Theological Precision: I was about to leave the following as a reply to a comment on one of my recent Peter Masters posts, but the more I began thinking about what was said, the more I realized the thought reached far beyond that particular sermon. So perhaps it is worth sharing on its own.

A friend had written: “A man can drive himself quite crazy in his own meticulousness. That’s OK, it works, too.” I laughed at the last part, but there is something surprisingly serious underneath it, because I see that tendency in myself – trying to connect every theological thought into one perfect system, as though if we just keep hacking away at it long enough everything will finally fall into place.

After all, some of us have spent years almost living inside these questions. Scripture fills our thoughts, theology shapes our conversations, our reading, our writing, and in one sense even the structure of our days. And perhaps after enough years of that, we begin to feel that we ought to understand more than we actually do. We have handled the words so often, defined the doctrines so carefully, and connected so many passages together that it becomes easy to forget how infinitely greater the reality is than the language we use to describe it. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” Romans 11:33.

And before long we can have the Lord, as it were, contained within our system. Everything has its category, every difficulty has its explanation, every apparent tension has been resolved, and somehow we begin to feel that we have grasped what can never finally be grasped. We name something, define it, place it within a creed or confession, connect it to everything else, and then begin to feel that the mystery itself has somehow been mastered.

And this is where another danger appears. We may sincerely confess that every bit of light and understanding comes from the Lord, and yet still find ourselves pleased with our own grasp of it. Self is remarkably resourceful. If it cannot boast in discovering truth apart from God, it may begin boasting in how clearly God has enabled us to see it. We can give all the glory to the Lord with our lips and still somehow find a little room for ourselves through the back door. Perhaps that is where theological precision can quietly become something else – a desire for theological mastery.

We become so accustomed to certain expressions that we repeat them almost automatically. They become part of the theological furniture around us, and sometimes they make everything sound wonderfully settled and coherent. But the danger is that our system can begin explaining more than Scripture itself actually says. The words may be familiar, the categories may be ancient, and the conclusions may fit beautifully together, but none of that gives us permission to speak beyond what God has revealed.

Theology is unlike almost anything else we study. In most fields, increasing knowledge can eventually give us an increasing sense of mastery over the subject. But theology concerns the infinite God. No amount of carefulness will ever reduce Him to a perfectly closed system. “Canst thou by searching find out God, canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.” Job 11:7-9.

So there is certainly a place for meticulousness. There is a place for defining words carefully, comparing passages, asking difficult questions, and trying to understand how the truths of Scripture relate to one another. But there must also be a place for knowing where to stop. Sometimes we simply need to let Scripture say what it says without feeling compelled to build an entire theological structure around every expression. Mystery is not always evidence that our theology has failed, sometimes it is what keeps theology from becoming an illusion of mastery.

And I still love my friend’s concluding thought: “That’s OK, it works, too.” There is something strangely comforting about that. Apparently even driving ourselves a little crazy over these things can occasionally serve some purpose. Perhaps all the questioning, pulling apart, and trying to understand can at least leave us a little less confident in our own explanations and a little more overwhelmed by the One we are trying to understand. “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” Ecclesiastes 12:12. MPJ

Thoughts on Sanctification: There are some theological ideas we question because they are unfamiliar to us. Others are much harder to question precisely because they have become so familiar that we no longer realize we are assuming them. I suspect sanctification may be one of those subjects for me. John Gill, in A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, distinguishes between the sanctification of the elect in Christ and an inward sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in the believer. The first concerns what the elect are in Christ representatively and federally; the second concerns what is wrought within them – the new heart, the new man, spiritual principles, implanted graces, and inward holiness. John Owen speaks in the same broad theological tradition, treating sanctification as the Spirit’s creation and preservation of an inward principle or habit of holiness from which spiritual acts and obedience proceed.

“And our first assertion is, that in the sanctification of believers, the Holy Ghost doth work in them, in their whole souls, their minds, wills, and affections, a gracious, supernatural habit, principle, and disposition of living unto God; wherein the substance or essence, the life and being, of holiness doth consist. This is that spirit which is born of the Spirit, that new creature, that new and divine nature which is wrought in them, and whereof they are made partakers.” John Owen, Pneumatologia: Book 3, Chapter 6.

