All of us, I presume, from time to time change our minds. We know that we err, and we know that we grow in grace. At least part of that growth happens when we no longer believe the errors we once believed. Sometimes we add new information to what we believe. Sometimes we jettison old information. And sometimes we do both. I used to believe, decades ago, for instance, that the universe is many millions of years old. I now believe that it is less than ten thousand years old. That is progress.
Paul commands of elders that they, among other things, be sober-minded. I suspect that many of us give precious little thought to this command. Too many of us dismiss all of Paul’s qualifications. Even if we try to apply them, however, we often slide right over this one. We may assume “sober-minded” means the same thing as “not given to much wine.” We may assume that we don’t want elders who are given to whoopee cushions, joy buzzers and oversized clown shoes.
To be sober-minded, however, is to treat truth seriously, and to have a healthy doubt as to our own understanding of truth. It is all too easy to get confused here. Many churches have their fair share of “theology wonks.” These are usually young men who, happily, have a passion for theology. They read substantial books, and they engage in substantial conversations. You’ll usually find them at the church picnic, smoking a pipe, with a small cadre of acolytes sitting around them as they share their wisdom. They are contemplating the tug and pull of Nestorianism and Eutychianism. They are wondering out loud if maybe the hyper-preterists have it right, that Jesus may not be coming back again. They are expositing the proper procedure for stoning rebellious children.
A sober-minded person should think through the challenges of the incarnation. A sober-minded person should know the claims of all sorts of heretics, including hyper-preterists. A sober-minded person ought to contemplate the law of God. But there are two things a sober-minded person doesn’t do. He doesn’t practice experimental theology right in front of people. And he certainly doesn’t veer from this bedrock position to that one, dragging his sheep behind him. Indeed a sober-minded man, if he finds himself questioning some fundamentals, will grow frightened rather than excited, will grow more careful rather than more reckless, will encourage the faithful to look away, not to draw near.
If a man, for instance, suddenly “gets” covenant theology and now believes in baptizing covenant children he does not now take up this holy cause with the same zeal with which he defended the Baptist view just weeks before. A sober-minded man doesn’t, when he gives in to the biblical weight of Calvinism crusade for it just as he once crusaded against it. A sober-minded man instead thinks- “Wow. I once was so passionate about what I now know is error. Perhaps I ought not to lay hands on myself and become webmaster of www.don’t-listen-to-old-me-listen-to-new-me.com.”
One need not be the theology wonk to fail here. Neither does one need to be or aspire to be an elder to heed the call to sobriety of mind. Those who follow theology wonks are likewise not sober-minded. They are instead drinking a dangerous brew. If you are following someone who gives you intellectual whiplash, you would be wise to get off that bus. If your local guru is telling you about all the exciting things he saw on the other side of the Tiber, walk away. He leads sheep to slaughter, not to green pastures. It makes no difference whether it be sensual or intellectual delights. Only fools heed the call of the seductress. Her paths lead to death. Wisdom, on the other hand, is sober and steady. Heed her.
Thesis 58 We must fear God and obey all that He commands.
Ecclesiastes is one of the most difficult books in all the Bible. One key reason is that it is inverted. Much of it is an extended ad hominem argument. By ad hominem I don’t mean that Solomon is insulting his intellectual opponents. Rather he is embracing, hypothetically, an errant worldview, and then showing forth the necessary implications of that worldview. When Solomon says “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity” he is not saying that all is vanity. Rather he is saying that if there is nothing beyond the sun, if this world that we perceive with our senses is all that there is, then all would be vanity.
The bulk of the book is taken up with various explorations of attempts to find meaning under the sun. He looks at earthly wisdom, at pleasure, at work, at success. And each one dies a swift and brutal death when confronted with… death. If there is nothing beyond the here and now, there is no meaning in the here and now. Solomon looks unflinchingly into the empty chasm of meaninglessness and returns to tell us the horror of what he saw.
He does not, however, leave us there. Having left the world of matter and energy in a heap of dust he turns to remind his reader that there is meaning, and that there is direction. He finally tells us, truthfully, the sum of the matter- “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). After all the complications, after the hard work of tearing down our idols, Solomon brings us right back to the most simple of truths, to the direct, plain, eminently understandable calling of God on our lives- we are to fear Him and obey all that He commands.
It would be easy to find this conclusion anti-climactic. Of course we are to fear God and obey all that He commands. Every child knows that. There’s no disputing it. But what about… We may be willing to confess that this is our default position. The trouble is we think there’s a switch, and that sometimes circumstances cause us to flip it. Yes, fear God. Obey God. But if they threaten your livelihood, if they see you as a second-class citizen, if hardship comes, if this or if that, then it gets complicated. Then we have to figure out how to get what we want. God understands. He wouldn’t want us to be miserable and overrun.
