I find great comfort in the fact that because of the incarnation of Christ, God is forever bound to man. God cannot be bound by anything outside of Himself, but in Jesus Christ, God united Himself to humanity forever in the personal union on humanity and deity. The eternal Logos, the Second Person, the Word of God, took a full human nature, body and soul, and thus I can know with certainty that God can never give up on humanity, for He is personally united to humanity, irrevocably, forever. So He will certainly finish the work of salvation that He started. His Word that He would do so is of course sufficient, but the incarnation makes that promise visible and concrete.
Author: Matt Powell
The Purpose of the Human Will
“I can of Myself do nothing. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is righteous, because I do not seek My own will but the will of the Father who sent Me. (Joh 5:30 NKJ)”
The human being is created with a will, the ability to desire and choose things. The purpose of that will is to be conformed to God’s will. Jesus shows us here the true way, the true use of our will, to do that which the Father wills. When our wills diverge from God’s, the result is misery and destruction, but when our wills align with God’s, then beauty, joy and freedom is the result.
I write this listening to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which reminds me of this very truth. The discordancies of the piece create tension, but the tension is all resolved when the multiple lines of harmony all come together at the end. The joy of the piece is found in the resolution of tension, the unity out of discordance.
That is the gospel.
A Failed Atheism
This is a beautiful account of a man’s conversion from atheism to Christianity. Speaking of later reflection on his seventeen-year-old self’s epiphany that there was no God:
I no longer regard my insight as a genuine discovery. For all its irreligious effects, the certitude I felt that morning in 1976 now appears to me a specimen of faith, and that faith began to crumble a few years ago. I thought it had heralded the truth, and for three decades afterward I felt it to be binding truth, but at fifty-three years of age, I now see it as error, an unfortunate one whose cost to me was an anti-spiritual, depleted existence through the prime of my life.
Read it all- I found it really moving. One thing I’d correct him about- he hasn’t lost the prime of his life. That’s still coming.
The Power of the Experts
The scientific community has been hijacked to push the agenda of unscrupulous men who wish to rule over you. Remember this the next time the witness of “experts” contradicts what you know to be true, and especially what the word of God tells you to be true. I am not a scientist. But I have been alive long enough and have read enough to see prediction after prediction utterly fail, and immoral and destructive behavior defended by “science”, to extrapolate the trend.
Paul Ehrlich has been as wrong, wronger even, than Jim Hansen or Al Gore, yet no number of failed predictions has so much as put a crease in the man’s unwavering support of himself. And wasn’t he as a younger man convincing! The sheer authority in his voice, the utter believability! How many times did he say he was on The Tonight Show?
“Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.””
As far as I can tell, though I haven’t done a systematic count, not one of Ehrlich’s predictions has come true. Does it matter? Not to him, and not to the many, many grant- and award-awarding bodies who, to this very day, fete the man.
…
Now don’t make the same mistake this magazine did and call Ehrlich “insanely dangerous”. He is not. He is a harmless old man, who was wrong about, as far as I can tell, absolutely everything. It is a world class blunder to focus on Ehrlich and not on the political scum who “leveraged” Ehrlich’s preposterous predictions to push their anti-human agenda. It was the one-worlders who deserve all the discredit, not poor Ehrlich.
Forced sterilizations! They happened. Forced population “planning”. It happened. Not because Ehrlich said they must, and not even because this deluded and delusional man desired them, but because the powerful progressives who used Ehrlich as a front-man wanted them. They were content to let Ehrlich and others create panic and then to use that panic to their benefit. Headlines shouted “Science Says…!”, “Scientists Agree…!”, “Science Science Science!”
Sound familiar?
There’s been a fifty-year process of pushing anyone who disagrees with the agenda out of the academy. So now, whenever anyone questions the dogma, a true believer can say, “But all the scientists, all the experts, say something else!” Those who disagree will either be a small minority or hold positions outside the mainstream academy, and thus can be dismissed. They were wrong about DDT, wrong about the coming ice age, wrong about overpopulation, wrong about peak oil, wrong about their social planning, wrong about so many things.
