The Altogether Lovely One I: Keeping the Focus

The Song of Solomon as a Picture of Christ and the Church

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm John Snyder, and with me this week is a special guest, Jordan Thomas. Hey, Jordan, how are you?

Greetings, brother. Doing well.

And you just had your oldest daughter get married?

True. Two weeks ago.

Yeah, and they had a lot of friends.

About 600 of their closest friends.

Did you get to do the service?

No. Both bride and groom were PKs, and so both of us were just dads, and another wonderful brother, officiated.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, we're here to talk about a study that Jordan has done for us some time back. It took us a long time to get it to print because there were other things that were in the shoot before it, and kind of bottlenecking.

But the study is called Christ Our Treasure, Enjoying the Preeminence of Jesus in the Local Church, and it's designed for small groups, family studies. You know, you can do it with Christian schools. But I've asked Jordan if he would come and spend some time with us talking about that significant theme, and before we jump into that and throw it over to Jordan, I want to just kind of use a picture from the Old Testament as maybe a good introduction, and maybe to stir our own hearts, in the Song of Solomon.

So a wonderful picture between the husband and the wife, the love, the yearning, the ups and downs of the relationship. Classically, it has been considered a picture of God's love for His people, Christ and the Church.

And I feel that if that's not the interpretation, it certainly is a wonderful application because of what the rest of Scripture says. I remember recently hearing a young Scottish man preach on the Song of Solomon from that perspective, and I was encouraged to see it.

And he opened his sermon by saying, if you think this is not a picture of God and the Church, it's just a husband-wife issue, and it just tells you how to do marriage. He said, then you're going to have trouble because in this book, all the fault is found in the wife, no fault in the husband.

So it cannot be a husband-wife relationship only. So the picture, the love of God for His people, and how we see that reflected in a marriage. In chapter 2 of the Song of Solomon, the queen, the wife, she has a palace life, and yet she's not happy.

She's looking at these distant hills, yearning, longing, because her husband is away on royal business. And he's been away for some time, and she's looking and yearning. She just wants to see his group traveling back, and there's the king with all of his escorts.

And so she's looking, and finally she hears a voice, and she looks, and coming up over the hills, she sees her husband at a distance. And when he comes, he speaks to her. And chapter 2, it's all very ancient, poetic pictures, so a little strange to us at some times.

He speaks to her, and it all becomes springtime. It goes from winter to spring in her life, because he's there, and he says, come away with me. But by the time you reach chapter 5, you find that the wife has become maybe a bit indifferent.

Maybe she takes for granted the sweetness of his nearness. She's gone to bed, and in chapter 5, verse 2, she's laying in bed, she's asleep. He comes, and he knocks on the door of her bedroom, and she hears him.

And he speaks to her through the door, and he wants to spend time with her, and her with him, and she's indifferent. I've gotten ready for bed. Oh, just let's talk tomorrow. He leaves, and her heart begins to be stirred.

Why was she indifferent toward her love? And she gets out of bed, throws on her clothes, and goes looking throughout the city at night to find the husband. She finds night guardsmen, the watchmen, and they're a bit rough with her.

What are you doing out at this time of night? And it says, I searched for him, but I did not find him. I called him, but he did not answer me. That's the wife. And then when the night guardsmen meet her, and she says, you know, if you see my beloved, tell him.

Tell him I am lovesick. And then finally they ask her, because the situation's weird. Why would a woman be wandering the streets looking for her beloved? And so in verse 9 of chapter 5, they ask, what kind of beloved is your beloved?

O most beautiful among women, what kind of beloved is your beloved that you thus adjure or entreat us? And she goes on to just describe him, you know. He is altogether lovely. So when we think about the love of the Church returning their love to Christ, Christ's love pouring into us in a small but true response from us, I wonder if people came and visited our churches, would they look at a group of people that in all other cases they looked like normal people, but there's some weirdness about them, and the weirdness is that even though they have a good life and they have all that the New Covenant provides, and the salvation, the forgiveness, the peace, the friendships with other believers, and yet in the midst of this palace life, this wonderful provision, they're still yearning for something more.

