“And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.  ...  And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh.  And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”  -- Genesis 32:24-26

 

On Friday August 16 my brother Stan drove me over to McNairy County, an hour and a half west of here beyond the Tennessee River, to visit some family graveyards.

Now genealogies are like slide shows – everybody has one and nobody wants to see another one, especially not yours.  But bear with me, dear reader, and presently I will unravel a meditation that I hope will calm your fears and repay your effort.

MOVING WEST – WITH GRAVEYARDS

The Sanders story typifies upper South families.  After the Revolutionary war they moved from North Carolina first to east Tennessee, then to West Tennessee, and some further west still.  But finding their graves was no easy matter.  In cemetery after cemetery, we couldn’t find our ancestors’ graves, even though we knew they were buried there. After the War Between the States their poverty forced them to use wooden grave markers, now long vanished without loving hands to replace them. 

One of the cemeteries lay barely across the line in Mississippi.  Stan pulled up on the side of the road and pointed to an overgrown grove about 60 yards from the road.

“That’s it,” he said.

“That’s what?” I asked.

“The Sanders cemetery.”  The closer we got the more I could discern it.  A circle of large trees was overgrown with sawbriers and saplings thicker than your thumb.  Inside the grove there was one small fenced in plot and three or four gravestones.  The only other evidences of burials were the regular depressions in the ground.

From there we drove back toward Michie.  Just before we reached that crossroads, Stan turned off into what looked like a driveway into a sapling thicket.  “Look for the graveyard,” he said. 

At last, there among the thick stand of saplings, I spied a graveplot fence.  It lay no more than 750 yards from the spot where my great-great-grandfather’s house once stood.  It was so completely overgrown, however, that you could only have found it by the most diligent search.  There were several marble tombstones, all dated before 1861.  Before that year tombstones  were a luxury people could afford, I reckon.

WHAT ABOUT THE COVENANT?

Later those cemeteries kept on eating on me.  Our earliest known ancestor (I learned just about five years ago) was one Lawrence Sanders or Saunders, an Anglican minister burned at the stake for the Reformation in 1555.[1] 

“Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.”  (Psalm 116:15)  If God granted him so glorious a death, then as far as we can judge from outward things, surely he granted to him entry into the covenant of life, too.  And if to him, then to his children, and to their children.[2]

THE COVENANT IS GENERATIONAL

That generational continuity lies at the heart of the covenant.  “The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people:  but because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty and, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh King of Egypt.  Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations; “[3] 

BLESSINGS & CURSES

Flowiing  from such faithfulness to God’s covenant, you would expect the God’s blessing to continue.  In fact, it usually does show up in generation after generation, multiplying and prospering, devoted as far as we can tell to piety.  That comes as no surprise, for in this way God promises to deal with us – through families, over time, not as individual burning brands snatched randomly out of the fire. 

Suddenly, however, this family seems to wink out.  One of the most populous families in the county just evaporated, but that didn’t bother me the most.  What kept gnawing on me was those cemeteries – those untended graves.

In July 1999 we had just moved to the country and we threw a big house and land blessing party.  Jim Lord from Utah happened to be in Atlanta then and drove all the way up, a five hour trip.  When he got here he smiled at me and said, “I know one thing.  When I die I want to be buried in one of these Tennessee graveyards!”  I had to laugh because I knew exactly what he meant.  We pass hundreds of them along the road, meticulously tended, faithfully clipped and trimmed, with headstones festooned with fresh, cloth, or plastic flowers.

This assiduous, faithful grave-tending is a Soutehrn tradition.  Here’s one example from the War Between the States. “When the Catholic Cemetery of [Savannah, Georgia] was ordered [by the Northern occupiers] to be levelled for useless breast works, our ladies, widows, and orphans carried the bones of their dead in baskets, sheets, and boxes two miles, and kept them in their houses until places of interment secure from violation could be found. … What an incident!  Imagine groups of women, young and old, learned and unlearned, high and low … anxious to secure from desecration the relics of those they loved, and then back again, bending under the weight of their precious burdens.”[4]

How did my forebears come to this, these untended graves?  Not the least curse in the Bible is to lie untended, food for the fowls of the air.  Jeremiah pronounces a special curse on Judah:  he bones of the kings and princes and priests and all the people would be pulled out of their graves and exposed naked  sky.[5]

NO PLACE

That fate forms part of the curse of having no place.  “Fret not thyself because of evildoers . . For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be; yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be.”[6]  Even the place of the wicked will disappear.  The lot of the godly is exactly the opposite.  Their place on the land is secure.  “[T]hose that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth… The meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.”[7]

To lack a place on the earth – to be cut off from the land – is an especially terrible curse, a sort of annihilation.  Even the despised children of Lot, Ammon and Moab were assured their own place upon the earth.[8]  At the same time God instructs them to utterly destroy the kings of Bashan and Hesbon, Og and Sihon, as well as  their wives and little ones.  After that, Og & Sihon become a byword for those whom God has rooted out of the earth.  The children of Lot’s incestuous union were given a place, but not Og & Sihon  We see this same concern for land mirrored in the history of the church.  As it spread out, it established the parish system.  It envisioned parcelling out the whole earth for the gentle government of Christ.

