When Bitter Becomes Sweet

I was moved to teach on the doxology and the benedictions, first of all, because of what they mean to me in my own devotional life. I turned to them in my own private meditations for refocus, for worship, for self-examination, for building up a faith. And then, as a result of that, I've been looking for opportunities to teach them to our church, because I believe they aid the people of God in looking up and seeing the greatness of God in these succinct statements of blessing and or doxology that are memorable and meaningful. We take them for granted, but they are there for our blessing and benefit.

Wishing and praise by H. B. Charles, Jr. Visit Ligonier.org slash teaching series to learn more. Have you ever read a passage of Scripture that hits a little too close to home? You don't like what it tells you to do or not to do? That means one of two things. Either there's something wrong with the author of Scripture who wrote those words, or what? There's something wrong with my thinking, because here, while I'm being critical of Scripture, Scripture is being critical of me. That was the plight of the Old Testament prophets.

They proclaimed God's message and often were persecuted, even killed, because the people didn't like what they heard. This week on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul is going to take a look at several of the difficult things the prophets had to say and help us understand what they mean.

Before we get started, though, I thought it would be helpful to hear this from R.C. And that's part of the difficulty of being a pastor in today's world, and at least it's better than having the job that Jeremiah had. When God says to Jeremiah, I want you to go out there and be a prophet, and what I want you to do is destroy everything that's out there. I'm giving you a negative message that is as politically incorrect as it can be. And I'm going to tell you not only this, but while I'm having you out there ripping everything to shreds, down the street from your church, there's going to be a whole school of false prophets that are going to be preaching to the people everything the people want to hear.

Nobody's going to want to hear what you have to say, and everybody's going to want to hear what the other guys have to say, but I want you to go anyway. And what happened to this poor guy? He tries to be obedient. He goes out there, and he has his belly full of it after a while, and he comes back to God and he says, I'm going to turn in my prophet's card. He said, Lord, I'm in derision daily. Everybody's mocking me, and I quit. And then he said, but your word was shut up in my bones like a fire, and I couldn't quit. Here's a guy who had fire in his bones, and that's what the role of the prophet was in the Old Testament, and that's why they all were hated and persecuted and killed and beheaded and all the rest. So with that in mind, let's listen to today's message.

It's titled, When Bitter Becomes Sweet. What we're thinking about here are those statements that we find in the Scripture that are hard. Now they could be hard for one of two reasons. A saying can be called a hard saying because it appears to us, at least at first blush, to be severe or harsh. In that sense, it's hard to swallow because these statements sort of jar us and jolt us and harm our sensibilities, and we recoil from them.

We read, for example, in the Old Testament that God instructed the Israelites to institute the harem, which had to do with the wholesale destruction of the Canaanite nation, man, woman, and child. And that just seems so harsh, so severe, and it seems to cast a shadow on the love of God and on the mercy of God and on the goodness of God. And we say, how do we handle texts like that? They're difficult. They're hard because they are severe to our senses. The second way we talk about hard sayings is that they are hard to unravel. They are hard to understand, not simply because of their harshness, but because they're difficult for us to conceive, much of what the Bible teaches about the sovereignty of God and His sovereign control over human behavior coupled with the responsibility that we have as volitional agents in being responsible for the choices that we make.

How do we put those things together? That's difficult, and so we can call those sayings hard sayings. Now, before we get into this, let me say one other thing by way of preface. If there is a shortcut to accelerating your understanding of Scripture, the shortcut would be focusing your attention on the hard sayings. I say when you read through the Bible and you come upon a text that bothers you, you don't have to just be paralyzed and stop there and stay there forever. You know, move on, but mark it, and I say if you find a passage you don't understand, put a red mark next to it.

And then later on, come back and focus on those red marks. Say, here's a portion of Scripture I don't understand. I'm going to devote special attention to trying to understand these passages that are difficult.

What a great way to learn. If you focus on the obstacles to your progress and remove them one by one, you'll have this augmented understanding. But even more importantly are those texts that jar your emotions, and you read that and you say, I don't like what the Bible says here. Put a big mark next to that one, to those passages in Scripture that offend you, that at first glance you disagree with.

Now those are the ones you really need to put your focus and your attention upon if you want to grow rapidly, because one of two things will happen. You may discover that the reason why that text offended you or annoyed your sensitivities is because you didn't understand it. And after you delve into it and examine it, read the commentaries on it, come to a better insight of what it means, now your problem is resolved and you can move on, and in the meantime you've gained new insight and new understanding. But suppose you check all the commentaries and you're careful in your examination of the text and you find out that you understand it exactly right and it still makes you mad. And you don't like it. Wives, submit yourself to your husbands. I don't like that, you say.

