New Covenant Living

Courtship

2012-01-26T16:43:00.002-05:00

The conservative Christian courtship craze has made young single Christians so tense about relationships that it destroys their ability to just relax and get to know one another. The unnatural degree of relational intensity creates high anxiety, and high anxiety is a toxic ingredient in a friendship.

The Spiritual Effect of Preaching Through Entire Bible Books

2012-01-23T11:00:00.003-05:00

I have just begun a series in the letter of Colossians. Something by which I'm struck is how preaching through an entire book touches different aspects of people's lives than topics. I'm not opposed to topical messages. What I dislike is how preachers rummage through the Bible, grab a verse that seems to say what they want it to say, then preach it with little regard to its context. This is a widespread habit among preachers, and it's a very bad habit. However, a topical message where the preacher takes a verse, interprets it correctly first, then applies it to a need of the moment, is a good thing, and can be a tremendous blessing to people. Preaching through whole books does something else for the listeners. When you preach through a whole book, you call on the listener to set aside their questions, and pay attention to something that defines a whole different set of issues. If done right, book-preaching can break the listener out of the mind-set of the immediate. Topical messages usually seek to answer questions that the listener brings to the meeting. But presenting a book, or a psalm, in its entirety, calls the listener to think about what the book is about. You are brought into it, in its world, rather than itty-bitty parts of it coming to you in your world. This dimension of spiritual learning is advanced by whole-book preaching. Sometimes our greatest need is not to have our questions answered, but to ask better questions.

The New Birth and Faith

2012-01-19T10:41:00.002-05:00

It is a commonplace teaching in Reformed circles that the new birth (regeneration) precedes faith in Christ, and causes faith in Christ. However, this doctrine is directly contradicted by 1st Peter 1:22-25. Peter tells his readers that they, by obeying the truth, purified their souls unto a sincere love of the Christian brethren. "Obeying the truth" is an apostolic phrase that means "believe the Gospel", such as you see in 1st Peter 1:2 and Romans 1:5. Love for God and Christian brethren is the main result of the new birth, according to the apostle John. Love is proof of true sonship (see, for example, 1 John 3:1-15). Peter's words show that his readers' faith in Christ preceded the purifying of their souls. In fact, their faith was the means by which they purified their souls -- it was a direct cause-and-effect relationship. In addition, Peter says they were born again by the living and enduring word of God (v. 23), that is, the Gospel that was preached to them (v. 25). In the Reformed view, the Gospel is not the instrument of new birth.In the Reformed view, you are not born again by means of the Gospel. Rather, you are born again by a direct, mystical action of God on the soul. You are born-agai9n with regards to the Gospel, but not by means of the Gospel. But this construct is contradicted by Peter in 1st Peter 1:22-25.

Baptism 2

2012-01-02T15:47:00.002-05:00

A Christian who refuses to be baptized is directly disobeying the Lord who saved him. There was no such thing in the apostolic times as an un-baptized Christian. I do not mean that baptism was a condition of justification of one's sins. It was not, and all who preach that it is are guilty of adding works to faith. The Churches of Christ stand outside the boundary of Christian orthodoxy. I also do not mean that it is impossible to be saved but fear making a public stanbd. Joseph of Arimathea was a saved man, but was a secret disciple, until the circumstances of Jesus' death and burial motivated him to declare himself by his actions. I mean that baptism was mandatory for all, not optional. It was not a debatable practice, such as whether to perform Communion weekly (as some Christian churches do), monthly (as many do), or quarterly (as some European churches did in the past). Baptism is the beginning of Christian discipleship, according to the Great Commission. Infant christening is no excuse for refusing baptism, since infant christening is not baptism. Baptism does not mean that one's parents are Christians, and that one attends a Christian church, contrary to the Reformed misrepresentation of its significance. Baptism means that you have taken Jesus' yoke upon you, and no one can do that for you. Only you can do that for yourself; it is a voluntary decision.

On Baptism

2012-01-02T13:04:00.003-05:00

The Greek words bapto and baptizo mean "to immerse". It doesn't matter whether one is immersed by being lowered down into water (as in the case of John's river-baptisms), or immersed by being flooded-upon by a great volume of something from above (as in the case of the Holy Spirit being poured-out from heaven upon the believers in Acts 2). Both examples are immersive. There are a few cases where those baptismal words were used in the Septuagint's translation of the book of Hebrews for "sprinkle". But since those examples had to do with Moses and the bloody hyssop, they do not transfer to Christian baptism. The meaning of a word is determined by usage in a context, and you cannot transfer meanings from one context to another, or one passage to another, based on a word only. The words bapto, baptizein, and baptizo mean "immerse."

Quiverfulls & A Daft Culture War

2012-01-02T12:26:00.002-05:00

The Quiverfull Movement people have created a false law which mandates as many pregnancies as possible = "God's will." The reality is that there is no such law. The Old Testament teaches mandatory values regarding human beings, children, and family, which are different from laws. It is God's will that we highly value people (because we are made in God's image). All the Old Testament laws on social relationships build on the foundation of that value. We are to highly value marriage and family, because of God's original mandate to Adam and Eve. If we respect God as Creator, and bow to Moses' God-given authority as His prophet, then we accept heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the lone standard. But marriage sometimes ends legitimately because of immorality and other causes, and singleness can also be God's gift to a Christian in certain cases, according to the apostle Paul. We should value children, because they are a blessing given by God. If these values rule over our thoughts and hearts, then we are in the place God wants us to be. But there is no divine law that commands Christians to have as many children as we can. And we certainly shouldn't reproduce as a personnel-tactic in a daft Theonomic culture-war! In the absence of any commandment to have a certain number of children, God has delegated to us the decision as to how many to have.

Christmas Party time!

2011-12-24T12:09:00.002-05:00

We're holding our first Christmas Eve party tonight! The church isn't doing a Christmas Eve service, since tomorrow is Sunday. A party still fits with the season! Christmas is no time to be solemn. Christ promised a big feast for all of us when he finally comes back, and our Christian Christmas parties are like little warm-ups for the big event. So, have a merry Christmas!

Greatness

2011-12-19T23:55:00.003-05:00

Make no effort to be a titan. I was trained in a fundamentalist Baptist environment that had a very bad habit of exalting "great men" -- Baptist fundamentalists, principally. Tonight, I began a biography of John Calvin, who is undoubtedly among the greatest formulators of Christian Europe, when there used to be a Christian Europe But I as yet see no evidence that Calvin strove to be a great man. He was slight of frame, sickly of health, nervous of psyche, and peevish of temperament. He became a "great man of the faith" in spite of himself. Most Christian work is carried on by men and women of mediocre talent, who will never be widely known, and who are forgotten after their deaths by all but those who loved them, and God, who loves them most of all. But they do good in their lifetimes, and from their number, sometimes, for His own secret reasons, God turns a few of them into world-changers of varying scopes. Let us not make ourselves heartsick from a long-deferred hope of titanic ambition.

Prayer & God's Sovereignty

2011-12-15T09:31:00.001-05:00

Prayer doesn't force God to act, as if He's a genie sitting passively in His bottle, and our prayer is like rubbing the lamp. But it isn't true, either, that prayer is just mental self-adjustment. James wrote that Elijah prayed, and God stopped the rain for 3 1/2 years; then Elijah prayed again, and God made it rain (James 5). Based on His promise, God does things when we pray that He refrains from doing when we don't pray. We shouldn't shrink prayer down to a form of reflexive mental therapy. That's a liberal's view of prayer -- it's purely psychological in its effect, that nothing out in the objective reality happens because of prayer, prayer just makes you feel better, or helps you be a more-moral person. The Bible says if you pray, in faith, and in harmony with God's revealed (scriptural) will, God makes stuff happen.

Book Review, "Whosoever Will", part 1

2011-12-12T16:15:00.005-05:00

Broadman & Holmes, a Baptist print house, recently published a collection of doctrinal essays tied to the John 3:16 Conference. The John 3:16 Conference was a gathering of Southern Baptist Arminians, devoted to countering the growing influence of Calvinist doctrine in the SBC. So far, I have read the Introduction, and the first three chapters. Of the Introduction, I can commend the author's statement that it is not their intention to drive Calvinists out of the SBC -- though statements made elsewhere in the SBC lead me to believe that there are Baptist preachers who very much do want to drive out all Calvinists. But the author also claims that the writers of the book are neither Arminians nor Calvinists -- which is an idiom tells you they are all Arminians to one degree or another. The first chapter was a transcript of a sermon by Jerry Vines on John 3:16, which did not supply any material on why Calvinism is wrong. (in fact, the title of the book, Whosoever Will, isn't the most-strict translation; the Greek phrase is "all the ones believing"). The next chapter claims to refute the doctrine of total depravity/spiritual inability, but doesn't. Its proofs are mostly preacher stories, such as one about a sailor burned and blinded in an accident. Next is a chapter titled "Congruent Election", in which the writer fails to define the word "congruent", claims that Calvinists don't know that the Bible distinguishes between national and personal election, and says that Calvinists take the view of election that they do because they aren't dispensationalists. So far, the book has nothing to offer -- really, a waste of time and paper. I was interested in thoughtful Arminian exegesis, but so far all this book supplies are anecdotes, historical claims that Southern Baptists of the past weren't Calvinists (which looks like an attempt to historically disenfranchise Baptist leaders like Al Mohler, and make them seem like interlopers). This book makes big claims, but so far the writers don't back any of them.

Conquering Sexual Addiction, According to Christianity

2011-12-09T13:15:00.002-05:00

This is a summary of what the Bible teaches about sexual addiction. Reams are being written on the psychology and sociology of this topic; my intention here is to give anyone a fast overview of basic Biblical ideas and ideals.

God created Adam and Eve in a monogamous, covenant union (Genesis 1-2).
Because sexual behavior is a reflection of the image and love of God, all sexual intercourse is to be confined to the relationship which expresses God's love: a monogamous, heterosexual, covenant union.
Human beings have a spiritual soul, and because of Adam's sin each soul is spiritually dead.
Individual evils erupt out of the underlying dead condition of the soul.
Only the grace of God in Jesus Christ, through faith, can change a dead soul into a living one. One common reason people cannot gain "victory' over a binding sin is because they are mistaken in their belief that they are a child of God.
Even a living soul struggles against bondage to lingering evil desires. Romans 7.
God, through Christ, has already supplied the living soul with everything it needs to be free. 2 Peter 1:1-2.
Inward evil desire is overcome progressively, not in one turning-point experience.
The methods by which evil desire is overcome is Bible knowledge, prayer, worship of God, and community fellowship with other Christians.
The death of Christ atones for all sexual sin, and continues to be the ground on which one may ask God's forgiveness (1 John 1:9).
Evil must be conquered from the inside-out. Just polishing up the externals is hypocritical and dangerous.
One's thinking about love and sex must be thoroughly rehabilitated and re-shaped (Romans 12:2).
You must become mature in the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:18-19). A person who was (hypothetically) mature in all of the fruit of the Spirit -- all of them being summed up in "love" -- would never fall to temptation.
Part of re-forming one's thinking into alignment with God's ideas and feeling regarding love and sexuality is to lock out all contrary social and cultural influences. You must starve the beast.

Faith & Math

2011-12-09T09:56:00.005-05:00

Faith isn't mathmatical certainty, because the Gospel isn't about numbers. Faith is confidence that the Gospel writers' testimony is true. Testimony cannot be like a math sum, because there is no possibility of the normal element of human variability creeping into numbers. Two "x"s plus two more "x"s equal 4 "x"s. It doesn't matter what the "x" stands for -- "x" is nothing more than a countable object. And no matter how much time and distance lies between the writer of 2 + 2 = 4, and the reader, the sum remains the same. Not only that, you can sit down at your own kitchen table and reproduce the formula for yourself. But when the Gospel writers testify that Jesus was born of a virgin, there is no way for any of us to observe the original event, and, by the very nature of a miracle, we can't reproduce the event. Unlike math, we have the combined testimony of four men (who rercorded the various testimonies of many other people) about Jesus. They did not provide us with the findings of a lab test. But this should not shake us. Atheists might mock faith, but no atheist lives his life by mathmatical or syllogistic certainty. They depend on the authority of testimony just as much as anyone else. If the four Gospels are rejected because we don't have photos or recordings of the events, then every other historical testimony is nullified, including all historical testimony about science. We don't need mathmatical certainty to have faith. The Spirit of God directly convinces us that the Gospel is true. He does not convince us that the logically-impossible is possible, and He doesn't convince us contrary to the historical evidence. But the Spirit doesn't depend on our powers of natural reason. Sometimes faith results from the Gospel proofs (as C.S. Lewis did), sometimes faith learns the proofs later (as I did, by reading C.S. Lewis). This is why children and fools can be saved.

2011-12-08T11:19:00.003-05:00

Pastor Chuck Phelps recently resigned from his board position at Bob Jones University, because of furor over his callous treatment of a young lady who was raped and impregnated by a man who attended the church that Phelps pastored. Phelps publicly humiliated the girl, arranged for her to leave the state, and both he and Bob Jones University initially resisted him taking the step of resignation. It angers me that there are some so-called conservative Christians whose first knee-jerk impulse upon hearing of a molestation case is to blame or disparage the girl. I am concerned that the ungodly, hostile social thinking promoted through conservative talk radio -- which is no more Biblical than the ungodly, hostile secular thinking presented through liberalism -- has trained us to regard victimized females as nutty feminists. It's easy to think that way, because we have heard, or know, of unscrupulous women who use false accusations to cash in on lax harassment laws, or to gain personal revenge. For instance, I ignored the initial complaints about Herman Cain, because it's politics. I knew it was possible he was guilty of something, but I assumed it was a con-job perpetrated by his enemies. I have since changed my mind. But my point isn't about Cain. The way some Christians continue to defend and excuse him illustrates a blind mind-set among some of us conservative Christians -- a knee-jerk assumption that girls or women who accuse a man of molesting them are gold-diggers, or that they must have brought it on themselves, or they're all lunatic femi-nazis. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, etc., are partly to blame for this judgmental cynicism. Limbaugh and savage represent one part of the worldly mentality of which the NT warns us to beware.

God's Love & Victoria's Secret

2011-12-08T09:12:00.004-05:00

Two of the most important truths to understand about God's love is that it isn't based on our attractiveness to him, and it is completely free of any selfish motives on God's part. These two realities stand in shocking contrast to the Victoria's Secret ads, that seem to be all over the tube this season. Victoria's Secret says that a woman's desirability is based on whether she looks like a knock-out runway model, and she is presented to the male viewers as an object to be used. Could anything be less like God's love for us? God loved us, and sent His Son to save us, while we were still sinners. He doesn't stop loving us, or love us less, when we sin. He certainly doesn't care what we look like, physically speaking. In fact, the Lord says in Proverbs that beauty is vain (Proverbs 31:30). And nothing about God's love is self-serving on His part. God doesn't use us, exploit us, or tear us down for His own selfish pleasures. God's kind of pleasure is to rescue us, heal us, strengthen us, build us up, and eventually save us from death itself. The clearer this vision of God's love is burned into the retina of our minds, the more we will be freed from the corrupt images of love proffered by the world.

Does Your Church Really Preach Grace?

2011-11-30T09:26:00.004-05:00

There are churches that claim to preach grace, but what they really preach is "the power to do more good works better." Think about the pulpit messages you have heard. How many of them mentioned the inadequate nature of even your best works? That you chose Christ because Christ chose you? That moral perfection isn't possible in this life? That knowing the Lord's moral laws doesn't make it possible to keep them? That Christ's death left nothing for you to contribute to your salvation at any point in your life? That you brought nothing to the table at your conversion, and to this very day you still bring nothing to the table? That the Gospel is the foundation and spirit of the entire Christian life, not just the first step? That your faith in Christ was wrought in you by God the Holy Spirit? That God's commitment to you is what will get you to heaven, not your commitment to God? A church that talks about grace only as the facilitator of good works, isn't preaching grace.

Lordship, Wth Caution

2011-11-29T10:17:00.005-05:00

Although I am strongly opposed to the teachings of Zane Hodges and Charles Ryrie on the so-called "Free Grace" theology, I also hold some reservations about certain forms of "Lordship Salvation" teaching. I feel that the "Lordship Salvation" preaching I've heard over the years has a bad tendency to drift into legalism, if the preacher isn't careful. We must not blur the biblical distinction between faith with faithfulness. Belief in Christ motivates loyalty to Christ, but loyalty isn't a synonym for faith. We aren't saved by our loyalty to or love for Christ, since love is a work (it's the root of all ten of the 10 Commandments), and we are not saved by good works. Romans 12:1 and John 3:16 are about two related but distinct issues. Romans 12:1 is not the Gospel. Web should not expect an excessive amount of automatic righteousness out of the new birth (the free-grace movement expects nothing or very little). LS preachers, to my thinking, sometimes seem to believe in almost a "first work of grace" perfectionism. It becomes a Calvinist perfectionism, as opposed to the usual Wesleyan perfectionism. And I am a 4.5 Calvinist saying this. We must never confuse the fruits of faith with conditions for justification. For example, faith will motivate a Christian to place his love for his own father and mother on a lower rung than his love for Christ, as Christ taught His disciples they must do. But no one is justified of his sins by "hating father and mother." Christ's demands of discipleship were not conditions of justification from the guilt of sin. We pastors should not feel driven to strip Christians of the assurance of their own salvation. Doubting your salvation when you are is just as bad a problem as believing yourself saved when you aren't. Willful or habitual sin in the life of a believer is not proof that the person is not a child of God, because the sin that breaks fellowship (the sin to which 1st John 1:9 speaks) is known sin. The Biblical view of regeneration and faith leaves room for the "sin that so easily entangles" (Hebrews 12:1), and it recognizes that there are Christians who are immature, ignorant, and worldly (1 Corinthians 3:1).

Georgetown Evangelical Free Church

2011-11-19T17:38:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the newly-upgraded GEFC blog! Blogger has added a whole bunch of gadgets that make using this website easier for the browsing reader. Come visit us at church on Sunday!

The Bible On Poverty

2011-10-17T12:58:00.002-04:00

The Bible attributes poverty to three causes, which can exist separately from each other, or together in varying degrees. Those causes can be summed up in the books of Job, Proverbs, and the Prophets. Job tells us about disasters which are no one's fault. Satan wiped out Job's family and property by a series of bizarre disasters and crimes. Proverbs tells us about the person's own foolishness and laziness. People's fortunes are ruined by drunkenness, sex, laziness, hot tempers, and general stupidity. The Prophets spoke against oppression by the powerful, such as rich people or government officials. Liberals generally ignore Proverbs and quote the Prophets (usually ignoring the spiritual context, however), and many conservatives ignore the Prophets. How did God address these problems? The general solution was to foster a society of justice and love. But "justice" was defined by God's nature and His laws, not Marxist theories of class warfare, societal evolution, or collective property ownership. A society of justice and love would spontaneously spring to action at times of need, in little ways and big ways. However, such a society cannot exist apart from religion, and true religion cannot exist apart from faith in the Scripture. Justice and charity faded away whenever Israel went into spiritual decline. This is why it is impossible to approach being a society of justice and love without the Gospel constantly renewing the society from within. Moses' law made allowance for a sort of "workfare", in which farm-owners were required to set aside the corners of their fields (a tax in kind), and the poor were allowed to glean after the main reaping was done. Farmers were also ordered not to reap to the nth degree, but to leave something behind for the poor. Moses' law also mandated a system of debt relief, where debts did not prolong past the seven-year mark; and forbade high interest rates on loans. It doesn't seem that Israel was consistent in following these laws, however, due to their greed and political corruption. The Prophets charged the government ("the king") with the responsibility of redressing the exploitation of the poor. This was part of the king's job description. Sometimes it worked -- for example, King Joram restored the Shunnamite woman's land to her after she had been away from Israel for seven years, and order that she be reimbursed for the crops that had been stolen from her (it might be that tenant farmers had tried to claim her house and land in her family's absence). But often it didn't, again because of political graft. The Socialist solution fails because socialism / progressivism denies the Bible's teaching that mankind is wicked, and as a result socialists find hope in the fatal idea of a benevolent dictatorship -- Stalinism with a smile. It also fails because it denies that each person is individually made in God's image, and therefore each person exists first for God, not for the good of the collective. Laissez-faire capitalism fails because of its denial of the corporate nature of the human community (just as God is One but is comprised of three eternal Persons), and that there are moral laws that govern economic exchanges -- moral laws which are the government's responsibility to enforce.

The Power of Good Parenting

2011-10-17T11:22:00.002-04:00

A parent can be either a stepping-stone across which the child navigates the river of life -- or an anchor, dragging the child down into the depths. Inborn sin is rebellious in itself (Romans 8:7), and responsibility for sin rests on the actor. But Satan uses bad parents to feed the flame -- to draw a child with the false promises of a rebellious life. A parent's justice, affection, mercy, and consistency make it much harder for the devil to fool a child.

Was God in Covenant With Adam? Does It Matter?

2011-10-14T16:45:00.004-04:00

Adam's similarity to Christ, especially in his role as a type of Christ (Romans 5:14), implies that Adam was in covenant with God. We know that Jesus Christ is the head of the Lord's new covenant. This is the symbolism of the bread and the cup. Sin entered the human race through one man, Adam. Death followed sin, because everyone sinned in the sin of Adam (Romans 5:12). This is proven by the fact that death reigned over the human race from Adam until Moses (Romans 5:14), even though God didn't reveal to man the Ten Commandments until Moses (5:13). God doesn't impute sin to people's accounts unless he has given them a law first. And yet death reigned over mankind anyway, which proves that God was holding everyone accountable for Adam's one sin against the one law God had given him. Adam functioned as a covenant mediator. He represented the whole human race (except for Jesus) in the sight of God, and his action passed down to everyone he represented (5:15-16). A covenant head is someone who acts in place of others. Later examples in the Old testament are Noah, whose obedience accrued blessings for the human race, and Abraham, whose faith accrued covenantal blessings for his line (which includes all Christian believers). Just as Christ's obedience on the cross resulted in the justification of those for whom He died, Adam's sin resulted in the condemnation of many. There are clear disparities between Christ and Adam -- for instance, the number of the "many" condemned by Adam's sin is far larger than the number justified by Christ (5:15). But both of them represent others, and their actions in the sight of God brought life or catastrophe down on the ones they represent. Adam being a covenant head in the sight of God is the only way we can explain the universal sinfulness of humanity, or explain why or how Christ's death on the cross saves anyone. And since Adam's standing was preserved by obeying a law, and ruined by breaking that same law (Genesis 2:17), it is right to call what Adam had a covenant of works.

Does Romans 8:29 Teach Unconditional Election

2011-10-10T14:01:00.000-04:00

God's knowing in v. 28 is a personal, relational, and saving knowledge. It reminds us of Jesus' warning in Matthew 7:23, that He never knew the worker of iniquity, and so casts him into hell. Proginosko isn't about knowing facts; it is whom God foreknew. It's God knowing a person, in the sense of recognizing and favoring him. To “know” someone in this sense is to look upon him or her with blessing. What does God's foreknowing produce in the person's life? Paul says it results in being predestined to conformity to Christ's image. Conformity to Christ's image means “to be resurrected.” We know this because Paul goes on to say that God's intent is that Christ be the firstborn (i.e., first resurrected) among many brethren. The preceding context speaks about how the groaning creation waits for the resurrection of God's sons (8:18-22). We Christians are all waiting for our adoption, that is, the redemption of our bodies (8:23). Romans 8:29 does not say that God predestined the plan of salvation, or that He predestined the results of accepting the plan. God predestined specific people. This means that God decided that they would be saved, since resurrection unto glory is the full-and-final form of salvation. Paul says the foreknown group was consequently called by God to Christ, justified by God through faith in Christ, and glorified by God. God's foreknowledge preceded all these temporal experiences, and caused them. These are all the same people. None of the foreknown people rejected the Gospel call. God performed every action (calling, justification, and glorification) the foreknown people needed to make their destiny happen. It is easy to see how Calvinists treat Paul's “foreknow” as a synonym for Luke's “appoint” in Acts 13:48. Romans 8:29 says in theological language what Acts 13:48 puts into a story form. Romans 8:29 teaches that God has predestined certain specific people to be resurrected, and as a result He acts on His decision by calling them, justifying them (because they all obey the call), and glorifying all of them in Christ.

Does the New Testament Require Paternal Approval For A Daughter To Marry?

2011-09-22T12:02:00.001-04:00

Does the Bible teach that a Christian offspring must secure the approval of the father, in order to marry? A section of Scripture in this context is I Corinthians 7, particularly vv. 25-40. The Reformation Study Bible note says this about vv. 36-38: "There are two different ways of understanding this passage. We simply do not know for certain whether Paul is addressing men who have deferred marriage to their fiancee ("virgin") or fathers who have not permitted their daughters to marry ("virgin daughter"; see text note)." The MacArthur study note says that "virgin" means a man's daughter, without acknowledging that there are any exegetical ambiguities.In verse 36, Paul tells the single Christian man that if the young man feels he is sinning against his young woman, and her ability to attract a husband and bear children is passing ("she is past the flower of youth"), he should marry her. I believe the passage might imply a formal betrothal, since the young woman is called "his" young woman, and his waiting or indecision is imposing an unfair burden on her as time is passing by. Notice that verse 36 does not say "Let her marry", or "Let him give her in marriage", both of which would be accurate if Paul addressed a father. Instead, Paul says "Let them marry", meaning, the two people. However, if the Christian man can control himself -- in other words, as Paul says in 7:8-9, if he can exercise self-control and not burn with lust -- then the man does well to keep his young woman a single woman. A father need not have inward "power over his own will" (37) to refrain from giving his daughter in marriage, but a man certainly would need power over his own will if he was going to knowingly choose a life of singleness over married sexual union. The Christian father is in view, in verse 38. A Christian father of the time might have feared that he was becoming complicit in a decision that was contrary to God's will, if he blesses the marriage union between his Christian daughter and a Christian man. The word "so" at the beginning of the sentence suggests Paul means, "In light of all I have just said." If the Christian young man and the Christian young woman have followed God's wisdom in this matter, the woman's father should not feel any moral qualms about blessing the marriage. Notice in verse 39 that a Christian widow is free to marry any Christian she wishes. Her decision-making power in this matter is affirmed. Authority regarding whether to marry, or who to marry, does not revert back to her father, even though her husband is deceased and she has become single again. Adult children are not obligated to obey their parents ( mean in the sense of a moral absolute, not in the "you're living under my roof and so you need to follow the house rules" way), since that commandment applies to children (Ephesians 6:1). My college-aged son Alex is our offspring but he is not a child. God wants him to love and respect his mother and me, and he would be foolish to ignore our counsel on most things. But he does not need to obey us. He isn't a child. The Bible never says that a Christian woman must always, in all cases, obtain the approval of her father to marry someone, or else the marriage is unlawful in God's eyes. There are wicked fathers who oppose the marriage choices of their daughters for wicked reasons; those fathers should be ignored. A legal covenant is lawful in the eyes of God, even if entering into that covenant is most unwise. If an immature and foolish Christian woman marries an immature and foolish Christian man, then the marriage covenant is a real one in God's eyes.

Americ Founded As A Christian Nation?

2011-09-15T11:50:00.000-04:00

We Christians should take care in what we say about our country. America was founded with strong influences from Scripture, which blessed us as only the Word of God can. But the founders were equally and strongly influenced by the British empiricist John Locke, and all of them were raised with a classical education -- which means they drew upon ancient pagan philosophers, such as Roman writer and thinker Cicero. The founding Fathers were nominally Christian, but only a few were Evangelical believers. Jefferson was what we would call today a "liberal", Benjamin Franklin was a moralistic Deist, as was John Adams (his son, John Quincy, on the other hand was an Evangelical Christian). The Puritan experiment in Massacusetts eventually failed, as soon as the Republic disestablished, and allowed citizens to be any religion, or no religion at all. Roger Williams' cruel winter expulsion from Boston, and his subsequent founding of Rhode Island as a haven of tolerance, tolled the death-knell for the Massachusetts Puritans' vision of a Christian covenant nation. Jesus is never mentioned in any of our founding documents, which form the only legal basis for the nation; and there is no religious subscription required for citizenship. I love my country, but we were never a "Christian nation" in the way we generally mean that phrase. We should not pursue a fool's goal of "restoring" or going back to an Evangelical Christian America that you can see from reading the documents of that time didn't exist.

Warning Signs of A Cult

2011-09-05T12:40:00.001-04:00

Did you know that a church can preach the Gospel, but still have cult characteristics? These are hard to recognize, because trained Christians stay alert to fundamental errors (such as denying Christ's deity), but aren't familiar with other marks of a cult. Here are some warning signs to watch out for, that a church might preach the Gospel but still have cult characteristics:

1. Is there any real accountability over the head pastor? The Lord Jesus tells us that the congregation has the authority to correct and expel sinning members (Matthew 18:15-17). This includes the preacher, as long as the process is handled fairly (1 Timothy 5:19-20). If your preacher cannot be disciplined by the congregation (or elected representatives thereof), and cannot be fired, then your church is a cult. If your preacher can single-handedly hire and fire staff, or appoint and un-appoint members of the leadership team, then he is exercising cultic authority.

2. Is the preacher held up in an exaggerated way as a man who hears from God? The Bible says that every Christian is anointed by the Holy Spirit, and knows the truth of the Gospel (1 John 2:20-21). The Bible is the sole, authoritative voice of God to us (2 Timothy 3:16-17), not some man's claims to inner enlightenment. If your preacher is praised as the man who hears from God better than anyone else, or better than any other preacher, or better than anyone else of the church's leadership team, and he accepts this praise, then he is a cultic preacher.

3. Does the church publish how the church's money is spent? The apostles in the early church were careful to handle money in an above-board manner. When a gift was sent to the beleaguered church in Jerusalem, two of their best people (Paul and Barnabas) were picked to handle it, and they made sure it was delivered in a timely manner. Any church that hides the budget from the congregation, or puts bureacratic obstacles in the way of people finding out how the money is being spent, or tells inquiring people "You should just trust us", is a cult.

4. Does the church manipulate Christian people into getting saved all over again? Any church that preaches that you must know the day and the hour of your conversion in order to have assurance of your own salvation, is preaching a false gospel. The Bible teaches no such thing. Many people have a distinct time in mind that they know they came to Christ. But there are children who grow up in Christian homes, having been well-nurtured in ther Lord, who as far as they can tell have always believed in Christ. They have spiritual turning-point experiences, but when did saving faith start? They can't always say, but they don't need to, since you are not saved by your memory of an experience. You are saved by Jesus Christ. What you believe right now about Him is the only thing that matters. A church that tears down a Christian's assurance, in order to get him or her to come forward to the altar, and thus be proudly claimed as a conversion statistic, is abusing that poor person. It's cultic.

5. Manipulating conversions and conversion statistics is cultic. Suppose a church claims that "X" number of people became Christians at a special event. How can they be so sure that, say, 300 became Christians? They answer, "Because 300 people stood up when we asked them to stand up." Thoughtful Christian people know this is nonsense. People stand up (or raise their hands, or bow their heads in prayer, or go forward to the platform) for all sorts of reasons. Besides, standing up, or going forward, or praying, doesn't cause you to become born again. You exercise faith in Christ because you already are being born-again on the inside. The Holy-Spirit-caused regeneration experience precedes faith, and causes faith to happen. The reality is that the boasting church has no idea how many people actually became Christians.

Does your church have a head preacher over whom there is no accountability system? Is it not allowed for your congregation to discipline him, or remove him? Can he appoint people to his leadership team at will? Do people claim that your preacher hears God's so-called voice better than anyone else? Does your church withhold information about the budget, and how the church's money is being spent, from the congregation? Do you have to be a member of the leadership team in order to find this out? Are you ordered to "just trust us" (and Hebrews 13:17 is quoted at you) if you ever ask? Does your preacher try to make Christian people believe that they aren't really saved, by teaching unscriptural standards of "savedness" by which they codnemn themselves? Does your church make exaggerated claims about how many people supposedly become Christians through its ministries, based on fase standards like how many people responded to an altar call?

If the answer is "yes", then your church is a cult.

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Why Some People Only Attend Large Churches

2011-09-02T13:27:00.000-04:00

What would you do about these factors, if anything?

1. Some people avoid small churches because they have shy personalities. They hate the idea of standing out in a group. In a larger church you can merge in with a multitude, and you don't feel like you have a spotlight shining on you.

2. Some people just want to ride the trolley. A church is like a trolley that's already on its way from here to there. They would like to hop on and ride along (i.e., take advantage of the service offered), and they'll be nice to the other passengers. But they don't want to be a conductor, punch tickets, paint the trolley, repair the electrical mechanism when it shorts out, or anything else to do with the trolley's operations. The bigness of a big churches let you just ride their trolley.

3. Some people want inspiration, not discipling. Lots of people go to church once a week because the music makes them feel better, and a Bible message stretches their thoughts, makes them consider deeper issues than the demands at work or home, and their children enjoy Sunday school. Then they go away again for a week. Some smaller-church ministries want to take the person a lot further up and into Aslan's country than the person wishes to go.

4. Size implies a certain degree of quality, when it comes to churches. We don't apply this reasoning to restaurants and clothing shops -- we all know about outstanding little restaurants where it's hard to get a reservation, and women know about charming little specialty shops. But we do apply this idea to churches. We assume that if something is large, it must have something going for it; and we assume that if something is small, then there's something wrong with it. Often enough, there is some truth in this nugget of conventional wisdom. Many small churches are small because, honestly, they really aren't very good. But there can be many reasons for a church's size, large or small, and those reasons have very little to do with quality (such as local religious taste and bias).