Stop listening to them. At a certain point one must begin to suspect that truth isn’t really their concern.
Sweden Proves Socialism Cannot Work in the Long Run Even Under Optimal Conditions
This report by an American living in Sweden (seen first on Ace of Spades) well supports my thesis that socialism can work for a time, if the population is small, homogenous and hard-working. If people are naturally industrious and minded to look out for each other, then the free-rider problem isn’t so severe. But the problem is, socialism works to undermine the very characteristics that make it work in the first place- it attracts malingerers, discourages thrift and responsibility, and causes its own collapse. Immigrants come in to take advantage of the free welfare, or if immigration is somehow restricted, their own children grow up not learning the value of hard work. Ultimately group loyalty becomes completely undermined, more and more people free-ride, and eventually math wins, as it always does.
Wooden Pulpit Media on Church Discipline
If you’re wondering what church discipline is all about, please listen to this podcast by Wooden Pulpit Media, by Rev. Lee Johnson, a fellow RCUS minister, on the subject. He addresses head-on the idea that church discipline is not loving, and instead shows very clearly that not doing church discipline is what’s not loving, and that doing church discipline rightly is often the only loving thing you can do in a given situation.
Transgenderism, Progressivism, and God’s Law
Bruce Jenner is not a woman. He is a man. Every single chromosome* in his body records this fact. He can mutilate and poison himself all he likes, but he will remain a man. A badly damaged man, perhaps, but still a man. He can no more make himself a woman than I can make myself a giraffe.
Progressivism is basically rebellion against what is. Progressives try to rewrite human nature and human behavior to suit their preferences- not just in sexual matters but in all areas of life. When they inevitably fail, they do not reflect, do not consider that they were wrong, because the disease is not an intellectual one but a moral one. Instead they double down and seek to crush any dissenters from their utopian lie, believing those dissenters to be the cause of their failure. So now we are going to be told to believe that while homosexuality is genetic and unalterable, gender is not genetic, but purely a matter of individual choice that a person can decide for themselves, completely contrary to their actual genetics. Perhaps we will be told that there is an elusive “transgender” gene that overpowers the force of that “y” chromosome on every cell of the body.
Progressivism is organized rebellion against the law and rule of God. It is the systematic violation of the Ten Commandments. It is the rejection of the reality of the curse on man, and the attempts to overcome the effects of that curse by throwing off the law of God. It never works and will never work, because God is God, and His curse on mankind will stand, until man submits to Jesus Christ the Messiah and the remedy to the curse which He provides.
Promiscuous sex will always lead to horrible results. They can try to cure all the STDs, have expensive government programs to provide for the broken families, kill the unwanted babies, train the kids in “safe sex”, educate or force us to be approving of all the sad broken results of this madness like Bruce Jenner, pretend there is nothing weird at all about a 65 year old man calling himself Caitlyn and posing in a women’s magazine in a slinky dress, and provide psychotherapy to try to fix all the scarred and shattered souls. Finally they will set out to destroy anyone that continues to speak out against perversion and promiscuity, believing that our lack of full-throated approval for their evil is what causes all the associated ills. They think it’s our condemnation of their actions that causes those actions to have bad consequences. But breaking God’s Law, which defines reality itself, will always lead to horrible results, and no program of man can ever do more than put a bandaid on the gunshot wound. Every single person in the world could fully support and celebrate a 65-year-old man making himself a eunuch and God would still be God and the results will still be horrible. The bill will always come due in time. Math always wins, the arithmetic of God’s law doubly so.
The wages of sin is death, the Scriptures tell us. This is the reality of God’s economy, and no progressive attempts at redistribution will ever overcome God’s justice.
*This should say “every cell in his body”. I apologize for the error.
John Piper’s Hopelessly Subjective View of Faith
An article by John Piper was brought to my attention by a reader of a previous post on the subject of assurance. I think it is another illustration of the same kind of thinking that I took issue with there, presented even more boldly this time.
