Monthly Archives: May 2017

Responding to Open Theism

Posted on by
Reply

Article: Responding to Open Theism in Fourteen Words By Andrew Wilson (original source here)

Because of the controversy over open theism twenty years ago, there is a huge range of books and articles out there, both critiquing it and defending it. Greg Boyd’s website is a fount of free resources in defence; Crossway’s generosity means that in many ways the most significant critique, Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, is also free to download or read online. But when theological debates hit the person in the pew, there is a place for keeping things simple. So here are fourteen common sense objections to open theism, framed around thirteen words and one number. Here’s hoping they help.

Orthodoxy. Even the most sympathetic advocates of open theism admit that it is all-but-impossible to find in the first eighteen centuries of the Church’s history. (The Trinitarian heretic Faustus Socinus is the somewhat uncomfortable exception that proves the rule.) For those committed to historic orthodoxy, that is a massive problem—and the common open theist response, that we have only recently learned how to read the Bible without being skewed by Platonism, founders on the evidence from the (decidedly non-Platonic) Rabbis, among other things.

139. If you type “Greg Boyd Psalm” into Google, it immediately suggests “139,” and it’s easy to see why. “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether” (139:4). “In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.” Despite their best efforts, texts like these continue to pose an enormous problem for open theists.

Babies. If love is not love unless it is freely chosen—which is pretty central for many open theists—then how can babies go to heaven? (This is a problem for Arminians as well, of course.)

Exceptions. One of the difficulties of engaging with open theism is that, whenever a specific example of God knowing about a future human decision is under discussion—Pharaoh’s hardening, most of the things foretold by the prophets, Peter’s denial, Judas’s betrayal, and so on—it can be waved away as an exception: “ah, but that’s one of the things that God does know.” This makes it look suspiciously like a claim that is immune to being falsified. (It’s like Tom Wright’s comment on a Dominican theologian: “Schillebeeckx first sweeps all the evidence under the carpet, and then exclaims, ‘Look! No evidence!’”)

Miracles. As soon as you have a God who can work miracles, you also have a God who could work all sorts of miracles to prevent evil, and yet chooses not to. Why raise Lazarus and not John the Baptist? Why calm one storm and not another? Why provide manna for Israel and not Sudan? Why strike down Herod and not Hitler? Why destroy all the non-Jews in Egypt, but not Auschwitz? If X is evil, and God could stop X miraculously but chooses not to, is he not somehow choosing to allow X? If not, why not?

Sustinence. It’s actually worse than that, because God is not only choosing not to stop Auschwitz; he is sustaining it. He upholds the universe by the word of his power. He provides rain and sunshine for it. He causes the heart of the Oberst-Gruppenführer to keep beating. He sustains the whole cosmos, including the Zyklon B. By choosing to continue doing these things, God is just as implicated in the ongoing existence of evil as he would be in a more orthodox view. Isn’t he?

Names. If, as is often said, God knows what he is going to do but not what we are going to do, how did he know, centuries in advance, what the parents of the Persian king Cyrus were going to name their son (Isa 44:28; 45:1)? I choose this example because the parents’ choice of name clearly has no bearing whatsoever on the history of redemption, so we cannot put it in a special category of its own. If God knows a human decision as apparently trivial as that, why should we think there are any human decisions he does not know about?

Comfort. If you are Reformed or Arminian, and you face a situation of intense difficulty, you can be comforted with the truth that God knew this was going to happen, and it has not caught him by surprise. (I’m speaking from experience here, obviously, as many can.) If you are an open theist, you cannot say that; in fact, you will probably assume that he has only just found out, just like you. Somehow that is far less reassuring.

Providence. Again, faced with suffering or opposition, a Reformed person will say some version of what Joseph said to his brothers—“You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good, that many lives should be saved”—and then go and read the Heidelberg Catechism. An open theist will have to say: no, God didn’t mean it for good. In fact, he didn’t “mean” it at all.

Agency. If God in no sense wills the evil that is brought about by Satan and/or wicked human beings, then how do we make sense of the fact that both God and Satan incited David to take a census? Or that both God and Satan are said to be behind Job’s sufferings? Or that both God and Satan moved Judas to betray Jesus? Or that Paul’s thorn was a messenger of Satan, yet was given in order to make Paul depend on grace? What do we do with those texts (Ex 5-10; Isa 10; 45; Lam 3; Acts 4; etc) which explicitly attribute actions both to wicked human beings and to God?