Why We Don't Worship On the Sabbath

2011-08-30T14:08:00.000-04:00

First: Some Christians do worship on the seventh day -- generally Christian Jews. Paul says that's OK, as long as they don't demand that we all do it. Romans 14:5-6. However, let it be clear that a Jewish Christian who knowingly refuses to worship with other Christians on the Lord's Day, the first day of the week, is out of fellowship with Christ, and walking life in an unruly manner. They need to repent of their rebellion, and if they don't, other Christians should avoid them (Romans 16:17, 2 Thess 3:6).

Second: the 7th-day Sabbath was for the Jews particularly. It is true that the sacredness of the seventh day was established by God at the Creation (Genesis 2:3). It's possible that God communicated directions on how He wanted to be worshiped that aren't recorded in Scripture, such as the use of animal sacrifices (Genesis 4:4), or a distinction between ceremonially clean vs. unclean animals (Genesis 7:1-2). But by the time you read Exodus 31:13, it has become more than a memorial of God's greatness as Creator, and been up-graded to a sign of God's covenant with Israel. John Bunyan astutely pointed out that you never see the Lord judging any of the Gentile nation for failing to keep the Sabbath, even though you see Him judging them for just about everything else. The Sabbath and its laws were limited to the Jews.

Third: the Lord's Day and the Sabbath are distinguished throughout the New Testament. The Sabbath commemorated God resting from His creation work, and the Jews resting from their bondage in Egypt. The Lord's Day commemorates Christians resting in the finished work of Christ the resurrected Son of God. In this sense, the Sabbath was a typological sign of the (future) saving work of Christ. But the word "sabbath' is never applied to the first day of the week, and Sunday is never called the Christian Sabbath -- in this the Westminster Confession errs.

We worship together on the first day of the week because that was when the Lord rose, and that is the example of the 1st century Christians. The Fourth Commandment was a type of the believer's rest in the future saving work of Christ, and was a ceremonial law just likie circumcision.

Is the Bible Mysterious?

2011-08-22T13:48:00.000-04:00

Calvinist and Eastern Orthodox writers both like to cite mystery. It sounds valid, since the infinite God is beyond our complete comprehension. But think: God can't be beyond all human comprehension, or we couldn't know anything about Him, even with a Bible.

Some say that our knowledge and God's knowledge are only analogous to each other. But to say this is meaningless on one hand (since the only part of an analogy that makes it work is the one bit that is just like something else, which means that one bit is not an analogy), and it's a prescription for sinful doubt on the other (since an “analogous” knowledge that never overlaps with anything we know, or can know, might as well not exist as far us ever knowing it is concerned). The Bible doesn't blow blue smoke-rings of mystery at us.

This sloppy theological use of “mystery” is a mask for laziness, in my opinion. What I call “mysterious” could really mean that I'm just a poor Bible interpreter. It is too easy to blow a fog of mystery across our interpretive mistakes, logical inconsistencies, confused language, and weak thinking. For example, let's propose that unconditional election contradicts Scripture. Calling election “mysterious” wouldn't change that.

The Bible is not mysterious. It was written in common Hebrew, normal-guy Aramaic, and street Greek. Parts of the Bible are harder to understand than other parts1, but all of it is a lamp and a light. For example, I cannot understand how the Trinity can exist, since nothing like the Trinity exists on the earth, but I understand that the Trinity exists.

The Bible is mysterious? If anything, the Bible is much too clear! That's why so many people dislike it. If it was as mysterious as skeptics and mystics make it out to be, no one would ever be bothered by it.

"Keep The Oil, I Want My Husband"

2011-08-18T17:03:00.000-04:00

Last night, I was leading a Bible discussion group from 2 Kings chapter 4. It's a story where the widow of one of Elisha's students comes to him, because she owes money and the creditor is threatening to take her sons as slaves. Elisha tells her to load up the house with empty pots. She starts pouring oil from her little pot, and it miraculously becomes the never-ending pot of oil. She fills every single container in the house, and is able to sell off the valuable oil, pay off their debt, and still have enough to spare for herself and her sons to live on.

In the flow of discussion, I found myself thinking like a skeptic, and a thought came to me. Instead of a miracle, wouldn't she have preferred her husband? Why did her husband need to die, since God (being God) could have easily prevented his death? Why couldn't the Lord just have resuscitated her husband a la Lazarus?

Then, as we discussed this, I was reminded that the Lord had done something to save her husband's life. He would send His Son to die for her husband's sins, and secure a home in heaven for him. Her husband was resting in the blessed place with father Abraham and all the other Old testament believers, because the Lord Jesus was, with certainty, going to redeem him approximately 1500 years hence.

But why did the husband need to die at that time, in that way, and why did sorrow upon sorrow need to be heaped upon this poor lady?

Another comment was made that she seemed to have waited until her personal situation had reached the absolute breaking-point. How similar to us is this? We struggle to solve our troubles until we have nothing left, and only then we go to God (or, in her case, to the prophet Elisha, who was God's representative). Could she not have gone to the prophet much earlier? She could have. Nevertheless, Elisha graciously does not chide her. Perhaps our sloganish talk about how the Lord waits till the very last moment to rescue us in our distress is more a reflection of our tardiness in approaching Him?

The Lord told Jehoshaphat in chapter three that it was a "light" thing for Him to supply them with water. Filling up this lady's vessels with oil (= money) was an equally easy, light thing for God to do. Why didn't God just hand Elisha a bag of money, to give to the woman? Because she had to face a test of her faith. If she had not put out the pots, no oil would have poured forth. She had to obey the Lord's commandment before the Lord would work the miracle.

So how should we apply that?

Marrying Wisely

2011-08-18T13:50:00.000-04:00

A Christian marriage can be lawful, but unwise. What are the guidelines for any Christian to marry wisely?

Do you love and desire each other? There's a good reason why God included the Song of Solomon in His Bible. Godliness and faith are compatible with romance and passion. Marriage isn't a business partnership. Solomon loved the farm girl, and she loved him. They wanted to be together romantically, sought each other out, and missed each other when they were apart. Notice that they loved each other -- they didn't love intercourse. Sexual lust is a selfish, law-breaking desire for intercourse. It uses the other person as a tool to gain pleasure. Song of Solomon is about a passion for the person, not a decadent thirst for pleasure. If I asked you, "Can you imagine living without this person in your life?", what would you answer?

Do you accept the built-in responsibilities of Christian husbandhood or wifehood? If a Christian woman is ready to obey Ephesians 5:22-24 and 33b for the rest of her life, not as some vague principle in the abstract but in a real, daily relationship with this specific man, then she is ready. If a Christian man is ready to daily obey Ephesians 5:25-33 toward this specific woman, for the rest of his life, then he is ready. Both people in the relationship must fully accept their impending marital responsibility, without any mental reservation. I say this knowing that we often fail these commitments, the same way we fail any of our commitments to Christ. This is why Christ shed His blood -- to atone for our failures. But the other person must have confidence that you will be faithful to live up to the yoke of the marriage covenant. If you are not ready to accept the role, then you aren't ready to marry, and the other person can't trust you, which will kill the marriage anyway.

Have you counted the costs in other ways? Costs, literally. When two people marry, they accept legal liability for each other's debts. If there are significant cultural differences between the two people (e.g., different ethnicities, different social classes), these will pose adjustment challenges. Are there health issues to be considered, which might impact a person's longevity, or the ability to safely father/bear children? If any of the parents oppose the marriage, this needs to be taken seriously. Sometimes parents oppose a marriage for sound reasons. Sometimes a parent opposes a marriage out of foolishness, religious bigotry, racial bigotry, possessiveness of the adult child, or just a small-minded dislike of the potential son or daughter-in-law. Even if these cases, the problems they pose ought to be soberly considered. I do not believe that an adult requires the blessing of every parent, since there are many wicked, godless parents in the world. But you should try to foresee what challenges lie ahead, without losing your faith as you consider what they will be.

Remember, after you say "I do", there are no take-backs. Six years in, you are not allowed to say, "I underestimated this challenge, and this is too hard, I'm breaking our covenant." It's impossible to foresee every future mountain you will need to climb together, but your pre-marital commitment needs to be that you two know that there will be mountains to climb, and you two will climb those mountains together.

Who Should You Marry?

2011-07-27T14:25:00.000-04:00

I believe the Scripture says that any committed Christian guy has the freedom to marry any committed Christian girl, and vice versa. Look at Paul's advice to the Christian widow in 1 Corinthians 7:39, for instance. One limit is that neither person should be illegitimately divorced (Matthew 19:9). Marrying an illegitimately-divorced person amounts to committing adultery. Another limit is that neither person can be involved in the sort of sins that get you put out of a church (1 Corinthians 5:9-12). But apart from those limits, there's a lot of freedom.

The third principle of marriage is to marry wisely. Two committed Christians can find each other but be majorly out-of-sync with each other in stuff like major beliefs (born-again-but-Catholic girl & Baptist guy), clashing convictions on how the male-female role relationship should work, or basic maturity issues like selfishness or problem-solving abilities. These differences could be successfully ironed out, but if they remain then they are likely to become a major and permanent irritant in the relationship.

But we should be careful not to make ourselves anxious about finding "The One & Only." Within these basic boundaries, there are likely to be *many* Christian girls whom a Christian guy could really, really like & could make a wonderful home, and the same goes for finding a Christian guy. God has a plan for us, but we are only responsible to do what's humanly possibl;e -- not try to read the heavenly tea-leaves of God's hidden plan. We've advised our son to consider what qualities his closest Christian guy friends share, and then stay alert for a Christian girl who also has those qualities. A life-time best-friendship, with marriage, sex, and hopefully children added in!

Why "Reconstructing America For God" Is Unbiblical

2011-06-29T12:05:00.000-04:00

How should Christianity relate to the governments of the world? What should be our approach? I have been using a Theonomist DVD in our Wednesday night Bible study, to illustrate both right and wrong ways to approach this question. As we have discussed the issues raised by speakers like R. J. Rushdoony and Ken Gentry, we've arrived at a certain consensus among ourselves:

Christians are called to influence all of society with Bible teaching, including the government. Matthew 13:33. The woman in the parable is the Church (or Christ's disciples, in a less-specific sense). The leaven is the teaching of Christ. Leaven (yeast) is often used in the Gospels as a metaphor for teachings. The woman works the yeast of Christ's teachings into the lump of dough (society). The old Dispensational teaching that yeast always, in every case, represents something sinful, is untrue. Christ used yeast as a picture of the ideas spread through teaching, whatever the teaching was.

We teach moral law as the government's definition of good & evil. Romans 13:3. Words like "good" and "evil" need to be defined, and the Word of God defines them. there is no secular authority that can correctly define good or evil. Only God can do that. Since every government is required to reward good and suppress evil, then every government is obligated to follow God's definitions of good and evil. An ethically neutral government can't exist.

We apply God-given wisdom to society's problems. (Proverbs/Ecclesiastes). All true wisdom comes down from above, from the Father of lights (James 1). Moral law forms the framework in which we think through problems, but mnoral laws don't answer the "hows" and "when, where, whys" of every possible problem.

Our loving, godly social influence salts society. Matt. 5:13-16. Christians commend the Bible to non-Christians by living godly, loving lives. This penetrates every aspect of society. But it assumes that Christians even exist in a particular society, or that the ones who do exist there are leading godly, loving lives. Consequently, evangelism takes priority over social reform.

However, Christian Reconstructionism is a Biblically aberrant, destructive movement. Where are the errors in the “Reconstruct America For God” theology?

First: The Church can't bring in the political aspects of Christ's kingdom. This is because unbelievers are spiritually incapable of obeying God's laws, Romans 8:7-8. In addition,
Satan rules over unbelievers, I John 5:19. Satan is not bound! That foolish idea springs out of a twisting of Revelation 20. These factors are why European Christendom was such a hypocritical failure.

Second: Moses' Law doesn't apply to Gentiles. The prologue to the Ten Commandments tells us that God gave Moses' Law to the Jews only, and no one else. Ex. 20:1-2. No other nation on the earth has a national covenant with God. Ministries like CBN for years have perpetuated the myth that the United States also has a national covenant with God. But covenants are only established by God -- no one can decide on their own to create a covenant with Almighty God and then declare it so. If you look at the first chapter of Amos, you see that God held the pagan nations accountable to the moral law, not Moses' Law. Moses' Law is not moral law. Moses' Law included moral (that is, universal and timeless moral rules) in the over-all legislative mix.

Third: God ended Moses' Law when Christ came, Galatians 3:19, 23-25. Nothing in Moses' Law carries authority anymore. Only the New Testament establishes moral law now. The New Testament tells us which parts of Moses' Law were timeless, and which parts can be applied in principle (like Paul quoting the Levitical execution law as a basis for church discipline, in I Corinthians 5). But Moses' Covenant was fulfilled at the cross, as Colossians 2 says.

Christianity is incapable of being a state religion. Christ recognized the validity of non-Christian rulers. He affirmed Caesars right to levy taxes, Lk. 20:19-26, and, writing through Paul, he affirmed the legitimacy of non-Christian governments -- Rom. 13:1. Christ even allowed unbelief to persist in society. Jesus' rebuke of the disciples in Lk. 9:51-56 had civil implications. He refused to execute even the unbelieving Israelites. Christ told Pilate (in an backward kind of way) that his authority to rule came from God; and that His disciples would not fight with swords to defend His crown rights.

Christianity is based on the New Covenant, which is the individual covenant of salvation, not a group covenant of nationhood (Abrahamic). Hebrews 8:7-13. Thius is one of the deepest, most fundamental errors in Reformed theology -- the equating of all the covenants into a national covenant, hence the New Covenant into a national covenant.

Custodian of Secrets

2011-06-22T14:08:00.000-04:00

Yet another feature of pastoring that seminary never mentioned is how the pastor becomes the custodian of other people's secrets. Some secrets should never be kept, specifically those that involve crimes, or someone's suitability for a task that impacts other people in the church. The cliche that the priest may never speak what is shared in the confessional not only isn't legally true, it isn't applicable to the Christian pastor. There are also people who are emotionally ill, and whose extreme notions of what they call discretion aren't reasonable in a healthy relationship. However, gossip and being a tale-bearer is a sin. This might not be hard for a naturally quiet man, but for the extroverted temperament it can be a major challenge to keep his or her lips locked shut. The fruit of the Spirit which applies here is self-discipline. People feeling called to enter the ministry, or men interested in serving as elders or deacons, should be forewarned that they will become privy to insider information of all kinds. They will also need to publicly relate to people in social situations about whom they know sensitive secrets. For a job that demands a high level of speaking (preaching), the alternate power of being able not to speak is as valuable as gold.

Responding To Life's Afflictions

2011-06-22T10:16:00.000-04:00

The old hymn It Is Well With My Soul spoke of times when Satan buffets us and trials come. What does it mean to us when such troubles come upon us? The holy Bible teaches several possible meanings behind the trials of life.

One explanation is that they're meant to free us from self-reliance. The apostle Paul says that troubles produce perseverance in faith, and then that perseverance produces good character and hope in God when He comes through (Romans 5:3-4). Self-reliance -- which is faith in one's self rather than faith in God -- is the enemy of our happiness. God throws obstacle courses into our path, in order to work the mental and spiritual flab off us. The process is often agonizing, but the final results are impressive, and we wouldn't go back to the way we were before we climbed those mountains. Paul says in II Corinthians 1 that self-reliance is such a bad thing that the Lord was willing to inflict such severity of trouble that they were convinced they were going to die, in order to free them of the sin of self-reliance.

Another explanation is that, yes, they are punishments for specifc sins. We should be glad that God doesn't punish all sin. If the Lord went after every one of our sins, none of us would survive (Psalm 130:3-4). But God does target particularly grievous sins. For example, many Christians in Corinth were sick, and some died, because of abuse going on in the church and how their mistreatment of the poor dishonored the table of the Lord (I Corinthians 11:30). Paul warns us that God is not mocked, and that we will reap what we sow (Galatians 6:7). If we foster the sinful flesh, then our sinful flesh will reap corruption. Jonah is an example of a man of God who willfully defied the Lord, and God inflicted horrifying punishment upon him.

A third explanation is that our troubles are designed to force us from one place in life to another. There are times when God wants to move us. For instance, a great persecution broke out in Jerusalem after Stephen's martyrdom, and all the Christian believers had to scatter into the surrounding regions (Acts 8:1). You can just imagine how disruptive this was to their lives, and their children's lives. But it resulted in the Gospel being spread rapidly, like dandelion seed blown to the wind, beyond the boundaries of Jerusalem; and this was the Lord's priority. I believe there are times when the Lord is focing us onward in some direction. We might not know where we're going to end up, but then we discover once we get there that we have some God-ordained role to play in new people's lives, and they in ours.

How should we respond? In the first case, we shoukd pray for the grace of perseverance, and recognize that God is applying therapy to us. He is working to strengthen our spiritually limp arms and our weak knees. We can pray our way through the trial, even as we're trying to cope with it. God will give us the wisdom we need to know what to do and how to do it (James 1:5). In the second case, we need to repent and ask God's forgiveness. If we are ignorant of what we've done wrong, we should ask God to open our eyes to our own attitudes and actions. Usually God removes the affliction, as we see in James chapter 5. Once believers confess their sins one to another, and pray, God takes the affliction of sickness away. When ancient Israel repented of their sins, God stopped afflicting them with the curses of the Law, and began blessing them instead. In the third case, we should cooperate with whatever God is doing. We might want to remain where we are, whether out of inertia, pleasure, or fear of change, but the Lord might be pushing us someplace new. We need to submit to it, if that is in fact what He's doing.

Enthusiasm Isn't Enough

2011-06-16T09:30:00.000-04:00

One of the hard lessons I learned from our five tough years in Houston was that zeal for the work of God isn't enough to qualify you for a particular task in that work. I was invited to become the pastor of a small multi-cultural church plant, and I accepted, when I should not have. While it's true that God had a plan for our lives, and we all grew in lots of ways over those five years, I was un-qualified for that job as far as know-how goes. I had no training in church planting, and had no practical experience in pastoring or cross-cultural ministries. We felt missionary zeal for the Lord's work in the world, and the Lord was leading me out of my educational staff role at Columbia Bible College. But zeal isn't enough; you also need to have some idea what you're doing. Amazingly, I can't recall anyone on my end of things ever making the "no-kidding" observation that these were very hard ministry tasks for which I had no first-hand practical knowledge, and had I considered maybe being an assistant pastor in a stable church first? Taking a reckless leap isn't faith.

The Need For Perseverance By Men in Christian Leadership

2011-06-07T11:19:00.000-04:00

"None are more exposed to slanders and insults than godly teachers. This comes not only from the difficulty of their duties, which are so great that sometimes they sink under them, or stagger, or halt, or take a false step, so that wicked men find many occasions of finding fault with them, but added to that, even when they do all their duties correctly and commit not even the smallest error, they never avoid a thousand criticisms.

"It is indeed a trick of Satan to estrange men from their ministers so as gradually to bring their teaching into contempt. In this way not only is wrong done to innocent people, whose reputation is undeservedly injured, but the authority of God's holy teaching is diminished...

"The more sincerely any pastor strives to further Christ's kingdom, the more he is loaded with spite, the more fierce the attacks upon him become. And not only so, but as soon as any charge is made against ministers of the Word, it is believed as surely and firmly as if it had already been proved. This happens not only because a higher standard of integrity is required from them, but because Satan makes most people, in fact nearly everyone, overly credulous so that without investigation, they eagerly condemn their pastors whose good name they ought to be defending."

John Calvin, The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians and the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon (Eerdmans, 1996), p. 263.

The Church That Thinks Like A Missionary

2011-05-31T14:33:00.000-04:00

THE SEEKER CHURCH MOVEMENT
Pros & Cons

Disciple-making is the local church's commission – This is our “manward” purpose.

Disciple-making is not that growth thing we do after someone comes to Christ. Matthew 28 disciple-making = evangelism, baptism, & Christian growth and service, the total package. Disciple-making also covers domestic and international missions. Seeker-church leaders have done well to remind us that it is our job to make new disciples. But methods that increase attendance are means to an end (exposure to God's Word), not ends in themselves.

Scripture, the Norm Over All Norms – It's our highest authority, but not our only authority.

We follow sola scriptura, not solo scriptura. The ministry cannot be done properly without experience-based knowledge. The Bible approves the value of knowledge. Seeker literature is right to advocate the use of research & practical information. But research can only describe, it can't prescribe. Only the Bible can ethically say what ought to be done. The ends (goals) do indeed justify the means (methods). Why would you do something that doesn't work? But the goals have to be Biblical and the methods have to be ethical and wise.

Understand, Adapt, & Serve – We tailor how we do what we do to whom we're doing it for.

A “serving attitude” is the attitude that Christ took. We realize that lost people are blind, deaf, and resistant. 1st Cor. 9:19-22 says that adaptation and holiness are both true. Be careful not to think of people as “customers.” Helping unbelieving people solve their problems can build a bridge to them. Ministry design for non-Christians and ministry design for Christians differ.

Evangelism – Think like missionaries, not like “church people.”

When in Rome...: The Gospel can cross any cultural barrier, because the message speaks to universal need, and the power of the Holy Spirit is greater than human cultural prejudices. But, as a general rule, people will accept someone who is more like them than someone who is unlike them. Don't seem alien. Communicate well: Since God works through normal means, do your best to communicate well. It is bad to be unprepared, unenthusiastic, or unconcerned with why the message matters. Prioritize interested people: Focus in on those who are interested in spiritual things. Don't completely abandon the indifferent (since they might change their attitudes), but you can start many fruitful chain-reactions by working closely with the people who have “ears to hear.” Gracious patience: We will need to graciously forbear with sins among the lost that would bring church discipline upon a believer. Sunday: There is no better place for a non-Christian to be on a Sunday than in church hearing the Word of God! But the pastor will need to make sure that his preaching makes sense to non-Christians (even if they don't “get” some of it), without depriving the Christian flock of spiritual food.

Trust and Obey

2011-05-27T09:41:00.000-04:00

One time I was bitterly accused of performing a pastoral responsibility because of a sense of responsibility.

I was taken aback by this being thrown at me. For one thing, the accuser was filled with bitterness, which tells you that the Holy Spirit is not speaking. Second, the accuser was guilty of judging. I did want to be there at that moment, doing the Christian service that I was doing, so the accusation was flat wrong.

But the idea that pastors should act out of sentiment, rather than out of faith in God's Word, reflected warped thinking. Jesus told a parable about two brothers, who were asked by their father to help him in the fields. One brother said yes, then didn't go. The other brother said no, then repented out of respect for the father and he went.

The bottom line was that only the second son obeyed, and only obedience counts -- not authenticity so-called. I wonder if the first brother felt "authenticity" when he told his father "yes"! Even if he did, it didn't amount to a hill of beans, because the only thing that matters to God is obedience, and since it isn't possible to obey apart from faith, that means the second son was motivated by faith.

"Trust and obey
For there's no other way
To be happy in Jesus
Than to trust and obey."

You don't wait until you feel certain emotions, then obey the Lord. You obey the Lord by faith regardless, and commit your feelings to the Lord, and His Spirit will bring the feelings. This appraoch to serving the Lord is a key difference between a spiritual adult and a spiritual child.

The Wrath of God

2011-05-17T10:24:00.000-04:00

It is an evangelical myth that God "hates the sin but loves the sinner." There would be no sin if not for sinners. God loves the sinner, and has loved the sinner. But, in a different sense, God also hates the sinner. The Bible teaches that God is angry at sinners, hates, and rejects them.

God's hatred of sinners springs out of His perfect righteousness. Because God is perfectly righteous, He cursed Adam and Eve with suffering and death when they sinned. Genesis 3:16-24. Because he is the Judge of the whole earth, He cursed Cain for murdering Abel. Genesis 4:10-12. God regretted ever creating us (Genesis 6:5-7). This regret, and God's feeling appalled by the human race, led up to God killing everyone with the great flood, except for Noah and his family (Gen. 6:8).

A second American-evangelical myth is that God unconditionally accepts people just as they are. It has never been true that God unconditionally accepts people as they are. There is a wall between us and God, a wall that God put there, because of our sins (Isaiah 59:2). The divinely-ordained worship system that God set up for Israel taught them that they were not acceptable just as they were. No one was allowed into the tabernacle but the priests, and even they had to ceremonially purify themselves first. No one was allowed into the Holy of Holies but the high priest. Representative blood always had to be shed, to atone for Israel's sins, and to ward off God's wrath.

David wrote: "You are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with You. The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity. You shall destroy those who speak falsehood; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man." Psalm 5:4-6. Confirming David's word, the Bible teaches elsewhere that everyone is wicked and evil. The "goodness" we claim to see in others is a weak, watered-down, comparative human goodness -- a goodness motivated by emotions, or habit, or hidden self-interest, or the fear of negative consequences if we don't do what's right.

This sort of shallow, flimsy goodness is preferable to open warfare, but it is not God's goodness. It's shallow, sentimental, biased, and unprincipled. Everyone is a worker of iniquity, God says in Romans 3:10-18. Everyone speaks falsehoods.

Psalm 130:3 said that no one would survive if God rewarded or punished according to our actual merit. Verse 4 comforts by revealing that God is willing to forgive. But sometimes God decides to judge.

God determined to kill Eli's two sons because of their sins, and for that reason God caused them to ignore their father's warnings. I Samuel 2:12-17, 22-25. The text says that their indifference to Eli's warning was God's doing, setting them up for punishment on their prior sins.

God hated/rejected Esau and his descendants, in a tribal-blessing sense (Malachi 1:1-4). The Lord's tearing-down of Edom magnified His name outside the borders of Israel (verse 5).

Paul wrote: "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness" (Romans 1:18). Human beings are not truth seekers, according to Paul. We are truth suppressors, and idolators. If you look carefully at Romans 1, you will find that homosexuality is God's punishment on people for their defiance against Him. God punishes the idolator by turning him or her over to self-destroying desire.

Although God does not gain pleasure from punishing the wicked (Ezekiel 18:31-32), He also does not love the souls who are in Hell. He showed love toward them while they were alive in this world by giving them natural blessings (Matthew 5:43-48). He showed love to them by sending Christ (John 3:16).

But Hell is nothing but God's relentless justice. There is no grace or blessing in Hell. God has fixed a gulf between Heaven and Hell so that even the slightest act of compassion, even a single drop of water on the tongue of one who is in the fire, is rendered impossible (Luke 16:19-21). Hell glorifies the greatness of God's justice, just as Heaven glorifies His undeserved love and mercy.

Here is why it is important for you to believe in the wrath of God toward sinners:

You can't be saved if you don't believe in God's wrath. Gabriel said that Jesus would save His people from their sins. Jesus did not come to save people from their purposelessness, depression, low self-esteem, physical illness, poverty, drug addiction, or unjust social systems. He came to save us from the wrath of God. He came to save us from His Father. We are saved from God by God. There is no good reason to even become a Christian, if God isn't wrathful.

We are worshiping a false God, if we reject the idea of the wrath of God toward sinners. If we don't believe in God's wrath, then we don't believe in His righteousness, or humanity's sinfulness. The reason God is wrathful is because He is righteous and we are very wicked. If God were not righteous, then He wouldn't be angry; and if the human race wasn't evil, He wouldn't be angry. But God is righteous, and we are evil, so as a result He is angry at all sinners.

If we don't accept the idea of God's wrath -- the wrath that in the past drowned the human race, raised up armies to lay waste to whole nations, that one day will rain fire down on the world, and then in the end will condemn sinners to the lake of fire for all eternity -- then we aren't worshiping God. We're worshiping some sort of (God forbid) giant version of Oprah.

We cannot understand grace if you don't understand wrath first. Grace doesn't mean "power." Grace isn't mere facilitation. Grace means "gift." What makes God's grace to you amazing is that you deserve to be burned. We aren't neutral. We're bad people, and we deserve punishment. It is this fact -- our moral worthlessness -- that makes the true worth of God's grace glitter.

Humility is essential for God's assistance through life. God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). You will never enter into humility, and the consequent blessings that come from humility, if you don't understand God's righteousness. Christian humility isn't just the fact that God is "big" and we are small in comparison, or that God is "strong" and we are weak in comparison. Humility begins with the fact that only God is good and we are not good. The rich young ruler who claimed to be sinless was proud, so Christ immediately hit him with this: "Only God is good" (Mark 10:18).

Last, the wrath of God is one of our motives for evangelism. We pursuade men because we know the fear of God, Paul said (2 Corinthians 5:11). If people aren't condemned sinners in the eyes of a holy God, then there's no reason to share the Gospel with them.

Distortions In "Lordship Salvation" Doctrines

2011-05-11T09:26:00.000-04:00

A major problem in Lordship Salvation theology is that it confuses good works as the evidence of justifying faith, with good works as a condition for justification. The Scripture teaches the first, not the second. In fact, the second falls under the censure of Paul in Galatians 1:6-8. To say that law-keeping is such a part of faith that law-keeping justifies you because faith justifies you, might be a clever trick of verbal legerdemain, but it is heretical.

When you read my opening sentence, underline the word "confuses". I'm not saying that LS teachers say that good works are a condition for justification. You can read writers like John MacArthur, J. Montgomery Boice, and others, and you'll see them clearly affirm justification by faith. They are on record about this. However, they want to forge such a tight bond between faith and works that it creates dangerous ambiguity. The British Puritans fell into the same trap.

In my opinion, a great deal of Lordship rhetoric is driven by a reactionary spirit, reacting against antinomianism that is both real in some cases, exagerrated in others, and non-existent in yet others. For example, I think it is likely that some will comment on this note by talking about the worst errors of Zane Hodges or certain other Free Grace preachers. the reply back will be, "You're both wrong."

Ironically, Lordship's blurring of this line (between good works as a general evidence of faith vs. good works equalling faith) is inconsistent with the Larger Catechism Question 73, which says that faith justifies not because of good works that are the fruits of it...or any act thereof (Harmony of the Westminster Confession and Catechism, Morton H. Smith, p. 57). I say ironic, since most LS teachers are Reformed, at least in their views on salvation.

Lordship Salvation teaching misinterprets Christ's teachings about what it means to be a disciple, which in itself reflects an underlying problem with LS using vague definitions of the word "disciple". To assume that every time Christ teaches about discipleship that He was teaching about "how to be saved" is wrong. We know this, because we know from Jesus' teachings on salvation (not the least of which is John 3:16) that we are not saved by forsaking father and mother, or by giving all our goods to the poor, or by carrying our cross, or by putting our hands to the plow and never looking back. We also know from our own practical experience that there are saved people who fail to obey those commands. Including us.

A disciple was someone who had professed faith in Christ as Son of God and Messiah and been baptized. Although there were many thousands who listened to Christ, and so they were in that very loose sense "learners", they were not disciples until they confessed faith in Him and were baptized. This is how the people at Jesus' trial used the word when they identified Peter as one of Christ's men. Not everyone in every crowd was a disciple simply because they were willing to listen to Jesus' messages.

This fact is significant because it means that Jesus' teachings about discipleship were given to people who had already made professions of faith. Disciples were insiders, not outsiders. We know there were tares among the wheat, certainly, and many of them outed themselves as false professors by falling away from Him later. We see an example of this in the crowd's reaction to Jesus in John chapter 6.

But when Jesus taught His disciples what He expected of them, He wasn't teaching them how to become believers because, by definition, a "disciple" has already made profession of faith. They had already crossed that initial line. This is one way we know that Christ's teachings on discipleship were not about how to be saved.

Lordship Salvation teaches an exagerrated view of regeneration. Again, men like MacArthur affirm sin in the believer but often contradicts himself, or zigs and zags in confusing ways. On one hand, LS teachers say that sinless perfection is impossible. They deny a second work of grace, and teach that sin remains in the believer. But then, on the other hand, they intensely deny the very existence of carnal Christians (even though "carnal" simply means is "worldly" or "immature", see 1st Cor. 3:1-3). The "marks of regeneration" they teach imply that the new birth destroys a Christian's ability to willfully or habitually sin. It is as if they believe in a first-work-of-grace perfectionism, if such a doctrine existed.

I once heard a PCA preacher say that if someone ever knowingly stole something, that person should consider himself a non-Christian. I wonder if impregnating your mistress, then setting up her innocent husband to die on a battlefield to cover it all up, should raise any doubts. Yet we know that David was a saved man.

The practical effect of this near-perfectionism doctrine is to strip everyone of assurance. It makes assurance of salvation (one's own or someone else's) impossible, even though the Bible teaches that everyone can have assurance opf their own salvation. Lordship Salvation doctrine makes normal Christians afraid of going to Hell.

Lordship Salvation in that sense is also self-centeredly subjective, and focuses on experience rather than promise. It promotes moral navel-gazing, and destroys confidence in one's own relationship with the Lord. It does this because there is remaining sin in every believer, including willful, knowledgeable, and habitual sins (the sin that so easily entangles, it says in Hebrews 12).

For these reasons I do not adhere to Lordship Salvation doctrine over-all, even though i agree with portions of it.

Rob Bell's LOVE WINS

2011-05-03T11:17:00.000-04:00

I'm not going to pretend to have no prior opinion about this book, even though contemporary rhetoric recommends that I pose as neutral in order to be more persuasive. That would be dishonest. I've already read enough reviews to have developed at least a general idea of what this book is about. However, I found often enough, in my years as a graduate faculty assistant, that grades need to be based on what the author really writes.