The title of the article is, “You Can Believe the Promises of God and Still Be Lost.” It’s obviously provocative, and designed to startle you and make you think. And I’m all in favor of provocation, of course. But not by saying things that aren’t true. The title of that article is manifestly not true.
The promise of the gospel is, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” If I believe in that promise, then I am saved. It really is that simple. Now if Piper is meaning that if I believe that I am forgiven and going to heaven, but I do not believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, then I am deluded and not going to heaven, like the falsely assured in Matthew 7:22. But the people in Matthew 7:22 did not believe the promises of the God. They made up a promise in their own head and believed that. They believed something God never said, that if you work miracles that proves you are saved. Nobody ever said that; that was just a comforting lie that they chose to believe. Their lack of faith is proven by their lack of repentance. But there is not a word said there about them believing in Jesus.
Yes, we also know that it is necessary to believe the truth about Jesus. There are many in the gospels who believe their own made-up lies about Jesus. They may even believe He is the Messiah, in the sense that the Messiah is the One who will come and solve all our problems. But they didn’t like the solutions He proposed, or even agree with the existence of the problems He actually came to fix. He came to free them from their sin, not to free them from the Romans, and so they rejected Him. Again, these are not examples of people who believed the promises of God. They believed lies made up in their own heads or told to them by Satan.
Satan himself cannot be used as an example of one who “believes the promises of God” as Piper tries to claim. Satan does not trust Jesus as his savior. Satan doesn’t even want to be saved. And the oft-cited passage in James, “The devils believe, and tremble” (James 2:19) says nothing about the demons believing in Christ, or in the gospel, or that Christ is the Savior, or anything like that. It says that they believe there is one God. That’s all. James’ point is merely that having certain correct doctrinal propositions does not make you saved. Being a monotheist in the first century was a pretty big commitment. But it did not indicate saving faith. James is nowhere making the point that I need to add some other element to believing in the promises of God in order to be saved. When he says that faith without works is dead, he makes very clear what he means. He does not say that faith without works is insufficient; he says it’s dead, not alive, not real faith. Real faith will produce repentance.
Even resting in Christ, says Piper, is not enough, since he claims the false professors in Matthew 7:22 are resting in Christ. But they’re not at all! They’re resting in their own works. When they are confronted, they do not say, “But we believed the promises of God!” (To which Piper would have Jesus respond, “It’s not enough! You did not apprehend properly the full spiritual beauty of the gospel promises!”) No, they say, “Did we not do all these wonderful works?” They never express any faith in Christ. They express confidence in their own working of miracles.
There is a similar passage in Luke 13:25-26, where Jesus is similarly attacking the false confidence of many of the Jews:
“When once the Master of the house has risen up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock at the door, saying,`Lord, Lord, open for us,’ and He will answer and say to you,`I do not know you, where you are from,’ then you will begin to say,`We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets.’ “But He will say,`I tell you I do not know you, where you are from. Depart from Me, all you workers of iniquity.’ (Luk 13:25-27 NKJ)
Once again, there is no protest on the basis of belief, to which Jesus responds, Piper-like, that their faith lacks some vague subjective quality of apprehending beauty. No, they thought they were in the kingdom just because they were around Jesus, because they were present when His ministry was happening. This rings very true to this pastor’s experience. Many seem to think just because they show up from time to time when Christianity is going on, that they are in the kingdom. But we should not put words in Jesus’ mouth and make Him say more than He says.
What does Piper say is actually necessary for saving faith?
Another way to say it would be that in all the acts of saving faith the Holy Spirit enables us not only to perceive and affirm factual truth, but also to apprehend and embrace spiritual beauty. It is the “embracing of spiritual beauty” that is the essential core of saving faith. And this embrace is what will shape our lives most deeply and receive the “well done” at the Last Day.
