R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 577

R.C. Sproul in Arabic

Now you can watch R.C. Sproul in Arabic. Find select messages from teaching series including Defending Your Faith, The Mystery of the Trinity, and The Last Days According to Jesus.

Defending Your Faith: The Bible and Apologetics (Part 1)

OTHER MESSAGES AVAILABLE IN ARABIC:

Defending Your Faith

Law of Contradiction (Part 1 & Part 2)
Law of Causality (Part 1 & Part 2)
Analogical Language I (Part 1 & Part 2)
Analogical Language II (Part 1 & Part 2)
Contradiction and Paradox (Part 1 & Part 2)
Mystery (Part 1 & Part 2)
Natural Theology I (Part 1 & Part 2)
Natural Theology II (Part 1 & Part 2)
Aquinas vs. Kant (Part 1 & Part 2)
The Case for God (Part 1 & Part 2)
Four Possibilities (Part 1 & Part 2)
The Illusion of Decartes (Part 1 & Part 2)
Self-Creation I (Part 1 & Part 2)
Self-Creation II (Part 1 & Part 2)
Self-Existence (Part 1 & Part 2)
Necessary Being (Part 1 & Part 2)
God of the Bible vs. God of Philosophy (Part 1 & Part 2)
Kant's Moral Argument (Part 1 & Part 2)
Vanity of Vanity (Part 1 & Part 2)
The Psychology of Atheism (Part 1 & Part 2)
The Bible and Apologetics I (Part 1 & Part 2)
The Bible and Apologetics II (Part 1 & Part 2)
The Bible and Apologetics III (Part 1 & Part 2)
The Bible and Apologetics IV (Part 1 & Part 2)
The Bible and Apologetics V (Part 1 & Part 2)

Hath God Said?

Authority and Authorship (Part 1 & Part 2)
Inspiration and the Canon of Scripture (Part 1 & Part 2)

Knowing Christ: The I AM Sayings of Jesus

The Bread of Life (Part 1 & Part 2) 

The Last Days According to Jesus

Literal or Figurative? (Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3)
The Millennium

 The Mystery of the Trinity

Early Controversies (Part 1 & Part 2)
Fifth Century Heresies (Part 1 & Part 2)
One in Essence, Three in Person (Part 1 & Part 2)

Great Quotes from Surprised by Suffering

I recently had the opportunity to read through almost all of the books of R.C. Sproul. Along the way I built a collection of some of the best quotes from each one of them. Here are 5 of the best from Surprised by Suffering.

There are times when we suffer innocently at other people’s hands. When that occurs, we are victims of injustice. But that injustice happens on a horizontal plane. No one ever suffers injustice on the vertical plane. That is, no one ever suffers unjustly in terms of his or her relationship with God. As long as we bear the guilt of sin, we cannot protest that God is unjust in allowing us to suffer.

God deserves to be trusted. He merits our trust in Him. The more we understand of His perfections, the more we understand how trustworthy He is. That is why the Christian pilgrimage moves from faith to faith, from strength to strength, and from grace to grace. It moves toward a crescendo.

The bottom-line assumption for anyone who believes in the God of providence is that ultimately there are no tragedies. God has promised that all things that happen—all pain, all suffering, all tragedies—are but for a moment, and that He works in and through these events for the good of those who love Him (Rom. 8:28). That’s why the apostle Paul said that the pain, the suffering, the affliction that we bear in this world isn’t worthy to be compared, isn’t worthy to be mentioned in the same breath, with the glory and the blessedness that God has stored up for His people (Rom. 8:18).

When God issues a call to us, it is always a holy call. The vocation of dying is a sacred vocation. To understand that is one of the most important lessons a Christian can ever learn. When the summons comes, we can respond in many ways. We can become angry, bitter or terrified. But if we see it as a call from God and not a threat from Satan, we are far more prepared to cope with its difficulties.

