The Law of God: The Ten Commandments

The Summer issue of the RPCS ‘Good News’ magazine contains the second of three articles by Stephen on the Law of God. You can read it below. Part 1 is available here.

In the last issue we considered some objections to the fact that God’s law still applies today. We saw that there are actually different types of law in the Bible. Some of these, governing sacrifices, food and drink and daily life in the Promised Land, were never meant to be permanent. There is another set of laws, however, which apply to all people in all places in all ages. They are rooted in the character of God himself, have been in force since the creation of the world and are summarised in the Ten Commandments.

Yet even if we accept all that, it would still be possible to get the Ten Commandments wrong. Have you ever arrived late to the cinema and missed the start of a film? Sometimes it is fairly easy to pick up what’s going on, but other times it isn’t. Maybe one big event has taken place at the very beginning, and the rest of the film shows how people react to it. And if you’ve missed that vital part, you’ll not realise why people are now doing what they’re doing.

Well the introduction to the Ten Commandments (in Exodus 20:1-2) is a bit like that. If we miss it, we’ll get the Ten Commandments wrong and misunderstand what they are for.  If you’re reading a book, it often doesn’t matter if you skip the introduction or preface – but we can’t skip the introduction to the Ten Commandments, because it tells us about the God who gave them.

It has been said that the biggest problem with our society is that we’re listening to the wrong voices. There are so many voices around us telling us how we should live. But into this confusion, where everyone is doing what is right in their own eyes, God speaks.

Did you know that the Ten Commandments aren’t actually called that in the original language of the Bible? Instead, they’re called the ‘Ten Words’. Of course, they are commandments – they’re not suggestions. But calling them the ‘Ten Words’ emphasises that they come from a God who communicates with us.

Our God is a God who speaks. And that in itself is something to stop and think about. That in itself is a sign that he’s a God of grace. He doesn’t leave us in our mess and confusion. He doesn’t leave us to decide what’s right and wrong by holding a referendum. In love he calls us back to himself.

We live in a world where people are desperate to hear a message from beyond this planet. Millions of pounds a year are spent listening in hope that we will hear a message from somewhere out there. But right here in the Bible, in front of our noses, we have the words of a loving God who speaks into this broken world and tells us what his will for us is. He gives us the answers to the big questions of life. He tells us how we his creatures are to live in this world that he has given to us. The question is – are we listening?

It is also important to realise that the authority with which God speaks goes deeper than any human authority. Human authority can only tell us what to do or not do – but God’s authority extends to our thoughts and motivations.

Our justice system aims to put murderers in jail. But it’s only concerned with the act of murder – or at least the attempt. It doesn’t seek to intervene if people go through life consumed with sheer hatred for someone else. As long as they don’t say anything too hateful, and don’t try and actually murder them, they’re obeying the law.

God’s law is different. Paul says in Romans that the law is spiritual – it’s not just concerned with outward actions. Yes, when we get to Jesus’ day, the religious leaders had reduced it to outward actions – but it would be ridiculous to think that in the Old Testament, God wasn’t concerned with hate, as long as his people didn’t actually murder someone. Or that he wasn’t concerned with lust, unless people actually committed adultery. Or that his command to ‘be holy as I am holy’ was only concerned with externals.

We see that inward concern even in the Ten Commandments themselves. In his reasons for the second commandment, in vs 5&6, God talks about those who hate him and those who love him. In other words, he sums people up by their heart attitude towards him – he was never just concerned with outward obedience. In fact, the tenth commandment, about not coveting, is something that is impossible to reduce to an outward action.

No human authority can tell us not to covet. But God can and does, because he’s concerned with the heart attitude as well as the outward action.

So the first part of the introduction to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20v1) reminds us that these ‘ten words’ were spoken to us by God himself. The second part (v2) reminds us that the Ten Commandments were given by a God who has already set us free.

The most common misconception about the Ten Commandments is that Christians are people who are trying to obey them to earn God’s favour. People think of them as a ten-rung ladder which we have to try and climb if we want to get to Heaven. This is why it is absolutely vital to remember that God begins the Ten Commandments by saying: ‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery’.

The Ten Commandments were first given to people who were already in a relationship with God. ‘Law’ as we think of it today is impersonal – we don’t have a personal relationship with the lawmakers. God’s law is different. 

