Last week I was a guest on my friend Chris Arnzen’s terrific radio program, Iron Sharpens Iron. We talked, as you might expect, about my book, Growing Up (with) RC but more important we talked about God’s grace for us in Christ. I hope you’ll give a listen, and then, give praise to our loving Father. Tune in here.
Sonship theology is a set of biblical notions originally propagated by Jack Miller, a former missionary and pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America (former because Jack has gone on to his reward.) The ideas were first spread through a Bible study, then through a Presbyterian missions agency. The central theme, as evidenced in the title, is that we must come to understand that we are not only justified, but that we are adopted. It begins with an assumption that while our lips may affirm we are justified by faith alone, our Pelagian hearts are given to thinking that God is happy with us when we do well in our walk, unhappy with us when we do not do as well. It encourages us to enter fully into our union with Christ. Among the common slogans birthed in this movement are these- “Relax!. You’re much worse than you think.” And “Preach the gospel to yourself every day.”
So far there is nothing here that I could imagine objecting to. Indeed these themes are near and dear to my heart, central to my thinking, my teaching, my writing. I agree with Jack Miller not only that we need to understand these truths, but agree that getting our hearts around the glorious truth is a potent means to a more sanctified heart, a more God-honoring family, and a more grace infused church.
But there have been complaints. Some have accused Sonship theology of being implicitly antinomian. That is, some suggest that the notion that God is already as pleased with us as He is with His Son will remove the motive for better behavior. I find this accusation profoundly telling. I am unable to see how this accusation can stick on Sonship, but not stick on the gospel. That is, this accusation is a precise echo of what Rome said about the Reformers and the gospel they (and we) preached and defended. Though it may be apocryphal, it is said that Luther once quipped about preaching the gospel “If you are not accused of being antinomian, you are doing it wrong.”
Others have suggested that Sonship is too introspective. As you are encouraged to look for the idols of your heart, so that they might be torn down, it seems you could spend your time gazing at your navel. But do you notice how this complaint works against the former complaint? That is, how can one movement take you off the moral hook, and then also be too accusatory? And how can it be a bad thing to mortify your sins?
Finally, some accuse the movement of being a Reformed version of “higher life.” That is, like the holiness movement, Christians always face the temptation to create a two-tiered Christianity. There are those Christians over there, who haven’t had our experience, and us over here that have. We’re willing to see them in heaven, but if they want to join the elite, they need to have our experience. That higher life perspective is deadly, Gnostic and foolish. But surely that can’t mean that we can’t grow in grace and wisdom. Surely it can’t mean that we can’t encourage others to grow in grace and wisdom. Surely believing the gospel more fully, more faithfully, more biblically is a good thing. Indeed, surely believing this more fully will make us more humble, not less so.
My only complaint with the movement, as with most movements, is that it is a movement. That is, it can become THE KEY in the minds of some. It can be divisive in the minds of others. It can become a focus ironically, away from the work of Christ. These failures, however, are our failures, not a failure in the glorious gospel truth that in Christ we are made the sons of God. These failures are our failures, not a failure in the glorious gospel truth that we are forever sons, and not only can nothing tear us from our Father, but that nothing from this day forward can diminish His infinite love for us. We don’t need a movement. We do need to believe the gospel.
P.S. The very best treatment on our adoption, and the best book I’ve read in the last 20 years is Children of the Living God by the amazing Sinclair Ferguson. It can change your life.
This week, in part 2 of our series The Spirit of the Fruit, we considered the works of the flesh and what they tell us about ourselves, and the blessings of obedience.
It has been my habit over the years to remind people often that the devil is introduced to us this way, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the beasts of the field” (Genesis 3:1). It is because he is crafty that we often lose sight of his craftiness. If he’s not standing in front of us offering up some forbidden desire we think he must be elsewhere, bothering someone else. The truth is his arsenal is not just potent, but varied. If one weapon disappoints him, he picks up another and tries again. I suspect if we were to seek out a second adjective to add to “crafty” it would be “persistent.” The devil has never won a single battle against his Maker- he is 0 for ever, but he keeps trying.
We likely think of distractions as more of a nuisance than a weapon. Like a fly buzzing around our eyes and ears when we’re trying to focus, they flit in and out, and annoy. Their power, however, is found less in how they frustrate us, more in how they misdirect us. The distractions I speak of are not the temptation to look at cat videos when we ought to be working. No, I’m talking about the kind of distraction that leads us to the wrong battlefield, shooting at the wrong enemy.
