It’s a tradition at CRTS that when seminary students draw to the close of their four years, their final chapel becomes a bit of a swan song. Well, I’ve been part of this institution for twenty-three years – first as a student from 1975-1979 and then as a professor from 2001 to 2020 – so I guess it’s time for a major swan song. It might be even more appropriate in my case; I mean, Wikipedia says that a swan song “is a metaphor­ical phrase for a final gesture, effort, or performance given just before death or retirement.”

The years of my time here as a professor have been marked by two dramatic book ends. When I began, it was the practice that the NT professor did not teach on Tuesdays. That Tuesday, instead, I joined the world and stood aghast as the twin towers of New York city came crashing down. So, there’s the one bookend: September 11, 2001. And now we’re going through the second bookend: COVID-19. I am tempted to say that maybe if I retire and get out of the way, the world will be a safer place. But of course, that would be foolishness. The world does not centre around you or me. It is centred around our Lord Jesus Christ.

To see that, I would like to read from 1 Corinthians 4, that chapter from which I drew my first sermon text upon ordination over forty years ago. I am thinking especially of verse 7: “What do you have that you did not receive?”

Since I am being somewhat historical this afternoon, let me also mention this. Back around 1972, I was a young philosophy student in Toronto, and one question that I was engrossed in was the philosophical problem of evil. The argument goes like this: if there is a God in the world where evil also exists, then one of two things must be true. Either this God is not power­ful enough to do away with evil, or he is not loving enough to want to do away with that evil. That question can and did send a young man for quite a spin.

But the truth is that it is the gospel that provides exactly the necessary answer to that question. This is Paul’s position over against Corinthian leaders who tend to elevate themselves over against each other and over against him in the face of God. He says to them: “What do you have that you did not receive?” The obvious answer to the rhetorical question is: “Nothing!” Everything we have, we have received from God. Every bit of it is from God. There is a similar note to this effect in Romans 11; in the context of election and reprobation, the question of the future of Israel, he plays with the words of Job and says: “Who has ever given to God that God should repay him?” In other words, there is no one who gives anything to God that would make God the debtor. God owes us nothing. When you think in a Christian manner about your life, you know it. God does not just give us salvation and life eternal. There is nothing that we are and nothing that we have that God has not given.

So I would first like to note that from where I am today, what­ever I have received spiritually, materially, family-wise – these are all gifts of an ever so generous God. You come towards the end of your life before you know it and you have to say as a Reformed person: “God, I owe you everything. It’s all grace.”

Free of charge⤒🔗

One of the authors I have found very helpful on all of this is Miroslav Volf, professor at Yale University. I thank my colleague Bill de Jong for frequently referring to Volf, and I am thinking especially of Volf’s book, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Zondervan, 2005). While I cannot of course endorse everything that Volf writes, especially in the first part of this book he gives a very clear and delightful exposition of the love and generosity of our gracious God. The approach of Volf here reminds me of the writings of John M. G. Barclay, which I have warmly recommended in other contexts.¹ Both fit very well with Reformed theology and help us to appreciate its nuances.

At one point, Volf says that there are a number of ways one can imagine God giving gifts to his people. The one way is to think of him as God the Negotiator. This is when we try to make deals with God. “God, I’ll be like this and I’ll do this if you will give me that.” Think of Gideon and his fleece: “I’ll satisfy your need, if you satisfy mine.” That’s how it goes in business in and trade. But the problem here is: God doesn’t need anything that you or I have to offer. There is no way in which we enrich him. It’s what Paul says in Romans 11, “Who has ever given to God that God should repay him?” As Volf says, if we see the God of Jesus Christ as a negotiator, we will experience the law of Christ (Gal 6:2) as an even heavier burden than the law of Moses. It does not even fit with the Mosaic period. God gave gifts and deliverance to Israel long before they offered anything to him that even looked like obedience. Even with respect to the cross, God is not saying, “I died for you, so now you’ve got to do what I tell you.” God’s goods are not for sale. You can’t buy them with money, or good deeds. God doesn’t make deals. God just gives.

