R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 37

We Thank God for You

Last month, we asked you to prayerfully consider supporting Ligonier Ministries, and thousands of people like you gave generously. We are grateful to God for His provision.

By God’s grace, even more people around the world will be reached with the life-transforming truth of His holiness in 2021. As we begin our fiftieth year of ministry, Chris Larson, our president and CEO, recorded this brief message to say thank you.

 

The State of Theology

Here’s an excerpt from The State of Theology, Keith Mathison's contribution to the January issue of Tabletalk:

Every other year since 2014, Ligonier Ministries has partnered with LifeWay Research to survey the beliefs of Americans on a number of theological and ethical issues. Like past surveys, the 2020 State of Theology survey reveals some encouraging results, but it also reveals confusion and a lack of theological knowledge among evangelicals. In this article, we will take a look at each of the thirty-one questions on the survey in an attempt to help readers understand the orthodox Christian view on these issues as well as the biblical grounds for it.

To take the survey yourself and explore the data, go to www.thestateoftheology.com. New this year is the option to create a group survey that you can send to your friends, family, or church. It’s completely confidential and is a great way to start a discussion on what the people in your community believe.

Continue reading The State of Theology, or begin receiving Tabletalk magazine by signing up for a free 3-month trial.

The Unsettling Justice of God

One reason why we may be uncomfortable with the Bible’s portrayals of God’s wrath is because we do not want to see the judgment we deserve. From his series Blessed Hope, W. Robert Godfrey considers how the book of Revelation gives us perspective on the justice of God and His mercy in Christ.

Transcript:

Verse 4: "The third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood." And now, the attack is on the fresh water, the water necessary to sustain life on earth. "And I heard the angel in charge of the waters say, 'Just are you, O Holy One, who is and who was, for you brought these judgments. For they," that is, those being judged, "have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve!'" Wow! Wow! If this makes you uncomfortable, that's okay. We're moderns. We're not bloodthirsty—most of us, most of the time, unless we watch football maybe—but I mean that's a whole other question. We're not used to the kind of longing for judgment that we find frequently in the Bible, and then we have to ask ourselves, "Is that a failing in the Bible or is that a failing in us?" That's a rhetorical question because this is one of the great issues. Will God be just in His judgment? And it's almost as if John anticipated that because we go on in verse 7 and read, "And I heard the altar saying, 'Yes, Lord God the Almighty, true and just are your judgments!'" Now, when the altar says that, what does it mean? It means the souls under the altar that we saw in the second cycle, those who were martyred for Jesus Christ, those who died for Him, those whose blood was shed—they're not sentimental about this. They think there ought to be a judgment for those who have rebelled against the Judge of heaven and earth. There ought to be a judgment on those who have rejected the God who blessed them and gave them so many benefits in this life. And sometimes that is hard for us to contemplate, because when we think of the God of that justice we often think about our own sins. And then we think, "Can I find mercy before such a God?" Or perhaps we think of family members and friends who don't know the Savior, and we worry about them, and that's appropriate. We should pray for them. But this book reminds us that we don't have a right to mitigate the just judgment of God. We have to affirm the wisdom and justice of God in what He does. And tragically, if we start down the path of thinking that we are more loving than God is, we end up with a God who has no judgment at all, and that's what has happened in too much of the modern church. We are “wiser” than God. We are “more loving” than God so we've “corrected” God's Word, and we've found ourselves in a mess. And as hard as this is to really redirect our feelings and our judgments, this is what this book is intended to help us do. And again, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy or what we necessarily immediately respond positively to. But I think part of the whole purpose of this book is to slow us down and make us think and make us reflect, make us reevaluate and say, "All right. Who's right, God or me? Should I be more sensitive to God's feelings as the offended Creator or insist on my own feelings?" And so here we have this challenge to us. And what we have to particularly meditate on, I think, is the insistence of Scripture, as hard as it is for us always to fully realize, that the judgment is what they deserve. That's what's said here explicitly in verse 6: "It is what they deserve!" And again, I think part of our squeamishness is we don't want what we deserve. And what God says to the whole world is, "You don't have to have what you deserve if you take refuge in My Son. But if you refuse My Son, whom I've provided for sinners, what can you expect except the just judgment for sinners?" And that's what this book is teaching us over and over again.

