R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 84

Indifference to Doctrine

Here’s an excerpt from Indifference to Doctrine, Burk Parsons' contribution to the April issue of Tabletalk:

The proper study of doctrine is not easy. It takes time, a lot of hard work, and much prayer. For those reasons, many people don’t study doctrine. Others don’t study doctrine because they think it is just for professionals, and even some pastors don’t study doctrine because they think it is just for scholars. Still, there are others who don’t study doctrine because they are indifferent to it. They are content with being fed milk and knowing only the basics of the faith, but they are largely apathetic to pursuing the doctrinal meat of the faith.

Continue reading Indifference to Doctrine, or begin receiving Tabletalk magazine by signing up for a free 3-month trial.

For a limited time, the new TabletalkMagazine.com allows everyone to browse and read the growing library of back issues, including this month’s issue.

How Can Christians Live as Lights in a Dark Time?

Christians have a bright hope that remains untouched by life’s darkest trials. From our livestream event Made in the Image of God, H.B. Charles Jr., Sinclair Ferguson, and Burk Parsons consider our responsibility to bear witness to the peace of God as the COVID-19 pandemic sends many into panic around us.

Do you have another biblical or theological question? Ask Ligonier is your place for answers.

Read the Transcript

Jesus Became a Curse for Us

One image, one aspect, of the atonement has receded in our day almost into obscurity. We have been made aware of present-day attempts to preach a more gentle and kind gospel. In our effort to communicate the work of Christ more kindly we flee from any mention of a curse inflicted by God upon his Son. We shrink in horror from the words of the prophet Isaiah (chap. 53) that describe the ministry of the suffering servant of Israel and tells us that it pleased the Lord to bruise him. Can you take that in? Somehow the Father took pleasure in bruising the Son when he set before him that awful cup of divine wrath. How could the Father be pleased by bruising his Son were it not for his eternal purpose through that bruising to restore us as his children?

But there is the curse motif that seems utterly foreign to us, particularly in this time in history. When we speak today of the idea of curse, what do we think of? We think perhaps of a voodoo witch doctor that places pins in a doll made to replicate his enemy. We think of an occultist who is involved in witchcraft, putting spells and hexes upon people. The very word curse in our culture suggests some kind of superstition, but in biblical categories there is nothing superstitious about it.

The Hebrew Benediction

If you really want to understand what it meant to a Jew to be cursed, I think the simplest way is to look at the famous Hebrew benediction in the Old Testament, one which clergy often use as the concluding benediction in a church service:

The Lord bless you and keep you;

the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

(Num. 6:24–26)

The structure of that famous benediction follows a common Hebrew poetic form known as parallelism. There are various types of parallelism in Hebrew literature. There's antithetical parallelism in which ideas are set in contrast one to another. There is synthetic parallelism, which contains a building crescendo of ideas. But one of the most common forms of parallelism is synonymous parallelism, and, as the words suggest, this type restates something with different words. There is no clearer example of synonymous parallelism anywhere in Scripture than in the benediction in Numbers 6, where exactly the same thing is said in three different ways. If you don't understand one line of it, then look to the next one, and maybe it will reveal to you the meaning.

We see in the benediction three stanzas with two elements in each one: "bless" and "keep"; "face shine" and "be gracious"; and "lift up the light of his countenance" and "give you peace." For the Jew, to be blessed by God was to be bathed in the refulgent glory that emanates from his face. "The Lord bless you" means "the Lord make his face to shine upon you." Is this not what Moses begged for on the mountain when he asked to see God? Yet God told him that no man can see him and live. So God carved out a niche in the rock and placed Moses in the cleft of it, and God allowed Moses to see a glimpse of his backward parts but not of his face. After Moses had gotten that brief glance of the back side of God, his face shone for an extended period of time. But what the Jew longed for was to see God's face, just once.

The Jews' ultimate hope was the same hope that is given to us in the New Testament, the final eschatological hope of the beatific vision: "Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). Don't you want to see him? The hardest thing about being a Christian is serving a God you have never seen, which is why the Jew asked for that.

