Thanks for those links! So it seems we aren’t alone with these questions! I even left a comment underneath the more recenly active (2nd one you shared) above.
2 Likes
My wife, kids and I are reading through some of MacDonald’s books recently–we just finished “The Boyhood of Ranald Bannerman” and “The Wanderings of Clare Skymer,” and are starting one of my wife’s and my favorites, “The Baronet’s Song.” One of the passages that made my wife and I nearly tear up came up 2 nights ago. It describes MacDonald’s view on God’s loving sanctification. In it, the 8 year old boy, Gibbie’s, father dies suddenly and tragically in his son’s arms of an alcoholic stomach ulcer, after a long battle with the drink:
He would not wake. He was gone to see what God could do for him there, for whom nothing could be done here.
Truly, when we die, God may have a lot of healing to do–and we look forward to it!
We know that there will be tears wiped away, figuratively anyway, because tears of joy will have supplanted them.
1 Like
If we are raise raised with new bodies, old pains will just be memories. Likewise and analogously (that’s probably redundant ; - ), so will our old sinful selves be just memories. (That sounds like it might be an argument against purgatory?)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest he was. I was just following through on what we are told and know already, not that we can know much ‘what to expect’,
1 Like
You were speaking of first needing to be like a child, @Dale ? … read on.
(232) Revealed to Babes
This then, or something like this, for words are poor to tell the best things, is the righteousness which is of God by faith–so far from being a thing built on the rubbish heap of legal fiction called vicarious sacrifice, or its shadow called imputed righteousness, that only the child with the child-heart, so far ahead of and so different from the wise and prudent, can understand it. The wise and prudent interprets God by himself, and does not understand him; the child interprets God by himself, and does understand him. The wise and prudent must make a system and arrange things to his mind before he can say, I believe . The child sees, believes, obeys–and knows he must be perfect as his father in heaven is perfect. If an angel, seeming to come from heaven, told him that God had let him off, that he did not require so much of him as that, but would be content with less; that he could not indeed allow him to be wicked, but would pass by a great deal, modifying his demands because it was so hard for him to be quite good, and he loved him so dearly, the child of God would at once recognize, woven with the angel’s starry brilliancy, the flicker of the flames of hell, and would say to the shining one, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’
As found in the unspoken sermon: “Righteousness”
3 Likes
It sounds to me that he’s saying we know God isn’t an “easy believe” God–that He isn’t one that will say we can sin and get forgiveness without repentance.
1 Like
Sorry! I took my note down 
Good thoughts. Thanks.
I like this bit. The implication I glean here is that we understand God truly through relationship (love) as a child. And such a relationship leads us naturally to want to imitate God (“righteousness”) as our model. We become disciples who truly train ourselves, motivated by love, to follow as closely we can. In contrast, intellectual adherence to a theological “system” can be abused by some as “easy-grace”. The human tendency in a legal-righteousness scheme to try to get away with sinning if we think the penalty has been covered.
3 Likes
Being childlike is more about being ingenuous and simple, about one’s desires, not loyalty or worrying about punishment.
(233) Answer
…and would say to the shining one, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ Nor would there be the slightest wonder or merit in his doing so, for at the words of the deceiver, if but for briefest moment imagined true, the shadow of a rising hell would gloom over the face of creation; hope would vanish; the eternal would be as the carcase of a dead man; the glory would die out of the face of God–until the groan of a thunderous no burst from the caverns of the universe, and the truth, flashing on his child’s soul from the heart of the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, withered up the lie of the messenger of darkness.
‘But how can God bring this about in me?’
Let him do it, and perhaps you will know; if you never know, yet there it will be. Help him to do it, or he cannot do it. He originates the possibility of your being his son, his daughter; he makes you able to will it, but you must will it. If he is not doing it in you–that is, if you have as yet prevented him from beginning, why should I tell you, even if I knew the process, how he would do what you will not let him do? Why should you know? What claim have you to know? But indeed how should you be able to know? For it must deal with deeper and higher things than you can know anything of till the work is at least begun.
As found in the unspoken sermon: “Righteousness”
1 Like
Hmm.
I’m reserving this thread for MacDonald’s thoughts (from the Lewis book) and our interactions with that, Dale. Was there something in that link that you thought goes along with or gives some answer to any of the regular thoughts expressed? It’s okay for you to share your thoughts - but I don’t intend to start taking in other devotionals here to try to guess the relevance you see.
I’m sorry, I thought the correlation was implicit.
1 Like
I imagine that the desire to ask for the Holy Spirit’s guidance is itself an act of obedience. But if one doesn’t go on to then obey that guidance … GM seems (to me) to suggest that this will be a barrier to the Holy Spirit’s work until one starts to obey.
