Sovereignty over Sovereignty

God is sovereign.  No doubt.  God will always accomplish His will.  He is God after all.  I know that the term “Trinity” isn’t in the Bible, but that there is a Trinity—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  These Three are One.  You don’t find the word “sovereign” in the King James Version.  You have the terminology “only Potentate” in 1 Timothy 6:15 and perhaps that would be the closest to sovereign in the King James.   Bauer-Danker Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament (BDAG) says the Greek word there (dunastes) means:  “one who is in a position to command others. . . . ruler, sovereign.”  So monos dunastes says that God alone commands others.  He is in the highest position.

Since God is sovereign, He is also sovereign over what it is to be sovereign.  No one else defines sovereignty but God.  God has sovereignty over sovereignty.  As men, we don’t figure out what sovereignty is and then apply that to God.  We don’t go to passages about God in the Bible and fit them into our own ideas about sovereignty.  We go to the Bible to find out what sovereignty is so that to us God is still sovereign over what His own sovereignty is.  If we change God’s sovereignty into what we want it to be, God isn’t more sovereign.  He is less so.  We then become sovereign over His sovereignty.  Now that can’t take place in reality, but in discussions about sovereignty men often become sovereign over sovereignty.  We should allow God to have the say about what it is for Him to be sovereign.

If I say that a man’s salvation depends on his will, some would say that I’ve made man sovereign in salvation.  For God to stay sovereign, they say that a man’s salvation must have absolutely nothing to do with his own will.  According to this view of sovereignty, God alone wills to and for salvation irregardless of man’s.   And if someone were to believe that man willed to be saved, he couldn’t believe in the sovereignty of God.  But is this what Scripture says?  God wrote it, so Scripture is sovereign over sovereignty.  Someone isn’t more dedicated to God’s sovereignty who departs from Scripture to define it.

Someone once told me that he could do Donald Duck better than Donald Duck.  I laughed.  That’s not possible.  No one can do Donald Duck better than Donald Duck.  Donald Duck is Donald Duck.  And God alone is God.  We can’t do God better than God.  God is sovereign, but we can’t do His sovereignty better than what He has done it in His Word.  We should conform our view of God’s sovereignty to what God said.  In whatever way our view of God’s sovereignty doesn’t match up with what God said, we should alter it to fit what God said.  We can’t have any higher view of God’s sovereignty than what God says His sovereignty is.  One possesses only in his own mind a higher view of God’s sovereignty than the view that God Himself communicates in His Word.

I might say that I have a higher view of the San Francisco Giants baseball team than you do.  And I have that higher view because I believe they are not only the San Francisco Giants, but they are also the Sante Fe Giants.   Even though they aren’t the Sante Fe Giants, I say my belief that they are elevates my view of the San Francisco Giants to a higher level than others at least according to me.   However, a view of the San Francisco Giants can’t be heightened by something not true about them.  The same can be said in judgment of a view of sovereignty.  Someone’s view of God’s sovereignty isn’t increased by something not true about it.  God’s sovereignty isn’t threatened in a way that it needs some exaggeration or misrepresentation to remain sovereign.  That’s how sovereigns are about their own sovereignty—they’re sovereign about it.

We don’t grasp the concept of sovereignty without a sovereign.  The Sovereign who created the concept of sovereignty wouldn’t let someone else rule over the concept.  He would henceforth not be sovereign and, therefore, look to those who defined it to be the true sovereigns.  The Sovereign will have His understanding of sovereignty be sovereign over all other views of sovereignty.

Does God become any less sovereign by any statement of His Word?  Of course not.  God’s Word manifests God to be as sovereign as He actually is.  Since He is sovereign, He can’t be diminished in His sovereignty.  And His own Word especially wouldn’t try to weaken it.  All of God’s statements in His Word that relate to sovereignty could only serve to enhance the right view of His sovereignty.

Let’s say that I wanted to enhance people’s understanding of God’s mercy, so I said that God wouldn’t punish anyone for any wrong he had done.  When you said that God did punish men for wrong they had done, I answer that you don’t really believe in God’s mercy.  However, the truth of God’s mercy isn’t diminished by the truth of God’s punishment of sin.  God’s mercy is mercy.  All other mercy is judged by what the Bible says is His.  God still punishes sin and His mercy remains all of what mercy is.  An unscriptural innovation of mercy departs from mercy.  We’re not talking about mercy anymore when we’re talking about something different than biblical mercy.

I haven’t dimished an iota of God’s sovereignty when I report that “whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).

Jesus wasn’t shrinking His own sovereignty when He said, “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.  For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it” (Mark 8:34, 35).

We don’t improve upon a biblical view of God’s sovereignty.  We don’t help God’s sovereignty along by professing that a man’s will has nothing to do with his salvation, when a sovereign God said that it does.  When God says, “whosoever will,” we don’t exalt God’s sovereignty by saying that “whosoever really doesn’t mean whosoever like we think it means.”  We don’t enlighten God’s sovereignty by saying “whosoever will but only those whom He predetermined will can will.”  No, whosoever does mean whosoever.

I recently read, “God determines who shall believe and who shall not believe.”  Some might think that statement exalts the sovereignty of God.  It could do that only if God said it.  He didn’t.  Someone thinking he could embellish God’s sovereignty with his own thoughts took the rule over that sovereignty.

God’s sovereignty and “whosoever will” coexist.  “Whosoever will” doesn’t make God’s sovereignty less sovereign or less amazing.  “Whosoever will” pins the needle on God’s sovereignty.  God is equal to the most sovereign He can be while “whosoever will” exists.  We don’t need to clear away “whosoever will” to make room for God’s sovereignty.  The people who can’t cope with “whosoever will” according to their view of sovereignty need to trust God.   God is big enough to work out the details they can’t possibly comprehend.

God is sovereign.  God gets what He wants.  He wants “whosoever will,” therefore, He gets it.  No one can topple God from His throne.  He created all the possible enemies of “whosoever will.”  He didn’t create any of them with potential to overturn something He wants.  So the best they can undo “whosoever will” is in their mind and with their statements, which actually don’t do or undo anything that He already said was true.  Their thoughts and words about “whosoever will” dissipate into the ether of human invention.  They don’t change anything that God wants.  They don’t stop “whosoever will.”

A growing number of people come to the Bible with their definition of sovereignty in hand, ready to conform Scripture to their definition.   By limiting the recipients of salvation, they think they do service to God’s sovereignty.  They don’t.  They only take sovereignty over sovereignty.  And God doesn’t need their help.

“You don’t believe in sovereignty” or “you’ve made man sovereign in salvation” are often scare tactics.  They are effective, because they target a yearning of the conscientious Christian, like Sanballat and Tobiah zeroed in on Nehemiah’s legitimate concerns.  We don’t want to be guilty of ratcheting down God and magnifying man.  With such an attribute as sovereignty that defies comprehension, we could settle for a harsh extreme that hovers outside of biblical perimeters, just to protect us from proud criticism.  “Whosoever will” is there.  Be safe in the bounds of Scripture.

The Destructive Charge of “Legalism” Pinned on Rightful Application of Scripture pt. 2

The term “legalism” isn’t in the Bible, so it is off to a bad start as a scriptural discussion.  And, yes, I know “Trinity” isn’t in there either.  It is kind of ironic that someone could get in trouble for something that isn’t in the Bible to start with, and in trouble for something that says we’re in trouble for adding to the Bible.  Nevertheless, “legalism” is a term we’re forced to discuss and deal with today.

Modern society relegates moral and religious concerns to matters private and personal.   They’re nobodies’ business.   You have the utter independence of the individual, offering freedom from all moral restraint or bounds.  On the other hand, legalism becomes the suppression of the individual to majority or authority rule.  The authority imposes standards which might elevate appearances to greater importance.  Someone might look the part without really meaning it.  Is there a scriptural place to regulate the lives of individuals by outward authority or law?

The laws themselves, as long as they’re scriptural, are not the problem.  Having less of them won’t solve insincerity.  We’re a nation of laws.  God is a God of law.  He provides standards by which to follow Him.  Jesus said that if we love Him, we’ll keep His commandments.  We can keep His commandments and not love Him, but we can’t love Him if we don’t.  Reducing the commandments, the words, or the sayings to a manageable number, an amount we can keep, doesn’t make the living more about love.  The one falling short of obeying the commandments loves less.

Paul saw Galatians, who professed justification by grace alone, moving from the “faith alone” column to the “plus works” one.  This wasn’t the church having rules or standards.  These individuals weren’t shaking apostate Judaism.  They were still earning their salvation no matter what Jesus had done.   As a result, Christ was made “of no effect unto” them (Gal 5:4).  This mindset propagated by false teachers also effected already saved, truly converted believers.  They, who had “begun in the Spirit” “by the hearing of faith,” were influenced to “perfect” themselves “by the flesh” (Gal 3:2-3).   God accepts the fulfillment of Scriptural standards produced by the Spirit through the life of the believer.   The reduction of standards does not vindicate the acts of obedience any more than the addition of them.  The key for acceptable obedience isn’t the minimization of the rules but the grace by which they are accomplished.

The modern obsession with lessening restrictions, reflected in evangelicalism today,  doesn’t reveal God’s grace or His glory.  It manifests rebellious hearts and corrupt consciences.   God’s grace is a dynamic force of God that secures our working for Him.  Grace looks to obey the precepts and principles of Scripture.

Often evangelicals flash the term “legalism” to make room for a questionable behavior or habit.  I started part one of this two part series when a popular evangelical blog author attempted to defend a post about a popular television show (Lost) with another one against legalism.   The author said one of the forms of legalism is the pharisaism of adding to scripture.  Adding to the Bible is pharisaical and Pharisees are legalists.   However, legalism of the Galatian variety isn’t adding to God’s Word.  Actual scripture does just fine for Galatian legalism.

The evangelical charge of either legalism or adding to Scripture relates to the lasciviousness of evangelicalism today.  I want to use one obvious issue as an example—women wearing pants.  Why avoid it?  I agree that the Bible doesn’t prohibit women from wearing pants.  Case closed, right?  Wrong.   Deuteronomy 22:5 prohibits women from wearing the male garment.  Pants are the male garment.  So I’m coming from the Bible on this one.  And a woman wearing the male garment is an abomination to God, so this is a moral issue.  God is displeased by disobeying the prohibition.

Now this is where some say Christians have liberty because we have here one of these “doubtful disputations” of Romans 14:1.  We are not to reject someone in doubtful disputations.  Deuteronomy 22:5 hasn’t been doubtful until just recently when society decided they would overturn the symbols of God’s design of the two genders.  And if we’re going to still keep obeying Deuteronomy 22:5, we’ve got replace the male symbol, the male garment.  I get no answers, total silence, or a joke, from every person I ask to name the male symbol or garment that has replaced pants.  Evangelicals and fundamentalists don’t want women to be prohibited from wearing pants, so they say that grace, God’s grace, permits their pant wearing.  And since it is God’s grace that gives permission, it must be legalism now that prohibits.  This circuitous line of reasoning makes “the commandment of God of none effect” (Mt 15:6), another kind of pharisaism.

I read with interest some of the arguments of the “lovers of grace” for justifying the night time soap opera.  Here is one from one of the contributors there, Frank Turk:

Now, before stuff gets a little out of control, there is nothing that happened in the course of the 6 seasons of LOST which is anywhere near as gritty and frankly carnal as what happened to Er, Tamar, Onan, and Judah and his son Perez.

Frank argues that the content of biblical narratives justifies watching some sex scenes on television.   His argument says that if it’s OK to read the Bible, and it is, then it’s also OK to watch something equal to or less sinful.  I’m not going to provide opposition to this justification in this post, but I wanted you aware of what they’re saying.  Phil Johnson adds this:

But it’s not really necessary to portray Rob and Laura Petrie sleeping in separate beds in order to preserve the purity of the viewing audience, and it’s not inherently sinful to be exposed to a story in which someone commits adultery–or even worse.