The Supreme Malediction

But my purpose here is not to explain the blessing of God but its polar opposite, its antithesis, which again can be seen in vivid contrast to the benediction. The supreme malediction would read something like this:

"May the Lord curse you and abandon you. May the Lord keep you in darkness and give you only judgment without grace. May the Lord turn his back upon you and remove his peace from you forever."

When on the cross, not only was the Father's justice satisfied by the atoning work of the Son, but in bearing our sins the Lamb of God removed our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. He did it by being cursed. "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree'" (Gal. 3:13). He who is the incarnation of the glory of God became the very incarnation of the divine curse.

Excerpt taken from "The Curse Motif of the Cross" by R.C. Sproul in Proclaiming a Cross Centered Theology. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Il 60187.

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 2019 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.

APRIL PRAYER FOCUS:

Week 1:  Pray that you and your family will be committed to studying, doing, and teaching the Word of God, which is the means of awakening. “Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.” (Ezra 7:10)
Week 2: Pray that you will be willing to speak God’s Word to the people in your life and that God will supply opportunities to do so. “You . . . shall talk of [God’s commandments] when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” (Deut. 6:7)
Week 3:  Pray that God will grant many people in your city and in your nation the saving knowledge of Christ. “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him.” (Eph. 1:17)
Week 4: Pray that missionaries and church leaders throughout the world will be delivered from the opposition of unbelievers so that they might preach the gospel without hindrance. “I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints.” (Rom. 15:30–31)

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

Secure the Lowest Rate on Our 2021 National Conference: Right Now Counts Forever

If you are nothing more than a cosmic accident, your life doesn’t matter. Your joys, pains, sacrifices, and triumphs last for a moment before disappearing forever. But God’s Word refutes this devastating lie. Since we were purposefully made by a wise Creator, every moment of our lives bears inestimable value—because every moment matters for eternity.

Marking fifty years since the founding of Ligonier Ministries, our National Conference in 2021 will consider the eternal significance of our everyday lives by equipping us today to better serve the Lord, love our neighbors, and make Christ known. With our glorious future in view, Christians do not have less of a stake in the present, but infinitely more. As Dr. R.C. Sproul so often reminded us, right now counts forever. We hope you’ll join us next spring in Orlando.

Next year’s speakers include Voddie Baucham, Alistair Begg, Sinclair Ferguson, W. Robert Godfrey, Joel Kim, Steven Lawson, Stephen Nichols, Burk Parsons, John Piper, Michael Reeves, and Derek Thomas.

Register by midnight ET to secure your spot for $159 and save 50% off the standard rate. This is the lowest registration rate we will offer.

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The Attack on Calvinism in 19th Century America

Calvinism is not the dominant influence in American religious life today, but it used to be. What happened? In this brief clip, W. Robert Godfrey describes the dramatic change that took place in 19th-century American church life.

Transcript:

By the late 18th and early 19th century, American theology is becoming more optimistic. That doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. That optimism is part of what we have already seen from the Enlightenment, what we’re already seeing as developing European thought in the 19th century. That optimism will take a slightly different form in America, but it will end up being, in many circles, an attack on Calvinism. In the 17th and 18th centuries in America, Calvinism had been the dominant religious expression in the dominant denominations: Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian. But in the latter 18th century and on into the 19th century, Calvinism begins to be seen as excessively pessimistic, as excessively tied to old ways of thinking and doing things, and as excessively tied to the “old order” of things. Remember, America had—in Massachusetts, in Pennsylvania, in Virginia—it had established churches. The Episcopal Church was established in Virginia. The Congregational Church was established in Massachusetts. And the Calvinist clergy were well educated and used to a rather comfortable lifestyle. As that old established-church way of thinking began to crumble with the Revolution, as education began to be suspected—“Doesn’t education just lead you to read those European books and confuse you?”—as the country began to move west and the educated, well-paid Calvinist clergy were not so interested in making nothing on the frontier, life began to change in America. Calvinism began to recede as the dominant influence in American religious life. So, by 1850, the two largest denominations in America were the Methodists and the Baptists, no longer the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists, and the Presbyterians. There had been a dramatic change that was taking place. In America, the retreat of Calvinism and the advance of the frontier were shaping and remaking American religion, driven to a significant extent by a kind of optimism that things can be different, things can be better; and our newer approach to religion that will come to be called “The Second Awakening” in America stands behind that.

