Trilemma

Jesus Christ, who He is to you? Perhaps you might say He is a good man; or a great prophet; or a great teacher; or a miracle worker; or God Himself; or an out-of-his-mind man. But the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis had something to say about this question. I got his answer from his book 'Mere Christianity'. Here are the choices:

a. He is God Himself
b. a lunatic
c. or the Devil of Hell

and his answer:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [Jesus]: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

"My Lord and My God!", says Thomas after seeing Jesus Christ and having felt Jesus' wounds, hands and side after His resurrection (John 20:28); and the testimony of Jesus of Himself: "You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, FOR SO I AM. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet." (John 13:13-14).

[Indeed]"...Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." (John 20:29).

Fervency of prayer and faith

In this post, I will talk about the fervency of Agur's prayer and faith.

Proverbs 30:7-9, the Prayer of Agur, son of Jakeh.

"Two things I ask of you;
deny them not to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full and deny you
and say,"Who is the LORD?"
or lest I be poor and steal
and profane the name of my God."

First of all then, this kind of prayer or petition is against the presumptuous, excessively forward type. We are warned by the Preacher in Ecclesiastes against this kind of prayer. This is not also a prayer wherein we require God of His service for us, we demand Him to do something for us, as if we are the master and God is the servant. Such blasphemous prayers are now widespread as we see them on our television put forward by false ministers and evangelists, on the radio, and even hear them from other people acting as if they can put God in a box and order Him to act according to their selfish whims and wishes, gratifying the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. Such are not of humility but of pride, not of faith but of presumption, uttered not for the glory of God but for the proud rejoicing of men. Then let us be warned that God abhors and hates that kind of prayer lest He judge us by His righteous judgment and be found uttering meaningless, vain repetitions glorifying the selfish desire of the flesh. Though at times God might grant them their demands but this is not as blessing to them but as His righteous judgment. And who can forget the chosen nation of God, Israel, when they demanded that God would give them meat to eat in the wilderness. "Now the rabble that was among them had a strong craving. And the people of Israel also wept again and said,"Oh that we had meat to eat!"", says in Numbers 11:4. This is not that God seemingly heard and gave in to their desires, but He, in His righteous and holy anger, gave the children of Israel quail meat to eat as they were sick to eat the manna from heaven. But as they eat of this, they are consumed with it while the meat is still in their mouths. Far be it from us that we utter a prayer like this.

But how did Agur pray to the Almighty? Agur pleaded his request to God confidently for he knew that he was praying accordingly to the will of the Almighty. In the New Testament, the Apostle John tells us of the same confident as that of Agur in 1 John 5:14, it says, "And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.". If we are really asking God according to His revealed will in the Scriptures, we can have the confidence, the same as that of Agur, to bring our request to Him. Our Heavenly Father is delighted to hear our prayers to Him, to bring our praises and thanksgiving, and yeah, our requests and desires unto Him. This is not because our Father is ignorant of our needs and desires but because this declares our submission to Him, even our faith and hope in Him, and He delights to meet our needs in His appointed time, means and grace. We are even invited by our Lord to come unto Him in prayer with our requests. In Matthew 7:11 we read, "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!". Oh the Blessed Mercy of the Father! God will give us good things--those which are befitting of us as He sees it. Then it follows that if we are going to ask Him things not good for us, He will not give us. But that which He gives to us is screened through His love, grace and mercy. In Psalm 84:11, it says,

"For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
the LORD bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does he withhold
from those who walk uprightly".

No good thing will He withhold if only we will ask rightly, accordingly and live uprightly. Even so, we are dearly encouraged to come unto Him. "We do have not because we ask not!", says James in James 4:2. God will indeed provide and will not delay only if we come to Him with all our lawful desires in faith unto Him.

However we are warned by the Preacher not to rush our words unto the throne of grace, we should not be afraid to come to our Father if we ask accordingly and befittingly. Are we going to be afraid to come to our Lord and King in prayer for the removal of every sin and error inflicting and dividing us, and to abolish every false religion? Just as God was delighted in Gideon's 300, He may find delight in our prayers if this is accordingly and appropriately His will.

