Illumination is that doctrine that describes the work of the Holy Spirit in helping the believer to understand God’s Word. Though regeneration is required to rightly understand the Word, while having spiritual eyes comes before having spiritual sight, they are not, strictly speaking, the same event. Rather illumination describes how the Spirit comes to us as believers opening up the Bible.
There are at least two ways we tend to misunderstand this. First, illumination is not the Holy Spirit bringing us new revelation. Our insights into the text are not on par with the text itself. I sought to make this point a few years ago when many charged a well-known radio preacher of failed prophecy when his prediction of the return of Christ failed to come to pass. That preacher did not claim new revelation. Nor did he even claim special, supernatural insight into the text. Rather he argued that his interpretation of the text led him to his conclusion. He was a bad exegete, not a lying prophet.
Second, illumination is not the Holy Spirit giving us a particular text to answer our questions. If, for instance, I am wrestling over a decision to cut all carbs from my diet, and I come upon that text where King David eats the showbread, this is not the Holy Spirit nudging me to eat bread. The Bible speaks of the Urim and Thummim, the breastplate of the High Priest that provided divine revelation from time to time, but the Bible is not our own personal Urim and Thummim.
Instead illumination is when the Holy Spirit helps us understand a given text as it actually is. It is His work as the perfect exegete, helping us poor exegetes try to stay out of trouble. Such is certainly not as glamorous and exciting as the giving of new revelation. It is, however, where the power is. One blessing of a sound understanding of the work of illumination is it helps us have a sound understanding of the importance and work of the Word of God.
Illumination can, indeed should work alongside the Spirit’s work of conviction. Here the Spirit not only helps us understand the text, but helps us understand ourselves. James tells us that the Word of God is like a mirror. It shows us what we are, with all our blots and blemishes. But, James tells us, we are prone to forget. The work of conviction is the Spirit showing us those spots, and helping us not to forget.
In John 14 Jesus promises to send the Spirit, whom He calls “another helper.” A good exegete would ask here, “Helper for what?” The Spirit is the one who beautifies us, who washes the bride, who, in a word, sanctifies us. The work that we need help with is to become what we are being made into, reflections of the glory of Christ. The Spirit, like our Husband, washes us with the water of the Word. Along the way He helps us understand it, to see ourselves in it. He is, however, also the Encourager. He shows us our sin, but reminds us of our standing. We have a long way to go, but we have also already arrived.
The RC Sproul Jr. Principle of Hermeneutics is a simple truth, and a deep passion of mine. It goes like this- Whenever you see someone in the Bible doing something really, really stupid, do not say to yourself, “How can they be so stupid?” Instead say to yourself, “How am I stupid just like them?” It matters to me in large part because it reveals how the Bible reveals my sin. James tells us that the Word is a mirror. Because we are sinners, however, we too often look in the mirror, see the Hero rescuing us, and think that’s us in the reflection. We are indeed called to be rescuers, but first we have to know that we not only needed, but continue to need to be rescued.
One of the frequent snapshots of human stupidity in the Bible is the propensity of the people of God to think themselves such by birth right. We can, of course, err in the other direction. I remember once speaking at a Christian high school graduation, wherein not just one or two, but all of the graduates were given opportunity to speak. Each of them stood up and thanked their parents for raising them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, for sacrificing to give them a distinctly Christian education, for washing them with the Word. So far so good. What shocked me was that after giving their heartfelt thanks, each and every student went on to say that all that Christian nurture had nothing at all to do with their faith, that God rejected all that fidelity, and intervened to give them life. They dissed God’s work through their parents in order to praise God’s work apart from their parents.
The more common problem in the Bible, however, is the lazy conviction that because my parents were Israelites, I am due the privileges appertaining thereunto. The scribes and Pharisees insisted that Abraham, not the devil, was their father. Jesus said the opposite. Jesus was right. That this dynamic is not foreign to us, however, does not mean that we are in no danger of falling into it. Whether it be because we live in a nation with a strong, albeit rapidly waning Christian heritage, or whether it be closer to home, that our parents, grandparents, etc. were believers, we tend to think our being brought into the kingdom is a natural thing rather than a supernatural thing.
I was raised by faithful, believing parents. My ancestors hail from lands to whom missionaries braved death to bring the good news of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. This happened more than 1500 years before I was born. The land in which I was born, little more than 400 years before my birth, had been barren, virtually untouched by the gospel. What a fool I would be to think I was never in danger, that I was never outside the people of God. I, and my people were once not a people. But He made us His people. It was not my birthright. That was death and destruction. Instead it was His grace.
This same gospel is at work around the globe, bringing in the elect from the four corners. All the nations are being brought in. The kingdom is covering the earth like a stone uncut by human hands. Jesus saves. Do not forget that He called us from far off, even as we never forget we are the children of our father, Abraham.
Thesis 91 We must pray for Reformation.
