R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 604

Twitter Highlights (2/13/11)

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

Tabletalk Magazine "Brethren, it is easier to declaim against a thousand sins of others, than to mortify one sin in ourselves" (J. Flavel).



Ligonier Academy Seek not knowledge for the sake of applause and to dispute with others, but for the benefit of your soul, in order to practice. -J. Edwards



Tabletalk Magazine "It is not chance but the Lord that sends affliction, and we should own and reverence His hand in it" (T. Boston).



Reformation Trust The distance between us and God is infinite in every way. But God's love is infinitely great to span that distance. -Richard Phillips



Ligonier We're living in a culture now that is virtually obsessed with self-help pop-psychology remedies to make us happy. -R.C. Sproul



Reformation Trust If someone who is not a sheep comes [into church] ... we're not going to change the menu & give the sheep goats' food. -RC Sproul



Ligonier Is the exclusivity of Christ unjust? Alistair Begg explains & answers challenges raised by inclusivists & pluralists. http://bit.ly/evBJAW

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

Waiting in Faith

When Abraham arrived in Canaan, it was by no means a great nation. But he dwelt there, living in tents. God may have prepared a mansion for him in heaven, but in Canaan all he had was a tent. The only parcel of Canaan he ever actually owned was his burial plot.

Most importantly, Abraham waited. This is perhaps the hardest test of faith. Unrealized expectations make for bitterness and despair in many people's lives. But Abraham waited in faith, just as God later required of the prophet Habakkuk, when He said: "Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry" (Hab. 2:2–3).

Abraham waited in faith and died in faith. With the rest of the Old Testament saints, it was said: "And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us" (Heb. 11:39–40).

Coram Deo: Do you have a good testimony of faith? Have you learned to wait in faith for God to move on your behalf?

Habakkuk 2:2–3: "Then the Lord answered me and said: 'Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.'"

Hebrews 11:39–49: "And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us."

Ask R.C. Live Event: Feb. 17 @ 8 p.m.

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Mark your calendars! The next installment of Ask R.C. Live will take place on Thursday, February 17th from 8:00-8:45 p.m. EST.  During this special session, Dr. Sproul will answer questions from an online audience.  

Start submitting your questions now. Tweet your questions using hashtag #AskRC, or write your questions using Facebook from our live events page.

Watch the first session of Ask R.C. Live

The Prayer of Faith

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Years ago, the editor of a publishing company asked me to write a book on prayer. The theme is a vitally important one. The publishing house was well known. To be honest, I felt flattered. But in a moment of heaven-sent honesty, I told him that the author of such a book would need to be an older and more seasoned author (not to mention, alas, more prayerful) than I was. I mentioned one name and then another. My reaction seemed to encourage him to a moment of honesty, as well. He smiled. He had already asked the well-seasoned Christian leaders whose names I had just mentioned! They, too, had declined in similar terms. Wise men, I thought. Who can write or speak at any length easily on the mystery of prayer?

Yet in the past century and a half, much has been written and said particularly about "the prayer of faith." The focus has been on mountain-moving prayer by which we simply "claim" things from God with confidence that we will receive them because we believe that He will give them.

But what exactly is the prayer of faith?

Association with the Dramatic

Interestingly, it is in the letter of James (who has so much to say about works) that the term occurs. It climaxes the marvelous teaching on prayer that punctuates the entire letter (see 1:5–8; 4:2–3; 5:13–18).

What is even more striking is that the significance of the phrase seems to be illustrated by the experience of one individual, the prophet Elijah. In his case, the prayer of faith was instrumental in shutting the heavens. Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that the phrase has come to be associated largely, if not exclusively, with dramatic, miracle-like events—with the extraordinary rather than the daily.

Yet this misses the basic thrust of James's teaching. The reason Elijah is used as an example is not that he was an extraordinary man; James stresses that he was "a man with a nature like ours" (James 5:17). It is his ordinariness that is in view.

