THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY JUNE 27, 2024

God in Christ the Only True Rest for the Soul (from Edward Fisher's The Marrow of Modern Divinity in The Marrow of the Marrow of Modern Divinity, Andy Wilson, ed.)

When we struggle with PTSD, our souls are hardly ever at rest. There are all the what ifs and maybes to wrestle with. We fight against not getting angry with those we love. We battle over not being understood. We want to be left alone at the worst times. We hate crowds. Anxiety dogs us. We avoid activities we used to love and no one understands why and our explanations are inadequate to satisfy our spouse and children. We live lives of quiet desperation and inner turmoil. Nightmares cloud sleep so we don't sleep.

So, we turn to religion or a hundred activities to preoccupy us to insulate us from the misery and horror of the past. Edward Fisher did a masterful job of communicating the reason we can find no rest for our weary soul except in Christ alone.

Nomista: Then it seems to me that God in Christ, received by faith, is the only true rest for man's soul.

Evangelista: Indeed, this is the rest which David urges his soul to seek when he says, "Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you." (Ps. 116:7) It is what the writer of Hebrews is talking about when he says, "For we who have believed enter that rest." (Heb. 4:3) It is what Christ is offering when he says, "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Mt. 11:28) You may be sure that we will never find our heart's happiness and our soul's true rest until we find it here. A man tends to think that his heart would be satisfied if only he had this man's intelligence, or that man's wealth, or that man's honor, or that man's pleasure, or that man's wife, or that man's children. But this is proven to be false by experience. For not long after we obtain the thing we so desired, we find nothing but vanity and emptiness in it. Let a man deal honestly with his heart, and he will find that, even though he possesses many things, there is always something else that he lacks. A man's soul cannot be satisfied with any created thing, not even with a whole world of them. And the reason why is because the desires of man's soul are infinite, corresponding to the infinite goodness that it lost in losing God. Moreover, man's soul is spiritual, and therefore it cannot truly connect with any material thing. Because created things do not possess the infinite and spiritual fullness which the heart of fallen man has lost, they cannot give our hearts full contentment.

Furthermore, even if a man, in the midst of his sensual pleasures, becomes convinced in his conscience that he is at enmity with God and in danger of his wrath and eternal damnation, and this leads him to reform his life and amend his ways and endeavor to seek peace and rest for his soul, it will be impossible for him to find rest in this way, because it is the way of works. His conscience will constantly be accusing him that he should have done some duty that he has not done, that he should have abstained from some evil that he has done, that in the performance of some duty he was negligent, that his performance of another duty was very defective. In these and many other ways his soul will be disquieted.

But when a man comes to believe that all his sins, past, present, and future, are freely and fully pardoned, and that he has been reconciled to God in Christ, and the Lord reveals his fatherly face to him in Christ and makes known the union between him and the believing soul, then that man's heart becomes quietly contented in God. From this point on, peace from the God of peace comes flowing into his soul and fills its emptiness with the fullness of God. for when a man's heart is at peace in God and has become truly full in the peace and joy that surpasses understanding, then the devil has no hope of prevailing against his soul in the way he had done before. Satan knows it would be useless to bait his hook with profits, pleasures, honor, or anything else that seems good to catch a ouls that is in a state of quiet rest in God. for the heart of the believer, being filled with joy and peace in believing, abhors base allurements. There is nothing that truly and sincerely roots wickedness out of the heart of man other than the true tranquility of mind and rest of the soul in god. The nature of the peace and rest of the creature in his Creator is such that, according to the measure of its establishment in the heart by faith, no created thing can either add to it or detract from it. The increase of an earthly kingdom cannot augment it. The greatest losses and crosses cannot diminish it. The believer's good works flow from it, but they do not produce or maintain it. Not even the frailties from which believers are never free in this life assault it, though these faculties are met by the true repentance and gospel mourning that flow from the believer's peace and rest in God.

One thing is most certain: neither sin nor Satan, neither law nor conscience, neither anguish nor grave can fully extinguish the believer's peace and rest in God. For it is the Lord alone who gives and maintains this peace. While the peace and joy of a true believer may at times be diminished, the testimony that those graces are truly present in him remain so strong that, even when it seems that God is withdrawing himself, the believer remains confident that though weeping may tarry for the night, joy will come with the morning. (see Ps. 30:5) Indeed, even if it appears that the Lord is slaying them with unkindness, yet they will pup their trust in him (see Job 13:15), knowing that their Redeemer lives (see Job. (see 19:25) They are kept in perfect peace, because their minds are stayed on the Lord. (see Isa. 26:3)