Save on Our 2021 National Conference: Right Now Counts Forever

If you are nothing more than a cosmic accident, your life doesn’t matter. Your joys, pains, sacrifices, and triumphs last for a moment before disappearing forever. But God’s Word refutes this devastating lie. Since we were purposefully made by a wise Creator, every moment of our lives bears inestimable value—because every moment matters for eternity.

Marking fifty years since the founding of Ligonier Ministries, our National Conference in 2021 will consider the eternal significance of our everyday lives by equipping us today to better serve the Lord, love our neighbors, and make Christ known. With our glorious future in view, Christians do not have less of a stake in the present, but infinitely more. As Dr. R.C. Sproul so often reminded us, right now counts forever. We hope you’ll join us next spring in Orlando.

Next year’s speakers include Voddie Baucham, Alistair Begg, Sinclair Ferguson, W. Robert Godfrey, Joel Kim, Steven Lawson, Stephen Nichols, Burk Parsons, John Piper, Michael Reeves, and Derek Thomas.

Register by tomorrow, April 4 to secure your spot for $159 and save 50% off the standard rate. This is the lowest registration rate we will offer.

Register & Save

 

What Words of Comfort Can Help Me Fight Fear and Anxiety?

No matter what happens amid the spread of COVID-19, we know that our lives are in God’s hands. From our livestream event Made in the Image of God, H.B. Charles Jr., Sinclair Ferguson, and Burk Parsons offer counsel to Christians as we face this time of anxiety and fear.

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

Read the Transcript

Hearts Set Aflame with Certainty of the Resurrection

The life of Jesus follows a general pattern of movement from humiliation to exaltation. The movement is not strictly linear, however, as it is interspersed with vignettes of contrast. The birth narrative contains both ignominy and majesty. His public ministry attracts praise and scorn, welcome and rejection, cries of “Hosanna!” and “Crucify Him!” Nearing the shadow of death, He exhibited the translucent breakthrough of transfiguration.

The transition from the pathos of the cross to the grandeur of the resurrection is not abrupt. There is a rising crescendo that swells to the moment of breaking forth from the grave clothes and the shroud of the tomb. Exaltation begins with the descent from the cross immortalized in classical Christian art by the Pieta. With the disposition of the corpse of Jesus, the rules were broken. Under normal judicial circumstances, the body of a crucified criminal was discarded by the state, being thrown without ceremony into gehenna, the city garbage dump outside Jerusalem. There the body was incinerated, being subject to a pagan form of cremation, robbed of the dignity of traditional Jewish burial. The fires of gehenna burned incessantly as a necessary measure of public health to rid the city of its refuse. Gehenna served Jesus as an apt metaphor for hell, a place where the flames are never extinguished and the worm does not die.

Pilate made an exception in the case of Jesus. Perhaps he was bruised of conscience and was moved by pity to accede to the request for Jesus to be buried. Or perhaps he was moved by a mighty Providence to ensure fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah that Jesus would make His grave with the rich or of God’s promise that He would not let His Holy One see corruption. The body of Christ was anointed with spices and wrapped in fine linen to be laid in the tomb belonging to the patrician, Joseph of Arimathea.

For three days the world was plunged into darkness. The women of Jesus’ entourage wept bitterly, taking but small consolation in the permission to perform the tender act of anointing His body. The disciples had fled and were huddled together in hiding, their dreams shattered by the cry, “It is finished.”