Praying for something happens when two circumstances are met. First, we the ones praying must recognize that what we want is a good thing. No one prays to lose their job or to need a new heat pump. Second, we the ones praying must recognize that it is God who gives us every good gift. Reformations are not bootstrap efforts. If ever a man understood that, it was the leader of our last Reformation. When Luther was called to the Diet of Worms to recant his teaching he did not, at first, deliver his famous speech. Instead he asked for a day to pray about it. The next morning he took his stand. In between he prayed this for Reformation:
Almighty, eternal God! How dreadful is the world! Behold how its mouth opens to swallow me up, and how small is my faith in You!
O the weakness of the flesh and the power of Satan! If I am to depend upon any strength from this world, all is lost. O my God! Help me against all the wisdom of this world. Do this, I beg You.
The work is not mine, but Yours. I have no business here. I have nothing to contend for with these great men of the world! I would gladly pass my days in happiness and peace. But the cause is Yours, my Lord; and it is righteous and everlasting! Stand by me! O faithful and unchangeable God! I lean not upon man. It would be vain!
You have chosen me for this work. I know it! Therefore, O God, accomplish Your own will! Stand by me in the name of Jesus Christ, who will be my shelter and my shield, yes, my mighty fortress, through the might and strengthening of the Holy Spirit.
I am ready, even to lay down my life for this cause, patient as a little lamb. For the cause is holy. It is Your own. Though this world be filled with devils, and though my body, originally the work and creation of Your hands, go to destruction in this cause — yes, though it be shattered into pieces — Your Word and Your Spirit they are good to me still! It concerns only the body. The soul is Yours. It belongs to You and will also remain with You forever. God help me.
Amen.
I would argue that Reformation began not at Luther’s tower experience. Nor was it October 31, 1517 with the nailing on the church door of the 95 Theses. Neither was it with the speech he would deliver at Worms. It was the prayer, the meeting with the living God at the throne of grace. It started on this day not because of Luther himself but because of the Spirit that dwelt within him.
The leader of an earlier Reformation learned this lesson well praying for relief from the thorn in his side,
And He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me (II For. 12:9). May God grant us the grace to instill us an immovable certainty in our dependence on His grace.
“Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1) is surely the most popular Bible verse among all unbelievers. Such ought not to mean, however, that believers don’t much care for it. That it is wildly misused by the unbelieving Pharisees in our day doesn’t mean it has no use. Jesus is not, of course, condemning all judgments. Indeed He couldn’t coherently do so for such is itself a judgment. Which is precisely where the unbelievers get all tangled up. If you say, “People ought not to kill their unborn children” within earshot of an unbelieving Pharisee, with all the speed of Superman in a phone booth said Pharisee will don a black robe and a white wig, grab a gavel and thunder down on you with all the grace of a Puritan preacher on an all persimmon diet, “THOU SHALT NOT JUDGE!”
We all have to make judgments. The trouble is, as I constantly seek to remind my ethics students, that we are prone to judge by different standards. We judge our enemies and their friends with the strictest standards, ourselves and our friends by the loosest standards. Which is precisely how we can all end up looking down our noses at those horrible, awful, world-would-be-better-off-without-them judgmental people without a clue that we are able to look down because we’ve been hoisted on our own petard. Heck, we didn’t even know we had a petard.
Here are some suggestions on how we might learn to judge rightly. First, the standard is the law of God. Not our preferences. Not the culture’s current preferences. Not the culture of fifty years ago’s preferences. To judge rightly we have to judge by the standard of the only being who has only ever judged rightly, the Judge of all the Earth. We don’t whittle it down to make room for us and our friends to wiggle under it. We don’t add to it to make room for us and our friends to batter our enemies with it. Just God’s law.
Second, we keep ever before us our own failure to keep the law. The law by which we judge others isn’t the standard we keep. It’s the standard we break. All the time. Often while being oblivious to it. God has the right to have sheer disgust at our neighbor’s sins. We have the right to acknowledge that He also has the right to have sheer disgust over our own. It is true enough to might be holier than your neighbor. It’s also true Hitler might have been holier than Stalin.
Third, we have to keep before us that the only difference between us and any other sinner, whether Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy, Sister Boom Boom, Al Capone or Fred Phelps, is the grace of God at work in us. We have nothing to boast of. In the race toward righteousness, for which we all still have light years to go, we may have a ten yard lead over the rogue’s gallery above, but we have been blessed with shoes we didn’t earn, lungs we didn’t create and we’re being carried by the omnipotent Holy Spirit. So yeah, looking down our noses is a failure to judge rightly.
Humility, in acknowledging it is God’s law alone that is the standard. Humility, in acknowledging that we fall immeasurably short of that standard. Humility, in acknowledging every inch of progress has been powered by the grace of God. That’s how we aspire to judge rightly, just before we repent for how wrongly we judge.
