Underground Exiles

The Prophet Zechariah

This is what the LORD Almighty says: “Many peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will yet come, and the inhabitants of one city will go to another and say, ‘Let us go at once to entreat the LORD and seek the LORD Almighty. I myself am going.’  And many peoples and powerful nations will come to Jerusalem to seek the LORD Almighty and to entreat him.” –Zechariah 8.20-22

In the book I’m reading by Jonathan Edwards, he takes his text from Zechariah 8.20-22, which he interprets as a prophecy of a future glorious advancement of God’s Church.  From what I’ve gathered so far, Edwards’ eschatology is decidedly postmillenial, which was fairly common for his era.

In his exegesis of the text, Edwards sees an account of how this future glorious advancement of God’s Church is to come about; he sees this happening as people gather in from different towns and countries and taking up a joint resolution and coming into visible agreement that they will seek God by united and extraordinary prayer, that he would manifest Himself to His Church and grant them the fruits of His presence.

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The Tombstone of the great Jonathan Edwards

Right now I’m reading the Complete Works of Jonathan Edwards, published by the Banner of Truth Trust in 2 volumes.

Volume 2 contains an interesting work of Rev. Edwards called An Humble Attempt To Promote Explicit Agreement And Visible Union Of God’s People In Extraordinary Prayer For the Revival of Religion And The Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom On Earth.  I just love titles from the eighteenth century; they certainly don’t leave you guessing on what the author intends to say.  I think the words of Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones are significant and bear reading on the subject of Jonathan Edwards:

“In my early days in the ministry there were no books which helped me more, both personally and in respect of my preaching, than this two-volume edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards…I devoured these volumes and literally just read and read them. It is certainly true that they helped me more than anything else. If I had the power I would make these two volumes compulsory reading for all ministers! Edwards seems to satisfy all round; he really was an amazing man.”

So for the next posts on undergroundexiles.com, I’m going to blog my way through Edward’s call to extraordinary prayer and post my thoughts as I read this amazing work.

So I had another conversation this morning at church before the service started surrounding the question of free will.  There is a dear, dear lady at the Well who walked up before church started and noticed that our pastor had a copy of Erasmus and Luther’s debate on Free Will.  She picked up the book and said she’d never read anything by Erasmus and thought she might be interested in the book.

Seeking to engage the conversation, I mentioned that Pastor Todd had loaned me the book several years ago, and that I thought Luther’s writing in Bondage of the Will was by far the best piece of writing he’d every produced.

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The more that I look around at the state of the church and the state of my nation, I’m coming to a few realizations that are all inter-related.

The first is that the United States is sliding further and further towards becoming a secular, post-Christian society. This statement, of course, is more true in the Northeast than the South, and is more true in urban, than suburban and rural areas.

Canada, our northern neighbor, gives me a pretty good idea of where the United States will find itself in 3 generations(give or take). In the census in Canada in the year 2000, what I found was that roughly only 8% of the population were evangelical Christians. To put it in plain speech, only 8% of the population believes that the Bible is true, hell is hot, and forever is a long time. In addition, the number of Catholics was down from the previous censuses, and Protestants were down from previous censuses. You can directly attribute much of this to the greater influence of Europe on Canadian society.

Interestingly, however, the number of people with no spiritual preference was up, paganism was up, witchcraft was up, and previously almost dead, the number of people practicing native Canadian Indian spirituality was also up.

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