Tonight we continue exploring the greatest commandment. We will unpack both the command to love the Lord our God with all that we are and our neighbor as ourselves. All are welcome in our home at 6:15 eastern for dinner, and for the study itself at 7:00. The study will be live-streamed on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
I understand that it’s a tough issue. It’s disconcerting that the Holy Spirit inspired a prayer asking God to dash his enemies’ heads against the rocks. That thought is just what we find in what are called “imprecatory Psalms.” These are Psalms wherein one man beseeches God to destroy other men, and even children.
C.S. Lewis had one of his major trips over this issue, going so far as to call these texts “sinful.” Others have taken these texts as license to virtually cast evil spells on others they disapprove of. How do we embrace these Psalms for what they are, the Word of God, without embracing an ethic that would be repugnant to Jesus?
By understanding the nature of the gospel. Specifically, we must come to understand the cauldron of violence inherent in the gospel. How easily we misunderstand what God has done for us. We see ourselves like little children, lost, and alone, but basically good. Jesus came here to find us, take us by the hand and lead us to heaven. We think Jesus is the Great Hero and we the damsel in distress.
The truth is we are by nature the enemies of God, little dragons taking instruction from the Great Dragon. We are not the damsel in distress but the evil witch. And Jesus does not take our hand to lead us. No He takes His hand, plunges it into our chest and rips out our hearts. Before giving us new ones.
Our salvation is less moving from being lost to being found, more moving from being His dead enemies to being His living brothers and sisters. It begins with destruction, violent, earth-shattering destruction. If that’s not enough violence, remember that our salvation is built on the violence that scourged our Lord, that it pleased the Father to bruise Him, that by His stripes we are healed.
Which helps us understand precisely how and why we not only can but should pray imprecatory prayers on God’s enemies. First, our God is the God who lifts up the lowly and brings down the mighty. The Day of the Lord is darkness for some, glorious deliverance for others. But second, our God is the God who brings down the mighty, sometimes that He might lift them up. He destroys that He might rebuild, kills that He might give life.
When I pray against him who daily seeks my harm, against him who spurns His grace, who rails against the body of Christ, I do so asking that God would destroy him. Should He determine to destroy him through crucifying him with Christ, and raising him with Him, I have gained a brother, mercy has been made known and justice has been served. Should He determine to destroy him in the fire that never dies, justice has been served. Should I complain if God chooses the former, I show myself to fail to understand my own need for His grace.
God’s judgment is a beautiful thing, not something anyone needs to be ashamed of. His mercy is a sublime thing, not something anyone ought to be proud of. Pray for His judgment, and pray in thanksgiving should His judgment pass over your foes. Pray always knowing such once were we.
This is the thirty-third installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday March 2 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.
The hard driving forces of individualism do not yet stand astride the culture like a colossus. We have divided our homes into mini-apartment complexes and our churches into age and gender- segregated shopping malls. We break the ties that bind any time we find them the least bit binding. We live by ourselves and for ourselves. None of which has yet undone the truth that we are an incurably communal people.
Sociologists have argued for decades, for instance, that children in the inner-city, coming out of unstable homes, often without fathers, naturally gravitate toward the pseudo-family that is gang life. Even the mob mimics the contours of the family. Casa Nostra, after all, means “Our House.”
One need not, however, live in the context of a criminal subculture in order to see faux families at work, to see the parade and charade of ritual togetherness. One can see it driving into Ligonier Valley, PA. Ligonier is a small town in western Pennsylvania, where I grew up. As you enter from the south you see a sign of welcome. It welcomes you to town, but the welcome comes not from all its citizens, but from its leading “families.” That is, there on the sign you will see the logos for Ruritan and the Knights of Columbus, for the Rotary Club and the Masonic Lodge.
I’m no expert on these civic organizations. I’ve never joined one or visited one. Apart from the service to the communities, from business deals made, there are rituals, secrets that bind the members together. Which makes perfect sense. For these organizations invariably become not just pseudo-families, but pseudo-churches. They take on the shape of the one great organization wherein communities are served and dominion is exercised, the church of Jesus Christ.
We ought not, because of the obvious similarities, be ashamed of our practices. We do not greet one another with a secret handshake, but with the kiss. We do not wear funny hats, but crowns of gold. And the ritual that binds us together is as plain as it is powerful. There is no great power in bread. There is no great mystery surrounding wine. But Jesus, He is a different matter altogether. There is not just power and mystery, but power and glory.