Regardless of what Bell-o-philes might claim, there are ways to isolate and evaluate someone's claims fairly, even if the reviewer is skeptical. The rules of logic and evidence are valuable for that reason. Their formulae empower a reader to set feeling aside to some degree. I also chose to skim past Bell's heavy use of illustrations, stories, and wordplay. Since my only goals was to identify what the man teaches, and his evidences for the same, the illustrative frills don't matter.

The book is not a hard read. Considering that it uses 1-inch margins, what looks like 13-point font size, and places large spaces between paragraphs, the book is heavily padded out. It's a travesty that HarperOne charges somewhere north of $20 for this book. Had it been published in its true size, it would have been little more than a pamphlet. Considering how much Bell denounces greed, it's hypocritical that he's making so much money off such a plumped up pamphlet. Jesus said some things about men who preach one way then live the other.

There should be no question what Rob Bell thinks of the traditional Christian doctrine of Hell. He says it is misguided, toxic, and subverts the Gospel (preface, viii). Anyone who says that Bell is unclear regarding his stand on the doctrine of Hell either hasn't read this book, or is lying. That is his thesis. So the responsibility for proof falls on him to demonstrate the truth of his claim. Does he prove it? Here is a list of examples of Bell's stream of thought, with my observation afterward:

Jesus responded to almost every question he was asked with a question (preface, x). Bell implies that Jesus' use of questions justifies his use of them. However, two things come to mind. One is that Jesus did a great deal of assertive preaching. Anyone who says that Jesus' main communication method was to heap the questioner with more questions, in the contemporary, post-modernistic way, has never read the four Gospels.

People in the past who thought the same way as Bell about heaven and hell were orthodox (preface, x). Since he hasn't proven his view yet, this additional claim also needs proving. After all, if Bell's view is wrong, then these unnamed figures of the past were also wrong. Truth isn't based on who holds a view, or how many hold it. Bell is appealing ad populum -- "a lot of other people believe the same way I do, so it must be true."

Bell claims that the traditional doctrine of Hell demands us to say that abortions would be a good thing, since they would send the baby to heaven (4). I was going to call this a poor attempt at a syllogism, but then realized that it's circular reasoning. Bell's claim only grabs you if you share his assumption that the traditional doctrine of Hell is unfair because it says that God sends undeserving people to Hell. He's building his abortion statement on the very idea that he's trying to prove, which is cheating. But, really, we can't see too much substance in Bell's comment. The comment is only there for shock value. It doesn't actually make any sense.

Bell talks a great deal about love, but he never defines what he means by the word. The implication of the book is that "love" means whatever Rob Bell and lots of other people say love means. What is Bell's criteria for defining 'love"? He speaks ipse dixit -- it is whatever I, Rob Bell, say it is. But who is Rob Bell, and why should anyone else respect what he thinks love is?

Bell mildly ridicules the idea that Heaven is somewhere other than here. Even though at one point he asserts that Heaven is a place, his repeated snide comments about Heaven being thought of as "somewhere else" (the derisive phrase he uses on pg. 6 and elsewhere) deserves to be called gibberish, considering that the whole Bible talks about Heaven as being, well, someplace other than here (Earth). Heaven is a place, Earth isn't Heaven, therefore Heaven is somewhere else than Earth. Why is that funny? Bell encourages us to laugh at something that is neither funny nor non-funny. It's like mocking people's belief that Toronto is the capitol of Canada.

He utters similar gibberish when he says that Heaven is "more real" than the Earth (57). This is a branch of philosophy called ontology, a subject about which I doubt Bell knows anything. There aren't degrees of realness. Maybe it's a preaching line, designed to make emotional people go "oooh." Heaven is not a place where the people there go on forever (58). Heaven = God (58). Heaven = the earth in the future (58). Heaven = the joy, peace, and love we can experience in this life (59). Don't look for clear, well-founded word definitions in this book. Equivocation, thy name is Rob Bell.

He says that emphasizing salvation from Hell and for Heaven is the same thing as not caring about people (pgs. 7, 78-79). In addition to being the either/or fallacy, Bell in effect smears generations of traditional Christians from all denominations who loved their neighbors as themselves. Is this the composition fallacy (attributing qualities from one sample to the whole group, like saying that because one snowflake is so light that a whole bunch of snowflakes together would also be light)? Or is it just bigotry? Or worse yet, encouraging the bigotries of a certain kind of audience?

Bell mangles the encounter between Jesus and the rich young ruler (Matthew 19). Instead of the traditional interpretation, that Jesus sought to open the young man's eyes to his own sins, Bell decides that Jesus was teaching salvation by law-keeping (41-42). Bell also calls Jesus a prophet from a long line of prophets (32), which makes me want to know more about his Christology.

On the subject of Hell proper, Bell points out that the Old Testament has little to say about it (64-65), which is somewhat true. The New Testament teaches much more about the afterlife than the Old Testament. However, the Old Testament taught the immortality of the soul (Jesus made that case against the Sadducees, based on God's use of the present-tense "am", when He said, "I am the God of Abraham..."), and that the wicked remain classified as wicked. In fact, Daniel 12:2 says that some will rise to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt.

You should pay special attention to Daniel 12:2. Not only does Daniel assert a distinction between the righteous and the wicked in the afterlife, he also applies the Hebrew word for "everlasting" to life and contempt equally. Bell ignores this verse. He does so, because it blows up the core thesis of his book. If something "everlasting" is temporary, as Bell claims, then Daniel 12:2 means that those raised to life will only have life temporarily. The same adjective is applied to life and contempt in Daniel 12:2. Bell habitually omits any Biblical data that seems to contradict his thesis.

Bell asserts that man is sovereign over himself (72), and that we all have God-given goodness (73). So in two pages he denies God's sovereignty and denies man's depravity. Bell isn't an Arminian. He is, at best, semi-Pelagian, and, I suspect, possibly altogether Pelagian.

Jesus' gospel is a call to social revolution, calling everyone to human solidarity (75). The gospel is a losing-your-life-then-finding-it ethic (76). Jesus' teaching about the rich man and Lazarus was an illustration of a truth about the importance of unselfish living (77). Jesus warning His fellow Jews about God's coming wrath on Jerusalem means He did not teach eternal wrath (80-81). The fact that "everlasting" is sometimes used to apply to a limited amount of time proves that it is never applied to an unlimited amount of time (83-84). The fact that Jesus said that judgment day would be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for Capernaum proves that there's hope for eternal life for Sodom and Gomorrah (84).

He quotes Lamentations 3, "People are not cast off by the Lord forever", even though God there was referring to Israel as a covenanted nation before Him, not individuals. Bell will not affirm, and maybe doesn't even know about, the distinction Scripture makes between Jewish individuals and Israel as a whole. In Romans 11, Paul makes it clear that God has an on-going commitment to Israel over-all because of His covenant commitment to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Romans 11:28-29), even though individual elect Jews are converted while the rest are hardened in their sins and condemned (11:1-5). Bell doesn't show any consciousness of the uniqueness of Israel at all, and quotes promises for the nation of Israel as if they apply to the whole human race.

Bell questions the existence of Satan. He says that Satan might be an impersonal force or situation (89), and puts Satan's name in quotes on page 90.

Bell defines Hell as human evil and its practical consequences in life and society (93).

I think I'm going to pause here, even though there's more of the book to go. Here is my summary:

When it comes to handling the Bible, Rob Bell, in this book, is clearly incompetent. Criminally incompetent. In fact, considering that he has a degree from Wheaton College, I believe he is a liar. He is not some badly educated goof from the sticks. He cherry-picks Bible passages selectively, he quotes them out of their historical or literary context, and, more importantly, he leaves out everything that might contradict him. An honest man doesn't do these things. But cultists do. In fact, Bell does nearly everything that the typical Christian apologist warns us are red-flags to beware.

From a logic standpoint this is, without a doubt, one of the most badly reasoned essays I have ever seen. Each page is riddled with fallacies and deception. Straw man arguments, equivocation, appeals to numbers, appeals to emotion ("you wouldn't believe in a doctrine that makes sad mommies cry, would you?"), refusal to define his words, Bell is like a walking encyclopedia of illustrations of how not to think. I believe you could set this book before a non-Christian logic professor and, despite being a non-Christian, the logic professor would assign this book an "F".

Speaking from a pastoral standpoint, I have no reason, from this book, to believe that Rob Bell is a Christian. Professions of faith mean nothing, if you feel free to make words mean whatever you feel like making them mean. It is commonplace for liberal clergy to deceive their congregations by substituting humanistic meanings for Bible words. That is exactly what Bell does here. The congregation up at Mars Hill Bible Church must either be unconverted people themselves, or worldly Christians who don't know their Bibles. Does Bell believe that Jesus of Nazareth was God? Does he believe that Jesus died for mankind's sins? Does he believe in the bodily resurrection? Does he believe in salvation by faith alone (I would say not, which at that point alone puts him outside the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy). I've seen no evidence that he does, in the material I've reviewed.

Romans 10:13: : Must You Pray For Salvation To Be Saved?

2011-04-22T10:52:00.000-04:00

It is commonplace in certain Christian circles to teach that one must pray for salvation to be saved, and Romans 10:13 is always given as the proof-text. But the verse is cited without interpretation, and on closer examination we discover that "calling on the name of the Lord" doesn't refer to prayer at all!

In Romans 10, Paul expresses his desire and prayer for Israel's salvation (v. 1). The Jews of his time had a zeal for God, but it was not consistent with the spiritual knowledge God gave them in His word (v. 2). The Jews were ignorant of true righteousness, and in fact they were rebelling against it, seeking to create a faux righteousness in its place (v.3). Paul said this because faith in Jesus Christ is the purpose and end-goal of Moses' law, for all who believe without keeping the law (v.4).

Forget about the rabbis. How did Moses define the relationship between law and life? The law promises life in exchange for performance. You will be given life if you keep the laws (v.5). But this is not righteousness by faith. Faith-righteousness spoke to the Jews in this way: "Israel, don't pretend that God's word regarding how to be saved is far away, as if it is way up in heaven somewhere, or down at the bottom of the sea; as if the Savior had never come down from heaven, or had never risen from the grave" (vv. 6-7).

Instead, Paul says that Israel in his day knew perfectly well the message of faith-salvation that he and all the other apostles preached. Israel was not ignorant. The Gospel was in their minds, and they talked about it with each other (v. 8). If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved (v. 9-10).

Now pay close attention to Paul's words. Paul never says that we confess to the Lord Jesus. He says that we confess the Lord Jesus.

Jesus said the same thing. The confession Jesus required was a confession made to men. This was not a prayer, it was a testimony. Matthew 10:32: "Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven." This is because of the truth, from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks (Luke 6:45). Real faith in Christ proves itself true by saying so, especially in the face of opposition. The confession in itself has no saving merit. It's only value, and relevance to salvation, rests in it being an outward manifestation of faith in the heart.

Next, Paul quotes Joel 2:32: "Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." This is the passage Peter quotes in his first Pentecostal sermon (Acts 2:17-21). When the distraught crowd asked Peter what they should do, he tells them to "repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins" (2:38).

This is how Peter interpreted "calling on the name of the Lord." We call on the name of the Lord by repenting.* Peter never leads them in a prayer. Instead, he tells them to repent (i.e., believe the Gospel), and confess their faith through baptism.

So: calling on the name of the Lord has nothing to do with praying a prayer for salvation. Those well-intentioned folk who cite Romans 10:13 as proof that people must pray to be saved are mistaken. Their opinion is a product of tradition. Romans 10 doesn't truly teach what they sincerely think it says. Calling on the name of the Lord = repenting and believing the Gospel, with or without a prayer.

*Without veering off into an essay on baptism and Acts 2:38, I will say that Acts 2:38 clearl;y does not teach that one must be baptized to be saved. We have many examples in the Bible of people getting saved prior to baptism. All the Old Testament saints like Abraham and david were saved without baptism, and Paul says they were saved in the same way we are (Romans 4:1-8). Cornelius in Acts 10:44-46 proves that baptism is not necessary for salvation. We also have many examples of Peter and Paul never mentioning baptism in their instructions on how to be saved (Acts 3:19, 5:31, 13:39, 15:11, 16:28-31). These would be damnable omissions, if baptism was necessary for salvation. Paul in I Corinthians 1:17 tells the Corinthian church that baptism was not part of his message of salvation. Jesus in John 3:16 said that same. He who believes in Christ will not perish. When we apply the bigger context of Scripture to Acts 2:38, which is what we should always do whern interpreting any individual verse, we must conclude that Peter did not mean that baptism saves. Repentance and baptism both relate to remission (hence the word "for"), but the rest of Scripture clarifies that they relate to it in different ways. Repentance obtains cleansing from sin from God, baptism signifies and confesses it to men. The Churches of Christ teach salvation by good works).

"Pray For The Peace of Jerusalem" -- What Does That Actually Mean?

2011-04-20T10:41:00.000-04:00

"What??", you say. "Shouldn't we want the people of Jerusalem to live in peace and safety?" Well of course we do, the same we wish it for all nations. But the real issue is, what does Psalm 122:6 really mean? And is it a timeless command for all peoples?

Observe:

1. Psalm 122 is about the Hebrews traveling up Mount Zion and going to the tabernacle of the Lord, to attend worship services there (v. 1). The temple of the Lord did not yet exist during David's era. God ordained that Solomon build that. But the house of the Lord, the tabernacle, was there. Believers in Jesus Christ are the spiritual temple of the Lord, but that isn't what david was talking about. David is talking about the ancient gated city (v. 2-3).

2. David is speaking to the twelve tribes of Israel (v. 4). The tribes go up. Gentile Christians are not the tribes of Israel, at least, not in this context. So verse 4 focuses the identity of David's audience. To whom is David speaking? David is speaking to the twelve tribes of Israel.

3. David says that he has two reasons for calling on his fellow Jews to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. One reasons was for his brothers and companions' sake (8), presumably for their blessing, since peace is a blessing of God. The second was for the sake of the tabernacle itself (9). The Gentiles would have loved to attack Jerusalem and destroy the tabernacle in the name of their pagan gods.

4. We should give proper attention to the fact that David is the one making this call in his role as king. His thrones of civil justice are set up in Jerusalem (v. 5). So he issues this call in his role as king.

I would say that Psalm 122 was a national call to prayer for all Israelites, by their king, to bless Jerusalem because God's house of worship, the tabernacle, was located there. However, God's Spirit is no longer attached to Israel. He has been poured out upon Christians only (Acts 2:14-18, 32-33, 37-38). All Christians together are the living temple of the Lord. God has broken off the Jews from membership in His people (see Romans 11:20). God didn't revoke His covenant with Abraham, but one must trust in Jesus Christ as Savior to become a son of Abraham and be a member of the chosen people. A Jew who doesn't not believe in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord is not a member of God's people in any sense.

It is God's will to pray for the conversion of the Jews (Romans 10:1), and to pray for blessing on israel no less than any other nation. But there is nothing special about praying for God to bless Israel, than to pray for God to bless Rwanda or Ecuador. David's call to pray for the peace of Jerusalem
was to his fellow Jews, on the condition that they belonged as a nation to the Lord, and the Lord's tabernacle was located in Jerusalem. But after Israel rejected their Messiah the Lord broke them off from His olive tree. Outside of Christ they are not the Lord's nation, and since the tabernacle doesn't exist any more, that special reason to pray is gone as well.

Idolatry

2011-04-14T15:08:00.000-04:00

If all we ever preach is the love of God, we are presenting a false God. A God of only love is not the God of the Bible. The real God is a Person, not a personification.

What will church-going sinners do, when they are plunged into eternal condemnation because the "gospel" in which they believed was a message about a God with no righteousness sending a Savior from purposelessness to a people with wounds but no wickedness?

Reacting Against Our Incompetent Parents

2011-03-25T12:20:00.000-04:00

One of the draws of authoritarian* parenting teachings among Christians, especially young Christians, is that it seems to counteract the bungling, incompetent parenting many opf us suffered at the hands of of our own godless parents.

I can't number how many cases I've seen over the last 35 years in which well-meaning Christians adopted overly-strict, authoritarian, and formulaic approaches to their children because they themselves were raised by what amounted to hippies, PC-addled liberals, absentee fathers, or working mothers who had no time for them.

As a result, a lot of us got into deep trouble in life, maybe plunging into extreme immorality, drinking, drug use, or maybe cults or other sorts of weirdness. When we became Christians, the change was so sharp, and such a neck-twisting 180, that we had no moderate experience to judge the various new Christian teachings to which we were now exposed. Having been raised without a sane, moral authority over us, or by crazy, abusive authority unlocked from decency or common sense, we are trying to undo the damage done to us.

This suggests to me that we pastors need to teach about the very concept of authority, and make sure that our own ideas about authority are fully-rounded and fully-biblical. Maybe, if young Christians understood better what the Bible teaches about authority (both human and divine), they would be more likely to successfully avoid cultic ministries and authoritarian extremism. I also believe that authoritarianism is no excuse for egalitarianism. Two wrongs don't make a right.

* I distinguish this from "authority" in its proper sense, which is the right to make a decision that requires the obedience of another. The Bible is not a libertarian book, and it does teach that authority is real, a good thing whene xercised justly, is rooted in the nature of God, and governed by ther laws of God.

God Judges Through Deception

2011-03-25T09:12:00.000-04:00

I myself have witnessed cases in which the Lord seemed to turn someone over to total deception, as a judgment on their rebellion. We kick ourselves for not being persuasive enough, or we thow up our hands in frustration because we can't fathom how someone could buy into a particular lie. But this sort of thing has happened before, and will happen again. There was a tribal ruler named Sihon, whom Israel destroyed as they marched to Zion. Moses in Deuteronomy 2:30 said that the Lord hardened Sihon's heart, so as to provoke a war with Israel and deliver hinm and his kingdom into their hands. The Lord doesn't harden innocent hearts. He hardens the hearts of men and women guilty of high-handed sin, whom He has decided to hand over to judgment. He did the same thing to Eli's wicked sons -- he hardened their hearts against Eli's entreaties because God had already decided to kill them (1 Samuel 2:12, 22-25). We also see a prediction of this sort of thing on a worldwide scale. In 2 Thessalonians, Paul predicts that the Lord will send wrath on the earth in the form of a worldwide deception. The deception itself will be His punishment on the world for having rejected His truth (2 Thess. 2:10-11). God doesn't deceive people, but He controls the demons who do that for their own malicious reasons.

When someone is bent on doing something wrong, even self-destructive, and is impervious to reason and Scripture, even ordinary common sense reasoning, we should consider that they are being punished by God. Our failure to turn them from a wicked way might not be the result of poor persuasive skills on our part. If the person has been resisting the light of God's truth shining into their life (whether truth from Scripture or from nature), the Lord might judge them by turning them over to a depraved mind (Romans 1:28).

Rick Warren: Neither Fully Endorse Nor Entirely Condemn.

2011-03-23T11:02:00.001-04:00

I see RW as the Stan Lee of California evangelicals. In other words, he is a modern-media tub-thumper for Christ who makes it his goal to rarely disagree with anyone in a public way. He is a Baptist evangelist, hasn’t shown much interest in apologetics, and hasn’t shown himself to be a particularly capable theologian. As an evangelist, he mostly cares about persuasively communicating with liberal southern Californians, to the diminishment of a lot of other equally important concerns.

But what this ends up causing is a bad habit of shape-shifting, depending on with whom he is at any given time. He’ll criticize the New Age movement from the pulpit (good), then invite new-age-ish health gurus into the church to promote a heath program (??). He advocated California’s Prop 8 from his pulpit, but then claimed to the media he had never campaigned for it, which made him look bad since it was at worst a lie, or at best a very misleading claim.

I sit squarely between the “Rick Warren is just fine!” group (no, when thoroughly evaluated he isn’t fine), and the “Rick Warren is an anti-christ!” (no, when you examine the Gospel he preaches, he is not an anti-christ). I don’t have to endorse a guy as having a sound, reliable ministry just because I see he’s a brother in Christ, and I don’t have to anathematize a guy just because I see he has serious flaws and wouldn’t recommend attending his church.

MK Schools

2011-03-23T10:03:00.000-04:00

Older missionaries I talked to at Columbia in the 80s about my dislike for the idea of missionary schools would become very defensive & testy. One I remember was quite contemptuous of the un-spirituality of anyone who questioned MK schools. Even then I could see that this reflected the self-serving myth-making taught within the Evangelical missionary community of that generation.

But I still say, 20 yrs later, that if you marry you limit yourself (to some degree) as to what sort of ministry you are free to pursue, and then if you have children you automatically limit yourself even more. Maybe becoming a parent means you can't be a missionary in a foreign country at all! This was Paul's whole point in 1 Corinthians 7, that single people are free to do certain things that married Christians automatically cannot.

Being a missionary doesn't trump all other family responsibilities or ethical considerations, or make it OK to fail to be the parent to our children that the Bible orders us to be. It looks to me like we Evangelicals did almost as much to cover up and excuse child-abuse in our MK schools as the Roman Catholic hierarchy to cover up and excuse homosexuality among its priests. We Protestants have no place for boasting in this matter.

Parenting the Perfectionistic Child

2011-03-21T13:28:00.000-04:00

Some parenting thoughts:
I believe that children inherit personality tendencies from their ancestors, just as they inherit physical characteristics and talents. Only the Lord can untangle where nature ends and nurture begins, and how they influence each other! But we observe that two childen can come from the same home, and yet they can exhibit distinct personality tendencies that make them different from each other. Some parents say they could see distinct personality attributes in their children starting from infancy.

What about perfectionistic tendencies? We might be tempted to think of all children fun-loving lazybones, but there is such a thing as the perfectionistic child.

Perfectionism is not an altogether bad quality. We should be thankful for people who can focus in on small details, and achieve exacting results. I'm sure you agree that you would prefer an exacting surgeon if you are having brain surgery, or a nuclear power-plant engineer who scored 4.0 all the way through grad school! But what about when perfectionism begins to damage a child's personality, to the point that they are constantly criticizing themselves or others, or is never happy because there is always something "wrong", or function in a relxed, confident way with others? Here are some thoughts from Scripture...

First, it is in every child's nature to respond to life foolishly. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but correction will drive it far from him (Proverbs 22:15). I take the word "rod' there as a metaphor, a genitive of apposition -- which is a fancy way of saying, "The rod that is correction." In other words, a child will not self-correct. A child left untrained will bring disgrace to his or her parents (Proverbs 29:15). It is the parent's responsibility to (affirmatively) build up godly, loving qualities in the child, and (correctively) deter selfish, foolish, and wicked qualities. It will not happen on its own.

Second, it is important that the parent be sure that he or she is not an out-of-control perfectionist. A rule of education, which Jesus quoted a number of times, is that the student will become like the teacher. If a parent is an out-of-control perfectionist -- self-loathing over personal faults, relentlessly critical of self and others, rejecting the Bible's teachings about the fundamental defectiveness of fallen human nature -- then the child will be crippled by perfectionism also. Who is going to shepherd the perfectionistic child out of their perfectionism, if their parent is in emotional bondage? (And what about the perfectionistic parent who discovers he or she is a perfectionist, and then hates himself for it, since being a perfectionist means they are... imperfect?) Are we teaching our children that we must be perfect to be lovable?

Third, this kind of perfectionism -- not a diligent attention to detail, but the delusional, self-loathing belief that perfection of performance or character is possible -- is born out of pride. See the sinful pride hiding underneath the perfectionism!

Why do I say this? Because failure (whatever that means to me) means I have "lost face" in the eyes of someone else -- a teacher, a friend, a parent, or God. This emotion is not repentance. This is shame, which is entirely different from Christian repentance. It's one thing to confess a sin to God. It's quite another thing to become angry, or tearful, because I think I failed in front of other people, and now I'm angry because I looked bad. Some families build a large part of their approach to motivation around shame. Religions such as Roman Catholicism are notorious for trying to shame the people into good behavior.

The child must understand and wholeheartedly believe certain Biblical truths:

1. Perfection cannot be achieved. This is the hardest truth of which to convince a perfectionist. The perfectionist is so driven to achieve perfection that to tell them that it can't be done is like trying to convince them to swallow a deadly poison. It runs counter-grain to the fiber of their being. But Jesus said, "Only God is good" (Mark 10:18). Only God. It is possible to become a good person, but we are always on our way toward that goal -- we never arrive in this life. All our human goodness, even as Christians, is relative goodness, comparative goodness, and flawed goodness. The bottom-line, authoritative definition of "good" is God, not some really admirable person we know.

2. The child needs to accept that he or she can never deserve to be loved. God doesn't love us because we hit the mark. God loves us in spite of our constant sins and goof-ups. This is where repentance of pride must come up. It is the drive of a sinful ego to try to merit God's love and grace. It takes humility, even in a child, to accept God's love and grace in the same way that a penniless beggar accepts a gift from a benefactor. We brought nothing worthwhile to our relationship with God when we first became Christians, and to this very day we still bring nothing worthwhile. God still loves and graces us in spite of us, not because of us.

3. The child needs to learn to distinguish between sinning and making amoral mistakes. Accidentally knocking over a cup of milk is not a sin. Having a hard time understanding math is not a sin. Doing a poor job on an art project (because you just aren't very good at art) is not a sin. Only sin is sin! And sin is defined by the commandments of the Bible, not by other people's expectations. In other words, every possible skill one might need in life is not equally important with every other skill. Christ even distinguished between different portions of Scripture, saying some aspects of the Old Testament Law were weightier than others. Knowing God is infinitely more important than how I did in PE class, and my child needs to be trained to make those same distinctions, so that he or she doesn't everything as if it were #1, and as a result burn out.

Questions About Ministry In A Postmodern / Post-Christian City

2011-03-07T16:47:00.000-05:00

I recently attended a two-hour seminar on doing Christian ministry in a post-Christian city. I came away with these questions...

Do we seek to understand a culture's worldview in order to more clearly and insightfully communicate the Scripture to it? Or do we use that worldview as a philosophical grid into which we will try to force the Scripture to fit, in the name of relevance? If the second, then how is that any different from selling out to the culture -- going "native"?

Does such a thing as Christian orthodoxy exist? Isn't it true that the Bible does build a fence, which past generations have called "orthodoxy"? In fact, doesn't the Scripture order us to build and guard His fence, since Satan exists, and false prophets are a real, existent danger to His people? The simple existence of a theological "center" automatically creates a perimeter beyond which evil lies.

Does the Scripture contain (as it claims) an innate power to convert, due to its inspired and inerrant nature, and due to the infinite wisdom with which it speaks to man (whose essential nature, spiritual issues, and problems never change from society to society and generation to generation) and his universal moral condition? Or does the Scripture need to be piggy-backed onto the thought-forms of a culture, in order to accomplish anything?

Does Christ come to facilitate the spirit, goals and desires of the city, and His value to the city is that He will enable it to achieve what it wants, unlike the city's current gods? Or is it His intention to kill off the depraved culture of the city, and then by means of grace and the Word of God re-create the city in God's image? I believe the second to what Christ said He came to do. See Paul's address to the Athenians in Acts 17 -- Paul doesn't affirm the Athenian culture, he calls it "ignorant".

Is post-modernism really a new thing, or just the latest mutation of a cultural/philosophical battle that has gone on for millennia? Rationalism and Romanticism battled each other since the beginnings of the modern scientific revolution. Before that the ancient world swayed back and forth between Stoic rationalism and ecstatic Asian mysticism, Platonic cosmic universals vs. Aristotelian earth-bound particulars There is nothing new under the sun.

Isn't it unjust to dismiss traditional Christian alarm over toxic cultural movements such as Progressivism as empty paranoia? Such dismissal reflects an woefully inadequate sensivitity to the evil nature of Progressivism, not unlike treating cobra venom as if it was no more dangerous than a fattening soft drink.

Spiritual Warfare & Parenting

2011-02-22T14:28:00.001-05:00

Here are some thoughts about spiritual warfare & children.

Saving faith in Christ isn't a vaccine that immunizes us against Satan. While it's true that Christ becomes our shepherd, and nothing can snatch us out of His hand, Satan is still prowling around like a lion, looking for whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8. Children are not exempt -- Mark 9:17-22. It is especially important that new Christians understand this, so they don't have wrong notions about faith in Christ. It is also important that a child actually be a believer, and not simply have gone through some motions just to please Mommy and Daddy or because he thinks that praying-a-prayer is like a magic spell.

If a child is a new believer, then the child needs to be discipled in how to walk with Christ, no less than an adult convert. It is wrong for a parent to shove off all the responsibility for discipling his own child onto the local church. A child's #1 pastor (in a Christian home) is his mom and dad.

It is the parent's job to daily pray up a hedge of divine protection against Satan around the family. This is what Job did, as seen in Job 1:1-10. The Christian's warfare against Satan is fought by faith, obedience to the Bible, and prayer (Ephesians 6:16-18). Spiritual problems require spiritual solutions, and only the prayer of faith (James 5:16-18) brings down heaven's solutions.

A child's heart is a well-spring of foolishness, even if it has been cleansed and improved by the new birth. Proverbs 25:15. Some manifestations of foolishness are self-centeredness, self-pity, a demanding spirit, rebellion, and unclean sexual or morbid thoughts. A parent who will not correct his child, including spanking, does not love his child. Proverbs 13:24.

It is the parents' job, with the help and power of the Holy Spirit, to correct the child's budding foolishness patterns, before the patterns harden into the enslaving chains of a lifetime. It isn't possible to create a perfect child, but we can do a tremendous amount to set them on the right path early. Of course, it is essential that we ourselves not be selfish, rebellious fools, or else our children will grow up to despise the Christ we pretend to serve.

Americn Evangelicals Ignoring the Bible, Flocking To Dictatorial Pastors

2011-02-09T12:26:00.000-05:00

From D.A. Carson:

"This libertarianism has engendered two surprising children. The first is a new love of authoritarianism among some believers: they do not feel safe and orthodox unless some leader is telling them exactly what to say, do, and think. Inevitably this brings some power lovers to positions of religious leadership, supported sometimes by a theology that ascribes “apostleship” or some other special, charismatic enduement to them, sometimes by a theology of churchmanship that makes each pastor a pope. The authority of the Scriptures is in such instances almost always formally affirmed; but an observer may be forgiven if he or she senses that these self-promoted leaders characteristically so elevate their opinions over the Scripture, often in the name of the Scripture, that the Word of God becomes muted. The church cries out for those who proclaim the Scriptures with unction and authority while simultaneously demonstrating that they stand under that authority themselves.

The second is a fairly conservative mood, a reaction to the times, that some interpret as a great blessing. But this conservative swing does not appear to be characterized by brokenness and contrition. Far from it: it is imbued with a “can do” mentality not far removed from arrogance. Many of the most respected religious leaders among us are those who project an image of total command, endless competence, glorious success, formulaic cleverness. We are experts, and we live in a generation of experts. But the cost is high: we gradually lose our sense of indebtedness to grace, we no longer cherish our complete dependence on the God of all grace, and we begin to reject themes like self-sacrifice and discipleship in favor of courses on successful living and leadership in the church….

Mere conservatism must not be confused with godliness, mere discipline with discipleship, mere assent to orthodox doctrine with wholehearted delight in truth….

Along with the arrogance has come the exegetical and philosophical sophistication that enables us to make Scripture support almost anything we want….

…even some of us who would never dream of formally disentangling some parts of the Bible from the rest and declaring them less authoritative than other parts can by exegetical ingenuity get the Scriptures to say just about whatever we want–and this we thunder to the age as if it were a prophetic word, when it is little more than the message of the age bounced off Holy Scripture. To our shame, we have hungered to be masters of the Word much more than we have hungered to be mastered by it.

The pervasiveness of the problem erupts in the “Christian” merchant whose faith has no bearing on the integrity of his or her dealings, or in the way material possessions are assessed. It is reflected in an accelerating divorce rate in Christian homes and among the clergy themselves–with little sense of shame and no entailment in their “ministries.” It is seen in its most pathetic garb when considerable exegetical skill goes into proving, say, that the Bible condemns promiscuous homosexuality but not homosexuality itself (though careful handling of the evidence overturns the thesis), or that the Bible’s use of “head” in passages dealing with male/female relationships follows allegedly characteristic Greek usage, and therefore, means “source” (when close scrutiny of the primary evidence fails to turn up more than a handful of disputable instances of the meaning “source in over two thousand occurrences). It finds new lease when popular evangelicals publicly abandon any mention of “sin”–allegedly on the ground that the term no longer “communicates”-without recognizing that adjacent truths (e.g., those dealing with the fall, the law of God, the nature of transgression, the wrath of God, and even the gracious atonement itself) undergo telling transformation.

While I fear that evangelicalism is heading for another severe conflict on the doctrine of Scripture, and while it is necessary to face these impending debates with humility and courage, what is far more alarming is the diminishing authority of the Scriptures in the churches. This is taking place not only among those who depreciate the consistent truthfulness of Scripture but also (if for different reasons) among those who most vociferously defend it. To some extent we are all part of the problem; and perhaps we can do most to salvage something of value from the growing fragmentation by pledging ourselves in repentance and faith to learning and obeying God’s most holy Word. Then we shall also be reminded that the challenge to preserve and articulate a fully self-consistent and orthodox doctrine of Scripture cannot be met by intellectual powers alone, but only on our knees and by the power of God."

(D.A. Carson, Collected Writings on Scripture [Crossway, 2010],

Faith Alone Saves

2011-02-08T14:47:00.000-05:00

Any who say that saving faith in Christ must include an altar call, baptism, confessing Christ, or a prayer, are preaching a different gospel, even if unintentionally. Faith's incidentals differ from person to person, but faith alone in Christ alone saves. Abraham wasn't baptized and didn't pray a prayer (Gen. 15:6; Romans 4:1-4).

