The Forty Days: 4. A Giant Problem

During the forty days of Lent we have been looking at some other 'forty days' in the Bible.  

As a point of introduction, today it is forty days since Russia invaded Ukraine to plunge Europe into a situation we liked to think had been left behind in 1945.  (Some hope, given European history).

While forty days often seem to have a divine connection in Scripture, that is not always so.  Back in the days of Israelite King Saul his primitive army faced harassment from the Philistines.  One in particular made a mockery of Saul's forces - a giant man named Goliath.  Day after day he issued a dueling challenge:

For forty days the Philistine came forward every morning and evening and took his stand.

On reaching 40 days of the Russian-Ukraine War we can perhaps appreciate the length of intimidation Goliath represented.  And the heart of the problem was that there seemed no more likelihood of him being rivalled on the evening of the fortieth day than on the morning of the first.

Length of time - for all its meaning in Lent - is not a virtue by itself.  As we all know, the contest was settled by the whizz of one stone from David's sling - from a David who utterly trusted in the power of God to make his own learned skills count.

Have you been watching giants for 40 days?  Is it time to fight and trust the Lord? 

The Forty Days: 3. Days turn to Years

Forty days Moses was on the mountain.  Forty days figure in another turning point of the Exodus - the forty days the 12 spies spent in reconnaissance in Canaan.  They returned, ten expressing fears of a formidable enemy, two trusting in the power of God to help them.  The people sided with the fearful - and God was not pleased to not be trusted.  He had, after all, rescued them miraculously from Egypt.

NUMBERS 14:30 Not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun. 31 As for your children that you said would be taken as plunder, I will bring them in to enjoy the land you have rejected. 32 But you – your bodies will fall in this wilderness. 33 Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the wilderness. 34 For forty years – one year for each of the forty days you explored the land – you will suffer for your sins and know what it is like to have me against you.”

The forty days is turned by God into forty years.  If such an extended time as forty days couldn't draw out a trusting faith from his people, then maybe a generation passing will do so.

Forty days is a long time for us, but nothing to God.  For all of us in some areas of our life, and for some of us in every area of our life, God will teach us long lessons if we refuse to learn them in medium time.

The Forty Days: 2. Cloud

In the desert of Sinai the Israelites watch Moses leave them to climb the mountain where he will meet with God.

Exodus 24:15-18  When Moses went up on the mountain, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. For six days the cloud covered the mountain, and on the seventh day the Lord called to Moses from within the cloud.  To the Israelites the glory of the Lord looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain. Then Moses entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain. And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights

It is not a small thing to meet God.  For six days Moses waits to enter the cloud atop the mountain.  How casually we assume the ear of God.  It is promised.  But we should never take it lightly.

Moses remains in the cloud for forty days.  He is, after all, going to be a key conveyor of God's truth not only to his generation but to us all.

For most people the idea of spending 40 days in a mountain cloud with God - after waiting a week to be called in - seems to lack practicality.  This is certainly what the Israelites (at the foot of the mountain) thought:

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered round Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’

'May they be forgiven', we sigh in disgust, (oh, and by the way, I'm too busy to come to the prayer meetings . . .)

The Forty Days: 1. Rain

During Lent - the 40 days of Lent - it is worth reflecting on the forty days in Biblical revelation.  Forty days is a long time, and 'LENT' derives from the same root as 'Length' in English.

It is likely that when anything happens for a long time it has added significance in the economy of God.  The first occurrence of 40 days in the Bible certainly has significance:

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.

Genesis 7:11,12

The Great Flood is greatly underestimated in Christian thinking.  Although I have heard songs about the animals, and sermons about Noah I have never heard a sermon or seminar dealing with the blatant similarities between Noah's fall (Genesis chapter 9) and Adam's fall.  (If you've never considered this - read the two accounts and it will keep you thoughtful through the remainder of Lent - a more useful and Biblical exercise than pondering the fate of kangaroos or Antarctica at the time).

But back to the 40 days of rain.  Forty days seems often to be indicative of resetting, or preparation (as in the Temptations of Jesus in the wilderness - the foundational Lenten story).  Never, before or since, has God reset his created world as he did in those forty days.  Inundation undid almost all breathing created things.

Noah and his family and invited creatures were instantly saved when the Ark's door was slammed shut by God.  But while saving may be instant, resetting and preparation for the new never is.  

Plainly God would not need 40 days to reset humankind.  But he took them.  Sin takes some cleansing.