The Lord’s Supper is a rite, a ritual, a form, and a raging storm of power. Of course there is the power to remind us of our sin. The body wasn’t broken by a car accident. The blood was not shed because of a mishandled kitchen knife. No, we come to the table knowing that we crucified Him. We broke the body, as our sin shed the blood. The very act of eating and drinking the destruction our sin has wrought will penetrate our hearts far better than the most cogent lecture on the doctrine of total depravity.
But there is greater power. For the Table not only tells us of our sin, but tells us of His forgiveness. It is, after all, the Table of the Lord. He invites us there that we might enjoy table fellowship with Him. We enter into His forgiveness and His peace as He lays out before us a table in the presence of His enemies. He bids us to rest not just in Him but with Him.
When we affirm the power of conviction, when we affirm the power of connection with Him, we still, however, miss the Body. For the glory isn’t merely that we commune with Jesus but that as we commune with Jesus, we commune with each other. The Lord’s Table has the power to make of bickering, back-biting, and squabbling siblings the very body of Christ. Just as hundreds of grains of wheat join together to form a single loaf, so too hundreds of grains of wheat join together to form the body of Christ, the very bread of life.
The Lord doesn’t set His table for one or for two, but for the teeming multitudes that are His. The Table opens our eyes not just to see Him, but to see Him in our brothers and sisters, that we might love them as we are called. It all ties together.
When the Table reminds us of our own sin, it helps us look past the sins of our brothers. And when the Table shows us the glory of the Son, we set aside seeking our own glory and love our brothers better. When we enter into the power of the Table to make of us one, then suddenly the formulaic copies of the world around us lose their appeal.
Who needs funny hats and secret handshakes, when Jesus, the one we crucified, when Jesus, the one He raised from the dead, when Jesus, the one who is the express image of the glory of the Father, comes and feeds His bride? May He purify us that we might love Him, and so better love His body, the church.
There is something both healthy and unhealthy about our propensity to see our salvation in a punctiliar, once-for-all context. Many, though not all of us can pinpoint the day when, by His grace we entered into His kingdom by faith. Even those who cannot name the day do believe that it happened once and for all.
It’s a good and healthy thing that we understand that we are already fully forgiven, adopted, beloved of our Father. We fail to grasp the scope of His grace when we walk about as if He has forgiven us but won’t really, fully love us until we’re dead and sin no more. There is no leveling up to look forward to with respect to His love for us, and that’s a good thing. We’re already at level infinity. We became saved, and will never again be anything other than His.
We do, however, remain sinners as long as we live. And such often means that we don’t rightly rejoice over the ongoing nature of our salvation. We look at salvation as something behind us, something we’ve already accomplished. We’ve moved on to the sanctification stage. And for some that is measured by how finely we are able to hone our theological convictions. Salvation is milk for babies. We want meat.
Oh mercy no. We will not only never move on from the salvation He has given us, but we will never move on from the calling to rejoice in that salvation, to walk in joy because we walk in shock. He saved a wretch like me. Which is nothing to yawn over but is something to revel in.
We ought never to forget that in ourselves, each of us is rightly under God’s curse. When we wake up each morning in our bed we ought to rejoice that we are not asleep in our graves. More astonishing still, we ought to cry out in thanksgiving that we are not perpetually drowning in the lake of fire.
It is right and fitting that we should, when we wake each morning, give thanks for His many blessings. We give thanks for the refreshing rest He has given us, that He watched over us through the night. We praise Him for a warm home, wherein we are secure from the elements. We express our gratitude for the work that lies before us, and for the daily bread He daily provides for us.
These are all things for which we owe Him infinite gratitude. How much more so, however, do we owe Him infinite gratitude, daily, that He has forgiven all our sins? That we wake up at all? How ought our hearts sing to wake up not drowning in the lake of fire but secure in His nail scarred hands? This, friends, isn’t rhetoric, but the truth. This isn’t poetry to send us into flights of fancy. It is instead hard-edged reality to send us into genuine joy and thanksgiving.
Every morning for the unbeliever is another morning God in His grace invites repentance. Every morning for the believer is another morning God in His grace is owed ecstatic gratitude. Lord help me to live a life of thanksgiving, always giving sacrifice of praise.
Does a fish know it’s wet? When one is born in water, goes to school in water, marries in water and raises little fish in water before dying in water, despite its ever presence, the water just isn’t noticed. So it is with each of us. We come into a world that is the only world we’ve ever known. How we know it, its meaning and its message, is shaped by it. And it’s so hard to miss.
