Have you ever read something with the realization that what the author is conveying is the result of decades of thinking and meditation in the Scriptures? I just did in reading this article by Joni Eareckson Tada. It is deep in insight and rich in comfort.
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/ten-words-that-changed-everything-about-my-suffering
May the Lord comfort you in all your trials this day.
Guy M. Richard (original source – https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2021/09/baptism-now-saves-you/)
First Peter 3:21—“Baptism . . . now saves you”—is a difficult passage. Even revered figures in history, the likes of Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, have said as much. To appreciate the interpretive challenges this verse provides, we need only to read through a few commentaries, and we will no doubt see a wide range of opinions on display.
One of the things we learn from difficult passages such this is that we need to hold our interpretations loosely. We shouldn’t fight to the death over our understanding of 1 Peter 3:21. It is in an altogether different category than, say, John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” We cannot hold a wide range of opinions on John 14:6, at least not within the bounds of historic Christian orthodoxy, and that is why it is appropriate for us to take a stand in defending the truth of that passage in a way that it isn’t appropriate in regard to 1 Peter 3:21. Peter’s comments demand greater patience precisely because they are less clear.
With this in mind, we can rightly give ourselves to considering this passage—every word of which is God-breathed (see 2 Tim. 3:16) and, as such, warrants our careful attention. The first thing we can say about 1 Peter 3:21 is that the analogy of faith (which teaches that Scripture interprets Scripture) prevents us from understanding this verse as a reference to baptismal regeneration. Other Bible passages explicitly tell us that regeneration is grounded on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and is a work of the Holy Spirit who, like the wind, “blows” when and where He wills (John 3:5, 8; Titus 3:5–6). Still other passages declare that we are not saved by the “will of man” or by “human . . . exertion,” which would obviously include baptism, but by God who “has mercy on whomever he wills” (John 1:12–13; Rom. 9:15–18). Regeneration, therefore, happens when God wants it to happen and not necessarily in the act of water baptism. What is more, the account of the thief on the cross teaches us that regeneration and baptism have no necessary temporal connection whatsoever (Luke 23:43).
The next thing we can say is that the analogy of faith also helps us see that 1 Peter 3:21 is not unique in terms of the language it uses. Several other Bible passages speak similarly in regard to the relationship between a sacrament and the thing that the sacrament signifies. I think immediately of Genesis 17:10, which states: “This is my covenant, which you shall keep. . . . Every male among you shall be circumcised.” Here the Lord so connects the sacrament of circumcision to the thing it signifies (i.e., the covenant) that He speaks of them coextensively. The whole of the covenant can be reduced to just one thing: circumcision.
The Westminster Confession of Faith refers to this connection between a sacrament and the thing it signifies as a “sacramental union” and defines it as a “spiritual relation” in which “the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other” (WCF 27.2). We see this idea in several places in the New Testament. In Acts 22:16, for instance, Paul urges the people of Jerusalem to “rise and be baptized and wash away your sins.” Here again, just as in Genesis 17:10, we see a very close alliance between the sacrament—baptism, in this case—and the thing signified, the washing away of sins.
Likewise, in instituting the Lord’s Supper, Jesus uses the language of sacramental union when He says of the bread “this is my body” and of the wine “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:26, 28; see 1 Cor. 10:16–17). Jesus doesn’t say that the bread and wine merely represent His body and blood. He says that they are His body and blood, even though they physically are not (His body is holding these elements). To borrow the words of the Westminster Confession, Jesus is speaking of the “spiritual relation” that exists between the elements and the things they signify.
This spiritual relation is grounded on the fact that the sacraments are means of grace. They don’t simply exhibit grace; they are vehicles that God uses to grow us in grace as we partake of them in faith. They do this not insofar as they are bread and wine or baptismal water but insofar as they communicate Christ to us. Spiritually speaking, then, the bread and the wine are the body and blood of Christ given for us, and the water of baptism is the blood of Christ that washes away all our sins.