Elijah's praying is used as an example not because it produced miracle-like effects but because it gives us one of the clearest of all illustrations of what it means for anyone to pray with faith: it is believing God's revealed Word, taking hold of His covenant commitment to it, and asking Him to keep it.

The Prayer of a Righteous Person

Shutting up the heavens was not, after all, a novel idea that originated in the fertile mind of Elijah. In fact, it was the fulfillment of the promised curse of the covenant Lord: "If you do not obey the Lord your God . . . these curses will come upon you. . . . The Lord will strike you . . . with scorching heat and drought. . . . The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder" (Deut. 28:15, 22–24, NIV).

Like every "righteous man" (James 5:16), Elijah sought to align his life with God's covenant promises and threats (which is, essentially, what "righteousness" means in the Old Testament—to be rightly covenantally related to the Lord). He lived his life in the light of the covenant God had made, and so he held on to its threats of judgment in prayer, as well as to its promises of blessing.

This, then, is the prayer of faith: to ask God to accomplish what He has promised in His Word. That promise is the only ground for our confidence in asking. Such confidence is not "worked up" from within our emotional life; rather, it is given and supported by what God has said in Scripture.

This, then, is the prayer of faith: to ask God to accomplish what He has promised in His Word.

Truly "righteous" men and women of faith know the value of their heavenly Father's promises. They go to Him, as children do to a loving human father. They know that if they can say to an earthly father, "But, father, you promised . . . ," they can both persist in asking and be confident that he will keep his word. How much more our heavenly Father, who has given His Son for our salvation! We have no other grounds of confidence that He hears our prayers. We need none.

Legitimate Prayer

Such appeal to God's promises constitutes what John Calvin, following Tertullian, calls "legitimate prayer."

Some Christians find this disappointing. It seems to remove the mystique from the prayer of faith. Are we not tying down our faith to ask only for what God already has promised? But such disappointment reveals a spiritual malaise: would we rather devise our own spirituality (preferably spectacular) than God's (frequently modest)?

The struggles we sometimes experience in prayer, then, are often part of the process by which God gradually brings us to ask for only what He has promised to give. The struggle is not our wrestling to bring Him to give us what we desire, but our wrestling with His Word until we are illuminated and subdued by it, saying, "Not my will, but Your will be done." Then, as Calvin again says, we learn "not to ask for more than God allows."

True prayer can never be divorced from real holiness.

This is why true prayer can never be divorced from real holiness. The prayer of faith can be made only by the "righteous" man whose life is being more and more aligned with the covenant grace and purposes of God. In the realm of prayer, too (since it is a microcosm of the whole of the Christian life), faith (prayer to the covenant Lord) without works (obedience to the covenant Lord) is dead.

From In Christ Alone.

Confessions of a Bibliophile

If you read Tabletalk magazine or if you are a regular reader of this blog, it will come as no surprise to you to hear Keith Mathison confess to being a bibliophile. In his contribution to this month's issue of Tabletalk he writes, "According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a bibliophile is 'A lover of books; a book-fancier.' Although this is a helpful definition, I'm not entirely sure I want to refer to myself as a 'fancier' of anything. I'm from Texas. We either like something or we don't. We don't 'fancy' things. It's...unnatural."

He may not fancy books, but he cannot deny that he loves books and, even more so, that he loves to read. In this article he writes about his growing love of reading, how the Lord used reading as a means to draw Keith to Himself and how his passion for reading changed as a result. He also offers just a couple of words of advice for those who are similarly captivated by the printed word.

Read Confessions of a Bibliophile for more.

Get Dr. Sproul's Series on Anger for a Donation of Any Amount

[image error]Have you ever wondered what the verse "Be angry, and do not sin" really means? Did Jesus ever get angry? R.C. Sproul answers these questions and more in his teaching series, Anger. This week you can get this series for a donation of any amount. Messages include:

God's Furious Anger
The Son's Anger
Be Angry, But Don't Sin
When Anger Destroys
Dealing With Anger

Offer valid through February 13th. Donate now.

What Is R.C. Sproul's Position on Creation?

