R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 289

January 5, 2016

The Briefing 01-05-16

Mormon dimension of Oregon standoff largely overlooked by national mediaOregon Public Broadcasting (John Sepulvado) — Explainer: The Bundy Militia’s Particular Brand Of Mormonism

Post-Christian Britain becoming hostile, not neutral, to its historic Christian rootsThe Telegraph (John Bingham) — The ‘silencing of Christians’ in the public sectorThe Telegraph (John Bingham and Steven Swinford) — Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as if it is, says judge

Decline of Christianity in Europe sees rise in pagan spiritualism, not atheismWall Street Journal (Naomi Schaefer Riley) — The God Profusion

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Published on January 05, 2016 02:42

January 4, 2016

The Briefing 01-04-16

Upheaval in Middle East reminds of theological rift in Islam between Shiite and Sunni sectsWashington Post (Liz Sly) — Saudi Arabia breaks diplomatic ties with Iran as crisis intensifies

Leftward moral and political trajectory points to more fundamental American secularizationThe Atlantic (Peter Beinart) — Why America Is Moving Left

Absence of religious affiliation lends to politics becoming religion, basis for moral lifeWeekly Standard (David Gelernter) — What Explains the Vicious Left?

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Published on January 04, 2016 02:39

December 22, 2015

For the Mouth of the Lord Hath Spoken It: The Real Meaning of Handel’s “Messiah”

Though his work is almost universally known within the English-speaking world, Charles Jennens is virtually unknown. He was a brilliant librettist — a writer of texts to be put to music by others. Born in the year 1700, Jennens inherited his father’s vast estate and wealth, attended Oxford University, and became a gentleman scholar. He published a controversial interpretation of William Shakespeare and lived a life of extravagance and eccentricity. That could have been the end of his story, but it was not.

His emergence as a brilliant librettist was driven by a sense of theological and spiritual urgency. Jennens was greatly concerned to confront the deism that was then spreading so quickly among the educated classes in England in the wake of the Enlightenment. Deism rejected the self-revelation of God in the Bible, the need of humanity for salvation, the deity of Christ, Christianity’s message of salvation, and any divine judgment to come. Deists rejected the very idea of a personal God who can be known, the intervention of God into human history, and all of the Bible’s claims of miracles, prophecies, and divine promises.

Jennens was determined to defend orthodox Christianity, and he was driven by two great impulses — a sense of the threat to the spiritual health of the people by the encroachments of deism and a profound sense of personal grief over the death of his own younger brother, Robert, who, as a young student, had committed suicide after falling into a deep depression. Robert’s depression was rooted in his having fallen into deep doubt about his Christian commitment, aided and abetted by correspondence with a professed deist.

Jennens went to work on a great project he called “another Scripture collection.” On the tenth of July 1741, he wrote a friend, stating: “Handel says he will do nothing next winter, but I hope I shall persuade him to set another Scripture collection I have made for him, and perform it for his own benefit in Passion Week. I hope he will lay out his whole genius and skill upon it, that the composition may excel all his former compositions, as the subject excels every other subject. The subject is Messiah.”

George Frideric Handel did agree to compose an oratorio based on Jennens’ great “Scripture collection.” He began composing on August 22, 1741 and completed the entire massive work in just twenty-four days of breathtaking intensity. Messiah was first performed in Dublin in 1742, and the work has been in continuous performance for over 250 years.

Jennens understood the Bible to reveal a comprehensive and unitary story of God’s salvation of his people. Messiah is arranged into three great parts. The first presents the promise of salvation and focuses upon the birth of Christ as the fulfillment of God’s promise of a Messiah. The second part tells of the work of redemption and looks especially to the cross and resurrection of Christ. The third part looks to the final consummation of God’s purpose of salvation in the future.

Every word of the oratorio comes from the Bible and is based mainly in the King James Version. The power of Handel’s majestic composition is evident in the fact that most of us cannot hear many of these biblical texts without hearing also the refrains of Handel’s greatest oratorio.