Trinity. If love is necessarily risky (this claim is one of Boyd’s central propositions in his “Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy”), then how can the Father, Son and Spirit all love one another?

Hell. Why are advocates of open theism so frequently drawn to either annihilationism or purgatory, or both? (This isn’t a mere ad hominem; views on hell and openness are explicitly connected in the works of a number of open theist writers.) Is the traditional view of hell incompatible with open theism?

Paul. In a number of places, Paul presents a picture of divine and human action that looks very different to open theism, a point which I encountered regularly in my PhD studies. Not only does God know what we will choose to do; he is himself somehow active in what we choose to do (1 Cor 10:12-13; 15:10; Gal 2:20; Phil 2:13-14; and so on). John Barclay coins the term “energism” to reflect Paul’s thought here: God is active within the human subject. So if we try to rescue God from being aware of (or active in) free human choices in advance, we may find ourselves also rescuing God from Paul’s theology.

Lewis. If you can stretch from fourteen words to twenty, then C. S. Lewis put it best in his Mere Christianity: “Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.” Sometimes a dose of good old-fashioned English common sense is what you need.

As I said at the start, there is far, far more that could be (and has been) said about all this, so this is very much a brief introduction to a whole range of issues associated with open theism. But since it is coming up a bit more in my immediate experience, I thought a sketch like this might be helpful to others.

Reasons to Avoid Churches Who Will Not Practice Church Discipline

Posted on by
Reply

Article: Reasons to Avoid Churches Who Will Not Practice Church Discipline by Eric Davis (original source here)

The biblical church discipline process described in Matthew 18:15-20 is often messy, costly, and accompanied by damage. The pain experienced is typically unmatched when a professing believer must be publicly put out of the local church.

Even so, when practiced biblically, it is consistent with biblical love, care, and obedience to Christ. It is that sacred process where the holiness of God is upheld, the purity of the church maintained, and the value of souls practiced. Mark Dever rightly says that church discipline is “a loving, provocative, attractive, distinct, respectful, gracious act of obedience and mercy, and that it helps to build a church that brings glory to God.” A friend of mine personally experienced that very thing. He was biblically disciplined out of a large church and to this day he confesses that it was one of the best things that ever happened to him.

But more importantly, it’s a non-negotiable matter in God’s kind of church. Robust confessions of faith such as the Belgic, Scottish, and Heidelberg Catechism rightly identified church discipline as a sine qua non ingredient of a local church.

Now, the existence of church discipline in a church does not necessarily mean that a church is sound. Sadly, it’s a process that is sometimes abused. However, a refusal to practice it is a certain red flag. It’s one thing if a church leadership has not been practicing church discipline and is attempting to implement it. But it’s quite another thing if a church will not practice it. That refusal is symptomatic of other problems, making it a church to be avoided.

Here are 10 common problems among churches that will not practice discipline on you, making them unsafe:

1. A dangerous approach to God and his word.

God commands the sacred practice of church discipline. In addition to Christ’s clear command in Matthew 18:15-20, it shows up in passages like Romans 16:17-18, 1 Corinthians 5:1-13, 2 Corinthians 2:5-11, Galatians 6:1-3, 2 Thessalonians 3:6, 14-15, and Titus 3:9-11. Continue reading →

The Courage to Be Reformed

Posted on by
Reply

Article: The Courage to Be Reformed by Burk Parsons (original source here)

Rev. Burk Parsons is copastor of Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Fla., a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow, vice president of publishing for Ligonier Ministries, and editor of Tabletalk magazine.

When we come to grasp Reformed theology, it’s not only our understanding of salvation that changes, but our understanding of everything. It’s for this reason that when people wrestle through the rudimentary doctrines of Reformed theology and come to comprehend them, they often feel like they have been converted a second time. In fact, as many have admitted to me, the reality is that some have been converted for the very first time. It was through their examination of Reformed theology that they came face-to-face with the stark reality of their radical corruption and deadness in sin, God’s unconditional election of His own and condemnation of others, Christ’s actual accomplishment of redemption for His people, the Holy Spirit’s effectual grace, the reason they persevere by God’s preserving grace, and God’s covenantal way of working in all of history for His glory. When people realize that ultimately, they didn’t choose God, but He chose them, they naturally come to a point of humble admission of the amazing grace of God toward them. It’s only then, when we recognize what wretches we really are, that we can truly sing “Amazing Grace.” And that is precisely what Reformed theology does: it transforms us from the inside out and leads us to sing—it leads us to worship our sovereign and triune, gracious, and loving God in all of life, not just on Sundays but every day and in all of life. Reformed theology isn’t just a badge we wear when being Reformed is popular and cool, it’s a theology that we live and breathe, confess, and defend even when it’s under attack.