S. E. Pierce, another favorite author of mine, likewise uses this familiar language of inward spiritual life and grace: “That the believer is the child and Son of God appears from his being a partaker of the Spirit of God, who has given him a new nature, and a new understanding, that he might know him that is true, and find, and feel that he is in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ.” Samuel Eyles Pierce.

Nothing particularly controversial there. In fact, that is the point. This is the standard view. Open almost any substantial treatment of sanctification – Reformed, Calvinistic, Arminian, or otherwise – and you will find some version of the same framework, usually with page after page of Scripture marshalled in support of it. It becomes so familiar that eventually we stop noticing that we are working within a theological framework at all. It simply becomes the way we read the passages.

And I was no exception. If anything, the very familiarity of this language made it feel almost self-evident to me. Their language became my language because, while I had always understood sanctification as complete in Christ, I also accepted this familiar account of an inward sanctifying work of the Spirit. New nature. New man. New heart. New spiritual principles. Graces implanted within the soul by the Holy Spirit. That second part of the framework had simply become the way I understood what the Spirit was said to work within the believer.

These are not questions that suddenly occurred to me while reading Gill or Owen. In one form or another, I have been circling around them for quite a while. Over the past couple of years I have found myself reconsidering some of the language I had long taken for granted – the “new nature,” the “new man,” the “new heart,” even the way we sometimes speak of the new birth itself. I have increasingly wondered whether we have taken biblical expressions describing the life God gives, our union with Christ, and the work of His Spirit, and turned them into a kind of inward spiritual anatomy that Scripture itself never quite lays out in that way. I certainly do not pretend to have all of this settled. In fact, this is probably only the beginning of trying to look more carefully at a framework I have lived with for most of my Christian life. For now, I simply want to open the door a little and begin considering some of these things more closely, with the hope of returning to them along the way, the Lord willing. MPJ

Masters Revisited: One of the friends mentioned in my previous post about the Peter Masters sermon had actually been working his way through the same message and forming his own thoughts before he ever saw mine. So, in a sense, we were both looking at it at the same time, independently of one another. Now that I have seen some of his reservations and observations, there are a few that I think are worth considering further – not because I want to begin dissecting the entire sermon, but because they raise some larger questions that go well beyond Peter Masters or this particular message.

One of them is Masters’ phrase, “credited freely to our moral account.” I had already kind of balked at that wording myself. Scripture does speak of righteousness being counted, reckoned, or imputed – especially in Romans 4 – so that language itself is plainly biblical. But “moral account” feels like it stretches the image a bit further than Scripture does, almost like turning it into a detailed heavenly bookkeeping system. Romans 5 just speaks more simply of “the gift of righteousness.” Maybe the caution isn’t against reckoning or imputation itself, but against letting the accounting metaphor get more elaborate than the Bible’s own language.

Another observation raised a question that seems worth considering. Are we sometimes so concerned to explain exactly what we mean by righteousness that our qualifications begin to overshadow Scripture’s own wonderfully simple declarations? Scripture never directs us to any righteousness found within ourselves, but it does speak with remarkable boldness about the righteousness that is ours in Christ. “By the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.” Romans 5:19. We are “made the righteousness of God in him.” II Corinthians 5:21. And Christ “is made unto us – righteousness.” I Corinthians 1:30. Perhaps there is something to learn from that simplicity. Our righteousness is not a fiction or merely a theological designation. It is real because Christ Himself is our righteousness, and we are really in Him.

After some of the conditional language that both of us picked up on, my friend made this observation, and I have kept thinking about it:

“Why does he blame Catholic teaching when this is the thoughts of all flesh by nature – and is so prevalent in ALL religion! All men think God requires sacrifice and atonement and works? And that ceremony works, law keeping works, and that grace is needed. It’s co-operative effort – no? Don’t they? Yes, historically Luther had to deal with the Church’s doctrine, but he had to deal more with the flesh! Which agreed with his church! Only Scripture could release him!”