Reformation happens not when we embrace a complicated, man-made strategy, but when we do the simple and obvious, when we fear God and obey Him. Consider the Great Reformer. When Martin Luther spent the night in his cell praying over his second appearance at the Diet of Worms his prayer was as simple as it was powerful. He did not ask for God to show him a way out. He asked God to recognize that the battle was His. Luther reminded himself that the end was in God’s hand, that all he had to do was fear God and obey. It is still true for all of us. It is the sum of the matter.
Friends,
Tonight, 7 eastern, we begin a new study The ABC’s of Theology. Need a basic refresher? Feeling a mite light in your theological credits? Better still, would you like to know God better? Tonight-why study theology? Join us online at RC-Lisa Sproul on Facebook Live, or in person at our home in Fort Wayne. All are welcome.
Of what? Antithesis, to the broader world, describes that idea which counters the thesis. The antithesis of “Social justice is a biblical concept” is “Social justice comes out of Marxist ideology.” To the Christian, however, it is more than this. “The antithesis” is a concept found in our Bibles that affirms the reality that there exists in this world two groups of people- the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, and that these two groups are at war with one another. It is a way of looking at the world in light of this reality.
The church, too often, takes the eminently biblical notion that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal and turns it into the eminently carnal notion that there is no war going on. The world is, to those who don’t think in terms of the antithesis, a neutral place, Switzerland if you will. To be sure there are Nazis out there, enemies of the kingdom of God, but the great bulk of the world is made of non-combatants, well-meaning albeit ignorant civilians. Such a perspective is, well, the antithesis of what the Bible teaches.
We are engaged in a war. The war began in the garden. Satan’s first assault made of every mere human a soldier in his army. God’s promise, however, was that He would put enmity in our hearts against the serpent, that He would draft us into His army. There is, however, no way station. We are born at enmity with God, by nature His enemies. We stay that way, no matter how polite and well behaved we might be, no matter how conservative our politics might be, unless or until He gives us new life. The instant that happens we are at enmity with the Serpent, soldiers in the Lord’s army.
Antithesis then means tearing down strongholds, every high-minded thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God (II Corinthians 10: 4-5). The Apostle Paul, Jesus Himself, the whole of the Bible reminds us of the reality of the war. Because one of the enemy’s most potent weapons is simply getting us to forget. In our day, as the broader culture tosses overboard every vestige of its biblical heritage, the antithesis is more easy to see. Watching tens of thousands of Argentinians in a frenzy of celebration over being given the legal “right” to murder their own babies doesn’t look “neutral” to the most oblivious Christian.
The danger faced by those who are aware of the antithesis, however, is found here- knowing who and what our enemies are. There is great overlap between the culture wars and the war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. But they are not the same thing. The enemy of our enemy may be someone we can fight beside. But we must remain on our guard. We must not confuse our common cause with a common faith. We must, in fact, be eager to fight the enemy within, our own sins and lofty thoughts. We have been drafted into the Lord’s army, but the old man always tries to drag us to the other side. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty. And they begin here- with repenting and believing the gospel.
Grace is a virtue that is not only far more powerful than nice, but, not coincidently, is far more difficult to cultivate. All it takes to adopt a nice attitude toward others is to simply not care. Nice, in fact, is close kin to apathy. Grace, on the other hand, requires a right balance and right application of indifference, and passion.
Consider the indifference. Have you ever noticed that confusing phenomenon wherein you find it far easier to be angry with those with whom you have the most in common? The people closest to us, whether emotionally or ideologically, have the greatest capacity to test our patience. We expect little to nothing from our ideological enemies.
The truth is, however, that the greater issue is over what is under our jurisdiction. It is not my duty to make sure that in all issues everyone else be as sound as I think I am. I won’t answer to God for these things, and so can maintain peace because it’s outside of my control. All this is just a drawn out version of the punch line in the serenity prayer. As a big mouthed boor I usually do okay having the courage to try to change the things I can change. But it takes grace to be at peace about the things that I can’t. Understand that I’m not suggesting that I don’t care. I care deeply, but I don’t feel responsible.
Where does the passion come in? Often we destroy our peace with our brother because we lack a passionate commitment to the gospel. We miss three central truths, all of which are grounded in grace. First, we forget that we are sinners. One of the reasons we are so easily put out by others is we operate under the assumption that we are God. This, of course, is false. Nevertheless, we often lose patience with our brothers because they aren’t bowing and scraping before us. If we remember that perhaps they’re not throwing roses in our path might be because something we have done wrong, we will go a long way in keeping the peace.
