Love is one of the good words. Just as no one particularly labors to have words like death, or cruelty associated with themselves or their ideas, so everyone wants to lay claim to love. The devil, however, is quite content for all of us to love love, as long as he maintains the power to define the term. The mainline American church follows mainstream American culture and defines love principally in permissive terms. Love means never requiring others to say they are sorry. God’s love for us, in this scheme, makes our sins insignificant (as well as making the atonement of Christ insignificant.) God winks us into heaven, because we’re so valuable and lovable, and He’s such a swell guy (or girl).
The devil’s goal in promoting this nonsense, is not, in the end, directed at either liberal professing Christians nor those who are not professing Christians. Instead, his enemy is always those who trust in Christ alone. In getting them to embrace this foolish idea of love, he tempts us to deny or at least diminish the sound idea of God’s love. Evangelicals, at least the fundamentalist and the Reformed wings, want to affirm the reality of God’s wrath. He is a just and holy God. His wrath, justice and holiness are more real than we will ever realize. But they ought never to be contrasted with His love. We should not diminish any attribute of God to emphasize any others. The Lord our God is one. The Bible tells us time and again that we are loved by God. Our duty is to believe Him.
This is, in the end, the very end of the work of Christ. God’s goal was not merely that we would end up forgiven for our sins. This was but a step in a longer process whereby we who are by nature children of wrath become His own children. Our justification is in the service of our adoption. Jesus, His beloved Son, suffered for our sins so that we might become by grace His beloved sons.
I spent over a decade of my public ministry seeking to make known this startling reality- that if we are in Christ, we are loved by our heavenly Father as much now as we will ever be. Even when we remember our evangelical theology, even when we sing with our lips that we are justified by faith alone, too many of us too often seem to think that God is angry with us when we sin, and that we keep His anger far from us by not sinning. We long for heaven in part because we know that there we will sin no more. Guilt will no longer stand between us and our Father. The truth is, however, that guilt does not stand between us. Our guilt was driven away as far as the east is from the west two thousand years ago. God’s anger at our sins was spent on Calvary.
Over the past few years I have repented of preaching this message. I no longer believe that I ought to be seeking to persuade people that God loves them now as much as He ever will love them. My goal now is to persuade Christians of this truth, far more shocking still- if you are in Christ, God loves you now as much as He loves His own Son. This is the good news. Not only were our sins forever expunged at Calvary, but the very obedience of Jesus became ours. He is as pleased with us as He is with His first born Son. We are now joint heirs with Him. We are in union with Him.
Believing this precious truth changes everything. So much of our fear, our weakness is driven by a failure to rest in this truth. We long for the approval of men, because we do not believe we have the approval of God. And so we fail to be faithful. Faith, however, is believing God. He has told us that He loves us. He has told us that He has made us His Sons. By his grace may He bless us with hearts that believe Him.
Tonight we continue our look at the monumental, towering book of Romans. All are welcome to our home at 7 est, or you may join us for dinner at 6:15. We will also stream the study at Facebook, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
Martin Luther would certainly be among the top ten people who’ve had an influence on me. CS Lewis would as well. Among more contemporary thinkers, I’d have to list Ravi Zacharias and RC Sproul. Luther, of course, had some less than gentle things to say about Jews in his day, giving a black eye to the Reformation. Lewis’s view of the Bible is shameful, embarrassing. I need not catalogue for anyone who hasn’t been in a cave the last fifteen years, the grievous sins of Ravi Zacharias. As for RC Sproul, well, while he was a sinner like the rest of us, he’s the exception that proves the rule.
Sadly, we all tend to conflate the men and their ideas, and so when confronted with the failures of these men we are tempted either to defend the defenseless (the men) or give up the wonderful (the ideas.) The more nuanced among us remind us to “chew on the meat, and spit out the bones.” It’s a good principle, assuming we know how to tell the difference. The less subtle are more than willing to build a bonfire for both the books and bodies of their enemies.
Today the nation observes Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I’m old enough to remember when there was no such day, and when our solar system had nine planets. There was quite a ruckus when the holiday was first proposed (though, oddly, none whatsoever when Pluto got demoted.) Arizona refused to take part. And, a whole cottage industry committed to revealing all the flaws of MLK was born.