Well, then Volf says, maybe God is more like Santa Claus. It seems appropriate. God gives as lavishly and generously as the legendary Santa. But there’s an important difference. Santa doesn’t really care what you do and how you live after he gives you his gifts. A Santa Claus God demands nothing from us, but God does. Would a God who is loving still be God if he ignored evil and injustice in the world? Certainly not, says Volf. God’s face twists in the pain of disappointment and sometimes even frowns in angry condemnation when we fail to live as we ought, bringing devastation to ourselves as well as to those around us. Here’s the point: the true God gives so that we can become joyful givers, and not just self-absorbed receivers.

I can give you many more wonderful quotes from this Yale professor. He says that since our very existence is a result of God’s grace, if God were to stop giving, we would just stop existing. Everything that is not God owes its existence to God. Volf works with a wonderful thought of Martin Luther, who said: “The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to God” (37). “God’s gifts,” says Volf, “oblige us to a posture of receptivity”(42). All we do is receive. Faith is an expression of the fact that we exist so that the infinite God can dwell in us and work through us for the well-being of the whole creation. Second, he says, God’s gifts oblige us to gratitude. But gratitude is not a gift we return as part of our negotiation. When we are grateful, we express our appreciation of the fact that gifts have been given to us. The things we do are not acts of ours we return as gifts. They are signs of the fact that we are grateful and that his grace continues to work in us. When I’m grateful I recognize and honour God explicitly as the Giver. Faith and gratitude are two sides of the same coin.

These are all words that accord very well with Reformed doctrine. Think of the Canons of Dort “Faith is a gift of God ... in the sense that he brings about in man both the will to believe and the act of believing” (III/IV, 14) “This grace God owes to no one,” says the Canons, “For what could he owe to man? Who has given him first that he might be repaid? What could God owe to one who has nothing of his own but sin and falsehood?” (III/IV, 15).

It also reminds me of John M. G. Barclay, who, in trying to understand Paul, compares God’s relationship to us to the patron-client relationship of Paul’s day. The generous patron does not lay down conditions for his generosity. He does not negotiate or force the clients into the conditions of a contract. He just freely gives to the one he chooses. But, says Barclay, in a patron-client society, there was always still the expectation of some kind of return to the giver. So too the apostle. The God who freely gives his grace does expect a return on his most gracious gift. He expects something of himself reflected in the one to whom he graciously gives.

It’s also refreshing to note the clarity that Volf brings to the whole matter of evil in the face of holy righteous and loving God; anyone who has gone through the ravages of war will agree. Volf says at one point:

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resist­ance to the idea of God’s wrath was actually a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over three million were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry... How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandpar­ently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”² More directly to our topic, Volf says:

Is evil, whether humanly caused or natural, God’s gift? It is not. Evil just inexplicably is. God didn’t create it. It’s a twisting of God’s creation, a negation of its original goodness and therefore an assault on God. In the end, God will finally and definitively overcome evil. And even now God is engaged in countering it. Just as God was mysteriously in the Crucified One, God is in the midst of humanity’s suffering, listening to every sigh, collecting every tear, resonating with the trem­bling of every fear-stricken heart (p. 30).³

We could ask: what about COVID-19 then? What about 9/11? Clearly our answer and Volf’s answer would be that this is our responsibility. It finds its origin in our fallenness, in our twist­ing of God’s good creation. It reminds me of Article 13 of the Belgic Confession which reminds us that God is not the author of sin and evil. There are times in which he uses the evil of our own making for his purposes but “even when his actions surpass human understanding we will not curiously inquire farther than our capacity allows us but with the greatest humil­ity and reverence we adore the just judgments of God and we content ourselves that we are pupils of Christ.”

Volf’s book can help us to appreciate the truth of the very profound statement of 1 John 4:16 that “God is love.” There the Scriptures are making the point that love is not just one of the many attributes of God like mercy or grace or justice. God is merciful and gracious, to be sure but he is not, as we often think, partly loving and partly just. The Bible never says, “God is mercy” or “God is grace.” It never implies that justice is the sum total of the divine being. What John means to say, I believe, is that all of God’s activity is loving activity; when God creates, he creates in love; when he rules, he rules in love; when he judges, he judges in love, but it’s not judgment that defines him to the core. It is love.