Where does this great work begin? How would one go about telling the story of God’s redemptive work? Messiah begins with a text from Isaiah in the great recitative, “Comfort Ye,” drawn from Isaiah 40:1-5.

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low, the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Jennens began the story of our redemption with this prophecy of Isaiah, believing that it is ultimately fulfilled only in Christ. The message of comfort first addressed a future when Judah would suffer under Babylonian captivity, and was eventually fulfilled only in Christ, our Messiah, who rescued his people from captivity to sin and death. The promise of comfort is the promise of salvation, without which there can be no comfort. The good news is that in Christ our warfare is ended, our sins are pardoned, and the glory of the Lord is fully revealed.

Just as the prophet was to speak tenderly to Jerusalem, God spoke tenderly to all humanity in Christ. The voice crying in the wilderness would eventually be known as John the Baptist, who did indeed call for the wilderness to be prepared for the coming of the Messianic King, and the way of the Lord was perfectly prepared. Like a causeway in the desert, in the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son. And all creation, from mountains to valleys and everything in between, became the great theater for the revelation of the glory of the Lord.

All flesh — indeed, the entire cosmos — became one great witness to the revelation of the glory of the Lord. The people who dwell in darkness have indeed seen a great light. In Jesus Christ, the glory of God is revealed.

And yet, how can we be assured of this great truth? On what basis do we make such a claim? How do we know that God has, in fact, made and kept the promise of our salvation? Isaiah declares the singular basis for our confidence in declaring this supreme truth — “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.”

That one sentence grounds all our hopes — “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.” Our knowledge of the Gospel is not based in human speculation, but in the revealed Word of God. We have not come to know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord by means of syllogisms or rational calculus. We did not come to know salvation by induction or deduction, but by revelation. We know the great good news of the Gospel because the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.

In this great text from Isaiah, we are firmly established in the knowledge of God’s purposes for his people precisely because God has spoken, and we have heard his Word. Of course, in the verses that follow this declaration, we hear the promise of the eternal power of that Word:

A voice says, “Cry!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. [Isaiah 40:6-8]

The word of our Lord will stand forever. If so, we are saved. If not, we are doomed. This is exactly where all true Christian faithfulness begins. We begin with absolute confidence in God’s promises precisely because we have absolute confidence in God’s Word.

Our confidence is full because we have heard God speak, and we receive and trust his Word in all of its dimensions. We live by the Holy Scriptures because we know that they are the written Word of God. We trust in Christ, the incarnate Word, who, from the beginning, was with God and is God.

For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

For reading on the background of Handel’s Messiah, see:

Calvin R. Stapert, Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People (Eerdmans, 2010).

Richard Luckett, Handel’s Messiah: A Celebration (Mariner Books, 1995).

You can listen to my “Thinking in Public” conversation with Calvin Stapert here.

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Published on December 22, 2015 08:54

December 18, 2015

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

A statement made by a professor at a leading evangelical college has become a flashpoint in a controversy that really matters. In explaining why she intended to wear a traditional Muslim hijab over the holiday season in order to symbolize solidarity with her Muslim neighbors, the professor asserted that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

Is this true?

The answer to that question depends upon a distinctly Christian and clearly biblical answer to yet another question: Can anyone truly worship the Father while rejecting the Son?

The Christian’s answer to that question must follow the example of Christ. Jesus himself settled the question when he responded to Jewish leaders who confronted him after he had said “I am the light of the world.” When they denied him, Jesus said, “If you knew me, you would know my Father also” (John 8:19). Later in that same chapter, Jesus used some of the strongest language of his earthly ministry in stating clearly that to deny him is to deny the Father.

Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God. Christians worship the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and no other god. We know the Father through the Son, and it is solely through Christ’s atonement for sin that salvation has come. Salvation comes to those who confess with their lips that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in their hearts that God has raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). The New Testament leaves no margin for misunderstanding. To deny the Son is to deny the Father.