The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, along with their fifteenth-century forerunners and their seventeenth-century descendants, did not teach and defend their doctrine because it was cool or popular, but because it was biblical, and they put their lives on the line for it. They were not only willing to die for the theology of Scripture, they were willing to live for it, to suffer for it, and to be considered fools for it. Make no mistake: the Reformers were bold and courageous not on account of their self-confidence and self-reliance but on account of the fact that they had been humbled by the gospel. They were courageous because they had been indwelled by the Holy Spirit and equipped to proclaim the light of truth in a dark age of lies. The truth they preached was not new; it was ancient. It was the doctrine of the martyrs, the fathers, the Apostles, and the patriarchs—it was the doctrine of God set forth in sacred Scripture.

The Reformers didn’t make up their theology; rather, their theology made them who they were. The theology of Scripture made them Reformers. For they did not set out to be Reformers, per se—they set out to be faithful to God and faithful to Scripture. Neither the solas of the Reformation nor the doctrines of grace (the five points of Calvinism) were invented by the Reformers, nor were they by any means the sum total of Reformation doctrine. Rather, they became underlying doctrinal premises that served to help the church of subsequent eras confess and defend what she believes. Even today there are many who think they embrace Reformed theology, but their Reformed theology only runs as deep as the solas of the Reformation and the doctrines of grace. What’s more, there are many who say they adhere to Reformed theology but do so without anyone knowing they are Reformed. Such “closet Calvinists” neither confess any of the historic Reformed confessions of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries nor employ any distinctly Reformed theological language.

However, if we truly adhere to Reformed theology according to the historic Reformed confessions, we cannot help but be identified as Reformed. In truth, it’s impossible to remain a “closet Calvinist,” and it’s impossible to remain Reformed without anyone knowing it—it will inevitably come out. To be historically Reformed, one must adhere to a Reformed confession, and not only adhere to it but confess it, proclaim it, and defend it. Reformed theology is fundamentally a confessional theology.

Reformed theology is also an all-encompassing theology. It changes not only what we know, it changes how we know what we know. It not only changes our understanding of God, it changes our understanding of ourselves. Indeed, it not only changes our view of salvation, it changes how we worship, how we evangelize, how we raise our children, how we treat the church, how we pray, how we study Scripture—it changes how we live, move, and have our being. Reformed theology is not a theology that we can hide, and it is not a theology to which we can merely pay lip service. For that has been the habit of heretics and theological progressives throughout history. They claim to adhere to their Reformed confessions, but they never actually confess them. They claim to be Reformed only when they are on the defensive—when their progressive (albeit popular) theology is called into question, and, if they are pastors, only when their jobs are on the line. While theological liberals might be in churches and denominations that identify as “Reformed,” they are ashamed of such an identity and have come to believe that being known as “Reformed” is a stumbling block to some and an offense to others. Moreover, according to the historic, ordinary marks of the church—the pure preaching of the Word of God, prayer according to the Word of God, the right use of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and the consistent practice of church discipline—such “Reformed” churches are often not even true churches. Today, there are many laypeople and pastors who are in traditionally Reformed and Protestant churches and denominations who, along with their churches and denominations, left their Reformed moorings and rejected their confessions years ago.

Contrary to this trend, what we most need are men in the pulpit who have the courage to be Reformed—men who aren’t ashamed of the faith once delivered to the saints but who are ready to contend for it, not with lip service but with all their life and all their might. We need men in the pulpit who are bold and unwavering in their proclamation of the truth and who are at the same time gracious and compassionate. We need men who will preach the unvarnished truth of Reformed theology in season and out of season, not with a finger pointing in the face but with an arm around the shoulder. We need men who love the Reformed confessions precisely because they love the Lord our God and His unchanging, inspired, and authoritative Word. It’s only when we have men in the pulpit who have the courage to be Reformed that we will have people in the pew who grasp Reformed theology and its effects in all of life, so that we might love God more with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves. That is the theology that reformed the church in the sixteenth century, and that is the only theology that will bring reformation and revival in the twenty-first century. For in our day of radical progressive theological liberalism, the most radical thing we can be is orthodox according to our Reformed confessions, yet not with arrogance but with courage and compassion for the church and for the lost, all for the glory of God, and His glory alone.