That seems to me much larger than a criticism of Roman Catholicism. The instinct to contribute something to our acceptance before God did not begin with Rome. The flesh already wants that. It wants some place for works, obedience, ceremony, faith, or human response to stand alongside grace. Religious systems may organize that instinct differently, but the instinct itself is universal. Rome may have given that instinct a theological system, but it did not create the instinct itself.

Luther certainly had a church system to confront, but underneath that he had the same flesh every man has. And perhaps that is the larger point worth carrying away from all of this. The Gospel does not merely correct the errors of one church or one theological tradition. It confronts something native to us all – that persistent desire to bring something of ourselves into the ground of our acceptance before God. Only the Word of God can strip us of every imagined contribution and turn us wholly away from ourselves to Christ. MPJ

A Sermon by Peter Masters: Apparently my drive to work has become the setting for all sorts of unexpected theological adventures. One day last week the featured message on SermonAudio was Peter Masters preaching The Glorious Gospel Defined. The title alone caught my attention. There is something wonderfully overwhelming about the very expression “the glorious Gospel” – as though the words themselves are already directing us away from everything small in ourselves and toward Christ.

What especially caught me was not Peter Masters himself – I had never even heard of him – but the direction of what I was hearing. Again and again the emphasis seemed to move away from man and toward Christ. And when he came to the righteousness of God, and said in effect that our righteousness is not something found in us but in Christ Himself, I found myself leaping for joy. I actually pulled over on the side of the road and shared it with three different individuals.

Sadly, that is often the way I operate. Something strikes me deeply, I get excited about it, and before I have had time to examine every implication, I am already sharing it with somebody else. Well, naturally, once I had shared it, somebody raised a question. Then another question followed. And before long I was searching for a transcript of a sermon by a man I had never heard of twenty-four hours earlier. One of my friends eventually sent me the entire transcript, and although I have no desire to dissect every sentence of the message, I did want to go back and look carefully at the portion that had so deeply encouraged me.

Here it is: “The righteousness of God in verse 17. Romans 1:17. Is the gift, the free gift of righteousness credited freely to our moral account if we trust in Christ. Even more, the righteousness of God in verse 17 is a person. It is Christ, the second person of the Godhead. The righteousness of God is Christ. He personally will come down like rain upon the mown grass. Righteousness will descend from heaven. Those are the prophecies. Christ will come and live a perfect life, and suffer and die to atone for the sins of all who trust in him. He is our righteousness.”

Reading it now, I certainly see things that I would not say in precisely that way. “If we trust in Christ” sounds conditional to my ears, and the closing expression – Christ dying “to atone for the sins of all who trust in him” – puts the order differently than I would. I would rather say that those for whom Christ died are brought to trust Him. The order matters. Faith is not what determines whom Christ redeemed, nor is it what causes His redeeming work to become effective for a particular sinner. Christ died for His people, and those for whom He died are brought to faith. And “the second person of the Godhead,” while perfectly familiar theological language, is not language I normally adopt.

But here is what interests me. None of that changes what made me pull the car over. What overwhelmed me was the direction of the whole passage. Christ is our righteousness. Christ came. Christ lived the perfect life. Christ suffered. Christ died. Christ is the whole ground of our acceptance before God. I was not being directed inward to search for something in myself that might commend me to God. I was being directed outward to Christ.

Perhaps that is what I want to hold onto here. Careful reading may require us to qualify certain expressions, but careful reading should not make us incapable of rejoicing when Christ is plainly being set before us as everything. And in this passage, that is exactly what I heard: “He is our righteousness.” Jeremiah 23:6. MPJ

Every Word — And Christ: First thing that met my eyes this morning was a short ten-minute devotional from some Sovereign Grace Fellowship. There were some good things said, and then, almost in passing, came this line: “One of these days, we’re gonna be held accountable for every word that we say, especially those things that we say against the clearly revealed Word of God.” That sounded strangely familiar, because our Lord said something very much like it: “Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.” Matthew 12:36-37. And there is no escaping the force of those words. But as I sat there listening, another thought immediately followed. If the meaning is that those who belong to Christ must one day stand before God with every careless, foolish, angry, proud, ignorant, and unbelieving word brought forth as the basis upon which our standing with Him is finally determined, then the conclusion seems rather obvious: we are doomed.

