The Joy of
Obedience
Trust and obey, for there's no other way
To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
— John H. Sammis
The word "obedience" has stuck in the craw of the human race for so many centuries that I have decided to begin this chapter, as I did the first chapter, by asking myself some straight questions:
"Why should I obey anybody?"
"You won't last long if you don't."
"Whom should I obey?"
"God, first of all."
"My first ancestor didn't obey Him."
"Yes, and look at the trouble he started."
"You mean she started."
"Don't quibble. Obey God, and you shall live."
"You mean, obey the Ten Commandments, or obey Christ? Which?"
"Both."
"I see. Well, I'm a free person. Where's the payoff in all this obedience? Where's the fun?"
"Obey. You will find out."
"One other point. Does your God ever stop smiling?"
"You will find that out, too."
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OUR DIFFICULTY WITH OBEDIENCE
When the word "obedience' is mentioned today in Western society, it is often given a cool reception. In fact, obedience was the one word of the English language I disliked as a little boy. "Why should I obey? What is the point? Why can't I do what I feel like doing, instead of what someone else wants?" This got me into trouble.
During the '20s, I learned to recognize authority as a Boy Scout. Those were postwar days of intense patriotism. I loved to read about Bunker Hill and Nathan Hale and Washington crossing the Delaware. As a sophomore ROTC corporal at a land-grant university, I marched on parade in uniform twice a week, proud to be an American.
Then came Hitler, and Churchill, and war in Europe. I remember 1940 as a year when intense antiwar feeling swept across our nation. Respect for government decreased. Opposition spread against any participation in combat, and it grew until a different enemy made a direct attack on our soil at Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian Islands.
By the time the American people had suffered through the horrendous losses of life in World War II, the Korean "United Nations Action," and the Vietnam debacle, words like patriotism, loyalty, obedience, and authority had inevitably lost their appeal to much of our rank and file. But even more significant and much more tragic, the basic moral ideals of Western civilization had also been brought into widespread contempt.
None of this became fully apparent to me until an incident occurred at my own school, the University of California at Berkeley, in the year 1964. A campus policeman made a routine arrest, as I recall, and a crowd of students then surrounded his car and kept the officer captive inside for two days and nights. No effort was ever made to relieve the officer, either by government agencies or the university administration.
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This signal expression of the public disobedience in American life came to me and to others as a shock, for it developed into full-fledged student unrest that spread across the country. I no longer blame the students alone, for experience has since taught me that the degeneration of Western society, both public and private, has been going on ever since those terrible days in World War I when the lingering vestiges of Victorian social conduct were drowned in the blood-soaked trenches of Belgium and France.
Now for my conclusion: The chief obstacles to America's survival as a nation is not our failure to deal successfully with such social problems as drugs, guns, traffic, divorce, porn, or high-tech corruption. The present unhappiness (I don't call it a malaise) in America can be laid to the fact that we, for the most part, have either forgotten or never learned how to obey.
Concurrent with and resulting from this lack of obedience is the spread of a disenchanted, rebellious spirit that is evident in nearly every agency of North American life: education, security, business, finance, politics, family life, communication, transportation, athletics, and religion. It shows itself in every form of government, including the legislative, executive, and judicial.
Don't categorize me as a doomsayer or hopeless cynic. This negative spirit is not to be confused with sickness, let alone with original sin. Sickness cannot be cured by an act of the will. Original sin cannot be removed by a decision. Our problem is simply that we have forgotten how to take orders and have therefore refused to obey. Our discipline is gone with the wind. But we may yet be enabled to remember and do what is needed. God is still smiling, life is still a beautiful miracle, and His divine grace is as powerful as ever.
We Americans all need to reassure ourselves that ours is a noble commonwealth, blessed of God and endowed with a magnificent heritage. America still has a good Constitution
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and is not falling apart. Our citizens as a whole want to be good people and to enjoy a good life. Unfortunately we are part of a generation that has had great difficulty in learning obedience either to God or man.
OBEDIENCE AND FREEDOM
If it is true that the student rioters of the '60s had no basic plan whatever except to disobey, today we are reaping that harvest. In fact, in the twenty-first century I see only one remaining strong American force that seriously attempts to maintain the rule of law. Such a force is unique in a land filled with millions of competing, lawbreaking individuals who prefer to obey absolutely no one.