For three days God was silent. Then He screamed. With cataclysmic power, God rolled the stone away and unleashed a paroxysm of creative energy of life, infusing it once more into the still body of Christ. Jesus’ heart began to beat, pumping glorified blood through glorified arteries, sending glorified power to muscles atrophied by death. The grave clothes could not bind Him as He rose to His feet and quit the crypt. In an instant, the mortal became immortal and death was swallowed up by victory. In a moment of history, Job’s question was answered once and for all: “If a man die, shall he live again?” Here is the watershed moment of human history, where the misery of the race is transformed into grandeur. Here the kerygma, the proclamation of the early church, was born with the cry, “He is risen.”

We can view this event as a symbol, a lovely tale of hope. We can reduce it to a moralism that declares, as one preacher put it, “The meaning of the resurrection is that we can face the dawn of each new day with dialectical courage.” Dialectical courage is the variety invented by Frederick Nietzsche, the father of modern nihilism. Courage that is dialectical is a courage in tension. The tension is this: Life is meaningless, death is ultimate. We must be courageous, knowing that even our courage is empty of meaning. This is denial of resurrection bathed in the despair of a truncated existential hope.

However, the New Testament proclaims the resurrection as sober historical fact. The early Christians were not interested in dialectical symbols but in concrete realities. Authentic Christianity stands or falls with the space/time event of Jesus’ resurrection. The term Christian suffers from the burden of a thousand qualifications and a myriad of diverse definitions. One dictionary defines a Christian as a person who is civilized. One can certainly be civilized without affirming the resurrection, but one cannot then be a Christian in the biblical sense. The person who claims to be a Christian while denying the resurrection speaks with a forked tongue, and we should turn away from such.

The resurrection of Jesus is radical in the original sense of the word. It touches the radix, the “root” of the Christian faith. Without it, Christianity becomes just another religion designed to titillate our moral senses with platitudes of human wisdom.

The apostle Paul spelled out the clear and irrefutable consequences of a “resurrectionless” Christianity. If Christ is not raised, he reasoned, we are left with the following list of conclusions (1 Cor. 15:13–19):

1. Our preaching is futile.

2. Our faith is in vain.

3. We have misrepresented God.

4. We are still in our sins.

5. Our loved ones who have died have perished.

6. We are of all men most to be pitied.

These six consequences sharply reveal the inner connection of the resurrection to the substance of Christianity. The resurrection of Jesus is the sine qua non of the Christian faith. Take away the resurrection and you take away Christianity.

The biblical writers do not base their claim of resurrection on its internal consistency to the whole of faith, however. It is not simply a logical deduction drawn from other doctrines of faith. It is not that we must affirm the resurrection because the alternatives to it are grim. Resurrection is not affirmed because life would be hopeless or intolerable without it. The claim is based not on speculation but on empirical data. They saw the risen Christ. They spoke with Him and ate with Him. Neither His death nor His resurrection happened in a corner like Joseph Smith’s alleged reception of special revelation. The death of Jesus was a public spectacle and a matter of public record. The resurrected Christ was seen by more than five hundred people at one time. The Bible presents history on this matter.

The strongest objection raised against the biblical account of Jesus’ resurrection is the same objection raised against other biblical miracles, namely, that such an event is impossible. It is ironic that the New Testament approaches the question of Christ’s resurrection from exactly the opposite direction. In Peter’s speech on Pentecost, he declared: “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it” (Acts 2:24).

To set forth the principle stated here, I must indulge myself with the use of a double negative. It was impossible for Christ not to have been raised. For death to have held Christ would have required the supreme and unthinkable violation of the laws of death. It is viewed by modern man as an inexorable law of nature that what dies stays dead. However, that is a law of fallen nature. In the Judeo-Christian view of nature, death entered the world as a judgment on sin. The Creator decreed that sin was a capital offense: “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17) was the original warning. God granted an extension of life beyond the day of sin, but not indefinitely. The original sanction was not completely rescinded. Mother Nature became the paramount executioner. Adam was created with both the possibility of death (posse mori) and the possibility of avoiding it (posse non mori). By his transgression, he forfeited the possibility of avoidance of death and incurred, as judgment, the impossibility of not dying (non posse non mori).

