Wilson The Storytelling God

Seeing the Glory of Jesus in His Parables
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3671-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

The prodigal son. The good Samaritan. A treasure hidden in a field. Most of us have heard these parables before. Yet if these oft-repeated stories strike us as merely sweet, heartwarming, or sentimental, we can be sure we've misread them. Jesus's parables are simultaneously working to conceal and reveal profound spiritual truths about God, humanity, the world, and the future-and we must learn to plumb their depths. A careful reading of the biblical text reveals the surprising ways in which such seemingly simple stories rebuke, subvert, and sabotage our sinful habits, perspectives, and priorities. Discarding the notion that Jesus's parables are nothing more than moralistic fables, Jared Wilson shows how each one is designed to drive us to Jesus in awe, need, faith, and worship.

Jared C. Wilson is assistant professor of pastoral ministry at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and director of the Pastoral Training Center at Liberty Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri. He is a popular author and conference speaker, and also blogs regularly at Gospel Driven Church, hosted by the Gospel Coalition. His books include Gospel Wakefulness; The Storytelling God; and The Wonder-Working God.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Jared C.

Leseproben

Over the first three years of my pastorate at our church in Vermont, I had undertaken the task of ensuring the accuracy of our membership rolls. The existing membership list had not been updated in many years. There were many people on the list who had moved or died, or had simply stopped attending the church, in some cases decades ago. I sent out letters to the inactive members I could reach, encouraging them to revisit with me their interest in membership so that we could discuss their long absence, as well as the church’s statement of faith and membership covenant. I was not surprised, honestly, that the nature of this contact irritated a few recipients of the letter. What I found both funny and sad at the same time were those who said in response that they would now withhold money they had planned to give the church in the event of their death. If they couldn’t be a member, they reasoned, they weren’t going to support the church.

I found it odd that these folks could not see the logic at work in saying that someone who hadn’t participated in church life in years, who had shown no interest in supporting the church in any other way, and who had been grumbling about the church’s very existence probably wasn’t an ideal candidate for membership. Further, I don’t suppose it occurred to any of these people that the church doesn’t really care about their money. In their minds, withholding some (dubious) financial endowment was thought to be a great punishment. What they didn’t understand is that we don’t care about their money. We don’t want their money. We want them to have our Jesus!

The ex-members picking up their piggy banks and going home were spitefully attempting a sort of blackmail; it is the way of the world to assume that justification is bought by the leveraging of worldly treasures. But it is the way of the kingdom to stay tuned to eternity.

In turning everything right side up, Jesus is putting a great many things upside down. As we survey his message and ministry in the four Gospels, we learn that he is constantly subverting values and expectations, and yet he is simultaneously fulfilling the essence of the desires at the root of these values and expectations.

The Jews of Jesus’s day expected Messiah to storm the castle, so to speak, and cast out the oppressors. Jesus’s eschewing of a militaristic messianism was most assuredly a continual head-scratcher for such people. And yet he was in fact overthrowing the government. He was in fact subverting the powers and principalities. As he cast out demons and put the authorities to shame (even on the cross, an alleged defeat), he was proving that the government was on his shoulders (see Isa. 9:6). So-called spiritual meanings and fulfillments are not less real than literal meanings and fulfillments; they are more real. When the Son sets a man free, he is really free. Even if he’s in prison. The apostle Paul certainly thought so, which was why he sang praises while in shackles and said beautifully frustrating things like, “To live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21).

Paul was a spiritually free man, which meant the powers oppressing him likely could not figure out what to do with him. What do you make of a guy who believes living or dying means the same thing—union with Christ? If he lived, he had Christ. If he died, he had Christ. Indeed, Paul reckoned himself already dead to the world and alive to Christ (Gal. 6:14), so he had put all his eggs in the basket of John 11:25. He had totally abandoned himself to the sovereignty of God, having found Christ of surpassing worth compared to anything and everything else.

What Is Supremely Valuable?