What place have we?  If we’re lucky, a parking place with our name.  Or, more likely, the name of our office that entitles us to our own parking place – CEO or CFO or CIO or “visitor.”  Nearly all of us have been driven clean off the land.

But how do we establish a place?  Does all the Scriptures say about the land mean nothing?  Should it all be spiritualized away, or is it all meant literally?  Is “our place” just any old place where we put our foot and stand as mortgagor?  Is it enough simply to buy land and put down roots?  Doesn’t our relation to a certain place, a certain parcel of land, act out and embody the spiritual reality of Christ’s kingdom?

What was the promise to Abraham, the covenant? 

Land.  Children.  The love of God himself.

From the beginning God stated the promise in terms of land, as if that summed up the fullness of the covenant.  “Get out of thy country …unto a land I will show thee.”[9]  “And the Lord appeared to Abraham and said, unto thy seed will I give this land.”[10]  ( [And by the way, the land was in the South – Genesis 12:9]  “Lift up now thine eyes, and look. . . For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever.”[11] 

Although the land is not the exclusive blessing of the covenant, still all those blessings – wealth, riches, all earthly happiness, even children – are all contained symbolically in this gift of land.

But the land is only a symbol, a foretaste, of that greatest blessing of the covenant, God’s gracious love:  “Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield, and they exceeding great reward.”[12] Clearly God’s love flows only out of himself, and not out of any merit of Abram or his children.  Yet at the same time living in covenant with him is not passive, but demands a certain active behaviour from us.  Not only must we frame all our behaviour according to God’s law, but far greater than that, we must form our hearts after his law, and we must work that out in our lives.

After reciting the blessing of the covenant in the hearing of the twelve tribes, Moses adds a warning, “Only take heed to thyself and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life; but teach them to thy sons, and thy son’s sons.”[13] Lay hold the covenant.  “And if you break my covenant, not only will I take the land away from you, I will also take you away from the land.”[14] Lay hold the covenant.

We ought carefully to observe that this commandment does not form some sort of exception, but recurs throughout Scripture.  Although the context is always – from Abraham to Christ –  that the covenant comes to us through the unmerited grace of God, yet God always accompanies that offer of grace with a demand that we lay hold the covenant.  “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”[15]   The graciousness of the covenant presents all the more reason to diligently lay hold on it.  This is repeated throughout the scriptures with such frequency that it would weary your attention to do more than mention a few of them in a footnote.[16]  While all these exhortations carry the express or implied promise that God will graciously enable us to perform, still  the exhortation to strive, to lay hold to the covenant with all our might, remains.

What thwarted the covenant my own family?  Like the Pharisees of old, they were born into the covenant.  They had the knowledge and benefit of it.  But something failed.  Something more was required than land and birth.  What was it?  What warning does it make to us?

They had to make the covenant theirs.  They had to lay hold on the covenant.

Before all these other things – a place for themselves and their children – could be added to them they had to abandon all other loves.  Even though one is born into the covenant outwardly, yet only those belong to the covenant who belong to it inwardly.  “For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel; neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, in Isaac shall they seed be called.  That is, they which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God:  but the children of the promise are counted for the seed.”[17]

So Christ preached to the Jews of his day, born into the covenant: “Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father:  for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.  And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees:  every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.”[18]

I understand that we are saved by grace, that no good deeds of ours go before us to win God’s favour.  But at the same time the Scriptures keep on urging and demanding that we live a certain way.   We have to lay hold on the covenant.  We have to bestir ourselves to make progress in the grace of God, to improve the gift.  Paul expresses perfectly this tension between the utterly sovereign gracious work of God in us and our absolute responsibility to improve the gift. “But by the grace of God I am what I am:  and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all:  yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”[19]  And in another place he says, “[Since we have received such great grace in Christ and have before us the example of his humiliation], work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.  For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”[20]

Providentially, as I was thinking on these things, we came in our lectionary to the Twelfth Sunday in Trinity.  The readings appointed were Isaiah 56:1-7, a prophecy of God’s grace extending out to the Gentiles; Psalm 67, a psalm exhorting the Gentiles to worship God; Romans 11:13-32, and explanation of the gentiles grafting into the kingdom and replacing the unbelieving Jews, and Matthew 5:21-28, the Canaanite woman who begs a miracle from Christ.  Here is what I discovered.