To affirm this truth is not to argue that non-Christians, our Muslim neighbors included, know nothing true about God or to deny that the three major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — share some major theological beliefs. All three religions affirm that there is only one God and that he has spoken to us by divine revelation. All three religions point to what each claims to be revealed scriptures. Historically, Jews and Christians and Muslims have affirmed many points of agreement on moral teachings. All three theological worldviews hold to a linear view of history, unlike many Asian worldviews that believe in a circular view of history.

And yet, when we look more closely, even these points of agreement begin to break down. Christian trinitarianism is rejected by both Judaism and Islam. Muslims deny that Jesus Christ is the incarnate and eternal Son of God and go further to deny that God has a son. Any reader of the New Testament knows that this was the major point of division between Christianity and Judaism. The central Christian claim that Jesus is Israel’s promised Messiah and the divine Son become flesh led to the separation of the church and the synagogue as is revealed in the Book of Acts.

There is historical truth in the claim of “three Abrahamic religions” because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all look to Abraham as a principal figure and model of faith. But this historical truth is far surpassed in importance by the fact that Jesus explicitly denied that salvation comes merely by being merely one of “Abraham’s children” (John 8:39-59). He told the Jewish leaders who rejected him that their rejection revealed that they were not Abraham’s true sons and that they did not truly know God.

Christians do not deny that Muslims know some true things about God. As a matter of fact, in Romans 1:19-20 Paul explains that all people have some real knowledge of God by general revelation, so that they are without excuse. Speaking at Mars Hill in Athens in Acts 17, Paul argued that even some of the Greeks’ own philosophers and poets gave evidence of a rudimentary knowledge of God — but this was not a saving knowledge, and the Apostle was brokenhearted when he saw the Athenians at worship.

In making her claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, the professor claimed the authority of Pope Francis, and since Vatican II the Roman Catholic Church has become ever more explicit in its teaching that salvation can come without a conscious and explicit faith in Christ. This is simply not an option for evangelical Christians committed to the authority of Scripture alone and to the Gospel as defined in the New Testament.

Francis J. Beckwith, a leading Catholic apologist and philosopher, defended the claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. At one point, Beckwith argued that two people could have differing knowledge of Thomas Jefferson while knowing the same Thomas Jefferson as the third President of the United States. He continued: “In the same way, Abraham and Moses did not believe that God is a Trinity, but St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Billy Graham do. Does that mean that Augustine, Aquinas, and Graham do not worship the same God as Abraham and Moses? Again, of course not.”

But this line of argument evades the entire structure of promise and fulfillment that links the Old Testament and the New Testament. Abraham and Moses could not have defined the doctrine of the Trinity while they were on earth, but they believed that God would be faithful to all of his promises, and those promises were fulfilled only and fulfilled perfectly in Christ. And, going back to John 8:56-58, Jesus said: “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad … Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”

Evangelical Christians understand that, theologically, there is a genetic link between Judaism and Christianity. That is why Christians must always be humbled by the fact that we have been grafted onto the promises first made to Israel. In terms of both history and theology, there is no genetic link between Christianity and Islam. The Qur’an claims that to confess Jesus Christ as the divine Son and the second person of the Trinity is to commit blasphemy against Allah.

Hard times come with hard questions, and our cultural context exerts enormous pressure on Christians to affirm common ground at the expense of theological differences. But the cost of getting this question wrong is the loss of the Gospel. Christians affirm the image of God in every single human being and we must obey Christ as we love all people everywhere as our neighbor. Love of neighbor also demands that we tell our neighbor the truth concerning Christ as the only way to truly know the Father.

We must also understand that the most basic issue is the one Jesus answered with absolute clarity. One cannot deny the Son and truly worship the Father. There is no question that the Muslim is our neighbor, but there is no way to remain faithful to Scripture and the gospel and then claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

For other resources I have written on this topic see:

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God.

What Does God Care What We Call Him.

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Published on December 18, 2015 05:34