Skip to main content

The Wilderness Encroaches

Written by Rick Shrader

The Wilderness Encroaches

by Rick Shrader

Admitting that, when you first go to mingle with worldly scenes, you may intend not to be seduced from the path of duty; admitting that you at first possess sincerity, firmness, and courage; you will soon deviate from them. Those ideas of zeal and firmness against vice with which you enter into the world will soon grow weaker; intimacy with the world will soon make them appear to you unsocial and erroneous; to them will succeed ideas more pleasant, more agreeable to man, more according to the common manner of thinking; what appeared zeal and duty you will regard as excessive and imprudent severity; and what appeared virtue and ministerial prudence you will consider as unnecessary singularity. Nothing enervates that firmness becoming the ministerial character like associating freely with men of the world.

Jean Baptiste Massillon1

 

Last summer I had an enjoyable dinner with Dr. Harold Rawlings in Cincinnati, Ohio. He used the phrase, “the wilderness encroaches” as we were talking in the context of being constant and vigilant in the ministry. Having grown up around farms in the Midwest (Landmark Baptist Temple is my home church) I recall the blackberry and raspberry bushes growing along the fence rows. If they were not mowed back every summer, they would encroach into the yard and take as much space as they were allowed to have. I am sure that Adam noticed the same thing not long after God said to him, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake . . . Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (Gen 3:17-18). Dr. Rawlings did not elaborate on the phrase, but I have thought about its use in many ways. Here are three of those ways.

The wilderness encroaches upon our manners.

The manners that a civil society insists upon, is a middle ground of free self-control, existing between an encroaching totalitarianism on the one hand, and antinomianism on the other. Douglas Groothuis wrote, “Restraint is the price of civilization, and we are casting off restraint.”2 To the extent a people can maintain personal manners, they can maintain their freedom.

We all feel the encroaching wilderness that takes its toll on our manners: every time we let our wife open the car door herself; every time we walk inside with our ball cap still on; and every time we interrupt, fail to say “please” and are too lazy to say “thank-you.” Manners are never against the law, only against the conscience.

In a more chivalrous age Blaise Pascal wrote, “Some fancy makes me dislike people who croak or who puff while eating. Fancy carries a lot of weight. What good will that do us? That we indulge it because it is natural? No, rather we resist it.”3 It is our nature to let down in this area of manners, especially when those who stood over us to make us be polite are gone and we are our only enforcers. Our age is not an age of self-control. Modern man is what philosophers have called “the Noble Savage” and Kenneth Myers wrote, “If the Noble Savage is the highest form of man, you can hardly protest if his table manners are deplorable.”4 Let’s mow back the wilderness with self-imposed manners!

The wilderness encroaches upon our morality.

Our age is an age without moral restraint; an age that no longer believes in a moral absolute. The whole yard of right and wrong has been overgrown by the wilderness of permissiveness. Os Guinness said, “‘Just say no’ has become America’s most urgent slogan when ‘why not?’ has become America’s most publicly unanswerable question.”5 We must be vigilant to stop the onslaught by crushing even the smallest weed of immorality.

God has a Moral Law that exists in our world. Because man is made in God’s image, he is intuitively aware of moral right and wrong and, being a sinner, is justly condemned for his failure to keep it. It is our duty as believers to be moral people for the sinner’s sake. A contemporary writer put it, “Moral behavior presupposes a transcendent absolute.”6 If we let the wilderness of moral permissiveness creep into our lives, we convey the message to the sinner that we are not responsible for the Moral Law. Ironically, it is in the smallest matters of morality where the sinner sees our inconsistency the most. He hears our little lies; he sees our fits of anger; he watches where we go, what we look at, how we respond to the smallest situations. By acquiescing in small matters we forfeit a voice in larger ones as well.

The wilderness encroaches upon our ministry.

Considering all that the Apostle Paul said about setting our affections on things above (Col 3:2), I do not believe it is possible to be too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.”7 But after Paul’s heavenly vision of 2 Corinthians 12, he was given a thorn in the flesh to remind him to not let the worldly cares overrun his higher calling. The wilderness of worldly cares can cause us to be cumbered about with much serving and yet miss the part that is most needful.