Keeping these things in mind, it would seem best to conclude that 1 Peter 3:21 is adopting the language of sacramental union, just like Genesis 17:10. The sacrament and the thing it signifies are connected to such a degree that the whole of our salvation is reduced to only one thing: baptism. We are continually “saved” (note that the Greek word for “save” is present tense, showing ongoing action) by baptism because the baptismal water is, spiritually speaking, the blood of Christ that washes away all our sins. As such, it is “an appeal to God for a good conscience,” which is the same thing as saying “an appeal to God to preserve us in faith and obedience” (see the phrase “good conscience” in 1 Tim. 1:5, 19; 1 Peter 3:16; see also Heb. 9:9, 14; 10:22). This divine preservation takes place within the context of our sanctification “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Every time we faithfully meditate on our baptism or witness it being applied to others, we receive grace from the God of all grace to persevere to the end and be saved.
Justin Taylor summarizes Dr. J. I. Packer’s thoughts on impressions: (original source here – https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/j-i-packer-on-impressions/)
J. I. Packer’s essay, “Guidance: How God Loves Us,” in God’s Plans for Us (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), 89–106, is a really important read.
Halfway through, Packer covers what he has argued thus far:
I have already said that God ordinarily guides his children in their decision-making through Bible-based wisdom.
I have dismissed the idea that guidance is usually or essentially an inner voice telling us facts otherwise unknown and prescribing strange modes of action.
I have criticized the way some Christians wait passively for guidance and “put out a fleece” when perplexed, rather than prayerfully following wisdom’s lead.
He acknowledges that at this point, some readers might be muttering in response.
Some readers may believe that I have played down and thereby dishonored the guiding ministry of the Holy Spirit. One cannot say what I have said in today’s steamy Christian atmosphere without provoking that reaction. So there is need now to discuss the Holy Spirit’s role in guidance in a direct way.
The last thing I want to do is to dishonor, or lead others to dishonor, the Holy Spirit. But the fact must be faced that not all endeavors that seek to honor the Holy Spirit succeed in their purpose. There is such a thing as fanatical delusion, just as there is such a thing as barren intellectualism. Overheated views of life in the Spirit can be as damaging as “flat tire” versions of Christianity that minimize the Spirit’s ministry. This is especially true in relation to guidance.
So, Packer asks, “What does it mean to be ‘led by the Spirit’ in personal decision-making?” The phrase, he points out, is from Romans 8:14 and Galatians 5:18 and speaks not of decision making but of resisting sinful impulses. But, he acknowledges, “the question of what it means to be Spirit-led in choosing courses of action is a proper and important one.”
The Spirit leads by helping us understand the biblical guidelines within which we must keep, the biblical goals at which we must aim, and the biblical models that we should imitate, as well as the bad examples from which we are meant to take warning.
He leads through prayer and others’ advice, giving us wisdom as to how we can best follow biblical teaching.
He leads by giving us the desire for spiritual growth and God’s glory. The result is that spiritual priorities become clearer, and our resources of wisdom and experience for making future decisions increase.
He leads, finally, by making us delight in God’s will so that we find ourselves wanting to do it because we know it is best. Wisdom’s paths will be “ways of pleasantness” (Prov. 3:17). If at first we find we dislike what we see to be God’s will for us, God will change our attitude if we let him. God is not a sadist, directing us to do what we do not want to do so that he can see us suffer. He wants joy for us in every course of action to which he leads us, even those from which we shrink at first and that involve outward unpleasantness.
Packer knows that virtually no Christian would deny what he has written here. But he also knows that some would say this is only “half the story.”
Part of what being Spirit-led means, they would tell us, is that one receives instruction from the Spirit through prophecies and inward revelations such as repeatedly came to godly people in Bible times (see Gen. 22; 2 Chron. 7:12-22; Jer. 32:19; Acts 8:29; 11:28; 13:4; 21:11; 1 Cor. 14:30). They believe this kind of communication to be the fulfillment of God’s promise that “your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left” (Isa. 30:21 RSV). They are sure that some impressions of this kind should be identified as the Spirit-given “word of knowledge” in 1 Corinthians 12:8. They insist that this is divine guidance in its highest and purest form, which Christians should therefore constantly seek. Those who play it down, they would say, thereby show that they have too limited a view of life in the Spirit.