Psalms of lament to a gracious God←⤒🔗

Here’s another example of God’s love towards us. I have been preaching lately on a psalm of lament, and I have wondered: are these psalms not a wonderful gift of a loving God to his people? We don’t let members of our family complain to this degree, but God lets us as members of his family. Only we call it a “lament.” One third of the psalms are apparently about evil, and so laments are quite predominant. One Old Testament scholar, Claus Westermann, says that “this is Israel’s foremost word on pain and Israel’s most daring the theological act”⁴ because it asserts (1) that pain is present, and that (2) pain can and must be addressed to God. Why? Because (3) pain and evil and trouble is God’s proper business, and he is the only one who is doing and can and will do something lasting about it, because (4) he does care for us.

The lament needs to be uttered because, in the understand­ing of Israel, the lament cannot be answered and resolved by God unless it is spoken. I must say that the first time I read these comments of this scholar (Walter Brueggemann), I wondered about their truthfulness. He says we must speak to God about our trouble. Reflecting on it, though, I’m sure he’s right. We may not just argue that God knows all things and therefore I don’t need to tell him my trouble. No. We must verbalize our trouble. In this God distinguishes himself from all other gods. He wants to hear us put our trouble into words. Think of what James says in chapter 4, verse 2 (cf. 1 John 5:15). He says: “You do not have because you do not ask.” Think of how the Catechism summarizes Scripture in Lord’s Day 45. Why do you need to pray? Because “God will give his grace and Holy Spirit only to those who constantly and with heartfelt longing ask him for these gifts and thank him for them.” It’s not speaking about the grace of God that begins your conversion. In the unconverted state we are in no position to ask for that. But as Christians, we need to continue to voice our concerns to God so that we might receive all the help and grace we need as we go through life. That’s God’s way. Says Brueggemann: “The speech out of despair moves toward and addresses God, the subject of hope. As silence leads to brokenness, so speech invites the God of all hope to be present” (p. 142). The speech of Israel draws God into the trouble. The prayers of the people of God shape their lives and the lives of those around them. That’s why laments are necessary. That’s why they are redemptive and therapeutic. It’s why we need to be singing the whole psalter.

COVID-19←⤒🔗

There will be times in the lives of your future parishioners, in your life as a pastor, Lord willing, when the songs of lament are very helpful for your people in order to move from the pain of suffering to the joys of victory. It’s one example of the way in God how helps us his children through our pain and the troubles of a broken world by broken people. “Can a loving God exist in the same world as evil?” the philosophers ask. Yes, absolutely. Even in a COVID-19 world, he is lovingly reaching out to us and shaping us to be the kind of persons he wants us to be. In such a world he’s reaching out in love to humanity, he’s shattering all of our idols, and he’s showing us: there is one God and one God alone. In the end, it will be clear that his love is victorious over all the evil that humanity has ever brought into being.

Pastors: Administrators of God’s grace←⤒🔗

What’s the concrete takeaway for our community here today? Hopefully, with me, you come to a clearer insight into God’s love and grace. But there’s also this. How then should you see ministry if the Lord allows you to become ministers of the Word? How should you see yourselves in what will hopefully be your future jobs and tasks? All of this should make it quite clear that, in your service of God, you are not attempting in any way to earn some merits or points before God. Indeed, how will you enrich him? He will be who he is even without all of us togeth­er. It’s not a matter of God has done so much for me, so now I need to do this for God; rather, it’s a matter of you and me reflecting the grace and love of God in our actions and in our ministries. Faith tells us that we will not exist simply to live our threescore and ten years without pain, with ease and enjoyment so that we can accumulate possessions. Faith is an expression of the fact that we exist so that the infinite God can dwell in us and work through us for the well-being of the whole creation.

The truth is that by serving God we are not doing him favours. Hopefully he gets glory and praise from us, but even a lifetime of service doesn’t mean he is indebted to us. We are here to bene­fit God’s people, to be a blessing to his creation, and to share the message of his great generosity in Christ. When we are the grateful recipients of God’s loving grace, we become ourselves generous, gracious distributors of that same loving grace. Paul refers to himself as an administrator of God’s grace in Eph. 3:2 (NIV). You are not called to be a policeman or a supervisor, but to the administration of the grace of God. We really want all those who hear us, all those whom we love, all those to whom we minister, to experience the love of God in their lives. We say with Paul, “The love of Christ compels us.” We are imitators of God in every way, who live a life of love because Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. God’s gifts aim at making us into generous givers, not just fortunate receivers. God gives so that we in human measure can be givers as well. We are channels of God’s gifts to our neighbours. We are cheerful participants in Christ’s giving to the world. May God bless you all in this.