Well, put three checks next to that, because that means one of two things. Either there's something wrong with the author of Scripture who wrote those words, there's something wrong with Paul's thinking, and Paul ought to change, or what? There's something wrong with my thinking, because here while I'm being critical of Scripture, Scripture is being critical of me. And if you want to grow in grace and in sanctification, find those places where you are critical of God.

It might just be that these are the places where you need to change your thinking and change your life. Now, I'd like to ask you to turn to the book of the prophet Ezekiel in the Old Testament, to the beginning of the second chapter of Ezekiel. You recall that in the first chapter of Ezekiel, there is Ezekiel's description of an incredible visionary experience that he has. That first chapter has kept Old Testament scholars busy for centuries trying to sort it out with this vision of the whirling Merkabahs and the highly imaginative view of the whirlwind and the likenesses of these strange creatures and the means of conveyance of this thing that has wheels within wheels that some have even tried to identify as an Old Testament appearance of a flying saucer, but which we understand in the biblical imagery and literature that Ezekiel is having a vision of the transcendent majesty of God as he appears in His chariot throne, His movable throne, which is covered with glory and has the ability to shoot out in all different directions and appear here and there and everywhere, manifesting the appearance of God in His throne of judgment.

Now, having seen that vision in the first chapter, let's look and see what happens to Ezekiel in the second chapter. The first chapter ends with these words, this was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. So when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard a voice of one speaking.

Now listen to what the voice says. Chapter 2, verse 1, and he said to me, Son of Man, stand on your feet and I will speak to you. And then the Spirit entered me when He spoke to me and set me on my feet, and I heard Him who spoke to me, and He said, Son of Man, I am sending you to the children of Israel to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me, for they and their fathers have transgressed against me to this very day.

They are impudent and stubborn children. I am sending you to them and you shall say to them, Thus says the Lord God. And as for them, whether they hear or whether they refuse, for they are a rebellious house, yet they will know that a prophet has been among them. Now this may not be a hard saying for you, but this is a hard saying for Ezekiel because God says to Ezekiel, I am going to send you with my word to a rebellious house. I'm going to send you to preach to people who don't want to hear your preaching.

I am going to send you to minister to people who despise your ministry. That's not an easy thing for any prophet to hear. And you, Son of Man, do not be afraid of them nor afraid of their words, though briars and thorns are with you and you dwell among scorpions. Do not be afraid of their words or dismayed by their looks, though they are a rebellious house. Say that to a young minister who's about to be ordained and has to walk out on Sunday morning and stand before a congregation and say to the young man, don't be afraid of their words and don't be afraid of their looks.

Everybody that's ever spoken publicly knows what a contemptuous look looks like coming from the audience or from the congregation. And God says, don't be afraid of them, for you shall speak my words to them whether they hear or whether they refuse. But you, Son of Man, hear what I say to you. Do not be rebellious like that rebellious house.

Open your mouth and eat what I give you. Do you hear what God's saying? He's saying, Ezekiel, I'm sending you to a rebellious people, and they are going to resist everything that you say. You will be speaking my word. They don't want my word. They've rebelled against my word.

But that's not your responsibility. Understand, Ezekiel, that the people who will be angered by this word are really angry at me because it's my word. So don't worry about what they say, and don't worry about what they do. You worry about Ezekiel. Don't you be rebellious.

Don't you join in this host that resists my word. Then he says something incredible to him. He says, open your mouth and eat what I give you. Now when I looked, there was a hand stretched out to me, and behold a scroll of a book was in it. And then he spread it before me, and there was writing on the inside and on the outside, and written on it were lamentations and mourning and woe.

Listen to the hard saying. God says, eat what I give you. And Isaiah looks, and he sees this hand stretched out, and in the hand is a scroll. And the scroll is written on the front and on the back, on the inside and on the outside. Ladies and gentlemen, the scroll is the word of God. Now, it's a wonderful thing, a joyous thing to announce peace to Jerusalem, to declare the gospel that people hear with great joy, to announce the good news of God's promise of mercy and of forgiveness and redemption and of His love.

That's not hard to do. But the scroll that God gives to Ezekiel contains what? Lamentations, mourning, and woe.

It's all bad news. It's all hard sayings. That's all the scroll has, is hard sayings. And moreover, he said to me, Son of Man, eat what you find. Eat this scroll and go speak to the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and He caused me to eat that scroll. And then he said to me, Son of Man, feed your belly and fill your stomach with this scroll that I give you.