For perfect justice to be carried out, the judge must have the power necessary to see that justice is truly served. He must have enough power to withstand any attempt to disrupt the flow of justice. There cannot be a single maverick molecule outside the scope of his power and authority, lest that single molecule become the grain of sand that brings the machine of justice to a grinding halt. Therefore, the perfect judge must have perfect power. He must be all-powerful, or omnipotent.

Understanding Homosexuality: Free Download from R.C. Sproul

In today’s society we are told that homosexuality is a legitimate alternative lifestyle. Confusion still abounds, even in the church, about the nature of homosexuality. Do we have a biblical understanding of homosexuality? Are we called to love people who practice it? What makes someone a homosexual? These may seem like strange questions, but R.C. Sproul looks to Scripture to help us understand some of the confusion surrounding the issue of homosexuality and provides us with simple biblical responses to them.

Free Download from R.C. Sproul: Homosexuality
(Right click to download. Note: This lecture was originally given at the Ligonier Valley Study Center in Pennsylvania in the early days of the ministry.)

"As the image-bearer of God, [man] is called upon to reflect and mirror the holiness of God. When we fail to honor the glory of God it's inevitable that the dignity of man suffers. Our dignity flows out of the fact that we are created in the image of God. If the image of our God is soiled and destroyed and defaced, that defaces us."
—R.C. Sproul

Related Resources

"Christ & Sexual Sin" by John Freeman (Article)
"Homosexuality" (Devotional)
"Final Greetings for Philemon" (Devotional)
"Godly Living in a Sexually Immoral Culture" by John Freeman (Article)
"God's Wrath on Unrighteousness" by R.C. Sproul (Sermon)
"Grace and Forgiveness" (Devotional)
"Grand Delusions" by Burk Parsons (Article)
""Lust & Chastity" by Thabiti Anyabwile (Article)
"One Flesh" by Jay Adams (Article)

An Interview with Matt Chandler

Matt Chandler serves as lead pastor of the Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas. He has become a leader in the evangelical world through his ministry at the Village Church, his involvement in the Acts 29 Church Planting Network, his teaching at multiple conferences, and most recently through his faithful witness to Jesus Christ while battling a malignant brain tumor.

The current issue of Tabletalk features a interview with Chandler. He answers questions like these ones:

By way of offering a brief introduction of yourself and your family, when was God’s call to serve His people confirmed for you?
What counsel would you give to a believer on the day he or she is diagnosed with cancer? How about six months after the diagnosis?
In what ways has your cancer sanctified you?

You can read his answers to these questions and others at "Don’t Waste Your Cancer: An Interview with Matt Chandler."

Get Dr. Sproul's Series on the End Times for a Donation of Any Amount

What did Jesus mean when He said to His disciples that some of them would not taste death until they saw the Son of Man coming in His kingdom? What is meant when the book of Revelation says that the things prophesied therein “must soon take place”? In this series, R.C. Sproul examines the time-texts associated with the Olivet Discourse and the book of Revelation, demonstrating that when properly understood, they are actually strong evidence for the truthfulness of Scripture.

This week you can get this DVD series plus Dr. Sproul's book on sovereignty and sorrow, When Worlds Collide, for a donation of any amount. Messages include:

Crisis in Eschatology
Understanding the Parousia
A Question of Time
Literal or Figurative?
This Generation
The End of the Age
The Destruction of Jerusalem
The Book of Revelation
The Antichrist
The Beast
The Rapture
The Millennium

Offer valid through July 20th. Donate Now .

Does God Forgive & Forget?

Are my sins that I genuinely repent of remembered by God after my death or are they removed forever?

It was a moment over which I remain deeply ashamed. The office meeting was getting pretty intense. Arguments were getting rather heated. I found myself, in the argument, opposing the perspective of the president of the organization, who was also the chairman of the board. He made a suggestion of some sort, and I replied, while the half a dozen others in the room stared in shock, “Are you out of your mind?”

To his credit the chairman remained calm in reply, explaining to me that no, he was quite sane. I knew I had done badly as soon as the words left my mouth. When the meeting was over I went to him and apologized. He forgave me right away. I wasn’t surprised by that, since he had been forgiving me as long as I can remember. The chairman was my father.