And that relationship began before the law was given. God didn’t come to the people of Israel when they were in slavery in Egypt and say: ‘If you obey these commandments, then I’ll rescue you from slavery’. Instead, he rescued them from slavery, and then he gave them the Ten Commandments!

That changes everything. God doesn’t say ‘Obey these and I will be your God’ or ‘Obey these and I will love you’. He has already demonstrated that he loves us – the commandments simply tell us how we are to live in response.

Even as Christians, we can often end up thinking ‘If I obey, then God will love me’. ‘If I fail him, he’ll stop loving me’. But the whole Bible is shaped to stop us thinking that way. We see it even in this book of Exodus. Exodus is divided into two parts. And it’s significant that the Ten Commandments don’t come until Part Two. The first eighteen chapters of Exodus are about God’s great rescue plan to bring his people out of Egypt. And then chapters nineteen to the end are about how rescued people should live. 

We see the same pattern in the book of Ephesians. The first half is all about what God has done for us in Christ Jesus. The second half is about how we are to live in response – and includes one of the Ten Commandments quoted directly (6:1).

So God redeems us, he gives us his law – and as we’ll think about next time – he also gives us the ability and desire to keep it.

William Symington (Part 2): Family man, author and public figure

The latest issue of the RPCS magazine ‘Good News’ features the second part of Stephen’s biographical sketch of Stranraer’s most famous minister, William Symington. The first part can be read here.

A modern-day minister, when asked for his thoughts on the art of preaching, said ‘a thousand sorrows teaches a man to preach’. William Symington certainly knew about sorrow, and the greatest grief of his life was the death of his six-year-old son in August 1833.

During the month that marked fourteen years since his ordination in Stranraer, William and Agnes’s fourth child, Robert, was playing in the manse garden when a stone pillar supporting a sun dial fell on him. He suffered an internal injury, and despite the efforts of three doctors, died within thirty-six hours.

There are a number of touching details associated with the tragic event. His mother gently asked him a number of questions about his faith in Christ and hope for Heaven. Doubtless most of them were catechism questions he had learnt before. But she couldn’t help asking him a final question: ‘Would you not be sorry to leave us all?’ To which he responded by putting his arms around her neck and telling her not to cry because he was going to be with Jesus’.

Thinking back to the event as a widow, nearly 30 years later, Agnes charged her youngest son never to forget a certain friend because of the love he’d shown at the time. The sons don’t tell us his full name, but she was almost certainly talking about James M’Gill. M’Gill was a farmer’s son from Portpatrick and had been part of the Stranraer congregation as a 13 year-old when Symington was ordained. He had gone on to become a minister himself, at Hightae, near Lockerbie.

Agnes told her youngest son: ‘You were an infant six weeks old when Robert died. Mr M‘G- had baptized you, and was on his way home when the tidings overtook him. He turned his horse and came back on the Saturday evening (Robert had died in the morning) and preached on the Sabbath. I crept into the vestry with you at my breast, and heard him preach on “Jesus wept.” Never forget Mr M‘G- as long as you live.’

For her husband, grief drove him to writing – both for himself and for a wider audience. Among his papers was found a sixteen-page document called ‘Memorial of a severe domestic bereavement’, where every detail is recorded of what the sons describe as an ‘overwhelming calamity’.

His grief also led him to resume writing his first book-length publication. It was entitled On the Atonement and Intercession of Jesus Christ and was published in May 1834, less than a year after Robert’s death. As the title suggests, the book is about Jesus’ role as a priest – both in the past, as he made atonement for our sins on the cross – and in the present as he prays for us in Heaven.

The book was well received, and a second edition was published four months later. Within two years, the book had made its way across the Atlantic where it went through four editions by 1858.  By the middle of the century it had become one of the standard works in the field, and even as far away as southeast India students for the ministry were being trained with it as a primary text.

The preface to the book gives us an insight into the challenge of writing such a book in a location like Stranraer two hundred years ago. Symington says that since commencing the undertaking he had often had occasion to regret the remoteness of his situation, which was at a distance from those stores of learning to which he might otherwise have had access. Any time he was in Glasgow or Edinburgh he found himself spending part of the day at bookshops. Occasionally this would be supplemented by bundles of pamphlets or journals from friends in America.