But perhaps that is precisely where we need to distinguish between accountability and condemnation. Scripture does not teach that the believer is beyond the judgment of Christ, nor that our words and actions somehow cease to matter. They do matter. Christ said they matter. But the same Scriptures which tell us that we shall give account also declare that there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. Those truths cannot be enemies. The redeemed are accountable to Christ, but they are not returned beneath that law which condemns, as though the work of Christ had only carried them so far and the final verdict must still be settled by the record of their lives.

And that changes the whole direction of the thought. The Gospel is not that when every idle word is brought into view we will discover that our record was better than we feared. If anything, the opposite must be true. Every careless word, every foolish thought, every moment of pride, every judgment of another while blindness remained in ourselves — bring it all forward, and every possibility of confidence in us disappears. There will be no polished Christian record to present before God, no righteousness accumulated through years of improved conduct, no final appeal to what grace managed to produce in us. There will be Christ.

Perhaps that is why such words should not drive the believer into terror, but into an even clearer sight of the necessity and sufficiency of Christ. “Every idle word” does not make Christ less sufficient; it reveals just how desperately sufficient He must be. If my standing before God finally rests upon what can be discovered in me, I am lost. But if Christ is my righteousness, if He has borne my condemnation, if I am accepted in Him, then even the searching judgment of God cannot uncover something for which Christ failed to answer. Our words matter. Our sins matter. The judgment of Christ matters. But none of them can undo what Christ accomplished. When every refuge in ourselves is stripped away, Christ remains exactly what He has always been — our righteousness, our plea, and our only hope before God. MPJ

My Father, and Your Father: It seems like I spend so much time emphasizing the infinite distance between God and man, and I believe rightly so, and then Scripture places this astonishing truth right in the middle of everything: “For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one, for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren.” Hebrews 2:11. There is something almost impossible to take in there. The Christ before whom angels worship, the ONE by whom all things were made, the ONE we rightly speak of in the highest and loftiest terms imaginable, looks upon creatures of dust whom He has redeemed and is “not ashamed to call them brethren.” I don’t usually stop and look into the Greek behind a word, but this one made me curious. “Ashamed” carries the thought that Christ does not shrink back from being identified with His people. And when you really stop and think about who He is, and then think about what we are, that becomes overwhelming.

All of this was prompted by a small moment on my way to work one morning this week. Driving along and speaking to the Lord, I absentmindedly said, “Oh brother, please…” and immediately caught myself. It startled me, because that is certainly not how I ordinarily think of or address Christ. Ecclesiastes says, “God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.” There is something in me that feels the weight of that distance. Even the privilege of calling God “Father” – though Christ Himself teaches us to do so – can sometimes seem almost overwhelming. There is something in me that instinctively thinks of Christ in the fullness of His glory, far more than in terms of nearness or familiarity.

And yet Scripture says something that, apart from Scripture declaring it, I am not sure I would ever dare to say. After His resurrection Christ says: “Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” John 20:17. “My brethren.” If these words had come from us, they would sound almost unthinkably bold. We would have no right to presume such nearness, no right to assign ourselves such a place, no right to speak as though the infinite distance between Christ and us had somehow disappeared. But He is the One who said it: “My brethren.”

Without Christ Himself saying it, I cannot imagine us ever claiming language like this. Servants, subjects, creatures, redeemed sinners – yes. But “my brethren.” That seems almost beyond the reach of human thought. And yet those are the very words chosen by the One who is infinitely above us. He remains the Lord of glory, speaking from all the fullness of who He is, and still He calls them His brethren. This is one of those places where Scripture seems to lift the soul beyond anything we would ever have imagined for ourselves.

We are not trying to bring Christ down into some imagined familiarity with ourselves. Not because He has been brought down to our level, but because in grace He has brought His people near. And somehow this makes His greatness seem greater rather than smaller. The higher our thoughts of Christ rise, the more astonishing it becomes that this glorious Christ is not ashamed to call us brethren. He remains infinitely above us. And yet He says, “My brethren.” I hardly know what to do with that except wonder. “Who is like unto the LORD our God, who dwelleth on high, Who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven, and in the earth!” Psalm 113:5-6. MPJ

Beer: Interesting. A few hours ago I sent a friend from work a casual photo from home, and he happened to notice a little refrigerator off to the side. He says, “Really off topic, is that your beer fridge on the left?” My reply: “Why do you assume there is beer in it? There is, but I’m just saying.” His response was almost immediate: “I wasn’t judging, don’t worry, I just never noticed it in any of the other pictures you have sent me.”

Now, there was absolutely nothing wrong with what he said. He wasn’t judging me, and I knew he wasn’t. In fact, that is precisely what made those few words so interesting to me: “I wasn’t judging.” I hadn’t accused him of judging me. Why, then, does judgment enter the conversation at all?

I suspect that little sentence tells us something about the religious atmosphere many of us have breathed for a very long time. Among believers, alcohol has often occupied that strange territory where nearly everyone knows that Scripture does not forbid it, and yet it can still become a marker of spirituality, worldliness, wisdom, liberty, stumbling, and almost everything else. And alcohol is only an easy illustration. The same thing can happen with clothing, music, entertainment, where we go, what we own, and countless other ordinary decisions of life.

Before long, perfectly legitimate choices begin carrying far more theological weight than Scripture ever gave them. Instead of simply asking whether something is sinful, wise, loving, or appropriate under the circumstances, we begin reading these things as evidence of somebody’s spiritual condition or progress in the Christian life. That is what interests me.

Of course, the answer is not that nothing matters. Drunkenness matters. Self-control matters. Loving our neighbor matters. How we live matters. The Christian life matters. But those things are very different from creating an atmosphere in which merely having beer in a refrigerator can feel like something that might require the assurance, “Don’t worry, I wasn’t judging.”

Perhaps we have spent so much time measuring the Christian life through outward indicators that even when nobody is actually judging anybody, we all understand instinctively that the possibility is somewhere in the room. And maybe that is worth thinking about. Even if it did take a beer refrigerator to get us there. MPJ

What Are We Even Talking About: A friend recently ended a question about sovereignty with these words: “I do believe in God being Sovereign and I also believe God can do whatsoever He pleases.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with that statement. In fact, it is wonderfully true. But the more I thought about it, the more another question came to mind: How did we ever become accustomed to speaking about God as though this needed to be said?

We are talking about God. The One whose understanding is infinite. The One who calls the stars by name. The One without whom not even a sparrow falls to the ground. The One who brought this staggering universe into existence in all of its vastness and microscopic complexity, with an order and precision we are still struggling to comprehend. Before a God like this, how did we ever become comfortable speaking as though His power or authority might somehow need to be defended, limited, or explained?

Perhaps the deeper problem is not simply that we think too little about God’s sovereignty. It may be that we have become accustomed to thinking about God as though He were somehow like us. We have an astonishing tendency to make God in our own image and then become troubled whenever He refuses to remain there. We imagine Him as a larger, stronger, wiser version of ourselves, only with infinitely more power. We enlarge our own reasoning, our own moral instincts, our own ideas of fairness and justice, and then imagine that somewhere at the top of all of that stands God. But God is not man enlarged.

He does not answer to a standard above Himself, and He certainly does not stand before the tribunal of His creatures waiting for us to decide whether His ways meet with our approval. And this is precisely why revelation is so absolutely necessary. Our instinct is to begin with ourselves. We reason outward from our own experience, our own limitations, our own sense of justice, our own understanding of what seems reasonable, and then we project those things upward and call the result God. Scripture does the opposite. Scripture does not begin with man and work its way upward. It begins with God. “In the beginning God.”

That changes everything. And perhaps much of our confusion begins right there. We keep trying to understand God by beginning with ourselves, when Scripture requires us to begin with Him. We take our moral instincts and place God beneath them. We take our ideas of fairness and ask whether God conforms to them. We take our limited perspective on history, suffering, evil, mercy, judgment, and salvation, and then wonder whether His ways can be justified before us.