Like Paul, if we have found Christ’s work reframing our understanding of life and death, certainly everything else must be reevaluated as well. And one of these important areas of reevaluation is the concept of treasure. What is it that we really value? What is of supreme worth? What is the currency of the kingdom? Using the language of the world’s values, Jesus helps us see what is supremely valuable:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matt. 13:44–46)

How do we know that the treasure and the pearl in these short companion parables are of supreme value? Because in the first, the man sells everything else he owns in order to buy the whole field. Don’t get bogged down in the detail about his covering up the treasure. This does not correspond to anything we ought to do in terms of obscuring or hiding the kingdom but is just an indication of how precious the treasure was for him. He was so zealous for ownership that he was trying to make sure it would still be there when he came back. I do this in a store when I want the last of a certain item but can’t buy it at the moment. Ever stick a shirt on a different rack so it won’t be snatched up before you can come back and claim it? Similar concept. Jesus isn’t telling us we need to cover up the kingdom. He’s just showing us that our behavior should reflect how valuable it is to us. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21).

The merchant also shows how valuable this particular pearl is by selling everything he has in order to purchase it. In the first parable, we do not know if the man was searching for treasure or not. It may be that he simply stumbled upon it while working the field or walking across it. In the second parable, we see that the merchant’s job was looking for valuable pearls. Finding that one pearl of supreme value put an end to all his searching. He sold all in his inventory in order to buy it.

This is like the kingdom, Jesus says. You may not be looking for Jesus and his kingdom at all. Or you may be a seeker of some kind, constantly trying out new philosophies and religions. My friend Jeff was like the merchant. In his youth he was always on the lookout for the meaning to the universe. He tried out various spiritualities, all in a sincere attempt to find fulfillment for his aching heart and a reason to live. From LSD to Buddhism to homegrown religious cults, he invested in a lot of searching—until he heard the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and was compelled to sell everything he had in order to gain Christ. He gave his heart to the Lord and never looked back. His searching was done.

But whether you’re looking for it or not, it is the kingdom that really does the finding. And once we’ve been found by it, we’re willing to lose all for it. That is how valuable it is. If we have Christ and his kingdom, we have all that matters.

The logic of this upending of values is not plain to many. No doubt the fellow selling all his pearls looked a little foolish to those who did not understand the value of the one pearl he’d found. Similarly, the man selling all his stuff to buy a field might have looked silly to those who had no idea a treasure was hidden there. And so in the two thousand years since the kingdom’s inauguration, those who have given up worldly treasures left and right to walk the narrow path after Jesus have been viewed as crazy or stupid or both. Nonbelievers cannot see the value; therefore, they cannot see the logic. They do not realize that what looks foolish is actually very, very wise! R. T. Kendall writes,

The interesting thing is, it is possible to lose your head and keep it at the same time! You lose your head in your joy in knowing God and don’t care if people think you are crazy. Yet you are probably at your sanest when you come to the place where you abandon all else but your desire for God. Once you have truly experienced the anointing of the Spirit, your money, reputation, love for the world, fear of what people will say and so on all pale into insignificance.1

The Contrast of Glory

It is not possible that the Bible is against wealth per se, since it speaks favorably of it in numerous places.2 What the Bible is against is greed, materialism, injustice, and miserliness—thus all the reminders that wealth is fleeting, that trusting in it is vanity, and thus all the dire warnings to the wealthy, including the difficult command to the rich young ruler to sell everything he had and give it to the poor. What the Bible is against is treating wealth—or any other temporal thing—as our treasure.

When Zacchaeus gives half of his stuff to the poor and repays fourfold what he has defrauded others of, he is not showing that money is bad but that salvation in Christ is infinitely better. He shows us the truth many don’t see until they really see: when you see the kingdom as precious, you see lesser treasures as dingy. The sheen is off. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,” Jesus says (Matt. 6:19). This is easier to do when you can see the moths and oxidation in the sunlight of Christ’s glory.

The pearl merchant did not sell all his inventory because he found one more pearl, but because he found the “be-all and end-all” of pearls. When Christ becomes our be-all and end-all, this sort of trade-off makes total sense. It is the contrast provided by captivation in Christ’s glory, which is eternally rich and incomparably beautiful. When we really see Christ as our saving security, the loss of all else seems a worthy risk. Jairus was willing to risk his position in the synagogue to ask for Jesus’s help with his dying daughter because he had...