We’ve learned about his dissertation that even Harvard’s ex-president wouldn’t have approved. We’ve learned about the serial infidelity. We’ve known about J. Edgar Hoover’s conclusion that King was a card-carrying communist. Suppose all those things were true, as they may well be. Suppose there are worse things we don’t even know about, as there certainly are. Suppose the man was a scoundrel from top to bottom. None of that in the least diminishes the truth and the beauty of the core message which was so eloquently expressed in his “I have a dream” speech.
I have no interest in lifting up the man, defending his reputation or anything of the sort. Nor do I think his core message was original or unique to him. Instead, I share with him the dream that a day will come when all people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I share the dream not because he had it, but because Jesus calls us to pray for it when He taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, om earth as it is in heaven.”
That this simple principle has come to be despised and repudiated by race hustlers in our own day is yet another good sign that it’s a good idea. Good character embraces the concept of judging people by their character, even when that message is made famous by a man of low character. Don’t celebrate the man. Instead dream the dream.
We are, I believe, dispensationalists by nature. That is, dispensationalism has so dominated the evangelical church over the past one hundred years, boldly and faithfully standing on the inerrancy of the Word of God when so many turned their backs, that it has become the dominant wing of the evangelical church. Bible colleges and study Bibles strategically spread its message and, in turn, its eschatology (doctrine of the last things). Its tendency to emphasize the power of Satan in the last days has meshed well with an increasingly secularized West. It has become the water we swim in.
Dispensational doctrine tends to emphasize the differences between the old covenant and the new. The temptation among those who take a more covenantal approach to the question is to de-emphasize the differences. My dispensational friends are wont to drive a wedge between the Old and New Testaments. My covenantal friends are wont to tear out the pages that separate them. Make the first mistake and you denigrate the work of God prior to the advent of Christ and reduce your Bible by more than half. Make the second mistake and you denigrate the greatness of the work of Christ.
The solution, of course, is to agree with all the Bible, which affirms both that God was at work well before the announcement to Zechariah (Luke 1:5–25), and that John the Baptist, along with Jesus, came with a radical message. The difference: the kingdom of God was at hand. John the Forerunner certainly knew that things had changed. For centuries up to that point, baptism was a ritual by which those who were not Abraham’s descendents were numbered among the people of God. Now, however, John was proclaiming that even the Jews must be baptized. Why? Because the kingdom was at hand. The ax was being laid to the root of the tree. The winnowing fork was in hand.
Jesus, in turn, preached the same. The first account we have of Jesus preaching recounts how He read this promise of a new age to come: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19). Reading the promise wasn’t the great watershed, however, but what He said afterward: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (v. 21).
Under the old covenant, people came to have peace with God in the same way we have peace with God. That is, they trusted in the work of Christ that from their vantage point was still to come. They, not knowing exactly how God would bring it to pass, cried out, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” In our context, it is the same faith in the same object. We have peace with God by trusting in the once-for-all finished work of Christ. It is, of course, a great and glorious change in the new covenant that this event has come to pass in space and time. It is likewise a great thing that under the new covenant, we have so much more understanding and revelation of the means by which God redeems us. I can’t imagine how much more difficult it must have been to live in a world of types and shadows. This means we must give thanks for living in light of light.
There is, of course, yet another great change: the giving of the Spirit in power to all those who have been blessed to believe. That power, and its purpose, however, relates deeply to the great change. With the fall of man in the garden, what God had designed was swept into chaos and decay. The perfect world, which just days before God Himself had declared “good,” and the stewards over the creation were now corrupted. Sin opened a Pandora’s box of entropy— physical, spiritual, and cosmological. Every instance of God’s giving grace in the old covenant— the covering of Adam and Eve, the deliverance of Noah and family, the calling of Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees, the rescuing of His people from the boot of Pharaoh, the judges, the godly kings— was given in a context of fits and starts, each designed to fall short and to point to what was to come.
The kingdom we now seek is His kingdom, which shall have no end. We need have no fear that our King has feet of clay. We need not despair that His strong right arm will come up short of the task. When Jesus walked out of His tomb as the firstborn of the new creation, that downward spiral came to an end. His resurrection did not merely signal a counterattack. It was not just the establishment of a beachhead. It was not just a crucial success in a war whose outcome is unsure. It was victory.
To be sure, we have much yet to mop up. He is still bringing all things under subjection. But in principle, we are of good cheer, for He has already overcome the world. Seek this kingdom— because it has come. Seek this kingdom— because it is covering the world as the water covers the sea. He is risen. That changes everything.
