Author: Matt Powell

John Owen’s Wrong View of Assurance

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There is a very real difference within different camps of the Reformed faith on the subject of assurance.  We might identify the two different perspectives on the subject as the Westminster position and Heidelberg position.  The Westminster position might also be identified as the Puritan position.  This is well illustrated by John Owen’s book, The Mortification of Sin.  This is a worthy book in a lot of ways, with much helpful advice.  But there is a consistent emphasis throughout the book on the question of whether one can rightly view oneself as saved or not, based on rather subjective standards.

In chapter 13, Precautions Against False Peace, he says,

When men are wounded by sin, disquieted and perplexed, and knowing that there is no remedy for them but only in the mercies of God, through the blood of Christ, do therefore look to him, and to the promises of the covenant in him, and thereupon quiet their hearts that it shall be well with them, and that God will be exalted, that he may be gracious to them, and, yet their souls are not wrought to the greatest detestation of the sin or sins upon the account whereof they are disquieted, — this is to heal themselves, and not to be healed of God.

Just the title of that chapter made me nervous.  Owens here teaches us that unless we are “wrought with the greatest detestation” of sin, we have no right to rest in the promise of the gospel.  After getting over my initial alarm at this passage, I thought perhaps Owen was just being hyperbolic.  After all, if I really had the “greatest detestation” of my sin, that is, I hated my sin in the superlative, to the greatest degree possible, with no love of any kind at all for my sin, then I wouldn’t sin.  Why do people sin?  Because it’s fun, because they enjoy it.  Now that just shows the corruption of our hearts, that we think it’s fun to engage in the misery and bondage of sin, but that’s the nature of it.  And Owens doesn’t just mean hatred of the worst sins I commit, or the overt sin, but all of them, even the pride I hide in my heart.

Now don’t get me wrong.  We ought to have such hatred.  And it is a valuable and necessary part of sanctification to cultivate such a hatred.  But Owens is saying that I must have this hatred before I can even be confident of my justification.

The really disturbing thing about this is that Owen asserts that a man can have sorrow for sin, have faith in Christ as his savior, believe in the covenant, believe in the shed blood of Jesus Christ on his behalf, and still have no right to consider himself saved unless he have this “greatest detestation of sin”.

The thrust of the chapter might be summed up as this, “take heed thou speakest not peace to thyself before God speaks it; but hearken what he says to thy soul.”  This statement is emphasized at the beginning of this chapter as a sort of thesis statement for the whole chapter.  Owen’s point throughout the chapter is that we must not console ourselves with the promise of forgiveness until we have the requisite level of hatred for our sin, at which God will “speak peace” to us.  To speak peace to ourselves before that point is to illegitimately claim the promise of the gospel.

The next question is obvious- how do we know that God has “spoken peace” to us?  And what does that mean?  Assurance of pardon is the question- how can I be assured that I am truly forgiven?

Owen’s answer to this is entirely subjective.  One who is accustomed to fellowshipping with Jesus will recognize His voice:

There is, if I may so say, a secret instinct in faith, whereby it knows the voice of Christ when he speaks indeed; as the babe leaped in the womb when the blessed Virgin came to Elisabeth, faith leaps in the heart when Christ indeed draws nigh to it.  Mortification of Sin, p. 64.

In other words, you’ll just know when it happens.

Why didn’t he point us to the promises of the Scriptures?  Why not simply say, “If you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you will be saved”?  What are we afraid of here?  I know that many of the Puritans were especially concerned about nominal Christians, and in the context of a state church where everyone was baptized just because they were born within the bounds of that church, that the problem of nominal Christians was a real one.  It’s still a problem today.  But there’s another problem as well, and that is robbing people of their confidence and rest of the gospel, “robbing them of their reward” in the words of Paul.

If we believe in election, as Owen certainly did, then we ought to know that the false confessor is not going to be turned into a true confessor because you beat him up with guilt.  All Owen is really doing here is beating up the tender consciences of the true believer; they’re the only ones that will even hear this.

Owen’s perspective is similar to what the Westminster Confession states, though Owen states it more strongly.  But the Westminster Confession, in Chapter XVII, denies that assurance is of the essence of faith, but teaches that believers will often not possess that assurance and must labor long with the means of grace to achieve it.