Psalm 91: A Psalm for a Pandemic in Lent

The text of a sermon preached at Muswell Hill Baptist Church on March 15, 2020.  This was the church's last meeting before the growing pandemic led the Government to instruct all religious groups to stop gathering in order to hold back the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

We are in unusual times – for us.  

But these are far from unusual times for the human race.  More locally, these are far from unusual times in London.

Every so often you may be checking out the increasingly grim coronavirus statistics.  But in the Diary of Samuel Pepys we find him reading the 17^th century Bills of Mortality:  

Thus this month ends, with great sadness upon the public through the greatness of the plague, everywhere through the Kingdom almost. Every day sadder and sadder news of its increase. In the City died this week 7496; and all of them, 6102 of the plague. But it is feared that the true number of the dead this week is near 10000 - partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will not have any bell ring for them. As to myself, I am very well; only, in fear of the plague . .

So we are not at all the first London congregation to turn to Psalm 91 as a pestilence happens around us.

1. This Psalm is for You - personally

Psalm 90 begins this 4th book of Psalms. 

1 Lord, you have been our dwelling-place

throughout all generations.

. . .4 A thousand years in your sight

are like a day that has just gone by,

or like a watch in the night.

5 Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death –

they are like the new grass of the morning:

It makes uncomfortable human reading  (until you trust in God.)  The individual human being seems very small, part of a tide.  This is what a global epidemic feels like - numbers and statistics and curves and percentages.  And it always was:

The Bills of Mortality began to be published regularly in 1603, in which year 33,347 deaths were recorded from plague. 1625 saw 41,313 dead.  The 1625 outbreak was recorded at the time as the 'Great Plague', until deaths from the plague of 1665 surpassed it.  The official returns for 1665 record 68,596 cases of plague, but a reasonable estimate suggests this figure is 30,000 short of the true total.

Into all these fearful statistics comes Psalm 91.

1 He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High

will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

2 I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress,

my God, in whom I trust.’

In every ‘you’ in this Psalm it is addressed to the singular.  

HE who dwells – that’s just him, you, me.

The numbers are here of course: 

7 A thousand may fall at your side,

ten thousand at your right hand,

but it will not come near you.

But the number that matters is just you. 

This is a pointed and opportune time to ask this question – how is your personal relationship with God?

ISAIAH 55:6 Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near.  7 Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.

If  you must self-isolate in this epidemic – take this Psalm with you – and remember it is for you, not for church.  Provided you too can say:

2 I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress,

my God, in whom I trust.’

2. This Psalm is for Salvation but not for Show

a. For Salvation

3 Surely he will save you

from the fowler’s snare

and from the deadly pestilence.

4 He will cover you with his feathers,

and under his wings you will find refuge;

his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.

14 ‘Because he loves me,’ says the Lord, ‘I will rescue him;

I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.

15 He will call on me, and I will answer him;

I will be with him in trouble,

I will deliver him and honour him.

16 With long life I will satisfy him

and show him my salvation.’

There are many troubles in this Psalm:

5 You will not fear the terror of night,

nor the arrow that flies by day,

6 nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,

nor the plague that destroys at midday.

But His feathers are enough.  They are as a shield, as a rampart.  Feathers so gentle, so powerful.

Lord Craven lived in London when the plague raged. On the plague growing epidemic, his Lordship, to avoid the danger, resolved to go to his seat in the country. His coach and six were accordingly at the door, his baggage put up, and all things in readiness for the journey. As he was walking through his hall he overheard his servant saying to another servant. "I suppose, by my Lord's quitting London to avoid the plague, that his God lives in the country, and not in town." The man said this really believing a plurality of gods.

Lord Craven paused. "My God lives everywhere, and can preserve me in town as well as in the country. I will stay where I am.”

He continued in London, helped his sick neighbours, and never caught the infection.

It is a Psalm to place our trust in because God is personally with us where we are.

b. Not for Show

A Psalm for a Pandemic  - in Lent.  What has it to do with Lent? 

Lent is framed around the forty days when Jesus, in the wilderness, confronted and overcame Satan, the tempter.

LUKE 4:9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written [Psalm 91]:

‘“He will command his angels concerning you

    to guard you carefully;

11 they will lift you up in their hands,

    so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”’

12 Jesus answered, ‘It is said: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’

Satan tempts Jesus with Psalm 91.  It is Jesus’ chance to display his invincibility.  Jesus, instead, shows his obedience to his calling.

