Saints at His Service

Believing that the word "sinner" is not only overused but misused today in reference to God's children, and, believing that it matters whether we identify ourselves as "sinners" or as "saints,"

I have set out to study Scripture's use of the word "saints." The search is as easy as it is daunting, for the word "saints" is used at least 98 times in the King James Bible, but it isn't at all difficult to find the references. With Strong's Concordance and a journal in front of me, I began carefully copying each reference and studying its context. So far, I have studied only a handful, and what I thought would be a straightforward task has taken much longer than I anticipated, to my delight. Finding God's Word the complete antithesis to our cultural mindset, I have found a most refreshing view of God's use of the word "saints." I have also discovered a rather amusing use of the word that sounds like there truly is nothing new under the sun, as Solomon said so long ago, but I'll save that for another post.

The first appearance of the word "saints" occurs in Deuteronomy 33:2-3, when Moses is blessing the people before he dies. If anyone was a saint, it would seem to have been Moses, whose face shone when he came down from Mount Sinai to deliver the law to his people. And yet this "saint" literally broke the first set of commandments and later broke God's command to speak to the rock by smiting it instead. This display of self-appointed power barred Moses from the Promised Land, but it did not bar him from God's Presence, for he appears on the Mount of Transfiguration with Christ Himself 1400 years later. It seems fitting that the first appearance of the word "saints" would come out of Moses' mouth, but the context is even more intriguing. I don't know how many times I read this passage during my study, always to find something new. It goes like this: "And he said, 'The Lord came from Sinai, and dawned on them from Seir; He shone forth from Mount Paran, and He came with ten thousands of saints; from His right hand came a fiery law for them. Yes, He loves the people; all His saints are in Your hand; they sit down at Your feet; everyone receives Your words.'"

Some Bible scholars believe the "ten thousands of saints" are angels, but that wouldn't appear to make sense as the correct antecedent for the word "them"--"from His right hand came a fiery law for them." The angels don't need the fiery law. People do. So, who are these thousands of saints? Are they the Israelites in the wilderness? Moses' people hardly seem like saints. They were literally worshiping idols while Moses was receiving the law. Did saints from 2500 years prior to Moses accompany the Lord's delivery of the law, as a parallel to the final judgment described in Jude 14? The text remains a mystery. Even more of a mystery is that this is a prayer of blessing--a blessing our culture seems to have completely lost for the express reason that we have also lost any true respect for the law of God even as Christians. What is clear is that the word "saints" is fused with a context of "fiery law," as if God's truth is so precious that it demands the holy escort of thousands upon thousands of witnesses to its power. I absolutely love the image this conveys.

The idea that God's law is "fiery" is unfathomable in itself. God's law was written in stone for human eyes to read, but His truth is written in the Son Himself, whose eyes are as a flame of fire (Revelation 1:14; 2:18; 19:12). Can we look into those eyes that look into ours? Fire changes all it touches. It gives both light and warmth, but it also consumes. Nothing can withstand its power. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that our God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29). The "fiery" law of Moses was indeed delivered in fire and smoke on Mount Sinai, but this isn't merely an adjective to describe the giving of the law but a modifier to describe the law itself. Psalm 19 links the sun with the law, and Psalm 119:130 says, "The entrance of Your words gives light." The context of Deuteronomy 33:2-3 identifies the Lord Himself with the sun as He "dawned" on the people and as He "shone forth" from Mount Paran.

Why is "fiery" an apt adjective with which to describe God's law? Before we attempt to answer this, we should look at the very next verse: "Yes, He loves the people." That is not a non sequitur. The meaning here is profound. The second reference to saints in Scripture comes next: "all His saints are in Your hand." Fiery law, love, saints, hand--these all work together. Law is a glorious gift from God, a loving security and an eternal stability of all that is right and good and true. So, how can law be fiery, and how can fire be stable? God's law is absolute, requiring no fuel outside of itself, as of Moses' bush that burned but was not consumed. Can we even begin to imagine the power of the law which is like fire itself? We cannot live without fire--call it what we will these days. We certainly could not live without the sun. And yet even the sun will burn out one day, but God's Word will abide forever (Isaiah 40:8).

It would seem to make sense, then, that the greatest light a society can have is for God's people to follow His law. And yet how trite, how tired, how erroneous, is even the "Christian" use of the word "law," as of a loathsome toxin. We wrongly associate "law" with legalism, when the Lord associates "law" here with both love and light. But how dark is the society where God's laws are ignored, smothered, or even stamped out! Why would we want to identify with this apostasy by calling ourselves "sinners"? We are children of light (Ephesians 5:8; I Thessalonians 5:5)! And both the law and the saints who follow it are in God's Hand--the safest place in all the universe to be. In the second use of the word "saints," the Deuteronomy text reads, "All His saints are in Your hand; they sit down at Your feet; everyone receives Your words."

This is exactly what happened when Jesus preached His Sermon on the Mount--the New Testament's "Mount Sinai," equivalent to the law of Moses and also its complete fulfillment. In this sermon, Jesus refers to His disciples as the light of the world who cannot hide their light under a bushel. And it is when we do indeed sit down at the feet of Jesus, as they did so long ago near the Sea of Galilee, and receive the words of our God, that we find perfect rest, sanity, and the very preservation of society itself. But the society that ignores God's law will be destroyed, as God's Word foretells. This old sinful world will be consumed one day in fire, as Peter tells us, saying that the elements will burn with fervent heat (II Peter 3:10). But until that time, we may walk in the light of God's law as He delivered it to Moses and to His "saints."

If we want to know the first associations surrounding the word "saints," they are twofold: saints are God's people, often identified with a possessive pronoun--"His saints," and they accompany the giving and the preserving of the law, as the salt to which Jesus alludes in His Sermon on the Mount. It is our business as believers to deliver and to protect God's Words even in this evil day. Think of the untold suffering those faithful saints endured to give us God's Word as we have it now. William Tyndale experienced quite literally the "fiery law," as it were, giving his life to be burned at the stake so that we may have God's Word in the common language. And we could go on and on with stories of other saints who have suffered to preserve God's Word. We could even veer off into miraculous, inexplicable stories of how God's Word was thrown into bonfires and failed to burn.

How glorious is God's law! This is the way He created life in His universe to work, and this is the way His kingdom will one day come to perfect fruition. When He "comes with ten thousands of His saints" (Jude 14), He will judge the world by His fiery law which Jesus Christ has fulfilled to the letter. I know where I want to be when disaster strikes. I want to be in God's Hand, where no evil foe can pluck me from my Savior (John 10:28-29). And when I consider that I am held in God's Hand, I think of Isaiah 40:12, which tells me that God has measured the waters in the hollow of His Hand and that He has marked off the heavens with a span. A span? That's the distance between the thumb and the pinky finger. If God's Hand is that big--that, in a span, it can measure all infinity--then, as a saint held in the same "right Hand" that delivered the "fiery" law, I am safe from all harm, and the light of God's truth illumines my path. What a wonderful initiation of the word "saints" our Lord has given us!

The next time we see this word is in the prayer of Hannah when she dedicated Samuel to the Lord. That's another story, but let us rest assured that this wonderful word, used 98 times in Scripture, needs to be dusted off and reinstated in our daily vocabulary! Let us begin by blessing the Lord as saints in His service, all you saints of His (Psalm 30:4)!