Putting Wind In His Sails

Posted on by
Reply

By Rachel Zwayne (original source here)

Rachel Zwayne was born and raised in New Zealand. At the age of 14, her father’s ministry (Ray Comfort/ Living Waters) relocated to southern California, where she eventually met her husband and became the mother of five children. Rachel has been homeschooling for the past 15 years and finds great delight in encouraging other women in their role as mothers, wives, and homeschoolers. She has done this in her capacity as a leader and teacher of multiple women’s groups. Rachel has been married to Emeal (“E.Z.”) for 21 years and they live in Riverside, California with their three daughters and two sons.

I have now graduated two of my five, wonderful, homeschool students, and with each year that passes, my heart is filled with more and more gratitude for the privilege of educating my children at home. But as every homeschool mother knows, amidst all of the joy and delight that we are blessed to experience, homeschooling has plenty of challenges along the way.

One of these challenges is making sure that your relationship with your husband gets more focus than all the other responsibilities that are constantly vying for your attention. John MacArthur reminds us that “Contrary to popular opinion, the most important characteristic of a godly mother is her relationship, not with her children, but with her husband. What you communicate to your children through your marital relationship will stay with them for the rest of their lives. By watching you and your husband, they are learning the most fundamental lessons of life-love, self-sacrifice, integrity, virtue, sin, sympathy, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. Whatever you teach them about those things, right or wrong, is planted deep within their hearts.” Your relationship with your husband must be a priority to you, even when life gets chaotic and overwhelming.

Proverbs 31 Woman?
When things are going smoothly—the baby is sleeping through the night, the older children are actually learning how to love each other, academics are a breeze, everyone is healthy, and finances look great, it’s definitely not a problem to love on and serve your husband. When he arrives home from work, he’s greeted with a tidy house, happy children, the laundry done, his requests taken care of, and a hot meal on the table. These are the seasons of life when we feel like we might actually be somewhat close to being a “Proverbs 31 woman.”

But then there are those days that are all too familiar to a homeschool wife: The baby screamed every time you put her down. Five different children had “math meltdowns.” Your toddler decided he’s not potty-trained anymore. The morning devotion on “loving one another” basically had about a 15-second impact on your bickering children. You forgot about dinner on the stove (because you got caught up trying to finally get that science experiment to actually work), and now the dog won’t even eat it. And you didn’t have a moment to brush your hair, let alone take a shower. By the time your husband walks through the door, you’re not sure if it is humanly possible for you to live until the kids’ bedtime.

One of “Those” Days
These types of challenging days are extremely frequent for homeschool mothers, so what’s a woman to do in regard to prioritizing her marriage in these times? When you encounter one of “those” days once again, and you feel that you don’t have an ounce of energy to give an ounce of ANYTHING to your husband, remember this encouraging truth: “Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the bones” (Proverbs 16:24). Use your words to serve your husband! Your mouth is still in working order and you can use it to speak words of hope, encouragement, and joy.

When a husband has a wife who finds joy in her God, and words of hope and encouragement flow off her tongue, it brings great refreshment to his soul. Your life-giving words can and will put wind in your husband’s sails. Proverbs 15:23 says, “A man has joy by the answer of his mouth, and a word spoken in due season, how good it is!” Encouraging words are truly a balm to the soul. Choose to glorify the Lord in this beautiful way in the life of your husband:

• Speak of the hope that you have in Christ even though your day was rough
• Talk of the hope that you have for your family and how the Lord is at work in all of you
• Express how blessed you are by your life regardless of the many challenges in your day
• Convey with optimism what the next day holds for you
• Even through tears, verbalize that you are trusting in God’s sovereignty in your trials
• Ask him how his day was and find out what he needs prayer for
• Encourage him with the things that you love about his character
• Tell him how much you admire him for how he provides for your family
• Remind him how handsome and strong he is
• Share Scripture and things you have been encouraged by in your time with the Lord
• Express delight at his arrival
• Share any events of the day that you can find humor in and laugh about together
• Verbalize a lightheartedness about life
• Communicate the things you are thankful for and what brings you joy Continue reading →

Christ Did It All

Posted on by
Reply

This excerpt is adapted from Stephen Nichols’ contribution in The Legacy of Luther.

