The Thought of God by Maurice Roberts Review
The name Maurice Roberts probably isn't familiar to a lot of us. It wasn't to me until last year, when a dear friend gave me this book.
The book and the author
It's a 230-page paperback, glued, printed in the USA by Versa Press.
Maurice Jonathan Roberts was born in 1938 in Chester, England, and is still with us today. He studied at Durham University and later at the Free Church College, now Edinburgh Theological Seminary. He was a pastor for over 30 years in two pulpits, played a huge part in founding a new Scottish Presbyterian denomination in 2000, and preached from a pulpit of that denomination until 2010. He was general editor of the Banner of Truth magazine from 1988 to 2003, has written some eight titles, and has been professor of Greek and New Testament at the same seminary he attended. He's married to Sandra, and they have a daughter and two grandchildren.
What's in it
Every chapter is an article Roberts wrote for the Banner of Truth magazine, so they're short, three to five pages. You aren't sitting on one topic for hundreds of pages; you're focused on one thing for a short time. That makes it a very readable, accessible book.
The thirty chapters fall into five sections: Our Great God, Fellowship with Christ, The Christian's Walk, Life Together, and The Glory to Come. Each section is only about 30 pages, so you could read a section at a sitting. Some of the chapter titles: "The Thought of God," "Ceasing from Man," "Christ the Lover of Our Souls," "Our Unpopular Lord," "The Management of Our Pride," "Redeeming the Tongue," "A Dose of Moral Courage," "Where Have the Saints Gone?", "When Good Men Fall," "Christian Friendship," "The Prayer for Revival," and "The Happiness of Heaven."
Rereading the chapter titles, I kept thinking, "Oh yes, this is what he was talking about there." It's so rich and full of biblical truth. I could see many of these being used as tracts within the church. I reread it this past week, about a year after my first reading, and I wasn't let down.
A few things I marked
On panic. Roberts says that panic is the sinful failure to apply our knowledge of God to particular problems, and that panic is only possible when God is obscured from our thoughts by visible circumstances (pp. 6–7). I wrote an entire paper responding to those two sentences in light of the last couple of years. We had visible circumstances, and we panicked. We feared. That's a sinful failure to apply our knowledge of God. And because God really exists and isn't a medicine invented by our fears, life's secret is largely holding Him in our thoughts as much as possible, especially in times of fear and need (p. 8).
On our age. He fears that a future generation will look back on us as an age of shallowness in the things of God (pp. 10–11). That's so true and so painful. We look back at giants like Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards and J. C. Ryle. We do have men today like Matthew Everhard, Voddie Baucham, Paul Washer and James White, but overall, people will look back on us as a time of failure in the things of God.
On repentance. He says modern Christianity is impatient with anything more than a perfunctory confession of sin (p. 11), and that it's only the antinomian who thinks the Christian has no need to go on repenting (p. 103). He reminds us of Tertullian's words that he was born for nothing but repentance. We almost fear holiness today. People see holiness as legalism, but it's because they themselves are antinomians. And the antinomian response to sin is that there's always grace in God. But Christ is not given to us to enable us to sin without fear or shame. That would make Christ the minister of sin (p. 104).
On correction. Happy are we if we distrust our own hearts enough to accept correction from those who love us in the Lord (p. 136).
On parenting. He asks Christian parents who use the television as a regular child-minder whether they're really acting responsibly (p. 147). That has only become more common, with children as young as two on phones and iPads. Lord willing, when I have children, my goal is to raise them without that at all.
And to end on an uplifting note, from page 4: "To have God in his mind and thought is the believer's constant source of strength." Let's make a plan to have God in our minds and hearts constantly, in prayer and in meditation.
Soli Deo Gloria!
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