The Number of Greats Diminished by One

Mark Ashton July 18, 2009

Did you hear the story of the Pastor driving home from church lamenting to his wife that there simply were not many great preachers left in the world? She nodded sadly and informed him there was even one less than he thought.
Mark Ashton, Vicar of The Round Church meeting at St. Andrew the Great Cambridge, was a great preacher. Humility does not always adorn the pulpits of the great. But this was one of those rare impressive men who was wholly unimpressed with himself.
Mark entered heaven on what some Christians call Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter. April 3rd 2010. He was 62 years old.
I remember the exact date I first heard Mark preach. It was The Lord's Day 26 March, 2006. Easy to remember because it was our wedding anniversary and Jane was with me. We'd gone to another Cambridge Church in the morning, but we made it to STAG for the 5pm service. It was between terms so the students were away from Cambridge. You can imagine my surprise when we entered a church packed with young people. The music was wonderful. A spirit of worship prevailed in the congregation.
The minister approached the platform and proceeded to amaze me. He read from Numbers 19 and delivered a verse by verse exposition on the subject of the Red Heifer. THE RED HEIFER! From Numbers! In the context of successive expository messages though the Fourth Book of Moses. To young people mainly. In the 21st Century. To a packed house.
The sermon was magnificent.
I felt dazed and grateful.
I determined there and then that Mark Ashton would be my friend.
It was not unlike the doctrine of Election. He did not choose me; I chose him.
Later that summer we did ministry together with students in the Czech Republic.
Just before his diagnosis he agreed to come and minister in our church in Budapest, a prospect abandoned as the cancer closed in. His last sermons in January were from the Book of Acts.
Mark had the bearing and carriage of an athlete which, in fact, he was. His first degree was from Oxford but he later rowed for Cambridge where he took his theology degree. He was one of those robust personalities we have trouble associating with illness and death. There are few things harder to trust God with than this business of who dies early and who stays late. Who but God could discharge a responsibility so grave?
But we do trust Him, because we must trust Him.
But just because we trust, that doesn't mean we don't grieve.
And we grieve most deeply.

Your beauty O Israel is slain upon your high places
Tell it not in Gath
Publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon
I am distressed for you my brother
You were very pleasant to me
How are the mighty now fallen
While the battle rages still

Easter and the Point of it All

He is Risen – The First Easter
Arthur Hughes (1893)

He is not here; for He is risen. Just as He said.
Matthew 28:6

The atheist protests that God (the One Who, by skeptic reckoning, was never there) should have created a far different world than the world we now have. I can fathom no reason why God should adjust His sovereignty to accommodate the bellowing of ranters. But in point of fact He did create a world which would be unrecognizable to us today.
In that Original Creation death was nowhere to be found. Everything teemed with life. Throbbing, pulsating, prolific life. Literally everything in that system collaborated for the sustenance of human happiness. The elements themselves, the beasts of the field, the things which creep and those micro-organisms invisible to our sight were either benign or salubrious in their impact on the health of human-kind.
In the first Garden death was a nullity unregistered in history or experience. Because it was unexperienced and unwitnessed it was a thing scarcely to be imagined. Death existed, if we may use the word 'existed' in such a manner, in only one place, and that place was the Word of God. More precisely death existed solely in a Warning by God. And that warning was localized in a Tree and the fruit which hung thereon. Eat of the fruit of that tree said the Lord and in the day you eat of it, dying you shall surely die.
Of course the world as it is today is precisely the opposite to what we have read of that Paradise of Innocents. Everything tends toward death. Every person ever born (Enoch and Elijah excepted) is either dead or will die. It is the one great commonality in our history and the one great certainty in our future.
Life after the grave, the triumph over death at the end, is found in only one place: In the Word of God. As far as our hope for life goes the Promise is localized upon one tree and the one Man who hung thereon. That tree was the Cross, and the Man Who died there is Jesus of Nazareth. It is only by faith believing God's Promise that death will be cheated and the grave plundered.
We will not here trace the various threads of evidence which lend credence to biblical miracles.
Our question is a simple one. Why was Christ raised? To give Him life? Not in the ultimate sense. Christ already possessed Life which was eternal, non-contingent and unalienable.
No man takes My life from Me. I lay it down. (John 10:18)
His resurrection was not necessary to secure His own life for the simple reason that His death was not necessary. It was rather voluntary.
The resurrection was necessary to secure life for the sinner.
He was raised for our justification.
Before the throne my Surety stands.
My name is written on His hands.
Christ is risen that I too may rise.
Having died with Him by faith I will reign with Him in glory.
Such is the promise, such are the prospects.
The warning went unheeded let not the promise go unclaimed.
Christ is risen as our hope.
There is no other recourse.
Nor would we want one if there could be.

