From Grace Immanuel Reformed Baptist Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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b. Notice more briefly a second example of a godly man wrestling with the apparent tensions at this point – that of the prophet Jeremiah. Compare with me Jeremiah 9:1-2 and 11:19-20:
9:1 Oh, that my head were waters,
And my eyes a fountain of tears,
That I might weep day and night
For the slain of the daughter of my people!
2 Oh, that I had in the wilderness
A lodging place for wayfaring men;
That I might leave my people,
And go from them!
For they are all adulterers,
An assembly of treacherous men.11:19 But I was like a docile lamb brought to the slaughter; and I did not know that they had devised schemes against me, saying, `Let us destroy the tree with its fruit, and let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be remembered no more.’
20 But, O LORD of hosts,
You who judge righteously,
Testing the mind and the heart,
Let me see Your vengeance on them,
For to You I have revealed my cause.
What a strange mixture there seems to be in this the weeping prophet. We find him weeping over the destruction and misery of his vile fellow Israelites as one who, with His God, did not delight in the death of the wicked, and who knew that His God did not afflict from the heart (Lamentations 3:33). Yet he, out of loathing, could not stand to be around them in close companionship, and called upon the Lord to bring vengeance upon them for trying to kill him because he was God’s faithful prophet. Jeremiah was one who had learned to live with a torn-up heart, seemingly being wrenched with strong emotions in at least two different directions.
c. Even more striking is that picture of perfect manhood which is found in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ:
Notice the words of Psalm 69:20-28:
20 Reproach has broken my heart,
And I am full of heaviness;
I looked for someone to take pity, but there was none;
And for comforters, but I found none.
21 They also gave me gall for my food,
And for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.
22 Let their table become a snare before them,
And their well-being a trap.
23 Let their eyes be darkened, so that they do not see;
And make their loins shake continually.
24 Pour out Your indignation upon them,
And let Your wrathful anger take hold of them.
25 Let their habitation be desolate;
Let no one dwell in their tents.
26 For they persecute him whom You have struck,
And talk of the grief of those You have wounded.
27 Add iniquity to their iniquity,
And let them not come into Your righteousness.
28 Let them be blotted out of the book of the living,
And not be written with the righteous.
When we studied the imprecatory Psalms earlier, we observed that their language is often the prophetic description of the prayers of the coming Messiah. Here we have one such clear instance where the One given gall for His food and vinegar for His thirst (a clear prediction of Christ at the cross) speaks out in strong language calling upon God to curse those who afflicted and tormented Him. This is, as it were, the language of Christ looking back at the cross, and should not be forgotten as we now take note of His recorded prayer at the cross found in Luke 23:33-34a:
33 And when they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on the right hand and the other on the left.
34 Then Jesus said, `Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.’ . . .
There is a textual question regarding this petition. However, the prayer is backed up by strong manuscript evidence, and thus we will assume that it is indeed part of the inspired text. Based upon that assumption, what a startling contrast we find here with the imprecations of Psalm 69. Here we find Christ obeying His own command of Matthew 5 and Luke 6 to pray for one’s enemies. He prayed that the Father would forgive those who crucified Him because they did not know what they did.
Good men have differed regarding the meaning of Christ’s words here, but I have found the position of William Hendriksen to be persuasive and recommend his commentary on Luke(23) for further study beyond the summary I’m about to give. Since there can be no enduring, eternal, personal forgiveness apart from true repentance, the Lord was evidently asking the Father to sovereignly bring His tormenters to true repentance so that there could be full pardon. He was praying for their salvation – a prayer which was answered for many of His persecutors.
We do not know for sure the final result, but the Gentile Roman centurion at the cross appears to have been deeply affected spiritually the day of the crucifixion (Matthew 27:54; Luke 23:47). Thousands of Jews whom Peter could accuse of nailing Jesus to a cross were indeed brought to repentance on the day of Pentecost and later in Jerusalem (Acts 2:23&41; 3:13-15 & 4:4). Yet, the Lord also prayed imprecations against His tormentors – evidently toward those who did not and would not repent.
According to Luke 19:41-44, the Lord Jesus wept over Jerusalem when He drew near it in his triumphal entry because of their rejection of their Messiah and the horrible judgment which would surely result. Here were tears of real compassion which later could lament:
`O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!’ (Matthew 23:37)
Yet, just before this lament He also pronounced fearful woes upon the Jewish leaders in that very city (Matthew 23:1-36). And according to Revelation 19:11-16, this very same Jesus will return as a righteous and true Judge with a sharp sword going out of His mouth with which to strike the nations, and ruling the nations with a rod of iron while He Himself treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.
Which part of this is the real Jesus? It all is.
In conclusion, the examples and passages we have seen tell us that if we would fully follow the will of God regarding loving our fellow man in this present world, we must be prepared to have our hearts torn up in seemingly opposite directions as we weep and pray with compassion and sympathy for the miserable plight of wicked men and women and children around us, and yet loathe them and desire their removal in judgment if they do not repent. As parents we must be prepared to delight in our children as our own offspring and to weep many tears in prayer and groaning over them, while at the same time being repulsed by their wickedness and driven to take up the rod. We should expect quite mixed emotions when facing and dealing with the sins of the Christian husband or wife or fellow member in the church. The Word of God calls us to a lifetime of seeming contradiction and tension in loving our fellow men. This will be the reality of obedience to our God in a fallen world. And we must embrace that reality, following the example of our Lord during the days of His flesh on this same sin-cursed earth.
We must steadfastly resist that carnal tendency to exalt our reasons and minds above God and His Word, and to end up denying one side or the other of such apparent tensions and contradictions because we cannot understand them or bring them together in our puny intellects. We must reject the error of Arminian brethren who usually deny that there should be a conditional love of delight and opposite hatred of abhorrence because they cannot reconcile it with a general love toward all men. But we must even more abhor the serious error of Hyper-Calvinistic brethren who deny the duty of general love to all men, and especially deny our duty to earnestly press the free and sincere offer of the Gospel to all men because they cannot reconcile this with God’s unconditional electing love and conditional love of complacency. Let us not be wiser than God in order to exalt our proud minds, and to avoid the flesh-withering struggle of living with apparent tensions in loving our fellow men.
On the other hand, what we have seen should encourage as well as challenge the true child of God, because if we have true grace in our hearts, we have already found ourselves responding in these seemingly contradictory ways toward the wicked around us. The Word of God which we have been studying indicates that we are not crazy to so respond. We are not necessarily wicked and vile and unloving for despising the wicked, nor are we necessarily soft on sin for tenderly loving them and seeking their good. We are not necessarily wicked and unloving to respond strongly and negatively toward the sins which arise in our brethren, nor are we necessarily failing to be principled and godly when we for good and gracious reasons overlook many of their faults and continue to delight in them. We as parents will and should rightly find diverse responses in our hearts toward our children as we deal with them – all of which may very well be righteous. In this way we should be encouraged that we are responding in a godly way as we live with the seeming tension with which life in this present world confronts us.
But it certainly is not easy to live with such seeming tension, which brings us to a second lesson regarding it.
Having seen its biblical reality, we see:
23. William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary — Exposition of the Gospel According to Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978), p. 1028.
(to be continued)
