R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 10

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This Father’s Day, you can save on a gift for Dad that will help equip him for faithful family discipleship. For a limited time, get up to 60% off more than 95 discipleship resources, including select teaching series, books, study Bibles, and more.

Browse the sale collection today and find a meaningful gift to help a father in your life grow as a dad and as a follower of Christ. If a friend or someone at your church is also looking for gift recommendations, remember to tell them about these discounted resources while supplies last. Don’t delay—this offer ends June 19.

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People like Esther Need Your Support Today

You are involved in vital outreach through Ligonier Ministries. I wish I could share all the testimonies that we receive daily about the impact that your support makes possible. Be encouraged. God is using you. As a taste, I want to tell you about Esther, an international student studying here in the United States.

When her campus closed because of the global health situation, Esther writes, “By the providence of God, I stumbled upon Ligonier’s website and Renewing Your Mind’s podcast.” Esther says that these resources from Dr. R.C. Sproul and Ligonier helped “provide clarity for many of [her] theological questions” and “prompted [her] to examine [her] faith further.”

That’s not all. Esther also says, “As a result, I’ve decided to change some life plans and am now attending a seminary to pursue a master’s in Apologetics. . . . I pray that this ministry will be blessed and be a blessing to many more.” Finally, she notes, “I’m excited to discover the Mandarin version of Ligonier! We need more solid teaching in Asia.”

Thousands upon thousands of people have recently begun a journey similar to Esther’s, and it’s all made possible through the generosity of friends such as you. Just think about this: if the Lord sustains the current trajectory of growth for Ligonier, more people will be served in the next five years than have been so far in our now fifty-year history. That’s astounding.

As the West finds itself in the midst of what some have called “cancel culture,” we praise God that the gospel of our risen Savior can never be canceled. Psalm 2 encourages us to have the proper eternal perspective when the nations rage and plot against the Lord. Together, the body of Christ must strategically continue to serve the church in the West, strengthening what remains (Rev. 3:2). Yet, this is not the situation everywhere. Isn’t it remarkable to consider the appetite for God’s truth in the Global South? The ministry opportunity is beyond what many of us have ever seen before. We are pressing into this gap as God provides the opportunities and the resources.

By God’s grace, so much outreach has already happened in 2021. But as you know, giving in support of ministry can often slow during the summer months. As our board prepares to meet at the end of July to check on our progress, we are carefully monitoring our funding needs and may need to reevaluate our plans for the rest of the year depending on donor response.

This is not a time to pull back. It’s my firm conviction that we are in one of the most critical moments of church history. The Lord is moving around the world, and vast numbers of people are professing Christ for the first time. But if these people aren’t adequately discipled in God’s truth, false teaching and heresy will spread and lives may not be ordered according to God’s Word. We don’t want to slow down our outreach at Ligonier. Indeed, this work must not slow, because the enemy has no intention of letting up on his attacks.

In only the last few months, faithful friends such as you have made it possible to:

complete the Farsi translation of Foundations , Dr. Sproul’s sixty-message overview of systematic theology, for broadcast throughout Iran via satellite TV, followed by the translation of his series Justified by Faith Alone , which will be finished this month;launch Ligonier’s dedicated-language outreach in Hindi;see the Ligonier app surpass one million downloads;go back to the printer for the third printing of the Reformation Study Bible in Spanish;finalize the Portuguese version of the Reformation Study Bible for release this summer;continue on pace to exceed the translation of three million words of trusted teaching in 2021 by year’s end;serve the global church through our 2021 National Conference, which was seen by close to 250,000 people online in English, Spanish, and Portuguese—our largest streaming event ever; andmove toward releasing the first wave of upgrades to Ligonier.org, with further expansion planned through 2021 and into 2022 as we seek to make it the unparalleled learning and discipleship platform for growing Christians everywhere.

Jesus Christ is building His church around the world. All authority has been given to Him, and He is with His people every day (Matt. 28:20).

What a privilege to be a part of His work to raise up disciples as we proclaim, teach, and defend the holiness of God. There’s much good we can do together as we seek to reach as many people as possible. Let’s send even more discipleship resources out in the coming months. Your commitment to a monthly gift before June 30 is greatly needed to help us meet and exceed the outreach expansion I’ve just outlined, laying a foundation for more ministry. Every gift is used by the Lord, and your monthly generosity can reach many people like Esther.