Compare this to the Heidelberg Catechism.  In Lord’s Day 23, after the examination of the Apostles Creed, question 59 asks,

59. What does it help you now, that you believe all this?
That I am righteous in Christ before God, and an heir of eternal
life.

How simple.  I believe the gospel, therefore I can be confident that I am saved.

Later in question 86, the Catechism does tell us that good works are an aid to assurance.  One of the reasons to do good works is that “we may be assured of our faith by the fruits thereof.”  When we turn from sin and live more righteously instead, and we experience the benefits that flow from this repentance, we see further confirmation of the truth of the claims of the gospel and begin to experience the blessings of salvation as an “earnest” or downpayment of all the blessings God has for us in future (2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5).  But the Catechism roots assurance firmly in belief in the premises of the gospel, in putting our trust in Christ for salvation.

Yes, that’s going to work sorrow for sin.  But the process of the Christian life is in manifold ways driven by the knowledge of my forgiveness.  If you take away the assurance of salvation from people, you have taken away the engine that drives the Christian life.  It is not guilt and fear that drives sanctification.  It is thankfulness, trust and peace.

Happy Shavuot!

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God freed the people of Israel from bondage in Egypt by the Ten Plagues.  God taught the Israelites to celebrate their deliverance from slavery and preservation from judgment in the Passover, or Shavuot in Hebrew.  Fifty days after they left Egypt, they came to Sinai, and God gave them His law which constituted them as a nation and provided them the basis on which He would continue to dwell with them and be their God.  Fifty days after Passover, they were to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, which was a celebration of the completed harvest, but also became associated naturally with the giving of the Law at Sinai.

Of course they never kept the law, and eventually God’s patience and longsuffering came to an end and the nation was exiled in Babylon.  But God promised a restoration, and one of the characteristics of that restoration was that the Spirit of God would be poured out on them, working the law of God in their hearts (Jer. 31:31-34).

Jesus died on the cross to deliver His people from their sins.  He is our Passover (1 Cor. 5:7), the Lamb of God who was slain for the sins of the world.  Fifty days after His death on Passover, on the day of Pentecost, the Spirit of God was poured out on the early believers, just as was promised.  The parallel with Sinai helps us see what the point of this was.  It was not just the miraculous display.  That was just the sign of what was really going on, which was the new giving of the law.  Now the law was being given not on tables of stone but on the fleshy tables of the heart.  The Spirit of God would reconstitute Israel according to the presence of the law in their hearts.  He would make His home in believers’ hearts, making those hearts His temple, a temple sanctified with the blood of Christ and filled with the Spirit of God so that the presence of God would never again leave His temple.

We look to no new temple, no new kingdom, no new Passover to be re-instituted.  All the ceremonies and rituals of the Old Testament merely looked forward to the reality of Christ, and His sacrifice on our behalf.  On the foundation of His blood the Israel of God is constituted and filled with His Spirit, never again to be rejected and sent into exile, not because we are better than the Jews but because God is putting His Spirit into His people to make them what He would have them be.  He never fully did that with the Jews, precisely to show them and us our need for the power of God unto salvation.  His tabernacle is established in our presence, His Spirit is in our hearts, our sins are forgiven.  All that remains is the consummation of our salvation, when we have finished our wilderness journey and enter into the Promised Land of our rest.

California Water Crisis

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The California water crisis is a great example of how badly state-run monopolies allocate scarce resources.  According to Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex, the entire thing could be solved by simply paying the alfalfa industry $860 million to not grow alfalfa, which would pretty much make up the shortfall.  That sounds like a lot of money, but the state is spending billions on rebates for low-flow toilets and all sorts of things like that, which will not even save a fraction of what shutting down the alfalfa industry would cost.  Alexander isn’t saying this is even the optimal solution.  His point is, that the market could easily come up with much better solutions than the ones they’re proposing, solutions that are already acknowledged to be inadequate.  $860 million comes to about $20 a year per California resident.

Enjoying Your Computer? Thank Protestantism.

