R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 124

Wreck the Word of God

Here’s an excerpt from Wreck the Word of God , Steven J. Lawson’s contribution to the September issue of Tabletalk:

Our strategy is to unleash a full-scale, frontal assault on the Word of our Enemy. This has been the essence of our sinister strategy from the very beginning. Over the centuries, nothing has changed. Our modus operandi is the same. The Enemy does His most damaging work to us when His Word is preached, taught, respected, and followed.

There are several specific methods that you can employ as you seek to wreck the Word of our Enemy. Persuade preachers to doubt the flawless purity of the Word. Cause them to believe liberal theologians, not our Enemy. Con pastors into thinking that the Bible is just another book, and deceive them into elevating fallible church tradition and personal opinion over Scripture. Blind them into thinking the majority vote of the congregation is the highest authority.

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Do We All Believe the Same Thing?

In this brief clip from his teaching series Defending Your Faith, R.C. Sproul explains why Christianity is different from every other religion.

Transcript

I hear people say, "there is this underlining unity, we all believe the same thing." That's not true. What Muslims believe about what is good and the nature of redemption is radically different from what Christianity teaches, for example. Buddha was an atheist who simply claimed to be enlightened, Confucius talked about the veneration of ancestors—that's a long way from the faith of the Scriptures. And what you don't have in Buddhism and Islam, Confucianism, Shintoism, Taoism, and these other religions is an atonement. You don't have a way of redemption that we have in Christianity, nor do you have a living Mediator. Moses is dead, Buddha is dead, Confucius is dead, and Muhammad is dead. There is no resurrection in these other religions. Christianity has elements to it, content to it that distinguish it from all other religions, and with that distinction comes the claim of Christ that it [He] is the only true way to God.

The Marrow of Calvinism

The Calvinist believes that God is the Lord of life and Sovereign of the universe, whose will is the key to history. The Calvinist believes that He is free and independent of any force outside Himself to accomplish His purposes; that He knows the end from the beginning; that He creates, sustains, governs, and directs all things; and that His marvelous design will be fully and perfectly manifest at the end of the ages. "For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever" (Rom. 11:36). As Charles Hodge says: "God's sovereignty is to all other doctrines what the granite formation is to the other strata of the earth. It underlies and sustains them, but it crops out only here and there. So this doctrine should underlie all our preaching, and should be definitely asserted only now and then."

God's sovereignty is the marrow of doctrinal Calvinism—provided we understand that this sovereignty is not arbitrary but is the sovereignty of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. As [John] Duncan wrote: "It is a holy will that rules the universe—a will in which loving-kindness is locked up, to be in due time displayed. It is a solemn thing that we and all creatures are at the disposal of pure will; but it is not merely free will, it is the free will of the sovereign Lord Jehovah, and therein it is distinguished from the abstractness and apparent arbitrariness of mere will." B. B. Warfield wrote in his essay on predestination: "The Biblical writers find their comfort continually in the assurance that it is the righteous, holy, faithful, loving God in whose hands rests the determination of the sequence of events and all their issues…. The roots of the divine election are planted in His unsearchable love, by which it appears as the supreme act of grace."

This is balanced, genuine, defensible Calvinism. It is the Calvinism expressed in Isaiah 9:6, which says that the government, or sovereignty, is upon the shoulders of Him who is "Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." In Christ, the warm and fatherly sovereignty of the God of the Scriptures is vastly different from the cold and capricious sovereignty of other "gods," such as Allah. Fatherly sovereignty, like the incarnation itself, is in perfect harmony with all of God's attributes. The Calvinist finds peace in the conviction that behind God's all-encompassing providence is the full acquiescence of the triune God. The sovereign grace and love that went to Calvary has the whole world in its hands. God's fatherly sovereignty in Christ is the essence of who God is.

This excerpt is taken from Living for God's Glory by Joel Beeke.

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Subvert the Sacraments

Here’s an excerpt from Subvert the Sacraments, Keith A. Mathison's contribution to the September issue of Tabletalk:

Our Enemy has given the sacraments to the church as something His followers like to call “the means of grace.” Your goal is to do everything in your power and then some to prevent the Christians from understanding the sacraments and observing them in such a manner as to strengthen their faith in our Enemy.

