Revival and Renewal

To be thankful implies something about what someone hopes in. When one looks at the world today, there are many things which can be said to be wrong. Wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, drought, and anger abound. Terrorism has struck fear into Adam’s progeny throughout the globe. Friendships are strained by the vast ideological gaps that separate both the American landscape and the world. To acknowledge these things is simply to be a realist. Thanksgiving at the secular home this year could be a quiet event indeed.

This is because thanksgiving is a Christian scandal, a paradox that looks at the mystery of providence and sees behind it a smiling God. It is the command, given by God, to be thankful in all things (1 Thess. 5:18), even in during the times that do not immediately look to be pleasant or good to us. Christians can look upon circumstances and see behind them something a secularist can never claim.

Samuel Rutherford described two distinct ways in which God works out his providence: evangelic and legal[1]. Legal providence is the work of judgment, the wrath of a just God upon sinners deserving of divine punishment. The sinner thus looks on providence as the sign of a frowning God, even all his benefits and graces, for they only further condemn him (cf. Rom 2:4-5). Those outside of Christ have no claim on God’s covenant care, and all reflection on this should bring them to honest repentance.

Believers, however, are not to look on providence in this way. To them the activity of God on earth is supposed to signify something totally different: God’s steadfast love (cf. Ps. 100). “My times are in your hand,” writes David (Ps. 31:15). God’s evangelic providence is supposed to enhance the Christians faith, and to build up her hope in God’s grace. The mystery of sovereignty is not supposed to disillusion us, but rather press us toward God in thankfulness for his covenant care.

In a very real way this is enabled for us by the cross of Christ. Christ’s life serves Christians not only in what it achieved, but also in what it signified. Christ’s life story, from suffering to glory, humiliation to exaltation, gives Christians hope that “ when he appears we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2).  Christians can look at suffering, not as precursors to God’s wrath, but as the conforming grace of God’s goodness to us. It is a signifier that he is treating us as sons (cf. Heb. 12:3-11), and it can grow our hope and anticipation at Christ’s appearing and the joy that awaits us (cf. Ps. 16:11).

So this thanksgiving, if you are in Christ, be thankful for God’s covenant care. If you are in Christ, thank God not only for the things you thought went well last year, but for the trials, the heartbreaks, the disappointments. And may this Thanksgiving make you grow in hope in the coming of Christ, so that we might say with the saints, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20).

[1. For a great analysis of Rutherford’s view, cf.  Brent Macedo, “From Dogma to Practice: Systematic Theology and Application In the Sermons of the Scottish Commissioners to the Westminster Assembly”, Westminster Theological Journal 77 (2015): 317-36.]