Ten years later the two of us were having another conversation, this one perfectly peaceful. Wishing to illustrate my point I asked him, “Do you remember that time, at that meeting, when I said that really shameful thing, about you being out of your mind?” “No son,” my father replied, “I have no memory of that.” I didn’t push the question. I didn’t probe to find out whether he was speaking metaphorically or not. Either way I was astonished at his character.

Now the Bible regularly uses language about the depth of God’s forgiveness for our sins. He forgets them; He washes us thoroughly from them; He removes them as far from us as the east is from the west. Does this mean He has no knowledge of these sins? Of course not. God knows all things. He knows all things immediately. That is, God never has to compute an answer, nor recall one. All information is immediately before Him.

That we ask this question, however, gets at precisely why God uses this kind of language. We want to know if He really does remember because we are really ashamed and wish He didn’t.  We want to be really, really sure we are really, really forgiven. We know that when some humans says after we confess our sins, “I’ve already forgotten it” that they have instead filed it away for later use. Not so with God. There is no later use. There is no secret, hidden grudge.

The glory of the gospel is not that God, just because He’s a nice guy, decides not to hold our sins against us. The glory of the gospel is that my sins are already dealt with, already punished. There is no grudge not because He has forgotten, but because He remembered our sins at Calvary.  Our sins are not forgotten but forgiven, because Jesus received their due punishment. Our Father in heaven loves us as if we had never sinned at all. Our sins have no part in the equation. They simply don’t count because they were cancelled on the cross.

The glory of the gospel is that my sins are already dealt with, already punished.

My father is a loving and gracious man, who can literally forget. My heavenly Father is a loving and gracious omniscient God who cannot forget. Both of them, praise God, can and do forgive.

Twitter Highlights (7/17/11)

Here are some highlights from the various Ligonier Twitter feeds over the past week.

Ligonier God absolutely requires that He be...worshiped in a way that He commands, not according to the way that we prefer. -R.C. Sproul



Tabletalk Magazine "You can only come to the morning through the shadows." — J.R.R. Tolkien



Ligonier If left to ourselves...we will not only gravitate toward, but we'll be swept into some form of idolatry. -R.C. Sproul



Reformation Trust The Bible’s truth does not depend in any way on whether a person believes the truth. -R.C. Sproul http://bit.ly/iROVoG



Ligonier God is not going to negotiate His holiness...in order to accommodate us. -R.C. Sproul



Reformation Trust If Jesus is less than God, His saving work at the cross was less than sufficient. -Steven Lawson



Tabletalk Magazine "To live without hope is to cease to live." — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You can also find our various ministries on Facebook:
Ligonier Ministries | Ligonier Academy | Reformation Bible College
Reformation Trust | Tabletalk Magazine

Links We Liked (7/16/11)

Here is a round-up of some of the notable blogs and articles our team read this week.

The Puritans: Can They Teach Us Anything Today? - Sinclair Ferguson thinks so. Listen to this message from Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

The Gift of Friendship and the Godliness of Good Friends - "We talk a lot about relationships in the church. But have you ever noticed we seldom study friendship? It is the most important-least talked about relationship in the church." Kevin DeYoung looks at Proverbs and invites us to ask three questions relative to friendship: Are you fake? Are you foul? Or are you faithful?

Sangre de Cristo Seminary has a bi-weekly blog of an exegetical commentary of the book of II Peter. Every two weeks a few verses are presented along with a translation, commentary, truth statement, and application.

R.C. Sproul on Demons

I think we can take some solace in the thought that it’s unlikely we’ll ever meet with Satan in our lifetimes. He has bigger fish to fry. He’s not going to chase after the little guys. But nevertheless, he has a host of minions, his demons, to do his work for him, and so they may surround us as close as our clothes, and satanic emissaries may besiege us, and we have to be alert to that. But it’s unlikely that you and I will encounter the Prince of Darkness himself. I say that because he is not omnipresent. That is an attribute that belongs only to God. Also, he’s not omniscient. Satan does not know everything. Satan is a creature, and he is defined by the limits of creatureliness.

