I found this VERY funny! It is humor with a message, making the point that Facebook is taking over our lives without us realizing it.
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Yearly Archives: 2011
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Why We Must Be Unapologetically Theological
Kevin DeYoung wrote the following at his blog and agree especially with his conclusion that “Churches will still come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But “atheological,” or worse yet “anti-theological,” should not be one of them.”:
If I’m not mistaken, our church has a reputation for being quite theological. I know this is why many people have come to our church. And I imagine it’s why some people have left, or never checked us out in the first place. But no church should apologize for talking about and loving theology. Now–and this is an important caveat–if we are arrogant with our theology, or if our doctrinal passion is just about intellectual gamesmanship, or we are all out of proportioned in our affections for less important doctrines, then may the Lord rebuke us. We should not be surprised theology gets a bad name in such circumstances.
But when it comes to thinking on, rejoicing in, and building a church upon sound biblical truth, we should all long for a richly theological church.
I could cite many reasons for preaching theologically and many reasons for wanting to pastor a congregation that loves theology. Let me mention six:
1. God has revealed himself to us in his word and given us his Spirit that we might understand the truth. Obviously, you don’t need to master every theme in Scripture in order to be a Christian. God is gracious to save lots of us with lots of gaps in our understanding. But if we have a Bible, not to mention an embarrassment of riches when it comes to resources in English, why wouldn’t we want to understand as much of God’s self-revelation as possible? Theology is getting more of God. Don’t you want your church to know God better?
2. The New Testament places a high value on discerning truth from error. There is a deposit of truth that must be guarded. False teaching must be placed out of bounds. Good teaching must be promoted and defended. This is not the concern of some soulless Ph.D. candidate wasting away in front of microfiche. This is the passion of the Apostles and the Lord Jesus himself who commended the church at Ephesus for being intolerant of false teachers and hating the deeds of the Nicolaitans.
3. The ethical commands of the New Testament are predicated on theological propositions. So many of Paul’s letters have a twofold structure. The beginning chapters lay out doctrine and the latter chapters exhort us to obedience. Doctrine and life are always connected in the Bible. It’s in view of God’s mercies, in view of all the massive theological realities of Romans 1-11, that we are called to lay down our lives as living sacrifices in Romans 12. Know doctrine, know life. No doctrine, no life.
4. Theological categories enable us to more fully and more deeply rejoice in God’s glory. Simple truths are wonderful. It is good for us to sing simple songs like “God is good. All the time!” If you sing that in sincere faith, the Lord is very pleased. But he is also pleased when we can sing and pray about how exactly he has been good to us in the plan of salvation and in the scope of salvation history. He is pleased when we can glory in the completed work of Christ, and rest in his all-encompassing providence, and marvel at his infinity and aseity, when we can delight in his holiness and mediate on his three-ness and one-ness and stand in awe at his omniscience and omnipotence. These theological categories are not meant to give us bigger heads, but bigger hearts that worship deeper and higher because of what we’ve seen in God.
5. Theology helps us more fully and more deeply rejoice in the blessings that are ours in Christ. Again, it is a sweet thing to know that Jesus saves you from your sins. There’s no better news than that in the whole world. But how much fuller and deeper will your delight be when you understand that salvation means election to the praise of God’s grace, expiation to cover your sins, propitiation to turn away divine wrath, redemption to purchase you for God, justification before the judgment seat of God, adoption into God’s family, on-going sanctification by the Spirit, and promised glorification at the end of the age? If God has given us so many varied and multi-layered blessings in Christ, wouldn’t it help you and honor him to understand what they are?
6. Even (or is it especially?) non-Christians need good theology. They may not thrill to hear a dry lecture on the ordo salutis. But who wants dry lectures on anything? If you can talk winsomely, passionately, and simply about the blessings of effectual calling, regeneration, and adoption, and how all these blessings are found in Christ, and how the Christian life is nothing more or less than being who we are in Christ, and how this means God really does want us to be true to ourselves, but ourselves as we were born again not as we were born in sin–if you give non-Christians all of this, and give it to them plainly, you’ll be giving them a whole lot of theology. And, if the Spirit of God is at work, they just might come back looking for more.
There is no reason for any church to be anything other than robustly theological. Churches will still come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But “atheological,” or worse yet “anti-theological,” should not be one of them.
A Question of Time
“Surely one of the most difficult things for us to understand about God is His eternal nature. We are limited to time. We experience reality as a series of events- past, present and future. Our language is based upon our experience of time. We have past tenses, and present tenses, and future tenses. We think in a temporal, time-based way.