Savonarola once said, “In the primitive church the chalices were of wood and the prelates were of gold; today the prelates are of wood and the chalices are of gold.”8 In our day of symbolism over substance and emotion without meaning, the love of this present world creeps in too easily. Paul was ready to depart and to be with Christ while Demas had departed to be with the world. J. Sidlow Baxter wrote, “Holiness is not only a reclamation of the garden from weeds, but a filling of it with fragrant flowers.”9 The best way to fight the wilderness is to “manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place” (2 Cor 2:14).

Notes:
1. Jean Baptiste Massillon, “On the Spirit of the Ministry” Orations, 4 (New York: Collier, 1902) 1719.
2. Douglas Groothuis, The Soul In Cyberspace (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997) 91.
3. Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York: Penquin, 1966) 196 (86) p. 88.
4. Kenneth Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes (Wheaton: Crossway, 1989) 142.
5. Quoted by Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil (Dallas: Word, 1996) 134.
6. Kenneth Boa, “What is Behind Morality?”, Vital Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1994) 20.
7. C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns (New York: HB&J, 1986) 80.
8. Savonarola, “On the Degeneration of the Church” , Orations, 3 (New York: Collier, 1902) 1281.
9. J. Sidlow Baxter, Christian Holiness (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977) 162.

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

Speaking To Those Who Are Never Wrong!

Written by Rick Shrader

Speaking To Those Who Are Never Wrong!

by Rick Shrader

Our existence is more real to us than the existence of anything else because the existence of everything else is evaluated in terms of its usefulness and attractiveness to our purposes. Everything is subordinate to our will. To do evil is to attempt to retain that perspective and relation to others. To refuse to do evil is to recognize that we are not at the center and that all things are not to be judged with ourselves at the center.

Diogenes Allen1

I have thought for some time that people do not believe that they are actually wrong about anything they do. In this regard we all remain narcissistic children, fully convinced that each decision we make is justified by circumstances around us. A mother asks in vain why a two-year old hit another child. The reason is always justified in the child’s mind and any crying that follows is only because mother was not able to properly assess the situation. In this morning’s paper, Lawrence Taylor, ex-professional athlete and convicted drug user, said plainly, “I am not sorry for anything I have done.” Adult circumstances differ only in degree, not in kind.

Though God tells us plainly in His Word that we are born in sin, it is the one thing we do not want to hear. Eve thought it was wrong of God to keep her from fulfilling her desires and Adam blamed Eve for his decision to participate in the sin. Since then humans have been convinced that all their decisions are really justified, it is only circumstances that make our decisions appear to be bad ones. We may be forced at times to say we are sorry or to make restitution for our misunderstood actions, but that is not at all the same as believing we were wrong. Perhaps the only true admission of wrong-doing that humans ever come to is called repentance. And perhaps that is why there is so little true repentance these days.

The attitude I am describing is selfishness. It is at the root of our sinfulness. It goes against the very fiber of our nature to take blame, to admit that we are wrong, to be sorry for the action itself, not just for the consequences. In fact, without the help of the Spirit of God no one ever does admit such things, for to admit that would be to repent of our sins. This is the root of paganism! We see it all around us today from the highest offices to the lowest grade school rooms. And it is the most natural thing to see in a society apart from God.

I have said before that I believe the current paganism in America can actually afford us better opportunity to preach the gospel of forgiveness through Christ’s blood than what we have known in recent times. The New Testament was written to pagans, not some form of Christendom. It was a world of naturalism, mysticism and humanism, not a world conditioned to think of themselves as born in sin and in need of redemption.

Our gospel demands repentance. It demands a volitional, moral decision to give up on yourself and throw yourself on the mercy of Christ. This is becoming a more radical concept as our society becomes more pagan! David Wells wrote, “It is obvious that the pagan mind had no moral categories superseding the relativities of daily life. Pagans made no appeal to moral absolutes. They determined what was right experimentally.”2 The Apostolic endeavor (as well as the New Testament itself) was designed for such a world and it worked perfectly.

I believe, however, that in order for us to be as successful, we must be careful and accurate in some areas as well.

1. We must center on the moral arguments for God’s existence, not only on creation. That God’s creation shows His eternal power and Godhead will always be true, and that the complexity of nature gives testimony to a complex Creator as well. But knowing that humans are created in God’s image, and that they will always have a conscience void of fulfillment as they try to live against God’s moral universe, we ought to preach loud and clear to this need.