One of the foundation-stones of the Protestant Reformation is the doctrine of sola fide – salvation is by “faith alone”, not faith plus good works and the sacraments. This should go without saying among Protestants: we're not Catholics, Roman or Eastern. But it becomes necessary in these confused times to re-clarify what we Protestants all used to know.

Jesus Christ wrote us that a man is justified of his sins by faith, apart from the works of the Law (Romans 3:28). What were the works of the Law? Review Exodus 20:1-17 for the core of the Law, the Ten Commandments. When the apostle Paul says that we are not justified of the works of the Law, he means that our sins are not forgiven by being content with what we have, being truthful, respecting other people's property, honoring our marriage vows, respecting human life, respecting our parents, keeping the Sabbath, respecting God's name, eschewing idolatry, or showing complete devotion to the one true God. The Law also included the Jewish rite of circumcision, the Jewish festival and holy days, dietary laws, tithing laws, civil laws, or liturgical regulations. The observance of any or all of these good works do not justify us of our sins.

We do not deny the right use of God's law, a slander that is falsely charged against Protestants by Rome. We endorse and support God's moral law (Romans 3:31). But we do not misapply the law. To say that the Law justifies us of sin is like saying that a thermometer cures a cold, and shows deep ignorance of what moral law is. Expecting moral law to forgive sin is like expecting your state's transportation law to nullify your speeding ticket. The law reveals God's holiness, and convicts the sinner's conscience by contrasting God's requirements to our thoughts and actions. But the law cannot, to use Scrooge's words, “sponge clean” our record. Only the payment Christ made on the cross can do that, and that payment is received by faith alone.

Paul's universal example of how justification works is Abraham. Abraham believed God's promise, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness (Romans 4:3). Verses 4 and 5 make it clear that, in this context, “works” is an antonym of “believe.” Everything other than belief is a work. Paul says in that same vein that saving grace and good works are mutually exclusive of each other, on the question of how a sinner is justified of his sins (Romans 11:6). Justification is either by grace or is by works. It is not by “works that are empowered by grace.”

Paul goes into even greater depth on this matter in his letter to the Galatians. Justification by faith alone is so important to Paul, that he emphatically repeats three times in one sentence that men are not justified by good works (Galatians 2:16). We do not receive the Holy Spirit by good works or keeping God's laws (Gal. 3:2). In consequence of this, we are not further perfected in spiritual holiness by obeying God's laws (Gal. 3:3).1 We receive the Holy Spirit, mature spiritually, and see miraculous answers to prayer, by faith alone, just as Abraham did (Gal. 3:5-6).

What condition for eternal life did Jesus require? Belief in Him only (John 3:16). The three Synoptic Gospels use the term “repent”, where the Gospel of John uses “believe”, but they are simply two sides of the same coin. “Repent” signifies the change of mind and heart that happens when faith in Christ occurs. In other words, the sinner stops believing in other gods (e.g., I Thess. 1:8-9), and joins God in condemning his own sins rather than excusing or denying them. “Believe” underlines the affirmative content of Gospel faith, rather than the change-of-mind necessarily involved in exercising it.

So salvation by faith in Christ alone is the Biblical, Christian teaching. Not faith in Christ plus baptism, not faith in Christ plus a dedicated life of evangelical obedience. Faith in Christ alone. This faith is not a sterile exercise. It always, in all cases, produces obedience to God';s will, in varying degrees of consistency. Any claim to faith that produces no godly works at all is a false faith. Obedience to God's will justifies our claims to be believers, just as Abraham's willingness to obey god by offering up Isaac justified Moses' claim that Abraham was a believer and God's friend (James 2:21-23). But James 2 speaks of justification in the sense of visible vindication in the eyes of man. God doesn't need proof of who is or is not a real believer.

Where in the Bible does it say that praying a prayer to be saved is either a necessary condition of justification, or a basis for assurance of our salvation? The Bible nowhere teaches these things; and to say that the sinner's prayer is a necessary condition of justification is the same as saying that we are saved by faith plus good works. To teach such a thing is to deny the free grace of God and abandon the core principles of the Reformation.

You must pay close attention to the phrase necessary condition. Why am I using that specific phrase? I use it to make a crucial point, a point that draws a line between the grace of the Gospel and legalism. I am not saying that people do not at times express their faith by means of a sinner's prayer. Christ taught about a tax-gatherer who beat his breast in repentant grief and prayed, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:9-14). I have never said that people can't or don't pray a sinner's prayer as part of their conversion experience. Let there be no distorting here, whether unintentional or deliberate.

If someone says that you must pray the sinner's prayer to be justified, they are saying that it is a necessary condition for justification, in addition to faith in Christ. The Bible teaches no such thing, and in fact Christ condemns any such idea (see Galatians 1:6-8). God justifies you of your sin when you trust in Christ, that is, when you put your faith in the Gospel. God does this regardless of whether or not you pray a sinner's prayer. You call on the name of the Lord by believing the Gospel (see the parallelism set up between “believe” and “call” in Romans 10:11-13). True faith will always confess Christ as Lord to God and man (Romans 10:9-10), but profession of faith is an expression of faith, not a co-condition of justification. It is not an additional requirement for justification above-and-beyond trusting Christ.

The sinner's prayer, as commonly used, is an invention of man. Many have been saved without ever praying it. My wife was saved without it. I was saved without it. Neither of us ever prayed the sinner's prayer. But both of us have been justified believers for many years now. Why? Because we believed the message we heard (Ephesians 1:13).

The idea that praying a salvation prayer for assurance of one's own salvation is equally unbiblical. When John the Baptist doubted Jesus' sonship (Matt. 11:3), Christ addressed John's wavering heart by directing John's mind to the objective realities about Himself – His miraculous healings of the blind and deaf, His resurrecting of dead people, and His preaching ministry to the poor (Matt. 11:4-5). All these things fulfilled Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, and proved Jesus' identity. Jesus did not tell John to remember some salvation prayer John prayed in his past. Since John was regenerate from the womb (Luke 1:39-44), due to the unilateral, electing grace of God, he never needed to pray the sinner's prayer.

When Jesus wanted to strengthen Martha's faith in the face of her brother's death, He said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” Jesus never asked her, “Do you remember when you prayed such-and-such a prayer at such-and-such a time?”

The Biblical approach to assurance is to focus the person's mind outwardly upon the Person, teachings, and redeeming work of Jesus Christ on the cross and in His resurrection. Any attempt to create assurance of salvation by focusing the person's mind on some prayer he prayed in the past is humanistic and experience-centered. After all, if Jesus isn't the Christ, if He didn't die, if He didn't rise, and if He doesn't now sit at God's right hand able to save, then it doesn't matter what prayer you prayed.

Belief is not an act of the will. You can't will yourself into believing something you don't actually believe. You are either convinced of something, or you are not, or because of the power of inward sin you waver in-between, like the poor father who begged Christ to help him with his unbelief (Mark 9:24). How does belief come about? Belief in Christ comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the Word of God (Romans 10:17). In other words, belief is produced by truth that comes to you from outside of you. Faith does not come by Christianized navel-gazing. Any religious person from any religion or cult can talk about their “experience.” The source of assurance is the Bible's testimonial about who Jesus Christ was, what He did, and what He promised us.

Assurance of one's own salvation is built into the Gospel itself. Jesus said He was God's Son, eternally equal with the heavenly Father. The Gospel writers say He died to ransom sinners, that he rose bodily, that He now sits at God's right hand, and will give eternal life to you if you believe this. To repeat Jesus' question to Martha, do you believe this? If you believe this, then you are a saved person. When you confidence wavers, your own prayers are no reason to believe yourself saved!

Stop looking at yourself. Go back into the pages of Scripture and immerse yourself in Jesus Christ. Your source of assurance about your status with the Lord, just like the righteousness that justified you, is located entirely outside of you.

The Inerrancy of Scripture is Non-Negotiable

2011-01-21T13:03:00.001-05:00

Do you consider yourself a liberal? No? If not, then do you think religious liberalism is OK? If not, then why are there Christians who say that the inerrancy of the Bible doesn't matter? Denial of the Bible's complete truthfulness is the hallmark of liberalism. When someone says that the Scripture isn't inerrant, or that it doesn't matter, they are saying that Jesus was not the Son of God.

Jesus taught that the Scripture is inerrant. He treated the Old Testament laws as holding authority over Himself (Matthew 4:4, 7, 10). Jesus said that the tiniest grammatical particles of the Old Testament were infallible (Matthew 5:18). He required His people to obey even the ceremonial portions of Moses' Law (Matthew 8:4). He quoted from nearly every book of the Old Testament.

He said that the destructions of Tyre, Sidon, and Sodom happened as depicted in Scripture (Matthew 11:21-24). He said that the story of Jonah was just as historical as His own resurrection (Matthew 12:39-41). He condemned the Pharisees for substituting their traditions for the Word of God (Matthew 15:3). He taught that all of the prophecies of the Scripture will be fulfilled. He applied the Jewish civil laws to conflict management in the church (Matthew 18:15-16). He said that Adam and Eve were real people (Matthew 19:3-6).

He proved the doctrine of the immortality of the soul on the basis of one Scripture word: "am". The Saducees who denied the immortality of the soul argued with Him. He called them ignorant of the Scripture and refuted them by quoting the Lord: "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" (Matthew 22:29-32). He based His rebuttal on one word.

Jesus prayed to the heavenly Father: "Thy word is truth." If the Scriptures were not truthful, which is what "inerrancy" means, then Jesus' prayer was in error. That would mean that Jesus was not the Son of God, since the Son of God cannot err. To deny inerrancy is to deny Christ.

Second, there are not two kinds of truth, spiritual truth and non-spiritual truth. There is only truth. This is because God is Truth. There are not two gods, and so there are not two kinds of truth in the universe. All truth is God's truth. There is no difference of truthfulness between the statement, "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son", and the statement that Quirinius was governor of Syria at the time of Jesus' birth (Luke 2:2).

In fact, the so-called "spiritual" truths of the Bible are all built on the foundation of historical facts. If Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, specifically, then he is not the Son of God, and you are lost in your sins. If his mother Mary was not a virgin when she bore him, then Jesus is not the Son of God, and you are lost in your sins. If Jesus did not descend from King David's bloodline (see the geneaology in Matthew 1), then he is not Israel's Messiah.

You cannot separate Bible history from Bible morality. Are you pro-life, or a believer in traditional marriage? All the Bible's teachings about the sanctity of human life are built on the principle that Genesis 1-2 really happened. Not a myth.

Do you beleive in parental authority? The Bible's teachings about children being raised to honor their parents are built on the principle that God really met with Moses on Mt. Sinai and gave him the Ten Commandments.

Do you think we should love others? The authority of the commandment "Love your neighbor as yourself" is built on the belief that Moses was an actual prophet of God. If Moses was not a prophet a God, then you can ignore it, because "love your neighbor" becomes nothing more than one guy's opinion.

Liberalism teaches that we should separate the Bible into spiritual and non-spiritual statements, and then says that it doesn't matter if the "non-spiritual" statements are true or not. Liberalism does this in order to destroy your Christian faith, while hypocritically pretending to support it. Their agenda is almost always political. The liberal preacher's real intention is to get you to support gay marriage, or become pro-abortion, or vote for his favored candidate, or to believe that all religions lead to God.

Worst of all, religious liberalism denies the Gospel, and as a result real people go to hell.

If the Bible is not inerrant, then we have no way of knowing whether the Gospel is true. There might be people who imagine they can tell the difference between the true and un-true parts of the Bible, but this is all just emotionalism. They just 'feel" like one part is true and the other one part isn't. But someone else will come along and "feel" the exact opposite, and there is no way to tell the difference. That is just a faith based on feelings, and a faith based on feelings isn't faith.

Belief in the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture is not negotiable.

Christ's Death: Sufficient For Everyone, Extended To All, Applied Only To Believers

2010-12-16T13:46:00.000-05:00

The very idea of limits to Christ's atonement upsets people. It upset me. It's the reason we stopped attending a Presbyterian church back in Houston. I've read some Reformed books on the subject that came off like, “How hard can I shove this Calvinistic stick up your nose?”, and that sure didn't help. Honestly, most Christian people hear about this idea of a limited atonement, and think it's nuts. The issue is so big I even considered skipping this chapter, but the publisher urged me to press on, so here I am. I decided to start by summarizing the Bible, rather than begin with the historical debates. I'm not familiar enough with all the twists and turns of this historical debate, reviewing it would take too long, I didn't want to get into logic-chopping, and I don't think it would interest the people I'm writing this for anyway. I think it's right to say that the Calvinist view of the scope of the atonement is not monolithic.1 So: how was Christ's death presented in the New Testament?

The Gospels

I recently read some really bad theology, where it was claimed that believers in Christ's lifetime knew nothing about His death until late in His ministry, with an application that sinners don't need to know about the cross to be saved.2 But John the Baptist's preaching started Jesus' ministry with: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29). The Jews would have known John's reference to the sacrifice lamb. So the shadow of the cross appears at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, not the end.

Who did John mean there by the world? I ask that, because we know from other portions of Scripture that not every persons' sin is taken away. The Bible predicts that the wicked will be eternally punished in the future (Revelation 20:11-13). In fact, there were sinners already in hell when John the Baptist preached (Luke 16:19-26). But the Lamb's death takes away the world's sins.

The Greek word kosmos, “world”, doesn't always mean “everyone without exception”. It can mean different things, depending on usage:

People in a general sense (John 1:9-10, 3:16).
Unbelievers specifically (John 15:19).
The planet (Matthew 13:35).
Earthly life under sin and Satan (John 16:33, Luke 11:50).
The Roman Empire (Luke 2:1).
Israelites (John 7:4, 12:19).
The peoples of all nations (Luke 12:30).
Material property (Matthew 16:26).

Which of these best fits John's sentence? It appears (factoring in the limits from other Scriptures) that “world” here means people in a general sense, which allows for exceptions. John in another place said that there would be “bad trees” and “chaff” that would end up burned by God3, so he wasn't preaching universal salvation in John 1:29.

So John spoke of Christ's death prophetically. Christ did also, predicting His own death in John 2:19-22 and 3:14-15. In John 8:28, Christ said that His death would prove His claim to be the Son of God. Christ also said He would die on behalf of others. He would lay down His life for His sheep (John. 10:11, 15). That was His purpose for coming (Jn. 12:27). But He would die by His own choice (Jn. 10:17-18). After that, His death would become the focal-point to which He would draw all sorts of people (Jn. 12:32-33). Anyone who believed in Him and His saving work on the cross could be spiritually healed, just like the snake-sickened Jews could look upon the bronze serpent upon the tree (Jn. 3:14-15).

Christ preached His death and burial as prophetic signs of His identity. Like Jonah spending three days in the depths of the ocean, Christ would spend three days in the tomb (Matt. 12:38-40). Christ prophesied the same to His disciples, which upset them greatly. Peter in particular struggled to accept it (Matt. 16:21-23, 17:22-23).

Christ's death was an experience of divine wrath for Him, resulting in redemption for others. He compared His death to drinking a cup of God's wrath, or a baptism (Matt. 20:23).4 It would be a ransom-payment for many (Mt. 20:28, Mk. 10:45). In the upper room, Christ preached that His blood would be shed for many (Mt. 26:28), resulting in their sins' remission. I was once told by a disgusted co-worker at Sears that the gospel I shared with him was a “slaughter-house religion.” I should have said, “Yes, indeed; and that's what Christ said it needed to be.” People object to the blood because they don't believe God is that demanding or sin is that bad.

The book of Acts

Acts 2:22-36/3:11-26: Peter preached that Christ's death was the result of God's predetermined purpose and foreknowledge (23). He accused the Jerusalemites of denying Christ, wanting a murderer released to them, and handing their own messiah over (23, 36; see also Acts 3:13-15). Even though they acted ignorantly (3:17), they still needed to repent and be converted (2:38, 3:19), so that God would forgive them and give them the Holy Spirit. Peter also promised that God would send times of refreshing to Israel, and Christ would return to them from heaven (3:19-20).5 Peter preached Christ's death consistently with the way Christ preached it, as prophetic proof of Jesus' Sonship. But he also preached it as a unique sin for which this particular group of Jewish people needed forgiveness (4:12). Jerusalem's leaders hypocritically complained that the apostles were trying to pin Jesus' death on them (Acts 5:27).6

In Acts 8:26-35, Philip evangelized the Ethiopian eunuch by explaining how Christ fulfilled Isaiah 53:7-8, which deals with the death of Messiah. Philip's focus was on the identity of Jesus Christ as Son of God. The Ethiopian responded in faith, and was baptized on the spot.

In Acts 9:1-9, Christ doesn't mention His death. It's likely that Saul, an important member of the Sanhedrin, already knew about it. Instead, Christ focused on His identity as Lord (cf. 9:20). Saul spends three days fasting in shocked, humbled blindness, until Ananias shows up (calling him “brother”), lays hands on him, and baptizes him. I take Saul's addressing Christ as “Lord” (9:6a), obeying Him (in 9:6b), and Ananias' addressing him as brother, as proofs of Saul's faith.

In Acts 10:43-43, Peter preaches that the Jews crucified Christ (10:39), but God raised Him from the dead (10:40). Jesus is the promised Son of God. Whoever believes in Him will receive remission of their sins (10:43).7 In Acts 13:16-41 and 17:1-3, Paul preaches that the Jews crucified Christ, fulfilling prophecy. Then the Lord raised Christ from the dead (13:28-29). Paul's use of the cross is consistent with Peter's use in the earlier parts of Acts.

Over and over, Christ's crucifixion is preached for evidential purpose. His death is a persuasive proof of His identity as God's Son. When Christ died, it supported His claim to be the Messiah (e.g., Isa. 53:4-5, Dan. 9:26). Christ also taught that His death would be a ransom paid to God on behalf of many,8 so that their sins could be remitted. Christ's use of the word “many” harks back to Isaiah 53:11, where the “many” are those transgressors whom God justifies of their sins by means of the Servant's death.

New Testament letters.

Adam's sin condemned all of us, since Adam acted in our place (Romans 5:16, 18). Christ also acted representatively, except that His act produced justification from sin (5:16).9 On what grounds does God justify anyone of their guilt? Christ's redeeming death is the method by which God freely, apart from man's good works, justifies sinners (Rom. 3:24-25). Paul in 3:24-25 substitutes the longer word apolutroseos (redemption) for the simpler lutron (ransom). Both words refer to the price paid to buy a slave. As sinners we are in horrible debt to God's moral law, and guilty of our failure to meet our contractual obligations with our Creator. Christ's death purchased us out of this debt-slavery to God's law, bringing about sins' forgiveness (Eph. 1:7).

Christ's death demonstrates God's righteousness, because by it God fulfilled His justice (Rom. 3:26).10 If God were to simply snap His fingers and declare sinners guilt-free, He would violate His own integrity. God said he does not acquit the guilty.11 God is holy, so sin must be avenged. Christ's death did that. He freed God to legitimately forgive sinners without compromise.

God said that he would appoint the Messiah as a covenant (Isa. 42:6). A covenanter acts and receives on behalf of others, like Abram or Noah did. So Christ as covenanter died in place of the ungodly (Rom. 5:6), and passes down the benefits of His resurrection. The chief benefit was that He reconciled us all to God (10a), and so ensured our ultimate salvation (10b).12 Notice here that the people reconciled will undoubtedly be saved.

God objectively, historically raised all of us with Christ, lifted us up to heaven, and seated us at His right hand, even though we weren't even believers yet (Eph. 2:5-6).

These are clues as to how Paul uses the word “all.” For example, “all men” in 2 Cor. 5:18 can't mean everyone without exception, since all are not justified. Not everyone has faith (2 Thess. 3:2), and Romans 3:25 says there is no justification without faith. In the same sense, “world” in 2 Corinthians 5:19 are the people to whom God does not impute sin. Paul earlier said such people are believers (Romans 4:5-8).

Because we were “in” Christ in the sense that He represented us to God, it is impossible for those whom He represented to be condemned (Rom. 8:1). God did what we couldn't do – He fulfilled the righteous requirement of His own law (8:4). This is why nothing can separate us from God's love (Rom. 8:38-39). Christ represented me to God, so in God's eyes it's as if I died (Galatians 2:20a). Christ took the divine law-curse meant for us (Gal. 3:10, 13). If I still need to keep commandments in order to be righteous enough in God's eyes to be saved, Jesus' death was pointless (2:21).

This cross message makes no sense to unbelievers (1 Cor. 1:18),. The Jews to whom Paul witnessed wanted to see miracles, and the Greeks wanted to debate philosophy, but Paul preached the cross. The cross-centered Gospel became God's power and wisdom to anyone the Spirit called (1:22-24). So Paul focused on the cross, because it was central to the Gospel message (1 Cor. 15:1-3). A Gospel that isn't cross-centered isn't Christianity.

The book of Hebrews looks at Christ's death through priestly eyes. Christ's death purged our sins (Heb. 1:3). He experienced death for everyone (2:9). The “everyone” there seem to be the “many sons” being brought to salvation in. 2:14-15. He propitiated the sins of the people (2:17), that is, the holy brethren, the partakers of the heavenly calling (3:1). Paul earlier in Romans 11 and Colossians 2 made it clear that “God's people” in these contexts were believers in Christ, not the Jews as such.

Hebrews approaches Christ's death in light of His priesthood. Christ's priesthood is unique, in that He was both offerer and offering. Unlike the Levitical system, His sacrifice was a one time event (7:27). By it He obtained eternal redemption (9:12-14) for those whom God calls (15). Ascending into heaven, Christ appears in God's presence on our behalf (9:24). Since He lives forever as God's priest, Christ never stops representing us.

His death put away sin (9:26), as he bore them for many (9:28). God sanctified us through Christ's death (10:10), by which offering we are perfected forever (10:14). He is why we can approach God with confidence (10:19-22). Hebrews 13:20-21 ends by calling on the Lord to equip us with everything good we need to do His will. God does this by the blood of the everlasting covenant, which Christ shed on the cross.

James doesn't mention Christ's death. His focus is on the practical ethics of faith.

Peter says that Christ's suffering and subsequent glory were predicted by the prophets (1 Pe. 1:10-11). He repeats the ransom theme in 1:18-19, saying that Christ's blood purchased us from our forefathers' spiritually futile traditions. Christ's suffering is also an example to emulate when we are persecuted for our faith (1 Pe. 2:21-23). Christ bore our sins on the cross, so that we would live righteous lives. His wounds heal our sin-sick souls. This healing results in us no longer straying in sin, but returning to the Shepherd of our souls (v.25). Christ suffered in the flesh one time on behalf of the sins of the unrighteous, so that He might bring us to God (1 Pe. 3:18, 4:1). This is why we should mentally arm ourselves against sin. When we suffer as Christians, we share in Christ's pain and His reward (1 Pe. 4:13-14).

John says that Jesus Christ's death had universal proportion. He is the expiation (hilasmos, referring back to the hilasterion, the mercy-seat, of the ark of the covenant) for our sins, as well as the sins of the whole world (1 Jn. 2:1-2, 4:10). It should be noted that 1 John 2:2 speaks to what Christ is, rather than what He did. He is the propitiation of the whole world's sins (“whole world” being the same as “the wicked who are under Satan's power” in 1 John 5:19, which uses the identical Greek phrase).

In the Revelation,. John praises Christ for freeing us from sin by his blood (Rev. 1:6a). Christ is symbolically shown as a slain lamb (5:6). The angels and elders praise Him for ransoming people for God out of every tribe, language, people, and nation (5:9). People who will become believers during the tribulation wash their robes white in His blood (7:14), and will overcome the Beast by that same blood (12:11).

Let's sum up

We see that Christ's death was preached as a proof of His Messiahship. The Messiah was prophesied to die by piercing, a certain number of years after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem. Christ died by piercing, at that time. These are reasons why we ought to believe in Christ. He is the Son of the living God. The cross played a persuasive role in the Christian apologetic, and was intended to encourage faith through this prophetic fulfillment.

Second, Christ's death was a ransom-price paid to purchase sinners out of their indebtedness to God's law. His death appeased God's holy anger against sinners, and takes away their sins, since the blood-price for sin was paid. Both these aspects of the cross build on the God-ordained principle of covenantal representation, which allowed Christ to act in other's stead.

Did Christ's death expiate – take away – the entire human race's sins? The Bible says no. We're not universalists. This is where we begin to see that the debate over the scope of the atonement isn't senseless. The NT does in places present Christ's death as a model of godly humility to follow (Ph'p 2:5-8) and proof of God's love for us (1 John 3:16), but the overwhelming application is that He died to ransom the sins of the many. Yet all are not saved.

Add to this the Bible's teaching that Christ's death accomplished what he intended to do. Christ said, “It is finished” when He died (Jn. 19:30), not, “And it begins”. Christ's death didn't make people from the world's tribes purchasable. It purchased them. His death didn't make sinners reconcilable. It reconciled them. He didn't make sins purgeable, He purged them. He didn't make eternal redemption obtainable, He obtained it. He didn't make sinners ransomable, He ransomed them. God's holy anger toward me wasn't satisfied when I first trusted in Christ. It was satisfied 2,000 years ago, when Christ died. God justified me when I believed, but the basis for my justification, the ransom for my sin, was paid at the cross. Redemption was Christ entering the Bank of God on behalf of a group of specific people, without them knowing it, and paying off their mortgages. Yet everyone without exception is invited to come to Christ.

One strict-Calvinist church council of the past concluded this:

“The death of the Son of God is the only and most perfect sacrifice and satisfaction for sin, and is of infinite worth and value, abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world. This death is of such infinite value and dignity because the person who submitted to it was not only really man and perfectly holy, but also the only-begotten Son of God, of the same eternal and infinite essence with the Father and the Holy Spirit, which qualifications were necessary to constitute Him a Savior for us; and, moreover, because it was attended with a sense of the wrath and curse of God due to us for sin.Moreover, the promise of the gospel is that whosoever believes in Christ crucified shall not perish, but have eternal life. This promise, together with the command to repent and believe, ought to be declared and published to all nations, and to all persons promiscuously and without distinction, to whom God out of His good pleasure sends the gospel. And, whereas many who are called by the gospel do not repent nor believe in Christ, but perish in unbelief, this is not owing to any defect or insufficiency in the sacrifice offered by Christ upon the cross, but is wholly to be imputed to themselves.”13

Jesus Christ's is God's Son. Because He was and is the Lord, He had and has the authority to forgive sin. He had it before He died (Mk. 2:10), and He still has it. So He is the One to whom we must go. All without exception have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but can be justified freely by God's grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith (Romans 3:23-25). This means that Christ not only has the authority to forgive sin, He also has the moral right to do so. The cross allows God to forgive sin without violating His own holiness.

The Scripture defends a distinction between that which could happen, and what does happen. The Lord would have established Saul's kingdom, but Saul's sin ruined it (1 Sam. 13:13-14). The Lord would have blessed Jeroboam, having already given him David's kingdom, but Jeroboam's sins led God to judge him instead (1 Kings 14:6-16). God told all the sick Israelites that looking up at the bronze serpent on the pole would heal them (Numbers 21:8-9). Is it possible that some refused? If they did, then they died of snakebite. But God, working through the serpent symbol, would have healed them. Christ said He would be that bronze serpent, and His death would work on sin in the same way (John 3:14-16).

We don't believe in universal salvationism. The scripture says that the benefits of Christ's death accrue only to the elect, that is, to those who God mercifully gives the gift of faith. From God's POV, Christ paid His ransom for specific people. He shed His blood for the many, which is a particularized group (Mt. 26:28). According to the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders, Christ didn't buy every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. He bought us out of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. Dordt said this, but Dordt was right on the other matter as well. The death of the Son of God is abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world. We invite everyone to believe, because of the intrinsic, infinite worth of the One who died there. Anyone could have been healed if they looked at the serpent. Everyone can be forgiven if they will look to Christ.

I will let some genius figure the rest of it out.

Assurance of Salvation - Bible Study Outline

2010-10-21T12:04:00.000-04:00

THE HOLY SPIRIT & ASSURANCE OF SALVATION
I Thessalonians 1:1-10

It is possible to have false assurance. How?

Rest your faith in works.

I was christened as an infant.
I was baptized and confirmed.
I responded to an altar call.
I prayed a prayer.

Rest your faith in experience.

I shook, fell down, and spoke in tongues.
I saw the steeple of the church against the beautiful setting sun, and knew I was ready to go.
I cried.
I felt powerfully moved by music.

You can see true faith in a person's life. I Thessalonians 1:4

The Thessalonians received the Gospel message. See 1 Thess. 2:13-13.
The person without the Spirit can't receive the Gospel. I Cor. 2:14.
The Gospel bounces off the hard-soil heart.

The Thessalonians expressed full confidence in the Gospel.

Martha is an example of full confidence – John 11:23-27.
The answer to weak assurance is the Gospel itself. The Gospel is like a mirror in which we can see ourselves as we really are.

Six evidences of genuine faith:

A genuine believer follows Christ. 1:6
A genuine believer's faith endures affliction. 1:6; see Matt. 13:20-22.
A genuine believer rejoices for the Gospel's blessings.
A genuine believer confesses his faith. 1:7-8; Romans 10:9.
A genuine believer turns from their former “god.” 1:9.
A genuine believer expects Jesus to come again. 1:10.

It is also possible to lose assurance. How?

Laziness in applying yourself to your own spiritual growth. 2 Peter 1:8-9.
Acceptance of ungodly philosophies & ideas. I Corinthians 15:12-17.

I'm Disappointed With Voddie Baucham's Material on FIC

2010-10-08T15:01:00.000-04:00

I finally managed to obtain my own copy of Voddie Baucham's Family-Driven Faith (Crossways), and read the final two chapters where he makes a case for the family-integrated church. If you're not familiar with that term, it is a movement that advocates the abolition of traditional youth ministry, and any organizing of children or youth according to age. I won't go into a detailed interaction with these chapters; I'll just give a short comment. I was hoping for a good, solid presentation, but was very disappointed with Baucham's chapters, for a couple of reasons.

My biggest disappointment is that Baucham never supplies any Scriptural proof of his core idea (that organizing children in complementary age-groups is against God's will). To my thinking, this is the fatal flaw, the one factor that throws a shadow over everything in these chapters. He never proves his thesis. Therefore, his claim to represent the Lord's own thinking on this subject -- which is what he claims -- can't be accepted. What does the Word of God say? Perhaps someone else, somewhere else, does the job as far as providing a Scriptural basis of the anti-age-grading principle, but I'm not aware of it. Based on my knowledge of Scripture, the reason brother Baucham doesn't provide any Scriptural proof is because no such Scriptural proof exists.

Parallel to this problem is brother Baucham's reliance on heated rhetoric and a stream of logic fallacies. For example, pointing out everything that's wrong with the way Southern Baptist churches do youth ministry doesn't prove the FIC principle (they could both be wrong). Brother Baucham's case is built on anecdotes. All his examples of the typical youth ministry are negative, and yet we all know there have been and are, excellent youth ministries.

Lamenting the weakness of the modern American Christian family doesn't prove the FIC principle. Teaching (correctly) that the Christian parent is responsible for the spiritual nurture and up-bringing of their own children does not prove that having youth workers is a sin. Baucham's thesis is that, if the parent is responsible, then no one else is, which is a non sequitur. You might as well get rid of pastors altogether, if no one but the parents are allowed to spiritually disciple children. Also, Baucham's notion that no one could be better at discipling a child than that child's parents is untrue. The Old Testament teaching that the parent is responsible to train the child in the faith does not, ergo, prove that other people helping is a sin, or that training children of the same age together is a sin.

The core thesis of FIC is that age-classified ministry is a sin. Make sure you understand the gravity of it. Not just "unwise", or "flawed", or "less than ideal", but contrary to God's will. Anything that is contrary to God's will is sin. So the burden of proof rests on FIC-ers to prove the assertion. Baucham never proves this. Instead, he relies on stories to evoke sympathy, such as being teased for having a large-ish family. In fact, most of brother Baucham's proofs are really just preacher's stories presented as if they are hard evidence.

He also never interacts with the thought that there are multiple reasons why so many Southern Baptist youth abandon the faith when they go away to college. Like: the Baptist altar call tradition producing scores of false professions of faith; the corruption of many SBC churches by religious liberalism; shallow, pragmatic, experience-centered SBC preaching; parental and hypocrisy at home. Getting rid of all the youth pastors isn't going to fix any of that.

In fact, teaching that age-graded ministry is a sin, is itself a sin. It's a sin, because the Bible doesn't say that age-graded Christian education is a sin. So, if we say that it is, then we are false prophets, putting words into the Lord's mouth that tghe Lord didn't say. It's also a sin because the teaching is divisive to the church. It's a church-splitter, no different from people who say you have to speak in tongues to be truly Spirit-filled. It is a merely man-made idea that is presented to us as the very will of God, when it is not.