Packer responds:
Here I must come clean. I know that this line of thought is sincerely believed by many people who are, I am sure, better Christians than I am. Yet I think it is wrong and harmful, and I shall now argue against it. I choose my words with care, for some of the arguments made against this view are as bad and damaging as is the view itself. The way of wisdom is like walking a tightrope, from which one can fall by overbalancing either to the left or to the right. As, in Richard Baxter’s sharp-sighted phrase, overdoing is undoing, so overreacting is undermining.
He then distinguishes the real issue from what he is not insisting or implying:
The issue here is not whether a person’s life in the Spirit is shallow or deep, as if the further one advances spiritually, the more one will seek and find guidance through prophecies and inward revelations. Nor is the issue whether God has so limited himself that he will never communicate directly with present-day Christians as he did with some saints in biblical times. In my view there is no biblical warrant either for correlating spiritual maturity with direct divine guidance or for denying that God may still directly indicate his will to his servants. The real issue is twofold: what we should expect from God in this regard and what we should do with any invading impressions that come our way.
When Christians feel that God has directly told them to say or do something, Packer says they should face up to the following three facts:
1. If anyone today receives a direct disclosure from God, it will have no canonical significance. It will not become part of the church’s rule of faith and life; nor will the church be under any obligation to acknowledge the disclosure as revelation; nor will anyone merit blame for suspecting that the disclosure was not from God. If the alleged disclosure is a prediction . . . , Moses assures us that there is not even a prima facie case for treating it as from God until it has come true (Deut. 18:21ff.). If the alleged disclosure is a directive (as when a leader claims that God told him to found a hospital, university, mission, or crusade of some kind), any who associate themselves with his project should do so because wisdom tells them that it is needed, realistic, and God-honoring, not because the leader tells them that God directly commanded him (and by implication them) to attempt it.
People who believe they have received direct indications of what God will do or what they should do should refrain in all situations (worship services, board meetings, gatherings of family or friends, preparation of publications, or whatever) from asking others to agree that direct revelation has been given to them, and Christians should greet any such request with resolute silence.
2. Guidance in this particular form is not promised. For it to occur is, as we have said, extraordinary, exceptional, and anomalous. No Scripture leads us to hope or to look for it. Isaiah 30:21, which may seem to point this way, is actually a promise of wise teaching through wise teachers. No one, therefore, who believes that he received a direct revelation at any time should look for this event to recur. The idea that spiritual persons may expect this sort of guidance often or that such experiences are proof of their holiness or of their call and fitness to lead others should be dismissed out of hand.
3. Direct communications from God take the form of impressions, and impressions can come even to the most devoted and prayerful people from such murky sources as wishful thinking, fear, obsessional neurosis, schizophrenia, hormonal imbalance, depression, side effects of medication, and satanic delusion, as well as from God. Impressions need to be suspected before they are sanctioned and tested before they are trusted. Confidence that one’s impressions are God-given is no guarantee that this is really so, even when they persist and grow stronger through long seasons of prayer. Bible-based wisdom must judge them. . . .
Some people conclude that the Holy Spirit never gives specific impressions and that every claim to them must be a delusion. Packer says this is wrong.
Impressions—not revelations of information but focusings of concern—belong to Christian living. When we say we have a “vision” or “burden” about something, we are referring to an impression. When our concern is biblically proper, we are right to regard our impression as a nudge from the Holy Spirit.
Nehemiah speaks of what “God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem” (Neh. 2:12 RSV), and by prayer, persuasion, and push, Nehemiah got the job done. Paul and Silas “attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them” (Acts 16:7 RSV)—that is, an inner impression restrained them. God, as they soon discovered, was leading them to Greece. Paul’s “mind could not rest” while evangelizing Troas, because Titus had not come (2 Cor. 2:13; mind is “spirit” in the Greek, meaning a mind enlightened by God’s Spirit). So Paul left, construing his restlessness as God prompting him to go in search of Titus rather than continue the Troas mission. These are biblical examples of saints pulled or pressed by God in particular directions. This is an experience that most Christians know.
My point is not that the Spirit of God gives no direct impressions, but rather that impressions must be rigorously tested by biblical wisdom—the corporate wisdom of the believing community as well as personal wisdom. If this is not done, impressions that are rooted in egoism, pride, headstrong unrealism, the fancy that irrationality glorifies God, a sense that some human being is infallible, or similar misconceptions will be allowed to masquerade as Spirit-given. Only impressions verified as biblically appropriate and practically wise should be recognized as from God. People who receive impressions about what they should believe or do should question such impressions until they have been thoroughly tested.