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I was really moved by this article.  It’s from Tom Wolfe writing in Esquire Magazine in 1983, about Silicon Valley and the men, especially one man, Bob Noyce, who were responsible for its rise:

On the face of it, there you had Grinnell, Iowa, in 1948: a piece of mid-nineteenth-century American history frozen solid in the middle of the twentieth. It was one of the last towns in America that people back east would have figured to become the starting point of a bolt into the future that would create the very substructure, the electronic grid, of life in the year 2000 and beyond.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t have surprised Josiah Grinnell in the slightest.

…

Yet in Grinnell necessity had been the least of the mothers of invention. There had been something else about Grinnell, something people Noyce’s age could feel but couldn’t name. It had to do with the fact that Grinnell had once been a religious community; not merely a town with a church but a town that was inseparable from the church. In Josiah Grinnell’s day most of the townspeople were devout Congregationalists, and the rest were smart enough to act as if they were. Anyone in Grinnell who aspired to the status of feed-store clerk or better joined the First Congregational Church. By the end of the Second World War educated people in Grinnell, and in all the Grinnells of the Middle West, had begun to drop this side of their history into a lake of amnesia. They gave in to the modem urge to be urbane. They themselves began to enjoy sniggering over Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Once the amnesia set in, all they remembered from the old days were the austere moral codes, which in some cases still hung on. Josiah Grinnell’s real estate covenants prohibiting drinking, for example. . . . Just imagine! How absurd it was to see these unburied bones of something that had once been strong and alive.

That something was Dissenting Protestantism itself. Oh, it had once been quite strong and very much alive! The passion—the exhilaration!—of those early days was what no one could any longer recall. To be a believing Protestant in a town such as Grinnell in the middle of the nineteenth century was to experience a spiritual ecstasy greater than any that the readers of Main Street or the viewers of American Gothic were likely to know in their lifetimes. Josiah Grinnell had gone to Iowa in 1854 to create nothing less than a City of Light. He was a New Englander who had given up on the East. He had founded the first Congregational church in Washington, D.C., and then defected from it when the congregation, mostly southerners, objected to his antislavery views. He went to New York and met the famous editor of the New York Herald, Horace Greeley. It was while talking to Josiah Grinnell, who was then thirty-two and wondering what to do with his life, that Greeley uttered the words for which he would be remembered forever after: “Go west, young man, go west.” So Grinnell went to Iowa, and he and three friends bought up five thousand acres of land in order to start up a Congregational community the way he thought it should be done. A City of Light! The first thing he organized was the congregation. The second was the college. Oxford and Cambridge had started banning Dissenting Protestants in the seventeenth century; Dissenters founded their own schools and colleges. Grinnell became a champion of “free schools,” and it was largely thanks to him that Iowa had one of the first and best public-school systems in the west. To this day Iowa has the highest literacy rate of any state. In the 1940s a bright youngster whose parents were not rich—such as Bob Noyce or his brother Donald—was far more likely to receive a superior education in Iowa than in Massachusetts.

It was Christianity, and especially the Christianity of Dissenting Protestantism, that made Silicon Valley possible.  There were of course many factors, but that was a big one.  There’s no getting away from it- religion always lies upstream from everything else.  And when you look at all the triumphs and successes of the modern world, and you trace them back, you’re going to find Christianity back at the roots of those successes.  Christianity gave us the modern world.  With all its ills, I’ll take the modern world over ancient Rome or Assyria any day.

I’m more optimistic than Wolfe, though:

Surely the moral capital of the nineteenth century is by now all but completely spent. Robert Noyce turns fifty-six this month, and his is the last generation to have grown up in families where the light existed in anything approaching a pure state.

That light burns bright in a lot of places, a lot of families, all across this country.  Christ promised His church would never fail and His gospel would never be destroyed.  And it’s not only here in this country, but all across the world, rapidly growing in China, Africa and South America.  We’ll see what wonders it works in those places, just as it worked here in the past.

Choose This Day Whom You Will Serve

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All the stuff we’re seeing about political correctness, social justice warrior-ing, GamerGate, Sad Puppies, online shamestorms directed at pizza parlors and bakeries for not catering gay marriages and the like, ultimately proves that a society is going to be governed by a religious worldview.  The only question is, which one?  A nation’s political system is going to be governed by the dominant religious perspective and worldview of that nation’s people (sometimes just their elites), and if it’s not clear what that dominant worldview is, then a nation is going to tear itself apart until one is established.  That’s what’s going on in America right now.

