The Word seems like it is so little, like five barley loaves and two small fish, but it is all that God used to create the heavens and the earth.
An infidel, some time ago, was speaking in the open air, and he orated very eloquently about the elevating influences of nature and what a blessing it was to study nature. A friend in the crowd said to him, “That is very pretty. But would you have the goodness to tell me what Nature is that does all this?” The orator answered tartly, “Every fool knows what Nature is.” “Well,” said the questioner, “then it will be easy to tell us.” “Nature,” said the speaker, “Well: Nature is Nature.”
Just so. That is where it ended. And so it is with very many people when they talk about Providence or Nature. Let us not speak without knowing what we mean, or without declaring our meaning. We do not erect an altar and inscribe it TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. We know the Lord, and are known by him, and therefore we would speak of him as our hope, our trust, our joy. We know no providence apart from Jehovah-Jireh, the God who foresees and provides. To us there is no fickle chance, but the Lord reigns. Equally to us is there no blind, inexorable fate, but the Most High decrees and works out his wise and sovereign will.” [1]
A lot has changed since the time when Charles Spurgeon first delivered this sermon 130 years ago. If you were to make an illustration, the progression may look something like this:
- What Scripture reveals - “God is, He created all things, and he created humans with the purpose of maintaining an active and personal relationship with - and providing all things necessary towards that end - for us.
- What we have concluded under the guise of Deism: “God is, He created all things - for us.”
- What Western culture, in our modern era, believes, teaches and confesses: “God, however you define it, is - for us.”
- What Western culture now lives by: “us.”
Sadly, its all too common for both mainline Christianity – with its efforts to be culturally relevant on the one hand – and American Evangelicalism – with its incessant navel-gazing messages of self-fulfillment on the other – to fill pulpits with preachers who seem to have forgotten that Christianity really is God’s message to us. He is the subject of the conversation, not us. His will is the operative initiator, not ours.
Such narcissism that permeates the most popular expressions of the gospel of Jesus Christ is bad enough. What is worse and far more lamentable is how those who have “seen behind the curtain” have responded. Many have reacted by dechurching: a detachment from the “household of faith,” and deconstructing: the caustic application of rationalism to the core elements of what St. Jude called “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”
While people inside and outside the church may still have the word, “God,” in their vocabulary, live as if that word is the theological equivalent of “abracadabra,” and some view it as exactly that. As James Shire wrote in his book, The Universe Next Door,
In intellectual terms the route is this: In theism God is the infinite-personal Creator and sustainer of the cosmos. In deism God is reduced; he begins to lose his personality, though he remains Creator and (by implication) sustainer of the cosmos. In naturalism God is further reduced; he loses his very existence” (pp. 55-56).
This shift could not occur without the simultaneous attack on the idea that the Word is the central expression of God, and therefore both the Word and words matter. The Logos, understood as Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22-36 in the Old Testament, and revealed as God’s unique Son, Jesus Christ by St. John in Chapter 1 of his Gospel, reveals God to us, and claims that we cannot truly know our Creator apart from knowing him. We cannot rationalize God into our consciousness, nor can we argue him into our conscience. We either hear and believe or refuse to hear and believe not. Due to the sin of our first parents, our earthly understanding is corrupted beyond our ability to repair, and with it, the ability to recognize the good, and from it, to see the God who establishes it. Instead, God can only be known through the agency of the Word proclaimed, as it is written in 1 Cor 1:19-21:
For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
God will not share his glory with another; as the prophet Isaiah wrote in Isaiah 42:8 “I am the Lord; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.” We cannot devise a new method, a new message, or a new paradigm that accords with our stubborn desire to remake God’s Kingdom according to our philosophies. Not even our earthly zeal, attached to a desire to either gain God’s attention or show that we have “outgrown” him through our own efforts of “being good,” enables us to run the vineyard and keep the harvest to ourselves. The truth is, as long as we cling to a foolish and dangerous denial of God, the earth does not, did not, and (no matter how much technological advancement we achieve) will not belong to us. Psalm 24:1 asserts, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.” The higher we build, the harder we try, we only show just how far away we are from God and from the purpose for which we were created. The very lives that we live testify to our fruitless quest. The last enemy is death, and it has lost only once, to Christ. The one hope the world has must be accepted on the basis of his Word, and he has placed that Word in his temple, the Church.
We cannot devise a new method, a new message, or a new paradigm that accords with our stubborn desire to remake God’s Kingdom according to our philosophies.
That is who we are, God help us. We cannot be something else, and still fulfill his purpose, nor do we, in truth, desire to do so. As St. Augustine wrote in Confessions 1.1.1 , “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” By the same token, we cannot help our neighbor in any meaningful way that is detached from his Word and will. Any efforts to meet earthly needs that is disconnected from the source of all good will suffer the same ends of every other temporal thing: death. Life can only be found in Christ, the Prince of Life, and the message of life is the message of him. That is why what the world seeks to create without God must fail, as will the one who has tempted us to join him in his efforts to be like God, as it is written in John 10:10: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
The problems of today are immense, and it is clear that the hour is late, especially to those who do not know God as he has revealed himself and his will in his Word. The story of how Jesus fed the five thousand is the illustration of our dilemma and his solution. As Matthew recorded it in Matthew 14:15–18:
Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” But Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.”
In that passage, Jesus took what was both small and seemingly inferior, five loaves of barley bread and two small fish, and blessed it to be what they needed and more. If we were to give the world everything it wants, without giving the world what it needs, we are only feeding them the food of death. but if we give the world the Bread of Life, as we are called to do, we are feeding it that which will sustain it for time and eternity. The Word seems like it is so little, like five barley loaves and two small fish, but it is all that God used to create the heavens and the earth, and it is all that the Lord uses to transform us from slaves to sons, from creatures with a destiny of death to children who will inherit eternal life. He is enough, for he is Alpha and Omega, First and Last, and as the poets of Greece said by the Wisdom of God in Acts 17:28: “In him we live and move and have our being.”
[1] C. H. Spurgeon, “Israel’s Hope; Or, the Centre of the Target,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 37 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1891), 213–14.