A culture that denies that truth exists and can be known is already dead whether its obituary has been written or not. Cultures are built on truths, even if those truths are false. It is bad enough to be wrong, but so much worse to deny that right and wrong exist. Once upon a time we held these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Now everyone gets to decide for themselves what a man is, and the state gets to decide what rights some men have and others do not.
Truth is the foundation of all other things. The word itself is a synonym for the Word, the Lord of all things. The message of the gospel, that which we are commanded to go into all the world and preach, is true. Truth, however, comes to us never as less than abstract propositions but at best, more than mere abstract propositions.
In the church, especially, we can be prone to reducing truth to propositions. While the less theologically astute churches present elaborate displays when gathered for worship, the more theologically astute churches often gather simply to have the smart pastor download the information he gathered into the minds of the congregation. This kind of “download” isn’t in itself a bad thing. Jesus spoke to all who would listen.
This same Jesus, however, didn’t leave us an abstract gospel, a neatly stacked pile of propositions. Neither did He leave us mysterious and elaborate rituals and incantations. Instead He gave us water, bread and wine. He gave us water as the mark of the covenant, a tangible, watchable event that goes beyond mere words. He gave us in turn the sacrament of His Supper, a tangible, watchable, smellable, taste-able event that reminds us of His sacrifice for us, that draws us closer to Him, that draws us closer to one another.
The One who came to save the world, who Himself took on flesh and dwelt among us, the very embodiment of the Word directs our gaze beyond words to things, fellow creatures that He has set apart, making them holy. He is Lord not just of heavenly ideas but of earthly, and earthy realities.
We are indeed to take every thought captive. But He is about the business of bringing all things into subjection, every idea and every power that exalts itself above Him. He speaks truth, and He breaks knees. He reigns in our hearts, and reigns over the sun and the stars, the wind and the rain. He is the sower who plants the seed, the vineyard owner who crushes grapes into wine. He came to bring life, and life abundant, not mere deracinated truths to make sure we’re right. Not less than this, but more.
Our Lord has invaded space and time, recapturing what was His from the beginning. And He is bringing it all under subjection. May He start with us, in remaking us into His image.
I have noticed in recent years a great upsurge in objections to the objective truth of what we are. Any time I speak of the believer as a sinner, let alone a miserable sinner, I can always count on someone to come along behind and chasten me for forgetting how God sees us. They will, happily, often do so by reminding me of the great truths of the gospel. But one thing the gospel doesn’t do is make our sin disappear on this side of the veil. It doesn’t make us incapable of committing this sin or that (with the exception of blaspheming the Holy Spirit). If we define “sinner” simply as “one who sins” then it doesn’t cause us to cease being sinners. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we are removed from our calling to recognize and give thanks for His mercy.
When we get ahead of ourselves, when we start to think not that we are deemed fine fellows by our Maker due to the life and death of His Son for us, but think instead that we are fine fellows in ourselves, we lose sight of the marvel of mercy. We forget not only to give thanks for the redemption of our souls, but for the preservation of our bodies. We forget not only to give thanks for the goodness in our lives in all the things that give us pleasure, but for the goodness in our lives in all the things that give us pain. In short, when we miss the sin, we miss the mercy. When we forget what we are due, we forget all that we have been given.
We forget we are sinners, we forget to give thanks for His mercy, precisely because we are still sinners. We preach this truth not to weigh us down, but that we would look up. Jesus told us that the man who beat his breast, crying, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner” went to his home justified (Luke 18:13). He went home then joyful, thankful. He did not, however, from that moment forward never again beat his breast. He did not, from that moment forward, never again cry out to God, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” But each time he returned to pray, he prayed the same prayer, and went home with the same joy. If we would remember the joy of our salvation, we must needs remember the sorrow of our damnation.
Our lives are faithful liturgies by which we remember the joy of our thanksgiving. We remember to remember our condition before we are redeemed. We remember to remember our condition after we are redeemed. We remember to enter into the graces He continues to show us, remembering that His mercies are new each day (Lamentations 3:22). We remember to hope in the promises of future grace, remembering that one day we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is (I John 1:3). And all along the way we give thanks, that He did not destroy us, but died for us when we were yet sinners (Romans 5:8), that He will never leave us not forsake us as we walk to the Celestial City (Deuteronomy 31:6), that He who began a good work in us will carry it through to the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6).
