The Rock of Ages
Tuesday (December 2)
The Rock of Ages
Psalm 89:14
Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you.
Foundations are everything, aren’t they? Walls, roofs, floors—all depend on the strength and perfection of their bedrock. So notice how the psalmist describes the rock upon which Christianity stands. Notice that the bedrock is God’s strength of character, not His strength of arms. In other words, power isn’t what undergirds Heaven’s work; rather, perfection is. It isn’t just that God is the supremely powerful Being in the cosmos and can accomplish whatever He wants without fail, because He could be supremely powerful and still be a little evil, right? Power isn’t the substance of gospel truth; perfection of character is. God alone is great because God alone is good.
This isn’t a trivial distinction, by the way. Whether you’re interested in conversations like these or not, one of the loudest historical critiques of Christianity is that the church is just another religious game of thrones, or that political power rather than divine Incarnation is the animating factor of its growth in the world, or that the conversion of souls has come by way of conquest and colonialism and crusading, or that the reason Christianity has advanced as a dominant force is because kings and popes and preachers have used it as a cudgel over the masses. But that notion could not be any further from the foundational truth expressed in the Scriptures, and it’s a bedrock that cynics like G.K. Chesterton and Lee Strobel and Saul of Tarsus collapsed upon when trying to hammer down the walls. So let’s straighten out our theology right off the bat and not mistake the ceilings for the foundation stone: God is righteousness and justice and love and faithfulness, which is why Paul can tell us in Romans 12:12 to always be joyful in hope and patient in affliction and faithful in prayer, because we follow the Light of the world in Whom there is no shroud of darkness at all.
Remember the admonition of the prophet in Isaiah 26:3-4: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock.” There is no Rock like our God, not only because He is all-powerful, but because He is all-pure.