1 Like
There is an argument that the desire itself is implanted by the Holy Spirit.
It’s an interesting question @Dale, and @Mervin_Bitikofer. I went back over the whole sermon just now, and unsurprisingly, not being a calvinist, GM doesn’t answer it on calvinistic terms. But more to the point, the sermon is defining what the righteousness is that one gains “through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith.” GM’s main purpose is not to establish how that first act of faith is possible.
However, there are a number of points in the sermon, that I think clarify GM’s view on this. Here are some segments:
Be sure that the thing that God gives, the righteousness that is of God, is a real thing, and not a contemptible legalism.
pg. 2b
It was no mere intellectual recognition of the existence of a God, which is consistent with the deepest atheism; it was that faith which is one with action: ‘He went out, not knowing whither he went.’ The very act of believing in God after such fashion that, when the time of action comes, the man will obey God, is the highest act, the deepest, loftiest righteousness of which man is capable, is at the root of all other righteousness, and the spirit of it will work till the man is perfect.
pg. 3a
As we are born, it is the doing of, or at least the honest trying to do many another duty, that will at length lead a man to see that his duty to God is the first and deepest and highest of all, including and requiring the performance of all other duties whatever.
pg. 3b
He needs creative God, and time for will and effort.
pg. 4b
Born into the world without righteousness, he cannot see, he cannot know, he is not in touch with perfect righteousness, and it would be the deepest injustice to demand of him, with a penalty, at any given moment, more than he knows how to yield; but it is the highest lore constantly to demand of him perfect righteousness as what he must attain to. With what life and possibility is in him, he must keep turning to righteousness and abjuring iniquity, ever aiming at the perfection of God. Such an obedient faith is most justly and fairly, being all that God himself can require of the man, called by God righteousness in the man.
Pg. 4b-5a
What, then, is the righteousness which is of God by faith? It is simply the thing that God wants every man to be, wrought out in him by constant obedient contact with God himself. It is not an attribute either of God or man, but a fact of character in God and in man. It is God’s righteousness wrought out in us, so that as he is righteous we too are righteous.
pg. 5b
The righteousness which is of God by faith in the source, the prime of that righteousness, is then just the same kind of thing as God’s righteousness, differing only as the created differs from the creating.
pg. 6b
He knows that if he needs anything, it is his before he asks it; for his father has willed him, in the might and truth of his fatherhood, to be one with himself.
pg. 7b
The wise and prudent interprets God by himself, and does not understand him; the child interprets God by himself, and does understand him. The wise and prudent must make a system and arrange things to his mind before he can say, I believe. The child sees, believes, obeys–and knows he must be perfect as his father in heaven is perfect.
pg. 7b
‘But how can God bring this about in me?’
Let him do it, and perhaps you will know; if you never know, yet there it will be. Help him to do it, or he cannot do it. He originates the possibility of your being his son, his daughter; he makes you able to will it, but you must will it. If he is not doing it in you–that is, if you have as yet prevented him from beginning,
pg. 8a
Brother, when thou sittest at home in thy house, which is the temple of the Lord, open all thy windows to breathe the air of his approach; set the watcher on thy turret, that he may listen out into the dark for the sound of his coming, and thy hand be on the latch to open the door at his first knock. Shouldst thou open the door and not see him, do not say he did not knock, but understand that he is there, and wants thee to go out to him. It may be he has something for thee to do for him. Go and do it, and perhaps thou wilt return with a new prayer, to find a new window in thy soul.
pg. 8b-9a
The sermon is linked above as I formatted it for my Google Drive. Feel free to use it!
2 Likes
That is an interesting, and maintained ‘tension’ between “It’s God doing it in me” and “I must consent (allow) it to happen.” It seems to me that GM sticks hard to both sides of that - he will not relinquish the conviction that it is God who works righteousness, but nor will he let go of the thought that God also requires our participatory consent. God will not have slaves deprived of their freely given love as expressed by their own will and active participation.
That resonates with what I know of love too. Love and coercion are opposites. Fear and slavery are eventually seen to be hatred at work and not love.
3 Likes
(234) Useless Knowledge
For it must deal with deeper and higher things than you can know anything of till the work is at least begun. Perhaps if you approved of the plans of the glad creator, you would allow him to make of you something divine! To teach your intellect what has to be learned by your whole being, what cannot be understood without the whole being, what it would do you no good to understand save you understood it in your whole being–if this be the province of any man, it is not mine. Let the dead bury their dead, and the dead teach their dead; for me, I will try to wake them.
As found in the unspoken sermon: “Righteousness ”
2 Likes
2 Likes