The Bible Belongs to Every Age

In 1734 and 1735, Jonathan Edwards and the congregation at Northampton experienced a revival. So did many other churches in the Connecticut River Valley in the colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts. In the fall of 1733, Edwards preached some hard-hitting sermons. One of them, preached in November 1733, has been titled “The Kind of Preaching People Want.” Edwards starts his sermon in the Old Testament, observing that God’s people have had no shortage of false prophets, “that always flattered them in their sins.” True prophets rebuke the sinner. False prophets leave sinners “to the peaceable enjoyment of their sins.” He then turns to the desire that people in his own day had for such false prophets. Edwards continues, “If ministers were sent to tell the people that they might gratify their lusts without danger… how eagerly would they be listened to by some, and what good attention they would give.” He adds, “They would like a savior to save them in their sins much better than a savior to save them from their sins.”

Edwards was responding to those of his day who thought they knew better than the Word of God. He also wrote treatises to respond to the academics who thought they knew better than God’s Word. The English academic world of Edwards’ day was enthralled with the new thinking of the Enlightenment. The deists ruled. They believed that God created the world and then backed away, and now He lets it run along all on its own. They rejected the idea that God reveals His will in His Word. They rejected the doctrine of the incarnation and the deity of Christ. They rejected the possibility, let alone the actual occurrence, of miracles. They had “come of age.” The Enlightenment thinkers and the deists were far too sophisticated to submit to some ancient book.

The philosophers had affected the church. In 1727, a group of independent ministers met in London to debate the deity of Christ. These were the exact descendants of the stalwart Puritans of the 1600s. They voted on the deity of Christ, and the deity of Christ lost. These were men who should have known better. They capitulated to the whims of the day.

Edwards kept up with these developments. He was not a backwoods minister. He had the latest books and kept current with the latest ideas. He saw where these ideas would take the church in the American Colonies. He sounded the alarm. He also saw how his congregation could be so easily led astray by the wrong pursuits. He saw how worldliness crouched at the door, ready to overtake those who so willingly gave in.

So, he was not in a Puritan bubble. He responded to his culture and to his congregation. He preached sermons and he wrote books—all defending the Bible.

We are not historically situated at the dawn of the Enlightenment as Edwards was. We find our place at the Enlightenment’s setting sun. We live in the dawn of postmodernism. We live among those who reject the Bible. We live among those who give in to the clutches of worldliness. Sin crouches at our door too.

So what pastoral counsel did Edwards offer? He pointed his congregation to the Bible. He argued against the Enlightenment thinkers and against the deist theologians based on the Bible. He looked to the Word.

As Edwards noted, the Bible belongs to every age. It is not simply the true Word for the first century. It is not simply the authoritative Word for the first century. It is not simply the necessary Word for the first century. It is not simply the sufficient Word for the first century.

It is the true, authoritative, necessary, clear, and sufficient Word for all centuries, including the twenty-first. Theologians sometimes speak of these as the attributes of Scripture. As the attributes of God help us to learn about God, the attributes of Scripture help us learn about Scripture. The first and foremost attribute of Scripture is its authority. Scripture is authoritative. We again hear Peter Martyr Vermigli remind us that it all comes down to “Thus says the Lord.” If Scripture is the Word of God, it’s authoritative.

This excerpt is adapted from A Time for Confidence by Stephen Nichols

Columns from Tabletalk Magazine, January 2021

The January 2021 issue of Tabletalk considers the 2020 State of Theology Survey. Scripture calls believers to keep watch on their doctrine so that they can recognize false teaching and instruct others according to the truths of God’s Word (1 Tim. 4:16; Titus 1:9; 2:1). Sadly, however, we live in what Dr. R.C. Sproul called the most anti-doctrinal era in the history of the church. Far too many Christians—including laypeople, pastors, and teachers—do not understand the essential doctrines of our faith as taught in Scripture and summarized in the great creeds and confessions of the church. This is evident in Ligonier Ministries’ biennial State of Theology Survey, the results of which reveal an appalling lack of basic theological understanding even among professing Christians. This issue of Tabletalk seeks to help address this problem by providing the correct answers to the questions asked in the Ligonier Ministries survey while explaining why the truths that the survey asks about are essential for faithful Christian living.