We are commonly asked for a clarification of R.C. Sproul's position on Creation. Here is his commentary on the Westminster Confession's phrase "…in the space of six days."

In the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very good. In the Genesis account of creation, we read; "So the evening and the morning were the first day" (Gen. 1:5). This narrative proceeds from the first day to the sixth, each time referring to "the evening and the morning" and numbering the day. On the seventh day, God rested (Gen. 2:2).

In our time a considerable number of theories have arisen denying that the creation, as we know it, took place in twenty-four hour days. Common to these theories is the acceptance of the dominant scientific view that the earth and life on it are very old. Many consider the biblical account to be primitive, mythological, and untenable in light of modern scientific knowledge.

This crisis has resulted in several attempts to reinterpret the Genesis account of creation. We are reminded of the sixteenth century, when Copernicus and his followers repudiated the old Ptolemaic view of astronomy. They argued that the center of the solar system is not the earth (geocentricity), but the sun (heliocentricity). It was a sad chapter in the history of the church, which had believed for more than fifteen hundred years that the Bible teaches geocentricity, when it condemned Galileo for believing and teaching heliocentricity. Both Luther and Calvin opposed Copernicus's views, believing them to undermine Scripture's authority.

Actually the Bible does not explicitly teach geocentricity anywhere. Scripture describes the movements of the heavens from the perspective of someone standing on earth: the sun moves across the sky, rising in the east and setting in the west. We use that same language today. The church thought that because the Bible uses this kind of descriptive language, it was therefore teaching something about the relationship between the sun and the earth. This is a clear case of scientific knowledge correcting the church's interpretation of the Bible.

There are two spheres of revelation; the Bible (special revelation) and nature (general revelation). In the latter, God manifests himself through the created order. What God reveals in nature can never contradict what he reveals in Scripture, and what he reveals in Scripture can never contradict what he reveals in nature. He is the author of both forms of revelation, and God does not contradict himself.

The church has always taken the position that all truth meets at the top, and that science should never contradict Scripture. Scientific discoveries, however, can correct the theologian's faulty understanding of Scripture, just as biblical revelation can correct faulty speculations drawn from the natural order. When the scientific consensus on a particular point is on a collision course with the unmistakable teaching of Scripture, I trust Scripture before I trust the speculations and inferences of scientists. That is consistent with the history of the church and Christianity. We believe that sacred Scripture is nothing less than the Creator's truth revealed.

We have a problem not only with a six-day creation, but also with the age of the earth. Is the earth a few thousand years old or billions of years old (as scientists today insist)? Although the Bible clearly says that the world was created in six days, it gives no date for the beginning of that work. It would be a mistake to become embroiled in too much controversy about the date of creation.

In a Massachusetts college I taught Introduction to the Old Testament to two hundred and fifty students. Because the class was so large, we met in the chapel. Once I opened the old pulpit Bible to Genesis 1, and at the top of the page I read "4004 B.C." I did some research to see how that date had been determined. In the seventeenth century an archbishop, James Ussher, made some calculations based on the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 and other chronological clues in the Old Testament. He even pinned down the day of the week and the time of day when creation occurred. I hasten to tell my students that we must be very careful to distinguish between the text of Scripture and additions to the text. In defending the biblical authority, we are not obligated to defend a theory based on the speculations of a bishop in times past.

If we take the genealogies that go back to Adam, however, and if we make allowances for certain gaps in them (which could certainly be there), it remains a big stretch from 4004 B.C. to 4.6 billion years ago. We also have the problem of the antiquity of the human race. It seems as if every time a new skeleton or skull is discovered, scientists push back the date of man's origin another million years.

Scholars have proposed four basic theories to explain the time from of Genesis 1–2:

the gap theory, 
the day-age theory, 
the framework hypothesis, and 
six-day creation.