Since the work of Abraham Kuyper, and more recently Francis Schaeffer, the evangelical church has grown conscious of the importance of developing a Christian worldview. That’s a good thing, one I’m in favor of. It’s one of the reasons I wrote Tearing Down Strongholds. The devil understands the strategic importance of our little gray cells, and so invades our brains, intent on helping us think his thoughts after him. We must be conscious of the war, prepare for the war, and fight the war. But we must also beware the sleeper cells in our gray cells.
Consider this truth. Where does the Bible command us to develop a sound Christian worldview? It doesn’t. It commands us to seek after wisdom. It demands we not be conformed to this world but that we renew our minds. It insists that we tear down strongholds. All of which have overlap with developing a sound Christian worldview. But “developing a sound Christian worldview” also has overlap with modernism. It, in comparison to the Biblical command to pursue wisdom, is decidedly abstract, impersonal, even amoral. Just like modernism. It implicitly affirms that we are machines, and that ideologies are programs embedded on our hard drives.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is presented in our Bibles as a beautiful woman who is to be pursued. Her value is greater than gold. She is the paragon of virtue, a guider of earnest souls. Foolishness, in contrast, isn’t merely erroneous conclusions but a seductress and a killer of the simple. She isn’t passive (mis)information but aggressive assaults.
When we think that what is wrong with the world is bad information rather than wicked hearts we demonstrate that we have already given room to the world in our minds, and in our hearts. When we think that what is wrong with the church is bad information rather than wicked hearts we prove the point once again. When we think that what ails us will be cured by more and better education, we have adopted the sacrament of the moderns.
When we think the way to prepare our children for a good life is securing them credentials from the poshest educational institutions we have handed them over to the priests of the false religion of modernism. When we think the most powerful weapon to tear down the stronghold of postmodernism is a double dose of modernism we show ourselves to be all wet.
The real solution is the same as it ever was- to repent and believe the gospel. And to call on all others to do the same.
Tonight we begin a new study, exploring the greatest commandment. We will unpack both the command to love the Lord our God with all that we are and our neighbor as ourselves. All are welcome in our home at 6:15 eastern for dinner, and for the study itself at 7:00. The study will be live-streamed on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
“In essentials, unity. In doubtful matters, liberty. In all things, charity.”
This quote purports to tell us exactly where to draw these lines. And it does so rather well. What this famous quote doesn’t do is tell us which matters are essential, and which matters are doubtful. Nor does it tell us exactly what charity looks like. Perhaps most important, the quote does not define for us what liberty looks like.
We start with the ancient creeds of the church. One advantage of these ancient creeds is they were written, in large part, to answer, what are the essentials? They provide not my list of essentials, not your list, and not the other guy’s list. Instead they provide the list of the church through the ages. I am committed to the Reformed faith, a Calvinist to the core. I believe husbands are the heads of their homes. But, to join Sovereign Grace Fellowship you need only confess two truths. First, you must affirm your belief in the Apostles’ Creed. Second, you must affirm your dependence upon the finished work of Christ alone.
Here, on this second affirmation, Luther gave us much wisdom. He affirmed this is the article on which the church stands or falls. (I would affirm that the Protestant understanding of how we have peace with God is actually present in the creeds. It’s just not very clear. That is why Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy can “affirm” these creeds, even though they adhere to a false gospel.) We are unified along those essentials, and those alone.
This means, by the way, that we are not in union not only with Rome, but hard-core “Protestants” who, for instance, deny the resurrection of the body, or the future return of Christ. Full preterists, who believe there is no future prophecy yet to be fulfilled, deny the creed, and so we have no unity with them. This means that Oneness Pentecostals who could have a clear view of justification by faith alone, are not one with us because they deny the Trinity.
On the other hand, this also means that Baptists, dispensationalists, Lutherans, and any other evangelical body are in union with us, despite our disagreements over this issue or that. This is where both charity and liberty come in. While we disagree with our brothers on this issue and that, we disagree as brothers. We do not seek to bind the conscience on these matters, though we always seek to inform the conscience, even as they, in charity, seek to inform ours.
Charity also applies this way- it can help keep us from playing Six Degrees of Condemnation. That is to say, for instance, that while I am appalled that Dr. John Stott saw fit to suggest that the unredeemed do not suffer for eternity, that doesn’t mean I should judge with equal fervor someone else who believes in hell, but isn’t as unhappy with Dr. Stott as I am. In like manner, though I was rather seriously non-plussed and disappointed at several of the men who signed Evangelicals and Catholics Together more than thirty years ago, it is not my solemn duty to condemn loudly and publicly those who weren’t as troubled as I was.