Lesson two is like unto the first. If we are going to have peace with our brother, if we are going to be gracious instead of merely nice, we need to remember that like us, he is a sinner saved by grace. How can that help? We exhibit grace when we remember that we need grace, and when we remember that our brother needs it. The gospel, as it relates to our interpersonal relations, is in large part the call to forgive as we have been forgiven. If we remember that so and so is a sinner, we won’t be so put out when he actually sins. We will show grace, because we can understand how a sinner could end up doing such a thing.
The passion we are called to, however, is not simply a passionate remembrance of the condition in which Christ found us. It is not enough to say, “Well, I’m a sinner, you’re a sinner, so let’s just be friends.” We’re too sinful to be able to pull that off. We need, if we are to have peace with our brother, to have a passion for the ongoing grace of God.
This third thing though has two parts. “Oh Lord,” we pray, “indwell me, change me, make me more like You, so that I might love, show grace toward my brother that has this incredibly grating habit.” We have to rejoice in and live in the reality of our union with Christ. It is because we are in Him that we become more like Him. And no one knows more about showing grace than Jesus. In short, we need a passion to be more like our Savior and King.
We are called, however, not only to remember our union with Christ, but to remember our brother’s union with Christ. We have to have the passionate faith that says of sinful and annoying Brother Aggravatus, “Jesus Christ, my Lord and King, dwells therein. God our Father, when He gazes upon this brother, sees Jesus His Son. My duty and joy is to do the same.”
We must, if we would show grace to the brotherhood of grace, remember that, while we are called to encourage one another unto great works, and to be prophetic to each other, we are not responsible for the sanctification of those over whom we have not been placed in authority. That is, to have peace with our brother, we must have a peace about his incomplete sanctification. And then we must remember the gospel of grace, both in remembering what we were, and in remembering what we are, and in remembering what we will be. And then we will enjoy the peace that awaits the end of all war.
Nine times out of ten an accusation of hypocrisy becomes exposure of hypocrisy. The left believed they had caught the right in hypocrisy when it sought to brush off President Trump’s sexual sins, having insisted that when it was President Clinton’s sins, character matters. Touche. Point scored. That said, the left is just as guilty, for they insisted President Clinton’s private life didn’t matter, while President Trump’s private life did. Hypocrisy is a pox on both houses.
So it is when riot sauce for the goose became riot sauce for the gander. Those who downplayed riots in our streets last summer want blood from those rioting in the Capitol this winter. And those who insisted in the summer that rioting is a plenty bad thing are now using the rhetoric of their ideological opponents from the summer- “We just want to be heard.” The hypocrisy infection is taking root on all sides.
Nothing in the past few days has changed my position with respect to Christians and our political situation. I believe ignorance is a besetting sin to many Christians, leading many to vote D. They shouldn’t vote that way. I believe a Christian can, in good conscience, vote for a man of questionable moral stability, a man who is both refreshingly unmoved by the hatred of the mainstream media and his political opponents and seemingly dangerously uncaring about the niceties of Constitutional law. I believe in fact that Christians can and should cheer on the appointment of good justices, and rejoice over the refusal to practice political correctness, all while withholding a generic approval of the man or his presidency.
What is happening, however, is yet another double dose of hypocrisy. Those who vote D, including evangelicals, will insist that everyone who voted for President Trump wear a scarlet R over the riots. CNN’s Don Lemon on air said as much,
“If you voted for Trump, you voted for the person who the Klan supported. You voted for the person who Nazis support. You voted for the person who the alt-right supports. You voted for the person who incited a crowd to go into the Capitol and potentially take the lives of lawmakers…”
Those who vote R among the evangelicals insist that support for the President is limited to the good things, and will take no responsibility for anything bad he has done. In the meantime, those who vote R will insist that everyone who voted for President elect Biden be forced to wear a scarlet D for death through abortion. Those who vote D will insist they abhor the murder of the unborn, that they only voted for him for the sake of their “witness.” And we will witness, once again, hypocrisy on all sides.
The above is not an argument for moral equivalency, that Biden and Trump are equally evil. It is not an argument that we bear no responsibility for what those we vote for do once in office. It is an argument, however, that Biden, Trump and every mothers’ son who voted for either one are evil, too evil to be proudly claiming moral high ground. Would that both sides would get on our knees in repentance that it has come to this.