I think Phil is staying a little purposefully ambiguous, but he’s creating space for watching acts of adultery committed on television.  It’s along the same lines of the Frank argument above.  And overall, those who question this line of reasoning, they say, are “legalists.”  And Phil would add that this kind of “legalism,” the type that questions this type of viewership based upon moral grounds, is more dangerous than emergent or emerging types of license.  And this is coming from those who claim to be conservative evangelicals.

Was Job a tad legalistic when he followed that whole “covenant with his eyes” standard (Job 31:1)?  I guess Job was just trying to rack up merit points.  Either that, or he thought that having the right thought life would help him please God.  And He did love God.   We’re commanded by Paul, “Be not conformed to this world” (Rom 12:2a).  But how can we follow that requisite for presenting our bodies a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1b)?  Well, it’s by being transformed “by the renewing of our minds” (Rom 12:2b).  And how are our minds renewed?  They are renewed by what we fill them with.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Clean in, clean out.   Christian leaders shouldn’t be encouraging their listeners to belly-up to the garbage trough.  What do you think?

Now I say that these boy-who-cried-wolf type of accusations of “legalism” destroy.  They encourage lasciviousness and license.  They sear and suave the conscience.  They encourage false worship.  They impede holy living.  They excuse sin.

In the last week someone wrote that these “legalists” require lists of rules for their adherents in order to compensate for personal insecurities.   And then as a way of reaching unattainable spiritual heights, made impossible by the sheer magnitude of the regulations, the followers obtain special relics to overcome their spiritual shortfalls.  Mark Farnham says these fundamentalist relics were objects associated with fundamentalist saints, like the signature of a well-known preacher or the car of John R. Rice or Jack Hyles’ ring.  Interesting theory.  I wonder if a heavy collection of C. H. Spurgeon memorabilia would count as spiritual relics as well.  Or perhaps treks to the meccas of Together for the Gospel in Louisville or Shepherd’s Conference in Southern California might result in some pure spirituality that someone might otherwise be missing.

Following Farnham’s line of reasoning, I see evangelicals and fundamentalists also reaching for an abounding grace formerly unreachable without the relic of the worship team, the contemporary chorus, the goatee beard, the powerpoint screen medium, and the casual polo shirt.    Some mixture of these ingredients effuse Christians with a grace elixir capable of bringing them to a different spiritual dimension.   Grace is available to those hungry enough to release the ball and chain of an old version of Scripture, a stifling shirt and tie, and a constraining television standard.  Nothing says grace quite like your best Sunday t-shirt and a Jars of Clay logo on the bottom of your skateboard.

Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism: Man’s Approval and the Fear of Independence

Many years ago, someone taught me an acrostic that listed the historic marks of a New Testament church.  The first was “B,” Bible sole authority for faith and practice.  A Bible believer, the converted person, will alter his course to the direction of the teaching of Scripture.  This is also contained within the mark of “P,” priesthood of the believer, or if you may, “S,” soul liberty.  We are first responsible to God and are free to move at the promptings of the text of God’s Word.

God’s men have a responsibility before God.  They’re bought with a price.  They’re not their own.  They must give an account to God.  The big conference to which they are attuned is the one at the bema seat with the Lord Jesus Christ.   The Greek term for “preacher” in the New Testament is kerux.  The kerux was a herald.  He gave only the message of the king without regard for  popular opinion.   He was the representative of God and all that mattered was that he say exactly what the king wanted.  This concept is found in other New Testament terms, like “ambassador.”  An ambassador represents the country from which he comes and gives only the message from where he possesses his citizenship.   The believer is from heaven, hence a message conformed to God.  As 2 Timothy 2:4 teaches: “we please him who has chosen us to be a soldier.”  We’ve got one Commander-in-Chief in this war to which we’ve been recruited.

Preachers should have a kind of independent attitude of the Old Testament prophet.  We’re not working for anyone else but God.  He’s the One Who signs our paycheck, so to speak.  This relationship with the Lord gives the man of God the freedom to say what needs to be said.   We’re looking for our approval from Him.    Even pastors in one sense, although under the authority of the church like the rest of the congregation, still have an office that carries with it a separate authority that is all about saying the thing that needs to be said to that assembly of people.   The office of the pastor is a unique organizational role that both submits to and yet rules the church. The pastor’s ruling status allows him to maintain an independence from the people of the church for the purposes of telling the truth and pointing out error.   You get the essence of this job in the great passage on preaching in 2 Timothy 4.  “Preach the Word.”  “Reprove, rebuke, exhort.”  They are going to have “itching ears” and won’t “endure sound doctrine,” but be “long suffering” and finish your course whether it is popular or not.

THE PROBLEM

What I see as one of the biggest problems in evangelicalism and fundamentalism manifests itself in where men look for approval and in their fear of independence.  Both of them are related.   Built into man’s nature by God Himself, I believe, is an appetite for approval.  That hunger is intended to be directed toward the right bestower of approval, God Himself.  However, it requires living by faith to accept an only legitimate source of endorsement.   Instead of waiting for divine confirmation, men seek to gather tangible support on earth to satisfy the craving.

The replacement system of approval on earth has become very complicated.   The world itself will offer notoriety or popularity in many different forms.  Sometimes it comes in the small time stuff at a school or in a community.  If that’s not enough, there is national celebrity and even worldwide fame.   Some look for what Andy Warhol called the “fifteen minutes of fame.”  You can get that today on youtube if you find a way to get people’s attention.  It is often enough for one boy or girl to fit into his little group of friends and get acceptance from them.  That might require talking in a certain cadence or dressing with a certain style, but you will likely have to adapt your behavior to the preferences of the group.  In the context my son lives in at West Point, the people around him aren’t necessarily going to reward with a higher ranking those who manifest biblical behavior.  The young men pick up the cues for what types of actions will bring commendation from peers and from command.  Some of the types of actions that might impress the company won’t impress the Lord Jesus Christ.  You do have to decide what your life is about.

It is almost impossible for a Christian both to live worthy of God and find approval from the world.  But the temptation is great for believers to prove themselves to the unsaved crowd.   The sense is that you can’t really find out how good you are unless you can compare your relative skill to what’s happening in the world.  How do you stack up next to them?  Will they think you’re good?  And you’ll probably not ever show up in the history books unless you accomplish something the world can find impressive in whatever niche you might be—music, sports, politics, business, and more.

THE PROBLEM AS IT APPLIES TO EVANGELICALISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM

For pastors, scripture has isolated the Lord as the one to please.  Yet, you won’t likely feel that approval of the Lord.  You have to accept it by faith.  But sometimes that isn’t easy.  So what has developed to replace the confirmation of the Lord has been a very complex system of endorsement and sanction that would rival any organization on earth.  It has become its own giant entity with tentacles reaching all over the place—fellowships, boards, conferences, conventions, schools, colleges, publishers, and seminaries.  I believe that this is what has, more than anything else, propped up evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

We have the church.  That’s Christ’s institution.  And it is sufficient.  But that doesn’t satisfy the hunger that many have for approval.   Fundamentalism has developed its own orbs of sanction.  Evangelicalism has its too.  Both of them are similar in their organizational systems.  They both revolve around associations and conferences, boards and meetings.  Now you’ve got the internet as a tool to spread even more notoriety.  How many hits does your blog get?  What kind of online presence do you have?

Fundamentalism is the ugly step brother as a platform for approval.  And young men especially know how dorky they look being a fundamentalist.  At one time fundamentalism was bigger.  It could contend with evangelicals in that way.  But the fundamentalists always did have boundaries that evangelicals never had that would keep the world from being impressed.  Both sides have their cast of characters, but now evangelicalism has the biggest religious celebrities, wherever they might fall on the theological spectrum.  They are better at drawing a crowd and using the mediums that will gain the most attention.   Fundamentalists find this alluring.

To present ourselves to God as a living sacrifice, that is, to worship God, we must not be conformed to this world (Romans 12:1-2).  Being conformed to the world is not just the outward forms of the world, but also the same types of ambitions and appeals of the world or as 1 John 2:16 says, “the lust of the flesh” and “the pride of life.”  Because of the structures set up in evangelicalism and fundamentalism, you don’t have to go outside of those affiliations to gratify your desire for earthly approval.   Evangelicalism and fundamentalism can offer its own mini-versions of what the world offers all over the place.  In so doing, it influences behavior just like the world too.   Men will be stifled on the things they ought to be saying and constrained to go along with wrong methods and activities by the inducements of the group.  Men hunger for approval and they will alter their behavior to fit evangelical or fundamentalist scruples or lack thereof.

So now the lines that were drawn between fundamentalism and evangelicalism have become blurred.  The two are getting together more than ever.  Many times they say they’re getting together for the gospel, overlooking other biblical differences in order to fill an immense auditorium or convention center.  The size is a heady thing.  Makes you feel at least somewhat big time.  Maybe we all do have it going after all.  And you can feel the approval.  It seems like it might even be filling that appetite.

I think that evangelicals and fundamentalists should consider whether they’re together for the gospel or even together for the fundamentals or for loyalty to an evangelical or fundamentalist institution, or whether they really are together for approval.   I see fundamentalists today that are cozy with men they would have never been twenty years ago and for biblical reasons.  If these parachurch groups were in scripture, I would think that there might be something legitimate there, something God-designed.  But no.  I do believe that this is almost entirely about the feeling of legitimacy that men want to experience.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN

When we look for approval from God, what His  Word says takes the preeminence.  If the church is good enough, the only scriptural institution, we retain an independence to say the truth to anyone.  We aren’t attempting to cobble together a coalition.  We don’t need one.  What we need, what we crave, is to please Jesus Christ.  He is our all in all.  He designed that to be accomplished on a local level.  That’s why he left the little flocks as the pattern for His mission.

We have to remember that Scripture does say we aren’t going to be liked.  We won’t be approved of on earth.  “Take up your cross” does not speak of goodwill.  Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 4:13, “We are made as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day.”  Not being popular doesn’t bother the galley slave who’s only responsible for keeping is oar going.  We’ve got to be OK with faithfulness in this world.  Don’t be surprised if the persecution you get comes from evangelicalism and fundamentalism.   They don’t like feeling disapproval from you.  Your separation from them won’t be tolerated, especially when the disapprobation comes with quoted scripture.  You are “complete in” Christ (Col 2:10), not in an evangelical or fundamentalist association.  So you can handle it in Him.

I see so much acceptance of false worship and doctrine, the multiplication and the spread of it, and I believe that it all relates to this hunger for approval that men have in evangelicalism and fundamentalism.  I play basketball still on a regular basis.  There is a phrase that basketball people will understand:  “Let the game come to you.”  True fellowship isn’t anything that we have to force.  That fellowship has just come to me.  Men of like faith and practice will gravitate toward one another as long as they don’t try to force it.  I’ve got great fellowship outside of fundamentalism and evangelicalism in churches of like faith and practice.  They don’t even show up on the radar of fundamentalism or evangelicalism.  They are unaffiliated.  I’ve never been more greatly refreshed than being around men who weren’t interested in anything bigger than the church.  If it was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for them.

Men who are just fine with just the church don’t minimize the basis for gathering to only the gospel.  They fellowship based on the truth.  They’re more interested in the truth than they are in getting along.  In the end, Christ is honored because His Word is exalted.   If I do get together with these men, and they do exist, I’ve found that discussions about the Bible are occurring all over the place and without limits.  We’re not getting together with a diminishing of the truth.  We know our approval is in Christ.  I don’t care that it is a small group.  It doesn’t surprise me that it is.  I’m not intimidated by the fact that we don’t fit into either evangelicalism or fundamentalism.  I don’t feel any pressure from my friends, from these men, to say anything but whatever God would have me.