God also teaches us to be persistent and persevering in our prayers to bring our requests unto Him. In Luke 18:1ff, Jesus told us about the Parable of the Persistent Widow who asked continually of an ungodly king to give her justice. He would not hear her. But even so, she did not stop in asking and begging for justice in a particular area. Here we see that even an ungodly king would eventually hear her plead after persistently and perseveringly asking for it. How much more our Heavenly Father who cares for us and love us would hear our cry and hear our pleas and give good things to us! Another biblical example is the perseverance of the Canaanite woman who had a dying daughter and begged Jesus to have mercy on her and heal her daughter (Matthew 15:21-28). The disciples of Christ kept on getting in her way and discouraging her and even Jesus Himself told her that "[He] was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel". Oh what a great discouragement was this if only the Canaanite woman had so little of faith in her! But she begged for even the crumbs that fall under the master's table, as a dog, she would have and eat. Oh what a great faith! Then Jesus answered her, "O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire." And her daughter was healed instantly.

As Agur, may we have a great and persevering faith in our prayer. Like Agur, may we have an appropriate prayer unto our God.

Poverty and Riches may not be good for you

In Proverbs 30:7-9, Agur, the son of Jakeh, spoke of these words about poverty and riches and the temptation related therein:

"Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that is needful for me,
lest I be full and deny you and say, "Who is the LORD?"
or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God."

I have been meditating on this text for weeks now. These verses are striking to me. It is warning me against the vanity of pursuing wealth, honor, and power in the expense of forsaking or denying God and His works. Also, it tells me about the temptations of suffering in poverty as this may lead to stealing, thus, profaning the name of my God. Both extremes--riches and poverty, are bad for me.

Agur knows what he is asking of God. Two things he ask of Him. I learn that we must be certain on what we are asking of God. We must be aware of the things that we have to ask of God, what does our case require? and what do our hearts desire? But let our words be few for we are asking in the presence of the Almighty God. In Ecclesiastes 5:1-2 the Preacher says, "Guard your steps when you go to the house of God... Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few." (ESV). I think, knowing what we have to ask of God is to be careful in our words also, though our God is an omniscient God.

We can also plead our case or request to God. Agur pleads to God that He would not deny him his two requests before he dies. This is of the same tone as with the pleas of King David in Psalm 28:1-2, it says, "To you, O LORD, I call; my rock, be not deaf to me, lest, if you be silent to me, I become like those who go down to the pit. Hear the voice of my pleas for mercy, when I cry to you for help, when I lift up my hands toward your most holy sanctuary." (ESV). Jesus, in the New Testament, taught us through a parable in Luke 18:1-8 to plead our case before God and be persistent in our prayers, exercising much faith that God would hear our pleas.

On the matter of exercising our faith, we can be one with Jacob as he would want to see Joseph, his son, alive before he would go and see death. We pray to God that we would want to know and see God's answer to our pleas.

These are the two things which Agur, the son of Jakeh, asked of God, as Matthew Henry had them:(1) that grace will be sufficient and (2) that food would be convenient. In this entry, I will discuss first Agur's first request to the LORD--grace sufficient. The other request I will discuss on my next blog entry, which is, Lord-willing, soon.

He starts with his plea for the divine grace of God in his first request. He says, "Remove from me falsehood and lying..". Indeed, it is only through and by the grace of God that our falsehood and lying be removed and washed. We cannot do anything about it for we were dead in our trespasses and sins. There is nothing a dead can do but to be dead, unable to accomplish anything, unable to do anything that could help his state. The Bible teaches that man, by nature, is dead (Rom. 5:12), bound (2 Tim 2:25f), blind and deaf (Mark 4:11f), and uninstructable (1 Cor. 2:14), . "But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved." (Eph. 2:4-5, ESV). In Romans 6 and the preceding chapters, Apostle Paul argues about the power of the said grace of God in calling to salvation and justifying the dead-in-trespasses-and-sins inidividuals and in mortifying the flesh and its desires in sanctification. Job asks, "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?" and he says, "Not one!" (Job 14:4). "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?", asks Jeremiah the Prophet (Jer 13:23). Only God, by the richness of his grace and mercy, can change that thing. Salvation, by its very nature, must be 'of the LORD'.