Any booklover could identify with the following tongue in cheek paragraph, written in a letter to a fellow minister, that he would surely have been mortified to think of being made public:

‘The love of books is with me a perfect mania. When I see anything particular advertised, I immediately conceive a wish to have it – I persuade myself that really I ought to have it – and between the desire to have it and the reluctance to pay for it I am on the fidgets day and night. Then some demon or other whispers, “Your credit is good, it is a good while to the month of May, before then you will have had your purse replenished with next half year’s stipend” - the temptation succeeds; and off goes a post letter for the desired article, all objections, financial as well as others, being unceremoniously sent about their business. In this way I have nearly ruined myself - and the worst of it is that I am nearly incorrigible. Unlike other sinners, misery does not lead me to repent – or if I do repent, I do not at all events reform. Can you tell me what is to become of me? The jail I suppose’.

A second book, and the for which he’s most well-known, followed in 1839, entitled Messiah the Prince – a phrase taken from the book of Daniel. If his first book had been about Christ as a priest, this one was about Christ as a king. It remains the definitive articulation of the principles of the Covenanting movement. Both of his books have been republished in the twenty-first century.

The Covenanters had abandoned the state churches and taken to the hills because they believed that no king, archbishop or any other human being could decide how the church worshipped – that would be a usurpation of the rights of Christ. But although they believed in a separation of church and state, they didn’t believe in a radical separation. They believed that it was the duty of political leaders to rule according to God’s word. In other words, they believed in the kingship of Christ in the state as well as the church.  

The book was written at a time when the doctrine of Christ’s kingship over the church was becoming particularly relevant. Long running grievances in the National Church were coming to the boil, and would result in the Disruption of 1843, when one third of the ministers in the Church of Scotland left to form the Free Church.

The key issue which led to the Disruption was whether congregations had the right to choose their own ministers, or if they had to submit to the wishes of the local landowner – so it was really an issue of who gets to call the shots in the church. Those who formed the Free Church in 1843 saw the debate as being about the ‘Crown rights of Jesus Christ’. Given this background, Symington’s book about the kingship of Christ, published four years before the key event, was timely to say the least. There’s no doubt that the book, written in Stranraer at such a key time, impacted some of those who would lead the new denomination out of the Established Church.

When the momentous day came, Symington was there to see it. He wrote in his journal: ‘Witnessed the Disruption in the Church of Scotland – a splendid sight. Worth living a century to behold’.

When asked why he didn’t join the Free Church himself, he quoted the exchange between the Apostle Paul and a Roman tribute in the book of Acts. The tribune says: ‘With a great sum obtained I this freedom’. Paul replies: ‘But I was free born’. In other words, Symington was saying he didn’t need to join a church free from state interference, because his church had been free of it from the start.

It would be wrong, however, to see Symington as someone who delighted in division. The 19th century was the era of great religious and philanthropic societies. Symington was involved in many of them from the beginning, alongside evangelicals from other denominations. These included Bible Societies, Temperance Societies, the Sabbath School movement, missionary societies, Widow and Orphan societies.

He preached in many churches outside his own denomination. Shortly after the formation of the Free Church he was asked to preach the opening sermon at an interdenominational conference to mark the bicentenary of the Westminster Assembly, where the key documents of British and American Presbyterianism had been drawn up. That sermon, entitled ‘Love one another’, included a call for unity, which led two years later to the first meeting of the World Evangelical Alliance.

Symington also took part in many public meetings and gatherings in Glasgow, often at the city hall, on the great issues of the day. He spoke in favour of government education, Gaelic schools and a public female benevolent society – and against government support for a Roman Catholic training college at Maynooth, Sabbath railways and the government’s slave trade treaties with Spain and Brazil.

By this time, he was a minister in Glasgow, in a building which held 1000 people. But would the message of this descendent of the seventeenth century Covenanters still be relevant in a booming nineteenth century city in the grip of the Industrial Revolution?

It is with an account of Symington’s 23 years of ministry in Glasgow that we will conclude this series next time.