The Wicked Heart of King Saul

2010-09-22T08:58:00.000-04:00

Are you interested in recognizing sinful rebellion in a man's mind? Study the example of King Saul. He started out without any stark indicators of his eventual fate. He was a farm boy, searching the countryside for some missing donkeys. He had a charismatic experience with the Holy Spirit. Samuel the prophet met him, and anointed him the first king of Israel. Then Saul went home, and resumed his rural life. When the Spirit of God came upon him, he was transformed. He rallied Israel behind him, and together they routed the enemy. Saul seemed humble. He hid among the luggage. Saul was then publicly inaugurated as their king. The writer of I Samuel makes the point of crediting Saul for many valiant acts during this time in his life. But cut to the next story, and something has gone wrong in Saul. As you read his story, you see the outworking of his own rebellious heart. He is preoccupied with what other people think of him, but the Lord's opinion of him doesn't move him at all. He enver accepts responsibility for his own wrong actions. He never seeks forgiveness; he never apologizes to God or man. You never read of him praying to the Lord. He slips up once, and refers to the Lord as "your God" (talking to Samuel). Saul becomes a masterpiece of mental disorder. He becomes consumed with jealousy and fear toward David. He projects his own love of the throne onto David, and assumes that David will try to do to him what he would do if he were in David's shoes. All the while Saul assumes that David is just as consumed by love of power as he. God punishes Saul with a demonic spirit. Saul descends further into fantasizing. He never seeks the Lord when Samuel pronounces him "fired" by God. He just begs Samuel to publicly accompany him to the feast, so that a bad political impression wouldn't be made on the men. He drags David's name through the mud, and repeatedly tries to murder him, as if he believed that he could successfully thwart God's plans. He attacks Jonathan for Jonathan not hating David as he does. He orders the massacre of an entire village, including the women and young children, solely because they (unknowingly) helped David. His wicked heart causes him to become more and more deranged. He issues crazy orders to the troops, like "No one eats until we beat the enemy" (how does an army win without eating?). He tries to execute his own son for breaking the order, even though his son accomplished a fantastic victory. The troops (righteously, and with great indgnation on Jonathan's behalf) intervene, undermining his authority -- the very thing over which he obsessed. So Saul has all three elements going in his mind -- his own moral attitudes, symptoms of mental derangement caused by those godless attitudes, and serious spiritual warfare problems layered on top of them. At one point in his story he bursts out sobbing in front of the troops, proclaims David innocent of everything, and predicts that David will indeed be king one day. You have to wonder what his top command and the troops were thinking. It can't be good for morale to know that the commander in chief is insane. David's principled action (of having Saul at his mercy twice, and sparing him both times out of respect for God) ruined Saul's aggressive propaganda campaign against David. But then, after awhile, Saul breaks his word to David, and returns to hunt him again anyway. God finally won't talk to Saul anymore. So, rather than go to God and ask why, or repent, or even say he's sorry, Saul decides it is a brilliant idea to go ask a witch. The Lord (apparently) causes the real Samuel to appear -- terrifying the witch, who was either a fraud or expected the great prophet to strike her dead -- and Samuel says, "You again!" Then Samuel pronounces death on Saul. To which news Saul -- does nothing. Goes home. Doesn't cry out in fear or ask the Lord to guide him aright. No, he just goes home. Prideful stubbornness so extreme, so mind-bendingly irrational, that even the impulse of simple self-preservation has been snuffed out in Saul. What can you learn from Saul? 1. People can start out looking like they're believers, when they're not. 2. People can start out looking like they've got their act together, when they don't. 3. People can have experiences with the Holy Spirit, and still not be saved. 4. Sin's effects on the life get worse over time. It isn't a static condition. 5. Rebellion is knowingly not obeying the Lord's commandments. 6. The wicked heart never seeks God's forgiveness. 7. The wicked heart hates those who don't sin as it does. 8. The wicked heart mentally projects its own viciousness and values into others. 9. The wicked heart will stop at nothing, including murder, if not restrained. 10. A heart can become so wicked that it loses even the normal desire to stay alive. 11. The wicked heart will always say its sins were someone else's fault. 12. Rebellion unrepented opens you up to direct demonic control. 13. Lying is a chief manifestation of an evil heart.

You Must Conquer Stagnation

2010-09-17T14:17:00.000-04:00

Stagnation is the lack of progress or forward motion. Rivers are dynamic; swamps are stagnant. It sets into a life or a church when people do the same things again and again, but lose sight of why they're doing it, or are not committed to attaining results. The only cure for stagnation is to goal-set. Stagnation is different from frustration. The prophet Jeremiah experienced frustration, not stagnation. Israel defiantly rebelled against the Lord whom Jeremiah represented, causing him frustration (and fear, pain, and earthly loss). But Jeremiah knew what he was trying to do. He was goal-directed. His goals came from the Lord. If your life feels stagnant, it is because you need God-given goals, combined with a plan pursued energetically to achieve them. Then, once you have achieved your goals, you do that process again and again, until you die. There are people who stagnate because they look to everyone else around them to set goals for them. They are waiting for their environment to inspire and direct them. This ios total futility. Your stagnation will persist if you are waiting to be inspired by your circumstances, or by other people. Dynamic, God-pleasing goals do not come from the power of the flesh. Only the Holy Spirit, illuminating your mind to applied Scriptural truths, can tell you what your goals ought to be. And this won't happen on automatic pilot. You must ask the Holy Spirit to build direction into your life. Fear of change causes stagnation. Some change is destructive, as we have seen in the U.S. these past two years. But a naked fear of change is irrational and springs from godless unbelief. The Israelites wanted to go back to the stagnant suffering of Egypt, because they had no faith in the Lord. But the Holy Spirit has the power to drop goals into your mind, in response to prayer. Goal-setting is a necessary mark of a leader. If you can't pick Bible-based, faith-driven goals, you aren't a leader. But, on the plus side, goal-setting is a learnable skill. Not everyone will be equally good at it, but all human beings set goals, even though they may be modest ones. Do you want a sense of dynamism in your life and church? Set and pursue new goals, and you will automatically banish the feeling of stagnation.

Sunday & the Sabbath

2010-09-06T17:28:00.000-04:00

The subject of the Sabbath has rarely come up in the 14 years I've been pastoring. For some reason I haven't had to deal much with Adventists, although a good knowledge of Galatians is usually enough for anyone to refute their damnable errors. But here is my advice about Sunday and the Sabbath: The Lord hallowed the seventh day specifically. The teaching that God hallowed "one day in seven" (as J. Robertson McQuilkin's ethics textbooks teaches, for instance) is false -- that phrasing is, to state it gently, a calculated word-trick meant to set up the sabbatarian precept. The seventh day is holy because God finished the creation on the sixth day, and then He ceased creating. The seventh day also symbolizes the covenant God cut with Israel when He rescued them from Egyptian bondage. The actual word "sabbath" is used, in the New Testament, in a way consistent with its Old Testament origins. See, for example, how Luke consistently uses the word "sabbath" throughout the book of Acts. You never see the Apostles use it allegorically with reference to the first day of the week. As Reformed Baptists rightly point out that baptizo and its various Greek siblings are never applied to infants in the NT, so too "sabbath" is never applied to the first day. Paul in Colossians 2 associates the sabbaths (plural, notice) with the other ceremonial laws, specifically the dietary laws. He treats all the sabbaths, which includes the Jubilee year, as belonging to the same class of laws as that. Sabbatarians will object to this idea, on the ground that all ten commandments are timeless. But since that is the very issue in question, it is arguing in a circle to rebut with "all the commandments are timeless." No, on the basis of New Testament teaching, we are saying, after due consideration, that the fourth of them is not. This is not at all odd, since the entire Law is a mix of moral, civil, and ceremonial laws. Why wouldn't the Ten Words reflect that same mixture? Considering that there is NT material which treats the Fourth commandment as ceremonial law, not as moral law, the premise that all ten of the ten commandments are timeless is a hypothesis that needs to be proven, not a foundation to be assumed. For example, saying that the Fourth commandment is an "expression of God's holy character" is true, but saying that doesn't prove anything about whether it continues for all time. The entire Law is an expression of God's holy character, every last bit of it. But we do not sacrifice goats today. However, the New Testament teachings (by precept and example) about the Lord's Day are quite similar to the Sabbath. The day commemorates the resurrection of Christ, in which He entered His rest from the work of redemption. To trust in Christ as Savior is to enter His sabbath-rest (Hebrews 4), and since the Lord's Day remembers that achievement, it makes the Lord's Day the typological fulfillment of the fourth commandment. It is a sin to neglect the gathering-together of ourselves, and a grave sin either to neglect or abuse the Lord's Table. It shoukld not be called the Christian Sabbath, though; and the civil restrictions and penalties of Moses do not apply.

Waiting For Someone Else To Do It

2010-09-01T14:46:00.000-04:00

A feature of church life that I've learned a lot about, without having really thought about it before entering the pastorate, is the issue of Christians waiting for someone else to do it. "It" could be anything -- cleaning up the kitchen, visiting the sick, whatever. Doing outreach in the community is a big one. Growing the attendance, serving on the leadership. How many Christians are waiting for someone else to do it -- and then complaining about (a) how dirty the kitchen is, (b) how no one visited them when they were sick, (c) how small the church is, (d) the lack of sufficient, capable leaders. You can fill in the blank. A lot of people just wait and faintly hope that someone else will do whatever needs doing, which is why the same 30% of a typical congregation usually does 70% of what needs doing. A lot of this is consumerist, and indolent. People think about church like shoppers think about stores. They don't think of "church" as a community co-op. They think of it as a service provider. You contribute some money, and then expect services to pour out of the tap. It might be that large churches contribute to this illusion (that stuff "just happens"), since it probably looks that way to the uninitiated. People show up and the floors are vacuumed, coffee pots filled, and someone is ready to take care of your children. But it isn't limited to large churches. As I said, the big one is church growth. I absolutely believe that the congregation grows the congregation. The preacher needs to present God's Word well, and he needs to serve well as a leading elder. But I don't think preachers do much to directly increase attendance, unless they are specifically tasked to work in outreach and, as a result, spend most of their time cultivating new contacts. But then , that means there are other areas of pastoral ministry they won't have enough time to do. A form this takes is the idea that things will happen if you just get the right "anointed man of God", which is hogwash. Unfortunately, there are some denominations where this sort of magical thinking about the pastorate is promoted (the Assemblies of God comes to mind, coming from some of my own past experiences). However, a good pastor will try to train the people in the area of Christian service; and I imagine that most try to teach and preach using your gifts for the Lord. But big ministries also promote the illusion that a major ministry sprang up magically around the preacher. When was the last time you saw a TV ministry, or listened to a major radio ministry, focus for a long time on its elder board, deacon board, women's association, or the janitorial crew? Right; you never have, have you?

Overcoming An Abusive Upbringing

2010-08-09T09:29:00.000-04:00

I come from an abusive home, and I know how it distorted my thinking, and consequently my emotions. My parents' examples and behavior set me on a path of failure. But I became convinced later that it was possible to un-kinkl the knots in my head, with the healp of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. I was unwilling to drag through life, crippled, angry, or paralyzed by fear, once I became convinced that more was possible. I wanbt to thank the writings of John Wesley for this realization. Even though there are many matters about which i disagree with Wesley, it was his sermons, recorded in a set of dusty old volumes at the Northeastern Bible College library, that woke me up to the possibilities of the Spirit-healed life, and delivered me from the futility of the Darbyite doctrine I had been taught. I will list the key elements to emotional health that I've discovered in the Bible over the years: 1. My home is not the human race; my parents are not God. 2. I am obligated to believe and act on what God says about me. 3. It is crucial to be free from bondage to anger. A child, being a child, will grow up thinking foolishness, and part of that foolishness is the belief that its home is a microcosm of the human race. Children also accept whatever the parents say, until age and intellectual ability kicks in. Even so, the bad fruit of those evil seeds will continue to grow, and bear bitter fruit. An immature Christian stays locked in those early years of instruction, if we does not diligently work to renew his mind according to the truths of Scripture. If we had a parent who called us worthless, or stupid, or demeaned or cursed at us, the child takes in that abuse as Gospel truth, and the foolish adult continues on in them. It takes an act of faith to read the Scripture and decide, as an act of the will, that what it says about us is true, and the abusive things that our parent(s) said about us were lies. Many of our parents were Satan's servants, but God's Word is a light that cuts through the black fog of our parents godless influence on us. This decision to believe the Bible is necessary, to break through the ingrained patterns of thought, the iron tracks of self-belief, that a godless parent lays down in our mind. In other words: We must re-construct our view of ourselves, so that it comes into obedience to the authority of God's Word. Self-image is just as much part of that which must come captive to the obedience of the Word of God as worldview. To reject the good things that God says to us, about His esteem for us, how much we matter to Him, His undying loyalty to us, and the good things we're capable of in Him, is unbelief. It is sin, and a sin we must not commit. It is right to hate your sins, but it is not spiritual to hate your self. Your sins are not you. It also important to repent of the sin of judgmentalism. The paranoid Christian -- the Christian who walks through life suspecting everyone's motives, believing that others hate him/her, expecvting the worst from others (especially those in authority) is not only very immature, they are also commiting the sin of judging. There are times and places where such guardedness is called for. The prophet Jeremiah lived during terrible times, where almost every hand was turned against him. David rescued the city of Keilah from the Philistines, and then suspected that they would turn him over to Saul, who was hunting him. Christians in ther old Soviet Union needed to be very vigilant. Human sinfulness means that no one -- inclouding us -- is entirely trustworthy. But to walk through life simply assuming that others intend to do us harm is not only emotionally unhealthy, it is a sin-habit of which we need to repent! Most people are not out to get you. Most people don't even know who you are, and intend you no harm. It is one thing to grow up in a neighborhood where there are gangs, and alertness is called for. It is one thing to be aware of which car mechanic shops are honest, and which ones will rip you off. It is quite another thing to live on alert at all times. No one can sustain that. That way of living is not only irrational, it is ungodly, and you need to abandon it. The Holy Spirit can develop in us the wisdom to know when vigilance is appropriate, and when it is not. Recklessness is an unwise way to live life, though some choose it in a fleshly attempt to threow off the bondage of their fears. But the underlying force is fear, and that is a spiritual concern. Do you live in a constant, trembling state of tension? You should memorize Psalm 91, and better yet, believe that it applies to you. Faith in God counteracts the carnal fear of people. Do not deny, to God or yourself, that you are still angry at your parents. I did not say that staying angry at your mother or father is OK. It is not OK. It is bitterness, it is sin, and it gives Satan a foothold in your heart. Any bitterness you nurture in your breast renders you mentally unstable, and sometimes it can make people go completely unhinged. But denying that you are still angry doesn't mean that you are not still angry. It just means you're lying to God, yourself, and others. It may be that you are denying it because acknowledging the hatred would unlock emotional floodgates (strong tears and outcries, perhaps). Those emotions are unpleasant and embarassing. But the Bible doesn't tell us to stew or spew. It tells us to lay ourselves out before the Lord, and see ourselves as we really are, for what we really want, and feel, and desire. If we are guilty of the sin of hating our parents -- even if that hatred is richly understandable, from a human point of view -- then we are poisoning ourselves, and poisoning everyone else around us, including our family members. Especially our family members! It is not true that forgiveness means we never feel anger toward that person again. Your emotions will respond to whatever you focus your thoughts upon. If you were molested, and you think about the molestation, then you will feel anger or sadness, regardless of whether you have sincerely forgiven the perpetrator. There is a legitimate anger that strongly desires justice. Something truly evil was done, and the person does truly deserve punishment. But even there we find that we must exercise faith in God. He will balance the scales of justice. He will avenge the wrong. By choosing not to take vengeance ourselves, we make room, by faith, for the wrath of God. You can have hope that, one day, either the punishment that Christ took on the cross for your perpetrator will be applied to him or her in the form of the forgiveness of their sins, or God will justly judge them according to the book of their works that God maintains in His heavenly presence. It is not God's will that you lurch through life, emotionally damaged and causing damage. Nor is it necessary. You are not a computer, doomed to act out childhood programming. You can re-program yourself, by faith, using the Word of God. And you should do so. It is a necessary part of your growth process.

Listening To The Holy Spirit, 2

2010-07-07T14:01:00.000-04:00

The second way that the Holy Spirit speaks to us is in the form of wisdom. Wisdom is the power to discern what a situation calls for, and the different ways in which God's Word might apply to that situation. The Spirit has spoken in the form of the Bible, objectively (meaning, existing outside of our experience). That is His completed voice, delivered in a written format, and it cannot change. It is a "frozen form", which it needed to be, in order to operate as our authority. Wisdom, on the other hand, is subjective. It is a gift that unfolds within our minds. It is a candle that the Spirit lights in our souls. What does the Spirit's wisdom do? It enables us to know God as our Savior. Christ said, "Everything has been delivered to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him." (Matthew 11:27). This is illustrated by the conversion experience of Lydia. Luke wrote that the Lord opened Lydia's heart to heed the things spoken by Paul (Acts 16:14). The Spirit's wisdom enables us to know God better. This was Paul's prayer for the believers, recorded in Ephesians 1:17. The Spirit's wisdom enables Christians to understand God's will (Colossians 1:9). Then He enables Christians to teach and admonish each other (Colossians 3:16). In the Old Covenant, the Spirit gave Joshua the wisdom to lead (Deuteronomy 34:9). The Spirit gave Jesus, as Messiah, the wisdom to preach the Word of God (Isaiah 11:2). The Spirit also gave wisdom to the Church's first deacons, enabling them to know how to manage the benevolence ministry to the church's widows (Acts 6:3). So in these examples, we can see a progression of steps: 1. Salvation: To understand and accept the Gospel. 2. Growth: To come into deeper relationship with God. 3. Discernment: To recognize God's will in life's situations. 4. Body life: To teach fellow Christians. 5. Decision-making: To make leadership decisions. 6. Elders: To preach and teach God's Word in full-time ministry. 7. Deacons: To organize and run service ministry. How is the Holy Spirit's gift of wisdom different from Scripture? One way is that wisdom changes, dependent on circumstances. The meaning of any given passage of Scripture never changes, because the meanings of written words never depend on the circumstances of the contemporary reader. The idea that documents are "living", in the sense that the document's word-meanings change, is foolishness, held by those whose real goal is to ignore, distort, or disobey the document. But wisdom does change, depending on circumstances. As Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 3, there is a time for everything. There is a time to kill, and a time to make alive, a time to gather stones and a time to scatter them. Wisdonm enables us to recognize the times. You see this same principle in Paul's guidance to the Corinthians on how to handle the eating of meats offered up to idols. Under one circumstance, he says we are free to eat, but in another circumstance (specifically, if your host tells you that the meat was sacrifically dedicated to a pagan god and would see you as a hypocrite if you eat a bite), we are not to eat. This is an example of wisdom at work. This means that a Christian could possibly do a number of different things in a particular situation, in contrast to the commandment "Do not commit adultery", which allows for no exceptions. We also have no promise of infallibility. The Scripture was written by the hand of God. He preserved it from all factual errors (some of what religious liberals like to call "errors" in the Bible are literary devices like round numbers, poetic hyperbole, and colloquial, non-scientific descriptions of natural events). But the common Christian has not been promised the grace of infallibility. Wisdom is caopable of growth, which presumes that in its less-mature form the person makes more mistakes than later in life. James 1:5 is God's good promise of wisdom that we can all claim in prayer. As long as there is no unconfessed sin in our lives, God promises to tell us what to do and how to do it.

Listening to the Holy Spirit, 1

2010-07-06T16:20:00.000-04:00

The Holy Bible is the voice of the Holy Spirit. The Bible doesn't become the Spirit's voice to you when some verse leaps off the page at you, during your daily devotions. The Bible is the Spirit's voice even if it sits on a shelf, unread. The Bible's "Holy Spirit-ness" exists objectively, outside of your feelings and experiences. The writers of scripture were carried along by the spirit's flow, and though they wrote with their own particular grammars and styles, what they wrote was what the Holy Spirit wanted them to say. This is because the Scripture was out-breathed by God (II Timothy 3:14-17). God exhaled it. God gave us a Bible that is understandable even to the youngest children. Pastor Timothy had drunk the milk opf the Bible from his childhood. Timothy's mother and grandmother taught him the Bible from his earliest age. It gave him the wisdom he needed to be saved, which is the greatest gift any parent can ever give their child! Of what value is a good education or a fine career, if you do not attain to everlasting life! They are worthless, and will crumble into ashes in the end. The Bible is the only source of information we have on how to be made right with God and receive eternal life. The Bible was given for practical purposes. It was given to save sinners. It also supplies Christians with the broad content needed for doctrinal teaching. It provides the guidance and authority necessary for gentle criticisms of life, or stronger corrections when needed. After all, what right does anyone have to correct anyone, unless they have some credible authority standing behind them, stating the the difference between right and wrong? Without the Bible, we are merely arrogant busy-bodies. Some Christians don't feel like God guides them. Their sense of lostness is often due to their ignorance of the Bible. The mind is like a piano, and the various Scriptures are like the individual keys. The Holy Spirit would like to play you His music, but you have only given him five or six keys to play upon! By not reading the Bible, studying the Bible, or memorizing the Bible, you've hit the "mute" button on the Holy Spirit's voice in your life. The Bible then teaches two more ways that the Holy Spirit communicates with us. He communicates with us through wisdom, and then the Scripture also speaks of direct revelations from God.

Tithing

2010-06-24T09:06:00.000-04:00

Just a few thoughts on tithing... I think there ought to be a distinction made between Mosaic tithing and what the Old Testament called first-fruits giving. First-fruits giving was what Abraham offered Melchizedek -- the traditional 10% gift. I'm not sure where the 10% figure originally came from, since there doesn't seem to be any indication in Scripture of God telling people to follow that rule. Yet, the ancients followed the rule, and the Lord blessed it. The Old Testament also doesn't record where the ancients knew to make animal sacrifices as symbolic atonement for sin (such as Abel did), but they did, and God affirmed it by accepting that practice as well. Proverbs 3 refers to first-fruits giving, in its passage promising God's ample supply to those who honor Him with their income. Tithing, fully developed in the Mosaic law, amounted to nearly 30% of your income, and was as much a national tax as it was a personal act of religious devotion. Since we're not bound to Moses' Law, particularly not to its civil legislation, that kind of tithing isn't in force. However, the broader principle of God materially rewarding faithfulness in obeying His will in regards to our money, and faithfully meeting the needs of His laborers in the harvest, such as you read in Malachi 3, is a promise we should still claim for today. John MacArthur teaches that no giving percentage is required, because of the wrapping-up of the Mosaic era. He reasons that tithing was part of the Law, the Law is ended, so tithing is ended. II Corinthians 8-9 is often used to say that all percentages are erased, but I seem to recall that the section deals with a special benevolence project rather than regular giving. But first-fruits giving -- 10% giving -- predated Moses, and the Lord blessed it. I was much influenced by MacArthur in the past, and this is one of those areas where I have not followed the 10% rule consistently. However, the New Testament never abrogates first-fruit giving. There are deeper matters of justice, truth, and mercy with which we should concern ourselves, as Jesus said to the Pharisees. But He also said that they should have continued with their tithing (which for them at that time was the will of God), without neglecting the bigger issues of life with God. I think that the practice of 10% giving goes back all the way to Abraham, then is incorporated up into Moses' law in the form of the 30% tithe. The Law is no longer our rule of life, but I don't see anywhere in the New Testament where the older practice of 10% was done away.

Slain In The Spirit?

2010-06-08T14:39:00.000-04:00

My friend David is planting a church. Last Sunday, several different people being prayed-for by a church leader went limp during prayer. The person praying for them was not touching them, or pushing them on the forehead such as you see in the fraudulent revivals. David is not a Pentecostal, his message wasn't on the subject of experiencing the Spirit (he did an expository message on Habbakuk, with a gospel presentation at the end), and his denomination doesn't promote the "slain in the Spirit" phenomenon. (The phrase "slain in the Spirit" is not Biblical, so we shouldn't use it to describe the phenomenon.) In one case, the young woman's painful eye-ailment was substantially healed by the next day. In another case, the lady praying for another woman who came forward began praying for a series of life-issues that uncannily pinpointed specific sins and problems in that woman's past, even though they had never met before. How to explain, Biblically? Here's my stab at it: Going limp doesn't happen consistently in the Old Testament. Moses voluntarily prostrated himself at the burning bush because he recognized the glory of God speaking to him there. Moses did not fall to the ground whenever he spoke with the Lord, even though they spoke face-to-face, as friend to friend. Instead, Moses' face shone with God's glory. There is a verse in the Old Testament where it says the priests could not stay standing because of the glory of God coming down upon the temple. However, the glory of the Lord was a visible thing, such as the Lord's pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. Some people fell into a deep sleep with the power of God came upon them (Abraham in Genesis 17, Ezekiel), but others did not. But we must remember that these Bible figures saw actual visions of the Lord. People going weak during prayer does not match these examples. To the best of my knowledge, there are no cases described in the New Testament where the Holy Spirit's power caused someone to lose muscle control or sink to the ground. Usually, the Spirit's power coming upon someone empowered them either to speak the Word of God, or to praise God. Christ did not lose muscle strength when He was anointed by the Spirit, and He described the effect of the Spirit's coming-upon the Church as "power" (Acts 1:8), not a draining of strength. God's Spirit heals sickness and empowers the soul with grace, so I have a hard time believing that the Spirit of God would cause weakness. For example, when the Spirit was poured forth at Pentecost, the 120 disciples did not lose strength and fall to the ground. They miraculously praised the Lord in foreign languages, as the Spirit fell upon them (Acts 2). When the Christians prayed for God to prosper His apostles in the face of official persecution (Acts 4), they were all filled with the Spirit and "spoke the word of God with boldness." A key result of being filled with the Spirit in Ephesians 5 is to "worship the Lord with psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs, making melody in your heart..." The Holy Spirit always seems to make people stronger, not weaker. The Epistles don't say anything about the Holy Spirit causing a person to sink to the ground. This means that going limp is not something we have the right to expect to happen in a God-blessed meeting, let alone something we ourselves attempt to cause. If we attempt the latter, we might easily put ourselves in the dark position of a false prophet! The only scenario in the New Testament where we do read of people physically reacting to God's power is in cases of demonic possession and oppression. Demonically-afflicted people fell down before Christ or apostles, they often spasmed, or went into trances where they spoke with different voice. The Gospel writers describe demons wrenching people's bodies as they are pried loose from them by God's grace. So here is what I (tentatively) think, for what it's worth. 1. A person going limp during prayer is neither commanded nor forbidden in the New Testament. The epistles say nothing about it, pro or con. Therefore, it can never be held up as a sure example of the Spirit's working in someone's life. Because the New testament does not say it is a standard of effective ministry, it is not a standard of effective ministry. It is not necessarily a manifestation of God's power being present. The New Testament is filled with examples of Christ acting powerfully on behalf of people who were perfectly awake, aware, and standing vertical the whole time He was working for them. Christ prayed for the centurion's sick servant, and the servant was miraculously healed while the centurion remained awake and aware the entire time. 2. It could be a physical manifestation of a demonic power being banished from the life, through prayer and faith. This theory would harmonize with Gospel and Acts accounts of demonically-afflicted people losing control of their bodies when confronted with Christ's great power. I believe there are many people afflicted with mental and physical curses, andf those curses are the result of demonic activity in their lives. However, the afflicted people do not realize their problems have demonic roots. Unbelievers lie in the lap of the evil one at all times (1 John 5:19), unless God intervenes. 3. In some cases, it might also be that the intensity of the moment overwhelms the person for whom prayer is being offered. I say this because there can be natural explanations for events, as well as supernatural explanations. I think it is wiser to opt for less-dramatic explanations for most of life's events, unless the facts of a case support a supernatural explanation. To deny all supernaturalism is to be no better than an atheist; but to attribute everything to the supernatural reflects gullibility and a lack of discerment. A person carrying a terrible mental/emotional burden might become overwhelmed by the sense of God caring about them, or they might allow themselves to fully feel the emotions attached to their trial, during the process of prayer -- emotions that they have been "stuffing" as a means of coping.

Agree or Disagree?

2010-06-02T23:38:00.000-04:00

Agree or disagree? Every pastor (or any sort of Christian worker) depends on the Lord's leading, to enable him to find people who need the sort of ministry he does, or to help those same people find him. I remember many times over the past nine years where I encountered someone in the local park, or met someone at the local grocery store, or became acquainted with someone at a social event, or greeted people who visited church and we were both shocked to discover that they and I shared a friend from elsewhere, who by those means ended up at our church. Then, there have been times where it seemed like I couldn't make a new contact for ministry if my very life depended on it! Where it was like I was trying to drill into in rock with a cooked noodle. How frustrating those latter times are, but how much they remind me of how totally dependent I am on the invisible hand of God, and His unseen host maneuvering around behind the scenes. What can I do, Lord, other than what You have decided to enable me to do? Lord, show me what I should do, if there indeed is anything I can or should do differently when there is a drought; and give us the wisdom, Lord, to know what you want when you send rain or when you send drought.

Pastor Evaluations

2010-05-20T12:17:00.000-04:00

Here are some good ideas I received about work evaluations I learned from my wife, with application to pastor evaluations. (1) A good evaluation ought to be a snapshot of the person's last 8-10 weeks. They should not be a compilation of everything that happened over a year's period. Pastors often get dumped on by an evaluator, if which long-forgotten events are rehearsed ("this family was offended back in January..."). The evaluation should be about how things have been going recently. Really, there ought to be a steady stream of feedback happening anyway. No one should be piling up feedback, like water straining to burst from a dam. (2) A good evaluation should focus on the person's normal habits, not their occasional actions or out-of-the-ordinary behaviors. If a man makes a sarcastic quip in a public meeting, but he isn't customarily sarcastic, then that incident shouldn't make its way into an evaluation, because it isn't the normal way he acts. Now I'll add some more... (3) Who is complaining, and why, should play into whether the complaint is given much weight. If some fellow says, "I don't like Pastor Jack as a pastor much, he's too pushy", but he's the guy who is now living with his girlfriend after Jack warned him not to sin against the Lord in that way, then his opinion ought to be accorded a weight of "zero." Complaints (or praises) are just raw data. The input itself needs to be evaluated, before being used in an actual evaluation. Otherwise, all you're doing is reporting a very poorly-done poll. A woman who dislikes the pastor because she misses the previous pastor, or is annoyed because he won't let her preach, might deliberately complain. (4) A pastoral evaluation is not a synonym for, "A time to tell the pastor everything that sanyone said was wrong with him." The proper goal is to encourage and improve the worker, but a lot of evaluators, just like a lot of poor managers in secular businesses, use it to pick at the person being evaluated. Or worse, to vent their own issues under the false guise of representing unnamed "others." (5) People who can give examples should be accorded more weight in feedback than the other kind. For example, if someone points out that Pastor Jack used that same illustration about "the puppy on the railroad tracks", or that same story about when he was nine at the state fair, for the third time in three months, that's useful for the preacher to know. In other words, real-life examples should count for more than what someone says they feel about things.

Agree or Disagree?

2010-04-13T15:21:00.000-04:00

In all the church-growth material I've read, there are two issues that trigger the most controversy (even though they get clouded in theology). The first is music style. The second is, who is the Sunday service going to be aimed at -- Christians, or non-Christians? Evangelism, or edification?

Church-Based Evangelism -- Can You Grow Without Selling Out?

2010-04-13T11:32:00.001-04:00

This is a rough draft of an upcoming Bible class session: CHURCH-BASED EVANGELISM 1. Church-based evangelism is supposed to be the norm. Matthew 16:18 -- Christ focuses on building up His church. What is Christ building? His church. That's the church universal, but the church universal is composed of numerous individual "cells." You always have Christ's support, if you pray for Him to build up your church. Matthew 28:19-20 -- "All that I commanded you" includes Bod/Church life. There is so much church-life teaching in the New Testament, that the attempts by parachurch groups to "disciple" new Christians with zero reference to church life and church conduct, is sub-Biblical. Acts 15:41 -- Paul's team didn't just "win souls", they started churches. Paul wasn't running a parachurch ministry, in the usual sense of that word. He also wasn't just winning isolated individuals and then leaving them where he found them. He organized them into groups, taught them how to worship, eventually appointed elders (Titus 1), and so planted churches. 2. Evangelistic fertility starts with prayer for evangelistic fertility. Mt. 9:37-38. Prayer was Christ's method for creating evangelistically gifted workers. There will always be more work than there are workers, and the Christians will always be more preoccupied with themselves and their families than the plight of the lost. This is why we can never stop asking God to provide us with more people. Acts 1:8 -- A church that seeks the Spirit's filling will be used of God. Your claims of fear of Charimstaic excess is a lame excuse for sinning by refusing to ask the Holy Spirit to fill you. Colossians 4:2-4 -- Where do opportunities and ability come from? Even Paul depended on other people's prayers to do his apostolic ministry. Satan wants to keep all doors closed and locked. The touch of God can create opportunities, and enable us not to be tongue-tied. 3. We can be appealing without selling out. 1st Corinthians 9:19-22: Style. Do try to fit the people you're trying to reach. 19-20. This is where a lot of our old-school churches miserably fail. We can't tell the differences between style, preference, and substance, or we're too lazy to try. We conservatives attack all steps toward cultural adapatation as if every single one is a case of cultural sell-out. We become brainless in our knee-jerkiness. Do not change your doctrines (strategy vs. morality). 20-21. Paul knew the whole time that he was adapting to strict Jewish custom that God no longer required him to follow those customs. Paul never fell back into spiritual bondage to Pharaseeism, which you have to figure would have been an area of temptation for a man like him, right? Do not commit sin in the process! 21 On the other hand, no matter how much Paul adapted to Greek culture, he never forgot that he was morally, ethically, and ultimately answerable to Jesus Christ. Sin is never excusable. You can claim that you sinned in the process of winning someone to Christ, but the Lord will never accept that as a legitimate excuse. Sin is always wrong. You are always under the law of Christ. Evangelism doesn't excuse anything. 1 Thessalonians 2:3-5: Ethics. Paul requires... Accuracy ("our exhortation does not come from...error").Never water down the Gospel to make it more palatable. You don't like talking about sin, condemnation, the cross, or repentance, because it turns off your target audience. You're not selling a better brand of peas here. Of course they don't like that part of the message. But those parts of the message aren't disposable. If you water them down, then it isn't the Gospel you're preaching anymore. Purity ("does not come with...impurity"). No sexy singers performing strip tease on the platform to Santa Baby. You think I joke? There was a church here in my town that did that last Christmas. Or what about the sexy babe in the bare-shouldered halter, singing Rihanna at the church service? Not kidding about that one, either. Honesty ("not...flattery"). That "It's all about YOUR story" that we see on our local TV here in Georgetown is a form of godless flattery. The church that makes those commercials is appealing to one of the worst aspects of human nature: self-centeredness. And how can a message that caters like that to audience self-centeredness really be considered the Gospel?