Thank you for your cheerful generosity. Soli Deo gloria—To God alone be the glory!

 

How Sinful Is Man?

Imagine a circle that represents the character of mankind. Now imagine that if someone sins, a spot—a moral blemish of sorts—appears in the circle, marring the character of man. If other sins occur, more blemishes appear in the circle. Well, if sins continue to multiply, eventually the entire circle will be filled with spots and blemishes. But have things reached that point? Human character is clearly tainted by sin, but the debate is about the extent of that taint. The Roman Catholic Church holds the position that man's character is not completely tainted, but that he retains a little island of righteousness. However, the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century affirmed that the sinful pollution and corruption of fallen man is complete, rendering us totally corrupt.

There's a lot of misunderstanding about just what the Reformers meant by that affirmation. The term that is often used for the human predicament in classical Reformed theology is total depravity. People have a tendency to wince whenever we use that term because there's very widespread confusion between the concept of total depravity and the concept of utter depravity. Utter depravity would mean that man is as bad, as corrupt, as he possibly could be. I don't think that there's a human being in this world who is utterly corrupt, but that's only by the grace of God and by the restraining power of His common grace. As many sins as we have committed individually, we could have done worse. We could have sinned more often. We could have committed sins that were more heinous. Or we could have committed a greater number of sins. Total depravity, then, does not mean that men are as bad as they conceivably could be.

When the Protestant Reformers talked about total depravity, they meant that sin—its power, its influence, its inclination—affects the whole person. Our bodies are fallen, our hearts are fallen, and our minds are fallen—there's no part of us that escapes the ravages of our sinful human nature. Sin affects our behavior, our thought life, and even our conversation. The whole person is fallen. That is the true extent of our sinfulness when judged by the standard and the norm of God's perfection and holiness.

This excerpt is taken from The Truth of the Cross by R.C. Sproul. To learn more about the true extent of human sinfulness download R.C. Sproul's free Crucial Questions booklet Are People Basically Good?

The Confessing Church in History

Here’s an excerpt from The Confessing Church in History, John R. Muether's contribution to the June issue of Tabletalk:

From the very beginning, even in their Old Testament manifestation, the people of God have been a confessional community. The “primal creed” of Scripture is the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). This creed is invoked by both Jesus (Mark 12:29) and Paul (1 Cor. 8:4–6). On Mount Sinai, God revealed Himself as a God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34:6). In the judgment of some scholars, this expression also served a creedlike function for the old covenant people; it was repeated several times in the story of Israel, from the Pentateuch to the Prophets, including three references in the Psalms (Pss. 86:15; 103:8; 145:8).

Similarly, creedal statements can be found in the New Testament. Two such examples are 1 Timothy 2:5 and 3:16. “It would seem plausible,” historian Jaroslav Pelikan writes, that Paul was quoting “from very early confessions of the Christian faith, oral or written.” Other scholars have argued that the “faithful sayings” in Paul’s Pastoral Epistles have also originated from creedal or liturgical formulas of the early church.

Continue reading The Confessing Church in History, or begin receiving Tabletalk magazine by signing up for a free 3-month trial.

 

40 Years of R.C. Sproul’s Teaching in One Collection

There is no such thing as a meaningless moment. Since we’re made in God’s image and created for His eternal glory, everything we think, say, and do today matters forever. The question is, How should this truth direct our daily lives?

For more than forty years, Dr. R.C. Sproul wrote his recurring column in Tabletalk magazine, Right Now Counts Forever, to apply the teachings of the Bible and Reformed theology to everyday life. No topic was off-limits because every part of our lives bears enduring significance. Through the years, Dr. Sproul helped Christians give careful thought to topics in theology and history, politics and current events, relationships and entertainment, and more.

In this new four-volume collection, hundreds of Dr. Sproul’s columns have been brought together for the first time. Written to serve the church, this treasury of theological reflection can help guide believers of all ages to live with eternity in mind and devote all of life to the glory of God.