Ravi Zacharias has stated that as he has spoken on university campuses around the world, it is the discussions of moral absolutes and the existence of truth that bring more questions than any other topics.3 Schaeffer wrote, “In the area of morality we find exactly the same thing. Man cannot escape the fact of the motions of a true right and wrong in himself; not just a sociological or hedonistic morality, but true morality, true right and wrong.”4 The pagan morality of our day will only become more and more antithetical to Christianity as time goes on.

2. We must be convinced as believers that covetous desires are the height of hypocrisy. We will have a hard time pointing out the selfishness in others by congratulating and rewarding our own selfishness. This heart of ours is deceitful and desperately wicked. Even Paul admitted, “I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet” (Rom 7:7). Thomas Watson, an old Puritan writer, called covetousness “The mother sin”5 and showed how all ten commandments are underpinned by this most basic human fault. The breaking of each commandment is a covetous act done for some selfish gain.

I think it is no secret that our churches and our evangelistic efforts are often mere fronts for feeding our own ego. We have a innate desire to be seen and applauded that hounds us constantly. An older writer said, “The enemy whom the Christian combats is his own heart: for he is required to turn arms against himself. He must suspend all sentiments of self-love; he must become his own executioner, and, to use the ideas and expressions of Jesus Christ, he must actually deny himself.”6

If we are to bring the sinner to the place of repentance, in an age which denies moral obligation and exalts self-worth, we must give up our own selfish ambitions. It may be true that we can attract pagans by showing aggressive ambition, but we cannot bring them to repentance. If the cross is lifted up rather than ourselves, God will use us to bring men to himself.

3. We must be willing to accept the vilification which will come our way if we preach the need for repentance. We are seeing this kind of hatred for morality directed socially at the “religious right” and politically at conservatives, but I wonder if we find it directed at us purely because we speak for Christ? In Peter’s first epistle written to suffering Christians, he admonishes the believers in every chapter to accept suffering as Christians, not as law breakers, “for if you take it patiently, this is acceptable with God” (2:20). Since Christ has suffered for us, we are to “arm” ourselves “with the same mind” (4:1).

It was October 19, 1856, as Charles Spurgeon was preaching to twelve thousand people in Surrey Music Hall that someone yelled “Fire!”. Seven people died trying to escape the bogus alarm, and Spurgeon was terribly vilified as a “ranting charlatan.” After days of soul-searching and agony, Spurgeon emerged from the ordeal while walking with his wife in the garden, and said, “How foolish I have been! What does it matter what becomes of me if the Lord is glorified? If He is exalted, let Him do as He pleases with me. Oh, wifey, I see it all now.”7 That is the true evangelistic spirit that we find in the apostles throughout the book of Acts!

Our generation of believers may meet the Lord in the air! This generation of pagans has only one chance at salvation. We who love heaven more than earth, we who hate the garment spotted by the flesh, must have this kind of compassion, making a difference! That ministry of compassion must somehow convince the pagans that they are wrong, that only repentance from their selfish sins is acceptable before a holy God.

Notes:
1. Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World (Louisville: W/JKP, 1989) 106.
2. David Wells, No Place For Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) 268.
3. Ravi Zacharias, a tape series called Truth, Evangelism and the Postmodern Mind (May, 1998) tape 1.
4. Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1971) 127.
5. Thomas Watson, Exposition on the Shorter Catechism (downloaded from Banner of Truth, Edinburgh).
6. Jacques Saurin, “Christian Heroism,” Orations, IV (New York: Collier, 1902) 1752.
7. William J. Petersen, “Meet Charles and Susie Spurgeon” a chapter in a collection of short biographies called C.S. Lewis had a Wife, Catherine Marshall had a Husband (Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1985) 144.
 
 

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

The Hypocrite Finders

Written by Rick Shrader

The Hypocrite Finders

by Rick Shrader

For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.

. . . . But he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord. For not he that commendeth himself is approved, but whom the Lord commendeth.  2 Corinthians 10:12, 17-18

“In a Connecticut city, fifty-three residents of a certain neighborhood signed a petition to stop reckless driving on their streets. The police set a watch. A few nights later five violators were caught. All five had signed the petition.”1 Hypocrites are the best hypocrite-finders. It is their nature to be such. No one can walk into our church and spot hypocrisy faster than a total stranger who does not want to be there in the first place. These hypocrite-finders have a real advantage from the start. Being unfamiliar with the teachings of our church (and probably Christianity in general) they are at liberty to evaluate everyone there by their own standards, and not by the doctrines of the church. They have a preconceived idea of what a church should be and when it doesn’t measure up, the hypocrite-finder spots the inconsistency.