Salvation Army closes but legacy of Christian compassion must live on

So far it has been a summer of good news for Stranraer. The announcement of £16million of funding from the Borderlands Growth Deal to address the derelict East Pier was followed by the hugely successful Skiffie World Championships, with thousands of people and 57 different clubs from around the world descending on Stranraer. Agnew Park was a hive of activity for all the family on some of the sunniest days of summer so far.

One item of sadder news, is the closure of the Salvation Army church (separate from the charity shop). It is the latest closure of a church in the town following that of the Free Presbyterian Church on Bridge Street at the end of last year, and St Ninian’s in 2013.

The Salvation Army had been worshipping in Stranraer since 1884, when they acquired the building of the now-defunct Sheuchan Free Church in Park Lane. In 1967, Stranraer Town Council purchased the building and demolished it to make way for housing, with the Salvation Army moving to new headquarters at the corner of Charlotte Street and Harbour Street, which for many years was the popular Kiosk Café owned by Mr Adami. Following a farewell service, the building will now be sold once more.

Originally founded by William Booth in 1865 and called ‘The Christian Mission’, the change of name and adoption of military titles and uniforms set it apart from other Victorian charities. Booth was a fascinating man, with a deep and genuine compassion for the poor. One modern academic biography writes ‘what distinguished him as a social reformer was a willingness to cope from day to day with an awesome level of endemic disease, unemployment, and other social ills, which were then less well understood’. 

The sight of suffering children literally brought tears to his eyes, and it was this extreme sensitivity to suffering which made him so effective in unveiling society’s darker corners. ‘He saw clearly what others scarcely noticed at all, and he felt as an outrage what others considered to be natural’. The entry for him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography concludes that he ‘probably changed as many lives for the better as any philanthropist of his day’.

One of my fellow ministers recently gave three talks entitled ‘The Compassionate Christian’ – focusing on the abolitionist William Wilberforce, orphanage founder George Müller, and William Booth. For those of us who are Christians, it is challenging to consider whether ‘compassion’ is one of the first words that comes to mind when people think of us. Yet it should be if we follow a Saviour who was marked by compassion, both for crowds and for individuals.

True Christian compassion should always be in two directions – practical and spiritual. It wouldn’t do justice to Booth to think of him merely as a social reformer. He believed that you cannot make a man clean by washing his shirt – in other words, the human problem is so deep that simply improving our outward circumstances won’t fix the root issue. Booth cared about all suffering – especially eternal suffering. His biographer says: ‘he genuinely believed that eternal punishment was the fate of all those who died without conversion’. 

I don’t agree with Booth on everything. For one thing he condemned football as sharply as card-playing and horse-racing! He also tried to do his work outside the biblical structures and oversight of the church, as well as rejecting baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

And yet his legacy of caring for the whole person should not be forgotten. It’s easy to focus so much on the practical that we forget the spiritual – or vice versa.

Jesus said: ‘I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God, for I was sent for this purpose’. And although ‘faith without works is dead’, the Bible is equally clear that salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ, not acts of charity or compassion.

And yet Jesus’ brother James writes: ‘If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled, without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?”.

Booth’s legacy must live on. Our churches must be places where hurting people can come and experience the compassion of Jesus as his word is both preached and lived out. And for those who have lost a spiritual home in the recent – or not so recent – past, by God’s grace our doors are open and a welcome awaits.

 Published in the Stranraer and Wigtownshire Free Press, 25th July 2019

Football and Mental Health

Being a football chaplain is great. One of the few downsides is the close season – not just because there’s no football on, but because there is often a large turnover of players. That means players you’ve just started getting to know moving on, fresh faces coming in, and the whole process starting again. However, that pales into insignificance compared to the uncertainty the close season can bring for many players. Many play the final game on the season on a Saturday, knowing that on the following Tuesday they might be told their services are no longer required. For some, football is their main or only source of income. Many of us would think of that as a great position to be in – but it can be a mixed blessing. One ‘journeyman’ who knows all too well the pain of being let go is former Stranraer striker Christian Nadé. In an interview last month he said that when a club don’t want you anymore, ‘You won’t show it, you’ll pretend that it’s alright, but trust me that when you close the door in your home, you cry’. Then if a player does find a new club, they have to start from the beginning again.