LAY HOLD OF THE COVENANT

From these passages we ought to notice two things.  The first is a great and high truth of doctrine, namely, that in Christ the grace of God broadened out to embrace all mankind.  What had once been reserved to the Jewish nation is now opened to all men, no matter what their disabilities.  Obviously we ought to infer from that – as the Jews of Christ’s day could not – that any boasting from us must be only in the grace of God, not in our own merit.

And although this great and high truth seems far off, it is not.  It is not merely some abstract truth like the nineteenth decimal place of pi that exists out there without touching our daily lives.  No, it lies close to us, it comforts and instructs us. 

How is that?  First, the love of God – reconciliation to the Father – is held out to all men.  To make this crystal clear, Isaiah includes “eunuchs and foreigners,” two classes of people whom the Law specifically forbade to come into the tabernacle where God was worshipped.  From their inclusion, we ought to infer that there is no impediment in us – no sin, no lack, no disability – that can bar love of God.  These readings further make clear that God will work in us – and we must work in us – righteousness and justice.  True religion, Isaiah shows us, consist in keeping the first and second tables of the law, our duties to God and man.  True religion demands self-denial.

What is the point of these readings?  That God will save all those who call on him, but he saves them to holiness and righteousness.  You have to grab hold of his covenant, and improve the gift.

In Isaiah 56 and Psalm 67 we find a prophecy of the future outpouring of God’s grace on the whole world in Christ, until the knowledge of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.  In the Epistle Paul teaches us how we should understand that grace.  If we boast that we have found favour where the Jews have lost favour, then that is the same folly for which the Jews were rejected.  Finally in the Gospel, Matthew 15:21-28, we get a foretaste and example of that grace to the Gentiles.

ISAIAH 56

Isaiah shows us what God demands of us as soon as he holds out his grace:  a change of heart and mind, forsaking the world, and rising to heaven.  We must grab hold of his covenant and hold on!

“Thus saith the LORD, keep ye judgement, and do justice:  for my salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed.”  What is this?  The order seems reversed.  We know that God doesn’t save us because of any works of ours.  Rather, he saves us out of his free grace and pleasure.  But here that logical order is reversed, where he commands  first keep judgement and do justice, and then see his salvation.

What does he mean by “justice and judgement”?  This is the second table of the Law, all the commandments that teach us our duty to oiur fellow men.  By implication that includes the First table of the law as well, because the law is all one.  You cannot do justice to your neighbour unless you first love God with all your heart.  The message here is, “Show the fruits of repentance in your life.”

Why?  What reason does Isaiah give that we ought to do that?  “For my salvation is near, and my righteousness.”  This is the reason, the source and cause of all our righteousness.  This is the reason our daily Christian duty is to devote ourselves to newness of life.  Our grateful response to God’s grace is to draw near to him, to lay hold of his covenant, not to let it go, and to keep on trying to get nearer to him.  The nearer we draw, the more his holiness excites us to holiness.

And vice versa.  If you don’t draw near to God, he won’t draw near to you.  And since he offers us such a great benefit and gift, surely we ought to make every effort to draw near to him.

Isaiah next exhorts us to “keep the Sabbath.”  Here I have bad news for those who want to use this solely as a proof text for not working on the Lord’s Day.  That is not the issue Isaiah raises here.  God does not concern himself here with just this one thing in isolation, but the whole of his Law.  The part – keeping the Sabbath – stands for the whole law that honours him.  Only by both tables of the Law can we rightly regulate our lives.  He demands from us earnest self-denial to devote ourselves to his service.

Now in verse three Isaiah opens out God’s grace to all men.  The law excluded from Israel foreigners and eunuchs, specifically by name.  Can you imagine how this must have astonished the Israelites hundreds of years before Christ came.  What?  Foreigners and eunuchs, made part of the people of God?  What is he talking about?  What is the world coming to?  But through Isaiah God is saying, “I will remove every obstacle to our salvation. Don’t look at yourself!  Look only on my grace.  Be like Abraham who didn’t look at his own decayed body, or Sarah’s dead womb, but rather looked at the promise of God.  God promised Abraham that his children would outnumber the sand on the seashore and the stars in the heavens, and Abraham did not argue that the realities stood in the way.  No, he hoped above hope in God’s promise.

Now through Isaiah God tells the world that he will remove every disability and give those newly included in his covenant “a better name.”  That is, in Christ the grace of God is so much clearer, so much more abundant, that we have a higher dignity under Christ than believers under the Law.  We have obtained a more excellent name in Christ – indeed, an everlasting name.