They long for His nearness. And would the person visiting our church this Sunday turn to someone on the pew and say, hey, what kind of love is your love? Who is it that you love? What's he like that you guys, with so many wonderful privileges, still you're not satisfied if he is not drawn near?

Jordan's book, I think, helps with that in a very balanced and biblical way. If we were to summarize the study, the content of the study, really, the three words of the title help us. Christ, our treasure.

So Jordan, again, thank you for being here. Why don't you just kind of walk us through those three great truths? Christ, our treasure.

Christ as the Believer’s Treasure in New Testament Christianity

Yeah, gladly. Thank you, brother. My heart was stirred by the meditation you just gave from Song of Solomon, and then that picture of our churches being both satisfied, Christ is enough, and then longing for more.

So we yearn for Him. Where is my beloved Song of Solomon? The New Testament describes a Christian as somebody who is both satisfied. Christ is enough. He has won our redemption. He's paid our incalculable debt.

But even better than what He's saved us from, it's who He saved us for. And so we do long for Him, even though He has satisfied us. It's like this picture of an enlarging vessel that's both full to the brim and constantly growing, and Jesus keeps satisfying.

But that's our responsibility as well, to keep pursuing Him, longing for Him. So the New Testament says, I'll use a positive-negative. It's saying the same thing, but it's the end of the book of Ephesians and the end of the book of 1 Corinthians.

Positive Ephesians, grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ with incorruptible love. Well, that's an exclusive group, right? Only those who love Him with that love, incorruptible love, are the recipients of grace.

And so it's not loving doctrine, loving the church, loving theology, even loving some of the great articulations of what God has done for us. It's loving Him with incorruptible love. And then negatively, 1 Corinthians ends with an anathema.

It's a curse. Cursed be all those who do not love Him with that love. So there's something about a true Christian's heart that is just enamored with Christ. So back to the title of the study, hopefully it's a representative, a faithful representation of what the New Testament says basic Christianity is.

Christ, there's the Savior, second person of the Trinity, heaven's favorite, God's son, who He sent to be our Redeemer. Christ means anointed one, Messiah, Savior. So He's the one. But my concern is that a lot of people who I think sincerely profess to know Him, they're not being disingenuous, they're not trying to bait and switch, they believe themselves to be in a right standing with Him, think that they can have Him on their own or on their own terms.

That's the hour. The New Testament presents a Jesus who is very personal. John Snyder must have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That's a radically obvious biblical truth from even a cursory reading of the New Testament.

But if you have that relationship with Him, you can't have Him by yourself. That's the plural pronoun, our treasure. In fact, probably all your favorite verses about Jesus have plural pronouns. He's not just yours individually, He's ours.

He saves us into a family. And heaven will be, exhibit A, that He's not yours alone. He belongs to us, and astonishingly, we belong to Him. And He saves us into that people. And then treasure, you know, there's a lot of words that could be supplied in that place.

But really, Ephesians 6, it's grace belongs to those who love Him with a qualified love. It's an incorruptible love. It's a Holy Spirit wrought, Holy Spirit fueled, sincere love for the risen Jesus. And so Christ, our Savior, is our treasure.

And I think it's a basic summary of New Testament Christianity. And God's given us communities who treasure Him together. That's local churches.

I remember reading, at the end of a service, you know, as we close the service, we would have a doxology that we would read. And so I read the doxology that you mentioned from Corinthians. And that very, you know, strong language that Paul uses, those that will not love Christ, let them be accursed.

And this is not, you know, kind of a cold, hyper-Calvinist view. Paul is giving his life day by day to take the news of Christ across the Roman Empire. And so he's risking life daily. He's in prison.

He's, you know, weighed down many times with the needs of the churches, of the believers. And yet he says this. But what else could he say, having met Christ on the road to Damascus? And what, you know, what would any Christian say when we're thinking clearly?

And after making that statement, there was a young adult in the church that was offended. And they told their parent, you know, this is one reason I don't like the church. It's like, why would they be so harsh?