We have had great success in achieving our goals of confusing the Christians about the number, nature, and observance of these sacraments. Your responsibility, therefore, is to continue this legacy of success. We have accomplished our goals by pushing His followers toward one of two extremes. On the one hand, we have convinced many to so closely identify the signs with that which they signify that they have fallen into all manner of delightful superstition. On the other hand, we have convinced many others to so separate the signs from that which they signify that they begin to treat the sacraments as relatively unimportant and then begin to ignore the commands of our Enemy. Continue to use these broad tactical maneuvers for optimal results.

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How Can Ministers Ensure They're Preaching the Whole Counsel of God?

Preaching through books of the Bible requires ministers to address what the text itself addresses. From one of our Ask R.C. events, R.C. Sproul gives pastors a strategy for preaching the whole counsel of God.

To get real-time answers to your biblical and theological questions, just Ask.Ligonier.org.

Read the Transcript

How Do I Know That God Is for Me?

God has promised to work everything together for the good of His people. If God is for us, it follows that, ultimately, nothing can stand against us. That is logical. Otherwise, God would not be God. If something could rise up against God and overcome Him, that other thing would be God. God would then prove to be a false god—no God at all. But on the contrary Paul is saying that in the last analysis, nothing can be against us if God is for us.

But this raises the million-dollar question: "Is God for me?" Perhaps even more pointed is the personal question:

"How do I know that God is for me?"

Well, do you know that? How do you know?

Satan is very insistent about this—indeed, he has been insistent on this question from the beginning. He asked it in the Garden of Eden. In fact, his first recorded words are an assault on God's gracious character (will we never learn how much he hates God and His people?): "Did God put you in this lavish garden and forbid you to eat from any of its trees? What kind of God does that? You don't think He is really for you, do you, if He does that kind of thing?" (see Gen. 3:1).

You will find this innuendo repeated in various forms and guises throughout your Christian life. You need to have biblical answers to these questions:

How do you know God is really for you?
Where should you look for the proof that God is for you? Does it lie in the fact that your Christian life has been unbroken happiness? Does it lie in the fact that your Christian life been one of ecstatic joy?

There is only one irrefutable answer to these questions. It cannot be found in our circumstances. It lies only in the provision that God has made for us in Jesus Christ.

This is the whole point of Paul's question in verse 32. We can be sure that God is for us because this God, the God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up to the cross for us all.

If this is true, Paul affirms, we can be confident He will give us everything we will ever need.

This is the only sure way we can know that God is for us.

Frequently in the closing pages of the Gospel records we are told that the Lord Jesus Christ was "delivered up" (e.g., Matt. 26:15; 27:2, 18, 26). He was handed over by one person or group to another until eventually He was handed over by Pilate to be crucified as a criminal.

But Paul understood that behind every human "handing over" was the purpose of the heavenly Father. He "handed over" (it is the same verb) His own Son to bear the condemnation due to sinners.

Here is the heart of the plan of God and the wonder of the gospel. The best of all men dies as though He were the worst of all criminals. This is not merely a matter of human wickedness destroying a good man. It is the heart of the purpose of God, as Isaiah had long before prophesied (Isa. 53:4–6, 10).

Behind the handing over of the Lord Jesus—by Judas Iscariot, by Herod, by the priests, by Pontius Pilate—stood the purposes of His heavenly Father handing Him over to the cross in order to die in the place of sinners. He bore God's judgment and wrath against our sin.

What inexpressible love this is.

This excerpt is adapted from By Grace Alone: How the Grace of God Amazes Me by Sinclair Ferguson.

Does Jesus Have One or Two Wills?

In this brief clip from his teaching series A Survey of Church History, W. Robert Godfrey examines how the early church understood the relationship between nature and will in Jesus. Watch this entire message for free.

