Monthly Archives: September 2016

Understanding The Love of God

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DA CARSONArticle: D. A. Carson: 5 Key Realities the Bible Teaches about God’s Love (original source edited by Christopher W. Morgan.

Some Different Ways the Bible Speaks of the Love of God

I had better warn you that not all of the passages to which I refer actually use the word love. When I speak of the doctrine of the love of God, I include themes and texts that depict God’s love without ever using the word, just as Jesus tells parables that depict grace without using that word.

With that warning to the fore, I draw your attention to five distinguishable ways the Bible speaks of the love of God. This is not an exhaustive list, but it is heuristically useful.

1. The Peculiar Love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father

John’s Gospel is especially rich in this theme. Twice we are told that the Father loves the Son, once with the verb jagapaw (John 3:35), and once with oilew (5:20). Yet the evangelist also insists that the world must learn that Jesus loves the Father (14:31). This intra-Trinitarian love of God not only marks off Christian monotheism from all other monotheisms but is bound up in surprising ways with revelation and redemption.

2. God’s Providential Love over All That He Has Made

By and large the Bible veers away from using the word love in this connection, but the theme is not hard to find. God creates everything, and before there is a whiff of sin, he pronounces all that he has made to be “good” (Genesis 1). This is the product of a loving Creator. The Lord Jesus depicts a world in which God clothes the grass of the fields with the glory of wildflowers seen by no human being, perhaps, but seen by God. The lion roars and hauls down its prey, but it is God who feeds the animal. The birds of the air find food, but that is the result of God’s loving providence, and not a sparrow falls from the sky apart from the sanction of the Almighty (Matthew 6). If this were not a benevolent providence, a loving providence, then the moral lesson that Jesus drives home, viz., that this God can be trusted to provide for his own people, would be incoherent.

3. God’s Salvific Stance toward His Fallen World

God so loved the world that he gave his Son (John 3:16). I know that some try to take k´osmoy (“world”) here to refer to the elect. But that really will not do. All the evidence of the usage of the word in John’s Gospel is against the suggestion. True, “world” in John does not so much refer to bigness as to badness. In John’s vocabulary, “world” is primarily the moral order in willful and culpable rebellion against God. In John 3:16, God’s love in sending the Lord Jesus is to be admired not because it is extended to so big a thing as the world, but to so bad a thing; not to so many people, as to such wicked people. Nevertheless, elsewhere John can speak of “the whole world” (1 John 2:2),1 thus bringing bigness and badness together. More importantly, in Johannine theology the disciples themselves once belonged to the world but were drawn out of it (e.g., John 15:19). On this axis, God’s love for the world cannot be collapsed into his love for the elect.

The same lesson is learned from many passages and themes in Scripture. However much God stands in judgment over the world, he also presents himself as the God who invites and commands all human beings to repent. He orders his people to carry the gospel to the farthest corner of the world, proclaiming it to men and women everywhere. To rebels the sovereign Lord calls out, “As surely as I live . . . I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?” (Ezek. 33:11).2 Continue reading →

General and Special Revelation

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Sproul0003[Adapted from Everyone’s a Theologian by R.C. Sproul]

Christianity is not based on speculative philosophy; it is a revealed faith. The basic claim of the Christian faith is that the truth we embrace comes to us from God Himself.

Christianity makes a distinction between general revelation (in creation) and special revelation (in the Bible).

God is the Source of all truth

God is the source of all truth, not only religious truth. We as creatures could not know anything were it not that God has made knowledge possible for us. Even those with perfect vision, if they were placed in a room filled with beautiful objects, could not see any of the beauty, if the room were immersed in darkness. So, when scientists seek to discern truth in their laboratories while belittling us for our claim to trust in revelation for the content of our religious faith, we can simply point out that they could learn nothing from a test tube were it not for the Creator’s revelation and His gift of the ability to learn through a study of nature.