In the Bible, we see [demons] possessing people and oppressing people, causing bodily harm, property damage, and all kinds of things. The Christian is always faced with this question: Can I be demon-possessed? I don’t believe so. I believe that people can be demon-possessed, but I don’t think that this is possible for a Christian, because God the Holy Spirit resides in the regenerate person, and the Scriptures tell us, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17). So, no demon can hold us hostage to the power of Satan. Demons can oppress us, they can harass us, they can tempt us, attack us and so on, but thanks be to God, He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4).

—R.C. Sproul, excerpts from Unseen Realities: Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons

Related Resources

Angels and Demons by R.C. Sproul (Teaching Series)
"The Battle of Our Lives" by Stanley Gale (Article)
"Before the Time" by R.C. Sproul (Message)
"Demons: Servants of Satan" by John Blanchard
"The Devil" (Devotional)
"The Devil in the Details" by R.C. Sproul Jr. (Article)
"Our Ancient Foe" by Keith Mathison (Article)
"The Teaching of Demons" (Devotional)
"Victory Over Satan" (Devotional)
"When Angels Sinned" (Devotional)

What Are We to Make of the Casey Anthony Decision?

What are we to make of the Casey Anthony decision?

Nothing. A little girl died. She might have been murdered. It might have been an accident. It might have been somewhere in between. Her mother may be a murderer, or she may merely be a slightly more dramatic sinner than most of us.  She came by her sin naturally, inheriting it from her parents, just like the rest of us. Her verdict may have been a mistake, a travesty of justice, a regrettable inevitability, or the right thing. I don’t know, and I suspect, neither do any of you. 

It is a sad and sordid tale, whatever happened. No one should and I, as the father of five of them, never would want to diminish the horror of the death of a little girl.  That said, the thing that most interests me in this whole media event is what it tells us about us that it has become such an event.  Little children have died for millennia. In our own day thirty five hundred of them die every day, on purpose through the evil of abortion. In both instances there is no flotilla of satellite trucks beaming images into millions of living rooms. In both instances the wire services have not filled our newspapers with the latest information. What’s the difference?

What has changed is technology. Neil Postman, in his classic work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued that before the advent of the telegraph there was no such thing as “the news of the day.” There was no category for this form of information- descriptions of events, unlikely to ever directly impact us, in distant lands. The information we sought in times past was information that intersected with our own lives.

Now some might argue that this is a rather narrow and selfish perspective on things. Doesn’t opening the windows of the world onto the suffering of others encourage the virtues of empathy and compassion? Our second instance proves otherwise.  It is not a mistake that we are called to love our neighbor. Empathetic feelings about a tragedy far, far away, whether it be a little girl’s death, or an earthquake in Japan, can’t run that deep, given that we aren’t in the least jolted to see the coverage we are watching be interrupted by a pitch to switch which brand of dish soap we use. It is faux empathy, faux compassion, just enough to persuade us that in feeling bad we have actually done something.

Real empathy requires real relationships with real people, with real neighbors. Were we invested in those closest to us, our families, our neighbors, our pew neighbors we would live real lives. Maybe, just maybe, if Casey Antony’s neighbor had not been too busy tuning into whatever captured the nation’s attention three years ago, maybe things might have turned out differently.  Maybe we should all take up our cross, follow Jesus, and let the dead bury the dead. Our neighbors, and their unborn children are dying.  That it’s not being covered on the news is how you can tell it’s where you’re supposed to be.

Dr. R.C. Sproul Jr. is a Teaching Fellow at Ligonier Ministries and professor and lecturer at Ligonier Academy in both the Bible college and D.Min. programs. He is also founder of Highlands Ministries and author of Believing God: 12 Biblical Promises Christians Struggle to Accept.