“Embracing of spiritual beauty” is the core of saving faith. He’s even going farther than Owens in the article I quoted before. Owens was just talking about assurance. Piper is talking about what constitutes real faith. And into real faith he inserts the idea that embracing of spiritual beauty is necessary to be justified.
What does this even mean? How can I know whether I have embraced enough spiritual beauty? What particular definition of beauty does Piper endorse? And what Scripture would Piper use to defend this idea?
This idea destroys assurance, which one suspects may be the real goal here. The Puritan-minded (and Piper is a big fan of the Puritans) seem to view assurance as dangerous, as Lee Johnson says. They are so concerned about false professors and nominal believers that they seem to be willing to all but destroy the possibility of assurance in order to guard against that error. But in doing so they risk changing the definition of faith, and by doing so, overthrowing the Gospel, that very thing they are trying to preserve. It is the confidence in salvation worked by the Spirit which is the engine of spiritual growth. Spiritual growth essentially comes out of thankfulness, but to be thankful I have to be confident that I have a thing. It is impossible to be thankful for something which one is not sure one has.
Otherwise, sanctification becomes a means of achieving justification, the hallmark of legalism. And that is what Piper (perhaps unwittingly) is advocating for here, that the Christian be required to do a lot of work before that Christian has any right to view himself as saved. He says this is something revealed by the Spirit to the believer, but when I suspend my salvation on something subjective like this, the inevitable result is the necessity of doing a lot of work in order to assure that I have achieved that subjective standard. “Embracing spiritual beauty” is not something the believer automatically has when they come to faith. And how can we be certain we have enough of it? If I believe in the promises of God, but am uncertain that I “embrace the spiritual beauty” sufficiently, how do I go about getting it?
Here’s what I prefer:
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to Him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.” (Joh 11:25-27 NKJ)
Believing in Christ, here, is said to be the guaranteed ticket to eternal life. And what is believing in Christ? It’s believing that He is the Messiah, the Son of God. It’s trusting Him completely. It’s resting in Him. If I believe the promises of God, then I will believe in Christ. There is really no air between those two things.
Or as Paul and Silas said,
“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household.” (Act 16:31 NKJ)
Isn’t that enough? What are we afraid of? Are we afraid that people are going to be confident and joyful in their salvation when they have not shed as many tears as I think they need to, or have been raised to the same ecstatic heights that I believe to be necessary? Is it the fear that there are people who are going to believe the gospel, rest in Christ, repent of their sins, trust in their salvation, but will actually have been deluded and will go to hell because they didn’t “embrace the spiritual beauty” of the gospel enough? Does Piper actually think God would do that?
Well, boo on that. Trust Christ. And of course there is the need to unpack everything that means, and understand the implications of that. The idea of repentance, of rethinking our lives and committing to a different way is implicit in what it means to trust Christ as my Lord and Savior. But many a new Christian won’t have any kind of clear idea of the real nature of their sin, of its true horror, or of the full spiritual beauty of the gospel of Christ. Those things come in time. But they grow out of trust and thankfulness, that is to say, out of assurance. If you deny assurance until someone has reached some subjective level of apprehension, then you have destroyed the very spiritual principle that will produce that growth. Sanctification grows out of trust, not out of doubt.
The Heidelberg Catechism in Question 2 teaches us that three things are necessary to live and die in the comfort of belonging to Christ- the greatness of my sin and misery, how Christ has redeemed me from my sin and misery, and how I am to be thankful for that redemption. That’s simple. And more important, it’s not subjective. These are simply Biblical facts to be learned and embraced and applied to our lives. These are the promises of God. Believing them will certainly preserve your soul from hell.
Men’s Choir
Here’s a nice little thing. At the recent RCUS Synod meeting a choir of delegates sang “How Great Thou Art” before the Wednesday evening service. I thought it turned out nice.
It was a good meeting. There were disagreements of course, but they were handled graciously and collegially.
Church Discipline and Keeping Promises
It’s always risky commenting on a discipline or conflict situation going on at another church. But the situation at The Village Church I think merits a mention.
