Hey, Cobblestone,
Call me silly, but I’ve never understood why the passengers
and crew of the SS Minnow worked so
hard to get off Gilligan’s Island. Never got why, when they cinched up the
scrawny first mate to a wayward weather balloon, everybody groaned so loudly
and Skipper threw his hat to the ground when Gilligan got no farther than the
lagoon. Seems to me they had everything they needed – fresh water, food
sources, sun, sand. True enough, it was an inconvenient life, as the theme song
singers sang: “No phone, no lights, no motor cars – not a single luxury…” but my
bride and I have paid good money to get just a week or two of what the
Professor was trying to undo for himself and his shipmates.
It’s a sitcom parable on the human condition, I suppose, and
one more way to sell Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the Sixties. Everything,
everywhere… just out of reach. Coconuts will only take you so far. Life is a
desert island, and all the good stuff is somewhere else.
I’ve had some extra time to read this week, Church, which
will be evident to you shortly. On the advice of C.S. Lewis, I decided to
get-the-heck out of my own daggone century. That’s not exactly how Lewis put
it, as you might imagine, but the concept is the same. I’m a product of the
Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, and Lewis the Nineteenth and Twentieth,
so I figured – even sticking to my home continent – the Eighteenth would be
bare minimum. Get some perspective, unaffected by sitcoms. Found a volume
titled Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings.
Following is an excerpt from a sermon Edwards preached in
July of 1731 at Boston. At the time, he was under close scrutiny, his mentor
and tutor having recently bolted from the “proper” denomination of the
Christian church. Those who had invited him to preach were curious if the
twenty-seven-year-old Edwards would hold to sound doctrine. He chose a passage
from First Corinthians as his text…
…God chose what is low
and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to
nothing things that are, so that no human
being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you
are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness
and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let
the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1:28-31).
And then he preached. Be advised: there’s some 300-year-old
Colonial English coming up. Go slowly… stick with it… it’ll be worth the
effort, I promise.
“The redeemed have all
their objective good in God. God himself is the great good which they are
brought to the possession and enjoyment of by redemption. He is the highest
good, and the sum of all that good which Christ purchased. God is the
inheritance of the saints; he is the portion of their souls. God is their
wealth and treasure, their food, their life, their dwelling place, their
ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honour and glory. They have none in
heaven but God; he is the great good which the redeemed are received to at
death, and which they are to rise to at the end of the world. The Lord God is
the light of the heavenly Jerusalem; and is the “river of water of life” that
runs, and “the tree of life that grows, in the midst of the paradise of God.”
The glorious excellencies and beauty of God will be what will for ever
entertain the minds of the saints, and the love of God will be their
everlasting feast. The redeemed will indeed enjoy other things; they will enjoy
the angels, and will enjoy one another: but that which they shall enjoy in the
angels, or each other, or any thing else whatsoever, will be what shall be seen
of God in them.”
How’s that for sound doctrine?
Everything we’ve known, anywhere at any time, will eventually
become as the SS Minnow: tossed up on
the beach and useless, big whopping hole in its side. But the redeemed are not
marooned. “Let the one who boasts, boast
in the Lord.” It’s OK; he can make good on whatever checks your boasting
writes. Edwards chose to boast in the Lord, to lay off whatever luxuries might
otherwise have been his, if he had preached only the “party platform” in Boston
that day.
Honestly, Church, I have a hard time imagining what it’s like
for God to be all sufficient. I want to live in the vigor of Edwards’ sermon,
but like the castaways, I build signal fires on the sand; I lash together rafts
and paddle out toward the horizon, convinced that redemption can be earned with
a little more effort than I gave last time. Convinced, to exactly the same
degree, that redemption can’t be earned.
So I take it on faith, and look for evidence. I take God at
his word that everything I need – temporal and eternal – is found in him. I
choose to believe that before Skipper and Gilligan’s blunders; before the first
cathode ray tube ever received signal through the airwaves; sixteen centuries
before Jonathan Edwards gave his proof-of-concept sermon – an ordinary chosen
man breathed in the words God breathed out, and put truth to parchment, guarded
and preserved by the Almighty in every age.
To those he has redeemed, Christ is:
Wisdom from God.
Righteousness.
Sanctification.
Redemption.
What else is needed?
“So join us here each week, my friends / you’re sure to get a
smile…”
(I always did.)
“…from seven stranded castaways / here on Gilligan’s Isle.”
But in between episodes, maybe go back and read that Edwards
piece again.
Grace and Peace (aka sufficiency in the Lord),
John
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