Countercultural: Identities Written by the Gospel

By J. E. B. Mouw

We face a culture that is becoming less intentional and more confused, dragging with it a wayward church. Drifting in this waywardness, many have been taken captive by electronic media and have lost touch with their Bibles. However, God has graced us with a desire to grow in knowledge and find a ballast in life—we only need to accept his life-saving gift.

Countercultural: Identities Written by the Gospel will help us wayward children of God to look to the Bible to remind ourselves who God says we are, what we ought to expect, and how we should behave. Asking us to renew our interest in the entire Bible, author Jason E. B. Mouw shares his own personal spiritual journey through the trials and tribulations of life, depression, addiction, and faith in order to help others seek the Bible as a source of comfort and instruction.

Though life may sometimes seem meaningless, futile, or even cruel, the Bible and Christ’s redeeming gospel offers all believers a hope and a purpose. By finding our identities in God through his gospel message, we can be delivered from the desperation of the world and live peacefully in God’s grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532020018

J. E. B. Mouw

Jason E. B. Mouw is a biologist living in Anchorage, Alaska, and he holds degrees in forestry and environmental science from the University of Montana, Alaska Pacific University, and Northwestern College. He and his wife of twenty years have two sons, and the entire family enjoys being outdoors and roaming the beaches and mountains of Alaska. They are also heavily involved with their local church, volunteering in several ministries and communities.

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Copyright © 2016 Jason E.B. Mouw, PhD.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-2000-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2002-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2001-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017906321

iUniverse rev. date: 11/21/2017

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are taken from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scriptures marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (AMP) are taken from the Amplified Bible, Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

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Scripture quotations marked HCSB are taken from the Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Holman CSB®, and HCSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Knowing Simon Peter

Abandoning Self for Reliance on Grace

Brook Cherith

You Will Have Trouble in This Life

Hunger in the Midst of Pain

Alcohol is a subtle foe

When the Teacher Gives you a Test, He is Silent

Boom

Wrestling with Eternity

Our Educated Awareness of a Sovereign Plan

Carnal Pursuits of the Wayward: An Observation

That Great Cloud of Witnesses

Countercultural Peculiarity: A Testimony of Conscience

An Internal Witness of Truth

Standing Alone in the Face of Trouble

Men of Whom the World was not Worthy

Standing Alone

Amongst Critics

Truth About the Gossip

Upon Ashes of Tragedy

The End of this Divine Orchestration

Sovereign Election: The First Resurrection

Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones

The Doctrine of Election According to the Gospel of John

Why does it Matter to us so?

All the Father Gives will come

Our Genuine Response

Ramifications for Progressive Sanctification

Justified by the Righteousness of Jesus

What is Your Name?

Jesus is Lord of our Life

Our Identity in Relation to the Law

Yes, There are Consequences

Chosen According to God’s Good Pleasure

Questioning our Family History

God has a Definite Plan

To be Chosen of God

God Chose Abraham

God Chose Israel

The Mystery of Christ, the True Israel

The Remnant

The Poor

True Israel, the Remnant

Gentile Inclusion in Prophecy and History

The Post-Exilic Remnant and Gentile Inclusion

Prophetic Fulfillment in the New Testament

Prophetic Interpretation According to Jesus and His Gospel

A Redemptive Body of One

The Church: Individually and Collectively Hidden in Christ

What it Really Means to be Poor

Rivers of living water flowing from Jerusalem

Redemptive Confusion

Chronology of the Kingdom

The Present Tenses of our Reality

Millennial Reign of Christ

An Earth with no Sea

Already—Not Yet

The Expense of Premillennialism

Rivers of Living Water

The Unfathomable Riches of Revelation 12: The Woman, the Child, the Dragon, and You

Cultural Engagement

Isaiah for Context

God’s Sovereign Agenda

God’s Sovereign use of Nations

You will be my Witnesses

The Great Escape

The Church: In Captivity?

What is the Kingdom?