I suggest to you to get out of fundamentalism and evangelicalism.  Don’t worry about it.  It isn’t scriptural unity.  That’s found in the church.  You endeavor or strive for unity in the church.  The church has been given the tools to have unity.  If you have any unity outside of the church, let it come in the context of the truth that your church believes.  And then satiate in the approval you have from God.  Be truly independent like God designed.  You’ll love it

Approval is found in that “B” that distinguishes New Testament churches.  God wants belief in and obedience to His Word.  Priesthood is not just a privilege, it is also a responsibility.  When I’m interested most is my fellowship with Him, then I get the kind of fellowship too that is right in the world.  I’ve never had the liberty to do what I wanted, but to be and do what the Lord wants.  I want my life and my worship to be acceptable to Him.  Let us restore a right thinking of approval and a true spirit of independence in the man of God.

Salute Apelles approved in Christ.  Romans 16:10a

A Brother, A Help, and A Fellow Slave of the Lord (Colossians 4:7)

At the end of this letter, Paul writes his acknowledgments.  He didn’t get’er done alone.  It reminds me some of David’s mention of his mighty men at the end of 2 Samuel.  Paul liked giving credit to others.  The first on his list is Tychicus and Paul says three things about him to praise or thank him that should characterize all Christians.  And that’s what this kind of recognition will do, that is, show other people what important qualities to possess.

Tychicus comes in several times in the New Testament, and maybe he doesn’t get remembered because he’s got a name that doesn’t stick.  You can do some rich biographical study on him by looking at Acts 20, Titus 3, Ephesians 6, and 2 Timothy 4.  In this case, Tychicus, it seems, would be coming in person to give a report about Paul’s condition to the church.  But what about this man?

One, he was a beloved brother.  He was a family member to Paul, and Paul loved him.  Oh that we might be one to be loved and a brother to such a man as the Apostle Paul.

Two, he was a faithful minister to Paul.  Tychicus wasn’t a big shot.  He served.  You could count on him when you needed help, so we see Paul using him all the time through Acts and the Epistles.

Three, he was a fellow slave with Paul of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Like Paul, he was a bond slave.  He was committed to and loyal to the Lord.

He was a brother to Paul, a help to Paul, and co-laborer with Paul.  Let’s be those things too.

What We Are Thankful to God the Father For (Colossians 1:14)

You know how much you like someone to say thanks.  You even miss it when you don’t hear it.  God has done a lot for us for which we should give thanks.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to miss anything.  I don’t want Him not to hear it from me.   I know I do miss some of what He needs to hear from me.  But I can also be cued by God’s Word what it is for which I should give thanks.  I know He wants to hear it, but it’s good for me to remember it too.  It strengthens my Christology and soteriology, my doctrines of Christ and of salvation.  My belief is buoyed by the truth.   For this essay I’m focusing only on one of the list of these beginning in Colossians 1:12, the one in v. 14.

Colossians 1:14 explains how it is we received an inheritance, how it is we were delivered from the power of darkness, and how it is that we have been translated into the Kingdom of the Lord.  The thing that stands between us and these great and necessary blessings from God is sin.  The solution for sin is redemption and forgiveness of sins.  How were we set free from sin?  How were we forgiven?  How is it that we are able to gain a standing in Him (“in whom”)?  How?  Through the blood of the Son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus’ blood redeems us from sin and it is through His blood that we have forgiveness of those sins.

You should know that in the NIV, NASB, and ESV Paul doesn’t thank the Father for the redemption through Jesus’ blood.  The critical text, the one not received by the churches, leaves out “through his blood,” and, therefore, the modern versions leave out these words.  Those versions take away from the words of the Book (Rev 22:18-19).  Critical text advocates would say, “Well, that teaching is found elsewhere, so no teaching has been lost.”  Others may say, “Those words were added in later manuscripts.”   Even though that teaching may be in other places in Scripture, it isn’t found any more in Colossians 1:14 in the modern versions.  Churches and believers received those words with the guidance of God’s Spirit for centuries and “textual scholars” (mostly unconverted ones) removed them.

John Gill writes here:

This phrase is left out indeed in the Syriac and Ethiopic versions, and in the Complutensian edition, and in some copies; but rightly stands here, as it does in Eph 1:7, where there is another clause added, which is here omitted, at the end of the verse, “according to the riches of his grace”. This is the blood of Christ, his own blood, and not the blood of bulls and goats, and the same with that of the persons he redeems, but untainted with sin; the blood of Christ, as of a lamb without spot and blemish, of original or actual sin, otherwise it would not have been a sufficient redemption price for his people; nor even then, were it not as it was the blood of the Son of God, of one that was God as well as man, whereby it came to have a proper value and efficacy in it to obtain this blessing.

Spurgeon writes:

Paul, having mentioned his Master’s great work, — redemption by blood and the forgiveness of sins — goes on at a tangent, as it were. He is so enthusiastic with regard to Christ and his great atoning sacrifice that the very thought of Christ’s blood stirs his own blood, and he seems like a man all on fire with holy fervor as he writes.

Nope.  Not in there Spurgeon, so your speculation about Paul was just wrong.  The blood of Christ didn’t even come to Paul’s mind here according to the NIV, NASB, and ESV.  Forget the fact that God’s people believed these words were there—the textual critics have spoken.  But I digress.

Redemption includes a purchase price.  The price was the blood of Christ (cf. 1 Peter 1:18-19).  Christ wasn’t just anyone.   He was the Son of the Father.  What thanks the Father deserves!  His Son!  The eternal Son, Who is the image of the eternal God (v. 15), can pay the eternal price.  And He shed His blood.  He was not just some emanation from God, but very God.   And He was also man.  He bled.  He was pierced through again and again.   Blood poured from His veins.  Oh what a Savior!

People like to talk about God’s forgiveness.  But that forgiveness came at the price of His Son.  God didn’t “just forgive.”  The blood of the Lord Jesus Christ must be shed—not just His death—but His blood.  The blood, we know, washes away sin (Rev 1:5; 1 John 1:7).  The blood of bulls and goats atoned for sin.  The blood of Jesus removes sin, making us clean in God’s righteousness.  More than atonement!  It’s free for us, but it cost God His only begotten Son.  Let’s not forget that.  Let’s thank God the Father.

A Valid Prayer Request (Colossians 1:9)

I have to admit that I both think and feel that I’m a dufus at prayer.  I know I’ve got to depend on Scripture to know what to pray.  That makes these prayer texts in the epistles so helpful.  God wants me to pray this for sure.  My confidence as I go to God becomes huge.  And Paul talks about his prayer for these Colossians right here.  So let’s listen and learn.

By praying, I can help people anywhere and everywhere by long distance.  And Paul was a long ways away all the time from people he loved.  But he’s always praying for them, therefore having an impact in their lives more than a social network.   Prayer offers a beautiful multi-task.  You can chew gum, walk, and pray at the same time.

You’ll notice in his letters that Paul prays for believers.  I think we should get what we do in the Christian life from the Bible.  That would be sort of like having the Bible be your sole authority for faith and practice.  Paul doesn’t pray for unbelievers.  You may reply, “So are you saying it’s wrong then?!?!”  Good come back.  Read the second and third sentences in this paragraph again before you continue.  Now Paul didn’t really know the Colossians, but he was assured by Epaphras that they were a swell group of Christians there.   They loved God.  And that fact motivated Paul to pray for them all the time ever since he had heard it.

And Paul prayed for the sniffly nose of Jethro, for Balthus’ to get a promotion, and for Aunt Bernice’ arthritis to start feelin’ better.  Nope.  He didn’t mention any of those things.  You may reply, “So are you saying it’s wrong then?!?!”  Um.  Go back up to the previous paragraph and read sentences two and three again.  He did pray that those saints would be filled with the knowledge of God’s will.

So he prayed for the Colossian believers to learn what God’s will was?  No.  He prayed that they would be filled with the knowledge of it.  The idea of the verb, “be filled,” is to be controlled by.  That’s how it’s used in the New Testament.  Paul desired and so prayed that the knowledge of God’s will would control them.  He wanted them to do what God wanted them to do.  That was his prayer request.  Do you pray that for people?  Are you actually controlled by the knowledge of God’s will?  Hopefully someone will pray that on your behalf and you’ll pray it for others.

I want to pause to emphasize “knowledge” here.  He’s praying that they will be controlled by knowledge, not by emotions.  Unfortunately, a lot of churches try to foster emotions through their music, their programs, and even their evangelism.  So many Christians do what they feel.  God wants us to do something that we know.  How do we know it?  We know it by thinking about it.  Let’s think through what God’s Word says about things and then do what He wants.  The Holy Spirit is going to lead us through what we know, which is in our brain.

Just a brief connection to the larger context.  He didn’t want them to be controlled by the false knowledge espoused by the local false teachers.  He didn’t want the church’s behavior influenced by the Gnostics or the ascetics.   The knowledge of God’s will would be something different than that crowd was teaching.

Paul adds a couple of descriptors at the end of the verse:  “in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.”   It’s not as though there is a kind of controlling knowledge of God’s will that won’t be in wisdom and spiritual understanding.   The controlling knowledge will create in a person’s life wisdom and discernment.  A person who is controlled by the knowledge of the Word of God will make the right decisions.  He will assess situations properly.  He will know what the proper use of his time is.  He will handle his finances like he should.  He will get done the activities that God wants him to.  He will lead his family right.  He won’t get sucked up or swayed by unscriptural movements and influences.  In other words, he’ll make good applications of Scripture.

Do you get what this prayer encompasses?  If so, good.  Now let’s live it.  And let’s pray it.  All the time.

Solution to All Human Problems (Colossians 1:1-2)

You would not have included a Roman prison in a travelogue.    The very confined, trepidacious conditions of Paul, chained to a Roman guard, would have kept most people from visiting from just across town, let alone the 1000 to 1300 miles Epaphras had to journey to Rome from Colossae  in c. AD 60 out of concern for his own church, a congregation not even started by Paul that we know of.   It was God’s church at Colossae after all, and so very important—the doctrinal and practical issues were not a waste of time.  He knew that.  Whatever the problems that motivated this visit, they were serious enough for Epaphras to take the time out at great expense, energy, and danger to get some specialized instruction from Paul about what to do.

The apostle would offer authoritative words that could be counted upon for solutions.  Epaphras brought an encouraging report of his people, but the false teachings were a perilous threat to the budding assembly.   The contents of the epistle brought back to Colossae from Paul tell us that the problems he faced there involved confusing undermining of the identity and nature of the Lord Jesus Himself.  The faith that saves and keeps every church centers on Jesus, so Epaphras thought it was worth the trip, that what he was witnessing threatened the very future of the work there.

The solution for every difficulty in life is found in Jesus Christ.  He is All in All (Col 3:11).  Satan has always centered his attack on the seed of (Gen 3:15) or child of (Rev12:1-6) the woman.  He targets the foundation of the church (Mt 16:12-16).  Without Jesus we have no true knowledge, no success, no absolutes, no life, no meaningful relationships, no authority, no fulfillment, and no hope.

Christ loved the church.  Paul and his companion Timothy loved it too.  Like Epaphras, Paul and Timothy didn’t want to see this church suffering under such cataclysmic, destructive influences, so he sent back this inspired letter to buoy that church and others against the corrupt teaching about Jesus Christ.  In so doing, we continue today all the more enriched and established by Paul’s master portrait of our Lord.

Why Am I in a Church like the One I’m in? pt. 2

Churches today use a lot of different means to get people to join.  They often start with the interests that people have, their carnal desires, hoping that their lust could be a jumping off point for spiritual interest later.   A whole new theology has been built around this, a doctrine to justify talking people into coming to church on their terms.   Fundamentalists, evangelicals, emergents, and even the orthodox use marketing techniques and strategies to lure people in.  This does give one major explanation for why you will hear people offer many different reasons why they attend church or why they go to the church they do.