Transcript

You probably had begun to think that this black board was never to serve a purpose but when you get to a nice word like Monothelitism, it useful to have a blackboard. Monothelitism was the sort of last issue in the question of how the human and divine natures related to one another in Jesus. The church had reached this consensus at Chalcedon, 451, that Jesus was one person uniting in himself two full and complete natures – a complete divine nature and a complete human nature. So that he was fully human and fully divine; wasn’t half human, half divine. He's fully human and fully divine. And, that did leave the church with tensions amongst some who thought to talk about two complete nature's ran too much risk of leaving you with two persons in Jesus. And since that turmoil continued to trouble the Church, a theologian or several theologians suggested that maybe a way forward would be to say Jesus has two natures but he only has one will. Monothelitism is the teaching that Jesus has only one will.

And the other position, of course was, Dyothelitism that Jesus has two wills. Now this led to a fair amount of controversy that we don't have to rehearse in much detail but the church came to the conclusion. I'd really like to poll you, which you think the orthodox point of view? Monothelitism or Dyothelitism? I do that in seminary. Seminarians almost always getting it wrong which is very distressing but I'd try to correct them. Monothelitism was declared a heresy and the reason it was declared a heresy is because the church concluded a will is in extent an essential part of a nature. If Jesus didn't have a human will as well as the divine will, it would be very difficult to see him as truly and fully human. We know he has a divine will because he was the Logos from all eternity and the second person in trinity that has a will. So we know he has a divine will. If he has only one will it's just the divine will and the church, I think, rightly concluded that that would mean he did not have a fully human nature because he wouldn't have a fully human will.

Will We Live on Earth after the Resurrection?

This world is not our home. But it will be. In this Q&A video from one of our Ask Ligonier events, Burk Parsons gives a thoughtful perspective on the promise of God to make all things new.

To get real-time answers to your biblical and theological questions, just Ask.Ligonier.org.

Read the Transcript

Who Is Lord: Christ or Caesar?

Someday, we will be like Him. That's our hope. But it's not a hope that we put on the shelf, and it's not a hope that sends us into a cave. It's a hope that sends us into the world with confidence. We can be confident in God, confident in His Word, confident in Christ, confident in the gospel, and confident in hope. In the AD 90s, Domitian ruled as emperor over Rome. His cruelty rivaled that of Nero. He insisted that he be worshiped as a god. Christians, of course, could not participate in the rituals of this emperor cult. That left them vulnerable, and that vulnerability led to persecution. It is likely that John's exile to the island of Patmos directly resulted from Domitian's edicts. John refused to bow.

John wrote Revelation during this time, many scholars believe. Also around this time, an early church figure named Clement, serving as bishop at Rome, sent a letter to the church at Corinth. Clement opens his letter by referring to "the sudden and successive calamitous events." Persecution rolled over the church like wave after relentless wave. Clement wrote to comfort them and to exhort them to stand firm. Near the middle of his letter, he simply reminds the believers at Corinth that Christ is our leader and we are His soldiers.

Domitian's edict and the persecution that followed served to press an urgent question to the church. This question was there at the very beginning. It was there at the events surrounding the incarnation when Herod ruled. It was there when the soldier drew his sword in the garden of Gethsemane, and it was there all along the excruciating and agonizing road to the cross. The question never left the early decades of the church or even the early centuries of the church. The question was this: Caesar or Christ?

Domitian's edict made that question palpable, even visceral. Statues of him were sent all over the empire. On appointed days, feasts were held, and all of the populace had to pass before the cast image of Domitian and bow before him as god. It was very clear: Caesar or Christ?

The truth is that question is always there. It is always before us, before the church in every age of the past. The question is before us in our time today, and it will be in front of the church in the ages to come. Who is Lord? When the Apostles and the believers in the pages of the New Testament answered that Christ is Lord and Caesar is not, ramifications followed. That decision had consequences. They did not let the temporal consequences overshadow the eternal ones. The author of Hebrews reminds the believers that they had "endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated" (Heb. 10:32–33).

Then he declares in 10:35: "Do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward."

When the question is put to us, Caesar or Christ, may we be among those who don't shrink back. May we take our stand alongside the first-century church and the church through the centuries. May we not throw away our confidence.

From this singular point of the lordship of Christ came the church's confidence. And also from this point came the church's convictions. Chris Larson, my colleague at Ligonier Ministries, recently made the statement, "The future belongs to Christians of conviction."

This is a time for conviction. This is a time for confidence.

This excerpt is taken from A Time for Confidence by Stephen Nichols.