And I thought, you know, did I say that in a harsh way? Do I present that in a harsh way? So we have to ask that question. It may be us. But once we're careful, you know, to make sure that we're not presenting it in a way that Paul wouldn't have presented it, and in that case I just read it, you cannot reduce that.

You know, we cannot blunt the edge of that. There is something so infinitely worth treasuring in him. He is the pearl in the field. He is the treasure in the field. He is the pearl of great price. So that we with joy sell all to have him.

And last Sunday, Chuck Baggett preached that here, and I was hiding in the nursery listening because I've been on sabbatical, so I'm not supposed to be attending, so I was hiding. And I thought, you know, that's not just conversion.

That's every day. That's Paul, Philippians 3. I continue to count everything as rubbish if I could have more and more of him. In that second word, our, Christ our treasure, that's one I think that, you know, that you spend a lot of time on in the book because it is one that we struggle with, particularly as Western churches.

Members of a Western church, we tend to be very individualistic Americans. That's just kind of like tattooed on our heart, the me of everything. So Christ my treasure. Yeah, that's great. Christ our treasure.

Well, okay, sure. But, you know, Christ my treasure. So it's not an either-or, as you mentioned, because of the dynamic of the work of God in us, uniting us to his Son, uniting all believers to each other in his Son.

It can't be an individualistic approach. But I think as we consider the trends, we were talking before the podcast, there's been a healthy trend in the last 20 years, moving from, you know, and especially with the ministries of men like R .C. Sproul or John MacArthur or Piper, moving toward a more God-centered, God-exalting theology, we could say, reading some of the older writers that maybe we didn't even know existed.

So you're reading Puritans, you're reading Spurgeon, you know, and your heart's thrilled. And it needs to move from, this is how God redeems, you know, the five points, making sure that we protect the sovereignty of God's grace.

Well, but it needs to move from that to the practical application of, what does a body of believers look like? And that has occurred. That is a strong emphasis. If you ask someone, with Mediagratia, if I ask someone, would you write a mini-study for us, they almost always suggest an ecclesiological topic.

I want to write on the Church. And I say, well, in what way? Because there's been like a thousand books out there on the Church, so I don't know that we could add anything helpful. Your topic, I think, hits where there is a very particular need right now.

There's the danger of individualism that we've talked about, but there's also the danger of focusing on the Church or the body life, the horizontal connection, to the point that our religion becomes Church-centric rather than Christocentric.

And so, you know, Christ becomes the servant of the jewel, the Church, rather than the Church is valued because we love the one to whom the Church belongs. So this work helps us to have a good ecclesiology, but in a way that will not allow us to take one step back from that preoccupation with Him.

The Church’s Devotion as a Plural, Shared Treasure

So, if you would, Jordan, talk to us a little more about the Our, about the Church nature of devotion.

Yeah. And just, everybody's on the same page, I hope, when John says Our, it's not H-O-U-R, it's O-U-R, right?

Yeah.

The Our, the Us, the plural, the We. So, maybe an illustration, and then the biblical support that undergirds it. You mentioned my daughter got married a few weeks ago. She received, many months prior to that, a really beautiful engagement ring.

You know, every little girl dreams of getting that. And we knew that that day was coming, and we knew that that evening was coming, although she didn't. You know, she anticipated it might be soon, but she didn't know.

So, you know, she was element of surprise it worked. So, her fiancé pulled it off with the surprise engagement. But we planned a family gathering that night with our family and his family, and so she could show off her ring and everybody could celebrate.

We rejoiced together. And when we walked into the room, everybody's giving her a big hug and, you know, slapping him on the back and congratulations. When she shows us the goods, she's not impressed with the prongs.

Nobody's talking about what an amazing setting. You know, wow, I couldn't even tell you right now. Does it have three, four, five? I have no idea how many prongs it has. I just know there's a really beautiful rock, you know, right in the middle.

And the facets of it cause all the prisms, the shades and the lights and the refraction of the light. It's beautiful.

It's stunning.