Nestled along the Rhine River, Heidelberg was the site for the General Chapter, or assembly, of the Augustinian Order in May 1518. Staupitz, the general vicar (or head) of the order, seized this moment for Luther to speak to the crisis caused by the Ninety-Five Theses. Luther responded by drafting a new set of theses, the Twenty-Eight Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation. Though far less known than the theses nailed to the church door, these theses are the most important text during this period of Luther’s development. At one point in his life, Luther would declare, “Crux sola est nostra theologia,” meaning, “The cross alone is our theology.” That singular expression crystalizes what Luther was aiming at in the Twenty-Eight Theses at Heidelberg. Before enumerating the theses, Luther wrote a short introductory paragraph as a preface. The preface is essential for understanding the work as a whole. Luther starts off by noting that he distrusts “completely our own wisdom,” and so he relies on and draws from “St. Paul, the especially chosen vessel and instrument of Christ, and also from St. Augustine, his most trustworthy interpreter.”

The Latin expression ad fontes, “to the sources,” served as the Renaissance battle cry. It meant going back to the originals, or the fountainheads. This can be seen in the revival of Greco-Roman architecture and art. It can be seen in the desire to read Plato and Aristotle directly, instead of reading layers of medieval interpretations of Plato and Aristotle. In theology, it meant reading the Bible, and Augustine too, rather than reading layers of commentary on the primary sources. Ad fontes of the Renaissance is mirrored in the counterpart sola Scriptura of the Reformation. Luther’s short preface declares the sources of his teaching—Paul and Augustine. He also admits—and we need to see this—that the hearers and readers of the Twenty-Eight Theses will have to determine how “well or poorly” Luther deduced them from Paul and Augustine. Luther’s source, however, was the fountainhead. It was the “source” that led him to see how wrong the practice of penance became back in October 1517. The more Luther looked to the sources, the more wrong he saw in the church of his day.

After the short paragraph preface comes the Twenty-Eight Theses. They compare and contrast what Luther calls a “theologian of glory” and a “theologian of the cross.” Typically, we associate glory, especially the glory of God, with good things. In this case, however, Luther sees a theologian of glory as a bad thing. A theologian of glory is the same as the false prophet who declares peace in thesis 92 of the Ninety-Five Theses. In Heidelberg thesis 21, Luther writes, “A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil.” In using the term glory, Luther is talking about the inane idea that humanity itself has its own glory, or that humanity has the ability to please God and to perform righteousness. This idea leads the theologian of glory to disdain God’s grace. Divine grace is the good thing that a theologian of glory calls evil. In short, the theologian of glory exults in human ability and in works-righteousness. Standing in contrast to the theologian of glory is the theologian of the cross. The theologian of the cross starts with us—more specifically, with our misery. Thesis 18 reads, “It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ.” Consequently, thesis 25 informs us, “He is not righteous who does much, but he who, without work, believes much in Christ.”

The theologian of glory actually does far worse than call grace evil. The theologian of glory, the one who trusts in human ability and trusts in the accumulation of merits and works, actually despises Christ. Then, in the last of the Twenty-Eight Theses, Martin Luther writes what very well may be the most beautiful sentence he ever wrote: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.” The love of God will never find anything pleasing to it in us, because we are all sinners who are unrighteous and utterly distasteful to the Holy God. And so, God makes us righteous. He (re)creates us.

Many years later, in 1545, Luther reflected on his conversion, and offered up an extraordinary account of this event, one that hinges on understanding the difference between the active and the passive. So, Luther tells us:

Meanwhile, I had already during that year returned to interpret the Psalter anew. I had confidence in the fact that I was more skilful, after I had lectured in the university on St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the one to the Hebrews. I had indeed been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. But up till then it was not the cold blood about the heart, but a single word in Chapter 1, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed” that had stood in my way. For I hated that word “righteousness of God,” which, according to the use and custom of all the teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they call it, with which God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at that place, most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted. At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.”

Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the Scripture from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.

This is the gospel. This is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The key here is that Luther is passive. Christ takes on his sin. Christ achieves righteousness, in His obedience in His life and in His death on the cross. This was Luther’s discovery. Christ did it. All of it.