Partly I think this shows the faulty thinking of some versions of Two Kingdoms Theology, who want Christians to disengage from politics as Christians.  Jay Nordlinger in the National Review quotes a Macedonian social conservative saying that you might not like being in a culture war, but the alternative is cultural surrender.

But the bigger lesson that people are going to have to learn is that the idea that we can just be a society that is based on no perspective at all on the world and life, that the government is going to just police the borders and otherwise not reflect any kind of perspective on what society ought to be, is madness.  This is the main reason that I’m not a libertarian.  Though I agree with them on a great many things, every government is going to be driven by a worldview, and that worldview is going to include a lot of things about sexual relations between people, this being one of the fundamental aspects of human society.  Knowing this, I’m going to advocate for a government driven by a Christian worldview, since that is my own.  Advocating for a “secular” nation, one not driven by any particular religious worldview, is just surrendering to the others that are willing to step into the space.

A Christian worldview is better able to provide space for other worldviews than any other worldview.  This is ironic; a Christian worldview can permit Marxist utopians or Muslim Sharia advocates to live and even preach within its borders, because the Christian worldview is not trying to create utopia.  But the converse is not true.  When a utopian worldview comes into power, they cannot tolerate dissent, because they need to get everyone on board.  When their utopia does not come to pass, they will always look to the dissenters as the reason why, and crush them into submission.  This has already happened many times in history.  The claims on the left of tolerance were only a ruse they used when they did not dominate the culture.  When they do dominate the culture, all talk of tolerating opposing views goes out the window.

The Gamergate issue in particular I think is revealing.  I find myself somewhat ambivalent on the conflict itself, because while I do like video games, I think there is no question that a lot of them objectify and demean women, and that is contrary to the Christian faith and is damaging to culture.  The other side of it is the tactics that progressives always use- not persuasion but bullying, slander, and name-calling, and worse.  But the reason I think you should be interested in this, even if you don’t care about video games, is that it’s a wonderful demonstration how in the absence of a Christian worldview policing society’s view of such things, other worldviews will rush in.  The object all along has not been to get religion out of a position of influence in politics, it’s been to get one particular religion out of influence (Christianity) and replace it with another (progressivism).  A lot of libertarian minded people got on board with eliminating Christianity’s influence in politics, and are now surprised to find themselves the target of the hostility of the dominant religious perspective (progressivism) that they helped enshrine.

So it’s not a question of whether religion will lie behind and upstream from our political debates.  It’s just a question of which religion.  I prefer Christianity, and will advocate for it.

Facebook harassment

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My little church’s Facebook page has somehow gotten the attention of a harasser.  My wife Andrea interacted with a family member about a political disagreement, and shortly after that, she began to receive “likes” from a group with a very vulgar and deliberately offensive name.  After that the church page began getting likes from the same page.  This is a page run by someone with a pathological level of hatred for Christianity.  As individuals we can block them.  Or if they left harassing comments I could delete them.  But there is no way for one page to prevent another page from liking their posts, guaranteeing that visitors to the church’s page will see these extremely vulgar and offensive messages.  I’ve reported the page to Facebook for harassment, but some research has indicated that these pages have been reported before by others and nothing has changed.

Oh well.  I think we as Christians are just going to have to get used to seeing more of this sort of thing.  It just reveals the character of the person doing it.  The only real problem is that we as Christians will have to see some bad words, and I suppose we can’t allow ourselves to be chased from the public square by some bad words.

The truth of the Bible

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If the Bible is true in what it says about itself, then it was written by the Creator, by the One who made you and me.  If that is so, then the Scriptures will match the very shape of your soul.  They will fit inside you like a key fits a lock.  You don’t need any external proof that a key is the right one for the lock- you know it’s right because it fits, it turns, it opens the door.

The Bible doesn’t need to be proved to be true.  People will see it or they won’t.  The evidences and arguments are fine; they serve their purpose.  But they’ll never by themselves get a man into the kingdom.  If God has prepared the man to hear the word, then he’ll hear.  If the man doesn’t hear, it’s like trying to convince a man standing outside on a sunny day that the sky is blue.

