Living the Antithesis Like Our Spiritual Fathers: “We must never conceal that Word in the folds and creases of worldly clothing.” ~ A. Kuyper

…What carries over from Isaiah’s imagery and what it intends to convey is that we can only see by the light of God’s Word and Spirit when our souls are not always looking at and hankering after the ways of the world. We see only when we embrace absolutely the separation between God’s people and the people of the world. Then we’ll have nothing to do with their song and dance, either in our hearts, our heads, or our homes.

That’s how our fathers felt. That’s why they became staunch Puritans, that is, people who had the courage to break with the ungodly world that the Lord so accurately describes as people ‘who hatch lizards’ eggs and weave spiders’ webs.’

Our spiritual fathers yearned not to be conformed to this world. That’s why they thought differently, sang differently, lived differently, ate differently, clothed themselves differently, and raised their children differently. They didn’t allow the world to dictate their standards, but they reverently bowed their heads to God’s law. When the world called out: ‘Come along with me!’ their ready, stalwart, and bold response was: ‘We can’t!’ And they didn’t either, but held to their own path and thus reached their destination.

And that’s how we should proceed, brothers and sisters, guided by the same rule. We shouldn’t introduce a Mennonite kind of avoidance, nor play the part of ‘Precisionists,’ nor expect repayment from God for satisfying him with the self-righteous work of chastising ourselves. All of this is deadening, under his curse, and yields nothing at all.

No, but remaining in this world, as often as the demands of this world’s words come into conflict with the Word of God, we need to stand relentlessly and immovably on God’s Word. We need to cling to it tenaciously. We simply need to proceed on that basis of that Word with deadly seriousness in opposition to all earthly powers, friends, kinsmen, and human talk and gossip.

We must never conceal that Word in the folds and creases of worldly clothing.

Taken from the new translation by James A. De Jong of Abraham Kuyper’s Honey from the Rock (Lexham Press, 2018), pp.162-64.

This particular meditation (#52 of Volume 1) is titled “We Fumble Along in the Middle of the Day” and is based on Isaiah 59:10 (KJV)  – “We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men..”