Are All Religions Basically the Same?

Posted on by
Reply

In this brief clip from his teaching series Defending Your Faith, R.C. Sproul explains why Christianity is different from every other religion.

Transcript

I hear people say, “there is this underlining unity, we all believe the same thing.” That’s not true. What Muslims believe about what is good and the nature of redemption is radically different from what Christianity teaches, for example. Buddha was an atheist who simply claimed to be enlightened, Confucius talked about the veneration of ancestors—that’s a long way from the faith of the Scriptures. And what you don’t have in Buddhism and Islam, Confucianism, Shintoism, Taoism, and these other religions is an atonement. You don’t have a way of redemption that we have in Christianity, nor do you have a living Mediator. Moses is dead, Buddha is dead, Confucius is dead, and Muhammad is dead. There is no resurrection in these other religions. Christianity has elements to it, content to it that distinguish it from all other religions, and with that distinction comes the claim of Christ that it [He] is the only true way to God.

Penal Substitution

Posted on by
Reply

Article: Dr. Sam Storms – The Most Serious and Severe Departure From The Faith In Our Day (original source here)

Heresy abounds. It always has and always will, until such time as Jesus returns and exposes the misguided theological fabrications of men and women and vindicates the truth of his Word. In our day, there are many heretical and deviant notions circulating within the professing evangelical church. But I am persuaded that the most serious and severe departure from biblical faith in our day is the repudiation of the truth of penal substitutionary atonement (together with the wicked, childish, inexcusable, or as J. I. Packer has put it, “the smarty-pants” caricature of penal substitution as “cosmic child abuse”).

There is much that could be said about this, but today I restrict my comments to the declaration of Revelation 1:5b where John predicates of Jesus Christ “glory and dominion forever and ever.” And what is the ground for this doxology? Why is Jesus deserving of such praise? It is because, among other things, he “loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood” (Rev. 1:5b).

This the only place in the NT where Christ’s love for us is in the present tense. John wants you to know that no matter what you endure, no matter how sorely you may be persecuted, no matter how badly circumstances may turn out for you and me, Jesus always has, does now, and always will love us. No matter what we face, he always has our best interests in view. His heart beats with passion for his people at all times.

And how do we know he loves us? What has he done to demonstrate that love? The last phrase in v. 5 tells us. The love of Christ for his people is demonstrated by his willingness to endure the judgment and wrath our sins deserved that we might be set free from the single most ominous threat to the eternal welfare of our souls: judgment in hell.

Here in v. 5 we see two motifs joined together: the love (motive) of Jesus for people and his voluntary expression of that love by freeing (action) us from our sins. This is an echo of what Paul said in Galatians 2:20 – “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Again we read in Ephesians 5:2 – “And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

Perhaps your life is a shambles. Perhaps nothing has turned out as you hoped it would. Perhaps you are alone and financially destitute and your body suffers from chronic pain or a terminal disease, and all this stirs in your heart the question: “Does he really love me?” Hear the declaration of John: Yes! He loves you, and you can know this by turning your heart to the concrete, historical, tangible reality of Jesus on a cross for you, shedding his blood for you, and setting you free from death and condemnation.

To say that he has “freed us from our sins by his blood” means that the guilt of our sin that exposes us to divine justice and righteous wrath has been finally and forever removed. We are free from that guilt that puts our souls in eternal jeopardy. And please take note of how this happened. It isn’t because we are physically impressive or because of our good intentions or because of our eloquence, intelligence, or the many promises we have kept. And it certainly isn’t because we are sincere in our religious faith. We are liberated from guilt and divine judgment because our guilt was imputed to Jesus, our judgment fell upon him. His “blood” shed on the cross is what cleanses us from the stain of sin.

The shocking tragedy in our day is that professing evangelicals are attempting to speak meaningfully of God’s love, the death of Christ, and the forgiveness of our sins without reference to the righteous wrath of God which Jesus suffered and exhausted in himself on the cross. It was there that he died in our place, as our substitute, where we should have died. The reason why his death has delivered or set us free from the well-deserved consequences of our sins is that he shed “his blood” as a penal, sacrificial offering for sinners like you and me.