The Bible gives us some interesting wisdom on these matters. Read through the New Testament epistles and you will see both patience with error within the church, and strong condemnation of certain errors that were plaguing the church. From these we seek to draw out principles such as those that inform this famous quote, and from these we in turn seek to fill in what we mean by essentials, and by doubtful matters.
This is the thirty-second installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday February 23 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.
We are a litigious people. We not only like to sue one another, we like to avoid being sued, and having to sue. That is, we hire lawyers not only to write up contracts, but to help enforce contracts. Handshakes and verbal agreements have gone the way of the nickel cup of coffee. (And be careful with that coffee now. It just might be hot, and you wouldn’t want anyone to sue.) As a culture we can barely even agree to disagree.
On the other hand, we are likewise a licentious people. We want our pleasures, and we want them now, and nothing, we seem to believe, ought to stand in our way. We have our rights, and by rights, we will have them. Contracts, the saying goes, are made to be broken.
It is a strange marriage in a given culture. The great English novelist, Anthony Burgess, in his great work, A Clockwork Orange, speculated that cultures are doomed to alternate between two extremes of the pendulum. Sometimes a culture embraces a Pelagian view of man, what Burgess called the “Pel phase.” Here man is seen as basically good, and all restraints are inherently bad. This romantic notion, however, soon loses its romance, as sinful men without restraint begin to, well, sin.
Their sin grows bolder and bolder until the culture reacts, and enters into the “Aug phase,” named for Augustine. Here man is looked at as fundamentally sinful, and restraints are all the rage. The state, in seeking to restrain sin, soon enters into sin, becoming ever more oppressive itself. Soon enough the people tire of a heavy handed state, and the pendulum swings back the other way.
His analysis, a case could be made, reflects similar thinking on the issue of the Trinity. Some cultures tend more toward the one, and exhibit a uniformitarianism, often manifested as totalitarianism. Other cultures tend toward the three, (or the many) and, as William Butler Yeats put it, the center cannot hold. Culture simply disintegrates in a fog of variety. The solution here is, of course, the Trinity, where the one and the many come together in peace. But what of the shift from a permissive culture to a repressive one and back again? The answer here is covenant.
Just as the Trinity brings together the one and the many, so covenant binds together (or marries, if you will) the legal and the familial. Covenant does not merely reduce down to contract, for such misses the inherent grace therein. God did not create Adam and Eve as tabulae rasae (blank slates), placing them in a neutral realm and then waiting to see which way they would go. Instead, He blessed them with life and a garden. He put them in a paradise they did not earn, and He walked with them in the cool of the evening.
This relationship, however, wasn’t some sort of anything-goes, if-it-feels-good-it-must-be-good relationship. Yes, God loved them. Yes, He blessed them. But He established that love and the boundaries by which it might be protected by making covenant. It is in this context, in the context of a loving father in relationship with His children, that God first establishes covenant with man.
Covenants, rightly understood, then, are not merely contracts, the legal forms of legal relationships. Neither are they formless sentimental feelings that bring people together as long as those feelings last. Instead, they are both. In covenant we have real obligation. Real promises are made, and real sanctions handed down when those promises are broken. But underlying all of that is grace, love, and relationship.
This is why Paul speaks of our heavenly Father this way, “It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26). God did not wink at our sin because He loved us. Instead, because He loved us, He punished our sin in His Son on the cross. He wanted to justify us because He loves us. He did it justly by punishing His only begotten Son.
Grasping covenant is not only necessary for understanding the Word of God, but it is our only hope, culturally speaking, to escape the pendulum of which Burgess wrote. It was in fact our understanding of covenant that birthed the freest nation the world has ever known. It is no accident that the British, during the time of the Revolutionary War, referred to it as “the Presbyterian war.” We are a nation founded on the principle of covenant, beginning even before the Revolution with the Mayflower Compact.
A nation built upon covenant recognizes the sinfulness of man. It seeks not only to restrain the sinful impulses of the individual but to restrain the sinfulness of men who wield state. As Lord Acton observed: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” To restrain the state we need checks and balances. We need covenant keepers in office. We will have these things only when we in the church learn to keep covenant among ourselves. We’ll have faithful politicians when we are faithful to our Shepherd. The nation will be free when God’s people are once again subject to their High King, and when God’s people rejoice in their Great Husband, even Jesus our Lord.