The Daughter of Zion Laughs at You

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21 Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, “Thus says the LORD God of Israel,`Because you have prayed to Me against Sennacherib king of Assyria,
22 `this is the word which the LORD has spoken concerning him: “The virgin, the daughter of Zion, Has despised you, laughed you to scorn; The daughter of Jerusalem Has shaken her head behind your back!
23 “Whom have you reproached and blasphemed? Against whom have you raised your voice, And lifted up your eyes on high? Against the Holy One of Israel.
(Isa 37:21-23 NKJ)

I found great comfort in this passage tonight.  I’ve been dwelling on the bad news, on the hostility of the world to God’s people, probably too much lately.  And God never promised it would be easy all the time.  It wasn’t for Israel.  But we are Israel; we are the virgin daughter of Zion, the bride of the Lord, and He’s not going to let anything happen to us.  We may seem very weak, but when we know who stands behind us, coming to take us to Himself, why should we be afraid of the world?  I think Christians should have their eyes open, but we shouldn’t live in fear.  Let’s remind ourselves to be busy at the work God’s given us to do, of serving our fellow Christians, of raising our families, of loving our spouses, of being faithful in our places of employment, being faithful citizens, or whatever else God has put in front of us.  And when the world tries to frighten us with their bluster and threats, maybe we’d be better just shaking our heads at them, laughing, and ignoring them.

I say that with full knowledge of all the horrible things that are happening to Christians around the world right now.  But through their tears, they can laugh too, for salvation, and judgment, is coming.

Meditations on Reformed Worship

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My latest book, Meditations on Reformed Worship, is all finished and done.  All saucered and blowed, as they say.  The cover art was a bit of a struggle this time, but after a false start that didn’t really turn out the way I wanted it to, I’m happy with how it ended up.  Here’s the summary:

Worship matters. We were created to be in relationship with God, in fellowship with Him, and to do so together with His people. The basic, bedrock promise of the Bible story from beginning to end is, “I will be your God, and you will be My people, and I will dwell in your midst.” Corporate worship at its best is the closest experience of that eternal reality we will experience in this life. Over time the most accurate insight into a church’s theology is their worship- what they do, what they sing, what they say, and the heart with which they do it. When you believe you are going to meet with God, you show everyone most accurately what you think about Him.

cover thumbnail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buy it on Amazon.  If you’re a pastor interested in it for your church, I’ll get you a discount code for bulk purchases, and if you’d like to review it, I’ll get you a copy.  The Kindle edition will be coming out soon as well.

The Value of Crummy Jobs

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This is a great article, by James Franco, on the value he got from working at McDonald’s as a young person.

It is a very sad thing to me that young people do not get jobs as often as they used to.  Some of that I suspect is because regulation makes it increasingly difficult to hire people, and the lowest-skilled people will always bear the brunt of that (pay attention, you who think raising the minimum wage is a good idea).  Some of it, I suspect, is the narcissism of our society, especially among the youth, many of whom I think would find it degrading to do any such thing as burger-flipping.  I also suspect that there is a similar dynamic as that which happened in the American South during slavery, where menial work was associated with an underclass and therefore something that no self-respecting white man would do.  In Colorado, in the cities, I noticed a few years back that virtually all of the fast food jobs were held by Mexicans, many of whom seemed like native Spanish speakers to me.  If it was true in Colorado I expect it is even more true in other places.  So a great many entry-level jobs- fast food, janitorial, landscaping, etc- would be associated with Mexican immigrants and something no respectable middle-class white kid would do.

It’s sad, because a great deal can be learned from these kinds of jobs.  I worked at Taco Bell and Furr’s Cafeteria for the first few years of my working life.  I made minimum wage.  I suspect I was barely worth that.  I was lazy and unfocused.  And I got criticized for it.  Every young person, as soon as possible, needs to go work for someone who doesn’t care very much about their feelings; especially young men.  It is highly motivating.  I learned some of the most important life skills at those jobs- how to be on time for things, how to meet expectations, how to work with a team, how to take orders from a boss.  And I learned the joy of a job well done and a paycheck I’d worked hard for.  Some of those lessons took years to sink in.  But the seeds were sown there.  Those simple lessons are 90% of your success at any career you pursue.