Unsurprisingly a life filled with uncertainty, but where you cannot afford to be seen as weak, can have a negative impact on mental health. This can particularly be the case when someone’s career ends – through injury, retirement or failure to earn a new contract. If football is everything, take it away and you have nothing. If your life has been based around football for as long as you can remember, if all your friends are involved in football, it can be very difficult to find yourself on the outside. Those who speak out about their difficulties don’t always find a lot of sympathy. Last year, Cowdenbeath striker David Cox revealed that after speaking out about his mental health struggles, he had been taunted by fans and fellow players, who mocked him about slitting his wrists.

Thankfully though, things are starting to change. In 2016, Chris Mitchell, a former Scotland Under-21 international who quit football after a series of injuries, took his own life at the age of 27. As a result, his family set up the Chris Mitchell Foundation, which they hope will ‘dispel the stigma’ in the game. Last year I had the opportunity to attend a 2-day NHS Mental Health First Aid Course at Hampden Park, tailored towards football and funded by Chris’s Foundation. Last month, the BBC screened a documentary about men’s mental health featuring Prince William and five current or former Premier League footballers: Gareth Southgate, Peter Crouch, Thierry Henry, Danny Rose and Jermaine Jenas. Southgate played over 700 games, but is remembered for only one. Crouch was booed when he came on for his England debut, with his mum and dad in the crowd. Rose became depressed when he suffered his first serious injury, and his team were doing well without him.

Many of the same pressures are shared by those outside of football. Not so long ago, it was normal for people to be with one company the whole of their working life. Today that sort of job security is a rarity. Nor is football the only environment where people, particularly men, aren’t always encouraged to talk about mental health. However, it is important for them to know that you are not alone, and there are people they can talk to.

If people do unburden themselves to us, we need to avoid simplistic or even damaging advice – ‘cheer up’, ‘what do you have to be depressed about?’. As a minister and a chaplain, I believe that mental health can have both a physical and a spiritual component, but even then one of the first things I would tell someone to do is talk to their GP. However it was encouraging to hear Christian Nadé telling the BBC about how talking to a pastor helped him after attempting suicide.

While mental health struggles aren’t always connected to our life circumstances, and can hit someone when everything seems to be going well, the stories of many footballers show that we are particularly at risk if we find our meaning and identity in things that can be taken from us. Our jobs, health and families are all gifts from God – but they may not always be there for us.

Don’t focus so much on the gifts, that you forget the Giver. Only the Creator is strong enough to sustain us when created things are taken from us.

Published in the Stranraer and Wigtownshire Free Press, 4th July 2019

Irish RP Synod

This past week, Stephen represented the Scottish RP Church at the Irish RP Church’s annual Synod meetings. This year Synod was held in Knockbracken RP Church, where Stephen had worked as an assistant for a year before coming to Stranraer.

The Synod began on the Monday night with a sermon by the outgoing Moderator, Rev. Andrew Kerr (Knockbracken). Rev. Mark Loughridge (Letterkenny and Milford), whose brother Peter is minister in North Edinburgh, was elected Moderator for the year ahead.

On Tuesday night, Stephen gave an update on the work of the Scottish RP Church, before preaching to begin the Wednesday morning day of prayer.

The Moderator and the American RP delegate then travelled across to Scotland for the meeting of our own Presbytery on Friday.

Stephen pictured with the Moderator and other delegates - William Macleod (FCC), Kevin Bidwell (EPCEW) and David Weir (RPCNA).

The Synod finished on the Wednesday night by commissioning Isaac Berrocal for mission work in Almuñécar and Nerja in Spain, a region where 90% of people have never heard the gospel.

On the weekend prior to the Synod, Stephen spoke at Knockbracken’s annual church weekend on the ‘One anothers’ of the Bible.

The most well-known name associated with Knockbracken is Thomas Houston, who was ordained there not long after William Symington began his ministry in Stranraer. Houston spent his whole ministry (1828 - 1882) in Knockbracken and Stephen spent a year studying his life for a Masters thesis in Irish history. Houston was a prolific author, whose book on prayer meetings has recently been digitised.

The current minister in Knockbracken is Andrew Kerr, who was the 2018 Moderator of Synod. Andrew writes regularly for the Gentle Reformation blog. Below is part of an interview he did for a recent documentary on the Welsh minister Martyn Lloyd-Jones: