John Owen:
The excellence of the believer is not that he has a large grasp of things, but that what he does grasp, which may be very little, he sees it in the light of the Spirit of God, in a saving, soul-transforming light; and this is that which gives us communion with God.
Overcoming Sin and Temptation (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 117, as quoted in Tony Reinke, Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 36-37.
Commenting on Romans 5:5-8, Kasemann writes:
As the Spirit determines Christian life as a whole, not just its extraordinary manifestations, so conversely it sets the whole of life in the sphere of miracle. “Being in the Spirit” becomes the proclamation of “being in Christ” both as the crucified and as the resurrected one. The event of justification is saved from the threat of historicization and the love of God from that of a mystical theory of the removal of the remaining distance between God and mankind, or Christ and the church, with the help of the motif of union between the two. The new creature stands, not on our morality, but on “God for us and with us.”
Ernst Kasemann, Commentary on Romans, 136
“A SONG OF ASCENTS. OF DAVID.
O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore.” (Psalms 131:0-3)
The context of Psalm 131 is the psalmist waiting on the LORD in the midst of affliction. “Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me” (129:2). “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the LORD…” (130:5-6). The waiting is a trusting in the hesed of God—the psalm concludes, “And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities” (v. 8). Psalm 131 presents itself as a more detailed explanation of what this waiting entails. The superscript is strategic in that David is the epitome of a faithful Israelite who hopes in the promise of God (cf. 132:11).
Verse 2 follows with a positive affirmation and concluding comparison. David calmed and quieted his soul. Therefore—because David calmed and quieted his soul—his soul is like a weaned child with its mother. What does this mean? How should the reader understand the metaphor?
Without stretching the metaphor, I think the characteristic what is underlined by David’s use of a weaned child is the reality that the child has aged. The child is still with its mother. There is no hint of independence here. But the child has gone through the initial stages of feeding—the late night outbursts and the sporadic, unpredictable desire for milk. The weaned child is patient. This child sits by its mother’s side and waits for her declaration of mealtime. That is David’s soul. It is calmed and waiting. It does not have to whine now, for his soul is as sure that God will fulfill his promise as a weaned child is that its mothers will give food. And it is here that the tone of the psalm changes and David instructs Israel: “O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore” (Ps 131:3).
It is true, religion in the souls of men is the immediate work of God, and all our natural endeavors can neither produce it alone, nor merit those supernatural aids by which it must be wrought: the Holy Ghost must come upon us, and the power of the Highest must overshadow us, before that holy thing can be begotten, and Christ be formed in us: but yet we must not expect that this whole work should be done without any concurring endeavours of our own: we must not lie loitering in the ditch, and wait till Omnipotence pull us from thence; no, no! we must bestir ourselves to our utmost capacities, and then we may hope that, ‘our labour shall not be in vain in the Lord ‘ (1 Corinthians 15:58).
Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man, 97ff.
And then looking back on the “bestirring of ourselves” we will say that it was all of grace.
A Christian dogmatics of holiness is not metaphysics, because the holy God, reaching out in the world in Son and Spirit, is the sanctifier; not is it mysticism (or moralism), because human reality is holy only in dependence upon the Spirit of the Son who makes holy. Thus, as Barth puts it, a trinitarian dogmatics of holiness ‘cannot seek to have merely one centre, one subject’ precisely because ‘its subject is God’–God known as holy in the incarnate Word and life-giving Spirit.
John Webster, Holiness, 7
A dogmatic account of holiness is thus not simply concerned to offer an account of immanent divine properties; nor is it an elaboration of a spirituality or ethics of human sanctification. Rather, its concern is with the path taken by the holy three-in-one who, in the majestic fulfillment of his own freedom, elects, reconciles and perfects the creature for holy obedience. Accordingly, it does not think of divine holiness in abstraction from the sanctifying acts of God pro nobis, nor of human sanctity in isolation from election, salvation and the work of the sanctifying Spirit. This is the difference which the Christian doctrine of the Trinity makes in a theological account of holiness.
John Webster, Holiness, 5
In the Church’s theological work, the gospel is articulated as the norm of the Church’s praise, confession and action, and the ground of the Church’s understanding of nature and human history. As it seeks to articulate the gospel in the sanctorum communio, theology concentrates on two fundamental tasks, namely exegesis and dogmatics. Exegesis is of supremely critical importance, because the chief instrument through which Christ publishes the gospel is Holy Scripture. Exegesis is the attempt to hear what the Spirit says to the Churches; without it, theology cannot even begin to discharge its office. Dogmatics is complementary but strictly subordinate to the exegetical task.
John Webster, Holiness, 3
The Pharisees and scribes were teaching wrong (Matthew 15:16). They contradicted the Scriptures and led people astray. Jesus called them blind guides (15:14). Isaiah nailed it. He prophesied well when he said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me, in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Isa. 29:13).
There is a relationship between their vain worship and the subsequent participle of them teaching the commandments of men to be the doctrine of God. Doctrine is directive preeminently in that it shows us the way of true worship. The Pharisees ordered their lives around the wrong stuff. We can learn something important about doctrine here, namely, the commandments of men propped up as the doctrine of God is a miserable endeavor that results in the worse kind of vanity.
Doctrine is holy because it is derived from God, it is of God. It is the Spirit-empowered exposition and articulation of the Holy Scriptures in the midst of life. It leads us in all truth because it is the repetition of the gospel– it is sang, prayed, preached, taught, cried… generating, ordering, validating, refining true worship of the triune God.
Last night ten seminary students converged for fellowship that was long overdue. We start the semester running and by this point we are coming up on the last lap. Our cohort is scattered–some guys are doing Hebrew, some Theology… but last night, we were all doing the same thing. Meat eating, sword fighting, and bearded tackling.
It was exactly what we needed in preparation for Christian leadership and ministry. It was joy abounding. It was humble. It was glorious.
It was a time together that was bought by the blood of the slain Lamb of God. It was by Jesus, in Jesus, and for Jesus. How else can ten sinners from all other the country, from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different personalities–how else could these men come together and share in such joy? How else could they come and let their guard down and not care about whether they ‘looked like’ graduate students, husbands, and fathers?
It was not cheap. It was deep. It was the evidence of grace that was bought by Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection. We are ten sinners who have been redeemed. We have tasted and seen that the Lord is good and we want to taste Him more, and more, and more. We want to soak in as much as we can from our studies. We want to treasure Jesus more than anything in the world. We want to be persevering, Spirit-dependent leaders in the church for the glory of God. And, sometimes, we need to grab a Nerf sword and go after one another.
Spurgeon writes, “Texts will often refuse to reveal their treasures till you open them with the key of prayer” (44).
Praying during exegesis is very important. Exegesis in sermon preparation is not the mechanical enterprise of our hermeneutics that then becomes spiritual when we think about our preaching it and souls hearing it. It is spiritual all the way through. If our exegesis is wooden and prayerless then our exegesis must change. Determinant meaning in a text does not make the task of discovering that text’s meaning any less spiritual. This is God’s Word—it is God’s Word! And we will not get it unless the Spirit comes.