GAP THEORY

The gap theory was made popular by the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which more than any other single edition of Scripture swept through this country and informed the theology of an entire generation of evangelicals. It became the principal instrument for propagating dispensational theology throughout America. In this Bible, Genesis 1:1 reads, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," and verse 2 reads, "And the earth became without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Other Bibles read, "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Verse 2 describes what most scholars consider to be the as-yet-unordered, basic structure of the universe—darkness, emptiness. Then the Holy Spirit hovers over the waters (v.2) and God says, "Let there be light" (v.3). Thus came the light and then the creation of the heavens, fish, birds, animals, and so on.

The Hebrew word in verse 2 translated "was" is the very common verb hayah, which ordinarily means "to be." Hayah means "to become" only in special circumstances, which are not present here. The Scofield Reference Bible translates verse 2 as "became" instead of "was" in order to facilitate the gap theory. As a result, only verse 1 refers to the original creation. Verse 2 then refers to a cosmic catastrophe in which the originally good and properly ordered creation became chaotic, dark, and fallen. After this period of darkness (the "gap"), God recreates the universe which could have been created billions of years ago, followed by a gap of billions of years (including the "geologic column" of immense ages), after which God returned to his distorted creation and renovated or reconstituted it relatively recently. The gap theory has also been called the restitution hypothesis, meaning that the creation narrative in Genesis is not about the original creation, but about the restitution of a fallen creation.

An entire generation was fed this theory through the Scofield Reference Bible. However, Scripture nowhere explicitly teaches that the original creation was marred and then after many years reconstituted. The broader context of the whole of Scripture militates against the gap theory.

DAY-AGE THEORY

According to the second approach, the day-age theory, each "day" of Genesis 1 may be an age. After all, one day in the Lord's sight is like a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8). Also, expressions like "in the days of Noah" and "in Abraham's day" can refer to open-ended periods. The Hebrew word yom, translated "day" in Genesis, can mean something other than a twenty-four-hour period, as it must in Genesis 2:4, which refers to "the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens." Accordingly, each "day" in Genesis 1 may refer to a thousand years, and perhaps even to millions of years. This will at least ameliorate some of the difficulties we have with those who argue for a gradual evolution of life-forms on this earth.

However, the day-age theory, like the gap theory, ignores the immediate context as well as the large biblical context. It ignores the fact that each of the six days of creation consists of an evening and a morning. If yom here means something like ten million years, then we need to give the words evening and morning the same kind of metaphorical meaning. From a literary, exegetical, and linguistic perspective, the day-age theory is weak. As a Christian apologist, I would not want to defend it.

The day-age theory tends to accommodate a theory of biological macroevolution that is incompatible with the Bible and purposive creation—the creation of all living things by the immediate agency of the sovereign God. Macroevolution teaches that all life has developed from a single, original cell, and that this happened through a somewhat fortuitous, chance collision of atoms, without an intelligent planner or Creator orchestrating the emergence of these species. Those who favor the day-age theory often link themselves with a position called theistic evolution, which grants the basic premises of biological evolution, but says that God, not chance, guided the process of evolution.

Macroevolution differs from microevolution. While the former teaches that all living things have developed from one original cell, the latter teaches that, over period of time, species undergo slight changes in order to adapt to their environment. Microevolution is not in dispute, either biblically or scientifically. Macroevolution has never been substantiated by observation or experiment, and it places its faith in an endless string of extremely improbable, yet beneficial chance mutations.

A frequent argument for macroevolution is the principle of common structure. All forms of life are made up of the same basic substances: amino acids, proteins, DNA, and that sort of thing. Because all living things have similar constituent parts, the argument goes, they must have developed from common ancestors. A common substance or structure, however, does not necessarily imply a common source. The fact that all forms of life are made of the same basic building blocks neither negates the possibility of evolution nor substantiates it. One would expect an intelligent Creator to have made all life-forms with a similar design—one that works on this earth.

When teaching a university course to thirty upper-level philosophy students, I asked who believed in macroevolution. Almost all the students raised their hands. I then asked them to explain why they believed in it. Their only argument was "common substance, therefore common source." Most said they believed it because they had been taught in school, and they assumed their teachers knew what they were talking about.

Macroevolution, in the final analysis, is not a question of biology or natural science, which rely upon experimented verification, but of history, which tries to interpret evidence left from the past in a coherent fashion. The discipline of paleontology, which studies the fossil record, claims to put evolution on a scientific footing, but it performs no experiments to substantiate evolutionary processes. It simply lines up similar fossils and infers that one creature must be related to another by common decent.

In the recent past in Russia, leading international scholars who favor macroevolution met. While comparing notes, they found that the weakest evidence for their theories is the fossil record. I remember reading the Royal Society's bulletin at that time and thinking, "What other source matters?" The fossil record is the one that counts, and yet that is the one that militates against their theory. I read an essay recently in which a professor argued for macroevolution on the basis of certain geological formations. He argued for an old earth on the ground that stratifications in the rocks contain fossils, which indicates a uniformitarian process that took millions of years to produce the whole formation. He then determined the age of each stratum by determining the kinds of fossils contained in each. This is a blatant example of what logicians call begging the question. It is circular reasoning to date the fossils by the rocks, and then date the rocks by the fossils. That just will not work.

We now have good evidence that stratification of rocks proves the antiquity of nothing. Within days after the Mount St. Helens explosion had subsided, scientists discovered that the cataclysmic upheaval of that volcanic explosion had laid down exactly the same rock stratification that had been assumed would take millions of years to develop. In other words, Mount St. Helens proved that catastrophic upheavals can produce the same empirical data as twenty million years of gradual deposition. We will not get into uniformitarianism or catastrophism here, except to say that they have been attempts to accommodate macroevolution. This tends to support and popularize the theory of theistic evolution, and it also uses the day-age theory of Genesis—a dangerous thing to do.

FRAMEWORK HYPOTHESIS

The third approach, called the framework hypothesis, was originally developed by the Dutch scholar Nicholas Ridderbos. He argued that the literary form of the book's first few chapters differs from that of its later chapters. Certain basic characteristics found in poetry are missing from historical narrative, and certain characteristics found in historical narrative are missing from poetry. For example, the book of Exodus, with its account of the Jewish captivity in Egypt, has genealogies, family names, real historical places, and an unmetered literary style (i.e., lacking a particular rhythm), making it clearly prose and historical narrative. After the account of the exodus, the book's author inserts the song of Miriam, which is in metered rhythm and is therefore clearly poetry. The literary structure before the song manifests all the characteristics of historical narrative, as does the structure following the poem.

Therefore, it is usually not difficult to distinguish between poetry and historical narrative in the Old Testament. But the opening chapters of Genesis, according to Ridderbos, exhibit a strange combination of literary forms. On the one hand is a discussion of the creation of a man and a woman who are given names that thereafter appear in genealogical accounts. In Hebrew literature this clearly signals historicity. The Garden of Eden is said to be set among four rivers, two of which we know were real rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates. The style of writing is not metered or rhythmic, as Hebrew poetry normally is. All this indicates that the opening chapters of Genesis are historical narrative.

There are some anomalies, however. We find trees in this garden with strange names: "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" and "the tree of life" (Gen 2:9). Had they been apple or pear trees, there would have been no problem. But what does a tree of life look like? Is the author of Genesis telling us that a real tree was off limits, giving it a metaphorical meaning as the tree of life? We are also introduced to a serpent who speaks. Because of these two features, some have argued that the literary structure of the opening chapters of Genesis was self consciously and intentionally mythological, or at least filled with legend and saga.

Ridderbos contended that the beginning chapters of Genesis are a mixture of historical narrative and poetry, with part of the poetic structure being the repeated refrain, "So the evening and the morning were the first day" (Gen 1:5), and so on. Ridderbos concluded that Genesis gives us not a historical narrative of the when or the how of divine creation, but a drama in seven acts. The first act ends with the statement, "So the evening and the morning were the first day." The author of Genesis, then, is trying to show that God's work of creation took place in seven distinct stages, which incidentally fit remarkably well into the stages identified by the modern theories of cosmic evolution.

Therefore, the framework hypothesis allows one to step into a Big Bang cosmology while maintaining the credibility and inspiration of Genesis 1-2. This is not history, but drama. The days are simply artistic literary devices to create a framework for a lengthy period of development.

In America Ridderbos's work was widely disseminated by Meredith Kline, who for many years taught Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, then at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and then at Westminster Seminary California. Because Kline endorsed the framework hypothesis, many people, particularly in the Reformed community, have embraced it, provoking a serious crisis in some circles. Some Reformed pastors today hold to a literal six-day creation, while others hold to the framework hypothesis, and yet they otherwise hold to the same system of orthodox theology.

SIX-DAY CREATION

For most of my teaching career, I considered the framework hypothesis to be a possibility. But I have now changed my mind. I now hold to a literal six-day creation, the fourth alternative and the traditional one. Genesis says that God created the universe and everything in it in six twenty-four-hour periods. According to the Reformation hermeneutic, the first option is to follow the plain sense of the text. One must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape the plain meaning of Genesis 1-2. The confession makes it a point of faith that God created the world in the space of six days.

Excerpted from Truths We Confess: A Layman's Guide to the Westminster Confession of Faith (Volume 1). In other settings, Dr. Sproul has also made a point of highlighting Dr. Douglas Kelly's book, Creation and Change, as formative in his position on the subject of Creation.

What is the Purpose of a College Education?

One of the great dangers of our industrialized view of education, wherein we view our children as raw material that are moved along a conveyer belt until they come out the other side educated widgets, is that it bifurcates our lives. We are, in this view, students for a time, until we are students no more. We think grade school is for this, junior high for that, senior high for the other, college for the next thing, and maybe some graduate school for this last thing. When we're done, we're done. Instead, a college education is for the same thing a kindergarten education is for, to repair the ruins. The great Puritan poet John Milton wisely said: "The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him."

How many of us, wherever we might be in the educational process, now know God aright? How many of us sufficiently love Him, imitate Him, are like Him? When we understand this purpose of education, we in turn understand that graduation happens when we die, our death certificate is our diploma. When we understand this purpose, this end, suddenly our means change as well.

There are essentially two common views on the purpose of college education. The great majority of people in our day see it as preparation for a career. We go to college to acquire specialized skills that will be in demand so that we can make a good living. This is school-to-work for the college set. I'm not against people learning skills. This, however, is training, not education. In addition, the Bible says that we prosper through frugality and integrity, not through acquiring the right set of tools.

The less common, far more historical view is that we go to college to receive a liberal education, to learn those things necessary to give us the tools to make us thoughtful adults who are familiar with the key issues of public life. We read the great books, so we can join the great conversation.

This second approach I certainly prefer to the first, though every time I am in an airplane I give thanks for engineers. The trouble with the second approach is that freedom, according to the Word, comes from the Word. That is, it is the truth that sets us free. The folly of Homer, the blindness of Plato, these will not enlighten my path like the Word, which is a lamp unto my feet. I don't want to exit the education factory looking like Michelangelo. I want, every step of the way, to look more and more like Jesus.

There is virtue in reading the great books. We do so not to find direction, but to learn to recognize where the culture is headed.  We find there the traps that are set before us. We do so not to join the great conversation, but to win the great confrontation, to be faithful soldiers in the war between the city of God and the city of man. That happens, however, only as we read the Great Book, as we study its wisdom, and submit to its discipline.

The goal then is to become more like Jesus. Which means we don't need to pursue the kind of education Calvin or Luther or even Milton received. We need to receive the kind of education Jesus received. Study the Word, in season and out. And repair the ruins.