And that's the way our churches should be. In fact, I think you said it well. I attribute it entirely to a work of grace, that there has been a recovery, even in our lifetime, of some precious ancient truths.

For whatever reason, the preeminence of Christ in redemption wasn't a theme that I heard a lot, probably because I wasn't listening carefully enough, even in my early years of church life. Well, by God's grace, it's not hard to find environments where you'll hear about God's providence, sovereignty and salvation.

And then, like you said, another wave of what I attribute entirely to a work of God's grace. While maybe a recovery of God's goodness and grace in redemption was happening, it caused another domino to fall, because it's an inevitable consequence.

This one who saves us, into what does he save us? And so there's been a lot of talk about the church. You said there's been a lot of books written about the church, and everybody who suggests writing a new one for you suggests the church theme.

And then you, I hope, I hope what you said is accurate. You said maybe this makes a contribution that is somewhat useful. But in that recovery of God's intention to save us into a people, thank God that there's a lot of ink being spilled on ecclesiology, doctrine of the church in our day.

But even so, both of those dominoes, God's grace and salvation, God's intention for the bride, the church, those are the prongs. Those are what hold up the diamond. They're God's wonderful idea. He's the one who's designed the church.

He's given us, in no uncertain terms, how he wants her to be led and structured, what her content ought to be, her diet that she's fed. But all of those things are means. They're not the end. So if my daughter would have taken the diamond out and been really impressed with her inadequate engagement ring, we would all have thought, something's off.

And today, I would say, if I could highlight a concern, though I think there's, as I said, massive evidences of God's good grace at work in our generation, I would say we often reveal that we're like kindergarteners at a show-and-tell class.

And we're holding up our little thing that we think is so impressive. You know, look at our church. We have, and then you're talking about a prong. You might even be able to support it with a verse. But my concern is, where is the emphasis that we see in the New Testament on Christ, for example?

Here's a biblical undergirding. We could talk about many. The book of Ephesians and Colossians are obviously mirror letters. A lot of the same verses, verbatim, appear in both books. But in Colossians, I think we see the supremacy of Christ in the cosmos.

He created everything.

He sustains everything. It all exists by him and for him, and he's over it all. He's just the king. He's just majestic vision. Well, even though some of those same verses are in Ephesians, Ephesians is more dialed in on the supremacy of Christ in the church.

And while there's tons of good theology, rightly so, I went through and counted all the pronouns. That refer to Jesus, he, him. And then all the explicit statements, Jesus, Christ. And I think it's something like 110 or 115 references to Jesus explicitly in a six-chapter book about ecclesiology.

Chapter three, he's making his wisdom known through the church. And chapter four, he gives gifts to the church. I mean, it's just church, church, church. But if you miss, I mean, John, a hundred and, let's be conservative, 50 references to Jesus in six chapters.

That's still quite a high percentage per verse.

Christ-Centered Church Life Versus Mere Ecclesiastical Formalism

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I imagine you find this to be your experience as well, that as we get older and we're not the youngest guys in the ministerial gatherings that we go to. I mean, you know, and now I even look older and like,.

Ugh.

When I meet young men who have questions about church, sometimes I'll get an email, and then, so, because of the Behold Your God study, and so they'll send an email and say, hey, can I have all these questions about planting a church?

And so I'm certainly not an expert on that. And they said, can I talk with you? I said, well, I'll give you the best advice I can. So they call me, and it's always the same set of questions. And I think they're important questions, but they're not the first questions that should be asked.

They're follow-up questions. They are not the root system, they're the fruit. And so they want to talk about, so how do you do a confession, and how do you do catechism, and what about this, and what about membership?

And so they're like, I want to do this. And what I notice is there's, let's perhaps say it like this, there are maybe two major paths that we can take in moving from a pretty unbiblical approach to church to a more biblical approach to church.

So as we're moving toward that direction, it's not just that we're moving toward a good object, a good goal, a more biblical ecclesiology, a more biblical way of worshiping, a more biblical way of teaching and preaching and witnessing.