Some Concluding Thoughts

Glossary

Bibliography

About the Author

Introduction

In Ellicott’s (1897¹) commentary on the Bible, Alfred Barry expounded upon the world as a scene of exceptional rebellion against God. It is also a scene where God’s steadfast love endures and, I might add, overwhelms this rebellion. I see my life as a mere thread in this story, overwhelmed and overtaken by the blood of the Lamb. Looking into Jesus’ gospel², I find my story. I see myself in its pages, stories of men who ran and were accosted by a love that never let them go. In this story, I’ve also found men in such a depression as mine, whose strength had left their bodies. These were men who saw themselves as no good, even those who longed for death. I identified with these stories and came to know that God’s plan was far more cosmic in scope than I formerly understood. Suffice it to say that I realized God’s work in my life was on display for the purposes of exposing His plan. Though formerly a mystery, our being interwoven into the church was part of God’s plan to expose himself and His gospel to the cosmos. Find Ephesians 3:8 where Paul explains God’s plan for the church, to expose His manifold wisdom to the heavenly realm, breaking walls of division, and revealing predestined mysteries. The gospel is indeed cosmic.

It has been way to easy for me to spiral inward in self-reflection and self-pity, forgetting all this. In crisis, I have consumed the word of God like only a desperate man can. I rehearsed and meditated upon the illumination and comfort found in its pages and was stricken with an urge to use bits of my journey to participate in the exposure of God’s word. There is great comfort in knowing that we are not alone, not of the first to experience the desperation of an evil heart, and to question the greater end for which this road of endurance is all about. This is to say, I’m convinced, that we look to the Bible for our identity. To this end, the general purpose of this book is to steam out, if you will, this identity. Without it, we lose sight of the horizon, become self-absorbed, and forget the next generation.

I’ll begin with reflection upon the man who Jesus called the rock. He was the man upon whom Jesus built His church. That man was Peter. As members of God’s holy church, the story of this man seems like quite an appropriate place to start. Many of us can identify with Peter. The bewilderment he expressed in his interaction with our resurrected Lord Jesus is used as a vehicle to introduce a book on the reconciliation of our own. To various degrees, some may escape this bewilderment. Others of us will come to a place in life where everything appears to have come apart, at the very seams. When this happened to me, God had my attention. In reflection of this journey, the first several chapters of this book touch on what it can look like to wrestle with the truths of God and circumstantial confusion. The remainder of the book looks to the truth about our identity and how good theology anchors our soul. We are called and often shaken, but validated and given an official stamp by God to be countercultural and holy. Let’s see how reflection on Peter’s story might help us begin this journey.

Knowing Simon Peter

If you could imagine what it must have been like, though I don’t suspect we fully can, it must have been about all that even the most patient and enduring of us could handle. It was quite likely that it was even well beyond that. Peter had already ridden the most extreme rollercoaster ride of all time. He was the one who walked on water with Jesus and then publicly denied him three times. This denial followed these words in Mark 14:29: Even though they all fall away, I will not, in reference to his fellow disciples and himself. Emphatically, in response to Jesus’ claim that he would, Peter said: If I must die with you, I will not deny you (Mark 14:31, ESV). We all know, of course, that he did; but I think we are too hard on Peter. Somehow we fancy ourselves as having learned from this most cavernous departure from his own identity, and that, somehow, that would never happen to us.

Peter was the one who first declared, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God (Matthew 16:16, ESV), in the days preceding the rooster’s crow. His denial was a place where time stood still. It was a public placeholder in the pages of history that every man must consider. Own it now, the Bible says. Own it today, for we know not what tomorrow will bring, only that it is left to us to embrace who and whose we are, and what we are called to do. Own it before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit to God who gave it (Ecclesiastes 12:7, ESV). "Before the evil dogs come and the years draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’" (Ecclesiastes 12:1, ESV). As strange as this all sounds, we deceive ourselves about time and how much we have left. The man who loses sight of this vapor we call life, inevitably becomes self-absorbed.

As I wrote this book I came to realize that I was in a place similar to Peter’s, following Jesus’ resurrection. I’ve questioned who I am, where I am going, and what will become of me. I’ve been anxious and like the Bible says, Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down (Proverbs 12:25a, ESV). Like Peter may have wondered, I sometimes question whether my past failures forfeit me from advancing a credible gospel proclamation. What can God do with me? In my mind I know this to be entirely misguided, for it isn’t my gospel and my failures cannot erode it in any way. As we’ll later discuss, it is in fact quite the opposite. But still, amidst the haunting failures and a wounded soul, I found myself at a complete loss on how to respond. I became severely depressed and was tempted to despair. What do we do when we find ourselves here, disillusioned and in fatigue? Maybe the first and most important thing to do is to remind ourselves and rehearse to one another who God is and who it is God says we are—like Nehemiah did as he grieved over the exiles returning from captivity (Nehemiah 1).