In my first submission in this series, I contended that God should be the top priority for why you’re in the church you’re in.  God should be what and Who church is about.   This one thought should serve as a baseline for elucidating why we’ve joined the church we have.   In one sense, the thinking about God relates to the subject of eternity.  Since we believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we make decisions based upon the fact that we will face God some day and that He is our ultimate Judge.   With this in mind, all the following reasons for why I’m in the church I’m in do relate to the first.   All the reasons hence will correlate to the first reason.  All the other reasons consider what will please God, since He is why I’m in church.

With pleasing God as the major grid for my church decision, the doctrine and practice of a church stands as the next two criteria for joining a church.  I want a church that believes and practices according to Scripture.  As long as a church keeps the same, right doctrine and practice, I will stay a part of it.   I see those as the emphasis in the Bible.   We want the right view of God and then to do what He says.  Those both keep God in the highest priority.  We know God exalts His Word.  Jesus said that those Who love Him will keep what He said.  With all other factors considered, belief and practice will determine what church I’m a part of.

If a church continues in the right doctrine and obeys the Bible, I can keep fellowshiping with it.   I may have a personality issue with someone else in the church.  I want to get that resolved.  Of course, that’s what God wants me to do, but it will be worth it to remain in fellowship with a church that believes right and does right.  Even if I’m the one that has been offended, I want to do what it takes to stay in the church.

Why Am I in a Church like the One I’m in? pt. 1

On some other blog someone asked this kind of question.  I thought it was a good question and something I wanted to explore with everyone for perhaps more than one post, that is, unless we pick a topic and go after it.  I’ll put this on hold then for a little while.  The other two jackhammers can write on this too if they want.   I think we’ll be back to our old schedule sometime soon.

First, I should get to the most basic part of the question, why am I in a church?   Perhaps the first thing you thought of was those people who say that they don’t believe in organized religion.  You get that out there when you’re talking to the lost.   But I’m not going there first.  I’m going to get into something that is even more basic than saying something good about the institution of the church itself.  The reason I’m in a church is because of God.

I want to please God.  I’m not in a church for myself.  I’m in a church for God.  That guides all the other thoughts and actions that I have about a church.  I don’t attend church for myself.  I go to church for God.  I don’t determine whether the church is good by what it does for me.  I make that decision based on what I believe is best for God.  I might have a bad relationship with someone in the church, but that doesn’t stop me from being in church.  Why?  I’m not there for other people.  I’m there for God.  I’m there for other people too, but entirely without one single other person, I would still be there.

God never fails.  He never changes.  He’s always great.  He’s always the best.  He’s amazingly worth it.  What it is that I like about whatever church that I’m going to be a part of starts with who God is.  He loves me.  I love Him.  Every good and perfect gift has come from Him.  I could never repay Him, but this life I’m living is going to be about Him.   So I’m there for Him.  I don’t care if my feelings are hurt.  He didn’t hurt them.   No one or no thing is going to keep me away, because it is all about God.

If you don’t have that as the reason, I feel sorry for you.  If you don’t have it as the reason, I think you’ve got it wrong right off the bat.  You’ll likely have problems because you don’t have that settled.  I also think that not having that as the reason is at the root of most problems with churches and with people toward churches.  Have church first be about God.  It will be the best thing you’ve every done for church is to have it not be about you or about your family, but about God.  It will be the best thing for you and for your family and for everyone else in the world if church would be about God to you.

Is John MacArthur Off on the Blood? If So, How Far Off?

I recently listened to this audio (below on an embedded youtube clip) in which Phil Johnson throws John MacArthur the ultimate softball in order to clear up the false assumptions made about his doctrinal stance on the blood of Christ.  I have often defended MacArthur in the past on this issue.  I read the original criticism of him by Bob Jones University in their former Faith for the Family.  I knew what he said in his Hebrews commentary.  I always hoped for the best.  Love does hope all things.

The attack on MacArthur, that he says is untrue on this audio, is that he denies the blood of Christ.   Is that true?  Does MacArthur deny the blood?  Well, it depends on what you mean by “deny the blood.”  He doesn’t deny that Jesus bled when He died.  He doesn’t reject that Jesus bled a whole lot.  In other words, MacArthur doesn’t take the R. B. Thieme position that Jesus barely shed any blood on the cross.

However, when I listened to this audio clip, I had a sick feeling in my stomach.  Here was the perfect opportunity for John MacArthur to clear up his blood position and I think that is exactly what he did.  As much as any time I’ve heard him, he communicates his position.  You can tell it bothers him that he has been attacked on this.  I want you to listen before you read what I write below the clip.  You make your own evaluation.   Then read what I wrote.  You will be welcome to comment and even defend MacArthur if you think that what he says is defensible.

John MacArthur is a very careful expositor.  There’s a lot you can learn if you read his commentaries.  He’s a great example for diligence in the study of scripture.  And then he takes this type of position, among several others, that belie the scriptural evidence.  And what does his position on this really mean to the nature of the gospel?  Does it change it?

Johnson poses the situation that people have said that MacArthur denies that it was necessary for Jesus to shed His blood.  Then he asks the question, “Could you tell us one more time your view on the necessity of Christ’s blood?”  MacArthur starts by saying that he has been completely misrepresented.  Well, he isn’t going to be misrepresented here.  He’s on tape and he has been set up perfectly to clear up all twisting of what he believes.  His first doctrinal statement is tell-tale.  Listen to what he says and doesn’t say.  It’s clear even by how he enunciates the words.  Remember that we are talking about the necessity of Christ’s blood.  And John MacArthur’s answer:

Of course I believe Christ had to die.

But that wasn’t the question.  The question was about His blood, not His death.  But John MacArthur far understates the necessity of Christ’s blood with His answer.  He misses what scripture teaches on the blood of Christ.

After a little more personal material, MacArthur says:

Jesus died on the cross because that was what God predetermined He would do.

OK, we all agree with that, but he still hasn’t said anything about the blood.  God predetermined that Jesus would died.  Yes.  But what about the blood?

After alluding to the text of John 3 with the lifting up of Jesus as the serpent and then referring to John 6 about Jesus drawing men to Himself, he comments:

I think the image of a bloody death is all over the Old Testament.

So there we get his first mention of blood and he uses it as an adjective for death.  Bloody death.  If you try to find that language in the Bible, “bloody death,” you won’t find it.  But he is setting up his view and he will be very plain with it.  He goes on, “Every animal that was sacrificed was a blood bath.”  So he’s still not really talking about the blood of Christ, but the animal sacrifices in the Old Testament.  He continues, “Priests were butchers who stood ankle deep in blood. . . .  The temple was a slaughterhouse.”   And then concluding that point, he says, “The image of that was to depict a violent death.”

John MacArthur teaches that the emphasis of the blood of the Old Testament sacrifice was to show how violent the death was.  Where do we get that instruction anywhere in the Bible?  I don’t know of any place.  The word (or forms of it) “violent” is found in the Old Testament many times, but it is never applied to the blood of the animals or of the Savior.

Finally, he makes the connection between the Old Testament imagery and Jesus, when he explains:

On the cross of Christ you have the Passover Lamb dying a bloody, violent death.  It’s necessitated.  It’s all the imagery of the Old Testament that directs itself toward that.

So if you can follow him, he’s saying that the necessity of the blood of Christ was to fulfill the imagery in the Old Testament sacrificial system of a bloody, violent death.  He never, ever says “the blood of Christ.”  It’s a bloody death.  The Bible never says “bloody death,” but it does say “blood of Christ” (4 times), “blood of Jesus” (3 times),  and “blood of the Lord” (1 time).   Then he makes this astounding statement:

Having said that, you must stop short of saying that we are saved by the blood of Jesus.

Why?  Why would anyone stop short of that?  Isn’t that what these verses say?

Romans 3:24-26, “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:  Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.”

Romans 5:9, “Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.”

Ephesians 1:7, “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace;”

Ephesians 2:13, “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.”

Hebrews 10:19, “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus,”

1 Peter 1:18-19, “Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:”

Revelation 12:11, “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.”

You want to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t get why MacArthur would say that we “must stop short of saying that we are saved by the blood of Jesus,” when the Bible says that we are saved by the blood of Jesus.  Well, he explains why it is that he says this:

In the sense that there is some efficacy in the fluid that poured out of His body.

He goes on:

I have tried to make that distinction—that when the New Testament refers to salvation by His blood that it is not talking about salvation by His fluid.  It uses blood as a metaphor or a synonym for death because it conveys the violence of it. . . . We don’t want to get caught into this bizarre notion that somehow in the actual fluid that came out of the body of Jesus that there is saving power or saving efficacy.

After explaining that, MacArthur goes on to give an example of something people have said about Jesus’ blood that is beyond and different than what he said in this above paragraph, in order to somehow color what someone would believe if he said that there was saving power in the actual blood of Jesus.  MacArthur then makes another important statement:

When the New Testament is talking about the blood of Christ it is talking about the death of Christ, but it uses blood because that is a metaphor that speaks of the violence of his death.

Where does MacArthur get this?  I don’t know.  It isn’t in the Bible.  When we see the blood of Jesus in the New Testament, we are not looking at a metaphor or synonym or metonym or euphemism for Jesus’ death, all words that MacArthur uses to describe what the blood of Christ is all about.  For one, the New Testament separates the death and the blood as two aspects of His sacrifice that were distinct and both individually necessary in Colossians 1:20-22:

And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven. And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled  In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight:

In those verses you see “the blood of his cross” doing something and “the body of his flesh through death” doing something.  Both were needed.  Second, you get the two separate elements in the Lord’s Table—the bread and the cup.  The bread symbolizes the death in His body and the cup portrays the sacrifice in His shed blood.  So MacArthur is wrong in taking away this New Testament emphasis.

MacArthur uses the tone of his voice to mock the other position that is not his own.  He talks in a condescending way about the blood being “fluid,” that salvation isn’t in the “fluid.”  This is a strawman.  Jesus’ blood isn’t just “fluid.”  There is something more to Jesus’ blood than just the human.  There is a Divine quality to the blood of Jesus that cleanses, something that MacArthur just ignores.  And is not willing to believe that there is anything to Acts 20:28:

Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

At the end of the verse, it says, “with his own blood.” What is the antecedent of “his?”  Yes, it is “God.”  So Acts 20:28 says “God’s own blood.”  One of the great mysteries of scripture is the hypostatic union.  Jesus is fully human and fully Divine.  There was something Divine to the blood of Christ, which is why the blood can cleanse.  Yes, the blood itself.  And you say, “How?”  I don’t know, but it does cleanse.  This is where MacArthur goes wrong.  He’s sort of like the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the Trinity on this.  They don’t get how Jesus could be man and God, so they reject His Deity.  MacArthur doesn’t see how the blood of Christ could cleanse everyone, so he just denies that it does anything of itself.  It is only by Jesus’ death, according to MacArthur, that people are saved.  But what about these verses?

1 John 1:7, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.”

Revelation 1:5, “And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood,”

Hebrews 9:14, “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”

We never hear about the cleansing of His death, do we?  Why?  Because the blood of Christ is what does the cleansing.

MacArthur goes to more strawmen, “It wouldn’t have done any good if He had just bled and then lived.”  He says this with a kind of tone of disdain as if there were all sorts of people saying this, when I haven’t heard anyone in my life or have read anyone who has claimed that Jesus bled and lived.  Really?!?!  Who are we arguing about here?!?!

Then MacArthur gets angry at the idea that Jesus could die in a way in which He would not bleed.  And then he again explains that this would be preposterous because then Jesus wouldn’t fulfill the depictions in the Old Testament.  And that’s the extent of MacArthur’s answer here.