But God does not exist as we do. We have seen that He is unique, and one of the greatest ways in which this is seen is His relationship with time itself. When we speak of God as eternal, what do we mean? Are we simply asserting that God has always existed and will always exist? While that may be true, God’s eternal nature is not limited to simply exhaustive existence for a very long, long time. We are speaking of God’s actually transcending the boundaries of time, of existing outside of the realm of time!
“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.” -Isaiah 40:28
Jehovah is the eternal, everlasting God. Yet, if He is limited to an existence within time, then we have to believe that time existed prior to God. Is time an absolute that is higher than God? Is God subservient to time? Does time exist outside of God, beyond His control, and is He limited to it? Or is time itself a creation of God, defined and directed by Him? I believe the Bible clearly teaches the latter position, despite the difficulty we have in understanding it! God is the Creator of all things, including time itself, and is therefore not bound to an existence that is marked by the “past–present–future” mode of being.
What this means is, quite obviously, mind-boggling for us creatures. God has never once predicted the future. What I mean by this is that God does not simply sit here in the present with us and, through some strange power, peer into the future so as to be able to predict future events with uncanny accuracy. No, God does not “look into the future” because He is already there! He is with the first and the last of the generations as Creator, and all that takes place in time does so at His sovereign command… God’s knowledge of the future, then, is based not upon predictive powers, but upon the simple fact that God created time, and is already present in that future that exists solely because He decreed it to be so.” – Dr. James White, God’s Sovereign Grace
Psalm 22
Psalm 22 is what theologians refer to as a Messianic Psalm. Though written by David it refers to events that transcend his own life and were fulfilled in the life, and especially the death (crucifixion) of Messiah. This is possible because as 2 Peter 1:21 tells us, “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
When Jesus cried out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me” two things were taking place, neither of which was contradictory. Firstly Jesus was feeling the full force of being forsaken by His Father, as sin was placed upon Him and He bore the Father’s just wrath for it in our place.
Secondly, just as in our culture, if someone were to say “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound” we know that these words are not being said at random, but we are being reminded of a familiar hymn. The Book of Psalms was the inspired song book of the Jews and for Jesus to quote the first line of Psalm 22 it was a thunderously loud message to all who heard it that He Himself was fulfilling the words of the entire Psalm as he hung there in agony on the cross.
Speaking of the Gentiles, David wrote in verse 16, “For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet.” There is nothing to suggest any of this happened in the life of David, but were fulfilled around a thousand years later by Christ at the crucifixion. What is more than interesting is that when David penned these words, crucifixion was not even invented as a form of torture and death. Sceptics grope for an answer as to why David could write of such things but the believer’s confidence is that only God could have been the source of these words, which is itself a wonderful testimony to the Divine inspiration of Scripture. David was “carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
The same can be said about verse 18, when David wrote, “they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” There’s nothing to suggest this happened to David, but it did happen to Messiah and Jesus is once again alerting us to that by quoting the opening words of the Psalm. The crucifixion of Christ was not an accidental, haphazard occurence. As the early Church prayed to God in Acts 4, “for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”
Jesus was never more in the will of God than when He hung on the cross as our sinless sin bearing Substitute. By raising Him from the dead God testified that He was indeed His Son and validified all His claims as to what His death had accomplished. Paul tells us, He “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord..” (Romans 1:3, 4)
Watch now as Ryan Ferguson delivers a memorized dramatic recitation of Psalm 22 from the ESV Bible.
Where is your treasure?
“Many Christians dread the thought of leaving this world. Why? Because so many have stored up their treasures on earth, not in heaven. Each day brings us closer to death. If your treasures are on earth, that means each day brings you closer to losing your treasures. He who lays up treasures on earth spends his life backing away from his treasures. To him, death is loss.
He who lays up treasures in heaven looks forward to eternity; he’s moving daily toward his treasures. To him, death is gain. He who spends his life moving toward his treasures has reason to rejoice. Are you despairing or rejoicing?” – Randy Alcorn
Roman Catholics, the Gospel and Salvation
Transcript from a Conference Question and Answer Session with Dr. R. C. Sproul – Pittsburgh, 2000
Questioner to Dr. R. C. Sproul: “How do you feel about the Vatican and its doctrine? Can you believe in this and still be saved?”
RC Sproul: “If they are asking ‘Can you be a member of the Roman Catholic Church and be saved?’ I would say ‘without question, Yes.’ If you understand fully the doctrines of the Vatican and embrace them, then I would say ‘No you can’t.’
That’s because to embrace the teaching of Rome, clearly understood, you would have to repudiate the gospel – particularly the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which contrary to the press releases of the accord with the Lutherans and all of that, the Roman Catholic Church has not changed its teaching from the Council of Trent one bit. The Council of Trent (the middle of the 16th Century) was where they set forth their condemnation of the Reformation view of justification and set forth the expression of their own doctrine of justification.