Then Isaiah says that their “burnt offerings and their sacrifices” will be acceptable (v. 9). He speaks in the symbols of the times, because at that day the worship of God consisted of such sacrifices.  But today, after the sacrifice of Christ has consummated sacrifice for all time, we no longer observe those ceremonies.  Now instead we offer to God praises, thanksgivings, good works, and finally, ourselves.  Look at the Epistle reading for today.  Everything that Paul says in Chapter 11 leads to the conclusion that we find in the first verse of Chapter 12: 

“I beseech you therefore [that is, on the grounds of everything I have already said above] brethren by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”  There it is.  The sacrifice that God requires of us is nothing less than all of us – our hearts and minds and souls and bodies.

MATTHEW 15:21-28

In the Gospel reading we see the beginning of grace flowing to the Gentiles.  We also see a picture of how that grace must be received, a picture so clear that it out to shame the ungrateful and stiffnecked Jews of that day. 

This woman is a gentile, a Canaanite, and not instructed in the law.  The Jews, although they had the benefit of being born and raised in God’s covenant, were blind and deaf to Christ.  Now here comes this Gentile – this dog – without instruction, without the covenant, yet with whatever little knowledge she had, she recognised Christ as the “Son of David.”  She knew only a little, but she laid hold of it with all the might of the little bit of faith she had.  She had heard a bare word only, but it took root and flowered in her heart.

What happens when she approached Christ?  He ignored her.  He didn’t answer her a word.  What did she do?  She persevered in hope, and so we are taught.  Christ refused to answer her on purpose.  It wasn’t a mistake.  It wasn’t that she spoke too softly for him to hear.  He held his silence not to put out her faith, but to fan it to flames.  And so he does with us, too.  He may not answer when we call the first time.  Or the second.  Or the third.  He is fanning our faith to flames.  If this Canaanite woman reacts this way to a tiny glimmer of the  hope of Christ, then what hope ought we to have, we who see Christ fully revealed?

Christ answers her  in verse 24, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  Well, that certainly wouldn’t have encouraged her, but what did Christ mean?  Did he mean that no Gentile could ever enter the kingdom of God?  Not at all.  He is only saying, “Right now, here at the present, my mission is to preach to the Jews first, to deliver the Gospel to them first, because they first of all the nations of the earth enjoyed the grace of God.  Once I have preached to them, once I have consummated the sacrifice that will reconcile all men to my Father, then grace will flow out to all mankind.”

What did the Canaanite woman do?  Did she frown and turn away, throw up her hands, and say, “Well, I guess that’s it.  I guess he doesn’t have time for me.”  No, not by any means.  “She came and worshiped him.”  She laid hold of no other hope.  She kept on believing in his kindness.  She was not intimidated or dissuaded by her own inabilities or her own filthiness.  She yielded to no obstacle.  She would not be torn from her faith in Christ, small though it was.

And how does Christ answer?  “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs.’  Whom did he mean by “dogs”?  The woman, and she knew it.  But he also means the Jews of his own day, and us as well, because all pride of flesh must fall before the grace of God.

The woman is not deterred.  She doesn’t care if she is a dog, she has grasped God’s promise, and will accept gratefully whatever he gives.  Why?  Because she knew that whatever he gave, even the crumbs of his grace would be better than anything she could imagine.

Christ shut the door to her, but not to exclude her from his grace.  Rather, he shut her so that by exercising her faith, she would force her way in.  That sounds rude to us, but then, we are lukewarm at best, or cold at worst.  Above all else, this woman desired the grace of Christ, and if she had to bang down the door and kick it in, she would do it.

So it is for us.  We have to force our way in.  We have to grab hold of the covenant, and hold with all our might.  We have to improve that gift, and draw nearer and nearer and nearer to God, or we will lose it.  It will slip from our fingers.

Finally, do not think that all this is merely an exhortation to “do better” or “try harder.”  Unaided by the Holy Spirit, that strength is not in you or in me.  Ask yourself, what was this woman seeking from Christ?

Healing for her daughter.  Something completely impossible in her own strength.

What else was she seeking?  A way into the covenant, something forbidden to her by heredity and condition.  She was a “dog.”

Both things that she sought were impossible to her.  Yet she had heard of the Son of David and she hoped.  She reached for this impossible promise – the grace of God – and he had mercy on her helplessness.  He planted the seed of faith in her by his word, he gave her the grace to call on him, and then he gave her the grace to keep on calling in the face of his seeming refusal to hear.

Here is the point.  The grace of God is poured out on the whole world in Christ Jesus, but you must lay hold of that grace.  You must grab hold of his covenant, and believe that he will give you grace to draw near in holiness and righteousness – and then do it.  Do it.