Now let's stop right there for a second. God says, I'm not just going to put this word in your mouth and have you taste it and spit it out. Nor am I asking you to chew on it for ten minutes and then discard it. I want you to put it in your mouth, to taste it, to chew it, and to swallow it, and to digest it. I want it in your belly, and then I want it in your bloodstream. I want it to be pervasive throughout your being. I want you to ingest it, and I want you to digest it so that this word of mine becomes a part of you. What word?

Lamentations, woe, mourning, and grief is the word that God feeds His prophet. Now here is where something radical and astonishing takes place. So I ate, and it was in my mouth like honey in sweetness.

What? The scroll of laments, the scroll of mourning, the scroll of grief, the scroll of judgment, the scroll of the woes of God is taken by Ezekiel, and he eats it expecting an impalatable bitterness, something that will make him choke, something that will make him gasp, something that will make him retch. Instead, he tastes it, and it has the sweetness of honey.

Now you could look at that in different ways. You could say, aha, this is one of these prophets who's sadistic. He enjoys being a bearer of the judgment of God. He loves to go around and tell people how bad they are and how mad God is.

No, no. That wasn't the personality of Ezekiel or any of God's prophets. They were men of compassion and men of immeasurable love, and yet God was able to make even His hard sayings taste as sweet as honey. I remember reading Edwards in his own personal struggle as a young theologian with the doctrine of God's sovereignty and of the doctrine of election and how he struggled so violently against this, thinking that it indicated that God was arbitrary or capricious or unfair or cruel, but he kept on trying to unravel this difficult and complex doctrine. And things came to him in stages, and Edwards said the first stage was he finally became convinced in his mind that the Scriptures were really teaching a sovereign doctrine of election.

He said, I didn't like it, but I couldn't gainsay that Scripture was teaching this. And then he had an experience similar to that of Augustine centuries before when he was reading from the New Testament and he read the passage, you know, about the immortal, invisible, only wise God. And as he was reading that passage, the Spirit of God so illumined the text that Edwards had this glorious sense of the transcendent majesty of God. And suddenly he saw the whole concept of God's sovereignty and of His election in a totally different light. And he said, now I was awakened to the sweetness of the doctrine.

Boy can I testify to that. I mean, I went through that same struggle, but now I see one of the sweetest messages of all the Scriptures, the message of God's gracious, sovereign election, which is an anchor for my soul and for yours. And if we can get past all of the problems that we have to struggle with intellectually with that doctrine and come to rest with the God who is sovereign, that hard saying which we initially recoil against is now as sweet as honey.

And we are delighted to swallow it, to digest it, and to get it into our bloodstream. And so I hope it will be for all of the hard sayings of the prophets and of Christ and of the apostles that though they seem hard at the outset, by the work of God's gracious Holy Spirit, they will become for us like the sweetness of honey. When we struggle with a command in Scripture, we're really facing the same question that Eve did in the garden. Did God really say? That's what the serpent asked her, and it's the question we face today. Unfortunately, so many in the church are falling for the lie. We see it happening at an alarming rate today, and that's why Dr. R.C. Sproul's series The Hard Sayings of the Prophets is so important. I hope you'll stay with us.

R.C. will have a final comment about the difficult passages in Scripture in just a moment. We're featuring this series all week here on Renewing Your Mind, but we'd also like for you to have a physical copy of it for your own study or as a resource for your church. When you contact us today with a donation of any amount, we'll be glad to send you all five lectures on two audio CDs.

You can give your gift and request the series online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us at 800-435-4343. When you have questions about the difficult passages you may read in Scripture, another helpful resource is Ask Ligonier. It's available 24 hours a day, Monday through Saturday, and it provides you with the opportunity to ask well-trained staff members here at Ligonier about your theological or biblical questions. Check it out.

You'll find it at ask.ligonier.org. And before we go today, here's R.C. with a final thought. We have a word in our language that is the word bittersweet. It seems to be an oxymoron, doesn't it? How can something be both bitter and sweet at the same time?

Well, it can't be at the same time and in the same relationship. But even those things that come to us initially, clothed in bitterness, can, under the agency of God's Holy Spirit, become sweet to us. And there is nothing more sweet to the Christian than His Word. And so I ask you, as we look at these difficult passages throughout Scripture, to look for the sweetness, to look for the beauty and the glory of God that stands behind them. Because for God, His truth is always sweet. It is always glorious.

It is always wonderful. And when we recoil against it in a spirit of bitterness, it's because we haven't yet tasted to see that the Lord is good. Well, we'll continue our study tomorrow, and we will learn about a hard prophecy Jeremiah proclaimed over Israel. It's a message that holds a warning for us as well. So we hope you'll join us for the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind.