This is a great book review and I love how he touches on Sinless Perfection, Romans 6 misuderstandings, False View of Suffering and the Health and Wealth Gospel. The review can be found here and I think this would be a great book to add to my library.
http://www.readingscripture.org/deserted-by-god/
The Apostle Paul warned believers that they would pass through many tribulations before they entered God’s kingdom (Acts 14:22). Unfortunately, down through the centuries countless Christians have reacted to this truth in one of two extreme fashions. Many misinterpreted Paul’s statement and others like it in the Bible as if they taught that suffering somehow made them deserving of heaven. So to ensure eternal life for themselves they would adopt ascetic lifestyles and sometimes even whip themselves—or worse. During the Middle Ages, people who faithfully inflicted various hardships upon themselves were usually considered the most spiritual people around by other Christians.
In more ways than one, we’re a long way from the Middle Ages, but the amount of distance we’ve put between ourselves and those times may not be a wholly good thing. It is certainly good that the Gospel of God’s grace in Christ has freed countless multitudes from bondage to legalistic asceticism, but for the most part it seems that we’ve now gone to the opposite extreme. Instead of suffering being the hallmark of spirituality, a large number of professing Christians now believe precisely the contrary. For them, the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme so that the lack of suffering is the highest badge of godliness. True Christians, so the party line goes, should expect a road to heaven paved with health and wealth, and if they don’t they have no one to blame but themselves for their lack of faith. (By this criteria the apostles and even Jesus Himself were abject failures!)
But what happens when you’ve spent your entire Christian life believing that God wants you to be free of all illness and that it’s God will for you to have lots of money, and you’ve mustered all the faith you can to believe these things but you come down with cancer anyway, or your life is one of constant financial struggle? Tragically, the road to the false gospel of worldly well-being is littered with the souls of people who, after years of pursuing its promises, have lost nearly all faith in God because they’ve come to the conclusion that the circumstances in their lives prove that their faith doesn’t stack up. Perhaps God is finished with them.
Sinclair Ferguson doesn’t say he wrote his book Deserted by God? specifically for such people. In fact, it quickly becomes clear that he wrote it for all Christians who find themselves struggling to hang on to some sense that God has not abandoned them in their darkest hours. I purchased my hardcover copy back in the ’90s, and at that time it seemed as though he was writing specifically to me. It still does.
But now that I pick up the book once again about a decade later, it dawns on me that one of the things that makes the dark night of the soul so difficult to endure these days is that most of us, at least here in North America, inhabit a Christian culture that has little by way of encouragement to offer those who go through it. Those ensnared in the health-and-wealth heresy of the Word-Faith movement are victims of the most extreme example of a pervasive tendency in many churches to shoot their own wounded, or at best leave them to wander off and die. It’s little wonder, then, that so many feel abandoned.
Now to be fair, many churches do actively reach out to those struggling with setbacks and failures, calamities and sins. And it’s also true that those of us caught up in these struggles are sometimes too proud or too lacking in trust to ask for help. But sometimes, even with the best of intentions on all sides, would-be helpers don’t really know how to help.
The author is far too diplomatic to come right out and tell us that he wrote this book to supply what is lacking due to the pastoral incompetence of the church, but where such incompetence exists, this book will meet a real need. In the meantime, however, he does drop a fairly large hint of his take on a lot that passes for pastoral or biblical counseling when he writes:
In my experience, many discouraged Christians who have sought help in their discouragement, either of a medical or a spiritual nature, have been shortchanged in the counsel they have received. We are all too familiar with Christians who have been told by secular counselors that their problem is that they read the Bible. They need to avoid it. But on the other hand, sadly, the way many Christians read the Bible and view the Christian life does in fact aggravate their difficulties.
[Page 13]
Who are the “many Christians” in his last sentence? Are they the Christians seeking help in their discouragement, or the Christians trying to help them? Perhaps it is both. On the one hand, if I have a skewed understanding of the Scriptures it will present a challenge to those who try to share the comfort of God’s word with me when I’m down. On the other hand, I’m likely to do more harm than good when I try to help people with Bible verses that were never meant to solve their problems.
I found it quite refreshing that at the outset of his book Ferguson acknowledges, “Sometimes our discouragements and depressions are so integrally related to our physical condition that we need to consult a medical doctor for help and healing” (ibid.). As the Puritan Thomas Brooks (1608-1680) wrote, “The cure of melancholy belongs rather to the physician than to the divine, to Galen than to Paul” (Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Works of Thomas Brooks, Volume IV, [Carlisle, PA, USA & Edinburgh, UK: The Banner of Truth Trust, n.d.], 260). This is not to say that a physically-based depression will have no spiritual dimension. Every problem in the Christian life has a spiritual dimension, otherwise there would not be books like this one. But a spiritual balm cannot heal a physical wound.
Even so, we cannot afford to abandon the spiritual balm when it is called for. And where better to find medicine for our souls than in a book of Scripture in which the authors are never too shy to tell us when they think God has let them down? Each chapter in Deserted by God? is based on a passage in the Psalms, where we find people who, like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, do not hesitate to complain, often loudly, when surrounded by enemies without or within.
“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” begins the 13th Psalm (NIV), the biblical starting point for Ferguson’s first chapter, “How Long, Lord?” The kind of cheap, sappy Christian whining that usually substitutes for good old fashioned Israelite complaining looks like the hypocrisy it really is when we compare it to what we find in the Psalms. I think we’ve tended to misinterpret God’s judgments on the ungrateful grumbling of the children of Israel in the wilderness as a blanket prohibition against all complaining, and the hyper-spiritual among us have led the way in this nonsense. If admitting that you have a problem is the first step toward solving it, then complaining to God was the way the ancient psalmists jump-started the process.
Are you surrounded by people who want to do you in? Is this the umpteenth time you caved in to the same temptation? When you look around does it seem that the signs of God’s care for you are utterly lacking? Then get off your knees, get on your feet, look God straight in the eye and complain to Him about it! Dare to ask him what’s going on, and, according to Ferguson, God will use it to help you see things from His perspective.
At first sight the questions seem to be expressions of bitter defiance. All the more so since he actually writes them down. We modern Christians would be a little more guarded. Bad enough to think such thoughts; dangerous to put them in writing. But already David is teaching us an important lesson. He was spelling out his difficulty. His questions are actually a diagnosis of his problem. By the time he had written two verses, he had clearly stated what it was. In this case, diagnosis is half the remedy.
[Page 21]
We need to closely follow Ferguson, at that time a theology professor, now a pastor, as he explains the first two verses of Psalm 13 over the next few pages. And when we do, we realize that David’s problem was that he was looking inward instead of outward, and was developing a kind of tunnel vision. The way he worded his initial statement in Psalm 13:2, which is more literally translated, “How long will I take counsel in my soul?” (24), shows that he was starting to wake up to the fact that he had been making the mistake of thinking with his feelings (since in the Old Testament the soul was the seat of the emotions), and thus forgetting the truth he knew about God. In this way, David’s complaining became a method for seeing his own problem.
To tell God that he has deserted you; to know that you have been thinking with your emotions—these are marks of life, not of death, of hope and not of despair. Why, you are even speaking to God himself about them as though you know he cares!
[Page 27]
Ferguson continues to provide careful readings of Psalms 23, 42, and 43 in chapters titled “Dark Valleys,” and “Discouragement.” Two of his chapters—the fifth and the ninth—are devoted to a common cause of depression which, like depression itself, is virtually verboten as a topic of conversation in some Christian circles: our sin.
There is no sugarcoating here. In chapter 5, which is based on the most well-known penitential passage in Scripture, Psalm 51, Ferguson shows how sin is the worst possible form of rebellion, twistedness, and evil (77), leading directly to guilt, defilement, spiritual helplessness, and immense danger (80-84). In chapter 9, “Can I Be Pure?”, he zeroes-in with theological precision and pastoral compassion on our “besetting sins”:
Have you failed again? Fallen into sin yet again? Each time gets more discouraging. Most of the time you feel that you have let down your Lord. But do you sometimes wonder whether he may have simply turned away from you and left you to your own failures? Does anyone have words of counsel to help you?
Psalm 119 is for you.
[Page 145]
Yes, it is. And so is this book! Chapter 9 alone is worth the price of the whole volume. Ferguson distills the two essential principles of spiritual purity from Psalm 119: “Seek God with all your heart” (150), and “Treasure God’s Word in Scripture” (153). The latter of these two will provide us with the teachings we need to overcome sin, which Ferguson presents as the “Five R’s” (154-159):
1.Remember your new identity in Christ.
2.Recognize the difference between “reigning sin” and “remaining sin”
3.Realize what your responsibilities are.
4.Resist sinful tendencies immediately when you notice them.
5.Replace all rejected sin with is opposite: grace.
Perhaps all this sounds familiar, even to the point of being overly-simplistic and perhaps even trite. Don’t be fooled: it would be impossible to do justice to the depth and skill with which Ferguson presents these points without essentially duplicating his work here (which would make neither him nor his publisher happy). In my opinion, every Christian really needs to get the book.
From the standpoint of the historic exposition of Scripture in the Reformed Protestant tradition, there is nothing new here—thankfully! The help Ferguson provides has stood the test of time, unlike the pathetic drivel now being served up in the “inspiration” section of the Wal-Mart book department (not to mention all-too-many Christian bookstores)! And that it is why the book is so necessary, because these truths are simultaneously old, crucial, and largely forgotten.
In conclusion, I’d like to shine a spotlight on the second of Ferguson’s “Five R’s.” One of the references he cites for the distinction between “reigning sin” and “remaining sin” is from a passage in which the Apostle Paul discussing the former (“reigning sin”) but not the latter (“remaining sin”): Romans 6. Confusing these two concepts will lead to hopeless misunderstanding and misapplication of that important chapter in Paul’s writings. I have argued with people who insist that in Romans 6 Paul begins to teach that it is possible for Christians to live in sinless perfection in this life. They totally miss Paul’s point, since he is actually warning against the notion that it is logical for a true Christian to give sin free reign, rather than that it is possible for Christians to avoid sin altogether for the rest of their lives. But these “perfectionist” Christians aren’t the only ones who make this mistake, as Ferguson notes when he writes:
Sin’s reign over you ended when you were united to Christ, yet is presence in you will not be abolished until glory.
It is very easy to confuse these two things. We sin and are tempted to conclude, “There I go; sin reigns again.” We feel paralyzed; failure seems ineviteable, and we despair. But we have confused the continuing presence of sin with the reign of sin. Understand the distinction and we realize that losing one skirmish is not the loss of the war.
[Pages 155-156]
Amen!
This has been a review of Deserted by God, by Sinclair B. Ferguson, (Grand Rapids, MI, USA: Baker Book House, 1993), ISBN 0-8010-3563-5. The Baker edition is currently out of print, and the book is now published by The Banner of Truth Trust under ISBN-10: 0851516912 and ISBN-13: 9780851516912.