It's not just that you have the right object or the goal, it's which path you take. And I find that which path a person takes, amazingly, it impacts in such a significant way the flavor of the kind of church they end up with, so to speak.

So, you and I grew up in churches that, as you mentioned, perhaps didn't talk a lot about some of the doctrines that we're talking about now, that didn't read a lot of Puritans, or Spurgeon was occasionally mentioned.

So, when the Lord brought us to Himself, and it was through the same man as He, Clyde Cranford, who long before we knew each other, led us to the Lord individually, it was Christ that was the great attraction for Clyde, who pointed us to Christ, and Christ becomes the attraction for us.

Certainly not that we perfectly responded, but that's what's interesting about Christianity, it's Christ. And then, as we've grown, then you move from Christ to, okay, but how does Christ want us to serve in His kingdom and in His church?

So, I think that's a healthy progression. In other words, we believe certain doctrines, we do church a certain way, we construct worship, we order discipleship within the church in a certain way, but the path is, I find Christ so worthy, this is the organic flow of that, this is why.

The other path, which is not a wrong path, but I find that it's fraught with some problems, is that a person says, hey, I've been a Christian for a while, I've been reading some old writers, I mean, I listened to so-and-so on the internet, and wow, I didn't even know John Owen existed, so I read a John Owen, I read a John Flavel, John Bunyan, and now I'm a Reformed guy.

Okay, so he looks around at his church, and he becomes a complete thorn in the side of his poor pastor. We're not Reformed, we need to be more Reformed. And the pastor just reacts to that and says, look, that's not us.

So the guy leaves, takes his family, starts searching around. We're going to be Reformed. And maybe he feels he's called to preach, and he wants to have a Reformed church. But he goes to the Reformed camp and says, okay, we all believe this about God, right?

Right. Okay, so what do you guys do? Oh, well, we do these things. We have confessions and catechisms and regulative principle. Great, I'll do that too, because I'm one of you guys, and that's what our kind of guys do.

But that's a totally different motivation. I've been able to attend church where you pastor a couple times on my sabbatical, and without any attempt to flatter, Jordan, you have for 20-ish years, how long has the church been there?

18.

18. So for 18 years, you have been maintaining aggressively such a Christocentric focus that whatever you're doing, whether it's the Lord's Supper or how you're raising children or doing the nursery or whatever, or evangelism, it is always flavored by this motivation, because of who Christ is.

It's just natural that we would want to do this in a way that pleases Him, not we're Reformed, therefore we do things this way, because that's the way our people do things. Very different flavor, you know, when you show up and you think, well, this is a Reformed Baptist church, or this is a church captivated with a person.

I pray that that's true. That's certainly our heart and our aim. But if a man's not intoxicated with Christ, he's not equipped to lead Christ abroad.

Right, and people say, okay, so what do you mean when you say that? Okay, wait, oh, wait, oh, so it's got to be organic.

Okay, oh, all right, all right.

So, you know, they get out their pad and they say, okay, so tell me what that means. And I say to them, like, no, no, wait, I can't, I'm sorry. It's something that has to happen in you first, and then it has to be cultivated and continue to happen in you, or you won't be able to pass it on to the church.

All of us have been to church long enough to know the preacher's reading a book on Christocentricity. And so we got seven sermons on Christocentricity, but wait three months, and there'll be a totally new emphasis.

No, you're absolutely right. And it's something that, even more significant than you or me, I think is very much on the heart of God. To just say it biblically, I said a minute ago, I don't know if people think it's too flowery a language or maybe too shocking a language, but if a man is not intoxicated with Christ, he's not equipped to lead Christ's people.

But I would say that that's true of all the Christians in the congregation as well. I think fundamental to a Christian's heart is that Jesus is his or her supreme allegiance. If you're not willing to lose all for him, and as you quoted from Matthew 13 earlier, consider that joy, that's better.

You're not making any sacrifice. You actually gave nothing to gain everything. That's not a sacrifice. But if he's not to you altogether lovely, then in what sense biblically are you one of his? Okay, so if a pastor's not intoxicated with Christ, he's not equipped to lead his people.

