hiding it from: the people who at their university who, like me, think they're some kind of bigwig. And God is saying I'm not going to reveal this to the wise and to the prudent. I'm going to reveal it to the children.
Now stop and think about that. Why is God going to tell something to people who not only have little apprehension due to lack of experience and knowledge about the world, but can't do much with whatever it is he tells them?
Now think for a moment about why the kingdom of God is said to belong to children. We adults who have been trained to understand “law” say the reason is obvious, children are dependent on their parents. And, so, we must be dependent on God.
But do you see that we’ve reduced the point to an analogy to a natural world phenomenon—to “natural laws”? And there is such a law: Archie can't go out and get a job tomorrow and take care of himself. That's why the kingdom of God belongs to children.
But I think it belongs to children because they're the only ones who could really believe that the world operates according to a covenant by a triune, personal God who oversees all things and is so great and so wise and so full of knowledge that He can let me make my decisions and still get everything for the rest of history to work out the right way.
[Rhetorically] What kind of God is that? I can't even watch over my child's decisions and get them to work out the right way. You see, children can believe the things that our old eyes no longer believe. And Jesus says, “I'll give my kingdom to them.”
And that why I think we must be born again. Because if you're not born again, you can't even believe the unblushing promises and rewards of the scripture and you'll be content making mud flies In the slums, because you won’t be able to envision a holiday at the sea.
And so, I hope today I have begun, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to transport us out of this world In which we live where we think everything is controlled by laws and operates like a widget, where if we just replace the broken part the cosmos, like a machine, the world will run right again—it won’t—and to see our cosmos in a new and fresh way.
Amen.
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