Note: I and my fellow elder, Jeff Clark, offered some devotional exhortations related to the current virus outbreak and our church's ministry to the brethren at CRBC on Sunday morning (3.15.20) before the start of our Lord's Day morning service. You can listen to the audio here. Here are my notes:
Dear friends,
A few weeks ago I preached from 2 Kings 7 about a time in
Israel’s history when everything changed within one day for the people living
within a besieged Jerusalem. One day a donkey’s head sold for 80 pieces of
silver and cab of dove dung for five pieces of silver and the next a measure of
flour or two measures of barley could be had for a bare shekel (2 Kings 6:25;
7:1, 18). One day people were starving, and the next they were feasting.
In that case it was a dramatic change from deprivation to
abundance.
This week witnessed a very different kind of turn. A week ago,
we prayed for those suffering from this virus and we prayed that the Lord might
use it to awaken men’s consciences to issues of life and death. Little did we
know how dramatically he would choose to do that.
Several years ago, I resolved not to allow my preaching to be
dictated by the headlines of media, but current circumstances are impossible to
avoid addressing.
On one hand, as we move forward, we do not want to act in
ways that are reckless and careless with respect to our own lives and the lives
of others, on the other hand, we think it is important that those so called can
have opportunity to assemble for prayer and worship.
We plan to continue meeting in our regular services in coming
weeks, but that could change. Whether or not we continue to meet in person, we
will also look into the possibility of livestreaming our services.
We want to continue to do, as much as possible, what is
normal and ordinary for us to do. We will continue, God willing, to preach
through 2 Kings and the 1689 Confession.
If you feel uncomfortable about attending our services or are
in a category that would be more vulnerable to contracting this virus or
suffering harmful consequences from it, then please feel free not to attend. You
can always listen online and keep the sabbath at home. We do want to place any
stigma or lay any guilt on anyone if you are not able to be here in person. You
will always be with us in spirit!
We will also try to use some basis precautions in our
meetings...
There are also, of course, practical things you can do. Keep
in touch with one another (by phone or online), pray for each other, encourage one another, bear one
another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.
And remember to keep up your stewardship, so the church can
meet its needs. If you cannot be here, then send your offerings to our
Treasurer or to the church’s PO box.
When one examines church history one finds that believers
have lived through many circumstances much like these over the years. There is
nothing new under the sun.
In around the year AD 250 Christians in Egypt had gone
through a terrible time of persecution under the Roman Emperor Decius. Many had died as
martyrs. No sooner was this over, but a pandemic disease broke out. In Eusebius
of Caesarea’s Church History (Book 7, chapter 22), he cites a letter
from Dionysius, a pastor in Alexandria, Egypt, describing the situation and how
Christians responded to it:
“But when the briefest breathing space had been granted us
and them, there descended upon us this disease, a thing that is to them more fearful
than any other object of fear, more cruel than any calamity whatsoever, and, as
one of their own writers declared, ‘the only thing of all that proved worse
than what was expected.’ Yet to us it was not so, but, no less than the other misfortunes,
a source of discipline and testing. For indeed it did not leave us untouched,
although it attacked the heathen with great strength.”
Following these remarks he adds as follows: “The most, at all
events, of our brethren in their exceeding love and affection for the
brotherhood were unsparing of themselves and clave to one another, visiting the
sick without a thought as to the danger, assiduously ministering to them,
tending them in Christ, and so most gladly departed this life among them; being
infected with the disease from others, drawing upon themselves the sickness
from their neighbors, and willingly taking their pains. And many, when they had
cared for and restored health to others, died themselves, thus transferring
their death to themselves, and then in very deed making good the popular saying,
that always seems to be merely an expression of courtesy: for in departing ‘they
became their devoted servants.’ In this manner, the best at any rate of our
brethren departed this life, certain elders and deacons and some of the laity,
receiving great commendation, so that this form of death seems in no respect to
come behind martyrdom, being the outcome of much piety and strong faith. So,
too, the bodies of the saints they would take up in their open hands to their bosom,
closing their eyes and shutting their mouths, carrying them on their shoulders,
and laying them out; they would cling to them, embrace them, bathe and adorn
them with their burial clothes, and after a little receive the same services
themselves, for those that were left behind were ever following those that went
before.
But the conduct of the heathen was the exact opposite. Even
those who were in the first stages of the disease they trust away, and fled
from their dearest. They would even cast them in the roads half-dead, and treat
the unburied corpses as vile refuse, in their attempts to avoid the spreading
and contagion of the death-plague; a thing which, for all their devices, it was
not easy for them to escape.”
In 1665 the so-called Great Plague or “Black Death” hit
London. It is estimated that in 18 months 100,000 people, or one fourth of the
population, died. Many Christians ministered heroically to brethren and
neighbors during that time.
A few years after the plague, a Puritan minister named Ralph
Venning wrote a work titled The Plague of Plagues (reprinted now as The
Sinfulness of Sin). Though he never directly described the plague through
which the nation had passed, his metaphor was clear. Venning described in that
work sin as a plague that infects and endangers every man’s heart. At one point
he wrote:
Keep out of harm’s way. ‘Enter not (put not a foot) into the
way of the wicked’ (Prov 4:14-15). And if you have been so foolishly forward,
yet do not go on in the way of evil men; but avoid it, pass not by it, turn
from it and pass away. You cannot stand at too great a distance from sin (267).
So friends, let us learn from the saints of old. Let us be wise,
exercise prudential judgment, and persevere in contentedness and even with joy.
What ever befalls, let us remember the opening to Psalm 97:
“The LORD reigneth” (v. 1a).
JTR
