On Sunday evening, February 17, 2019, the Rev. Steven A. Nicoletti was installed as the Senior Pastor of Faith Presbyterian Church.

Pastor Rayburn, on his last Lord’s Day morning as Senior Pastor of Faith Presbyterian Church, gives us “A Final Word” from Hebrews 3:1-15.

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2 Peter No. 14, “The New Testament Added to the Old”

We’ve been away from 2 Peter for a month and have but the final paragraph before us. Let me remind you that Peter’s subject in this final chapter – remember, of course, Peter didn’t divide his letter into chapters; that was done a thousand years later by someone else – has been the Second Coming of Christ and, in particular, the years that had passed since Christ left the world promising to return. And if that were a problem in the 60s of the first century, just some 30 years after the Ascension, how much more is it a problem for us now these 2,000 years later. Peter addressed that problem and his readers’ concerns by reminding them that time is not measured in heaven as it is on earth and by teaching them that the reason for the delay is precisely God’s desire to see the unbelieving brought to faith in Christ and the lost saved. Assuring them that, though we do not and cannot know when it will occur, Christ’s return is nevertheless a certainty, he urged them to live in the light of his coming and the judgment that will accompany it.

Text Comment

This final paragraph is interesting and important for several reasons and so I plan to take two Lord’s Day evenings to consider it. This evening I want to pay attention to two fascinating remarks that Peter makes, as it were by the way. Then next time I want to consider the drift of his exhortation as a whole. Tonight, I’ll comment only on vv. 14-16.

v.14 Peter’s point, made often in the Bible and in many different ways, is that heaven is for the righteous, therefore every Christian ought to strive to be righteous, strive to be found righteous either when by death we go to Christ or when Christ comes to find us. The thought is like that in Hebrews 9 where we are told that, having come the first time to atone for our sins, Christ will come a second time to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. Another way of describing a person as righteous is to say that he or she is waiting for the Lord! He’s anticipating the Lord’s coming. He’s preparing for it. Hope and godliness are two sides of the same coin. It was precisely the loss of hope in the Second Coming that had led to the worldliness of the false teachers whose teaching Peter was combating in this letter. Here is the question every Christian should be putting to himself or herself regularly: how will he find me? And the best possible answer we could give is: he will find me working hard to become as much like himself as possible. The same pair in v 14 – without blemish or spot – is found in 1:19 of Christ himself! [Lucas, 149] This is a key ingredient in the Bible’s doctrine of the Christian life. As John puts it in his First Letter (3:3), everyone who has this hope of heaven and the future life purifies himself. [Green, 155-6] The anticipation of the Second Coming, even of the Last Judgment, should not induce anxiety in Christians. The more they take that hope seriously, the more assiduously and carefully and earnestly they are preparing for that day, the more they are waiting for him, the more assured they are that the day will be the grandest of their lives!

v.15 The t

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“The Maker is in Charge!”

Psalm 33: Text Comment

v.2 Details such as references to these instruments place the psalms in their historical context. Archaeological confirmation of such details is commonplace. The two instruments, among others, would have accompanied the congregation’s singing. This is a psalm of praise to be sung by the congregation.

v.3 Throughout the Bible “new” refers not to something chronologically recent but to something that partakes of the new life that God gives to those who are being saved. The fact that “new” appears so often in the “Old” Testament should make us hesitate before thinking that spiritual realities were different then.

v.5 The four words in vv. 4 and 5 provide an outline for the rest of the hymn: word, work, righteousness, and love.

v.6 Vv. 6-9 concern the word of God. As in Genesis, God speaks, and it is so.

v.10 Vv. 10-12 concern the work of God. He infallibly brings his plans to pass.

v.13 Vv. 13-17 concern the Lord’s righteousness or justice, the basis in the Bible not only of the condemnation of the sinful, but the salvation of those who trust in the Lord. Note the recurring use of “all” in vv. 13-15. The Lord’s knowledge and control is absolute.

v.17 Voltaire’s famous jibe, “They say that God is always for the big battalions” is here denied. We’ve seen too many of the mighty fall to believe they will always succeed!

v.18 Vv. 18-22 concern the Lord’s love. This is the believer’s confidence; God will not forsake those he loves.