Even the most wonderful promises are part of our discipleship, our discipline, our self-denial.  Like the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the promises of God are for Service and for Salvation, not for Show.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great Baptist Preacher in Victorian London told this account of service and salvation in pestilential times:

In the year 1854, when I had scarcely been in London twelve months, the neighbourhood in which I laboured was visited by Asiatic cholera, and my congregation suffered from its inroads. Family after family summoned me to the bedside of the smitten, and almost every day I was called to visit the grave... I became weary in body and sick at heart. My friends seemed falling one by one, and I felt or fancied that I was sickening like those around me… As God would have it, I was returning mournfully home from a funeral, when my curiosity led me to read a paper in a shoemaker's window in the Dover Road. It bore in a good bold handwriting these words: "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling." The effect upon my heart was immediate. Faith appropriated the passage as her own. I felt secure, refreshed, girt with immortality ... The providence which moved the tradesman to place those verses in his window I gratefully acknowledge, and in the remembrance of its marvellous power I adore the Lord my God.

Nobody can have two homes — two places of ultimate resort. And if the Lord be truly my dwelling place then even in these times, my home is enough and is secure - a home of divine feathers in a hard world.

40 Days: Giants

We can imagine Day 1:  out from the camp of the enemy the Giant emerges.  Some clatter of shields behind him perhaps.  A booming voice.  A challenge.

He stood and shouted to the ranks of Israel, “Why have you come out to draw up for battle? Am I not a Philistine, and are you not servants of Saul? Choose a man for yourselves, and let him come down to me.  If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants. But if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us.”  And the Philistine said, “I defy the ranks of Israel this day. Give me a man, that we may fight together.”

Lent is familiarly a time of self-discipline.  The world rushes on, but time aside is taken by devout people to harness their souls.  It has become harder as the modern world pulls us away into 24/7 activity,

Goliath harnessed Israel to a stop for 40 days.  This was not 40 days of self-discipline, but 40 days of terror.  Day after day the challenge went unanswered.  It took faith in God - and a skilled good shot - to bring the terror to an end.

2020 will be remembered for a dramatically extended international Lent. 

What are you giving up for Lent?  As the coronavirus giant stares out the nations of the world  - travel, workplace, clubs, theatres, church services, school, public transport, toilet rolls, shopping in general, football, cricket, conferences, rugby, gym, swimming, meeting friends.  Fear achieves what self discipline rarely can. 

40 Days: Shattered

Years after the event, Moses tells the Israelites of his agony when he came down Sinai's mountain after receiving the instructions from God - including the Ten Commandments.:

 16 And  I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the Lord your God. You had made yourselves a golden1 calf.  You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you. 17 So I took hold of the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and broke them before your eyes. 18 Then I  lay prostrate before the Lord  as before, forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all the sin that you had committed,  in doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger. 

This is a truly astonishing intercession: God tells Moses that He's had enough of the Israelites (and what a grumbling, ungrateful, rebellious bunch they were).  God proposes getting rid of them and starting again, as He had previously done with humanity in the days of Noah and The Flood.

It is relatively difficult to understand 40 days and nights of prayer on any account.  People have done it in a repentant penitence for their poor, cold souls: leaders have done it for spiritual revival in their congregations and communities.  But here Moses does it just to save a people that God indicates he will rightly give up on.

Doing Lent for myself is a big ask; doing Lent for the Israelites would definitely be beyond my spirituality.  Yet there in heaven in a constant intercession, my Saviour makes the case - more eloquently and sacrificially than Moses of old - for those called in his name to be saved.

He deserves better.

And I don't.

40 Days: it's raining

As Lent begins, it may be worth remembering that its 40 days are reminiscent of many more such time periods in the Bible.  Many think that 40 days and nights were an expression for 'a long time' but that cannot be proven one way or another.  It is clear that wherever it occurs in Scripture this period of time is of divine significance and not a counting coincidence.

In the UK we have just come through a very wet February.

Genesis 7 may or may not be set in February but (verse 12) the rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.  Was it climate change?  Most certainly.  Was it man-made climate change?  Well, yes and no.

We don't know how the ensuing flood affected polar life, deep ocean life or many other questions but we do know that it judged human life.  It was sent by God the creator but the cause was Man the sinner.

It has been argued that this was the first rainfall, a thought more persuasive if the rainbow after the flood was also the first rainbow as is implied.  But nowhere does the Bible affirm this clearly (e.g. read here).  The significance of the rain days were that they represent a solemn length as ordained by God.  Whilst a day or two might just simply seem to happen - forty days never so.