Consider Darwin and his clown show, evolution. If you think of evolution as some powerful combatant against biblical creation you have missed its purpose and nature. Research and development down in hell wasn’t looking for a creation replacement, but a distraction. They were less trying to entice Christians to believe it, more to entice them to invest time and energy in defeating it. It’s a Potemkin village and we are idiots to aim all our weapons there.
When we come to the creation account and see it as source material for answering Darwin we are badly missing its purpose for us. God’s Word does answer the folly of the world, but it is designed to feed us. Throwing our food at our enemies leaves us hungry and weak. We need to enter into the glory of creation, to marvel at God speaking and reality coming to pass. We need to rest in the assurance of His absolute sovereignty over all things that is irresolutely affirmed with just these four words, “In the beginning, God.” When we read about Noah’s flood, and see there principally source material for developing flood geology, we miss the reality of our sin, God’s just wrath, and His grace in rescuing Noah.
Does creation defeat Darwin? Of course. Our story is true, and theirs utter nonsense. Does the flood explain various and sundry geological realities? Of course it does. It happened, and not in a corner, but all across the globe. But God did not tell us these stories so we could beat the world in winning the Better Science prize. He gave us these stories to teach us to repent, to depend on His grace, to celebrate His glory, to rest in His loving arms. And these are the very things the devil seeks to rob from us. He need not prove evolution to do so. He just floats that lead balloon out there and we go chasing after it.
The same principle applies to every kind of distraction. Sanballat didn’t need to persuade Nehemiah that he should stop building the wall. He just needed to get him to stop building the wall to defend the wisdom and rightness of building the wall. Nehemiah didn’t fall for it, and just kept at the job God gave him to do. Distraction can come in the form of our worries and fears about our provision. It can come in the form of worrying about what others think of us.
Our calling is to follow the agenda Jesus gave us, to seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness. And to enjoy our rest as we leave the rest to Him.
My friends at Social Church invited me on their podcast to consider what happens to those who never hear the gospel. Have a listen-
In wrestling they call it “the reversal.” You score big points when you not only escape the clutches of your opponent, but suddenly have him in your clutches. Here is how the devil does this to us as it relates to how we have peace with God. At the time of the Reformation our fathers spent a great deal of time and energy trying to get a handle of this question of how we have peace with God. Out of this came the solas of the Reformation, nuggets of recovered wisdom that slowly grew into a great mass of doctrine. Rome fired back, and we returned that fire. Sundry compromises were suggested, and we haggled, rightly I would add, over why those wouldn’t work. We built our competing empires, and fussed at one another. Yet every generation brings its Rodney Kings who wonder why we can’t all just get along.
So the debate goes like this- Cranky Reformed folk man the barricades in defense of their learned tomes. We make our stand, as we ought, on imputation, on sola fide, on penal, substitutionary atonement. Happy ecumenists, on the other hand, want a more “simple” gospel. They want to leave behind the tired old sixteenth century arguments in favor of something plain and unadorned. Have you caught the reversal yet? Rome, and her kissing cousin, eastern Orthodoxy, created a ladder like system to get into heaven, complete with lists of sundry saints to help you along the way, liturgies to appease the wrath of the Father, penances to pay and refining fire beyond the grave, all designed to make us good enough for God. The Reformation, on the other hand, threw over these man-made, man-driven systems in defense of a simple gospel- repent and believe.
Our heritage isn’t complex, weighty, pharisaical burdens. Our patron saint is the tax collector who entered the temple, beat his breast and prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” It is precisely the commitment we who are Reformed have to the simplicity of the gospel that requires us to draw lines in the sand against any system built upon self-righteousness, against any “gospel” that adds burdens to the good news. As one friend wisely put it, Jesus + Nothing= Everything. What we miss is this, Jesus + Anything= Nothing.
Recovering our heritage then requires two things. First, as we rightly defend sola fide, we must do so without destroying sola fide. If our explanations and defenses, no matter how zealous, do not lead us back to God, be merciful to me, a sinner, then we are on the deadly road to Rome, no matter how loudly we denounce Rome. And second, our commitment to the simplicity of the gospel must keep us from embracing the complexities of the anti-gospels. Our commitment to simplicity cannot allow an ecumenism that includes complex systems. Or to put it another way, we must repent and believe.
Today the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette published an interview with me in which I was able to speak about my book, Growing Up (with) RC, my sin, God’s grace, my Father, our Elder brother. Click here to check it out.
