“That we may know that God is love…”
July 14, 2011
Thanks to a summer internship at Grace PCA in Douglasville Georgia, I’ve had the opportunity to do some encouraging and very helpful reading under Dr. Payne’s direction. Currently I’m working through John Owen on the Lord’s Supper, and I must admit I was a bit intimidated at the prospect of getting into Owen. Besides having a reputation of being a difficult read, he’s a puritan for goodness sake! Weren’t all the puritans just mean, fire-breathing, judgment-calling, rule-making, Pharisaical legalists?
Well, as a matter of fact, no. I’ve very happily been proved wrong in assuming those aforementioned stereotypes, and I’d like to share a very brief example of Owen not being all those things. You see, because of those stereotypes, in coming to Owen’s writings on the Supper, I had in the back of my mind that I was about to read gobs of rules about legalistic self-examination to make sure I was worthy enough to partake of the Supper, and if I did not follow all those rules of introspection, I’d be dangled over the hell-fire on a very weak thread of God’s begrudging mercy. But that is not Owen. Sure, he talks about the need for examination (1 Cor. 11), but not in the harsh, legalistic way you might expect from a “puritan.” Instead, his main focus, the tenor of his writing, is on seeing the love of God in Christ as displayed in the Supper:
“The preparation of the table here is to mind us to call to rememberance the love and grace of God, in sending and exhibiting his Son Jesus Christ to be a ransom and propitiation for us” (191).
And
“There is no property of the nature of God which he doth so eminently design to glorify in the death of Christ as his love. That we may know that God is love, that the Father himself loves us, he has sent Jesus Christ, out of his eternal love, to save sinners” (221).
So much for Owen being a mean, grumpy puritan who doesn’t like to talk about the Gospel.
~ Praise be to our Lord for his love to us and for allowing us to “taste and see” that he is good! (Psalm 34:8)