Where Is A Church Planter's Line Between Being Culturally Appealing, and Compromised?

2010-04-08T08:13:00.000-04:00

Church planters want to be culturally appealing, but consistently run the risk of selling out. Theologians want to stick strictly to Scriptural substance, but run the risk of confusing form with substance, and being married to out-of-date or ethnocentric methods. I am just thinking out loud. We are on the road to compromise when we... 1. Don't consult the Bible first. There is no part of ministry that is free of Biblical authority. What good is it to pay lip service to Biblical inspiration and inerrancy in doctrine, then ignore it in our actual practice? The Bible doesn't just talk about metaphysics. It tells us how to do the ministry. The Bible doesn't just set certain goals ("Get people saved!") then tell us to run along and do whatever we like to get it done. 2. When we laughingly brush off the very issue of compromise, as if there's no danger of it, or that it doesn't matter to God. If all we do is make fun of the people who worry about cultural compromise, and depict all of them as a collection of pinch-nosed neurotics who don't care about the lost, then we are using a cheap stereotype to excuse our own sloppy attitudes. Uzzah the priest learned the cost of placing practicality ahead of Scripture, where Scripture spoke. They thought it was practical to carry the ark on a cart, when theLord commanded it be carried on long poles inserted through rings. Then Uzzah thought it was practical to steady the ark with his hand when it began to slip off the cart. God struck him dead for his disrespect. The New testament canceled all those ceremonial systems and laws, and we don't need to worry about arks and ox-carts any more. But when it does speak, we'd better listen. God was sending us all a message about himself when He struck Uzzah dead. 3. There shouldn't even be a hint of sexual immodesty in our personal conduct or how we stage big events. I witnessed a worship service at an AoG church in Columbia years ago, in which beautiful girls in sparkling, skin-tight, multi-colored Danskins came prnacing down the aisles, waving large flags. That was wrong, because that was all I thought about for the rest of the night (and obviously, I still remember it). A mega-church in Lexington opened their Saturday night service with a sexy babe in tight pants and a bare-shouldered top sang Rihanna's Disturbia. Equally wrong. It's not so much the use of a secular song, which can be a good tool (if chosen wisely) in an evangelistic meeting. But most pop music lends itself to a heavily sexualized performance style. 4. Don't water down sin and the cross. So what that the surveys say that people in the community don't like the word "sin"? Yeah, I bet they don't! I know I didn't want to hear it. But the cross had to first be a payment to God for me before it could become a cure of woundedness to me. We are wounded, and we are damaged, and God'[s love does heal. There are such things as victims. But we're also proud and unbelieving, and in bondage to various lusts. Our sins are so appalling to God that He required a death for their atonement. I object to the current penchant for substituting "woundedness" or "brokenness" for the word "sin." They are not synonyms. Sin causes woundedness. We wound ourselves with our sins, and others wound us by sinning against us. We are the walking wounded. But wounded is only a symptom of the real problem, so don't hide the "sin message" because you've done a marketing survey and are afraid you'll "turn someone off." Real Christianity is built around a core message that is an automatic turn-off to anyone whose heart is filled with pride. You cannot avoid the turn-off factor. That's why Jesus said that only those who had the ears to hear could hear.

Answers to Hyper-Calvinism #3: God Invites Us Christ For What We'll Get Out of It!

2010-04-04T23:36:00.000-04:00

Does God use motivators to stir unbelievers to come to christ? If so, what are they? In my last column, I wrote about Rick Warren, head pastor of the mega-church Saddleback. One of my concerns about Rick Warren is that, in my opinion, his desire to be inoffensive to non-Christians is too extreme. He’s far at the other end of the spectrum on this, whereas in contrast many of his Calvinist critics are way too eager to jam their thumbs into unsaved people’s eye sockets in the name of the sovereignty of God. So they attack Warren for being a compromiser, when part of what's happening there is that they are attack dogs for Christ, and they're angry at Warren for not snarling alongside them. I don't know how many sinners have ever been brought to Christ by snarling at them, even when the snarling is piously dressed up with Spurgeon quotations. Spurgeon, by the way, was not an attack-dog, and would have scolded many of these self-appointed Reformed watchbloggers. In stark contrast, Rick Warren seems to dread the possibility that some liberal Californian somewhere will take a bit of offense at him. He doesn’t seem to show much sense of camaraderie with the Biblical prophets, who preached unapologetic messages to a rebellious audience. Warren's desire to be pleasing can come across as smarmy at times, or disingenuous. For example, Warren appeared to be two-faced on the matter of California's Proposition 8 -- supporting it on one hand, then claiming he really didn't when he appeared on TV about it. The Gospel is pretty hard to see anywhere in Purpose-Driven Life. I feel that Warren did give a vague presentation of it. But does he do that always? Applying hermeneutical principles to figuring out what Rick Warren actually believes, I would feel obligated to listen to a wide selection of Rick Warren sermons on salvation, before I would feel confident in saying that Rick warren always preaches "X" on anything. Let's say I really did embark on such a research project. If I should discover that Warren presents the Gospel reasonably well over the course of 8-10 messages, or 8-10 articles, but then he presents it poorly in other places (such as PDL), then he deserves to be criticized for being inconsistent, but not for being heretical. But I feel no sympathy for the tooth-gnashing Calvinists who tear their clothes and throw dust in the air at the idea that a preacher referred to the benefits of God’s blessings as a valid motivator for inviting sinners to Christ. Throughout both Testaments, God holds out His earthly succor and assistance as blessings that sinners are losing out on by their continued rebellion. See the first chapter of Isaiah 1-2 — God describes how beaten-up Israel is, how futile are their idolatrous attempts to solve life’s terrible problems without Him, and how many blessings He is willing to give them if they will simply come and reason with Him, and have their red sins turned white and clean. Israel was suffering because of their unbelief, and God offers to reverse their suffering and turn it into joy if they will believe. So there you have God Himself, doing the very thing that hyper-Calvinists claim is some sort of adulterizing sell-out of the Gospel. Everyone comes to Christ for “what they will get out of it. Michael Scott Horton in one of his books decried this idea, as if it’s some humanistic corruption, but I don’t know what Bible he thinks he’s reading. Christ said, “Come to me, all ye who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” In other words, come to Me and I will give you something wonderful! The blessings and cursings of the Law similarly had an evangelistic application. The Law couldn't save or redeem, but the blessings and cursings worked as de-motivators for sin and motivators for repentance. So I see nothing wrong with Warren holding out all the possible blessings of the Christian life to the sinner, as motivators for turning away from their unbelief and calling on the name of Jesus Christ. In fact, I see everything right about it. God Himself does it, in the Bible. As long as his descriptions of the blessings are balanced and Scriptural, and don't drift into the false promises of the prosperity gospel, then he's doing the right thing. But Warren’s hyper-Calvinist critics seem to be operating on the notion that people are required to come to Christ out of some abstract appreciation of a disinterested good; or that alleviation of guilt, or Heaven, is the only motivation for faith ever offered in Scripture. Biblical motivations for faith offered to the sinner are bigger than this-world assistance from God -- vastly bigger -- but they don't exclude the experiential benefits of knowing God right now. A hyper-Calvinist's distorted ideas about evangelism and conversion don’t excuse the wishy-washy Gospel presentations that Warren seems prone to use, but what the hyper-Calvinist is advocating isn’t Biblical either.

John Piper, Rick Warren, & Ranting Calvinists

2010-04-03T20:18:00.000-04:00

It was announced on March 31 that John Piper has invited Rick Warren to speak at the 2010 Desiring God conference. Hysteria has ensued. Piperites are having a fit because of Rick Warren being invited to the DG Conference. As I read some comments in the last two days about this little storm, I was reminded of a book I read years ago. In fact, I was just looking at that book, John MacArthur’s Ashamed of the Gospel, about two hours ago at a Lifeway bookstore. After flipping through it, I was reminded what a bad book it is. MacArthur copiously quoting C.H. Spurgeon and Ian Murray doesn’t mean that the book was fair or sensible. It was a highly intellectual rant, and a slam aimed (allegedly) at Bill Hybels. But I've read reactions to this Piper news where the book was cited with reference to Warren. Pragmatist! Even Piper called Warren a pragmatist. And yet John MacArthur himself, the fiery critic of pragmatism, is a pragmatist. You know how I know? (a) John MacArthur preaches in English. Why? Because his audience is made up of English-speakers. That's pragmatism. Maybe he is supposed to preach in koine’ Greek. (b) His church has an entire staff that handles electronics, lighting, sound, and what-not, including the slick Plexiglass podium that rises up pneumatically from the floor when he’s ready to speak. (c) From time to time he preaches on topics, because of problems and issues going on in his congregation. Anyway, you see my point. I believe MacArthur is blind to his own cultural assumptions and practices, and sincerely believes that he doesn't think about who his audience is, how they receive and interpret information, or what they want from their preacher. The Westminster Confession of Faith says that God’s sovereignty doesn’t negate secondary causes, but establishes them. Paul did say, in 1 Corinthians 9, that he changed his cultural behavior because doing so facilitated winning people to Christ. I once had a Calvinist brother object to my interpretation of 1 Corinthians 9, because (he said) nothing we do, or don't do, helps or impedes reaching sinners -- or so he claimed. It was as if he was just denying what Paul said there in the text, because it wouldn't fit inside a set of pseudo-Calvinist cliches someone had planted into his thinking. Warren is a salesman for Christ. He's the "Stan Lee" of Californian evangelicalism. He's hardly known for deep reasoning. So, by inviting Warren to the DG Conference, Piper puts Warren on the hot-spot. Warren agreed to subject himself to this. Why? Because his talk isn't about "How To Film An Effective Baptismal Service”, which would have been Warren natural element. Warren is being called upon to give a message about how he loves God with his mind, or whatever the exact wording is. He's being called upon to give a deeply theological talk. Let's see how he does. Most of us also don’t know what Warren does or doesn’t do in his church's leadership training sessions. Judging by Warren’s focus and style, I don't believe him to be a closet R.C. Sproul Sr. This guy Warren is a Southern Baptist evangelist, which means he is not a teacher/theologian. On top of that, his thinking is discolored by his education at Fuller. But I believe one of the reasons Warren’s books and seminars are so generic is because he is consciously writing them for the common man. He isn’t even trying to communicate with Piper fanboys who own all of John Owen’s white-and-green books. But they're the specific ones who can't stand him (not counting the end-time kooks who claim that the PE.A.C.E. program is some sort of apocalyptic conspiracy). I found The Purpose-Driven Life to be just “meh.” I no more understand its explosive appeal, than I understand Henry Blackaby's appeal. But I know the book revolutionized some people’s lives for the better, and some people became Christians through it. I found The Purpose-Driven Church to be better written, and I found the practicality helpful. It tells you almost nothing about what the local church is, but it tells you a lot about what the local church does. You don’t read Rick Warren for exegesis. But do you read R.C. Sproul Sr. for books on how to counsel? No. Sproul's material is almost useless for anything practical in ministry skills. But does that make him bad? Is there some rule that Sproul Sr. must write books about how to run a good music program, or how to organize a good evangelistic outreach? No. Nor is Warren obligated to write exegetical commentaries. The particular writing and preaching standards that are being upheld by many of his critics aren’t even found in the Bible. Their templates seem (to me) to be 18th c. British Puritanism; and 18th c. British Puritanism isn’t God’s standard for anything. Let's hear what Warren says, then we can evaluate it.

Answers To Hyper-Calvinism #2: Does God Permit?

2010-04-02T23:31:00.000-04:00

Are you undermining God's sovereignty by saying that God permits things to happen -- things like sin? Some, who claim to follow Jonathan Edwards, say yes, that teaching God permits events to happen is an undermining of God's absolute sovereignty. Edwards' views on many issues were, in my opinion, often more philosophically-driven than exegetical. He was an undeniably brilliant man, but his view of the sovereignty of God eventually became so extreme that, at the end of his life, he was promoting something called "panentheism" -- the idea that God Himself directly causes everything. It's as if you or I only -think- that the cue ball striking the 8-ball makes it roll into the pocket; but in reality, it's God's finger at every point directly pushing the 8-ball along. Although proponents might quote portions of the Westminster Confession in its favor, I believe this idea actually contradicts the Confession. Push this idea a bit further, and you could begin to question the reality of the material world. That's why some scholars I've read felt that Edwards was creeping toward a form of Christian pantheism near the time when he died. There is a thread in Reformed theology called supralapsarianism ("lapse" referring to man lapsing into a sinful state, and how/why that happened). Supralapsarianism teaches that God caused Adam and Eve to sin. One Reformed book from 1999 says that God changed Adam and Eve's natures to make them want to sin (since, how could sinless beings want to sin in the first place?). Almost all Calvinists I know are infralapsarians, as am I. This means that God ordained to permit Adam and Eve to commit sin, and then, with sin as the backdrop, elected to intervene specific sinners so that some come to faith & glory but permitted other sinners to pursue their own hearts as they saw fit. Supralapsarianism has God more-or-less electing Adam and Eve to become sinners. This view is inconsistent with the Westminster Confession of Faith, in my opinion, but I think many Reformed groups allow it. I believe it's true that we need to talk about God permitting things in a way that doesn't unintentionally undermine His sovereignty. You only "permit" things that you could have made be otherwise. E.g., you or I do not permit the sun to rise in the morning; obviously we have no power over it one way or another. God has power over everything, so that means all His permissions are purposeful and planned out. God is never forced to do anything, in that sense. But, like in the case of a child who is struck by a car: God could prevent such tragedies from ever happening. Angels could swoop down and snatch up every child, before they are struck. But usually they don't do that. C.S. Lewis wrote about this somewhere, where he imagined a world where God causes bullets to turn into marshmallows when fired, and clubs turn into soft rubber. But that's not the sort of world God created; and it's a sinful world on which a death-curse lies. Once God ordained that the world fall into sin and death, He continues to work in it under those strictures, while having done what needed to be done to save the world from those very strictures. "Permission" doesn't undermine God's absolute sovereignty, because we're not saying that God is "forced" to do anything. God can do whatever He wants, wherever He wants, whenever He wants. But the Bible also teaches that human beings are choosing beings, even though our hearts are darkened and as a result our choices are corrupted. But we still choose, and our choices are not illusions. We're not sock-puppets on the hand of God. I recently heard someone relay a story about a Reformed Christian who equated the divine decree that brought about the virgin birth, with the divine decree that caused a particular dog to throw up on the living-room rug. Apart from the unnecessarily distasteful choice of analogy, I don't have as much of a problem with the example, since (setting aside the ambiguous word "decree for a moment) we believe that God's oversight covers everything. We live in a fallen world where sickness exists and living things die. God purposefully chose to allow that to happen. So, a particular dog gets sick on a particular day, and throws up in a particular place. Even if all God did was support the multitudinous circumstances of life (a puppy gets born, grows up, on a certain day catches a virus, and throws up), it would happen just that way. Since God works through real secondary causes -- real because God created them, and upholds them -- He doesn't need to say from the throne, "Dog, throw up NOW." God is already sustaining and directly everything in life. Nature is real, God created it, nature works in patterns of regularity, which in itself is a proof of God's existence. If God had wanted that dog not to throw up at that place and that time, or even get sick at all, the dog would not have. God could have neutralized the germ. The fact that God "allowed" nature to take its course doesn't undermine His sovereignty. Saying it that way assumes that God is in charge, and He could have made things turn out differently if He wanted to do so. But saying that God doesn't personally stick His index finger into the dog's small intestines isn't an attack on God's sovereignty. God created nature and sustains its processes, even in a fallen world. Secondary causes are real, and as a result they do their thing. Hyper-Calvinism questions or denies the real existence of secondary and tertiary causation.

Answers To Hyper-Calvinism #1: Does God Pre-ordain People To Hell?

2010-03-31T15:10:00.000-04:00

According to John's vision in Revelation 20:11-13, anyone God condemns to the lake of fire is condemned solely on the basis of their works. Beware the loose use of the word "cause." There is a book out by a Reformed pastor who argues that God is the Cause of everything, including sin, and he disdains those of us who speak of God permitting sin. This man's view is a form of hyper-Calvinism. God ordains that sinners sin, but He never causes anyone to sin. James 1:13-15. At times God permits sinners to sin in particular ways, as part of His bigger plan. See Joseph's words to his brothers in Genesis 50:20 as an illustration of this important principle. At other times, God has hardened a sinner's heart, as one part of passing judgment upon him or her. see the cases of Pharaoh in Exodus 7:1-5, Sihon and Og in the book of Numbers, or Eli's wicked sons in 1 Samuel 2:22-25. It is vital to distinguish between God's moral law and His eternal counsel. God's eternal counsel, according to which he ordains this-or-that to occur, covers everything (see the second half of Ephesians 1:11). It even includes calamities (Isaiah 45:7). But God every day ordains events as King that He morally despises and condemns in His heart as Judge. We find this very difficult to understand, but He alone is omnipotent and righteous at the same time. So yes, the people who go to Hell end up there because God ordained in eternity past that they should go there. If He absolutely decreed that they not go there, He could have refrained from creating them in the womb. He could also have created Lucifer and Adam without the ability to sin. After all, the saints now in Heaven lack the ability to sin, but they are still just as human, and their wills are just as free (more so, in one sense, since they are free of sin), as when they lived on the earth. Or God could have forbidden Satan to tempt Adam and Eve, and if God had done so, Satan would not have been able to get within a hundred miles of the couple. But God foreknew that, if He created living beings (angels and humans) in such-and-such a way, and if He further chose not to interfere in certain ways, that sin would result. Yet He went ahead and did create everything in just that way, already knowing from eternity past what all the various results would be (since He is omniscient). It was His will that it should be so. If it wasn't, then none of it would have happened. But he never tempted anyone, or approves of sin. God hates sin, and when He permits it, he permits it for His own reasons, while still condemning it. All Christian systems of doctrine struggle with the fact that evil and God both exist. Any Christian system that teaches God eternal, all-powerful, and all-knowing must grapple with the problem of evil (a.k.a. theodicy). This is often thrown out as a problem for Calvinism, but Arminian Christians are not exempt from the problem. The Biblical Arminian teaches that God knows from all eternity who will never accept Christ as Savior, and yet, even given that knowledge, God still causes that person to be born, live, and then die anyway. So, since God foreknew that a person would lead a life of sin and be justly condemned to Hell for sin, and caused that person to be born anyway, is it not part of God's eternal plan that that person be punished in Hell? We must remember that it is not a bad thing that sinners be punished in Hell. It is a good thing. Hell is not designed to be a sadist's torture pit. Hell is a place of holy penal retribution. This is one reason why people who can't understand that there is a God or that they have sinned against Him (such as babies) don't go to Hell. Because it is a place of penal retribution, it would be just meaningless suffering to a baby. Christ made it clear that babies or young children do not go there (Matthew 18:14). But remember. If God had condemned the entire human race to Hell, the angels would stand and applaud His justice. Hell reveals and glorifies God's righteousness, just as the cross reveals and glorifies God's love. We have nothing to apologize for, regarding the Bible's teachings about Hell. The human race richly deserves to go there; and God is not wringing His hands over justly consigning wicked sinners there. In fact, apart from Hell, the very idea of "salvation" makes no sense. God does not cause human beings to be sinners. God ordains that sinners be justly judged and then sent to Hell. To use the word "ordain" as a veiled way of saying that God causes people to sin, is heretical and should be rejected as a teaching.

Jennie Asks: What's the Relationship Between Faith & Good Works?

2010-03-23T16:21:00.000-04:00

From the commbox: I know I'm not a Calvinist, and I don't think I'm an Arminian, but I don't quite understand how this issue should be explained. I believe that we are justified by faith initially and that we continue in faith by God's grace. I believe that we are created for good works, not saved by them. There seems to be a fine line between saying that we must produce good works to continue to be saved, and to say that we produce good works because we are saved. What if we don't ever produce good works? Does that mean we were never saved? What if we produce 'good works' but are not yet justified by faith? Then we are working for our salvation instead of resting in Christ's righteousness by faith. What does Jesus mean by saying 'Those who endure to the end will be saved'? What does James mean by saying we are not justified by faith alone? Is James' use of justified different than Paul's? Piece of cake, Jennie! [ahh, no, just kidding; not a piece of cake. But I'll keep it brief]... 1. Yes, we are justified -- remitted of our sins -- by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. Abraham is one proof of this (see the book of Romans, chapter 4). Abraham lived at a time where there was no Church, no sacraments, and no priests. God appeared to Abraham in a vision, and promised him three things: a land (Canaan), a seed (the children of Israel), and a blessing (salvation). Abraham believed God, and God reckoned Abraham's faith to him as righteousness (Genesis 15). Another proof of this is John 3:16. If you want not to perish but have everlasting life, believe in Jesus Christ. This is the same as "confessing" Christ, or "calling on" Him (Romans 10:9-13). 2. We are spiritually created by God in and through Jesus Christ for good works, not by them. Ephesians 2:10. Good works cannot cause spiritual re-birth. John the Apostle says that we become children of God by believing on Christ, and not by physical bloodline, human will-power, or the will of others (John 1:12-13). Anyone who adds the necessity of good works or sacraments to the Gospel is attacking the Gospel, even though they might not realize it or intend to do so. 3. All true Christians will produce some good works in their lives. Christ compared us to grape-vines. Some produce thirty-fold, sixty-fold, or a hundred fold (Matthew 13:23). So our production rate isn't always consistent. Some true Christians can be very immature. They can't handle deeper Bible teaching, they act jealous, they quarrel, and cause divisions in the local church (1 Corinthians 3:1-4). But a person who produces no good works at all is still a child of the devil (1st John 3:4-10), regardless of what they claim about themselves. I believe that sometimes only God can tell the difference between an outwardly moral religious non-Christian and a selfish, immature true Christian. 4. The Bible says that all our righteousness is like filthy rags in the sight of God (Isaiah 64:6). Compared to God's perfect holiness, none of us are good. Jesus said to the rich young ruler, "No one is good but God" (Mark 10:18). Jesus wasn't just exaggerating. But the Scripture also recognizes that some unbelieving people act better than others. Obviously not everyone is an ax-murderer! For example, Cornelius the Roman centurion was a devout man who feared God, gave alms generously, and prayed continually to the Lord (Acts 10:1-2). God's Spirit was influencing him, and he was seeking the Lord. The Lord responded by sending him Peter, who preached the Gospel to him (vv. 3-8). But the fact that Peter needed to preach the Gospel to him shows that even a comparatively good man like Cornelius needed the everlasting life that Jesus offers. 5. "Those who endure to the end shall be saved" (which comes from Jesus' teachings about the end-times in Matthew 24-25) is a statement of fact, not a condition of salvation. True Christians do not completely or permanently fall away from Christ. This is because our faith is given to us by God -- read John 6:44, 65). You should especially notice verse 44 -- Jesus says that (a) no one has any natural ability to trust in Christ as Savior, (b) people come to Christ because God the Father draws them to Christ,. and (c) anyone so drawn will be raised up on the last day. There are no drop-outs. God brought you to Christ in the first place. You didn't bring yourself to Christ. God's ability to preserve your faith is omnipotent and infallible. I will address James 2 more tomorrow...

Michael & Debi Pearl, & Questions of Ministry Credentialing

2010-03-23T13:48:00.000-04:00

Regarding the writing and speaking ministriues of Mike & Debi Pearl, whose advice about beating children with quarter-inch plumber's tubing have been connected with the recent beating death of 7-year-old Lydia Schatz: What qualifies these people to be regarded as teaching authorities on anything, within the Body of Christ? As a pastor, this tragedy touches on an area that I feel is almost never addressed: formal ministry qualifications. We American Christians disdain such concerns. But the Bible doesn't support our disdain. Deacons are supposed to be examined prior to being recognized. We're warned not to lay hands on anyone suddenly, and thereby share in culpability for their ministry sins committed later. Elders are supposed to be proven, then ordained by the laying-on of hands, as Timothy was. The NT teaches that there is a process through which one must pass before you should be recognized. And if you fail the process, then you should not be recognized, as Paul says about any prophets who disregarded his apostolic authority (1 Corinthians 14:38). But in American evangelicalism, any Tom, Dick, or Harry with access to a computer or Xulon Press can declare himself a teacher with authority, and build a following, regardless of how under-qualified he is. Men launch parachurch foundations, with politically incestuous boards comprised of family members and best buddies. Women start traveling around, putting on seminars without ever having been tested as to their soundness in the faith. In my opinion, a Christian woman speaker ought to meet certain moral criteria, and be required to pass some sort of basic theological examination, no less than a pastor. We American Christians need to ask, when we read a new book or website, "Who is this person? Where does he come from? Where did she go to school? Have they ever been examined, commissioned, or ordained? To whom is he or she accountable? What are his or her qualifications to teach or preach the Word of God to anyone?" But we never ask those questions, do we? Why? Because we're ignorant of the New Testament's teachings about church, pastoral authority, and leadership qualifications. We're not interested in that subject. It's boring. Who cares about church government? Not us. Or we ignore these rules, and claim to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Why? Because then no one (suppoedly) has the right to question what we do, or how we do it. But I have that right, and I'm questioning.

Thoughts About Spanking

2010-03-15T14:18:00.000-04:00

Some thoughts about spanking, in light of the child-abuse death of little Lydia Schatz... I don't want to form my thoughts about spanking in reaction to the Lydia Schatz case (please click on the www.ThatMom.com link to the right and read the details about this horrible event). The killing of Lydia Schatz by her mother was clearly a sin, a crime, and it sickens me. I also know that nothing in the Bible justifies what was done to that child. What I mean is, that I don't want to have my reason colored by my horror over the Schatz case, when it comes to studying what the Bible says, or doesn't say, about spanking. The Bible gives a very big picture of parenting, and even ties parenting to the nature of God Himself. That changes the way we look at parenting. We don't just parent for pragmatic reasons. We are supposed to embody and reveal God's nature, to some flawed degree, as parents, and especially as Christian parents. God is called the heavenly Father. So He is a Parent, by His very nature. This is unique. Allah is no one's parent. Yahweh is the eternal Father of the eternal Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Ministries that make their main parenting focus the disciplining of children, or even more specifically the punishing of children (since the word "discipline" is also a bigger concept than correction, and simply means "to make a disciple of"), are warped. God's fatherhood isn't all about spanking people. In fact, God says in Lamentations 3:33 that He afflicts us unwillingly. The Cross of Christ is the supreme method God uses to fix us. He took the curse of sin away at the cross, legally speaking. Once that payment is received by the child, the Holy Spirit causes new birth, and that's when real, true soul improvement can begin. In contrast, the Law of Moses could be compared (somewhat) to the parenting approach many evangelicals try to use. Moses' Law was perfect. It was built on the foundation of divine revelation, it was based on God's authority, it had clearly stated, written expectations, and it included rewards (carrots) and punishments (sticks). And it failed. Not because there were any imperfections in it, but because man's heart is rotten by nature. The Lord kept "smiting" the Israelites but, over time, the smiting just didn't work. God was not acting in futility, and His smitings of Israel were also expressions of holy judicial wrath against Israel's terrible evils such as murder, theivery, and sex perversion. So the comparison to mortal parenting is only in the rough outline, and should be taken in a general sense. My point is that there is something so very, very wrong with us, even as little children, that the most perfectly fair, well-balanced management system -- which included God's version of spankings -- failed. The synonym for "rod" in Proverbs 13:24 is "discipline". "Discipline" is muwcar in Hebrew. This word means instruction in Psalm 50:17, Proverbs 1:2,3,7,8, 4:1,13, 5:12, 6:23, 8:10,33), reproof (Proverbs 12:1, 15:5), rebuke (Proverbs 13:1). It also in one example refers to adult corporal punishment, such as the stocks to which an adulterous fool goes (Proverbs 7:22). It appears, based on these many examples, that muwcar is verbal. The "rod", at least in Proverbs 13:24, is a metaphor for godly verbal instruction, correction, warning, and reproof. However, Proverbs 29:15 distinguishes the road from reproof, and describes them as co-ordinate to each other in the process of raising up a wise child. Proverbs 23:13-14 speaks of striking a child with a rod. The word for "strike" (nakah) has some latitude. It can refer to beating hypothetical stripes onto a fool (17:10), to strike a prince (17:26), or to strike a child with a rod. It often refers to killing someone (e.g. Gen. 4:15, Lev. 24:17). It is used in reference to God pouring out wrath on humanity (Gen. 8:21), or Moses triking the Red Sea with his rod (Ex. 7:20). The AV translates it in Lev. 26:24 as "punish." The word for "rod" used in this text is not muwcar, but shebet. It means a stick or a branch. For example the tribes of Israel are repeatedly described as shebet, probably because they were "branches" that grew out of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There you see a metaphorical usage. The word can also mean "sceptre" (as in, iron sceptre from Ps. 2:9). Basically, Strong's Concordance defines the word as "stick." A king might hold an iron pole, as a ceremonial emblem of his authority. But "stick" can be a lot of things. It can be a springy willow branch that stings when switched across a rebellious child's legs. The passages in Proverbs counsel us to use a branch as part of up-bringing, but do not counsel us to wale away on our children with iron sceptres. Corporal punishment is a part of discipling. To absolutely refuse to use corporal punishment at all is foolish. Our children are sinful, rebellious, and ignorant from the womb, by nature, and therefore they need this form of reproof. Youi can't reason with little children. Our adult reasoning is beyond them. They need to learn to obey us because learning to obey us is essential to them becoming good people in the future, not to mention proecting them from the many dangers in living life in a fallen world. The doctrine that children are naturally good, wise, or respectful is obviously wrong. People who believe that are either not parents, or are they are willfully shutting their eyes to reality beause of their devotion to some godless, humanistic dogma. But the Bible also does not present corporal punishment as the crown jewel of parenting. The over-all theme of Proverbs is godly wisdom. Corporal punishment is only one part of a wise parent's up-bringing on their child. If those character qualities are absent, then spanking a child will only exasperate them to rage (which would mean we were sinning against Christ's command in Ephesians 6:4). Nothing will enrage a child's heart faster, or cause them to doubt the Savior we claim to believe in, than our own hypocrisy.

Preparing for Accusations

2010-03-15T14:00:00.000-04:00

We live in an accusatory society, where loose litigation has cowed people into doing whatever the accusers demand. But Christians ought to be braver than that, while also shrewdly avoiding traps that sinners may set. This is especially true for pastors. For example, there is a pastor in another city who had pornographic material placed on his desk while the morning service was going on. The perp, who was out to harm the pastor due to a personal dispute, got into the pastor's office because it was left open, and no one else was around. This could have been prevented by locking the office door. Accusations shouldn't be treated lightly, but we shouldn't jump like rabbits when they're made. We know how self-centered and petty most human beings are, and we know how unprincipled some people are. If you have ever taught badly-brought-up teen-agers, then you know how skeptical they force you to become. If certain students told you the sky was up and the dirt was down, you'd be forced to send someone outside to check. And our human propensity for making mistakes, and grossly misinterpreting other people's words and actions, is almost without limit. This is why it is best to have Sunday-school doors with windows in them. This is why larger churches need to do basic security checks on volunteers, especially those who want to work with children, youth, or the money. This is why pastors don't step into the homes of women who are alone at the time. This is why all receipts must be turned in, and donation checks deposited into the bank in a timely manner. This is why we do unannounced internal audits. This is why we take minutes. And this tone -- of sobriety, caution, and full disclosure -- has to be set from the top. Everyone is a sinner. That possibly means that the wrong thing could have happened. It also possibly means that the accusation, a false one, is the wrong thing happening. We Christians should try to make it as hard for someone to make a false accusation against us or others as we can. By building a clear-cut reputation for above-board dealings, no shady back-room arrangements, and accepting responsibility in the seemingly little things. We need to be honest and smart.

