A three Tassimo Good Friday Post.

I am in a small rural town in Manitoba this Easter, spending time with my family. Which will not include the ability to get to worship: the pro photographer said that the service at my local kirk was beautiful and moving, but you cannot instantly disappear from your grandchildren, fly across half of North America and the Pacific, and then attend that service 15 time zones away. When she was in kirk I was in Safeway. Finding Hot Cross buns. In the snow.

And there is no. good. coffee. But the daughter has a Tassimo. I found the espresso pods. It took one to get thinking, and it will probably take three to finish this post. With long bits of music.

So before we go much further, we should worship the God who loved us to the point where he did become incarnate, to expiate our faults and our sins. For our God is great, and righteous, and holy. Despite neither us nor our nations being so.

Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.

(Psalm 95:6-7 ESV)

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD,
and all the families of the nations shall worship before you.
For kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations.

(Psalm 22:27-28 ESV)

To deny the crucifixion, and the power of this, is to deny the work of Christ. It is to fall again into the temptation of the serpent, that we will be like unto God. Which we are not. We are not worthy of worship. He is, and he alone is.

To deny this is to remove from our lives the foundation of wisdom, which is the fear and worship of the LORD Almighty.

I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.

(Psalm 40:1-3 ESV)

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.

Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you

(1 Peter 1:10-20 ESV)

What are we now to do? For the times are confronting Christians: we are told to be of Christ is to not be a good member of the progressive project. We are shamed in the West, shunned in the East, and killed in the islamic states.

For it is not our duty to be part of these states: for they will fail, and this is becoming more clear each day. The elite have become corrupt, and the peasants, knowing something wrong, are revolting.

But it is not our duty to move with the passions of the day, no more than it is to accede to our passions. We are fallen: we naturally flee and hide when truth, justice and beauty enter the room.

For the cross should make us aware of our unworthiness. Bonald is not a Reformed site, but they get the point across well enough.

As the Westminster Confession puts it, fallen man has “wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation: so as a natural man, being altogether adverse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.” Absent grace, we cannot will salvation because we do not want it; we do not find it at all attractive. What’s more, our attitude toward God is not just an absence of love, but active antipathy. Sproul even criticizes evangelical Christians for saying that their unbelieving friends are “searching for God”. No, Sproul insists, they are fleeing God. God willing, it will be He Who finds them. Nor will Sproul allow that the existence of desires that can only be fulfilled in God constitute in themselves an implicit desire for Him.

Need third cup now… because what we have done is denied this. We used to have either reformed rigour — with a clear sense that the goodness in this world is due not to our work but the work of Christ — or we remained Catholic. to return the compliment to Bonald, Catholicism has a logic if you accept their premises, which relate to the Church holding the keys of the kingdom to heaven.

But both are rejected: for men will naturally flee the gospel, choosing hysteria, madness or the use of multiple substances as an alternative.

Now, we have but two options. We can flee to paganism and regress, or we can turn to the cross. We do not choose the cross by our own nature, but because we are compelled to. By the truth of our lives. This bleak assessment of our lives, this acceptance not merely of our sin but our inability to change, has two consequences in us, and one for eternity.

For eternity, those who do the work of God, which is to have faith in Christ, are saved. (Yeah, Hearthie, I am “once saved, always saved”, and pray that I am among the elect).

In this world, firstly, you have a humility. For the errors of others are errors you could make: the people trapped in sin (we now call it “addiction”, but sin is the older and more accurate word) are akin to us. This is why I don’t damn those who err. For that I do. Instead I point to the truth and to the cross, and let the Spirit convict.

And the second thing in this world is that I am less anxious. About my soul, and about the church. For the preservation of both is the work of God, and he is faithful, even when our nations and churches are not. This makes me more relaxed about accepting that the reformed may have things wrong: I firmly believe that when the judgment comes and we are in heaven those Doctors of the church from Augustine to Hildegarde and Calvin will compare their errors and accept correction, and this mere blogger more so.

And since we began with Classical and German, let’s finish with some modern worship. Which, Will S, is not all wrong: some is even musically good.