Nor can one be certain even then about one’s impressions. Some impressions seem to be instances of clairvoyance, sanctified for restraint or encouragement (as in recorded cases of Christians feeling constrained to leave trains and planes that later crashed or when C. T. Studd saw in the margin of his Bible the words “China, India, Africa,” the three parts of the world where he subsequently served as a pioneer missionary). There is no certain way to test such impressions. Sometimes one will not be able to tell whether they are a message from God or a human fancy. The correct conclusion to draw is that as we seek to do what by biblical standards best serves God’s glory and the good of others, God will be with us—just that.
The radios of my youth would crackle with atmospherics, making clear reception impossible. All forms of self-centeredness and self-indulgence, from surface-level indiscipline and lawlessness to the subtlety of grandiose elitism or the irreverence of not obeying the guidance one has received already, will act as atmospherics in the heart, making recognition of God’s will harder than it should be and one’s testing of impressions less thorough and exact. But those who are being “led by the Spirit” into humble holiness will also be “led by the Spirit” in evaluating their impressions, and so they will increasingly be able to distinguish the Spirit’s nudges from impure and improper desire. “He . . . teaches the humble his way” (Ps. 25:9 RSV). Blessed, then, we may say, are the pure in heart. They shall know the will of God.
Article entitled “Divine Therapy” on the Doctrine of God & Expressive Individualism: (source: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=34-05-020-v) by Dr. Carl Trueman.
Dr. Trueman is professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He earned an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books, and is the co-host of the Mortification of Spin podcast.
There can be little doubt that we live in an age where the individual is sovereign. Whether it is commercials selling products on the basis of how they will make us feel or parents suing schools for refusing to allow their children to attend class dressed in any way they choose, ours is a world where individual rights and demands carry a peculiar weight. And the result is that our institutions, particularly our voluntary institutions, are more like boutiques competing for customers in the marketplace of self-fulfillment. Colleges sell themselves on the basis of allowing students to find themselves and reach their potential. And churches promote their programs as sources of personal happiness and well-being. Religious and irreligious, we are all expressive individuals now, seeing the purpose of life as feeling good and anything that hinders that as being evil.
The question of how to counter this and to recapture the New Testament’s vision of the Church as a body of believers who find their identity not in themselves but in love of God and of each other is a pressing but difficult one, made more so by the fact that our problem is in part the result of something we all consider good. Freedom of religion is a wonderful thing. Who wants to live under a regime where simply gathering together in the Lord’s name might merit prosecution, incarceration, or even death? It is good to worship without fear of reprisals.
Yet, when there is religious freedom, there is religious choice; and where there is religious choice, congregants are always in danger of tilting towards being customers, and churches towards being spiritual boutiques, presenting themselves as the answer to particular needs or desires. Add to that mix a normative notion of selfhood that places the individual and his or her needs—”felt” needs, to use the modern phrase—at the center of life, and the stage is set for precisely the kind of religion we have today.
A Vision of God in His Glory
If the problems of consumerist Christianity are so deeply entwined with the pathologies of the wider culture, from its cult of the independent self to its imperious belief that personal happiness is the great criterion of truth, then it is easy to despair. How, as Christians, do we break from this seductive cage in which we find ourselves and in which too often we enjoy being confined? And how do we persuade the rising generation that Christianity is not simply one possible option available for finding happiness and satisfaction in this life but rather is the very meaning of life itself?
I would like to suggest that one vital part of the answer is to be found in that most difficult and yet glorious of Christian teachings, the doctrine of God, particularly the doctrine of God as he is in himself. If patriotism leads individuals to see themselves (and if necessary, sacrifice themselves) in light of a larger, greater reality, that of the nation, so Christians stand or fall by whether they see the God they worship as truly greater than themselves. A God who is simply man writ large is no more worthy of devotion, and no more captivating to the imagination, than a sports hero or a movie star. Only as our imaginations are taken captive by a vision of God in his glory will we see any change in the wider malaise of modernity which afflicts our religious institutions.
