There aren’t many moments that I remember discerning pain in my father’s voice. Listening to him recount the sad saga of Francis Gary Powers was one of them. In 1960 Powers piloted a U-2 spy plane across Soviet airspace. With a ceiling at 70,000 feet the plane was believed to be out of reach of Soviet air defenses. Despite this his plane was shot down, mostly intact and he reached ground safely, only to be taken prisoner. The sorrow in my father’s voice, however, wasn’t over what happened. The sorrow came when he explained that President Eisenhower told the American people that a weather plane had accidentally flown off course and crashed with no survivors. Not long after, Khrushchev produced Powers and the spy plane for all to see. It was, to my father, the first time our government had been caught in an undeniable lie. It broke his innocence.
Lying is bad, heartbreaking, conducive to crushing the faith of the trusting. There is shame and embarrassment as well. What is worse, however, is when lies are told with such a brazen and callous spirit in which everyone knows it’s a lie. The rotting cynicism of a government that doesn’t expect to be believed, only obeyed brings to mind the words George Orwell penned in 1984– If you want a vision of the future imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever.
That time is here, unmasked with the shameless hypocrisy of various state and local governments who have told us we must not, because of the health risks, congregate, unless we are remembering the death of a civil rights icon. We must not gather in large numbers, unless we are protesting the death of George Floyd. There has been no attempt to nuance or spin this reality, no verbal two-step or rhetorical misdirection. It’s all been out there, in the open. “Yes, we said it is not safe for you to gather. But if the motive for the gathering is this favored political expression or that, then it is safe.” Absolutely shameless.
There is one thing sadder still. That we just accept this. Please don’t misunderstand. The issue isn’t COVID or quarantines. The issue isn’t the memorial services or the protests. The issue isn’t debates on how deadly the illness or how useful social distancing is. The issue is that the government has now reached a place where they don’t even pretend to have a rational defense of what they say, and that we move along as if we have not just crossed a Rubicon. They painted this on the side of the barn- “All group meetings are equal” and then, when it suited them, added, “but some are more equal than others.” And we just keep chewing our cud.
I don’t have a solution. I can’t begin to imagine how to even get back to that better place and time where they bothered to wrap a veil of plausibility around their lies. I don’t know how to teach us to once again blush in the face of such shame. All I can do is cling to this glorious truth, that the real government, the one with all the power, is well beyond the reach of surface to air missiles, and that He has never and will never lie. Maranatha Lord Jesus.
No, and yes. The Bible does not have a specific text that suggests that the Bible alone is our final authority in all matters of faith and practice. Those who delight to point this out, however, typically Roman Catholics and the eastern Orthodox, typically miss the point. First, their energies more often than not are aimed at the Anabaptist error that we call solo Scriptura. Here a man affirms that all he needs is himself and his Bible. The wisdom of the church in history, the community of believers, are all deemed irrelevant to understanding the things of God. Solo scriptura is reprehensible and ignorant and a-historical.
Sola Scriptura, like the Scriptures themselves, recognizes that God has gifted the church with teachers and pastors. It recognizes that the church has progressed and reached consensus on critical issues in and through the ancient ecumenical creeds. It affirms with vigor that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. But it also affirms that even these giants have feet of clay. And there is where the Bible does in the end teach sola Scriptura.
Sola Scriptura is not a true biblical doctrine resting on the Bible saying so. That would be a tautology- the kind of argument we find in that collection of lies the Book of Mormon. Instead the Bible is our alone final authority because it alone is the Word of God. It has been attested, authenticated, by God Himself. Miracles serve as the divine imprimatur, the proof that this is a message of God. This is how Nicodemus reasoned when he said, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him” (John 3:2). This is also how Jesus Himself reasoned when He first forgave the sins of the paralytic lowered through the roof. In response to the unspoken charge that He had blasphemed, Jesus told the man, “Arise, take up your bed, and go to your house” (Matthew 9:1-8).
I would be quite content to add as a second infallible and inerrant authority the ancient creeds of the church under the following conditions. First, those who gathered to formulate these creeds would need to have their message authenticated by miraculous works. Let them raise men from the dead. Second, we must add those creeds to our Bibles. If both sources are equally authoritative, why do we separate them? In like manner, I’d be content to add as a second infallible and inerrant authority the statements of the Pope when He speaks ex cathedra. First, however, let him raise men from the dead. Second, let us add his words, assuming he would even tell us what they were, to our canon.
But wait, there’s more. I want an authoritative list, in both instances of what these messages are. Ask someone Orthodox to show you exactly where you can read their infallible tradition and you will receive slippery ooze. Ask someone Roman Catholic for a list of infallible papal or consiliar statements, and you will receive the same.
Finally, there is this problem. In both instances, Rome and Orthodoxy, you run headlong into the problem of the infinite regress. That is, those who are less strident in their views on tradition, who deny that tradition carries additional content to the Scripture, instead argue that tradition gives an infallible and inerrant interpretation of Scripture. Okay. Where then can we find an infallible and inerrant interpretation of the interpretation? Assuming we could succeed there, of course, we would need an inerrant interpretation of the interpretation of the interpretation. Ad nauseum.