Watch this video with Dr. Burk Parsons, a Ligonier teaching fellow and the editor of Tabletalk magazine, to get a glimpse into this landmark resource from Dr. Sproul and the timeless significance of his long-standing column.

“This book will take you to the heights of heaven as Dr. Sproul addresses a wide breadth of issues and topics. Though now seated in a cloud of witnesses above, Dr. Sproul continues to instruct us in the vital essentials of Christian living. This book should be required reading for every believer.”
—Dr. Steven Lawson
Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow and president of OnePassion Ministries in Dallas, TX

“This collection of columns from four decades offers a treasure trove of timeless reflection on the timely. Dr. Sproul tackles football, commercials, ethical issues, best-selling books, politics, and philosophy—and that’s merely the first year of columns alone.”
—Dr. Stephen Nichols
Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow and chief academic officer for Ligonier Ministries

“Spanning more than forty years, Dr. Sproul’s prophetic insights on a wide range of ethical and theological issues provide a fascinating historical narrative of cultural change, both in society at large and, sadly, the evangelical church, as well as a breathtakingly clear Christian (biblical) response.”
—Dr. Derek Thomas
Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow

Available now from the Ligonier store. Read a sample chapter.

Hardcover for $120.00 $96.00

 

Dr. R.C. Sproul was founder of Ligonier Ministries, founding pastor of Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Fla., first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine. His daily program, Renewing Your Mind, is still broadcast daily on hundreds of radio stations around the world and can also be heard online. He was author of more than one hundred books, including The Holiness of God, Chosen by God, and Everyone’s a Theologian. He was recognized throughout the world for his articulate defense of the inerrancy of Scripture and the need for God’s people to stand with conviction upon His Word.

The Trauma of Holiness

As we read the works of nineteenth-century atheists, we find that they were not particularly concerned to prove that God does not exist. These atheists tacitly assumed God’s nonexistence. Instead, they said that after the Enlightenment, now that we know there is no God, how can we account for the almost universal presence of religion? If God doesn’t exist and human religion is not a response to the existence of God, why is it that man seems to be incurably homo religiosus—that man in all of his cultures seems to be incurably religious? If there’s no God, why is there religion?

One of the most popular and famous answers was the argument offered by Sigmund Freud. As a psychiatrist, Freud knew that people are afraid of lots of different things. Such fears are understandable, as there are all kinds of things in our world that represent a clear and present danger to our well-being. Other people can rise up individually in anger and try to murder us, or they may unite and attack us on a grand scale in warfare. But in addition to the human sphere of fear and danger, there’s also the impersonal realm of nature, particularly in previous ages when people did not have the protection against the natural world that we enjoy in this world of modern technology. Though natural terrors still strike us with fear at times, in the past people were exposed in a greater way to storms, famines, and floods. When diseases such as cholera or the plague could wipe out entire populations, life seemed more fragile and nature seemed more threatening.

Today we perceive that science has the responsibility of somehow taming the unruly forces of nature such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and fires. And in many ways, science has been successful in helping us prevent natural disasters from doing their worst and in helping us recover quickly after nature assaults us. But, Freud said, the ancient man’s dilemma was how to deal with these things when their destructive impacts were much worse and harder to recover from. You can talk to a human attacker, sign a peace treaty with a foreign power, or otherwise negotiate your safety with people who might threaten you, but how do you bargain with disease, storms, or earthquakes? These forces of nature are impersonal. They don’t have ears to hear. They don’t have hearts to which we can appeal. They have no emotions.

So, Freud argued, religion emerged as humans personalized nature and made it something they could negotiate with. Human beings invented the idea that natural disasters were inhabited by personal spirits: a storm god, an earthquake god, a fire god, and gods related to various sicknesses. These gods wielded natural forces to cause disaster. Having personalized these dangers, human beings could apply the techniques that we use to negotiate with personal hostile forces to the impersonal forces of nature. We could, for example, plead with the storm god, pray to the storm god, make sacrifices to the storm god, repent before the storm god in order to remove the threat. Eventually, human beings consolidated all the gods into one single deity who was in control over all these forces of nature and then pleaded with him.

I’m fascinated by Freud’s argument because it’s a reasonable explanation for how people could become religious. It is possible, theoretically, that there could still be religion even if there were no God. We know that we are capable of imagining things that don’t really exist. In fact, the Bible is replete with criticism of false religion that invents idols.