I have some personal grounds for believing this can be done. Each year I teach an undergraduate course on the doctrine of God, and each year I am delightfully surprised by the effect it has on many students.
My audience is primarily Protestant and, within that broad category, mainly Evangelical. I begin the course by pointing the students to the fact that much of Evangelical piety is concerned with what God does for us. Forgiveness, justification, sanctification, and glorification are all aspects of salvation and also form the staples of traditional Evangelical hymnody. And that is good and appropriate: God is a gracious God; salvation is a glorious thing; it is right and proper that we give thanks to him for the work that he has done, continues to do, and will complete in us through the Lord Jesus Christ. And the Bible itself sanctions such doxology: the Psalter, that great benchmark for all Christian praise, contains many passages praising God for his actions in salvation.
Yet the psalms do more than that. Indeed, in the Psalter, praise for God’s actions rests upon prior assumptions of who God is in himself. Indeed, the Psalmist often praises God simply for being God. I point the students to a simple but important truth: God as God is worthy of praise, prior to any consideration of what he has done.
A Mystery to Be Adored
That is the starting point for the course proper. We look at various biblical passages—Genesis 22, with God’s terrifying command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; Moses on Sinai, glimpsing only the hind parts of God as he passes by—in order to see something of the otherness and the incomprehensibility of God as set forth in the Bible. Then we look at classic texts of the early Church, particularly sections of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, and Gregory of Nazianzus’s Five Theological Orations. Again and again I point students to the beautiful way in which the early fathers saw God’s transcendence not as a problem to be solved, still less as a roadblock to faith, but rather as a mystery to be adored.
And each class is structured in a manner that borrows from Dorothy Sayers: we look at the dogma of the Church, how it connects to the drama of the biblical narrative, and how it informs the doxology of the people of God. Thus, every class culminates in looking at a great hymn or prayer from Christian history that articulates in praise the truth about God that formed the subject of the class.
As the course progresses, what is striking to me is how the students come to realize that so much of what passes for Christian teaching and worship in the Church today is little more than the concerns of our wider culture expressed in a Christianese idiom. One case in point, which I look at in detail, is the Lauren Daigle song, “You Say,” which won the award for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song at the 2019 Grammys. When juxtaposed with the glorious reflections on the mystery of God’s being found in Nazianzus, the students see it for what it is: a song in which God is nothing more than a therapist or a reassuring friend. He is a small god, no more than a boyfriend who is always there and who never says a cross word.
And as they see the contrast between “You Say” and the classics of Christian spirituality, they also see that the gospel is not about being affirmed for who we are, but about being transformed by God’s grace into that which we should be. Heaven is not personal happiness; it is eternal communion with God the Father through union with his Son via the work of the Holy Spirit. And the human problem is not that we do not feel psychologically happy. It is (morally) that we are sinful and (existentially) that we die. That vision is so much greater than the vision of God as Friendly Therapist, with which our own contemporary Christian culture is often so satisfied.
The Only Antidote
We live in an era in which expressive individualism and the cult of the therapeutic are the very cultural air we breathe. There is nothing we can do to escape that. But we need to remind ourselves that a glorious picture of God—that which is dramatically revealed in biblical history and dogmatically articulated by the greatest theologians of the Christian tradition—has led to some of the most compelling doxology of the Church throughout the ages. And that attractive vision, combining as it does the good, the beautiful, and the true, is still compelling.
Young Christians may have no choice but to be customers in the marketplace of religion, which the Constitution guarantees, but the magnificence of the Bible story, set against the transcendence of the Bible’s God, is still compelling. Those who aspire to teach in the Church need to grasp this vision of God for themselves and then communicate its power to those they pastor. Being overwhelmed by a vision of a great God at the center of all things is ultimately the only antidote to confusing the needs of ourselves as creatures with the meaning of life. While the pathologies of our culture—from materialism to sexual confusion—each have their own distinctives, the solution is ultimately the same: a vision of God that makes every problem, challenge, or question seem like a passing momentary affliction compared to the eternal weight of glory that is to come.
If we truly wish to combat the therapeutic culture, we need to focus not primarily on the symptoms. Frankly, we should not flatter it by taking it that seriously. Rather, we need to recapture, in thought, praise, and proclamation, the classical doctrine of the transcendent Trinitarian God.