As you know very well, we are living in an increasingly unbelieving culture; a culture in which not only has the consciousness of God receded from the minds of most people but in which the actual denial of God’s existence has become commonplace. This is especially the case in the elite culture, the culture that is shaping our social thought and life. As the years have passed, it has seemed to me more and more important that preachers in our society take care to help their people maintain firm and confident convictions about God; that I help you to see not only how reasonable our convictions are, but how unreasonable is the denial of God’s existence, how utterly unlikely to be true, no matter how confidently unbelief in God is now expressed. It is in the Psalms that we read that “the fool says in his heart that there is no God.” And in a great many Psalms we are given, by the by, the arguments that buttress belief in God. Psalm 33 is such a psalm. One fine commentator on the Psalms entitles this psalm “Maker and Monarch.” [Kidner, i, 136] The editors of the ESV take for the title of the psalm the last phrase of verse 5: “the steadfast love of the Lord.” But the point of the psalm is that this divine steadfast love is demonstrated in creation and in providence. It is a psalm about God’s nature and work.

You perhaps noticed that the statement that God had created the world in vv. 6-9 is immediately followed by the assertion of his absolute control over what happens in the world for the blessing and benefit of those who trust in him. The fact that “by the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath

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“Self-Examination”

I thought, on this last Lord’s Day of the year I would consider with you some teaching of the Word of God apropos the New Year. I believe it was Charles Lamb who once said that no one views January 1st with indifference. Our lives are marked by the passage of years and, as it happens, we mark the beginning of another year on the 1st of January. It is a time to think about our lives, what they have become and what they might and should become, and, very often, at this time of year we do think about such things. I chose for my text the opening paragraph of the prophecy of Haggai, one of the post-exilic prophets, because it is one of the principal texts in the Bible on the subject of self-examination, or, as the prophet puts it, on the subject of “considering our ways” or “paying attention to our ways.” By “way” in the Bible, as you know, is meant our way of life, our behavior.

Text Comment

v.1 The second year of Darius was 520 B.C. Remember now the historical situation. Cyrus had been killed in battle on the Persian Empire’s eastern frontier in 530 B.C. It was Cyrus, remember, who had permitted the Jews to return to the Promised Land after their years of exile in Babylon, actually fewer yeas than the 70 years that had been prophesied by Jeremiah. Babylon had fallen to Persia and the new government had a different and more tolerant and generous policy toward captive peoples. The Persians even funded the rebuilding of sanctuaries that had been destroyed by the Babylonians. As we read in Ezra, some Jews had returned to Judea immediately and the foundation of the temple was soon rebuilt. But there was opposition from the peoples surrounding Judea and work on the temple ground to a halt, as we also read in Ezra.

Darius was a Persian general who had assumed the position of emperor when the rightful emperor, Cambyses, died. Having restored peace in the empire after a period of instability, the program of restoring the national sanctuaries that had been destroyed by the Babylonians was recommenced. Haggai describes events that occurred between 520 and 515 B.C. It was during these years that the temple was rebuilt not only with the permission of Darius but with the promise of funding from the imperial treasury, the work performed under the leadership of the governor, Zerubbabel, the high priest Joshua, and the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. But the prophecy begins, as will be made clear in the following verses, before that rebuilding had begun. As Haggai begins the temple remained nothing but a foundation. Eighteen years had passed since the Jews first returned to Judea from Babylon and their situation was hardly encouraging. They were eking out an existence, hardly thriving. And certainly, there didn’t seem to be any indication that Yahweh, the God of Moses, David, and Elijah was astir on their behalf.

The sixth month would be August/September, the time for the harvest of the trees and the vines; three months after the harvest of the grain. So, the people would be very aware of how the harvest went.

Zerubbabel (which is a Babylonian name) was the civil governor, so an appointee of the

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“Deep Feeling”

In our sermons on the Psalms of late we have noted that the Psalter features poems and hymns of different types. We have considered so far, a psalm of praise – in particular for God’s wonderful world – a psalm describing a believing man’s struggle with doubt, and a psalm of confidence in God in the midst of trial and trouble. Each of these psalms was representative of a group of such psalms in the Psalter. But among the various types of psalms there are also typical features found in many of them, features that are characteristic of biblical faith and life. This morning I want to consider one such feature which I will call the “mystical element.”