Yet there’s a difference between possibility and actuality. That what Freud said is possible doesn’t mean that it actually happened that way. The major hole in his theory is this: If Freud’s theory is true, why, then, was the God of the Bible “invented”? This holy God, we see in Scripture, inspires far greater trauma in those whom He encounters than any natural disaster. We see, for example, how even righteous Isaiah was completely undone by meeting the God of Israel face-to-face (Isa. 6:1–7). Well-meaning Uzzah was struck dead when trying to steady the ark of this holy God (2 Sam. 6:5–10). Peter, James, and John at first saw the revelation of Christ’s deity and their hearing of the Father’s voice not as a blessing but as a terror (Matt. 17:1–8).

Why, to redeem us from the threat of trauma, would we invent a God whose character is infinitely more threatening than anything else we fear? I can see humanity inventing a benevolent god or even a bad god who is easily appeased. But would we invent a holy God? Where does that come from? For there is nothing in the universe more terrifying, more threatening to a person’s sense of security and well-being than the holiness of God. What we see throughout the Scriptures is that God rules over all of the threatening forces that we fear. But this same God, in and of Himself, frightens us more than any of these other things. We understand that nothing poses a greater threat to our well-being than the holiness of God. Left to ourselves, none of us would invent the God of the Bible, the being who is a threat to our sense of security more primal and more fundamental than any act of nature.

Martin Luther and the other Reformers understood the holy character of this God. For them, the recovery of the gospel was such good news because they knew the trauma of holiness and that the only way to endure the presence of this holy God’s judgment is to be covered in the holiness and righteousness of Christ. Five hundred years after the Protestant Reformation, the church desperately needs men and women who understand the trauma of God’s holiness, for in understanding that holiness we see that the gospel is the only thing that can give us confidence that when we meet this God face-to-face, His holiness will embrace us and not cast us into eternal judgment. May God in His grace grant to all of us a renewed vision of His majestic holiness.

This post was originally published in Tabletalk magazine.

How concerned should we be for the lack of truth taught in the church?

We are living in a period of church history when a startling number of professing Christians have little concern for the truth. From one of our Ask R.C. events, R.C. Sproul appeals to every believer to pursue and contend for the revealed truth of God.

Just ask Ligonier to get clear and trustworthy answers to your biblical and theological questions.

Read the Transcript

 

Is Scripture at Odds with Science?

Is Scripture at odds with science? Thomas Aquinas certainly didn’t think so. In this brief clip, R.C. Sproul examines Aquinas’ teaching on the two sources of truth that God has given us: grace and nature. Today, watch the entire message for free.

Transcript:

The double truth theory basically said this: Something can be true in philosophy and false in religion at the same time. Or it can be true by faith but false in science at the same time. Now, let’s translate that idea to contemporary categories. We see the raging controversy that goes on about human origins. Are we as human beings the product of a purposive act of divine creation, or are we merely fortuitous cosmic accidents, grown-up germs that have spontaneously come out of a chance collision of atoms? Now, obviously we cannot both be purposefully created by a self-existent, eternal God and at the same time be cosmic accidents. Those two concepts cannot be reconciled. But a double-truth thinker would say this: “I’m a religious person, but I’m also a scientist. So, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I will believe in creation, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I will believe in man as a cosmic accident. And on Sunday, I’ll rest from the controversy.” Do you see what’s going on here? It is a separation or a disjunction between faith and reason, between philosophy and religion, between theology and science, where the two don’t meet or ever overlap. Now, it’s precisely against that kind of thinking that Saint Thomas Aquinas—who had been the illustrious student of Albert the Great, and who had been called by his student classmates while he was in school “the dumb ox of Aquino,” to which Albert the Great replied, “This dumb ox is going to astonish the world with his brilliance.” But in any case, it was against this kind of thinking that Aquinas was responding. He realized that if you had that kind of disjunction between faith and reason, an antithesis between science and religion, you would end up as an intellectual schizophrenic, and it would make truth impossible to reconcile. And so, he said that there are certain truths that we learn from nature and other truths that we learn from grace. What he means by that is something like this: If you study nature, you can learn something about the circulatory system of the human body. But you can read the Bible all you want, and the Bible will not reveal to you the intricacies of the circulatory system of the human body or the molecular structure of a leaf. You have to apply natural science and empirical investigation to discover that sort of thing. So, you get certain truths—truths that don’t contradict the Scriptures or contradict special revelation—but you don’t find that content in the Bible. You find other truths, according to Aquinas, that are revealed to us only in the Bible, that you can’t discover with the microscope or with a telescope. For example, God’s plan of salvation—you can’t study that in a laboratory. You get that through the revelation of Scripture. So, you have two sources of truth: grace and nature.

