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.

February Already

January flew by as a month unremarked upon. I was distracted by a short trip to the Mid-East in the middle and travel to the US at the end. It would have been hard to write in January without mentioning Haiti. The last entry of 2009 was taken up with suffering. I found the prospect of an encore daunting. Sometimes it's better to simply weep and pray and leave the commentary to others. We've long heard that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. How do we conceive of those who have nothing losing everything? New Orleans bounced from Katrina to the Super Bowl. It's difficult to conceive of Haiti bouncing anywhere very high.

Years ago I had contact with a brilliant RAF officer, eccentric, unmarried and a believer. He was a Cambridge graduate and a fluent Russian speaker. At a wedding we both attended at the Air Force Academy he was holding forth (apropos of what I can't remember) on the subject that Haiti was dedicated to the devil at its founding. That was news to me and I never thought about it again until I heard that some were attributing Haiti's earthquake to its alleged diabolical origins.

Linking specific suffering to specific sins is a hazardous enterprise at best. Unless the link is direct (as in crime/punishment, drunkenness/accident etc) I think proving a connection is beyond the scope of human competence. There are innocents who have no knowledge or sympathy with the darker components of Haiti's founding (or their parents' HIV or something similar) who suffer dreadfully. And there are those who sin dreadfully who seem to be eluding immediate consequences in the short run. Suffice to say that in these mortal bodies, on this fallen planet, suffering is our lot until the coming of the Son of Man. Even so come quickly Lord Jesus.

The snow is heaped high here. I am in Budapest and Jane is in Florida. Good for her but a tough Valentine's Day assignment for me. One of our best memories as a couple is taking the train from Munich to Vienna on February 14, 1986, on our first visit to Austria. It's a five hour run through some beautiful countryside. It was snowing that day and the train stopped in St. Valentine Austria, a city whose existence I knew nothing about until the train pulled into the station.

Christians may overlook or underestimate romantic love. But it's a nearly overwhelming thing which has inspired the forlorn, the sublime and the dastardly for all our history. The Bible first mentions such love in describing what Jacob endured for Rachel.

The first mention of any kind of love in the Bible bears no trace of the romantic. Nor is it, as we would guess, the love of God for man or the love of man for God. It is rather the love of a father for a son in the most excruciating of contexts.

"Take now your son, your only son, the son whom you love..."

Genesis 22:2

When we take it upon ourselves to ask how a Son infinitely loved could be a Son actually sacrificed we begin to gaze upon the heart of Reality.

We begin to get at the root of things.

Now may the romance of Valentines compensate for the cold of February.

And if romance seems no part of your life remember that the Gospel itself is a romance.

The Church is, after all, a Community Betrothed.

If we are not consciously and conscientiously awaiting the Heavenly Bridegroom the only thing we've missed is the point.

So let us wait with longing and with faith.

We expect the consummation of the greatest Romance (theological not biological).

I am quite sure the weather will improve as well.

The Vapour of this Little Time

‘The Entombment’ by Daniele Crespi 1620’s

“For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time,
and then vanisheth away.” James 4:14 (AV)

I write within 24 hours of the death of a friend. I write on New Year’s Eve. I inflate my connection by calling him my friend. I think we only ever talked about Kentucky basketball. I was pastor to his missionary family during their Budapest years. He died when his truck left the road early yesterday morning in Atlanta. He was twenty-two. He knew the Lord Christ savingly. Dear God, what a difference that makes.

When we contemplate the Being of God we are inevitably staggered by mysteries, complexities, impossibilities. Eternity, Infinity, Trinity. Try wrapping your brain around that. Yet the moral dimension of God’s character is also a mystery to fallen flesh. Our vantage point is clouded. Our judgment is corrupt. The primary theological enterprise in the moral realm is the accommodation of our understanding of divine goodness to our experience of human pain. Grace is sorely needed. We would like more answers. We would like more faith. It is harder to be orthodox when our hearts are crushed.

I knew another young man, the son of intimate friends, who died in 2009. It is a fellowship with God, a stewardship from God which no one wants, this business of losing sons.

God will not prove His love for us by preventing the suffering or death of someone we love. I did not say He would not protect those we love. Is there anyone we care about still alive and prospering? It is because God protects them. We believe in Providence. I said God will not prove His love to us by Providence.

I did not say we cannot ask God to protect those we love. We believe in prayer. I said that God will not prove His love for us by answered prayer.

I make these emphatic declarations for the simple reason that God proves His love in a way quite different. He proves His love by refusing to protect the One He loves.

“He who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all,
will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” Romans 8:32

To doubt God’s love when those we care about are taken is to deem the crucifixion of God’s only Son an insufficient demonstration of favor. Of course we don’t mean to. But sorrow is a suffocating thing.

Probably the greatest thing, the hardest thing, we trust God with is who dies first and who dies next. The best man in the world once cried out,
“O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom!
Would God that I had died instead of thee…” 2 Samuel 18:33

We want to insist that heaven be adorned exclusively with the aged. We want to, but we can’t.

If I knew what God knows, and I do not, and if I were good, and I am not, I would do what God does. I would allow what God allows.

2009 is soon gone.
So shall our lives be.
It is therefore all the more urgent that we secure a life which cannot be forfeited.
A life purchased by the Dread Ransom of the Blood Royal.
We draw One Year Closer.

The Clothes God Wears

..and she brought forth her first-born Son and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes
Luke 2:7

Clothes are important. Clothes may be an expression of character, an insignia of rank, or an index of economic station. Clothes are also a consequence of the Fall. Practically the first question asked by the first human pair after the Fall was, "What shall we wear?" Of course their solution was inadequate. It was God, newly offended, newly estranged, who provided the covering. Even that covering was temporary. The great theological term 'atonement' is taken from the simple Hebrew word for 'covering.' That first physical covering provided by God for Adam and Eve foreshadowed the spiritual atonement only God Himself could provide.
On the Island of Patmos John sees and reports that the glorified Second Person is "clothed in a robe reaching to His feet and girded about His breast with a golden girdle." (Revelation 1:13) Quite a contrast to the swaddling clothes. The Son of Man came unclothed into the world and had to be covered. The Lord Jesus would make atonement for sinners by becoming a substitute for them. That meant being uncovered Himself.
At the Cross He was stripped.
Before they put Him on the Cross they gave Him a crown of thorns. Before they put Him on the Cross they took His covering. While he hung there they gambled for His clothes. Thorns are an emblem of the curse -another consequence of the Fall. He took the curse upon His head. He gave the covering off His back.
In Bethlehem His back was covered
Deity was swaddled and laid down.
He came to make His blessings flow.
Far as the curse is found.