The Numerical Growth of a Church

2010-03-12T09:38:00.000-05:00

Here are some more pragmatic observations I've made over the 36 years I've been a Christian, involved with a lot of different churches... High numerical growth doesn't mean you are pleasing the Lord with what you are doing. You could just be pandering to the worldly tastes and feelings of the population. You might be cultivating customers fairly well, but you aren't making disciples. Numbers tell us nothing about whether a church is a good church. Only the Scripture sets standards for what pleases God. However, the chronic failure to grow, when growth is possible, needs attention. If a church was larger in size at one time, and then goes into a rapid decline, then the causes of that must be identified and corrected. You can't just stoically pick up and start all over again without doing a post mortem, or angrily plod forward, because you might very likely keep on commiting the very same mistakes, and the same results will ensue. For example, why didn't the large group stick with the church, and help make things better? Did you train them to be religious customers rather than brethren in Christ, attracted by well-run programs but inadequately taught about commitment to the local body? Were you feeding them the psychological sugar-water that passes for Christian instruction today? As a result, were they immature people throwing a tantrum over power and personality conflicts? Did they have legitimate complaints, and the leadership either failed or refused to work with them? Did false teaching infect the body, as happened a few years ago with the baleful influence of Harold Camping and his Family Radio network telling all Christians to abandon their churches? Did a bad economy might have forced a great number of people to move away? The causes of decline must be identified, and fixed. Not rationalized. Why do you want to grow? Is it because you share God's love for the world, He who sent His Son to save all those people? Is it because you share Christ's commitment to the Lord's great commission, and want to multiple disciples and churches throughout the world, so that God would be hnored and people saved from Satan? Or is it because being a certain size is your institutional self-image, and it's a key component of your group self-regard? The latter is not a God-honoring motive.

Questions I would Ask A Would-Be Church Planter

2010-02-26T14:33:00.001-05:00

I'm not a church planter, nor do I play one on TV. But I've been a pastor since 1996, and been part of small, struggling churches most of my Christian life. I know that the church world is full of people who claim to know how to plant a booming church in every situation. I know the church world is full of people who feel discouraged that their church-plant didn't make it. If I, as an "ordinary" pastor, was to interview a church planter, or if I was doing a post-mortem on a project that didn't make it, here are some questions I would ask: How much hostility to Christianity, or to you, or to both, is there in the community? I grew up in a heavily Roman Catholic and Jewish part of the country, as well as very liberal. You need to understand how the people think there, in order to know how to circumvent the hostility and indifference. Other people try to start works where there are many East Asians, or New Agers. The pastor ends up confronting Hindu fatalism or New Age weirdness. Every community is different, and one size doesn't fit all. I have seldom seen in church-growth literature an awareness of this community hostility factor. You can see community hostility pop up in the book of Acts. The Thessalonians acted like a bunch of obnoxious jerks toward Paul's missionary team, while the Bereans were sensible people. There were cities in central Turkey that ran Paul out on a rail, and others that treated him like the arrival of an angel of God. You know you will find it the same today. Try planting a Christian church in the Muslim parts of Detroit. Try planting a church in some of these small towns in the Florida panhandle, where half the town is made up of drug-running motorcycle-gang members. Some churches that fail in Town A would thrive two towns over. Is what you're doing, and how you're doing it, pleasing to the locals? I don't mean that we tailor the message to the tastes of the populace. The Gospel is offensive to people, because it rebukes human pride. I'm talking about secondary matters of style. The themes we talk about, the music we use, the emotional tone we set, the sense of humor we employ, the recreations we plan, and so on. It is deflating to do almost the same thing as the next guy down the road, and the people go "meh" in reaction to us, while they flock to the other guy. But maybe the people enjoy what the other guy is doing, and the way he does it. If what the other guy just isn't you -- and I know what you mean, there are just some styles and ministry practices that would be totally phony for me to ever try and adopt -- then prayerfully find some place where the community will (probably) like the way you do things. This also applies to race. A white church whose community has steadily turned all Hispanic or black probably -- not always, but probably -- needs to either hire a Hispanic or black head pastor, or plant a black or Hispanic congregation. To knowingly, stubbornly stay a wheezy, geriatric, all-white church in a non-white neighborhood, and refuse to do what you need to do to reach the people of that neighborhood for Christ, is a huge sin. Are you gifted for this job? No matter how many church-growth cookbooks we read, or lists we follow, a list of to-do steps can never replace the actual worker. We could study Grace Community Church in order to imitate it, but you can't replace John MacArthur. You can study Willow Creek Community Church for two years, but no matter what, you cannot replace Bill Hybels. The element of the gifted man is often left out of church-growth formulae. Churches form, and wax and wane, around the main preacher. Mars Hill wouldn't exist apart from Mark Driscoll, love him or hate him. It doesn't matter how much you might want the church to be "lay-driven." Who is your featured guy? Does he have the right speaking and leadership gifts for being your main guy? You cannot underestimate the personal factor in church growth. For instance: Everybody hates bad preaching. "Bad" means (a) unscriptural, (b) unanointed, (c) inapplicable, and (d) boring. Don't hire a bad preacher, or one with a history of pulpit failure. Do your people want to reach the lost? In my opinion, many churched American evangelicals are indifferent about the lost, if they're not physically related to them. They start a church because some disgruntled group of newcomer Christians disliked the town churches. The birth of the church wasn't positive for the Great Commission, it was triggered by dislike of what was already available. Once th\at type of church hits a level where the bills are being paid and there's a youth group, it digs into the sandbank and goes to sleep, except for fighting. A church that makes no effort to interact with people it doesn't already know, pray for people it doesn't already know, serve people it doesn't already know, or share the Gospel with people it doesn't already know, is dead in the water. For a church like that to be dismayed at its own lack of growth is like a stupid farmer who refuses to plow, refuses to fertilize, refuses to plant, refuses to weed, and then he is shocked, shocked!, to find himself starving to death in the fall.

Haiti & God

2010-01-15T14:45:00.000-05:00

A lady at our church's Friday morning prayer group asked me some questions about the Bible in relation to the horrible earthquake in Haiti, and particularly some claims made by Pat Robertson. One of my thoughts was that you don't hold philosophical discussions while the sky is raining down fire, or buildings are collapsing. You go and help. But there's also a valid time for meaningful questions, and the Bible does not shrink away from the hard ones. First: There is no such thing as "generational cursing" taught in Scripture. Or, more precisely, the only ancestor whose action brought a curse down on his descendents was Adam, because he represented all of us in God's eyes (Romans 5:12-19). But read Ezekiel 18 and Jeremiah 18. The Lord in Ezekiel 18 takes great pains to make it clear that He does not punish a child for the sins of its parent. Adam was unique. God does not curse us for the sins of our ancestors. Jeremiah 18 speaks to the question of God punishing a people. What matters to God is what a nation is doing right now. If a society is engaged in willful sin, God will withdraw blessing and inflict trouble. If that same society repents, God will stop afflicting it, and bless it instead, because God does not afflict the children of men willingly (Lamentations 3:33). This principle was true for both Jew and Gentile. God only visits the sins of the fathers down to the third and fourth generation of those who hate God (Exodus 20:5). Jeremiah 18 gives the balancing truth to Exodus 20:5. Pat Robertson is wrong. Maybe some Haitians did make a pact with the devil 300 years ago. Maybe this is folklore, or partial folklore. In any event, it doesn't matter! God doesn't curse an entire people for the sins of some ancestors. If a people carry on in the sins of their ancestors, and they themselves perpetuate those sins, then God will continue to afflict them, just as He did their ancestors. But if a people renounce the evil ways of their ancestors, God relents, as He did toward the city of Nineveh, as in the book of Jonah. What matters to God is what a nation is doing now, not what its ancestors did centuries ago. Did God cause this earthquake? Yes. This is where we Christians become squeamish. I heard some weak efforts to excuse God for Hurricane Katrina. But we don't get to have it every which way -- credit God for the nice stuff and leave Him out of the picture for the suffering. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere-present, and eternal, then we by the relentless demands of consistency have to give up the option of God as innocent bystander. It was God who flooded the earth during Noah's time, and killed the population, including the children. God blew up Sodom and Gomorrah, including the children. God raised up the Assyrians to invade Israel, and he sent the Romans in to destroy Jerusalem. Who is it who makes a man sighted or blind, hearing or mute or deaf? The Lord says, "it is I" (Exodus 4:11). God does not squirm away from accepting full responsibility for catastrophic calamities. He steps up to the plate: "I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things" (Isaiah 45:7). God ordained that Hurricane Katrina, and this earthquake, occur. Do we need to defend God in this? No. God is not in the witness stand. He never answers to us for anything. God is not on trial. We are, because none of us are sin-free. Not even children. The more troubling question should be, why does God allow any of us to still live? Why are we still here, given our history on this globe? "Who is he who speaks and it comes to pass, if the Lord has not commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that woe and well-being proceed? Why should a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?" (Lamentations 3:37-39). The existence of human beings here on Planet Earth is a continuous witness to the patient forbearance of God. Do we despise the riches of God's goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering? (Romans 2:4a). The "fair" thing would be for God to get rid of the whole human race, and start over; but He doesn't do that. We assume that humanity is innocent, and God is at fault, but we have that completely backwards. So does this mean that Haitians are the worst sinners in the world? No! Jesus said, "Do you suppose that these Galileans [whom Pontius Pilate's soldiers had killed] were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish." (Luke 13:1-5). We all face our own deaths, from history's greatest criminals right down to the most trivial sinner, historically speaking. The rich man died in wealth, and went to hell. The beggar Lazarus died in indigence, and went into the eternal joy of Paradise. So how are we supposed to think about God, if all this is true? And what should we do about Haiti? Second question first. We must do unto Haiti as we would have done unto us if we were in the same terrible circumstance. This is how the love of Christ compels us. God has shown mercy to us, so we bring mercy to Haiti. Mercy is never conditional upon virtue or vice. No one can deserve mercy. You just give it, because that's how God gave it to you. We're never called upon to figure out the hidden cosmic designs of the Weaver. We're not in Camus' The Plague. The same God who declared the whole race condemned for its sins then sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die in order to save Haitians from everlasting condemnation. We can imitate that example. Some Haitians who died are in the blessed presence of Jesus Christ right now. God has wiped every tear from their eyes, and for them there is no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, or pain (Revelation 21:4). For them, this earthquake was not God's wrath. It was God's chosen method of bringing them home. But why did they have to end their time on earth in this way? Why couldn't they have simply passed away peacefully, in their sleep? I do not know. I don't know if that question is ever answered. This is how God chose to do it. But what to think of God? I suggest the following thoughts: We need to know God as He actually is, not as we would imagine Him to be. We should remember that kindness is only one of God's many different attributes. God isn't mono-dimensional. He is merciful, but gives us His mercies as a deliberate choice (Romans 9:15), not because He can't help Himself. He is not tame. God is powerful and can be dangerous, the way fire can be dangerous. We evangelical moderns are in no danger of believing in an overly-fearsome God, but many do believe in a harmless Deity. But the apostle Paul spoke of both the goodness and the severity of God (Romans 11:22). Many have only heard of the goodness of God. Some of us willfully refuse to think about the severity of God. But this terrible catastrophe confronts us with God's severity. We need to take Him as He is, and in what He does. God gives life, and God takes it away. I need to deal with Him for who He really is. Also, Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of who God is. He is what we should think of God. Jesus pronounced judgment on Israel's impenitent cities (Matthew 11:20-24). He thanked the Father for spiritually blinding the eyes of rejecters, and blessed Him for doing so (Matthew 11:25-27). Then Christ continued to call all men to Himself (vv. 28-30), since He knew that He alone is the One who can enable a sinner to savingly know God. Jesus was able to combine all these awarenesses -- judgment, accountability, wrath, salvation, mercy, resignation -- in His thoughts. Our God tramples out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, and looses the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword. He also sacrificed His only Son on the cross, while we were yet sinners, so that we could be saved from the wrath to come. I wish that everyone would be ready when each of our times come. Eternity yawns before us, a limitless vista.

Damage

2010-01-12T19:50:00.000-05:00

There are sinful actions men and women can take that so severely damage trust, and inflict so much wreckage, that the destruction *cannot* be reversed this side of Heaven, no matter how sincerely repentant we later may become. Thank God that all things become new in the next world; but not all things can be renewed here, so live carefully. Only on TV is everything fixed in the last 10 minutes.

Ideas Can Make You Crazy (Or Help You Go Sane!)

2010-01-05T08:23:00.000-05:00

When that government official shouted, "Paul, you're great learning has driven you mad!", he was invoking a true principle, even though I'm not sure he was being sincere about it. Ideas can make you crazy. I used to think that mentally unstable people were drawn to weird ideas, like flies to dead meat. But the Lord has impressed on me recently how much of an impact our Bible teaching has on the mental health of our listeners. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of a sound mind. If sanity is defined as having your mind rightly attuned to reality, then the Bible is the most powerful force on the planet to push people toward reality. The opposite is also true. Normally stable people can be pulled into sin and madness by warped ideas. We evangelicals usually think of bad teachings affecting us morally. But they also affect us mentally and emotionally, in the sense of the relational breakdowns, disorientation to life's demands, and emotional misery that false ideas cause. The most mentally-healing thing we can do is teach people the Bible.

Why Charismatic Ministries Don't Appeal to Me

2010-01-04T14:07:00.000-05:00

I pull back from all the false claims about apostleship: I'm not an apostle, none of us are apostles, and that's because there are no apostles. The apostles, and prophets, were all part of the Church's foundation. I have no reason to expect, or want, or work toward, an apostolic ministry. So when various writers (like C. Peter Wagner) talk about apostles for today, or call themselves apostles for today, it leaves me unmoved -- because the Bible tells me better. I have the apostles, and the prophets, in the form of my New Testament. I have the Spirit of the apostles, living in my heart, granting me wisdom, and empowering my work. I don't need any more anointing than the one I received at my salvation. There are no conferences or revivals to which I need to travel, in order to add power to my ministry. I know my intuitions are not the voice of God: The Bible tells me that it, the Bible, is my Bible. The Bible is God's voice. The Bible is the word of the Spirit to me, in a personal way. The Bible claims to be completely sufficient for every need I have (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Of course I believe that the Spirit communicates with me directly. But so does my sin-nature, so does my human capacity for foolishness, and so can demons. So the Bible is the grid by which I evaluate my thoughts, emotions, and intuitions. There is far too much intuitionalism in Charismatic ministries. It is a grave sin to claim to speak for God, if what you are speaking is emerging out of yourself. I believe that sin happens all the time in Charismatic ministries. Reasoning is a gift of the Spirit: I dislike the disparaging of reasoning you hear in Charismatic ministries. It's unbiblical to disparage reasoning. God reasons. God is the ultimate Ground of reason. God spoke to the prophets in sentences that had subjects and verbs, and which made connective sense as He spoke in a linear, logical, "Western" (that's meant as a joke) manner. The Spirit tells us, in the early chapters of Proverbs, how supremely valuable are wisdom and knowledge. Ministries that tell me to suspend my thought processes, and go into semi-trancelike states, are not guiding me in accordance with the will of God. Suspended states of consciousness were sometimes caused by God to His children, from time to time (like Peter seeing a vision of a sheet, in Acts 10), but in all cases they were miracles caused by God -- they could not be self-caused by technique. If God wants to give me a dream, I have faith in him that He can do it, but I don't need to seek it, and having an experience like that wouldn't bring me any closer to Him than I already am. I know I'm no better or worse than any other child of God: I received the Spirit in His fullness when I believed, and so does every other Christian. We may fail to obey the command to keep on being filled with the Spirit, but nevertheless He is in all of us believers, and upon all of us, and all around all of us, as His temple. My times of spiritual dryness are caused by many things -- neglect of worship, prayer and Bible reading, the sin of doubt in my heart, sometimes even physical sickness. But there is no Christian group that represents the "in" group. There is no ministry that can give me something that I don't already have, that will transport me into a superior class of Christian. And that is what Charismatic theology claims to be able to do. I object to that, in light of the Bible's promises that He already has all of me, and I already have all of Him. What I need to do is unpack more thoroughly what I already have been given.

We Need Repentance

2009-12-31T19:26:00.000-05:00

2009 was a pretty bad year for most people. We need to turn to God for 2010. Slack loan procedures, fired by rampant greed, mixed with wrong-headed social philosophies, excused and ignored by our elected officials until it was too late, and paid for with our money, knocked over this brittle house of cards we called the American economy. Like one drunkard leaning heavily upon another, and the first drunk in line falling down, the whole conga-line fell forward in a resounding crash. Credit evaporated, and the phony nature of the U.S.' insanely over-leveraged prosperity was exposed. Someone should force the entire Federal Government through Dave Ramsey's basic course on money-management. A new generation of American Christians were starting to get the junk-monkey addiction off their backs, and get on board the Frugality Train, but it was too late. God inflicted on us a President of no accomplishment, whose religious mentor is a ragingly racist Marxist, a man who spent most of his congressional career ducking leadership by voting "present", and contradicts his own smooth assurances at every turn -- often in the same sentence. Since our economic wreckage was caused by reckless debt, this President decided the answer must be trillions more in reckless debt (paid for by the Communist Chinese). The party in power took off after more power like starving wolves catching scent of a flock of geese. The Stimulus Slush Fund is being used to pay off the President's backers (a study released this week shows that twice as much money is being funneled to districts belonging to the President's party), when it's not being spent on useless things like a university's study of the sex lives of rats (I am not joking). Politics are the civic face of a man's gods. Socialism is dictatorship. Progressivism is hatred of Christianity and of Christianity's God. Our political leaders are God's punishment on us for our sins. The answer to this punishment will not be more politics. You can't cure alcoholism with the hair of the dog that bit you. Read the prophets -- God punished Israel by taking away leading men of wisdom, sobriety, and piety, and replacing them with women, children, brutes, and drunks. Read Jeremiah 18. We need as a nation to repent of our sins and come to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through Jesus Christ, starting with the President, but including both sides of the aisle. That repentance also needs to happen in the American evangelical church. To repent of the Prosperity Gospel, repent of the Word-Faith heresy, and of our hyper-Arminian enthronement of ourselves as kings and queens of God's universe. We are in terrible shape! Just in the last few years, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals had to step down because of homosexual sin and drug use! Unbelievable! The Manhattan Declaration throws away the Gospel, which is the theology of the reformation, in the name of social issues. According to pod-cast statistics, the most listened-to preacher in America is Joel Osteen. Rick Warren called us to join hands and hearts with the Christ-denying modernists of the old, mainline denominations, in the name of social work. Thank God that he is raising up alternative leaders, many from the Reformed movement, and many in the Bible-believing branch of the emerging (i.e., next-generation) church. We don't need more ecclesiastical sell-outs to modernity or post-modernity. We need brave men who believe the Bible, accurately interpret it with intelligence and without fanaticism, and who then teach it without calibrating the content of what they say to fit a demographic survey, or to keep the tepid leaders of the 1980's generation happy.

Did the Disciples Believe in the Death of the Messiah?

2009-12-10T14:30:00.001-05:00

There is a heretical doctrine being spread among some Bible churches today, nick-named "The Crossless Gospel." It originates out of a group called the Grace Evangliecal Society, led by a Dr. Bob Wilkin. Wilkin's belief, following those of the late Zane Hodges, is that it is not necessary to know about Jesus' death and resurrection in order to be saved. All that is necessary is to believe in Christ as the guarantor of your eternal life. Dr. Wilkin seems to believe that the disciples didn't know about the death of Messiah, and yet were saved people. I began thinking through this novel idea, and the following thoughts occurred to me: 1. You can't wind the Gospel clock backward. God's promise in the Abrahamic covenant, that through Abram all the families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:3), connected back to God's original promise to Adam and Eve that one of her male offspring would destroy Satan's power and thus release mankind from the curse Satan engineered (Genesis 3:15). Paul calls that promise the Gospel (Galatians 3:8), and it was sufficient to justify Abram of his sins (Genesis 15:6). But the Gospel is an expression of progressive revelation. As the prophets, Jesus Christ, and the apostles spoke, the Gospel message became clearer and more detailed. Melchizedek could be saved without knowing the name "Jesus", but that is no longer possible. Each issuance of new revelation from God was like a clarifying memo issuing down from headquarters, expanding on the original memo. Each new memo adds onto the original, and becomes the new standard. What GES does is turn the revelation clock backward, which is wrong. 2. The Old Testament preached the future atoning death of Messiah. The Law of Moses taught that sins could only be atoned by the shedding of blood by a substitutionary sacrifice. Even though the Law's sacrificial system was only ceremonial and temporary, as the book of Hebrews emphasizes, it was a teaching type of how a sinner could be made right with a holy God. This is why Christ said that Moses "wrote of Me" (John 5:46). Isaiah 52:13-15 was an explicit prophecy of the bloody death of Messiah, and Isaiah 53:4-11 was a bold, explicit expression of the Messiah's propitiatory death. Daniel 9:26 explicitly prophesied that Messiah would be killed, though not for himself. These passages are part of the reason Jesus chastised the Pharisees. "You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me" (John 5:29). This "crossless gospel" theology seems to think that the death of Messiah was a new idea that was only unveiled after Jesus' died, but in fact God had revealed the death of Messiah to the Jews centuries before Christ was born. 3. John preached Messiah's atoning death right from the start. John 1:29. Given that John's audience was entirely Jewish, everyone would have known exactly what he meant when he called Jesus "the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" This is the message about Christ to which Peter and the other disciples responded by faith. This was the message into which they were baptized, so to speak. Jesus was not the first to speak of His death. The prediction of His death did not first begin to emerge halfway through Christ's three years of work. John preached it from the very start of Jesus' public ministry. This is not to say that all people fully understood it. Confused by bad rabbinical teaching and their own wrong ideas about Messiah, Christ's own disciples struggled with it. One of Jesus' female disciples understood it perfectly, and anointed His feet for His burial. Peter on the other hand rebuked Christ later, but Christ attributed Peter's attitude Satan's influence (Matthew 16:21-23), and because he wasn't being mindful of the words of God (v. 23). John the Baptist expected people to respond to his message that Christ was the atoning Lamb of God. Every Jew living knew what happens to the atoning lamb. 4. Paul says that the cross is an essential part of the gospel. 1 Cor. 15:1-4. This is the message that saved the Corinthians (v. 2). The cross answers the most basic question that a thoughtful unbeliever could ask -- How is God able to forgive me? The cross gives the answer to that question. Christ doesn't forgive you on the brute force of His own divine authority. That's Islam. God can remain just, and yet still be your justifier, because Christ died for your sins. 1 Corinthians 15 gives the cumulative, final definition of the Gospel for our time. The idea of a crossless gospel is deformed and defective. It sounds to me like someone's own cock-eyed notion, born out of a perverse pleasure from being a renegade who imagines himself to alone be enlightened.

Classic Problems With Darwinism

2009-12-08T12:33:00.000-05:00

CLASSIC PROBLEMS WITH THE EVOLUTIONARY THEORY Adapted from an article by Rev. Ray Comfort / adaptation by Jack Brooks Never believe it, when others say that Darwinism has been proven. Darwinism has been picked apart by scientific critics from its very start. The following problems with Darwinism continue to plague it to this day. Here are the classic scientific and social problems with Darwinism -- the problems that won't go away... 1. It is impossible for DNA to have randomly formed. The amount of information in the 3 billion base pairs of DNA in every human cell -- adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine -- is equivalent to 1,000 books of encyclopedia size. It would take a person typing 60 words a minute, eight hours a day, for nearly 50 years, to type the human genome. If all the DNA in your body's 100 trillion cells was stacked end to end, it would reach the sun and come back 600 times. It is impossible that DNA could have arisen randomly. DNA is a chemical code. It is a language. 2. Similarities do not prove a common ancestor. This is a fundamental logic fault in Darwinism. Nothing about genetic similarity proves a common ancestor. A bi-plane and a jet share certain common features -- wings, body, tires, engine, controls -- but this does not mean that jets evolved from bi-planes. The 4% genetic difference between humans and chimp sounds small, until you realize that this amounts to 120,000,000 differences in the DNA base pairs. Architects use standard forms (I-beams, trusses) to build a wide variety of buildings. The fact that Building A and Building B share architectural forms in no way proves that Building A came from Building B. The "Tree of Life" is a made-up cartoon. 3. There are no missing links. If Darwinism was true, then there should be thousands of 'missing link' fossils, such as half monkey, half man. Darwin in his day fully expected transitional fossils to be discovered. 150 years later, there still are no transitional fossils. However, there have been numerous frauds, such as the Archeoraptor (1999: a Chinese farmer glued a primitive bird skull and body to a dromaeosaur tail and hind limbs; National Geographic helped perpetrate this fraud). In fact, nearly all the fossils we have appear, suddenly and without warning, during the Cambrian period. And since evolution is an on-going process, we should still see thousands of transitional life-forms today, in all stages of transition. But there are none. 4. There is no evidence of macroevolution. Microevolution is when variations happen within a kind, such as when breeders develop many varieties of dogs. Macroevolution says that mutations accumulate over a long period of time, until the organism makes a great change, such as a reptile becoming a bird. But mutation never adds anything new to the DNA. Mutation only alters what's already there, or removes it. Also, mutations are random, and don't necessarily make the organism more fit to survive. It isn't that an organism picks a helpful mutation. And adaptation to environment doesn't change DNA at all. Radiation damages or destroys genetic material. 5. Organisms are much too complicated for Darwin's theory to be true. For example, the human eye is an incredibly complex organ. For an eye to evolve from a simpler to more complex form, everything in an eye would need to evolve at the same time, at the same rate, and always in ways beneficial to the creature. The extreme complexity of the eye tells us that first, it had to be have been designed, and second, random chance changes could not cause it to 'upgrade.' And this is just one organ. In Darwinism, we're talking about the entire organism evolving in the same way that the eye would need to do. Each organism is a unity of interconnected parts, and every part would need to evolve for any one part to evolve. 6. Darwinism is a masked form of Atheism. One reason I am not a Darwinist is because I am not an atheist. I don't need an alternative explanation for the origin of the universe and of living things. Darwin was not an atheist, but became an increasingly-embittered agnostic over his lifetime. But his agnosticism was due to sad events he witnessed in life, not to scientific studies. The vast majority of scientists who founded the modern scientific revolution were all believers in God, and most of them were Christians of one sort or another. The modern claim that only atheists are "true" scientists is just boastfulness.

An Evangelism Question We Should Avoid

2009-12-03T11:54:00.000-05:00

"So, how many people did your church bring to Christ last year?" Would you like to know in what context I've seen this response thrown out in conversation? It gets shot as an attack, if someone challenges a church's ministry methods. "So, how many people did your church bring to Christ last year?", being translated, actually means: "It doesn't matter to me that such-and-so thing we do might be unethical, or contrary to the Bible. We had 'x' amount of positive attendance growth last year, and 'x' number of baptisms. Therefore, everything we do is automatically right." I attended a service at a large church in Columbia several years ago, in which a troop of beautiful young women came dancing down the aisles as part of the event. Each of these shapely young women were dressed in multi-colored, sparkly leotards. They tossed their hair back and forth, and waved praise flags back and forth to the music. It stumbled me then, and it still bothers me to think about it today. But I bet that, if I'd complained about it, someone would have said something like, "So how big is your church, compared to ours?", or "Look at all the people we reach." Another way I've heard this question phrased is, "Don't criticize what God is blessing." What that phrase actually means is, "You're forbidden to question anything I do. Why? Because I'm successful. That means that God is on our side and He approves of everything we/I do." Which, by reverse logic, means that God must be disgusted with all our small churches. It's like a church-growth version of the Prosperity Gospel. That question is meant to be a dialogue-killer; it's a pious way to say "Shut up, you loser" to someone. A response to the attacking, defensive question, "So how many people did your church lead to Christ last year?", might be, "Does evangelism excuse everything?" Evangelism doesn't excuse anything. The fact that somebody came to Christ does not mean that your interpretive mangling of the text was OK. The fact that somebody came to Christ doesn't make your refusal to tell the church board how you spend your work hours during the week OK. The fact that somebody came to Christ does not make the use of a sexy secular song in order to hook the audience OK. The fact that somebody came to Christ does not make preaching your experiences OK. The fact that somebody came to Christ doesn't mean that slavish mimicry of famous preachers is OK. The fact that somebody came to Christ doesn't explain where the petty cash has been going. And so on. Evangelism is never an excuse for anything.

Counseling And The Church

2009-12-03T09:37:00.001-05:00

The quickness which the Israelites reverted back to Baal worship after Gideon's death (Judges 8) illustrates a danger in authoritative Christian counseling, especially the type that heavily emphasizes accountability. Counselees can struggle to maintain certain levels of Christian conduct, but they might do so out of personal regard for the counselor rather than out of faith in the Lord. Instead of internalizing, by faith, the counselor's Biblical instruction, the counselee maintains a degree of "holding it together" out of personal regard for their pastor-counselor. Whether out of affection friendship, or fear of rebuke, the counselee can seem to make progress -- until the close relationship with the pastor-counselor ends, for whatever reason. Then, the counselee's life unravels at a shockingly fast rate. Israel got its act together for forty years, out of respect for the divine anointing on Gideon, his status as a war leader, and the fear of being "disciplined with briers." But as soon as Gideon passed, everyone reverted. One of the reasons secular psychology dominates in American Christianity is the nature of pastoral training in even our most conservative seminaries. Seminaries are dominated by theologians, not pastoral practitioners. Most of them spent many years pursuing doctoral degrees in the fields of theological research, not pastoral practice. They usually had no training in psychology or psychiatry, so their knowledge of those fields is often just as second-hand as the average layman in our congregations. One only has so much time, and only so much money, to accomplish one's education. Most professional theologians, from what I've seen over the past thirty years, have little pastoral experience, and often they had none. What's more, they did not, and do not, even want to be pastors; and yet they are training, for the most part, pastors. As a result, the bulk of content to which future pastors are exposed in seminary is barely explicated in terms of its counseling significance to human life. The seminary student is taught for theology for mastery of content, not application to life. On one hand, it's fair for theologians to ask, "How much can we accomplish in only three years?" Nevertheless, this form of education creates a massive vacuum in the seminarian's pastoral training. We take our first pastorates, and discover that between our theology and real life "a great gulf has been fixed, which no man can cross." Who will fill that gulf? Secular theory is right at hand to fill the bill, even though it is not the answer. It's as handy as fast-food, and as healthy.

How To Handle It When A Non-Christian Loved One Passes Away

2009-11-18T10:04:00.000-05:00

We Christians believe in the existence of hell because Jesus believed in it, not because we like it. Since he's the Son of God, we're obligated to take his word on it. The reason a hell even exists is because God is sovereign and holy, and people are evil. If people weren't evil, then hell wouldn't bother anybody. After all, who cares if the devil gets thrown into hell one day? He's a fiend, and we all figure he deserves to be there. But human souls that are, like the devil, in rebellion against God's authority, and are marinated in their sins, have no place in His heavenly home. God would no more allow such a person into heaven, than you would allow a cobra to slither in your door. We worry about tracking mud onto the carpet. God's not going to allow His house to be defiled. We don't like to think of our loved ones as snak or defilers. That's because we're bound to them by the bonds of affection, and because we've become dull to their sins. We're also ignorant of most of their sins. And we've got so much latent snakiness inside us, that we look at someone else's snakiness and say, I don't get it, what's the big deal? But God never gets "used to" snakiness. God is just as upset by sin today as He was when Adam first bit the fruit. God in the Bible describes himself as impartial. He doesn't slide the scales of justice based on liking one person better than another. God isn't a citizen of any nation, and he doesn't belong to any ethnic group, so He doesn't favor one country over another, or one race over another. We, however, definitely are not impartial. We say, "But that person is my (best friend, parent, offspring)...!" God says, "That person is a soul who for refuge to Jesus did not flee, so now I must and shall evaluate him/her according to my law." I think there is a deep seriousness and sobriety that a Christian must feel at the passing of a non-Christian loved one, that we mix in with our sadness. It counterbalances the sad part. God's judgment against sin is not an unexplainable tragedy that peculiarly befalls people from down out of the sky. It's not like leukemia, or tumbling down a flight of stairs. Every person is born into this world that blares the presence of God at them from the first moment they open their eyes. The beauty of the skies, the mountains, and the seas shout the glory of God. The voice of moral conscience speaks truth inwardly to the soul. Even our outrage at the victimization of evil, committed against us or against others, speaks to us of a great Law-giver. Practical evidences of the providence of God happen all around us. Prayers get answered. Food arrives on the table. Sick people get well. Someone loves you. By the time a person passes from this world into the next, they have experienced a graduate school course on The Existence & Glory of God 101. It's impossible for the departed person to plead ignorance of the glory of God. If they were atheists in this life, it's because they wanted to be. In the end, we are on the Lord's side. That's what it comes down to. I have chosen the Lord's side. You have chosen to devote your life to fighting my Savior. You have chosen to be God's enemy, so, when the last day comes, that means you are my enemy, even though I love you. Christ drew a line in the sand. You're either for me or against me, he said. Christ said that he came with a sword, to divide families against each other. Whose side are you on? When the children of Israel were rioting, Moses cried out, who is on the Lord's side? The Levites responded, "We are!", and began slaying their cousins with the sword, in order to restore order. Christ in the gospel says, "Who is on my side?", again and again, and again and again over the centuries we take sides. I don't want you to go into final judgment. I've prayed and worked, even wept, that you would repent. But nobody forced you to sin, not even once were you forced; and nobody forced you to live your life defying God in the particular way you did it. I am not your judge, and for that I thank God. You answer to Someone a million times higher than I. You may be my father, my mother, my sister, my brother, or my child, but I defer the handling of your case to the Lord, who is the only one who can be trusted to do the right thing by you. God is no sadist. He orchestrated the murder of his own Son for you, so that you could be offered redemption. The suffering in your life that you blamed on God, would have been healed by God, if you had brought them to Him, but you refused. Instead, you used them as another excuse to live how you please. I've chosen my side. When the final judgment day comes, I won't feel any divided loyalties. I won't be happy for your judgment, but I won't be un-happy with my Lord, either. I recognize that you are individual living life in the sight of the God who made you for Himself, and I know that, in the end, you will have to stand before God as you, with me standing by and watching from the sidelines.