No, the Bible is God’s Word. It is perspicuous, understandable. It says what it means and means what it says. It is attested by the miraculous power of God. And it is all these things, alone. It alone, all by itself, equips us for every good work. Flee anyone who tells you that more is required to understand, or more is required to obey. If you’d like to learn more, I’d encourage you to get and read my friend Keith Mathison’s outstanding book The Shape of Sola Scriptura.
No one likes to be judged, but everybody does it. Outside the church, of course, are those who embrace a relativistic ethic, wherein there is no objective right or wrong. Suggest otherwise to these good people, however, and you will know they believe you have embraced something objectively wrong. The one iron-clad moral law of our age is “Thou shalt not say there are any moral laws.” Inside the church things happen a smidge differently.
Here too we judge those who judge, citing, usually wrongly if I might make a judgment, Matthew 7:1, Judge not, lest ye be judged. Worse still however is not that we judge judgers, but that we judge non-judgers, simply on the basis that we “feel” judged. Consider this account I once read on a blog. Woman A is bemoaning the awful, evil, stench straight from hell judgmental-ness of hardcore, conservative homeschoolers. She explained how she was out doing some shopping, dressed in pants. She walked into a store, and there, doing her shopping, was Woman B, a member of Woman A’s church, dressed in a skirt. Woman B always wore a skirt or a dress, and so Woman A retired to her car, unable to shop, crying her eyes out because she was being judged by Woman B for wearing pants. Now if you think it not a bad thing for women to wear pants, chances are you sympathize with woman A. Even if you believe women shouldn’t wear pants, chances are you wish Woman B wouldn’t be so judgmental. But what, friends, has Woman B done? She dressed herself, and she went shopping. She said nothing, and as far as we know thought nothing at all about Woman A and her pants. Yet, Woman A is alone in her car casting all manner of judgment, all manner of private, secret (until she wrote the blog piece) bile against her sister. We know this not because we are free to guess what others might be thinking, but because Woman A told us in her own blog, without the least hint of irony.
Somehow we have come to believe that believing and practicing this belief or that is tantamount to practicing the inquisition against those who don’t so practice. Substitute masks for skirts if you like. Substitute opening, or not opening the doors of the church building. Substitute blacking out your instagram. This is what Matthew 7:1 is all about. When we do have a judgmental attitude, that is, not having a view on what is right and wrong, but rather being quick to convict with little or no evidence, we can rest assured that we will be judged in like manner. If you are judging people for what you guess they are thinking in judgment of you, turn around. There is someone secretly judging you in their heart. And you deserve it. Instead why don’t we all try to practice a judgment of charity? Why don’t we move through our days assuming that other people actually like us? That they mean and wish us well? That we can disagree about this issue and that without either side being unduly nasty about it? Maybe we in the church could all dial down the rhetoric, without dialing down our passion for His Word.
Last night’s study on The Holiness of God was interrupted by a warning that one manifestation of His awesome power might be on its way, a tornado. It was, as chapter 4, which we were to look at, begins, a dark and stormy night. But all is well, and we’ll be back next week, Deo volente.
Thesis 37- We must believe and teach our children to believe that God is the one who gives us our daily bread.
It is a common enough argument between those who believe in the sovereignty of God and those who do not. Those who do not, want to know, “If God has already determined all that will come to pass, why pray?” or the slightly less aggressive version, “Does prayer really change anything?” Those of us who believe in the sovereignty of God have good and sound answers to this objection. Often we break into a discourse on primary and secondary causality. We talk about how God ordains means as well as ends. It’s all true, though it may miss the heart of the matter. The truth is that prayer does change things. It doesn’t, of course, change our future. Instead it changes us. We do not, in other words, pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” because we will starve if we don’t so pray. We pray it instead to teach us that it is God Himself who provides our daily bread.
Our temptations are legion here. The serpent provides any number of different substitutes for God in our equation. We may believe that our skills, our diligence, our market savvy provide our daily bread. We may believe that it is our job that provides our daily bread. When our job is in jeopardy, we then tend to worry. We may believe it is the government that provides our daily bread. And so we expect it to ensure the stock market rises, to insure our risky home mortgage. Of course our gifts and our hard work are a part of the way God answers this prayer. Of course the company we work for is a part of the way God answers this prayer. Of course governments can either guard prosperity or destroy it, and so is a part of the way God answers this prayer. None of which changes the reality that it is God who provides our daily bread. When we sit down before a meal and return thanks, we ought, as we open our eyes, be as joyfully surprised as the children of Israel who awoke each morning to see the ground covered with manna.
Evangelicals, especially those of us who are Reformed in our thinking, are often practical deists. Just as deists believed that God wound up the great clock that is the universe and stepped back to watch it all play out, so we believe God wrote the story, His decrees, and then stepped back to watch it all play out. He has indeed decreed all that comes to pass. And He has decreed that He acts in space and time. He puts bread on our table. He meets our needs.
We are His children. We need to know this. Our children are His children. They need to know this. They need to know that as much as they are cared for by their earthly father, their heavenly Father is, in the end, the One who watches over them.
Don’t forget that today, at 7:00 eastern we continue our live study, working together through my father’s classic work, The Holiness of God. We will cover this week chapter 4. All are welcome to join us online. We’ll be on Facebook Live, at RC-Lisa Sproul. If, however, you are in the area, you are welcome to join us in our home. We serve a meal to our guests at 6:00. Do please let us know if you’d like to be here in person for the study or both the meal and the study. We hope to see you here.