 

Does Christology Matter?

“We all unanimously teach that our Lord Jesus Christ is to us one and the same Son, the self-same perfect in Godhead, the self-same perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man … acknowledged in two natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably … the properties of each nature being preserved.”

So wrote the church fathers in the Definition of Chalcedon in AD 451. But even if they spoke “unanimously,” their doctrine of Christ sounds so complex. Does it really matter?

Given the sacrifices they made to describe Christ rightly, one can imagine that if these Christians were present at a group Bible study on Philippians 2:5-11, they might well say to us, “From what we have heard, it never mattered more.”

Imagine the discussion on “Though he was in the form of God … emptied himself” (Phil. 2:6-7, RSV). Says one: “It means Jesus became a man for a time and then went back to being God afterwards.” “No,” says another, “He only emptied himself of His divine attributes and then He took them up again.” “Surely,” says another (not pausing to reflect on the miracles of Moses, Elijah, or the Apostles), "He mixed humanity with His deity—isn’t that how He was able to do miracles?"

Does it really matter if those views are wrong, indeed heretical, so long as we know that Jesus saves and we witness to others about Him? After all, the important thing is that we preach the gospel.

But that is precisely the point—Jesus Christ Himself is the gospel. Like loose threads in a tapestry—pull on any of these views, and the entire gospel will unravel. If the Christ we trust and preach is not qualified to save us, we have a false Christ.

Reflect for a moment on the descriptions of Christ above. If at any point He ceased to be all that He is as God, the cosmos would disintegrate—for He is the One who upholds the universe by the word of His power (Heb. 1:3). If He were a mixture of deity and humanity, then He would not be truly or fully human, and therefore would no longer be one of us and able to act as our representative and substitute. He could neither save sinners nor succor saints. This is why Hebrews emphasizes that Christ possesses a humanity identical to ours, apart from sin. No mixing or confusing here.

Most of us are sticklers for clearly describing anything we love, be it science, computing, sports, business, or family life. Should we be indifferent to how we think and speak about our Savior and Lord?

This is why the church fathers, and later the Westminster divines, stressed that God’s Son ever remained “of one substance, and equal with the Father” and yet, in the incarnation, took “upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties and infirmities thereof, yet without sin… . So that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion” (WCF 8.2).

What makes this statement so impressive is that it safeguards the mystery of the incarnation while carefully describing its reality. The Son’s two natures are not united to each other, but they are united in His one person. So in everything He did, He acted appropriately in terms of His deity or His humanity, one divine person exercising the powers of each nature in its own proper sphere.

This, then, underscores the value of the church’s creeds. They were written by men who had thought more deeply and often suffered more grievously than we do. They spoke out of a deep love for Christ and His people, concerned for a lost world. Their testimony helps us in three ways:

It protects us by setting boundaries for our thinking.It instructs us by helping us see biblical truth expressed in its briefest form.It unites us, so that everywhere in the world, Christians can share the same clear confession of who Christ is and what He has done.

Does it really matter? In light of the sacrifices our forefathers made in order to articulate the grandeur of the person of our Savior and what Christ had to be in order to save us, you bet it matters.

Related: The Ligonier Statement on Christology.

This post was originally published in Tabletalk magazine.

How should we approach “living in the world but not of the world”?

Christians must regularly remind themselves that this world is not their home—at least, not yet. From one of our Ask Ligoiner events, John MacArthur encourages us to reorient our perspective in this fleeting life around the promise of the life to come.

When you have biblical and theological questions, just ask Ligonier.

Read the Transcript