Browse and read the growing library of back issues, including this month's issue. You can also purchase the issue or subscribe to get the print issue every month.

The State of Our Souls by Burk Parsons
The State of Theology by Keith A. Mathison
The Meanest Man in Texas
Honoring the Watchmen on the Wall by Keith A. Mathison
Honoring the Watchmen on the Wall by John P. Sartelle Sr.
Unseen Righteousness by Victor Cruz
The Context of the Westminster Assembly by Greg A. Salazar

Read the Entire Issue

Subscribe to Tabletalk today for only $23 a year, and $20 to renew. You save even more if you get a 2- or 3-year subscription (as little as $1.36 per issue). Get your subscription to Tabletalk today by calling one of Ligonier Ministries’ resource consultants at 800-435-4343 or by subscribing online.

Is It Ever Permissible for a Christian to Refuse Medical Treatment?

Today, we have many medical advances that enable us to prolong our lives. Are Christians responsible to take advantage of these technologies? Is it ever permissible to refuse them? From one of our live events, R.C. Sproul reflects on these difficult questions.

Just message us for clear, concise, and trustworthy answers to your biblical and theological questions at Ask.Ligonier.org.

Read the Transcript

Listen to the First Episode: Ultimately with R.C. Sproul

Is Christianity a blind leap into irrationality? Today, listen to the first episode of our new podcast, Ultimately with R.C. Sproul, as Dr. Sproul teaches that the Christian faith engages not only the heart, but also the mind.

Have you subscribed to the podcast? Drawn from a lifetime of Bible study and reflections on the nature of truth, including content never before released, Ultimately with R.C. Sproul features unique moments of insight to help you understand what you believe and why you believe it. Each episode is only a few minutes, filled with biblical teaching and theological wisdom from Dr. Sproul to help you renew your mind, make sense of the world around you, and grow in your knowledge of who God is.

Subscribe today and listen every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to set your mind on what matters most—what matters ultimately.

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Listen on Apple Podcasts, , Google Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, or RSS. Coming soon on RefNet.

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.

Will You Pray for Awakening? Download Your Free Prayer Guide

We live in a world that needs awakening. Millions of people do not know Jesus Christ. The church itself needs renewed zeal for the truth, for spiritual growth, and for missions. Scripture reveals how this awakening comes about: by a powerful movement of the Spirit of God. It also tells us that when just two men—Paul and Silas—prayed, the earth itself shook (Acts 16:25–26). So we are dedicating the entire year of 2021 to pray for awakening, and we hope you will, too.

To help as many people as possible, we produced this free prayer guide. Download it today at PrayForAwakening.com, find it in the PrayerMate app, or order the prayer booklet in packs of ten to share with your loved ones.

To use the guide, find the prayer that corresponds to the current week. Each week of the month focuses on a different group to pray for, starting with you and your family and expanding to the world and the global church. You can also share your desire to #PrayForAwakening on social media.

JANUARY PRAYER FOCUS:

Week 1: Pray that you will know the riches of your salvation in Christ and that your family will too. “Having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.” (Eph. 1:18)
Week 2: Pray that your local church’s good works will shine as a light to your community. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” (Matt. 5:14)
Week 3: Pray that your nation will abandon its idols and worship the one true God. “Ascribe to the LORD, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength!” (1 Chron. 16:28)
Week 4: Pray that God will provide opportunities for the gospel to penetrate unreached people groups. “At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ.” (Col. 4:3)

We hope this prayer guide encourages you this year and in future years. Join us in praying fervently for a mighty movement of God’s Spirit today, thankful that He has graciously promised to hear us, and confident that He will answer our prayers according to His will.

DOWNLOAD NOW

Since No One Seeks after God, Why Do So Many Unconverted People Come to Church?

Many churches prioritize worshiping in a way that is attractive to the unconverted instead of worshiping in a manner that is pleasing to God. From one of our live events, H.B. Charles Jr. and Steven Lawson call us to solemnly consider the true calling of the church.

To ask a biblical or theological question, just visit ask.Ligonier.org or message us on Facebook or Twitter.

Read the Transcript