For me, in the years following The Revelation, Rembrandt said it best. A picture is sometimes worth a thousand words. It brings out the marrow of circumstance when words fall flat. In this case, even a painting cannot do justice to what it would have been like to be there. It’s like a photograph of a glacier. A photo might bring out some of the colors, but pales in comparison to the real thing. It also omits the musty smell of glacial debris and the violent sounds that accompany the sights. It cannot capture the waters, so full of sediment they sing as they run, or the joints of the ice that bellow and echo like the sounds of war. Rushing wind across glaciated expanses can sound just like a Cessna, even a Huey, a UH-1 Iroquois at times. Put a man out in such a wilderness, alone, and he must learn to ignore his senses or become overwhelmed by them. Within Peter’s circumstances, we find something of the same. Though we never did see Jesus, we know him. And as we’ve lived out our own personal sets of circumstances, we’ve either ignored our senses or they have overwhelmed us. Though I can’t translate the sights, sounds, smells, and vibrations of one night beside a glacier, I know that we’ve all had access to circumstances that function to place us alongside Peter in those days of ~AD 30-33. We can confess that we are no different. Rembrandt did.

Who was there at the cross of Jesus? A study of Rembrandt’s painting, titled The Raising of the Cross (1633) suggests that all of us were. Rembrandt makes this point by placing himself in at least two places in his painting. A younger Rembrandt, in light blue, is at the foot of the cross struggling to pull it upwards as Jesus is raised above the earth, from where He drew all men to himself (John 12:32). An older Rembrandt eerily looks back at himself and you, begging us all to question the truth about ourselves. When you look into the pages of Scripture, what do you see?

In his letter to the Romans, Paul instructs us with even greater clarity. The words of Scripture are living and active. They are piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4:12, ESV). As Paul explained, it was through one man, Adam, that we all were there at the cross. This is an imputation that none of us can escape, leaving us all dead in spirit, quickened only when God draws us to the Man who took our place. Through this Man we get to look back at the cross, not forward at it. And this is where spirit-filled instruction, wonder, humility, and honesty must accompany our consideration of Peter. By way of our own circumstances, the ways in which they have exposed our depravity, we can imagine the incomprehensible demoralization Peter walked through. With honesty, we can admit having fallen flat on our faces into places that exposed our complete inability to never fall again. In humility we can see how we are the same as Peter, in this sense. We may not have the forearms of a fisherman, but we all have the heart of a man.

So, toward the end of John’s gospel when Peter said, I’m going fishing (John 21:3, ESV), how does that strike you? He didn’t know where Jesus was and I’m pretty sure he was sick of hiding. Jesus had shown up, only to vanish, twice. The Romans and Jews were commingled and hostile forces, and only getting started in their persecution of the Way. Peter could have shriveled into a corner in self-pity, continuing to hide. He could have extended and even cultivated a fellowship of misery and fear with his family and his friends. But, he didn’t do that. He picked up the pieces of what was left, after the world had just been shattered. Before he would join and lead his brothers in turning this world upside down, before that mission became crystal clear to him, he decided to do something instead of nothing. He went fishing. And then Jesus showed up for breakfast.