Johnson tries to help, it seems, by asking MacArthur about those times that the New Testament talks about the cleansing of Jesus’ blood, but MacArthur gets it wrong again and even more so.  He says that those are the times that the New Testament is talking about Jesus’ death.  This is classic circular reasoning.  If you go look at the passages to see if they mention Jesus’ death, you won’t find it in 1 John 1:7 and Revelation 1:5.  So why are they talking about His death?  Well, because blood means death.  This is also begging the question.

To cap it all off, MacArthur makes this point, like this is a major point.  “Jesus didn’t bleed to death.”  That seems to contradict what he said earlier when he said that the shedding of the blood showed that Jesus’ life was leaving His body.  So when He bled enough, wouldn’t that mean that He had died?  But no, MacArthur says that Jesus died by asphyxiation.  How do we know that?  Because that’s how the thieves died and how history shows other crucified ones died.  But is that how the Bible says Jesus died?  No!  It says that He gave up His own spirit.  And when he gets to the very end he admonishes, “You just want to be biblical about it!”  Right!  I agree!  Let’s be biblical about it.  Or in this case, let’s not follow what John MacArthur says about the blood of Christ.  He’s wrong.

I’m asking you the reader.  What does this message do to the nature of the gospel?  Does it change it?  How far does changing scriptural truth about the blood alter the gospel itself?  Is Jesus’ blood important enough for us to take a stand in separation over this understatement or even misstatement by MacArthur?

Shameful Alternatives for Church Discipline pt. 2

Especially in this age of tolerance, the world is repulsed by the idea of church discipline.  Churches know the world doesn’t like it, so they have a choice.  Will they go ahead and practice it the way Jesus laid it out in Matthew 18:15-17 or will they try something that they think the world might like more?

Scripture is sufficient.  God knows more than we do.  And yet we still innovate in areas already settled by God’s Word.   In the first part of this series, we looked at what the Lord Jesus Christ taught with which the rest of the New Testament corroborates.  And then we considered a first and shameful alternative that churches have opted to handle church discipline instead.  Now for more.

Pulpit Bombardment

When pastors preach to the church, they must make application to the people in the room, not the ones outside of it.  We’re not preaching the Word to the rest of the world.  The ones inside the auditorium might enjoy never getting preached at, but it isn’t God’s will for the preacher.  The pastor must think of individual members of the church when he considers the application of the scripture he exposes.  I believe it is proper to preach to a particular shortfall in biblical obedience, even as we think of it in one person in the church.  If it is the proper application, a church member should welcome it into his life.  He should be “quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” (James 1:19).

Despite the need to apply the Bible to his people, a pastor should not use the pulpit instead of one of the scriptural steps of church discipline, and especially the first one.  I understand the temptation to do this, but it isn’t right.  The first a church member hears about the specific sin he committed, and I’m referring to obvious details of the offense, should not be in a sermon.   Making a sin public occurs on the third step, not the first or second.  Our goal, again, should be to make this sin as private as possible.  Love covers a multitude of sins.  With a goal of repentance, we talk to the individual first.

A pastor may take cover in the fact that he hasn’t mentioned the person’s name.  Right.  But many people know who he’s talking about, and that’s part of the reason for doing it, to shame an individual before he has even been given the opportunity to get it right.  Leaving the name out gives a form of deniability that is really a kind of dishonesty.  A pastor can say that he wasn’t talking about that individual—he was only giving an illustration of a scriptural point.  Again, right.  Actually wrong.

I could give numerous illustrations for this, but I had a family member who talked privately to his pastor about a concern he had about the music of the church.   His point was about the use of the microphone.  He talked to the pastor privately.  If the pastor thought it deserved a rebuttal, he could have told him right there in private.  He acted with ambivalence to the criticism from my family member when in his presence.  The very next sermon, the pastor blasted my relative with the specifics of this particular confrontation.  He mocked his criticism, attempting to make it seem as silly as possible.

This kind of pulpit bombardment begins to verge on paranoia on the part of the leadership.  He is afraid that perhaps this church member is talking.  He is afraid perhaps only that he might talk in the future.  He imagines some kind of conspiracy and wants to stop it before it gets out of hand.  It isn’t happening at all, but what if it does happen?  So he fires some preemptive warfare from the pulpit.

I understand imagined monsters.  I think every pastor is prey to these.  He doesn’t do better to disobey God’s Word in order to solve his problem, even if he thinks it’s more practical to do so.  You might look out at your congregation and you think that someone doesn’t like your preaching.  He’s just listening very closely and gets a scrunched up face when he does, that makes him look angry.  He really does love the preaching, but shows it in a different way than the bobble-head doll that never stops nodding and smiling.

All of this might be what Jeremiah was considering when he said that he wasn’t afraid of their faces.  Fear is at the root of this problem.  And God, of course, as Paul told Timothy, hasn’t given us the spirit of fear.  So the fear is coming from us and it is out of the human fallenness that still resides in our flesh.  We need some weapons verses to defeat this sin of fear. 

Ironically, a pastor may feel courageous when he practices pulpit bombardment, viewing what he is doing as some kind of public boldness.  Maybe he thinks he is filling some kind of prophetic role, like an Elijah or a John the Baptist.  It isn’t bold; it’s cowardice.  We pastors need to get that in our heads and hearts.  Courage would confront the sin privately to attempt reconciliation.  Courage would trust God with the care of the church.  Courage would only judge what it sees, not what it imagines is happening.  Courage accomplishes discipline face to face first.  Courage wouldn’t use the ministry of preaching as a cover for disobeying what scripture tells it to do.

Many churches have become conditioned into thinking that this kind of pastoral behavior is right.   Whatever they’ve heard, they may even assume is correct.  It might not be.  It could be a situation where the pastor has an inaccurate assessment of what has happened.  He may be firing in some shade of grey.  He doesn’t know all the details.  But flood the tubes and send the torpedoes.

For any church member to whom this looks familiar, before you launch your own form of explosive, consider the possibility that we have a pastor that has tried to confront church members in the past with very little success.  Maybe they say something like this, “How dare he confront me for that sin?”  And soon after the confrontation, a gossip campaign was started to harm the credibility of the pastor, especially to affect his believability as it relates to the sin he has addressed privately.  He feels like having been burned in the past, he needs to take other action in order to head off damage to the whole church.  A pastor shouldn’t be blowing away individual members from the pulpit, but if he is, we aren’t doing better by not talking to him with a few others in private before we have started a campaign to stop him.

The first shameful alternative was members turning people into the pastor or pastoral staff without themselves first confronting the sin privately.  Sometimes this act is followed by the pulpit bombardment.  They often go together.  When the informant hears the public condemnation of an individual without initial attempts at private reconciliation, he might feel proud of himself that he was involved in such a noble deed.  He should be ashamed of himself.  He is a partaker in an evil deed.

The cure to all this, of course, is to get back to what Jesus told us to do.  If we don’t, on a very root level we are disobedient to God.  And as practical as we might think our unscriptural methods, they aren’t.  The whole idea of practical is the practice of what the Bible says to do.  When we do what we want, instead of what He said, we’re as impractical as we possibly can be.

(to be continued)

Shameful Alternatives for Discipline in the Church pt. 1

Roman Catholicism has a long history of suppressing what it has seen as heresy in the church. The Roman Catholic Church enforced its beliefs and required practices by means of imprisonment and the threat of excommunication.  Finally the Catholic Church resorted to torture and executions to opposition.  In the thirteenth century, the Pope himself assigned inquisitors the duty of locating and then prosecuting heretics, which included burning at the stake.

In the colonial American Massachusetts Bay Colony, those who would dissent from Puritan doctrine and practice were often subjected to physical beatings as a form of church discipline.  Obadiah Holmes, the pastor of the second Baptist church in the American colonies, was tied to a public whipping post and beaten—his charge:  “disturbing the congregation in the afternoon, for drawing aside others after their erroneous judgments and practices, and for suspicion of rebaptizing one or more amongst us.”

Much church leadership desires a certain type of behavior from its people.  They want the  members to live in a way that lines up with scripture.    Churches and their leadership will use various means to acquire the desired behavior.

What Churches Should Do

Church discipline is required practice in scripture.  Jesus first laid it out in Matthew 18:15-17 and many other passages give similar instruction as what He did (cf. Titus 3:10-11).  The Lord instructed His disciples that they should first confront a sinning brother in private.  This limits the injury caused by the sin and avoids a public spectacle.  The point of the discipline we know to be restoration.  Later in Galatians, the Apostle Paul writes (6:1):

Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.

If the brother repents, the church has gained the brother, and the discipline goes no further.   However, if the private confrontation does not lead to repentance, restoration, and reconciliation, the next step is to take witnesses.  Jesus referred to Deuteronomic law which required at least two or three.   These multiple witnesses would provide corroboration and also add a more serious dimension to the discipline.

If a brother won’t listen, only then does it go before the church as a matter of discipline.  Now the church judges the matter before the Lord and render a binding judgment upon the sinner based upon biblical principles, even then with a goal of potential restoration, as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 5:5, “that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.”

Once the discipline has occurred, Jesus called for treating the unrepentant one as a heathen and a tax collector.  Other passages explain this as exclusion from the church membership (1 Cor 5:12b) and a degree of withdrawal or loss of company (2 Thess 3:6, 14).  The congregation is not to consider the former brother as a part of the church.

Jesus made this pattern clear.  The apostles reinforced it in the other New Testament books.  So is this what we see in churches today?  In most cases, we don’t.  What do we see?  I would like to mention and discuss some of the common abuses that I have seen in churches that consider themselves New Testament.

The Call on the Carpet

Many church leaders haven’t taught church discipline to their people.  In the absence of this biblical method, they have a kind of discipline once seen in the former Soviet Union.  The citizens watch for violations and turn the violators in to the authority.  Instead of the personal confrontation, the church member “gets in trouble” with a member of church staff or the pastor.  Another member sees the sin or at least a broken rule, and the member gets “turned in” by him to the church leader.

The next step in this kind of discipline might be a meeting in a staff member’s or pastor’s office.  It could be a phone call with a kind of warning.  It might be a change in treatment or a loss of position.  It might be some of the other forms of discipline found below.

When the person turns someone else in, of course he’s doing this as an act of “care” for the one he’s turning in.  He also might think he’s currying favor with the staff member.  The staff might put in a good word for him when it comes time to talk about new positions.  He might just like seeing other people get into trouble.  He could feel self-righteous because he is catching so many other people doing wrong.

The act of “turning someone else in” doesn’t require faith from the one doing the “turning in.”  He won’t develop the strength that comes from confronting sin personally.  He might not even want to do that—it’s too tough—so like the anonymous caller to the child protective services, he just turns someone into the office.

This form of discipline engenders pride in the church leaders.  They feel and even act like they are the only ones who can practice discipline, like they have a secret knowledge with which they have been endowed due to their positions.  They become very much like the leadership in Roman Catholic Churches, a special cadre that are beyond questioning.  When they say something in one of these office visits, it could take on the quality of ex cathedra.

Often what happens with this kind of discipline is that there is no due process.  Someone sees someone else “sin.”  He turns the sinner in to the office.  The office calls in the “perpetrator.”   The staff member confronts him about his sin.  He might ask, “Who told you?”  It doesn’t matter.  It could be that he knows who has turned him in.  He tells the staff member that he really didn’t do it.  He can’t be believed.  The person who has “turned him in” is always right.  He questioned.  Questioning is just another form of rebellion.

To start, of course, this method is disobedient to scripture.  It might seem like it will work or that it is even more practical than the biblical way, but it is disobedience to God.  Many of the people in churches that practice this way might think that this actually is the way that God wants us to do it.  They’ve been encouraged to think this way by their leaders.  Generations of people go on with the same false practice without ever understanding one of the most prominent teachings in the New Testament.

(to be continued)

Calvin 500

Some of you may have missed that July 10 was Calvin’s 500th birthday.  Celebrations were held all over the world in honor of Calvin and especially in Geneva, Switzerland, where many Calvinists gathered for the Calvin500 Conference.  I’ve taught World History for almost 20 years, so in the historic realm, I see Calvin as an important figure in the history of the world.   I believe that God providentially used the reformers at that point in time to counteract the harmful effects of Roman Catholicism on Europe.   Although not itself a grand purveyor of freedom, the Protestant Reformation loosened the tyranny of a Catholic stranglehold.  The translation, printing, and distribution of the Bible brought the real freedom as men and women could decide for themselves what God had said.

At the same time, the state churchism of Calvin, Zwingli, and Luther are not my ecclesiastical heritage.  Mine is found in the independent New Testament church movement represented in the Schleitheim Confession of 1527.   In response to this document, in 1544 Calvin disseminated his Brief Instruction for Arming All the Good Faithful against the Errors of the Common Sect of the Anabaptists, at the beginning of which, Calvin said it was was written by “ignorant persons ” and with “nothing beneficial for persons of learning and understanding, seeing that, in addition to being inept and haphazardly written, it sufficiently discredits itself.”  Calvin went on to passionately denounce believer’s baptism and defend infant sprinkling, despite the fact that Calvin himself conceded that baby baptism itself was found nowhere in the Bible.   His chief argument was that since scripture says nothing about women recieving the Lord’s Table, and yet women partake of that ordinance and it is good for them, then baptism, also being good for its recipients, should be applied to the never mentioned infants, seeing that the Lord regards these babies as the “servants of His church.”  In addition to passing down the heritage of a state church, which we can all be thankful was rejected by the Baptists in colonial America, Calvin also bequeathed this dangerous and unscriptural doctrine of infant sprinkling, of which John Gill later wrote in 1765:

The Paedobaptists are ever restless and uneasy, endeavoring to maintain and support, if possible, their unscriptural practice of infant-baptism; though it is no other than a pillar of popery; that by which Antichrist has spread his baneful influence over many nations; is the basis of national churches and worldly establishments; that which unites the church and world, and keeps them together; nor can there be a full separation of the one from the other, nor a thorough reformation in religion; until it is wholly removed: and though it has so long and largely obtained, and still does obtain; I believe with a firm and unshaken faith, that the time is hastening on, when infant-baptism will be no more practiced in the world; when churches will be formed on the same plan they were in the times of the apostles; when gospel-doctrine and discipline will be restored to their primitive luster and purity; when the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper will be administered as they were first delivered, clear of all present corruption and superstition.

Calvin and Baptismal Regeneration

When I read Calvin’s massive Institutes of the Christian Religion and other writings, I read a false gospel.  The Calvinists often rush to explain that we just don’t understand Calvin or that we’re wrongly interpreting him.  I didn’t get the Calvin code book, I guess, because he seems very clear to me, clearly wrong, but communicating it in plain fashion. He wrote (Institutes, 4:17:1, 4:15:3, 4):

God, regenerating us in baptism, ingrafts us into the fellowship of his Church, and makes us his by adoption . . . whatever time we are baptized, we are washed and purified . . . forgiveness, which at our first regeneration we receive by baptism alone . . . forgiveness has reference to baptism.

Calvin also published (1547 Antidote to the Council of Trent, Reply to the 1st Decree of the 5th Session):

We assert that the whole guilt of sin is taken away in baptism, so that the remains of sin still existing are not imputed. That this may be more clear, let my readers call to mind that there is a twofold grace in baptism, for therein both remission of sins and regeneration are offered to us. We teach that full remission is made . . . by baptism . . . the guilt is effaced [and] it is null in regard to imputation. Nothing is plainer than this doctrine.

He continued in the same publication (Canon #5):

We, too [as do the Catholics], acknowledge that the use of baptism is necessary—that no one may omit it from either neglect or contempt. In this way we by no means make it free (optional). And not only do we strictly bind the faithful to the observance of it, but we also maintain that it is the ordinary instrument of God in washing and renewing us; in short, in communicating to us salvation. The only exception we make is, that the hand of God must not be tied down to the instrument. He may of himself accomplish salvation. For when an opportunity for baptism is wanting, the promise of God alone is amply sufficient.

John Calvin also wrote in his Commentary on Matthew (19:14):

We . . . maintain that since baptism is the pledge and figure of the forgiveness of sins and likewise of adoption by God, it ought not to be denied to infants whom God adopts and washes with the blood of His Son.

In answer to these quotes of Calvin, an advocate of sole fide might quote the Westminster Confession of Faith (Article V of Chapter XXVIII):

Although it is a great sin to contemn or neglect this ordinance, yet grace and salvation are not so inseparably annexed unto it, as that no person can be regenerated, or saved, without it: or, that all that are baptized are undoubtedly regenerated.

I admit that this part of the WCF sounds great. But it’s only great in that it clears up one problem, that is, baptism isn’t necessary for salvation if an adult without baptism later places faith in Christ alone for salvation. However, it’s easy to see upon reading Calvin that he believed that baptism is not the only way of regeneration or salvation.  This WCF statement does not repudiate baptismal regeneration.

Are we going to be loyal to the God and the Bible in our belief and teaching on the gospel and baptism?  I’m not going to agree to disagree.  I’m just going to disagree.

Calvin and the Lord’s Supper

In part one of his commentary on Jeremiah (fourth paragraph), Calvin wrote:

That we really feed in the Holy Supper on the flesh and blood of Christ, no otherwise than as bread and wine are the aliments of our bodies, we freely confess. If a clearer explanation is asked, we say, that the substance of Christ’s flesh and blood is our spiritual life, and that it is communicated to us under the symbols of bread and wine; for Christ, in instituting the mystery of The Supper, promised nothing falsely, nor mocked us with a vain shew, but represented by external signs what he has really given us.

I’ll let that speak for itself.  I don’t find it to be anything different than what I read in Calvin’s Institutes and in his Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of our Lord Jesus Christ, in which he wrote this:

But as the blessings of Jesus Christ do not belong to us at all, unless he be previously ours, it is necessary, first of all, that he be given us in the Supper, in order that the things which we have mentioned may be truly accomplished in us. For this reason I am wont to say, that the substance of the sacraments is the Lord Jesus, and the efficacy of them the graces and blessings which we have by his means. Now the efficacy of the Supper is to confirm to us the reconciliation which we have with God through our Savior’s death and passion; the washing of our souls which we have in the shedding of his blood; the righteousness which we have in his obedience; in short, the hope of salvation which we have in all that he has done for us. It is necessary, then, that the substance should be conjoined with these, otherwise nothing would be firm or certain. Hence we conclude that two things are presented to us in the Supper, viz., Jesus Christ as the source and substance of all good; and, secondly, the fruit and efficacy of his death and passion.  This is implied in the words which were used. For after commanding us to eat his body and drink his blood, he adds that his body was delivered for us, and his blood shed for the remission of our sins. Hereby he intimates, first, that we ought not simply to communicate in his body and blood, without any other consideration, but in order to receive the fruit derived to us from his death and passion; secondly that we can attain the enjoyment of such fruit only by participating in his body and blood, from which it is derived.

Calvin taught that the real presence of Christ was found in the elements of the Lord’s Table. If John Calvin was not teaching that we receive salvation through the Lord’s Supper, he was at least making it very confusing as to whether someone could or could not be saved by partaking of the elements.

What did Calvin do for Baptists?

John T. Christian writes this in volume one, chapter fifteen, of his History of Baptists:

The influence of John Calvin had begun to be felt in English affairs. His books had appeared in translations in England. He was responsible in a large measure for the demon of hate and fierce hostility which the Baptists of England had to encounter. He advised that “Anabaptists and reactionists should be alike put to death” (Froude, History of England, V. p. 99). He wrote a letter to Lord Protector Somerset, the translation was probably made by Archbishop Cranmer (Calvin to the Protector, MSS. Domestic Edward VI, V. 1548) to the effect: “These altogether deserve to be well punished by the sword, seeing that they do conspire against God, who had set him in his royal seat.”

For those that think that Baptists are reformed or come out of the Reformation, they really need to study that time period and the relationship of the reformers to the Baptists.  They were separate from one another.  You also have the early history of the United States, when in the colonial period, the Puritans hated the Baptists.  The Baptists were treated criminal in the colonies.  They bore the persecutions of whipping, imprisonment, excommunication, banishment, ridicule, and starvation–all for believing and practicing principles which Baptists hold dear.  Henry Dunster (1612-1659), first president of Harvard, began to preach against infant baptism and in 1653, after twelve years of impressive service at Harvard, would not submit to sprinkling his fourth child.  Despite earnest pleading he was refused the use of his home, cast out into the winter, and died within five weeks.

The Baptists sacrificed to separate from infant sprinklers.  Today Baptists cozy up to them and appreciate them.  Men died rather than to subject their families to baby baptism.  Today Baptists are enthralled with John Calvin and the reformers, forgetting that heritage and that suffering.  C. H. Spurgeon wrote (from The New Park Street Pulpit, Volume VII, p. 225):

We believe that the Baptists are the original Christians. We did not commence our existence at the reformation, we were reformers before Luther or Calvin were born; we never come from the Church of Rome, for we were never in it, but we have an unbroken line up to the apostles themselves. We have always existed from the very days of Christ, and our principles, sometimes veiled and forgotten, like a river which may travel underground for a little season, have always had honest and holy adherents. Persecuted alike by Romanists and Protestants of almost every sect, yet there has never existed a Government holding Baptist principles which persecuted others; nor, I believe, any body of Baptists ever held it to be right to put the consciences of others under the control of man. We have ever been ready to suffer, as our martyrologies will prove, but we are not ready to accept any help from the State, to prostitute the purity of the Bride of Christ to any alliance with Government, and we will never make the Church, although the Queen, the despot over the consciences of men.

There are Baptists today who won’t separate over mode and recipient of baptism.  They say it’s a non-essential.  On this birthday of John Calvin, let us reconsider the authoritative Bible doctrine and love for the Lord that motivated our Baptist forefathers.

The Myth of Only Internal Worldliness

False doctrine and practice have been around since the garden, so I shouldn’t be surprised by the constant, growing, and innovative arguments for justifying worldliness.  Satan isn’t taking a vacation from his world system.  And men love the world.  It is tangible, tasty, and at the tip of the fingers.

A recent and common approach sees men, who propose to hate worldliness themselves, vindicate worldly living by redefining worldliness.  They make worldliness impossible to judge by anyone but God.  And He will.  They say it’s only on the inside.  These men challenge definitions of worldliness that recognize worldly externals.  No doubt everything that is worldly in someone proceeds from his heart.  However, what comes out is also worldly.

The World Is on the Outside

It is called the “world” because it relates to this planet we live on.  Worldliness won’t ever have anything to do with Neptune or Venus.   Men become enamored with what’s on the planet.   They mind earthly things.  Many of the things in the world or on the world came from people from here.  They made it, invented it, played it, or produced it.   And most of those things are the problem for men, the competition with God for their hearts.  The stuff that man generates has been affected by the curse of sin.  Because of that, it isn’t all innocent and it must be judged (1 Thessalonians 5:21).  Music, dress, entertainment, recreation, and even the things that we put into our body have all been trouble for mankind since the beginning.  And all of it is on the outside.

Being “conformed” to this world (Romans 12:2) is external.  Even being “transformed” is external.  It might start on the inside, but it will show up on the outside.  The word translated “conformed” in Romans 12:2 is translated “fashioning” in 1 Peter 1:14:  “not fashioning yourselves according to your former lusts.”  ‘Lusts” are internal but “fashioning” is external.  The primary verses on worldliness in the Bible are dealing with something that is external.

The Attack on External Worldliness

A recent primer for this novel approach to worldliness is Worldliness:  Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, edited by C. J. Mahaney with a foreword by John Piper.   Many of the chapter titles reveal the emphasis:  “God, My Heart, and Media,” “God, My Heart, and Music,” “God, My Heart, and Stuff,” and “God, My Heart, and Clothes.”  You can tell where the book is heading in the foreword when Piper writes:  “The only way most folks know how to draw lines is with rulers.  The idea that lines might come into being freely and lovingly (and firmly) as the fruit of the gospel is rare.”  We get the heads up that rules are going to be a problem in a stand against worldliness.  Then Mahaney adds in the first chapter (p. 29):

Some people try to define worldliness as living outside a specific set of rules or conservative standards.  If you listen to music with a certain beat, dress in fashionable clothes, watch movies with a certain rating, or indulge in certain luxuries of modern society, surely you must be worldly. . . .  Worldliness does not consist in outward behavior, though our actions can certainly be an evidence of worldliness within.

When this book came out, you’d think that nothing had been written about worldliness before.  Actually many books have been written about worldliness through the centuries since the printing press.   If you go to google books and use the advanced search mode and look only for full view books, you’ll find many books in the 19th and early 20th century that are now public domain, which talk about worldliness, many of which were sermons (consider this by J. C. Ryle, and this and this and this by Spurgeon).  They weren’t afraid to talk about external issues in the days when to us there didn’t seem like much in the world that could be a problem.

We can all be thankful for a volume intending to slay internal or heart worldliness.  However, circumventing the externals and painting only a partial picture of worldliness does more damage than good.  It offers some leverage to deal with worldliness without depriving the worldly of the worldly things they demand.   It vaccinates the adherents with a worldly, softer strain of Christianity that only inoculates them against the real thing.  It sends an ambiguous warning signal across the bow while worldliness stays on board.  I have to agree with Peter Masters in his recent short review of the Mahaney book, saying that it “hopelessly under-equips young believers for separation from the world.”

Others have obviously been influenced by Mahaney’s book.  Blog posts began to appear everywhere that argued that worldliness is a heart matter, so the standards in churches and lines drawn are moralistic and legalistic, argued with fervent dogmatism.  Of course, the point of Mahaney’s book was to deal with worldliness, not to encourage it, but the adherents caught one of his major emphases well, that is, people who obsess on externals don’t understand worldliness.  “Oh good, I get to keep my music, my entertainment, my worship, etc.”  Point taken.  The book doesn’t do much to hinder worldliness.

But why would anyone write a book against worldliness but not be against worldliness?   Worldliness is often how churches today got where they are.   Worldliness is the goose that laid their golden eggs.  They’ve produced worldly goslings, but they can’t very well destroy the goose.  They use worldly music, encourage worldly dress, offer worldly activities, and allow for worldly amusement.  It’s no wonder that they’ve got worldly people who need a book against worldliness.  But you can’t slay the goose.  So you go after “internal worldliness” with hopes for some kind of restraint.

However, Mahaney provides a perfect cover for the worldly person, excusing his worldly look, taste, and conduct.  He says he has a scriptural basis for it and he uses the classic passage, 1 John 2:15-17.   In an elaboration on v. 16, he writes:

Notice that in enlarging upon what is “in the world,” John doesn’t say, “this particular mode of dress, this way of speaking, this music, these possessions.”

Mahaney relies on the New International Version to continue with this point:

No, the essence of worldliness is in the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does.

Some of what Mahaney says is correct.  The internal is important, even as James wrote in his epistle in chapter 4 concerning carnal desires over which we will fight and war.

Mahaney makes at least two errors that debilitate his presentation.  First, 1 John 2:15 is far from the proof text on worldliness.  What about Romans 12:2?  What about worldliness as it relates to the doctrine of holiness, in setting a difference or distinction between the sacred and the profane?  Second, he doesn’t hit target in dealing with 1 John 2:15-17.  It reads as someone who comes to the text with a lifestyle to protect.

What about Romans 12:2?

Romans 12:1-2 is “gospel centered.”  We’ve got eleven chapters of gospel presentation.  What does the gospel effect?  It effects acceptable, spiritual worship, the saint offering his body to God according to His will.  That offering must not conform in its externals to the spirit of this age.  Certainly, for that to be accomplished requires a renewing of the mind.  You can’t think the same way about the world as you did when you were lost and not be conformed to it.   So this isn’t “moralism,” a regular strawman of the new worldly Christianity.

We don’t have a reason to define worldliness only with 1 John 2:15-17.  Those who claim to walk in the light, but love the world, are lying.  Those who love the world conform to the world.  Loving the world isn’t good and neither is conforming to it.  You can’t say, however, that you don’t love it when you conform to it.  The new approach to worldliness separates loving it from conforming to it.  They’ll say they don’t.  That’s part of the deniability found in ambiguous communication.  They can profess that they weren’t dismissing externals really, but if you read their writing, they leave them by the wayside.

How do you conform to the kosmos, the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist?  You do it with the way you talk, dude.  You do it with your comfort first, shabby, disrespectful dress.  You do it with your groovy music, your deco art, your fashions, your recreation, your amusement, and your entertainment.   These externals smack of a philosophy originating from a system operating in opposition against God.

What about Worldliness as it Relates to the Doctrine of Holiness?

Holiness is described by more than just moral purity, but also the transcendent majesty of God.  It relates to distinctions that separate us unto God from the common or the profane.

And I will put a division between my people and thy people: to morrow shall this sign be.  Exodus 8:23

[T]hat ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel. Exodus 11:7

And that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean;  Leviticus 10:10

Her priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane, neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among them.  Ezekiel 22:26

God wanted a difference put between the holy and the profane.  That explains “be not conformed to this world.”  It also helps us understand this verse in Zephaniah 1:8.

And it shall come to pass in the day of the LORD’S sacrifice, that I will punish the princes, and the king’s children, and all such as are clothed with strange apparel.

God will punish those who “are clothed with strange apparel.”  “Strange” could be understood as worldly.  The clothing itself is “strange” or “worldly,” in fitting with a profane culture.  The “strange apparel” meant something—it has a philosophy that accompanied it.  We see this same kind of teaching from Paul in 1 Corinthians.  Paul says that an “idol is nothing” in 1 Corinthians 8:4, because “there is none other God but one.”  And yet, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10: 19-21 that the idol, even though it is nothing, has a meaning to it that is devilish.

The pagan, anti-God philosophy of this world weaves its way into every part of a culture.  For this reason, everything must be judged (1 Thessalonians 5:21) and that which associates itself with a humanistic or depraved way of thinking must be eschewed (1 Thessalonians 5:22).  This applies to piercings, modern art, tattoos, extreme hair styles, rock, rap, and country.  In other words, we are not to “[fashion ourselves] according to the former lusts in [our] ignorance: but as he which hath called [us] is holy, so be [we] holy in all manner of conversation” (1 Peter 1:14-15).  Every aspect of our conduct or behavior is to be distinct.  In no way should our externals reflect the old unregenerate life.

Hitting or Missing on 1 John 2:15-17

1 John 2:15-17 (KJV)

15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

1 John 2:15-17 (NIV)

15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For everything in the world– the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does– comes not from the Father but from the world. 17 The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.

Mahaney leaves out the first part of 1 John 2:15 in his exegesis.  His description of v. 16, which isn’t completely accurately portrayed by the NIV, explains the love for the things “in the world.”  But v. 15 starts with “love not the world” before it moves to “neither the things that are in the world.”  The world itself is external.  Mahaney argues that “the world” is only internal because that’s how it is described in v. 16.  But v. 16 is explaining the things in the world, not the world itself.

The word “man” isn’t even found in the original language of v. 16 (or in the KJV).  What is translated “sinful man” in the NIV is a single Greek word, the word for “flesh” (sarx).   The NIV makes this “sinful man.”  The Greek words translated “cravings” and “lust” in the NIV are actually the same word in the Greek New Testament (epithumia), as we can see reflected in the KJV.   When you read the NIV, you’d think that there were two different words.   Mahaney applies two different meanings, when they are actually both the same word.  The NIV uses so much dynamic equivalence that you can’t get the true sense of 1 John 2:16 from its translation—and yet that is the translation that Mahaney chooses to use.  It suits his purposes for his treatment of worldliness.

The lust and pride are a problem, but so are things in the world.   We are not to “love the world.” “The world” that we’re not to love is a system that includes dress, music, entertainment, art, conduct, politics, and fashion.  Satan is the prince of this current system, one that will be overthrown by Jesus Christ in the imminent future.  Yes, weaving its way in this false system are the “lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.”  Those are not of the Father.  We are to love only that which is of the Father.  Whatever smacks of the world’s philosophy, the spirit of this age, we’re not to love.  We’re called upon to show discernment and say “no” to some things.  Those things are on the outside.

Quietism versus Pietism

From Mahaney and Piper (and many other evangelicals) we’re to assume something gospel driven that so swings away from human effort.  I believe it misrepresents the gospel and God’s grace.  God’s grace teaches to deny.  Grace fuels human effort.  We live by faith.  We don’t let go and let God.  The new nature possessed by the converted will do good (Romans 7:21).

The truth is that the new definers of worldliness emphasize conduct.  It’s just that it is, and ironically, the loose conduct appealing to the lust of the flesh.  And they’re judging externals.  They will judge your standards (which they do have) to be more strict than theirs, so you must be the legalist and the moralist.  Even in writing style they work hard to make it as easy as possible to understand.  Even in the dress down style of the sovereign grace ministries, something strategic is going on with their urban chic and soul patches.   They are working at attracting or making comfortable a certain demographic.  Something is driving all that, but it isn’t the gospel.

Perhaps it might dawn on these “gospel driven” that grace works toward using the ruler to draw the lines.  It is grace working though.  Old Testament Israel tested God’s grace by getting as close to evil as possible ( 1 Corinthians 10).  Thinking their liberty would kick in on their behalf, these Jews in the wilderness fell because they didn’t get further away from the evil.  They should have set up some safety boundaries.   The real bondage was found in their attraction to worldly things.   God’s grace and the gospel would have driven to distance themselves from them.

What we have here is the age-old tug of war between quietism and pietism.  Quietism is a view of sanctification in which the Christian exerts the least effort possible to ensure a product from God’s working.  On the other hand, there is pietism, which asserts that we must work hard and discipline ourselves to effect the favor from God that will empower the Christian life.  Neither of these are true.  The phantom enemy of Mahaney and his crowd is a pietism that wishes to bind his adherents in shackles of extra-scriptural regulations.  Most false beliefs that would dictate their desired point of view benefit from a boogeyman to inspire irrational fear.   Pietism is the boogeyman of only internal worldliness.

Conclusion

The grace of God that works in believers “denies ungodliness and worldly lusts” (Titus 2:12).   As God is working in both to will and do of His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13), true Christians are working out their own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).  What is this “fear and trembling”?  It is the fear of sinning, the distrust of human strength in the face of powerful temptations, and the terror at the thought of dishonoring God.  The fear of God and his judgment seat motivated Paul to labor for Christ’s acceptance (2 Corinthians 5:11-12).  When Philippians 2:13 says “to will,” the word speaks of the believer’s intent.  God instills in His own the desire to please Him.  He so respects God that he puts a distance between himself and the world, making no provision for the flesh (Romans 13:14).

Noah and his family were “saved by water” (1 Peter 3:21).  What did water save them from?  The ark saved them from destruction, but the water saved them from the world.  God promises to be a Father to those who come out from the world and “be ye separate” (2 Corinthians 6:18).  Having that promise, a believer will “cleanse himself of all filthiness of the flesh, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians 7:1).