Now that term and its related forms – mystical, mysticism – mean very different things to different people, so I want to make clear what I mean by the term as I use it. I am using the term “mystical” in its approved sense as referring to spiritual reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor subject to the intellect, especially in relationship to one’s communion with God. “Mystical” refers to the nature or personal experience of communion with God or communications from God that transcends human calculation and comprehension. The word refers to that which is unseen, mysterious in its origin and influence. In Christian usage it also refers to those experiences of communion with God that produce deep emotion.

Psalm 27

v.3 Once again we hear familiar strains. The reality of life’s difficulties and his confidence that the Lord will deliver him.

v.4 What David is expressing is the desire to be always with the Lord. As the following verses indicate, the Lord’s presence felt in the soul is the answer to all his troubles and calms all his fears.

v.7 The expression of triumph just described in vv. 5-6 is still in the future. Meanwhile there is little outward sign of God’s favor and so David prays for it.

v.13 One more expression of confidence in God before a final exhortation to himself and to anyone else in similar circumstances.

Now, it is true and needs to be said, as much in our day as in any other, that emotion and strong feelings, pure and simple, are evidence of virtually nothing but that human beings have emotions and that they are easily stirred. There is a long tradition of warning against emotionalism in the wise sort of Christian preaching and teaching. Emotionalism is any view that rests one’s conviction of truth and reality on the experience and the strength of one’s feelings. In our day especially, emotionalism has become a standard of truth in both the secular culture and the church. It used to be thought by some that reason had escaped the effects of the fall; nowadays this is more often thought about the emotions. In one way or another, many say today, whether advocates of sexual liberation in its various modern forms or evangelical Christians talking about divine guidance: what I feel is and must be true and therefore no one else is permitted to doubt the authority of my feelings.

But the Bible, and for that matter life itself, often bear witness to the unreliability of emotions, of the failure

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“The End in the Beginning”

Text Comment

v.13 God preserved the life of his son in Egypt as, long before, he had preserved the life of Israel there. Here we are introduced to a theme that is going to run through these verses, namely that Jesus is a second Moses. Moses also fled for his life from a king who was trying to kill him. The one who saved his people from their sins is the counterpart to the one who saved Israel from bondage in Egypt – the great redemptive event of the ancient Scriptures. [Hagner, i, 34] It was natural for the holy family to go to Egypt, not only because of its proximity, but because it had already a large Jewish population. Indeed, in Alexandria alone there were some 200,000 Jews, the largest concentration in any city of the empire.

v.14 The “during the night” indicates how promptly Joseph obeyed and how grave he understood the danger to be.

v.15 The citation from Hosea 11:1 is not itself a prophecy, but Matthew is noting the correspondence between the history of Israel and the history of her king and savior. representative. Both came up from Egypt to the Promised Land. Redemptive history is full of these patterns or this typology by which the Son of God is seen to be the fulfillment of what went before. Jesus is the goal of that history and gathers up all its threads. [Hagner, i, 36]

v.16 The ruthlessness of Herod’s later years was by this time a proverb. The victims of his paranoia included three of his own sons as well as several large groups of suspected conspirators, in one case with their families. This makes it entirely probable that he would kill a few babies (Bethlehem was a small village not a city) in order to eliminate a potential rival. Such would have been a minor incident in a period of history full of atrocities. To give you a window on the mind of the man consider this: when Herod was himself near death, he left orders that one member of each family in his kingdom should be executed so that the entire nation would really be in mourning. [France, 86-87; Josephus, Ant., 17.181] Here is another a parallel with Israel’s early history. Pharaoh tried to kill the Hebrew infants and Moses was spared.

v.18 Once again Matthew points out the biblical pattern. As Rachel in her tomb was said in Jeremiah, in a beautiful figure, to weep for the exiles as they were taken from the Promised Land, so here she weeps for the dead and the mourning mothers of Bethlehem.

v.20 Now, to a Hebrew hearer of this text – Matthew was originally written for a Jewish audience – knowing the Bible as well as they did, they would immediately again notice the biblical pattern. The language of v. 20 is taken from Exodus 4:19 where the Lord commands Moses, after his sojourn in Midian, to return to Egypt because those trying to kill him were dead. The correspondence is so exact that the plural in Ex. 4:19 is retained here – “those who are trying to take the child’s life…” – even though we would expect the singular, as it was Herod who sought the child’s life.

v.22 Archelaus was no better than his father; he was noted for his cruelty in an age of cruel men; but he succe