Such people are unencumbered by years of study about what the Bible teaches concerning human nature. Nor do they care that, being a stranger, they may not know many of the facts behind each person’s situation. They are much like an anxious fan watching a ball game he knows nothing about and yet criticizing the players for not performing the way he thinks they should. I might criticize a Christian for not being a good Orthodox Jew, but to criticize him for not being a good Christian is another thing entirely.

After two centuries of being criticized by the world, Christians have gotten used to this routine and should seldom be very upset at it. “The charge of hypocrisy is the unintended compliment that vice pays to virtue.”2 If there is an opposite to the Christ-centered worldview, it is the self-centered worldview. That is why true repentance turns us exactly around! Before we knew Christ, everything was intended to make us happy, to please us, to bend over backward to accommodate us. And by all means, nothing should intrude into our world so far as to tell us we are wrong and ought to change. When such a person as that comes into a group of people who believe that the basic nature is corrupt and needs to be changed, and who are constantly being changed from the old natural way to the new spiritual way, that person cannot help but feel the immediate pressure!

Two things are true when this happens. The stranger is not like the church and the church is not like the stranger. But being on church ground, the stranger is under the pressure to change (just as the church comes under pressure to change when she is in the world). The stranger, at that moment, employs the age-old defense mechanism that is the basis of the hypocrisy charge. He determines that a Christian ought to be what he imagines him to be! But since the Christian will not and can not be that, the stranger is obliged to call him a hypocrite.

If that were the end of the story, the evangelism of the church would work very well. But an irony almost always occurs. This hypocrite-finder finds someone in the church who agrees with him! Of course, this new comrade is truly at odds with the church and has been unwilling to conform all along. But now the coterie is complete. These two can be perfectly consistent between themselves and pronounce all others who are unlike them “hypocrites.” As long as the stranger has this new ally, and their self-view can be bolstered by one another, the stranger will never change. “Falsehood is never so false as when it is very nearly true.”3 Now, if a third member joins the gang, a three-fold cord cannot be broken. Had the stranger been left alone without an ally, change might have occurred out of necessity. Ron Mayers wrote, “The individual who says he is a Christian, but does not live like a Christian, actually gives the lie to his own testimony. Unfortunately, unbelievers interpret this contradiction as an indication of the absence of truth in the claims of Christianity.”4

We might recognize one more irony as well. Down deep, those in the church know they are all hypocrites to some degree. That is why they have learned not to criticize very quickly. They know that all believers are in the process of being conformed into the image of Christ, which process will continue until death. But one thing is sure for them, the original self-life is not satisfying nor desirable. To go on comparing oneself to oneself gets oneself nowhere. But to compare oneself with Christ is to begin a life-long and life-changing journey. And each of these travelers is forever thankful that when they were that stranger in the church, no one agreed with them and prohibited the necessary change. Rather, with the love of an observer during a birth process, they encouraged the leaving of the old life and the coming of the new.

The hypocrite-finders will always be coming among us. Bonhoeffer wrote of hypocrites, “He looks like a Christian, he talks and acts like one But it is not faith in Jesus Christ which made him one of us, but the devil.”5 We must remember that the hypocrite is not living in the “real” world. He is living in a world which he has imagined exists but in actuality does not. The thing he needs most of all from churches and from Christians is to see what Christianity really is, a reality that will contradict his preconceived idea. Stealth tactics that take pains to agree with the hypocrite in order to draw him in will, in the end, keep him from coming in.

Paul won Onesimus to Christ when all he had to show for his faith was his chain! Yet he wrote to Philemon encouraging him in evangelism, “That the communication of thy faith may become effectual by the acknowledging of every good thing which is in you in Christ Jesus” (Phile 6). It is hard to acknowledge it until you have seen it clearly.

Notes:
1. Charles Swindol, The Grace Awakening (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1996) 169.
2. Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1996) 118.
3. G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday, 1956) 91.
4. Ron Mayers, Balanced Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1984) 58.
5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959) 191.

