Personal Tragedy to Apostasy

I write this post from a position of not having experienced a personal tragedy of the magnitude that would rock the foundations of my faith to the core. In a way, I speak from ignorance, and yet the lives of some of those who have gone before me seem to speak ministration on this issue.

John Calvin lost his wife and son.

John Owen had eleven children. All died in early youth, except one daughter.

Francis Turretin had four children. Only one survived.

More recently, Michael Horton discloses in "A Place for Weakness" how one of his prematurely-born triplets, when older, experienced an accident wherein this elongated toy got jammed down the child's throat. The doctor gave a grim prognosis, but thankfully, the child survived.

As a father, I have often ruminated on the idea of the Lord taking back one of my kids. The same with Him taking back my wife. I have often wondered what my reaction would be. I do not know my heart well enough.

In a way, such thoughts are unwise, for it smacks of the attempt to peer into God's decretive will, and yet it is also wise in that reflection on one's faith, on one's devotion to the Lord, on the depth of one's love for Him, at the time when all is calm, may just be one of the ways in which stability may be had when the storms do come.

There's no minimizing the devastation of losing a family member. Imagining the possibility has often brought me to tears. But should it lead to apostasy? Should it drive one to the despair that leads to destruction? If the Lord Jesus Christ is our treasure, then we should mourn for the loss of a loved one with the passion that is due that love, but then that excruciating pain must be turned sacramental. It should lead us to Christ, whose life and death have redefined "death" for the Christian, with the promise of life forever restored in the future age of glory. Even if we think that the departed is lost by virtue of not being a Christian, our affinity with Christ and His promise of embodied eternal life should prove the stronger tug to renewed rejoicing.

May I love my Lord Jesus Christ more than my wife and children, that I may love them truly while they are here with me in this present age.

My Pathetic Piety

I missed two successive Lord's Day services due to sloth and sluggishness. I even lied to my pastor about the reasons. I've repented of my lying and of having profaned the Sabbath, and I've confessed to both him and the Lord. In other words, my piety is pathetic. I feel like Peter humiliated by Paul for hypocrisy—and rightly so.

I found this essay by Joel Beeke entitled, "Calvin's Piety." I need the first use of the Law to weigh down on me and the Gospel to remind me of Christ's active and passive obedience (and the imputation of their merits) in order to impel me to walk gratefully in the Law's third use.

"Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin" (Rom. 7:24-25).

Idelette

Calvin wrote the following letters after the death of his beloved wife:

To Farel, April 2, 1549:

The Rolling Stones Were Onto Something

Despair is the friend of everybody. The day a human being first sees the light of the sun is the day he gives despair an all-access pass to his life. That's just the way it is this side of the Fall.

When Adam transgressed and violated the terms of the Covenant of Works, we were there transgressing with him, and it was no less than Van Til (and I believe Bavinck as well) who surmised that Adam was so inextricably linked to the rest of the created order that the Curse fell on the natural world just as it did on him. Every creature is in covenant with God by virtue of creation, mandated to reflect the glories and excellencies of God in analogical fashion.