You may have heard of this analogy. When the teacher gives you a test, he is silent. The teacher doesn’t move to the black board, continuing his instruction. That part is over, for the time being. No, the teacher sits at his desk and is silent while you respond to his teaching, reflect your preparation, and display how serious you were about it. In life, the immediate consequences of our failures are our own, because the teaching is perfect. My son, Jesus says: If you will receive my words and treasure my commandments within you, make your ear attentive to wisdom, incline your heart to understanding; For if you cry for discernment, lift your voice for understanding; If you seek her as silver and search for her as for hidden treasures; Then you will discern the fear of the Lord and discover the knowledge of God (Proverbs 2:1-5, NASB). God’s word is the only mirror in which we can find any and all imperfections demanding our attention. Knowledge of God is to be our highest pursuit, for in it we find knowledge of self. His words, My son, should ring true for every vacancy in our lives. In this, all men fight, warring against their own imperfections and shortcomings, struggling to turn them over to the Father. Just give them to me, I can imagine Him saying³, you don’t want those, and I don’t want them to own you. Gone they never will totally be, till death tears us from them, or till He resurrects us from every enemy He shall put under. Today is still today though, as the Bible defines it. And that means we are responsible for responding, doing something. Work out your own salvation (excerpted from Philippians 2:12); meaning, we absolutely have a part to respond and a work to do. Jesus meets us there, and, like Peter and his ten remaining brothers, He often shows us just a little different way in which He’d like us to go. I don’t think they ever soaked a net again. Perhaps they did retain fishing as a means to earn a living⁴, but it was fishing from where they were called, redirected into a greater kind of fishing. Then, after they had breakfast, from that most notable catch of fish in history, Jesus said, Follow me (John 21:22). Go make disciples.

Many have surmised that Peter’s decision to go fishing demonstrated his thought that perhaps his failures had forfeited him from gathering men, calling them with the gospel, that somehow he was no longer qualified to proclaim. Me, I have to wonder if Peter was just at a loss for what else to do. Either way, we can see two things very clearly. Peter did something instead of nothing and the Lord met him and confirmed him, told him who he was and what it was he was called to. Follow me, Jesus said to Peter, and so He’s said to me.

Abandoning Self for Reliance on Grace

In this book, I’ve interacted with my own circumstances, my failures, and my need for the Man who now sits at the Father’s right hand. He is my life. My life is hidden with Him. As I continue to wrestle with my own eternity, I struggle to abandon myself daily, even hourly at times. Sometimes I have to watch the clock tick away in perspiration, begging for elevation above and away from the man who sits in the chair, wiping tears from his face. Such a season is now. I mention these things only for the source of encouragement they may provide to those so struggling. A personal testimony does not replace a biblical proclamation about Jesus, but it is an important complement (Phelps, 2014⁵). Our experiences are not part of the solution and they are not the gospel, but they can effectively be used to point to this solution.

The depression I experienced wasn’t episodic; it was constant throughout my writing. I explored literature on it and found these words of Abraham Lincoln, written on 23 September 1841⁶: I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me. I’m not sure if I was frightened or comforted at the relevancy of these words.

As my writing this book was coming to a close, I experienced an even greater depression. I came to a place I thought I’d already been, more than once, yet I had no idea the depths to which a man’s soul could descend into a sort of blackness that, even now, I struggle to find words for. It was as if my head was on fire and my brain swollen. Thoughts would race, and then time would stop. Each minute would then painfully, yet slothfully unfold. A pain that escapes any words of mine would elevate to intolerable levels as time stood still. The only images that strangely came to mind were Munch’s The Scream (1893) and Van Gogh’s At Eternity’s Gate (1890). Their own words are worth sharing here:

Munch wrote, One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.

Van Gogh wrote, It seems to me that a painter has a duty to try to put an idea into his work. I was trying to say this in this print — but I can’t say it as beautifully, as strikingly as reality, of which this is only a dim reflection seen in a dark mirror — that it seems to me that one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of ‘something on high’ in which Millet believed, namely in the existence of a God and an eternity, is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that, without his being aware of it perhaps, as he sits so quietly in the corner of his hearth. At the same time something precious, something noble, that can’t be meant for the worms…. This is far from all theology — simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to.

What Munch really spoke of was that external witness that is creation. David wrote about this witness in the heavens (Psalm 19:4) to which all men are held accountable (Romans 10:18). Van Gogh, on the other hand, really spoke of our internal witness, our knowledge of eternity (Ecclesiastes 3:11) and the law of God (Romans 2:15) written on our hearts.

The author of creation and conscience gives definition to this manifold witness in His word. Some men dabble in it as some are consumed with their own consumption of it. They are drawn to it for clarity and coherence on life’s challenging questions. This gospel is an overwhelming stream of living water, pouring out upon a thirsty land. It calls for spiritual offspring and promotes a sense of urgency in those reborn with a desire to pursue and proclaim it. In reference to this gospel, another depressed man once said, "There is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in by bones, and I am