Call it a dog whistle, a secret handshake, a shibboleth- it matters not. We all have our ways of communicating which tribe we belong to, all without offending, or even informing, those outside the club. You’re having lunch at work with various forms of professing Christians, all engaged in friendly discussion. The guy from accounting says, “Well, as Machen said, ‘There’s Christianity and then there’s liberalism’” you, if you are Reformed as I am, would have found a friend.
So far- no harm no foul. What happens though when the next guy mentions his firm conviction that volume 8 of the Left Behind series is by far the most faithful to what the Bible says about the end times? Now if I were to ask you, “Did Jesus die for dispensationalists?” you would swiftly affirm that such is true, as would your Machen quoting friend. The problem is that when your dispensational friend spoke his mind you and Machen Boy caught each other’s eyes, despite the heavy rolling all four eyes were going through. Those rolling eyes silently communicated this message- you and I are a higher order of Christian than this poor rube who embraces such a flawed eschatology. Why, he probably thinks he got his eschatology from the book of Revelations.
Now I believe in the sovereignty of God. I believe in the 5 points of Calvinism. My disagreements with the Westminster Standards could fit on a postage stamp. Were I ever a Methodist, my homeboys would have been Martin Lloyd Jones and George Whitefield. That commitment, however, requires that I recognize that I am not justified by being a Calvinist, but by the grace of God, that I am no less depraved than my dispensational brethren, that theological logic ought to burn like fire, and that, in agreement with Whitefield, I don’t think I’ll see that old perfectionist Arminian John Wesley in heaven, because he will be so much closer to the throne of grace than I will be.
I’m Reformed, Reformed enough to know that my closest friends within the kingdom are not those who cheerfully enter the boxing ring to fight in defense of Calvin, but those who woefully enter their prayer closets to cry out for the defense of Christ. I hope this tribe, the ones who get grace, doesn’t have a secret handshake. The moment we pat ourselves on the back as being the crew that “gets grace” is the moment that we demonstrate that we don’t get grace. Thankfully, however, even when we don’t get grace, we do receive it. Just like our cranky brethren, our dispensational brethren, our Wesleyan brethren. Instead I pray we learn to recognize each other this way, by our joy in having received grace, and our swiftness in showing it others.
Had some technical difficulties, and had to restart twice. The top one is the beginning, the bottom one the end, which means the middle one is, well, the middle one. Hope you enjoy, and join us next week when we consider the works of the flesh.
If “The Fall” was caused by just one sin from the very first humans and all humans since have sinned, what are our chances of remaining sinless in heaven? I assume we would still have our gift of free will, so surely someone would sin?
There is no chance whatsoever that we will, once we are in heaven, fall again into sin, for at least two important reasons. First, God has so promised. The picture we are given of the eternal blessing we receive in Christ includes our being utterly pure, white, without spot or blemish. That we will stay in this state will at least come to pass on the basis of God’s promise. Remember when God stood with Joshua looking out at the city of Jericho and its rather substantial wall. God said, “See, I have delivered the city into your hands.” God’s Word is so certain that what He has spoken, though it has not yet come to pass, that it can be spoken of as in the past tense. I call this tense, “God’s prophetic past.”
Secondly, and perhaps ironically, it is precisely our free will which will be the means by which God’s promise is brought to pass. All moral beings, men, angels and even God Himself are free to choose. All of them, however, in their freedom, always choose according to their nature. God, for instance, could sin, if He so desired. But He does not so desire, for He is altogether good. He is “free” to do evil in one sense, but not free in another sense. No one forces Him to do good, but He will always and only do good.
When we enter into our reward, we will be fully and finally sanctified. That is, we will be fully and finally holy. There will be no more sin, no more desire for sin in us. We will have no more sin nature in us; we will be altogether good. We, like God Himself, will be free to do evil, were we so to desire, but we would never so desire because we will be altogether good. This is one of the greatest promises of eternity, that the struggle within ourselves between the old and the new man, between the Spirit and the flesh will be over. We will be at peace; we will enter into rest. Our warfare will have ended.
It is good and right for us to mourn the fall, to look deeply into all the destruction wrought by our parents’ first sin. But we must in turn look forward to the fullness of the promises of God. We will walk with Him in the garden again, unashamed and at peace. This is what Jesus has brought to pass for us, His beloved bride. We will be what we were made to be, and will stay so forevermore.