Darkness at Noon

Good Friday


Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.
Matthew 27:45

The list of early adherents who later renounced Communism in the 20th Century is long. Some were disillusioned by the Ukrainian famine, others by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, still others by the hard fact (empirically demonstrated) that reality never measured up to theory. Many traced their awakening in memoirs: George Orwell, Whitaker Chambers, and Joy Davidman among others. One of the most prolific and profound of that number was Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian Jew who wrote 'The God that Failed.' His fictional account of the Moscow show trials was called 'Darkness at Noon’. Those trials were an exercise in judicial murder. Koestler's novel was an imaginary account of an historical tragedy.
Centuries earlier Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote historical accounts of a spiritual tragedy.
THE spiritual tragedy.
They too recorded a judicial murder.
They wrote of a day which really did know darkness at noon.
Christianity finds the fulcrum of its persuasive power in the real-time events of Crucifixion and Resurrection in Palestine at Passover in the First Century.
It is essential to the claims that the critical episodes unfolded in plain view. They were public spectacles. Jesus fed five thousand and appeared to five hundred. The fire fell on Jerusalem at Pentecost when the place was thronged with pilgrims. If you play at deception better to make the lie obscure and difficult of disputation.
But it wasn't deception.
That being the case, why, we may well ask, was the critical moment shrouded in darkness?
Scripture does not tell us outright but we may guess.
The first reason is DECORUM.
The Crucifixion was not simply the execution of the man Jesus. It was also the killing of our Maker. The crime was an attempt to uncreate the Creator. Imagine a book trying to annihilate its author. I know it's absurd. Absurd, but also monstrous. Unnatural, but also a travesty.
I submit that there is something beyond metaphor when Isaiah writes of the trees clapping their hands. Jesus speaks of the stones crying out and Paul informs us that creation groans. Poetic license merely? I think not. Enormous hints are being given.
Jesus would have remembered an original condition. And Paul was writing of a present reality.
Why was it dark?
It was dark because you don't wear bright colors to a wake.
CREATION WAS IN MOURNING.
It was only right for the sun to hide its face.

The second reason is DISCRETION.
One of the first foreshadowings of the dread day was the journey of Abraham and Isaac to Moriah. When they drew close the stricken father ordered those who accompanied them to stay behind. This was to be a family matter-something between father and son. The Covenant which brought our Redemption was ratified in Eternity Past before there were human witnesses. That plan was worked out at the Cross where the witnesses were uncomprehending. In the words of Jesus they simply did not know what they were doing.
Even with the sixty-six canonical books, even with two thousand years of the Holy Spirit's gracious disclosure to students of Scripture and their attendant theological reflection, there is much still beyond us. We stammer at the borders of human utterance. We bump up against the limits to human understanding. The astronomer strains to the capacity of the best telescope He concedes a nether darkness toward which the first stars flee. He can't see past them as they recede. We appreciate his position. We too would see more. God the Son has died. Tis mystery all, the Immortal dies. Human salvation has been secured by the cruelest of human sins Died He for me who caused His pain for me who Him to death pursued.
This is a transaction between God and God. Who can explore His strange design? In vain the first born seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. Amazing love how can it be? That Thou my God hast died for me.

It was dark that day between twelve and three.

The third reason is DECREE. It was required that the Passover Lamb be slain at twilight. (Exodus 12:3-6)
They hung Him high in the morning.
So God sent twilight to the middle of the day.
God's purpose could not be frustrated.
God's Law would not be broken.
Not in this Man's Life.
Not by this Man's Death.
He died in darkness that we might live in Light.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah
...for this Jesus.

Learning from Nationals

Abram and Melchizedek
Peter Paul Reubens (1625)

Chaucer, Browning, Eliot and Paul Simon all wrote about April. This year April relieves a winter unusually rugged by European standards.
Like January, March ripped past while I was looking the other way. Our family has lots of March birthdays and anniversaries. Travel made the month a blur. I saw California's coast and the Pacific coast of China without ever crossing that ocean.
March ended on an up note. Yesterday the Daily Telegraph reported that Christopher Hitchens’ younger brother has written a repudiation of the atheistic rants which appear all too frequently from Christopher’s obnoxious pen. The Rage Against God is the name of the new work by Peter Hitchens, himself a former atheist. Since the book won’t be available till May 1st, I have no idea whether the effort is sufficiently biblical or even Christian. I was somewhat daunted by a comment in the pre-pub video. Peter suggests that Christopher is beginning to soften. But the only evidence he offers is that the atheist has quit smoking. Self-preservation is always a wise policy for an atheist, but it doesn’t necessarily signal a move toward theism. Still, news of the forthcoming book is exciting, and it gives us hope of better things from the Hitchens family.

March leaves me with another positive memory.
Missionaries are supposed to teach, not just so we can leave behind students but so we can leave teachers in place long after we depart .It's an exquisite feeling to learn from someone who once learned from us. One Hungarian I work with often gifts me that experience. I baptized him over 20 years ago. Now he takes me to school.
Whenever I meet with a National I nearly always ask, “Tell me what you’re learning in Scripture." When I ask this particular friend I always reach for my notebook.
This last time he took me to Deuteronomy 17. (You remember Deuteronomy 17 don't you?)
In that place Moses is instructing Israel on the ways of kings, warning against false hopes for success as a nation.
First he warns against the tendency of kings to depend on military prowess. "...he shall not multiply horses to himself." v.16. Thus the key for Israel would not be military.
Then he mentions the false hope of political alliances."Neither shall he multiply wives to himself..." v.17. Presumably the motive for multiplying wives was not merely biological. It was the habit of those ancient monarchs to forge alliances by marrying the sisters and daughters of foreign rulers.
Moses intimates that security for Israel could not be gained in that way. Inter-marriage among European ruling houses was especially fashionable in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It proved no safeguard against World War I --which George Will called "The war to save the world from Queen Victoria's grandson."
Finally Moses warns against the hoarding of wealth- a tendency definitely not limited to kings. "... neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold." (v. 17b)
If a nation is not to hope in strength along military, political or economic lines where exactly does strength come from?
"It shall be when he sits upon the throne of his Kingdom that he shall... copy this law in a book...and it shall be with him. and he shall read therein all the days of his life; that he may learn to fear the Lord his God...that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren, that he may prolong his days in the Kingdom, he, and his children , in the midst of Israel."
It's a wonderful lesson is it not?
Not only for Kingdoms but for ministries, and for families.
What a pity that it's a lesson universally unheeded.
It's a thing worth noting that Jesus vanquished the tempter in the wilderness by quoting two passages in Deuteronomy. Having been given food will we not take it in? Having been given armor will we not put it on?
More tomorrow during THIS HOLY WEEK.