It was our “blood” that should have been shed. The punishment due unto our sin was eternal judgment and separation from the glorious presence of God. But Jesus made atonement for our transgressions by enduring in himself on the cross the penal consequences of our rebellion and idolatry. Continue reading →

About John Calvin

Posted on by
Reply

Article by Dr. Sam Storms entitled 10 Things You Should K ow About the Life of John Calvin (original source here)

Everyone everywhere is talking about Martin Luther in 2017. It is, as you know, the 500th anniversary of the “launch” of the Protestant Reformation. But we would do well to give equal consideration to John Calvin. So today we look at 10 things everyone should know about his life. I will later follow up on this with 10 things we should know about his theology.

(1) Calvin was born on July 10, 1509, at Noyon in Northeastern France. Unlike Luther, Calvin was born into the professional class and received an excellent early education. His name has come to us via a process: Cauvin is French; Calvinus is the Latinized form; Calvin is the Anglicized form.

(2) At the age of 13-14 he attended the University of Paris where he came under the influence of three men: Nicolas Cop; Olivetan (both of whom had a positive impact on him with respect to his eventual break with Rome); and John Major, an anti-reformer who ironically introduced Calvin to the writings of Wycliffe, Hus, and Luther. He received his masters degree in 1528 and then studied law at the University of Orleans under pressure from his father and because of a growing discontent with the Roman Catholic Church. In 1532, at the age of twenty-two, he received his doctorate in civil law. He later studied Classics in Paris and was also well-educated in theology, ancient languages and rhetoric.

(3) Some place his conversion as late as 1534 and others as early as 1527-28. Unlike Luther, his was not a dramatic experience, but not for that reason any less revolutionary. He does describe his move from the teachings of Rome to biblical Christianity as a change “from papal superstitions to evangelical faith, from mechanical ceremonies to trust and faith, and from scholastic traditionalism to biblical simplicity” (Schaff, VIII:306).

At another point he calls it a “sudden conversion” but not in the sense of a Damascus road experience. Rather it was the climactic fall of a city by a final assault following a long siege. When “I was obstinately addicted to the superstitions of the papacy,” he writes, “God subdued and reduced my heart to docility.” Speaking of the sovereignty of God’s work, he writes: “Thou didst shine upon me with the brightness of Thy Spirit. . . . Thou didst arouse my soul.”

(4) Calvin did not at first desire a break with Rome, but envisioned a purification of the church from within. This was not to be. Calvin’s friend, Nicolas Cop, was elected Rector of the University on Oct. 10, 1533 and delivered the inaugural lecture on All Saint’s Day, Nov. 1, before a large assembly. The speech, written primarily by Calvin, was a plea for reformation and an attack on both Catholic theology and theologians. Of the latter Calvin wrote: “They teach nothing of faith, nothing of the love of God, nothing of the remission of sins, nothing of grace, nothing of justification; or if they do so, they pervert and undermine it all by their laws and sophistries. I beg you, who are here present, not to tolerate any longer these heresies and abuses.”

The reaction was violent. Cop fled to Basel. Calvin is reported to have descended from a window by means of bed-sheets and escaped from Paris disguised as a vine-dresser with a hoe upon his shoulder. His rooms were ransacked and his papers seized.

(5) Calvin was influenced by friends and colleagues to break completely with Rome, which he did in 1534. The next two years were spent as a wandering student and evangelist. He settled in Basel, hoping to spend his life in quiet study. There he began writing The Institutes under the assumed name of Marianus Lucanius (either to avoid publicity or persecution). In March of 1536 the first edition, which contained only 6 chapters (an exposition of the Decalogue, the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, with brief comments on baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the other sacraments, Christian liberty, church government, and church discipline) was ready for publication. He became famous overnight.

(6) Calvin returned to Paris in 1536 to settle some old financial matters. He decided to go from there to Strasbourg to be a scholar, but as he later explained it: “God thrust me into the game!” He was detoured during the journey to Geneva because of the war then raging between Francis I and Charles V. An old friend, du Tillet, recognized him in the hotel and immediately informed William Farel (1489-1565). When Calvin resisted Farel’s pleas to join him in the work of reformation in Geneva, the latter shouted: “Therefore, I proclaim to you in the name of Almighty God whose command you defy: Upon your work there shall rest no blessing! Therefore, let God damn your rest, let God damn your work!” As if under searing fire, Calvin’s defiance melted. And as he offered his hand to the preacher, a tear rolled over his caved-in cheek. “I obey God!” was his cry.