Jesus was not Adam. He was the second Adam. He was free from sin, both original and actual. Death had no legitimate claim on Him. He was punished for the sin imputed to Him, but once the price was paid and the imputation was lifted from His back, death lost its power. In death, an atonement was made; in resurrection, the perfect sinlessness of Jesus was vindicated. He was, as the Scriptures assert, raised for our justification as well as His own vindication.

Hume’s probability quotients discard the resurrection because it was a unique event. He was right on one count. It was a unique event. Though Scripture relates other resurrection accounts, such as the raising of Lazarus, they were all in a different category. Lazarus died again. The uniqueness of Jesus’ resurrection was tied to another aspect of His uniqueness. It was tied to His sinlessness, a dimension of the person of Jesus that would be even more unique if uniqueness were capable of degrees.

For God to allow Jesus to be bound forever by death would have been for God to violate His own righteous character. It would have been an injustice, an act that is supremely impossible for God to commit. The surprise is not that Jesus rose, but that He stayed in the tomb as long as He did. Perhaps it was God’s condescension to human weakness of unbelief that inclined Him to keep Christ captive, to ensure that there would be no doubt He was dead and that the resurrection would not be mistaken for a resuscitation.

The resurrection sets Jesus apart from every other central figure of world religions. Buddha is dead. Mohammed is dead. Confucius is dead. None of these were sinless. None offered atonement. None were vindicated by resurrection.

If we stagger with unbelief before the fact of resurrection, we would do well to consider the plight of the two walking to Emmaus that weekend. Luke records the event for us (Luke 24:13–35.). As the two men were walking away from Jerusalem, Jesus joined them incognito. They presumed to inform Jesus about the events of the crucifixion and showed obvious impatience with His apparent ignorance of the matters. When they related the report of the women concerning the resurrection, Christ rebuked them:

“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

When the two had their eyes opened and they recognized Jesus that night, they said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”

A Christian is not a skeptic. A Christian is a person with a burning heart, a heart set aflame with certainty of the resurrection.

This excerpt is from Who Is Jesus? by R.C. Sproul. Download all 32 Crucial Questions ebooks for free here.

$5 Friday (And More): Marriage, Joy, & the Holy Spirit

It’s time for our weekly $5 Friday sale. This week’s resources include such topics as marriage, joy, the Holy Spirit, fear, Reformed theology, William Carey, and more.

Plus, several bonus resources are also available for more than $5. These have been significantly discounted from their original price. This week’s bonus resources include:

Hymns of Grace , hymnal $80 $50 (Save 37%)
Taking God at His Word by Kevin DeYoung, Paperback book $12 $10 (Save 33%)
Willing to Believe by R.C. Sproul, paperback book $14.40 $11 (Save 38%)
Willing to Believe with R.C. Sproul, CD collection $27.90 $10 (Save 67%)
Willing to Believe with R.C. Sproul, Study guide $12 $8 (Save 46%)
A Survey of Church History, Part 3 A.D. 1500-1620 with W. Robert Godfrey, CD collection $27.90 $10 (Save 67%)
A Survey of Church History, Part 3 A.D. 1500-1620 with W. Robert Godfrey, Study guide $12 $8 (Save 46%)
Chosen by God with R.C. Sproul, CD collection $21.60 $10 (Save 58%)
Recovering the Beauty of the Arts with R.C. Sproul, DVD $40.50 $12 (Save 73%)
Everyone’s a Theologian by R.C. Sproul, Audiobook CD $20 $10 (Save 50%)
July 2012 Tabletalk: Drawing the Line: Why Doctrine Matters , Magazine $3 $1 (Save 67%)
July 2013 Tabletalk: Out of the Abundance of the Heart , Magazine $3 $1 (Save 67%)
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Sale runs through 12:01 a.m.–11:59 p.m. Friday ET.

View today’s $5 Friday sale items.