At some point, without even realizing what we have done, we have reversed the order entirely. The creature begins examining the Creator. Man becomes the measure, and God is expected to explain Himself before standards drawn from our own minds. But Scripture turns that whole arrangement upside down—or rather, puts it right side up again. God is not standing before us to be judged. We stand before Him. “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.”

Perhaps that reaches closer to the heart of the problem than we realize. We keep imagining God in categories drawn from ourselves, and then struggle when the God revealed in Scripture refuses to fit inside them. And the more seriously we take that, the stranger some of our religious conversations begin to sound. We speak of an infinite God, an omniscient God, an omnipotent God, the Creator and Sustainer of all things, and then cautiously add, “I believe God can do whatsoever He pleases.” Of course He can. He is God. What are we even talking about? Perhaps the deeper question is not merely how sovereign God is, but how our thoughts of Him ever became so small in the first place. MPJ

When our Frameworks Collapse: After working through the slaughter of the innocents, I feel as though I have been brought back to the place where I stood nearly forty years ago. I am beginning to question everything again – not because I no longer believe, but because everything I thought I understood suddenly seems so small. God is immense. His ways are unsearchable. His judgments are past finding out. The little frameworks we build around God begin to collapse when we realize that He is not merely greater than we imagined, but altogether beyond our ability to comprehend. He is before all things, above all things, and dependent upon nothing, while everything we know and everything we are depends entirely upon Him.

I find myself crying for mercy, crying for life, crying for the smallest glimmer of light, because apart from what the Lord gives, we have nothing with which to stand before Him. We will never bring God within the grasp of our understanding. We will never rise above His purposes and explain Him from the outside. There is no outside. There is only God, and everything else exists because He willed it so. We are within His world, upheld by His power, and dependent upon Him for every breath.

And yet, we somehow think God is under our thumb. We think we can summon Him into the courtroom of our reason, ask our questions, and require Him to defend His ways. We imagine that if we study hard enough and build a system tight enough, nothing will remain beyond us. But God does not stand before us to be examined. We stand before Him. He has revealed enough for faith, enough for worship, enough to leave us without excuse, but never enough to bring God down to the measure of man. “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.” Psalm 50:21.

I do not know what else to do but live by faith – not faith in my ability to understand Him, but faith in God Himself. And perhaps that is where faith truly begins: not when everything has been explained, but when all our explanations have reached their end. Not when we have brought God within the reach of our reasoning, but when we have been brought low before Him. Not when we can say, “Now I understand,” but when we can only cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

The more deeply I consider the absoluteness and holiness of God, the more I feel the limits of everything I have thought, written, and believed. I feel as though I am standing before something infinitely greater, purer, and more terrible than anything I have ever imagined. I cannot protect myself from Him. I cannot negotiate with Him. I cannot make myself worthy of one moment of His favor. All I can do is plead for mercy for Christ’s sake. And even that plea rests entirely upon Christ – upon who He is, upon what He has accomplished, and upon the mercy of God revealed in Him. I cannot say that I understand God, but I can say that Christ is the only refuge I have. I cannot answer all the questions that rise within me, but I can look to Christ, in whom God has revealed mercy to sinners.

Perhaps I am being brought back to the beginning again. Perhaps after all these years, after all the reading, writing, studying, and seeking to understand the truth of Holy Scripture, I am being made to see that I still possess nothing apart from what God gives. No light unless He gives light. No faith unless He gives faith. No life unless He gives life. No mercy unless He is merciful. There is something frightening about being brought to that place, but perhaps there is also something safe about it. It leaves me with nothing to defend, nothing to boast in, and nothing to hold before God except Christ.

