SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
I am delighted to be joining Dr. James White on a special “Radio Free Geneva” Dividing Line live webcast Tuesday, January 24 at 1 PM EST. I’ve been asked to talk about and then we will both continue to examine Emir Caner’s sermon on Calvinism, which Dr. White began reviewing last week. You can listen to the webcast at www.aomin.org.
For those who cannot listen in live, I will post a link to the recording later in the day.
“But why is faith the means of justification? Simply because it is the action of union with Jesus Christ. Faith is our coming to Him, our trusting Him, our resting in Him. The moment we are united to Him, we are immediately endowed with all that He has secured for us. We are immediately justified before we have done a single good deed, because we are His and He is God’s. Just as a very poor woman is a very poor woman until the very moment that she marries a wealthy man. But at the moment that she becomes his wife, she becomes a wealthy woman. It is by means of her acceptance that she becomes a wealthy woman, but her acceptance does not make her a wealthy woman; it is her husband’s wealth that makes her so. So faith does not justify; Christ justifies. But faith is the act of union with Christ.”
– John H. Gerstner
“The Pharisees’ problem was not that they were too concerned with orthodox teaching, but that they had invented their own orthodoxy. Jesus condemned them for replacing and modifying the clear truth of Scripture with their own traditions (Matthew 15:1-9). They were the chief theological miscreants of their day.
So how did Jesus treat them? Did He show them love—i.e., did He obey the Second Great Commandment in His dealings with them? Of course.
What did that love entail? First and foremost, Jesus declared the truth to them. He also frequently delivered public rebukes for the errors that threatened to damn them. He castigated them. He occasionally held them up to public ridicule. He obviously valued their souls more than their feelings. That is what authentic love looks like. In other words, Christ, not Rodney King, is the paragon of perfect love.
The vast majority of Pharisees didn’t heed Jesus’ warnings, of course. The smug or snide ones might have even claimed it was because He didn’t “have a relationship based upon love.” It was nonetheless the right thing for Him to correct their false teaching and warn others of the danger posed by their error.”
– Phil Johnson