Here's one of many biblical supports to that claim. The one thing Satan doesn't want Jordan Thomas to see is the glory of God in the face of Christ. That's a direct quote from God. That's 2 Corinthians 4.

So if I get all my theology right, read all my ecclesiology books, we button up all our practices and our worship services, regulative principle, better than yours, we do it better, more watertight, but our hearts are not enthralled with Jesus, then I think Satan might applaud.

I think he could support that because he wants us not to see 2 Corinthians 4 .4, 2 Corinthians 4 .6, the glory of God in the face of Christ. So you read the New Testament and these believers, certainly their leaders, are running around the whole known world like people with their hair on fire.

But the one thing they keep saying is the message that you've just emphasized, that you must, Hebrews 12 .2, look off everything in order to fix your eyes on him, which, surprise, surprise, was written to a church.

And so were, again, all your other favorite verses about Jesus. They're written to congregations who are intoxicated with Jesus. And that's not too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good. That's not just mystical spirituality about a fuzzy Jesus.

I think it's radically biblical Christianity. And it's the one thing that will perfume all of our other practices with what the Bible presents as Christianity because anybody can do the mechanics. What kind of church do you want?

I want an ABC church. Well, go do that. You'll probably have some measure of visible success. Pick your formula. But the Bible is not pick your formula. It's belong to a person. Be so satisfied in Jesus and so aggressively by the Spirit pursuing him that all you have to offer is him, period, end of paragraph.

And this may be a little bit of a clunky way to say it, but I believe it. If somebody's not interested in the biblical Jesus, I would hope that no matter what their theological persuasion is or what their church preference style is, I would hope they'd be pretty uninterested in our churches.

I mean, you're welcome to come, but we're not changing who we're offering. He's it.

The Aroma of Christ and the Difference Between Fundamentals and Fundamentalism

Yeah, like you said, it's that intangible... If we're speaking on the human level, the horizontal level, there's this intangible quality of the aroma of Christ when it's love for the King that has brought us to Scripture with a cheerful submission to whatever the King wants.

But it's because it's him. You know, with doctrine, why do we believe these doctrines? Well, you know, because they're biblical and we like being people that are more right than our neighbor.

No.

The reason that doctrine is so important is because that doctrine is connected to the one I love, and I have no right to alter that. Why would I alter that? It's part of his beauty.

Yeah.

If I don't jump in now and say something, I'll forget.

Yeah, go ahead.

Well, that's the description I've heard between the fundamentals and the fundamentalists. There was a generation whose heart was captured by Christ. Therefore, as you just said, they believed certain things.

Christ was their treasure, so they pursued all that was true of him and faithful to him. And so then the next generation says, well, what are the things that we must have for that to be true of us? And so they took fundamentals and became fundamentalists.

And the enemy's just going to keep repackaging the same old lies. And all of our hearts want the formula. What do I have to do to pass through the hoops to be right with God? And I think the Bible's answer would be something like, with joy, sell all you have to have one treasure.

Give everything that you know of yourself and all that you have, including all your aspirations, all your hopes, all your dreams, for something infinitely better than you ever previously pursued. And if you have everything save Christ, you have nothing.

If you have Christ save nothing, you have everything. And so one way to approach church and Christianity is tell me the hoops to jump through. That's the wrong way. And as you've just emphasized, the other biblical way is who is this king?

Who is this savior? How can I know him? And if you do, there might be some mechanics that look really similar to churches that don't treasure him. But like you said, stick around for three months or three years or 30 years.

And is he the only offering you get? And if so, is he enough?

Jordan, thank you for being with us. And we're going to pick this topic up in our next podcast. And again, we're talking with Jordan Thomas who has written a study, Christ, Our Treasure, Enjoying the Preeminence of Jesus in the Local Church.

And so it's one of the many studies from Mediagratia. It comes with, like the other studies, it comes with a workbook where you're guiding the people back to scripture. And then also Jordan is teaching a lesson.

For each of the weeks.