Worldliness is more than internal.  Believers will visibly and tangibly separate themselves from the world like Noah and his family did on the ark, and like God expected of Israel in the wilderness.  Out of honor to God, to please Him, and with fear and trembling, they will work out their salvation.  If it’s out, then it isn’t in.  God put it in.  Christians work it out.  What God’s children work out is going to look and sound like something way different than this world system.

Concern over God’s Glory in Evangelism

Almost always today evangelism efforts are judged by their effectiveness.  In other words, do they work?  Sometimes you’ll hear, “Door to door just doesn’t work any more.”  Or, “Door to door evangelism turns people off.”  Or, “We invite the lost to our church services because we have found that it is more effective.”  I read often about all sorts of “effective” programs for evangelism.  “We’ve got this ministry or that ministry, and we’ve found that they work.”  Whether these evangelistic efforts work or not seems to be the justification for their usage.  Does it matter that the “program” or the “ministry” are not in the Bible?  I believe so.

I know this might sound harsh, but I don’t care about your evangelism statistics.  I don’t care that a certain program that you used garnered more numbers than other means that you have used.  I do care if you are obedient to the Bible in evangelism.  That’s what will please God.  It is living by faith when we trust what God told us to do and then do it.  He gets the credit for it.  When I hear about some new program, I can see the innovator getting the credit for it.  And I think that following exactly what God said is most important in evangelism.  God will always be the One doing the saving no matter what the innovation, but how we go about doing it will affect whether God will get the glory or not.  It is for this reason that we should limit our selves and our churches to biblical evangelism methodology.  God revealed the way and He gets the credit when it works.

Judging Results

Before I talk to you about why I believe we should do it only God’s way, I want us to consider that we can’t even judge results.  God has a perspective about results that we can’t have.  He sees all of time in one indivisible present.  We may think that we see better results with a certain methodology because of something visible and immediate.  We have no way of judging whether that will be the best for the next 500 to 1000 years.  None of us should imagine that we could think of a better way than what God has proposed.  And yet there seems to be non-stop innovation in the work of evangelism.  I keep hearing about one new  program and method after another that really makes a difference.

I might see few results in my entire lifetime, but those results may yield more results in the next generation, which then produces even more results in the next generation, and then it keeps going like that.  My new method might see some short-term results and then crash in the next generation.  This is where we get into trouble with a very cultural “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately” philosophy.  I think of Jesus in the parable of the mustard seed.  He said that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.  A major point of this, I believe, is that the population of His kingdom builds up slow to something great.  It doesn’t show immediate massive size.

What I’m proposing here is seeing your own personal stupidity.  I think I’m too stupid to judge better than God.  I’ll leave that judgment up to Him.  I know that there are things that I can judge by the grace of God, through the Word of God and the Holy Spirit.  Really these are things that God is still judging.  Not me.  I should take responsibility for judging where I am supposed to, but I don’t want to judge where I can’t possibly succeed.  I’m ridiculous to do so.  I want to think of myself as a methodological imbecile.  God created a universe.  I have, um, hmmmmm, not been very impressive.  So let’s get off our high horse, folks.  Get a rich understanding of how stupid you are and how smart God is.  Stop depending on what you might think is keen judgment of results.  You don’t have it.

The Permanence of God’s Glory

What will last is God’s glory.  And that’s what He wants.  He’ll produce salvations.  He is the only One Who can do that.  If we use His method, we’ll get exactly what He will effect.  I’m fine with that, because He gets the glory and that’s why I do what I do.  He’s a good God.  He deserves to be glorified.  I deserve zero glory, less than zero.  He isn’t glorified when I do it my way, so I don’t want to do it my way.  On top of the fact that I can’t judge results.  I’ve got to leave all that in God’s hands.

His glory is the gold, silver, and precious stones.  His glory is the laboring, that whether present or absent, I’m accepted of Him.  His glory is what’s important at the judgment seat.  His glory is what will last through eternity.  My ideas are at the most a vapor.

What Glorifies God In Evangelism

The Bible is full of this teaching that God doesn’t want human innovation in evangelism, replete with the idea that God wants worshiped through our preaching of the gospel.  We’ve obviously needed to have heard that instruction because we’ve often forgotten what He told us.  We have built our own evangelistic towers of Babel.  We’ve become the Thomas Edisons of evangelism.  And I don’t think we’ve recognized how far we’ve gotten away from what He said.

I’m not going to focus on all of the passages on this, but some are very enlightening.  I think of three right off the top of my head and I’ll deal with them in the order that they appear in my brain.  The first is 1 Corinthians 1-2.

1 Corinthians 1-2

1:17 gets it started when Paul writes, “preach the gospel:  not with wisdom of words.”  The “wisdom of words” represents human strategy and technique.  This is the gospel plus something else, the gospel along with the additions that make it work or make people like it, take some of the foolishness off of it so that it might seem a little more palatable to the lost.  He moves on with this in v. 18:

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness.

What we should get from this is that preaching of the cross doesn’t make sense to us as a method.  The world doesn’t like it.  He continues in v. 19:

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

Who are these wise and prudent?  They’re the ones who have have figured out that people don’t like the straight preaching of the gospel, so they choose something else or something more.

The smartypants know that “Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom” (1:22).  They’ve studied the demographic.  They know how people tick.  They know how to customize the gospel according to the particular characteristics of a type of lost person—the alcoholic, the drug addict, the homeless, the American, the big city person, the third world country citizen, the rich guy, the kiddies, youth, urban braniacs, etc.

Paul moves opposite of the strategic program evangelism.  He continues in 1:23:

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.

And more in 1:25:

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

What people say doesn’t work is actually the wisdom of God.  They don’t think it works because they don’t see something that says to them that it has worked.  God says it works.  That should be enough.  No one should assume it hasn’t worked.  The assumption should be that God has worked powerfully, because that’s what He does.  The way that glorifies God doesn’t make any kind of human sense that it should work.  It looks exactly like it shouldn’t work.  That it does work is because it is of God.

And why this particular methodology of straight preaching, of just going out and proclaiming the gospel?  1:29 answers:

That no flesh should glory in his presence.

And v. 31:

That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

We don’t want the glory, do we?  Do we?  If we don’t, then we restrain ourselves from a different methodology.  Just preach the gospel.  “But people will be offended.” “It will turn people off.”  “It works better if you….”  But whether He gets the glory matters.

Because of the doctrine that we read in 1 Corinthians 1:17-31, Paul operated in a particular fashion.  He explains that in chapter two beginning with this in v. 1:

I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.

Read this in vv. 4-5:

And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom . . . . That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

Somebody who wants God glorified in evangelism will take the same tack as Paul.

Here’s the program our church uses for evangelism—we preach the gospel.  We preach it house to house and to those with whom we come in contact.  We preach it to relatives, to neighbors, to co-workers, to fellow students, to children, to teens, to college students, and to the elderly.  We preach it to Buddhists, to atheists, to Catholics, to Hindus, to Sikhs, to professing Christians, and to Mormons.

In Matthew 13, the sower went out to sow.  We go out and sow.  We preach the gospel to every creature.  We don’t hide our light under a bushel.  We open our mouth boldly as we ought to speak.  We don’t have a program.  We just preach the gospel.  The world might hate us.  I marvel not.

We don’t use an invitation to church philosophy.  We don’t use any kind of special program for teens, for kids, for drunks, for drug addict, or for any other demographic.  We just preach it.  I can explain to you how that what I am describing is scriptural.  I can also describe how that your program is unscriptural.  I don’t think a person invited to church has a better opportunity of being saved than someone who hears the gospel at his door.

Romans 1:9

For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son.

“Serve” is the word latreuo.  It is speaking of the worship of the priestly service, the sacrificial system, the offerings to God.  The noun form is used in Romans 12:1 when the offering of your body to God is called latreia.

This verse says that our evangelism is a presentation to God as worship.  The concern for an offering to God is whether God accepts it or not.  Is it acceptable to God?  The question isn’t whether it will work but rather will please God.

Romans 15:16-17

That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.  I have therefore whereof I may glory through Jesus Christ in those things which pertain to God.

V. 16 uses the language of priestly service. Paul ministered in the sense that he acted as a priest. As the priest was to offer an acceptable offering unto God, so Paul offered up the believing Gentiles to God. Even as Aaron, the first Levitical priest, offered the Levites before the Lord (Numbers 8:13)—

And thou shalt set the Levites before Aaron, and before his sons, and offer them for an offering unto the LORD.

—So also believer-priests living today may offer Gentile converts before the Lord that they may serve Him. God is well pleased when they’re offered up to Him, because it is His plan for this present age.  Every new Gentile believer is sanctified by the Holy Spirit, indwelt by Him, made holy and acceptable to God.  You see this thought in Isaiah 66:20 where people “out of all nations” are offered to God.

In v. 17 we see that Paul wants to “glory through Jesus Christ.”  For Jesus to be glorified, the ministering, the offering that is Paul’s preaching of the gospel, must be acceptable to God.

Conclusion

The concern in evangelism is whether God will be glorified.  When we take care of what is required for that to occur, we’ll get the exact results we’re supposed to get, no more or no less.  More converts doesn’t justify a method.  This isn’t living by faith but by sight.  No one should assume that an evangelistic strategy is better because it has worked better than others.

In a question and answer time during a recent conference, John Piper commented that Mark Driscoll has a much greater opportunity to reach the people he does in Seattle than what Piper could.  Why?  What is it about Driscoll that would be more effective than Piper in reaching unsaved Seattle citizens?  The implication was that Driscoll’s speaking style, his deco teeshirts, his grunge rock bands, and these types of customized innovations to the Seattle crowd were more prone to the use of God than what Piper would be able to offer.  And this is coming from a Calvinist, who says he believes and teaches theological monergism in salvation.  It is sheer pragmatism, Finneyesque new measures.  Piper himself shows again and again that this is what he thinks.  He would not have the same results if he hadn’t bowed to his own wisdom in evangelistic approach.

You look at the Resolved conference of John MacArthur and Grace Community Church in Southern California, and you have the rock concert style theater lighting and platform, the relational dress, and the fleshly rock form of music all tailored for the youth culture.  These all smack of the contextualization that defies these passages on Divine methodology.

I bring these two examples because they actually contradict what these evangelicals say that they believe.  Young fundamentalists and evangelicals hover around them in part because they think that they are different than abuses in old fundamentalism.  There’s hypocrisy in their condoning and acceptance.

Of course, we’ve got the promotion and marketing methodologies of modern fundamentalism, the giveaways and the gimmicks, justified by their effect.  Methods don’t glorify God because they work.  They glorify God because they stand in His wisdom and not that of men.  God uses the supposed non-effective.  He doesn’t get Jews through signs and Greeks through wisdom, children through toys and games, and adults through buildings and bribes.  Music isn’t an evangelistic method.  There’s no gospel music in the Bible, only gospel preaching.  A Christmas concert is not an evangelistic strategy.  A youth rally with pizza and big ball is not a biblical technique.

Typical comebacks are: “Scripture doesn’t say it’s wrong.”  “Jesus got a crowd by healing  people.”  “The Lord gave food to the masses.”  “Paul adjusted his message to the Athenian crowd.”  “Jesus ate with sinners.”

The Bible does say the human innovations are wrong (see above).  The healing of Jesus was to fulfill prophecy in order to reveal His identity.  He wanted those to go away who were merely seeking after signs.  Jesus didn’t keep feeding people because it wasn’t an evangelistic strategy.  Paul preached the same gospel but used the truth that would pull down Athenian strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).  Jesus preached to sinners everywhere.

The limitations of the sufficient Word of God will free you from the bondage of evangelistic concoctions.  You won’t be burdened by the pressure to find a way to succeed.  You’ll find liberty in the simplicity of the gospel.  Come to the methods of Scripture.  God will give you rest.  Above all, Jesus will be glorified.  Oh praise His name!