Advice For Young Workers

2009-11-12T12:06:00.001-05:00

Here's some shocking, unheard-of advice for Christians seeking work (especially in leadership positions), or people praying about going into Christian work full-time: * If the organization you're talking to has repeatedly burned through numerous workers in the position for which you're interviewing, in a relatively short period of time, don't take the job. * If the organization is going to ask you to do things you have never done before, or for which you have no training, don't take the job. Never pretend to be able to do things you haven't done, can't do, or don't know how to do. * If working for that organization mean that you will end up becoming self-financing, or might go bankrupt, don't take the job. Christ said that jumping off the temple mount was not "faith", it was the sin of testing God. * If the organization won't let you see their public financial records, don't take the job. * If the organization won't give you the names, phone numbers, and other contact information of the previous people who held the position, don't take the job. * If the organization is divided against itself, don't take the job. * If the organization wants you to "save" them, don't take the job without there first being a candid admission of mistakes and failure on their parts. * If an organization acts as if they are doing you a huge favor by even considering hiring you, assume they are planning to use and abuse you. In other words: Don't be a martyr. Require fair compensation (not luxurious; fair and livable). Never believe you can do tasks for which you have no aptitude, interest, or training. Don't work for organizations that hide essential information from you. A house divided against itself will fall. Don't let it fall on you.

Children Walking Away From The Faith

2009-10-04T08:30:00.001-04:00

It's been reported that the children of Christians are walking away from the faith in record numbers. Answers in Genesis had an article on this last month, and one of my links (That Mom) talks about it this month as well. I don't know how statistics such as this are compiled, so I wonder how many of those sampled would we consider to be full-fledged Protestant evangelicals. So that is where I would begin to look: the polling categories themselves. The word "evangelical" has become so broad, loose and near-meaningless now, that it raises into question polling data that's based on self-identified "evangelicals." If it turns out that there's a huge swath of nominalism, then it would require us to re-think the information gathered. But let's grant that the polling is accurate. If the children of Christians are abandoning Christianity at record rates, what would I want to look at further? A. The high divorce rate among evangelicals. Somewhere in Malachi, God said that the reason he wanted His people to honor their marriage vows was because He was seeking a godly seed. The high divorce rate among American evangelicals is an indicator of our level of rebellion against God, our self-serving immaturity, and in many situations our men's slavery to lust. Christian parents who divorce shake not just their childrens' emotions to the core, but their budding faith as well. B. The anti-doctrine/anti-intellectual mentality among American evangelicals. We have wasted decades now, feeding our own people a lot of shallow pop theology, charismania doctrines, and self-esteem psychology. Christians like that are clawless and toothless when it comes to dealing with the world. Then that sort of Christian family sends their ill-formed child out into that militantly anti-Christian world, and of course the child converts over to Philistinism. The tepid mish-mosh of morality and sentimentality, with its sugar glaze of music, we feed our kids in Sunday school is no match for all the fierce propaganda that's out in society today, especially at state college. C. We do very little to shield our children from worldly influences when they're young, compared to our believing grandparents. We ridicule the old conservatives, and imagine ourselves much more enlightened. There are many areas where the Lord has freed us from unnecessarily restrictive rules. But instead we seem to think American society's pop cultural influence is benign. We subscribe to cable TV and watch nasty things we wouldn't have countenanced even in the 1970s, we don't turn off top-40 music when it's on the car radio, in short, we saturate our families with negative, atheistic/agnostic entertainment media, and so soften up our children's thinking. We think entertainment is worldview neutral, which is naive. Just some thoughts on an early Sunday morning.

Church Growth Principles: Do You Agree?

2009-10-02T14:09:00.000-04:00

How many of the following principles do you agree should control the way that we evangelical Christians go about making new followers of Jesus Christ? 1. The purpose of the local church is evangelism. 2. The Sunday morning church service should be exclusively devoted to non-believers. 3. The service should be constructed on the basis of social research. This approach should run through every aspect of the church's ministry, but especially be applied to the Sunday service. 4. The service has to conform to four standards. It has to feature a welcoming atmosphere. The message has to be non-threatening, positive, and up-beat. The service must be entertaining. The service must be aimed at an introductory level at all times. 5. Secular business ans counseling philosophy has to form a substantial amount of the church's guiding principles. The attendee should be defined as a customer, and the community is the market, and the church's actions shall all be taken accordingly. Counseling is founded on a combination of Bible and self-esteem theory. Business philosophy directs how the church board will conduct the various ministries. 6. "Does it work?" is the bottom-line criteria for decision making, within reason. 7. The attendee should experience the following four things. Attending church should be an anonymous experience -- no one connected with the church should take an attendee's name, phone number, or any other contact information of that sort. They should not be asked to stand up, identify themselves as a visitor, receive a special sticker, etc. It should be an entry-level experience. The attendee shouldn't need to know anything about the Bible, to understand the message. The attendee should not be challenged to accept Christ immediately. Coming to Christ is a learning process that takes time. The attendee should experience excellence in programming. What the church does must be the best. What do you think of these seven principles?

Renewing Stalled-Out Churches

2009-09-30T09:54:00.000-04:00

King David used to give advice to himself, when he was feeling down, discouraged, and frightened. What sort of advice would I give to myself, if I were tasked with advising a stalled-out church on how to get back on fire? Hmmm... Just thinking out loud...I'm working on a discussional Bible study in Judges for tonight, and there are some relevant principles I just read in Joshua 24 (which is the set-up for Judges). Joshua had them review God's goodness to them over the years. I think this was intended to stir up their faith, rather than to "guilt" them into doing good. Sometimes people remind you of all the good things they've done for you, in order to make you feel obligated to do what they want. I don't think God is that cheap. Instead, I think He was trying to fire up their faith. Review how committed He's been to doing them good, in real, hard, pragmatic terms. I think when you get bogged down, it's easy to forget that God is still on your side, and has a good plan for you. The supreme "good thing" that God has done for us in our past is to send Jesus Christ to die for our sins. Then we can also remember all the answered prayers and distinct interventions He's done for us, as well as for our church. Then Joshua had them re-commit to obeying God's word. Their forefathers had already done this, back in Exodus 19, but I think every generation needs to do it for themselves. We can't coast along on the momentum of our parents, or the founders of our church, even if we had godly parents or charter founders. This sort of re-commitment to following the Lord has to happen individually and corporately. It has to include the leaders and the rank-and-file. Jesus' teaching about picking up our cross daily implies that re-commitment is a daily decision. But there may be special times and experiences where that re-commitment is more emotional for us. Joshua marked the day with a rock memorial. Some of us remember key moments in our lives where we got something serious straightened out between us and the Lord, and we got back on track where we needed to be. This tells us that our spirituality and morality comes first before our mission strategizing. We have to get rid of the foreign gods in our hearts, and clean up our acts in the sight of God, before we can expect success in the more "outward" aspect of following the Lord. We mustn't plunge into strategizing and outward-focusing until our own house is in order, or we end up like Israel getting defeated by little Ai because Achan stole some stuff out of Jericho. Judges chapter 1 suggests that they got back to the work at hand. They set to the task which God had assigned to them. In the Jews' case, it was the mission of driving the godless Canaanites out of the land, as the first step in the bigger plan of creating a nation that would be a light to the nations. They re-focused on their mission, re-organized themselves, picked a clear target area (in their case, Judah and Simeon started with the region called Bezek), and went at it. This adventure was based on a clear geographical scheme that had already been defined by Joshua in chapters 18-19 of his book. I. Review the grace of God to you, in order to stir and firm your faith. II. Re-consecrate yourselves to God, unto personal devotion and holiness. III. Re-apply yourselves to the main mission God has assigned you.

My "Field Trip" To A Mega-Church

2009-09-28T11:21:00.000-04:00

My "Field Trip" To A Mega Church A report by Jack Brooks My son Alex and I were invited to attend a Saturday night service at a mega-church, one of the fastest growing mega-churches in our part of the nation. This is a report on our experience. I'll summarize we saw and did while we were there, and then offer up some opinions at the end, pro and con. My goal is to describe in such a way that thechurch's people themselves could agree that it was a fair, accurate description of their service. As we drove in, we were directed to a small parking area reserved for first-time guests. Everyone else parks out in front of the new main entrance on the opposite side of the building from where we were. We received a colorful booklet at a greeter's booth, which included a CD of a sermon. We made our way to the new front entrance, and located the couple who had invited us. We noticed that they had a coffee bar near the front door, serving beverages. I was told that first-time visitors get a coupon for a free coffee. All the greeters were very friendly, and worse bright red T-shirts that said "Help Staff". Alex and I walked into the auditorium and sat down. Alex estimated that the room probably seats around 2,000 people. There is a large stage up front with a two-story-high screen suspended at its back. Two other screens are up on the walls to the left and the right. The room was kept dark the whole time. It was not so dark that you couldn't see people or get around, but dark enough that your attention is naturally drawn to the stage. When we sat down, there was a band on stage, and a beautiful young woman in a black sleeveless tunic was belting out a pop song. The lyrics flashed on the screen behind her. (I just learned that this was a hot song this past summer by the pop singer Rihanna, on her album Good Girl Gone Bad.) The theme of the song is that of a young person lamenting that she is losing her bearings and all sense of meaning or order in her life. The volume level was loud enough that my chest cavity vibrated with the bass line. The rhythmic percussing was accentuated by the bright, whirling graphics on the big screen, that pulsed at us in time with the bass. The stage is lined along the top with hundreds of colored gel lights, hung from the metal scaffolding. Along the floor were eight spinning, rotating spotlights that could change the light color as they spun. I assume they were computer-controlled. They could do circular rotations at 360 degrees, and also tilt up and around in any direction Several times they shone directly into our eyes, so that we had to shut our eyes and turn our faces away. The volume was such that Alex and I could not hear each other speak unless we spoke directly into each other's ears, even though we were seated next to each other. There were two plastic columns on stage, to the left and the right. They flashed and twinkled with various colors throughout the music, and also, to a lesser extent, through the message. There might have been a mist machine running, though I couldn't tell for certain if it was mist, or just dust reflecting in the rotating spotlights. That band left the stage, and a different band replaced them. This was the worship band. The emotional tone settled down somewhat, though the volume level stayed more or less the same. Various verses from the Psalms were projected on the screen, as the lady song-leader greeted the crowd and then performed abou four contemporary worship songs. It seemed as if some of the crowd was singing along, but it also seemed as if many were not. Alex and I did not know three of the four songs, so we did not sing along. Next came a DVD skit, projected up on the screen, of a heavy-set young man with a beard, dressed in a white shirt. This was supposed to be Jesus Christ, and He was answering the "help" line at a desk in an office. The skit was intended to comically illustrate what it must be like for Jesus to receive so many selfish, demanding, or just-plain-odd "prayer calls" from people. This skit was followed by another skit, a live one on stage, in which a young woman has a conversation with God (God is unheard). She converses with God while seated on her living room couch, during her uncertain, artificial attempts at "worship" (playing Gregorian chants on her Ipod, prostrating herself, stilted language, and so on). Next came the message, delivered by a staff pastor. The topic was "Hearing the Voice of God". This subject was picked as a result on an on-line Quest conducted, asking people what they wanted to hear messages about. The over-all series is called "Because You Asked 4 It". Pastor McCardy spoke for approximately an hour. It's difficult to reproduce his message's main points just from memory, but the highlights of it were: · God wants to talk to you, in a conversational way; · you need a soft, pliable heart to hear Him; · God talks to you in three ways, the Bible, other people, and by inner impressions; · the Bible is the main way God talks to you; · the Bible is the test (the "guardrails") of the other two ways; · we can't "hear" Him because of wrong ideas in our minds about God, such as the idea that God is angry at anyone; · we need to unharden our own hearts to hear Him. The speaker cited about 10-12 different Bible verses throughout the message. I could not tell what version he was using. Alex thought it might have been the New Living Translation, or maybe Eugene Peterson's The Message. Object visuals were used at points. There was a large red Play-Doh heart to illustrate softness and pliability in God's hands; a box screen covered with a black stain, that illustrated man's wrong ideas about God; inside that box were thousands of clips of paper, illustrating sin and self. This was well done. It isn't easy to maintain interest for an hour, and the audio-visuals helped with that. The speaker gave testimony of his own conversion, and an evangelistic challenge was given. He also praised the head pastor of the church as a man who hears from God better than anyone. Then the head pastor got up on stage, and encouraged everyone to come to the building dedication this coming Friday, at which Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church will preside. The pastor encouraged everyone to invite others, including people from other churches, and thanked God for Bill Hybels being his personal mentor. There was an offering taken during this time, seekers were encouraged to still come down to the front even though the service was over, and the meeting let out. It began around 5:50 PM, and ended at 7:45 pm. Our hosts told us that this was the exact same service that would be done two more times Sunday morning. My thoughts, after a couple of days mulling it over. I'm disappointed to discover how completely subordinate this church is to Willow Creek. The Willow Creek attitude, in my opinion, is that winning people to Christ automatically makes everything else you do all right. I object to this mentality. The whole Bible has authority over us. I feel this warping is what happens when the head man is an evangelist. Saddleback is similarly warped. I recognize that what they did in this Saturday meeting was to consciously create a somewhat non-religious setting. By dropping the word "church" out of their name; by using a Rihanna song as the opener (because we came in at the end of it. I don't know what they did about the "s" word that Rihanna uses in the original), by using comical skits in which formality or fear toward God was ridiculed, their goal is to present God in a therapeutic, non-threatening way. No crosses, or other distinctively Christian art, could be seen anywhere. The assumption seems to be that the public feels only fear and loathing toward the iconography of Christianity. I very much dislike feeling my chest cavity vibrate. Alex commented that all the flashing strobe lights made it hard for him to concentrate. He joked later to me that it would be dangerous to bring an epileptic to this church. Alex is nineteen. He described the presentation as "garish". I commented later that it reminded me of the flashing lights of a carnival midway. On a deeper level, I have a big question about the ethics of using sensory stimulation to manipulate an audience. Is no one aware of how adrenaline can be used, to create a chemical substitute for the Holy Spirit? But because they were doing it to reach the lost, and that sort of show is what a lot of lost people like (obviously), did that make it okay? Alex and I were both offended by the DVD skit in which Jesus was played as a comical, semi-hapless figure. The same goes for the live skit, in which God rebuked the woman for kneeling in His presence. God doesn't ever want us to kneel, or bow down? What about the Psalms? Why do Christian people feel no hesitation about putting their own imagined words into God's mouth? Don't they read the Old Testament? Even the pastor told a joke in which God delivers the punch line. Where is the reverence for God? Have they never read about the Bible's prohibitions against false prophets and false teachers? Is it OK to put our own lame words into God's mouth, as long as we're doing it to reach the lost? What about the theology of the message itself? Many of the Bible verses cited were taken out of context, and were used to prove points they didn't prove. For example, Jesus' words from John 10, "My sheep hear my voice", doesn't mean that Christ promises to talk to us inside our heads. God's word to Israel, "I have a plan for you, a future and a hope", from Jeremiah, reflects God's bigger prophetic plan for the Jews. Jesus standing at the door and knocking was addressed to a church that was out of fellowship with Him. He was not speaking to an unsaved person there. That's a classic mis-application that I have heard used over and over through the years. "God doesn't send anyone to Hell", the preacher said. "We send ourselves there." In a strict sense. that's absurd. Of course God sends people to Hell. After all, who created Hell? God. Who created human beings with the potential ability to sin, and as a result die and go to Hell? God. Did God create Adam's capacity to sin already foreknowing that Adam would sin? Yes. Who actually causes the godless soul to go into Hell, when he or she dies? God. So the statement, "God doesn't send anyone to Hell" is misleading. Even thoughtful non-Christians can reason that out. Now, whose fault is it that someone goes to Hell? That is a different question. It is the sinner's fault, and not God's fault. Sinners deserve to go to Hell. Is God happy that sinners go to Hell? No. He says clearly, in Ezekiel 18, that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. But don't try to get God off the hook by claiming He doesn't send anyone to Hell. Of course He does. It is right and good that He does. He is the only one who can send someone to Hell. Jesus said, "Do not fear men, who can only destroy the body, but fear God, who destroys both soul and body in hell." The speaker said that God isn't angry at anyone. Does the Bible not teach about the wrath of God? If God isn't righteously angry at us sinners, then why do we need to be saved? Romans 1 says that the wrath of God is being made manifest from heaven against we sinners who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Psalm 5 says that God hates all workers of iniquity. God is angry at sinners, because God is holy. Alex's paraphrased comment to me was that the church presented God as if He's our therapist. I feel they presented Him as our "buddy". At no time did the message present God as being righteous or holy. Do we, as lost people, have the spiritual power to unharden our own hearts? The speaker said that we do. The Bible says we do not. He cited a passage from the Old Testament, which says that we have the responsibility to unharden ourselves toward God. That's true. We are all responsible before God to repent of our pride and come back to Him. But do we have the power to do it? The Bible says we do not. There is no connection between responsibility and ability in the Bible. We are all responsible to think and act righteously because God created Adam to think and act righteously. The fact that Adam sinned and destroyed our ability to think and act righteously did not erase our original mandate from God. But the speaker's teaching on this reflected the man-centeredness of a kidn of hyper-Arminianism. The over-all thrust of the message was that we should all have on-going conversations with God. Some of the message was fairly standard "guidance" doctrine, but over-all it was very mystical. I thought the head pastor'sclosing exhortation to the crowd, to get people from other churches to attend their dedication, was inappropriate. It sounded a bit like like sheep-stealing. Conclusions? I will say this. I respect what this church is attempting to do with this Saturday night meeting. One brother in the church I serve compared it to a Baptist tent revival, but for the 21st century. I agree. My problem with it is that they do it on Sunday morning. The New Testament teaches that the Lord's Day meeting is for the worship of the Lord Jesus Christ by His people, and for their fellowship and edification. The Lord's Day meeting is not for the lost. It is a sin for a church to abandon that rule, just as it would have been a sin for Israel to turn the Sabbath into Reach-The-Philistines Day. We should not ignore New Testament rules about church and Lord's Day worship. Uzzah thought it was OK to touch the holy ark, because he didn't want it to slide off the ox-cart on which they were (wrongly) carrying it. God killed him for it, without regard for Uzzah's heart. Why? Because the ends never justify the means. We don't labor under all those ceremonial laws of Israel anymore, but the rule remains forever true: We're never allowed to break God's rules, whatever they are. Just because we don't care about church government rules, or worship rules, doesn't mean that God doesn't care. Our adult Bible class this past Sunday morning, regarding the content of the Gospel, dealt with an issue in which the Saturday night prteacher failed. That pastor gave an invitation to receive Christ at the end of his message. But he never presented the Gospel. He mentioned bits and pieces of the Gospel, sort of, throughout a message that wasn't an evangelistic message. But he never presented the Gospel. We need to be careful about that. The Bible says the purpose of the local church is to worship God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our God-given purpose is God-centered, not man-centered. Like four wheels on a car, the church has four ways that we do that. We corporately worship on the Lord's Day and other times, we teach and preach God's Word, we evangelize the lost, and we do good works of service in Jesus' name. The teaching and preaching of God's Word takes priority over all of it, because without the Word of God we wouldn't know how to worship, what discipleship is, how to witness, or what good works are. Worship is bigger than discipling, though it includes it. Worship is bigger than marriage and family life, though it includes it. It's bigger than missions, though it includes it. Worshiping God in Christ is why we are here. So, to say that the purpose of the local church is to reach the lost is like inflating one tire on the car to ten times its appropriate size. More than that, to make evangelism THE purpose of the local church is man-centered. Evangelism isn't even God's own purpose for Himself. God's purpose for Himself is to glorify His own name. So that approach is distorted and imbalanced, just like churches that only do Bible study after Bible study are distorted and imbalanced in a similar way. A church that is all about marriage and child-rearing is distorted. A church that is all about world missions is distorted. The issue is Biblical balance -- maintaining a balanced ministry. Contrary to the doctrine of the therapeutic deity, God is indeed angry at sinners, because God is a consuming fire of righteousness, and we are evil. But God is also merciful, gracious, and compassionate as well That's why He sent His son. R.C. Sproul is correct when he said that God sent Jesus to save us from Himself. We at our church are in no danger of overwhelming people with sensory stimulation. But, even for us in our stylistic conservatism, it always bears fruit to think about how we do ministry, and that includes for whom we are doing it. Do we ever do anything with the non-Christian in mind? It seems to me, basically "no." That is our fault. This mega-church is thinking through carefully who their missionary target group is, what they want, and what they like. The missionaries our church supports do the same. I think this mega-church meeting I attended showed a great lack of Biblical discernment in many ways. I couldn't be its pastor, and I wouldn't attend it. But they are trying to think like missionaries, and as far as that goes, in spite of my generally negative reaction, I think we should commend them in that area. We should be able to weed through all of it, keep the wheat, but discard the chaff.

Problems With Evolution, For the Layman

2009-09-25T11:24:00.000-04:00

1. Evolution is driven by atheism. Evolution is actually atheism wearing a scientific mask. As soon as you let God into the picture, the "need" for evolution falls apart. So there's a deeper religious issue going on whenever we talk about evolution. 2. Evolution has many logic problems. Here are several. a. What does the word "evolution" mean? Just that living organism adapt and change over time? Everyone agrees. Or that all organisms came out of original single-celled organisms? That needs proof. Beware people juggling the word "evolution" in deceptive ways. b. Two organisms being similar doesn't demand that the two organisms came from the same ancestor. That's a fallacy known as a non sequitur -- "it does not follow". c. Which organisms are the fittest? The ones that survive. Which ones survive? The ones that are the fittest. Evolution is built on an empty repetition (this is called a tautology). d. Where did all the atoms that organisms are made out of come from in the first place? There are only three possibilities: created, self-created, or eternal. The second option is a logical impossibility, since, if you can create yourself you already exists, therefore you don't need to create yourself. The third is impossible since eternal things don't change or wind down, as we see the whole universe doing. e. Evolutionists who say that the earth is billions of years old are assuming there's no God. Thry are assuming this because, if there is a supreme, omnipotent Being, then he could have created everything in an already aged state (this is what Genesis 1 says He did). E.g., starlight was already penetrating the atmosphere. There's no rule that requires the Supreme Being to create everything set at "zero", as if argon decay must begin on the first moment of the existence of argon, starlight started traveling from each star on each star's first moment of existence. Instead, Genesis 1 depicts God creating everything in an already functioning, already fully-developed, already aged state of existence. f. Extraordfinary claims require extraordinary proof. Evolution is an extraordinary claim. Why don't we see it happening? Well, the response is that it happens so slowly that you it can't be observed. But if it is impossible to disprove evolution (e.g., "the reason you don't see it happening is because evolution takes so long to occur"), then that means it's impossible to prove. If evolution can't be proven false, then it can't be proven true. 3. Evolution has many scientific problems. Electricity doesn't cause non-living things to spring to life. There's no evidence that adaptation/natural selection creates new genuses. All natural selection does is promote heartier versions of what already exists. And that only temporarily. If circumstances change, then the less-fit forms of the organisms make a comeback. Radiation damages or destroys living things. Therefore, radiation can't account for organic improvements. Saying that raidation strengthens and improves living things is like X-Men science. There are no 'missing link' fossils, or "missing links" alive now, that we know of. Everything in an organism would need to evolve at the same time, to survive. 4. Evolution has many moral and spiritual problems. Jesus Christ was a creationist. Because He was the Son of God, this means creationism is true. If you reject creationism, you automatically have to reject that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. Evolutionary atheism has created the most evil societies in history.

Problems With Prophecy

2009-09-16T09:07:00.000-04:00

First of all, prophecy in the New Testament is always treated as an infallible divine revelation. It is never treated as a possibly fallible phenomenon. Dr. Grudem will cite Agabus' second prophecy about Paul going to Jerusalem as an example of a prophecy with mistakes in it (which it doesn't have, by the way). But when Agabus earlier predicted a famine, the church snapped into instant action that the prophecy would surely come true. And indeed it did (Acts 11:28). You can't use Agabus as an example of prophecy-with-mistakes in one case, then use him as an example of what prophecy looks like in action, in the other case where he was infallibly right. Regarding Agabus' alleged mistakes in the second instance (Acts 21:11): Agabaus predicted that Paul's hands would be tied by the Jews in Jerusalem, and that they would hand him over to the Gentiles. The chief difference between the Acts 11 and Acts 21 prophecies is that Luke in Acts 11 explicitly mentions the fulfillment of Agabus' famine prophecy, where he doesn't explicitly say in Acts 21 that Paul's hands were bound by a belt. Luke just says that they seized Paul (21:30). Since Agabus was explicitly correct about the famine, I believe that Paul's hands were bound by his own belt in Acts 21, because Afabus was infallibly correct back in Acts 11. Agabus also never says that the Jews would turn Paul over to the Gentiles voluntarily. Grudem and others read something into the text that isn't there. Acts 21 says that the Jews turned Paul over to the Romans, who arrested him (21:33). Paul being bound with a chain, which was not a "mistake" in the original prophecy. Paul's hands were first bound by a belt, then the Romans put handcuffs on him. Agabus never said one thing or another about what the Gentiles would do. He only spoke to what the Jews would do. Agabus' prophecy about the binding of Paul's hands and him being turned over to the Gentiles was completely accurate. When the gift of prophecy was operative in the local church, it had the effect of edification, encouragement, and comfort (1 Corinthians 14:3). It also exposed and convicted the secret heart-sins of visitors (1 Corinthians 14:24-25). These functions all presume that the gift's spontaneous diagnosis of the immediate needs of the congregation was accurate. The power to know the secrets (v. 25) of a heart is a miracle, not just good guesswork! Paul calls the gift of prophecy a revelation (14:30), an apokalupsis. Dr. Grudem doesn't see prophecy as equivalent to visions (even though the two are paired in 2 Cor. 12:1). Instead, using a method of undifferentiated word study, he conflates apokalupsis with what's been traditionally called "illumination", that is, inner enlightenment toward an already-revealed truth, such as the Holy Spirit revealing to the eyes of your heart that Jesus really is the Christ (e.g. Matthew 11:27, 16:17), or a deeper knowledge of who Christ is in your life (Ephesians 1:17). It can refer to the Lord opening your eyes to see yourself as you truly are (Philippians 3:15). But, like many Bible words, apokalupsis has a range of meaning, and in many contexts it clearly means something more than just "insight". The power of apokalupsis in 1st Corinthians 14 enabled the prophet to know what's inside someone's mind. That's enormously more than just an intuitional "leading." 1 Corinthians 14 also treats tongues and prophecy as closely linked together. As long as a tongues prayer is translated, its edificational value is equal to prophecy (1 Corinthians 14:5b). This is where Dr. Grudem's core thesis that there is such a thing as "fallible prophecy" breaks down. Peter cited Joel 2:28-32 as the Lord's interpretation of the Day of Pentecost. What happened on the Day of Pentecost was prophecy, and the prophecy that happened was identical in nature to the prophecies of the Old Covenant times. The Joel quotation proves that New Testament prophecy and Old Testament prophecy are the same in essence. Pentecostal prophecy took a surprising turn, because it manifested in the form of foreign languages -- and Luke clearly says it was a miracle of speaking, not a miracle of hearing as the charismatics wrongly say (see Acts 2:4). We don't need the gift of prophecy. God provided us with complementary gifts that still do the "non-revelatory" functions. We have the gift of teaching, the gift od discernment, and the gift of exhorting. We have a completed Bible. What about "all the revelation miracles that we know are happening around the world?", you might say. My reply: I don't know that lots of revelatory miracles are actually happening around the world. The missions world is overrun with fabulous claims, very few of which can be reasonably proven to be true. In fact, a paper was published for the Evangelical Missions Society, which I had the privilege of reading the early draft since its authors were two of my professors, which debunked many wild claims made by C. Peter Wagner, and exposed his shoddy (and often non-existent) verification criteria. Missionaries are no more or less reliable recounters than any other sinners, and they are as prone to hear stories and then uncritically pass them along as if they were proven fact (especially if the story fits their own personal beliefs or wishes) as is anyone else. I believe that Dr. Grudem and others experienced, for them, positive experiences with groups like the Vineyard and the Calvary Chapels. As a result, they have attempted to retrofit a theology that validates what already goes on in Vineyard and other sorts of charismatic churches. But the reasoning is unsound. One thing I think we need to get through our heads: There are no apostles. None of us are. Because none of us are apostles, or even could be, it's arrogant for any ecclesiastical leader to expect anyone else to automatically buy into their claims of revelation.

The Church That Tithed Manure

2009-09-14T15:59:00.000-04:00

I just received this from a friend who ministers in Kijabe, Kenya: Today I heard of a church that is so poor, it is tithing manure. I am NOT making this up. One of Moffat's first year students is a mature entry student. He is probably in his forties. He is the pastor of a very small church in an area where they are very poor anyway, and where they have not had a harvest this year because of the failed rains. They are trying to plant some trees to beautify the church property, and the pastor wanted to encourage the people that they did indeed have something to give. So he told them, "Every one of you has a cow. From now on, you can bring in a tithe of your manure and we will use it to plant these trees and beautify God's house." I think this is a first, even for here in Kenya. Rather than foster a poverty mentality that only looks for opportunities to receive, Pastor Luke is teaching his people to look at what they actually have and to be good stewards of it. That's an excellent position to take in a place where despondency can so easily take over. If you would like to help Moffat School of the Bible, or the Paszalek family, go to Africa Inland Mission's website -- www.aimint.org. Also, pray for God to send rain to Kijabe. Drought is God's wrath on idol worship, but if He was willing to spare Sodom for a mere ten believers, we can ask Him to send rain to Kijabe.

Angels & Demons

2009-08-27T11:01:00.000-04:00

Angels & Demons The Bible teaches the existence of spirit-beings. · They are organized in ranks, like the military. Jude 9. · Are there really guardian angels? Ps. 91:11-12, Mt. 18:10. Facts about angels: · They are spirit beings (Heb. 1:7), but can become tangible (Acts 12:7). · They do not marry or bear children. Mt. 22:30. · They are usually invisible. 2 Kings 6:17. What do angels do? o They serve the needs of God's children. Heb. 1:14 o They inflict God's wrath on sin. Acts 12:23, Rev. 16:1. o They fight the demons. Dan. 10:13, Rev. 12:7). o They rescue us from trials and afflictions. Dan. 6:22, Mt. 4:11. o They are God's worship choir. Lk. 2:14, 15:10. o They set an example of obedience for us. Mt. 6:10. o They can test us. Heb. 13:2. · What do angels not do? o They do not contradict or add to the Scriptures. Gal. 1:8 o They are never to be worshiped, prayed to, or sought. Rev. 19:10 Facts about demons: · They once were good. Gen. 1:31. · Some are already in Hell. 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6. Satan · Their leader is Satan, which means "Enemy". o Jesus called him the originator of sin. 1 John 3:8, John 8:44. o He opposes everything God is doing. § He tempts people to sin, even Christ. Mt. 4:1-11 § He blinds people to God's truth. 2 Cor. 4:4. § He binds people into works-religion. Gal. 4:8 · Demons are limited by God's sovereign power. Job 1-2. What can demons do? Demons can cause sickness, natural disasters, and stir men up to sin (Judges 9:23, Job 1-2, Luke 13:10-11, John 13:27). Demons can cause bizarre behavior, mental problems, and violent rages (1 Sam. 16:14, Luke 8:26-29). They plant false religious doctrines into people's minds. 1 Tim. 4:1. They infiltrate churches with false Christians. Matt. 13:24-28. Anger gives demons a foothold in a Christian's heart. Eph. 4:26. They cannot possess a Christian. 1 John 5:18 What can Christians do about demons? Be aware of their existence, and the danger they pose. Trust in Christ's victory over the demons. Hebrews 2:14, Colossians 2:15. Stay submitted to God, so we can successfully resist Satan. James 4:7. Pray against Satan, with faith in God's Word. Eph. 6:10, 16-18. Widespread wrong ideas about Christians and demons. It is commonly taught that all Christians have the authority to directly command evil spirits to leave people in Jesus' name. But is that true? Passages quoted to prove that all Christians have the authority to order demons to leave people are being taken out of context. For example, Luke 9:1 shows Jesus giving the apostles authority over all demons, but also "to cure diseases" -- including healing lepers and raising the dead (Matt. 10:8). But all Christians are not apostles, or members of the Seventy (Luke 10).Everyone does not have the gift of healing, either (1 Cor. 12:30). Those miracles were signs of the imminent kingdom of God (Luke 10:9). But God postponed the coming of the kingdom of God, as an act of saving mercy to the world. You can't just universalize actions from the Gospels without consideration for when, where, and why they happened. Casting demons out of people was also a miracle (since mere human power can't force a spirit to do anything). Paul says we do not all have the ability to work miracles (1 Cor. 12:29). There are no such things as "spirits of fill-in-the-blank", such as a spirit of lust, a spirit of anger, a spirit of division, etc. Not all evil and sin is from Satan. When the Corinthians had division, they weren't to rebuke the spirit of division, they were to repent and "be united in the same mind" (1 Cor. 1:10). They weren't to rebuke a spirit of immorality, they were to apply church discipline (1 Cor. 5:1-5).

Why Do So Many Young Men Act Like Cynics?

2009-08-23T17:41:00.000-04:00

1. Cynicism is the result of too much TV. 2. Cynicism is a fake substitute for an appropriate cautiousness about people. 3. People imagine that cynicism makes them smarter than everybody, so it's an ego trip. 4. Cynics think they're being funny.