Questioner: “which is?”
R C Sproul: “well its complicated.. but real quickly, the doctrine of justification in Rome involves several elements. It begins with baptism (sacramentally) where in the sacrament of baptism, justifying grace is infused into the soul of the recipient (its called the righteousness of Christ). It is infused ex opere operato (through the working of the sacrament). That infusion of grace places the infant in a state of grace and two things have to happen: one, they must cooperate with that grace and assent to that grace to be justified, (coopere et assentara are the exact words of Trent) to such a point that righteousness inheres in the soul for them to be saved. Now as long as righteousness inheres in the soul, you are in a state of justification (you are in a state of grace) until or unless you commit mortal sin.
Mortal sin is called mortal sin because it kills the grace of justification in your soul. Now here’s also what is spelled out at Trent – you can commit mortal sin while you still have authentic faith – so you can have faith and not have justification – so faith alone will never suffice. They are not saying that you will be justified without faith because they require that you have faith and faith performs three functions. Faith is determined at Trent to be the fundamentum (the foundation), the initium (the initiation), and the rodex, the root of justification – so you’ve got to have faith, but faith alone will not do it.
Now if you commit mortal sin, you don’t get re-baptized, even though you have lost the grace of justification, you go to the second plank of justification which is the sacrament of penance, defined by Trent as the sacrament for those who have made shipwreck of their souls. In the sacrament of penance you have to make confession, you have to get priestly absolution, and then you have to do your works of satisfaction which are necessary to gain meritum de congruo (or congruous merit) – merit that does not oblige God to redeem you but makes it fitting for God to restore you to a state of grace… and as long as you stay then in that state of grace and you have inherent righteousness (righteousness that is in you) then you will be saved.. but if you die with any impurity on your soul, you go to purgatory (the purging place) until the impurity is removed.
The Protestant and I believe biblical view is that the moment you put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ all that He is and all that He has becomes yours in the sight of God, and that the righteousness by which we are justified is not our inherent righteousness but strictly and solely the righteousness that Luther said is extra nos (outside of us) a iustisium alienum, an alien righteousness, somebody else’s righteousness, that’s the gospel, that what saves me is not my inherent righteousness but the righteousness of Christ that was performed in His life, not in my life, in His life, and the moment I put my faith and trust in Him, I am redeemed forever.
I don’t have to worry about purgatory, I don’t have to worry about works of congruous merit, I don’t have to worry about inherent righteousness – I mean God is going to make me inherently righteous in heaven, but my justification does not rely upon that. It is not the gospel to go tell people, here, the grace of God will help you become inherently righteous, why don’t you come and join our church and we will give you the sacrament of grace to help you. That’s not the gospel.”
Notes: Here are some quotes from the Catholic Catechism:
On Merit:
“With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man. Between God and us there is an immeasurable inequality, for we have received everything from him, our Creator” (CC, 2007).
“The merit of man before God in the Christian life arises from the fact that God has freely chosen to associate man with the work of his grace. The fatherly action of God is first on his own initiative, and then follows man’s free acting through his collaboration, so that the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful. Man’s merit, moreover, itself is due to God, for his good actions proceed in Christ, from the predispositions and assistance given by the Holy Spirit” (CC, 2008).
“Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion. Moved by the Holy Spirit and by charity, we can then merit for ourselves and for others the graces needed for our sanctification, for the increase of grace and charity, and for the attainment of eternal life” (CC, 2010).
On Forgiveness of Sins
“Our Lord tied the forgiveness of sins to faith and Baptism. . . . Baptism is the first and chief sacrament of forgiveness of sins because it unites us with Christ, who died for our sins and rose for our justification, so that ‘we too might walk in newness of life'” (977).
“When we made our first profession of faith while receiving the holy Baptism that cleansed us, the forgiveness we received then was so full and complete that there remained in us absolutely nothing left to efface, neither original sin nor offenses committed by our own will, nor was there left any penalty to suffer in order to expiate them… Yet the grace of Baptism delivers no one from all the weakness of nature” (CC, 978).
Justification: See CC, 1990-91.
“Justification is conferred in Baptism, the sacrament of faith. It conforms us to the righteousness of God, who makes us inwardly just by the power of his mercy. Its purpose is the glory of God and of Christ, and the gift of eternal life” (CC, 1992).
“…justification entails the sanctification of his whole being” (CC, 1995).
Two Questions from a Muslim
Without Excuse
When God says “I will…”
“I WILL sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I WILL cleanse you. And I WILL give you a new heart, and a new spirit I WILL put within you. And I WILL remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I WILL put my Spirit within you, and CAUSE YOU to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” – Ezekiel 36:25-27