I do not know where all these thoughts will lead. I only know that God is greater than I have ever understood Him to be, and I am smaller than I have ever imagined myself to be. And somewhere between those two realities, I find myself crying again for mercy, hoping in Christ, and asking the Lord for enough light to take one more step. MPJ

The Slaughter of the Innocents: I was reading Matthew 2 today and came again to what is commonly called the slaughter of the innocents. Herod, realizing that the wise men had not returned to him, sent men into Bethlehem and the surrounding region and killed all the children two years old and younger. It is one of those passages that does not fit very well upon a Christmas card. Christ had entered the world, but instead of everything becoming peaceful, there was bloodshed, mourning, and a voice heard in Ramah: “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

Matthew records it almost without explanation. Herod sought to destroy Christ. Joseph was warned to flee into Egypt. The prophecy was fulfilled. The narrative then continues. But I found myself stopping there. We are dealing with a God whose purposes reach infinitely beyond our slightest comprehension. We have been given truth – real truth – but we have not been given an explanation for very much at all. Sometimes Scripture opens a small window, allows us to see something terrible and mysterious, and then closes it again. Yet we speak so easily as though everything has been mapped out for us.

Christianity now comes in almost every imaginable form. A person may be raised Baptist, become Presbyterian, embrace Lutheranism, enter Rome, worship only on Saturday, or attach himself to a favorite teacher and spend the rest of his life repeating that teacher’s conclusions. Each group opens the same Bible, claims the guidance of the same Spirit, and is often convinced that everyone outside its boundaries has failed to understand the truth. Christianity can begin to resemble the tower of Babel: everyone speaking, everyone building, and very few understanding one another.

Of course, every group has an explanation for this confusion. The Holy Spirit leads His people into all truth, we are told, and therefore those who do not see the truth as we see it must not have the Spirit. Their disagreement becomes evidence against them. Then they say the same about us. The circle continues without end. Romans 14:4.

We gather the portions of truth we have been given, arrange them into a system, and then begin speaking as though our system were equal to the whole mind of God. We call our framework the gospel, establish the boundaries beyond which no sincere believer may pass, and assume that deviation from our understanding proves the absence of divine teaching. But how much do any of us really see? We are reading of a king attempting to murder the infant Christ, children being slaughtered without mercy simply because they were born in Bethlehem, families mourning, and the promised Messiah being carried into Egypt.

We are standing before events unfolding within a purpose we could never have imagined and cannot fully explain. Yet after closing the chapter, we may return almost immediately to speaking as though God, His ways, His truth, and everyone who belongs to Him fit neatly within the limits of our understanding. That should frighten us.

This does not mean that truth is unknowable or that doctrine does not matter. God has spoken. Error exists, and it should be exposed. But perhaps the first error needing exposure is our assumption that we ourselves have escaped it. Before we pronounce confidently upon everyone who sees differently, perhaps we should remember how little we have understood, how often we have changed our own minds, and how far the living God exceeds every theological arrangement we have constructed around Him.

Truth matters greatly. But has our possession of it made us tremble before God, or merely more secure in our own conclusions? We may condemn error while forgetting that error still clings to us. We may defend the gospel while making our own understanding of it the measure of every soul. We may speak of being taught by the Spirit while treating ourselves as though we have nothing left to learn. And whenever disagreement arises, we resolve the difficulty by deciding that the other person cannot belong to God. That is an easy answer. It may also be a fearful one. Perhaps we should spend less time trying to prove that God is with us and more time asking whether our confidence has outrun what He has actually shown us.

We speak confidently about whom God has received, whom He has rejected, and where His truth may be found. Nearly everyone assumes that God stands within his own circle, while few seem troubled by the possibility that His purpose may reach far beyond the lines we have drawn. The slaughter of the innocents reminds us that we are not dealing with a God who can be reduced to our familiar arrangements. His purposes move through darkness, suffering, kingdoms, human wickedness, fulfilled prophecy, and the flight of Christ into Egypt. We see fragments. He sees the end from the beginning.

So yes, we should speak what we believe to be true. We should expose error and testify plainly of Christ. But we should do so with trembling. We are not distributing light from some inexhaustible source within ourselves. We are poor and limited creatures gathering the few rays God has graciously given us. Perhaps the error we most urgently need exposed is not always theirs. Perhaps it is ours. Psalm 139:23-24. MPJ