A Taste of Heaven

Debates over the proper form and content of worship are not new. The apostle Paul was already contending with such disputes in the first century (e.g., 1 Cor. 11–14).  One could even argue that the "worship wars" began much earlier, when Cain and Abel brought their different sacrifices to God (Gen. 4:3–7; cf. Heb. 11:4).  Closer to our own time, the eighteenth-century rise of revivalism caused great controversy throughout North American churches. The worship styles introduced in the camp meetings were a far cry from traditional forms of worship. As time passed, revivalistic forms of worship became institutionalized in some denominations and strongly influenced others. The rise of Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century and the charismatic movement half a century later has also impacted worship in the contemporary church.  Recent decades have witnessed the rise of so-called "seeker-sensitive" worship services, which replace the pulpit with a stage, the pastor with an entertainer, worshipers with an audience, and which seem to be guided more by the spirit of Madison Avenue than by the Spirit of God. 

In our own day, Christian worship styles vary from the most formal to the most bizarre imaginable. At one end of the spectrum are those calling for a return to traditional forms of worship. At the other end are those advocating all manner of experimental ideas without any restraint. What else are we to make of spectacles like the "clown eucharist" at Trinity Church in New York?  There are those calling for contemporary music and those calling for traditional hymns.  There are those calling for high liturgy and those calling for loose informality.  When it comes to worship, Christians are faced by a cacophony of conflicting voices, and they are confused. They are looking for a voice of sanity in the midst of the chaos.

Dr. R.C. Sproul's A Taste of Heaven is such a voice. Dr. Sproul acknowledges the crisis that exists and points us back to the proper source for our answers to these questions. He reminds us that we are not to structure our worship based on what is pleasing to men. Instead, we are to structure our worship based on what is pleasing to God. He reminds us that we are not to look to modern culture or to surveys in order to determine what is pleasing to God. He reminds us that our source of knowledge on this subject is the Holy Scripture, both the Old and the New Testaments. In A Taste of Heaven, Dr. Sproul searches the Holy Scripture for the basic principles of worship that are valid in every time and place.

Dr. Sproul begins by observing that worship in the Old Testament was basically understood in terms of praise, prayer, and sacrifice, with the offering of sacrifices being central. Because Christ's once-and-for-all sacrifice on the cross fulfilled all that the Old Testament sacrifices symbolized, many Christians have lost sight of the sacrificial aspect of worship. But under the new covenant, believers are to present themselves as living sacrifices to God (Rom. 12:1). We are to give our whole selves to God, body and soul, heart and mind.  Dr. Sproul continues by examining the biblical principles of worship, devoting chapters to topics such as the nature of symbolism in worship, baptism and the Lord's Supper, the role of beauty, and the place of music in Christian worship. Each of these chapters provides a careful discussion of the controversies and the issues involved.

Worship of God is a blessed privilege and joyful duty. God is seeking for true worshipers who will worship him in spirit and truth. Because of what Jesus Christ has done, by offering himself as a sacrifice for our sin, by cleansing us from unrighteousness, we are now able to draw near to the throne of grace. The contemporary "worship wars" show no sign of ending any time soon, and they are being used effectively by the enemy to distract and confuse believers and unbelievers alike. For those seeking a guide through the fog, Dr. Sproul's book is a welcome resource. It reminds us that even during our earthly life, when we gather together with the saints to offer our prayer and our sacrifices of praise, we are granted a taste of heaven.

Does the Church Know Her Commission?

"Have you ever wished you could have a do-over? Have you ever looked back on a situation in which you know that you really botched the job and you just wish you could have another crack at it? That is the way I often feel when I reflect back on some of my less-than-fruitful efforts at evangelism when I was in college. Back then, I was (to say the least) a little wet behind the ears in terms of my theological convictions. I had a basic understanding of Christ's substitutionary atonement but little appreciation for how His lordship should inform evangelistic appeals. Anyone watching my approach to evangelism would have been well within his rights to label me an antinomian. Unfortunately, I simply did not know any better. So when I had the opportunity to share the gospel with my frat brother Mark, I really botched it."

In his contribution to February's issue of Tabletalk, Denny Burk, dean of Boyce College and associate professor of New Testament at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, reflects on some of his early attempts at sharing his faith and asks whether the church really understands her commission.

You can learn more by reading "Does the Church Know Her Commission?"