General Revelation

God’s general revelation is called general because it is given to every human being in the entire world. It is given in and through nature and through the human conscience (which is why it is sometimes called “natural revelation”). “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). God has given all human beings a sense of right and wrong (Rom. 2:14-15). General revelation does not reveal God’s work as Redeemer, only His work as Creator. One cannot study a sunset and see the heavens declaring God’s plan of salvation; which is precisely why God’s special revelation in the Bible is necessary for salvation.

Generally speaking, according to Romans 1:18-21, the knowledge that human beings gain through general revelation is knowledge of God’s “invisible attributes,” specifically, “His eternal power and Godhead.” This revelation is plain. But it is our nature as sinners to suppress that revelation in unrighteousness.

Unbelievers attempt to excuse their refusal to come to God by claiming that God has failed to provide sufficient proof of His existence, but the Bible is clear that God’s revelation of Himself in nature and in the human conscience provides us with true and clear knowledge of His character. Our sinful suppression of that revelation does not erase the knowledge of God that He has given us through nature and in our hearts. Therefore, everyone needs the gospel, because everyone has been judged guilty – not for rejecting Jesus, of whom many have never heard, but rejecting God the Father, who has revealed Himself plainly to every human being.

Special Revelation

Special Revelation is found (ever since the completion of the Canon) only in the Bible.

In OT times, God spoke to people directly on occasion: through dreams, signs, the casting of lots, and theophany, which is a visible manifestation of the invisible God. The best-known theophany is the burning bush; also the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire. Continue reading →

The meaning of Semper Reformanda

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carl-truemanArticle: Carl R. Trueman “What Semper Reformanda Is and Isn’t” (original source of course, is that while there may be agreement on the sentiment expressed, there is often radical disagreement on how it is to be achieved. In this example, some might argue for greater deregulation of international trade, others for increased aid, others for targeted educational solutions.

There are also some phrases that occur in the context of the church that are similar in terms of universal agreement. One that is a hardy perennial within broadly Reformed evangelical circles is this: The Reformed church always needs reforming. Who could disagree with that sentiment? It seems on the surface to capture something of the scriptural earnestness of the Reformation. To reject it would seem to smack of a complacent, if not positively pharisaical, assertion of the perfection of the status quo. It would also appear to undermine that most basic of Reformation ideas—the church is always to be measuring itself by Scripture and thus always seeking to change in ways that make its testimony more faithful to God’s revelation.

Unfortunately, however, the phrase is somewhat contentless. Within the last decade, it became the rallying cry of groups influenced by the so-called emergent church movement. To them, it meant that the church needed to engage in a fundamental, and generally continual, reformulation of her doctrine and, indeed, of her understanding of what doctrine is and how it is to function. Thus, doctrines such as justification, inerrancy, and even the idea of Scripture alone needed to be rethought in the context of a postmodern mind-set.

We might say that when used this way, the phrase “the reformed church always needs reforming” was less a basic methodological principle and more of an aesthetic. What I mean is this: we live in a world where the idea of truth as fixed and stable is unpopular and even regarded as dangerous and oppressive by many. Instead, people prefer a world where truth is always in flux, where it is negotiable, where, one might say, it ultimately makes no absolute demands on anyone.

Thus, this phrase appeals because it seems to make the truth a matter of continual negotiation and change. The church claims that Jesus is God? Well, that may have been true at Chalcedon in 451, but we need a different model for understanding Him today. The church denies the legitimacy of same-sex marriage? Again, that idea may have operated in a time when homophobia was dominant—indeed, it may have helped to maintain precisely such homophobia—but we need to reform our understanding of marriage and sex in light of contemporary needs and demands. Flux, change, and uncertainty rule, and glossing these with the phrase “the reformed church always needs reforming” gives this very postmodern aesthetic a speciously orthodox sound.

In fact, the phrase is a good one, but only when it is understood as reflecting the basic scriptural principle of the Reformed church.

There are two foundations necessary for grasping the appropriate meaning of the phrase. First, Scripture is the final authoritative source for the church’s life and doctrine. Everything the church says or does is to be consistent with God’s Word and is to be regulated by God’s Word. One implication of this is that whatever the church says and does because of inferences drawn from Scripture must be scrutinized very carefully in light of Scripture. There is always potential for refinement, for example. Continue reading →