(7) Upon arriving in Geneva, he began to lecture on the Pauline epistles, wrote a constitution for the church, introduced congregational psalm singing, wrote a confession of faith, a children’s catechism, and insisted on the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper (but eventually had to settle for monthly). Trouble erupted when he and Farel sought to administer both church and civil discipline. The two were literally kicked out of town in April of 1538. Calvin was determined to return to Basel and resume his studies, but Martin Bucer (who was won to the Reformation while listening to Luther at the Leipzig debate) persuaded him to go to Strasbourg where he remained from 1538-1541.

(8) Calvin often said he didn’t care what a wife looked like as long as she was of a Christian spirit and could interact with him intellectually. In another place he wrote:

“I am none of those insane lovers who embrace also the vices of those they are in love with, when they are smitten at first sight with a fine figure. This only is the beauty which attracts me: if she is chaste, if not too nice or fastidious, if economical, if patient, if there is hope that she will be interested about my health.”

He finally married Idelette de Bure in 1540 who brought two children with her from a previous marriage (her first husband was an Anabaptist whom Calvin had led to the Lord). She died in 1549. They had three children, all of whom died in infancy.

(9) Once again under pressure from Farel, Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541 and ministered there until his death in 1564. Upon his return, Calvin was given a free hand. He drafted a document containing rules for ecclesiastical operations called Church Order. This attempt to enforce discipline would again threaten his position in the city. He faced opposition from numerous fronts.

The so-called Patriots or Children of Geneva belonged to the oldest and most influential families of Geneva. They resented Calvin’s efforts at moral reform and viewed them as encroachments on personal freedom (Calvin resisted such practices as dancing and late-night carousing). They disliked the fact that Calvin was a foreigner (he did not become a citizen until 1559) and resented the refugees of religious persecution that flocked to him for shelter.

The Libertines lobbied for the very vices Calvin resisted. Being somewhat gnostic, they appealed to the freedom of the spirit as an excuse for indulging the flesh. Calvin described them as “the most execrable and pernicious sect the world has ever known.” The libertines boasted in their license. For them, the “communion of saints” meant the common possession of all goods, even other men’s wives. They engaged in adultery and widespread sexual immorality while claiming the right to sit at the Lord’s Table.

(10) Calvin’s physical afflictions read like a medical journal. He suffered from painful stomach cramps, intestinal influenza, and recurring migraine headaches. He was subject to a persistent onslaught of fevers that would often lay him up for weeks at a time. He experienced problems with his trachea, in addition to pleurisy, gout, and colic. He suffered from hemorrhoids that were often aggravated by an internal abscess that would not heal. He had severe arthritis and acute pain in his knees, calves, and feet. Other maladies included nephritis (acute, chronic inflammation of the kidney caused by infection), gallstones, and kidney stones. He once passed a kidney stone so large that it tore the urinary canal and led to excessive bleeding.

Due to his rigorous preaching schedule (he preached twice on Sunday and every day of the week, every other week) he would often strain his voice so severely that he experienced violent fits of coughing. On one occasion he broke a blood-vessel in his lungs and hemorrhaged. When he reached the age of 51 it was discovered that he was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, which ultimately proved fatal. Much of his study and writing was done while bed-ridden. In the final few years of his life he had to be carried to work.

His friends and physicians insisted he ease off the pace of ministry. “What! Would you have the Lord find me idle when he comes?” He preached his last sermon on February 6, 1564. He had to be carried to and from the pulpit. He dictated his will on April 25th. It read, in part, as follows:

“In the name of God, I, John Calvin, servant of the Word of God in the church of Geneva, weakened by many illnesses . . . thank God that He has shown not only his mercy toward me, His poor creature, and . . . has suffered me in all sins and weaknesses, but what is more, that He has made me a partaker of His grace to serve Him through my work, . . . I confess to live and die in this faith which He has given me, inasmuch as I have no other hope or refuge than His predestination upon which my entire salvation is grounded. I embrace the grace which He has offered me in our Lord Jesus Christ and accept the merits of His suffering and dying that through them all my sins are buried.”

Calvin’s coat of arms, a hand holding a heart, is testimony to his compassionate and self-sacrificial spirit. It is encircled by his motto: Cor meum tibi offero Domine prompte et sincere. Freely translated it means: “My heart for Thy cause I offer Thee, Lord, promptly and sincerely.”