The current fear factor of the coronavirus stems in part from its length of days.  As week follows week humans get the message that this is something to think and care about.  The forty days of rain were God's message that sin, concerning which humans are notoriously careless, is something to care about.

Lent is forty days for us to give it some thought in drier conditions.

The day of love

It is terribly bad luck that Lent begins on Valentines Day.  It is the death knell to every abstemious vow that involved chocolate and probably several other things that are perhaps best not speculated about . . .

Ash Wednesday seems a dive of a day by comparison with its romantic counterpart.  Who'd ever give an Ash Wednesday Card?

Try this.

It's not going to revive the flagging High Street retail sector, is it?

Yet of course the two days are linked by more than a calendar coincidence.  They are linked by love.  The Valentine love that overwhelms but can never last and the other a Calvary love that died but can never die.

What's it for?

There before you is that perfectly harmless button on the remote control or appendage to the zoo enclosure or light on the car dashboard or hole in the kitchen wall or marking on the dog’s underside or buoy bobbing in the river or pocket in the handbag.  It had unobtrusively nestled in your life until a small quizzical mind bent its curiosity toward the thing.  And the truth is that for the first time you realise - you don’t know!

A harrowing (and small) question it may be, but “What’s it for?” is a surprisingly useful question for assessing many things.  I have read that, seen from space, the brightest man-made spot on earth is the city of Las Vegas (partly due to its desert location but mainly due to the intensity of its neon lights).  An approaching alien might therefore think it is the most interesting place on earth!  But not if they ask, “What’s it for?”.  And many shining places and things are rendered a lot less inviting by the application of that little question.

The question that transforms the cross is “What’s it for?”.  The reason for most of the New Testament writings is not to describe the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but to proclaim its purpose.   As the writer A. W. Tozer commented, ‘the cross is rough, and it is deadly, but it is effective.’

Isn’t the reason Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness after his baptism so that he might absolutely nail this purpose question before his ministry began?    As we pursue our way through Lent I do think that I must also, therefore, be sure that I do not get to Easter with this question still lurking anywhere concerning it.

O teach me what it meaneth,
That cross uplifted high,
With One, the Man of Sorrows,
Condemned to bleed and die!
O teach me what it cost Thee
To make a sinner whole;
And teach me, Saviour, teach me
The value of a soul!

O teach me what it meaneth,
That sacred crimson tide,
The blood and water flowing
From Thine own wounded side.
Teach me that if none other
Had sinned, but I alone,
Yet still Thy blood, Lord Jesus,
Thine only, must atone.

Mirrored

"Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Who is the fairest of them all?"

The wicked queen wanted to know.  But mirrors have a funny way of cutting us down to size.

The most obvious way they do this is by telling us, more honestly than a friend might, what we look like.

But the more interesting way, for me at least, was the one I first heard of some time ago and was reminded of in an article this past week.  When we look at our face in a mirror it is about half the size of our real face.  If you didn't know that then, like me the first time I heard it, you won't believe it.  And when you go to the mirror with your tape measure you'll find that it's true.

When we look at our lives in the mirror of Christ in Lent we also find ourselves diminishing.  Not in a harmful way or out of existence.  Just so that there is more room to see past myself to Someone greater and something better.

Lent

Lent

Here's my book for Lent.  Andrew Rumsey works near where I once lived in North Croydon.  His Lent thoughts are hilarious and thought-provoking and here is a taste

. . . my limousine had inexplicably broken from the pack somewhere around South London's heart of drabness, Thornton Heath, and arrived at the cemetery with several minutes spare for the driver and myself to get to know each other a little better. As we stood stiffly by the graveside, he leant over and, in the conspiratorial tone beloved of undertakers, remarked,

'I don't know whether you've noticed this, sir, but if you look closely around the cemetery, you'll observe that all the headstones face towards Croydon.'

'It's quite deliberate,' he added, just to hit the nail home.

Gawping about like a halibut, I realised to my astonishment that he was quite correct. Taking myself in hand, I recovered sufficiently to counter that, if my friend were to look even closer, he might detect the residents ever so slowly turning back the other way. Nevertheless, his remark had left a deep impression: the thought of so many prone souls gazing for all eternity, not on the heavenly Jerusalem, but on the pedestrianised purgatory of the Whitgift Shopping Centre was fairly discomposing.

This memorable episode reinforced the truth that mortality is the basis or all humour . . .