I may have trouble identifying this force in a way that will convince readers in the twenty-first century. It is not the federal government. It is not the police. It is not the church — I wish it were. Instead, I see it as the military. I'm sure that will rouse a sharp protest, for many people today seem convinced that the armed forces of the United States, like every other social entity, no longer follow the moral principles of our founding fathers. Military obedience today is considered by many to be simply a pragmatic means of operation rather than a noble response to a great cause like human freedom.
As a veteran of World War II, I don't feel that way. I always loved the American flag and what it stood for, and I loved those who defended it. When I graduated from my university in 1932, heavily in debt, it took years of struggle during the Great Depression before I was free of it. Then while some American youths went through an undisciplined childhood and emerged into wayward adolescence and cynical maturity, I and some others put on our uniforms and learned how to take and carry orders.
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I realized now that our history professors, while giving us background on democracy and politics, failed to tell us that America was actually put together on discipline and the obeying of orders. We were assured that we had inherited a singularly great country, but we were never told how we got it — how we won our freedom in the Revolutionary War. It was not because of our superior statesmanship in devising a republic with divisions of power and two-party systems. It was not because of the Federalist Papers or the presence of the French fleet.
We won our country because thousands of young Americans decided to fight for it. They left home and placed themselves in complete obedience to one man, General George Washington. This man told them what to do, when to do it, and when to stop, and they obeyed him. They even died for him. That is what won our freedom: obedience to the death. The young colonists gave up their families and personal liberties to take on the yoke of obedience so that a new, free nation would be born under God. Who today remembers that it was the response of the colonial troops at Valley Forge and elsewhere to the commands of General Washington and his officers, and only that obedience, that made our golden political future a reality?
Today we Americas still wax loud in extolling and cherishing our political independence. "Live free or die" is carried on one state's license plate. But as General Eisenhower wrote, "Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to defend it."
Right now the publishing houses are bursting with books about leadership. I never was a leader, never wanted to be — but I wanted leaders I could obey. Today I don't see much help coming from billionaire Doonesburys with their latest computers and diagrams and projections on the Internet. I see true
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leadership as emerging from disciplined, capable, informed young Americans of principle who love their country and have learned how to take orders and carry them out. Now, let me add, how to cut a crooked deal, or work an angle, or pull off a coup, or steal an election.
America today needs God-fearing men and women of skill, perception, balance, and achievement, who have come up through ranks and earned their way by obeying orders. They will be honored by their country not with plaques and titles and high positions and useless medals, not to speak of bird-spattered statues — they will be honored with leadership.
THE JOY OF DOING RIGHT
That leads me to a higher question than civil obedience. What about God Himself? The Bible calls on men and women to give absolute obedience to the one true God. As we enter the new millennium, it is not always clear just what that entails. In Old Testament times the clerical emphasis was on obedience to God's law, which included all His statutes, testimonies, judgments, commandments, strictures, and precepts: "Do this, and you will live."
In the New Testaments the call to obedience shifted, as believers in Jesus Christ were justified before God by faith, as Paul says, and not by the works of the law, "for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified." Instead, the early Christians were called to rely on the Person and teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the writings of His apostles.
I find in the centuries following that scholars, theologians, preachers, and monks were spending too little time on the joys of obedience and rather too much on the sins of disobedience. We were warned, we were chided, we were threatened with all kinds of severe penalties for our lawbreaking and wrong doing. But as I now understand the original text, the real purpose of
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obedience to the Triune God was not the avoidance of wrong, but the thrill and glory and joy of doing right!
I don't care a fig tree's fig for all the ghastly punishments for disobedience the spewed from the mouths of the ancients, because they don't touch me. When I became a Christian, my heart and soul were sealed by the Holy Spirit. I gave my life to Jesus Christ, not out of obedience but out of sheer love. That life (what is left of it) now belongs to Him, and Him I obey.
I would go further and declare that for persons seeking God, the gospel challenge of obedience to God has been befogged by all the continued threats and warnings of severe punishment for disobedience. That emphasis is as far from the true message of the Lord Jesus as night is from day. Jesus, you remember, told us, "My yoke is easy and My burden is light." Not that the punitive elements is a mistaken idea; on the contrary, it is very real. But it is not the reason why we ought to obey God.
Let's suppose we are living in one of the American states and someone — anyone — in civil authority over us issues an order. We are given two choices: We can obey the order or disobey it. Its stated purpose is to accomplish something positive to promote the general welfare. For us to carry out the order would be, general speaking, helpful in making things better.
Now suppose our own decision to obey the order had nothing to do with the purpose. we obey simply because we are told to do it, and because if we don't do it we will be fined, jailed, put in stocks, or punished in whatever way is popular at the moment. The threat behind the order is what makes us do what we're told.
I say that is a rancid state of affairs. It violates the social contract of a nation, and it lacks the touch of Jesus. We should be glad to obey the order simply because it is the right thing to do and because it accomplished something for the common
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good. Who cares about threats and penalties? But that is why, in our so-called enlightened age, so many citizens find the idea of obedience unattractive.
Now, when it comes to obeying Almighty God (who requires absolute obedience) many Christian people frankly see it as a duty and obligation. They say something like this: "God orders me to worship Him, so I'll go to church." So off we go 1) just because He told us to; 2) because someone insisted it was our duty to go; or 3) because our own conscience pricks us into going. All of those reasons miss the point. Who do you think God is? He is not a stern schoolmaster with a whip. He loves you. Duty is not and never can be the immortal good news of the gospel of Jesus. God wants us in His house because He loves us, and He wants to give us joy!
OBEDIENCE GIVES US A GLIMPSE OF HEAVEN
To worship God in itself is a glorious treat. We sense His smiling presence, we feel His love, we move into the exalted realm of the Spirit, and for a little while we are in loving communion with heaven. Jesus seems to come anew and dwell in our hearts. By faith we become lyrical. We sing, we kneel, we lift our hands, we smile, and there is joy in our hearts. We realize that we are sinners who by the grace of God have become adopted children of the Most High, born from above to eternal life.
"Come on," the cynical misanthrope down the street cries in protest, "how do you know all that stuff? Where's your proof that heaven exists? You are building castles in the air!"
No, we Christians are not building anything. We simply have the best source of information. We have discovered through our study of the Bible that human life on this earth is not an end in itself; that for us it is a road test, a proving ground, a shakedown cruise, a simulator flight. In response to
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God's command, we have become pilgrims just passing through, making a kind of Starbuck stop on earth on our way to our destination.
Such is obedience. It is a foretaste of heaven.
It's true that sometimes the disciplinary expressions in the Bible seem hard to accept. Elisabeth Elliot wrote in one of her newsletters about a young mother who chafed at a verse, Titus 2:5, to the effect that young women of the church should be "keepers at home." The inquirer was answered sympathetically but Mrs. Elliot did not try to improve on the apostle Paul. She simply told the young mother that in studying God's Word, "obedience always leads finally to joy."
What a beautiful expression! And it's true.
Dr. Ed Wheat, who has written splendid books on married love, confessed that for two years at the beginning of his Christian life he found it hard to love his wife. Then, when he began to take the Bible seriously, he understood that it required just that kind of serious love from him. When he responded, things began to change. He wrote, "As I put the principles of the Bible into practice and I learned really how to love my wife, this became pleasure as well as responsibility. Obedience took on the bright colors of joy!"
The point of this discussion has been to lift obedience out of the category of duty and obligation, and to paint it in those bright and joyful colors. Now we must look at a far more significant aspect of our subject, namely, the obedience of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself to the will of His Father.
"FOR THE JOY..."
Charles Hodge, the great nineteenth-century teacher and scholar at Princeton, wrote that "the obedience of Christ was the righteousness of God." In other words, our Lord's obedience to His Father on the cross did more than just accomplish
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our rescue. All those trials, jeerings, sufferings, and cruelties that were heaped upon Him, together with His execution as a criminal, actually brought about a change in the moral universe. Our sins were forgiven!
Yet while we cheer the victory over death, we remember how distressing was the vicarious sacrifice. When Jesus arrived in Jerusalem over the protest of His disciples, He knew what awaited Him. A feeling of dread is evident in our Lord's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before His arrest. "Abba, Father," He prayed, "all things are possible for You. Take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will."
As the letter to the Hebrews tells us, this was more than the Son's duty to His Father, a carrying out of paternal orders. It was "for the joy that was set before Him" that Jesus "endured the cross, despising the shame," and then sat down at the right hand of the throne of Almighty God.
Joy! Joy at the accomplishment of our redemption from sin and the obtaining of our freedom! Delight at the prospect of returning to His Father and the everlasting joy of heaven!
For us who are Christians, the same beatific prospect is in sight today. Not because of our willingness to be obedient to a "heavenly vision," but because of His willingness to suffer and die and give His life for us in atonement for our sins. Not because of our repentance and confession and obedience, but because of the shed blood of Jesus that thwarted forever that grasp of the evil one and made for us a path to glory.
God Himself, in fact, became our Savior. God Himself became our Redeemer. And God Himself will welcome us one day to that great throne room of the whole creation. Why? Because of the joyful obedience of His Son.