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

Rewriting The Christmas Imperative

Written by Rick Shrader

Rewriting The Christmas Imperative

by Rick Shrader

And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! For ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.  Woe unto you! For ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them.  Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres . . . Woe unto you, lawyers! For ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered. (Luke 11:46-48, 52)

 

Jesus judged the Jewish nation through its leaders such as these lawyers.  They had rejected Him although their actions and words were often pious and godly.  On this particular occasion, Jesus paints a picture of their denial in a most vivid way.  The leaders of the Jewish nation had also killed the prophets of old “from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias” (vs 51).  The reason Jerusalem contained sepulchres of the great prophets is because their own leaders, kings and priests, put them to death out of hatred and envy.

An interesting thing happens to historical accounts as time goes by.  We can mold and shape historical characters the way our own generation wants.  Some of the most persecuted people in history can later be made to be everyone’s heroes.  The tragedy is that their message, the one for which they were persecuted, goes forgotten and unheeded.

Jesus knew this to be true of these lawyers and of the prophets of Israel.  Their (spiritual) ancestors had hated and killed the prophets in order to silence their message.  But that was yesterday, this is today.  Today the lawyers are all down at the cemetery building and white-washing beautiful sepulchers for those same prophets!  The tragedy remains.  The historical circumstance and message is forgotten and unheeded while their good name is used to promote the unbelievers themselves!

This is often the circumstance with the Christmas message in America today.  Those who use this holiday for their own profit and promotion are the spiritual ancestors of those who killed the virgin-born Son of God.  They are down at the local mall building shrines to that sacred event.  But if He were to be born in our world today, they would crucify Him again just as fast as before.  How do I know that?  Because they full well reject His offer of redemption today, as those lawyers were rejecting Jesus in His day.

We are watching the rewriting of history all around us today.  The actual historical characters are not around to set the record straight; the moral imperatives are too old to be convicting; and any urgency that existed then, is not felt by anyone today.  We can make historical heroes to be villains, and make historical villains to be heroes.  We recast the past to make the present pleasant!  That’s what the lawyers did in Jesus’ day.

There was another subtle change taking place between the lawyers of that day and the prophets of old.  By rebuilding the sepulchres of those they would have hated (had they been contemporaries), they leveled the moral landscape into a guiltless and harmless memory.  We see this today when someone reaches back into history and finds a famous person who was guilty of even the smallest moral failure, and then concludes that it is not wrong, it is even right, to do that and more today.

Here is how I suppose the thinking must have gone:  1) The prophets themselves were human and had faults and failures.  This can be demonstrated.  2) They were, therefore, of the same moral stuff as those to whom they spoke, even of us today.  3) Since only one sin shows the potential of the sinner to commit many sins, 4) someone with many sins (then or today) is no worse than they and they are no better than we.  5) Since no one is worse or better, none can properly be considered good or bad, it is all relative.

This, of course, is all true!  “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  Even the prophets of old.  “There is none righteous, no, not one.”  So, how do we answer such moral relativism?  Is it true that we can’t judge any sin simply because we all sin to some degree?  Ah, that is where the real Christmas message comes in!  Not one rewritten to eliminate the moral necessity, but one that still speaks about real peace on Earth and real good will toward men.  It is an historical message that is as startling today as ever.

Every person who ever sinned at all deserves equal condemnation.  This is true.  But, if just one man could live without sinning at all, if just one man actually kept a perfectly righteous standard, then that man, by his very existence, condemns us all, just as light condemns darkness and truth condemns error.  No longer could we excuse ourselves by saying that “we all do it, at least to some degree.”  That man never did!  For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh (Romans 3:26).

Consequently there is good news also!  Such a sinless life would also satisfy a righteous God who cannot tolerate even the smallest sin.  In that one man His holy government finds satisfaction without reason to condemn.  God declared of Him,  This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased (Matthew 3:17).

But how can such an One help the rest of humanity who truly do sin and come under God’s condemnation?  In the following way:

1) If this righteous man voluntarily takes punishment he does not deserve, he creates a moral vacuum by which God’s wrath is abated.  For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many (Romans 5:15).

2) The sinner, by attaching himself to that righteous One, has his own condemnation removed by this moral vacuum and receives the same innocent standing before God.  For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one:  for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren (Hebrews 2:11).

3) This attachment must be by faith, not works, to ensure that it cannot be by one’s faulty merits, but by the perfect merit of the Righteous One.  Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1).

That is the biblical message of Christmas!  Christ’s incarnation has thrown out a life-line to our moral failure.  No rebuilding of the story will do, only humble acceptance by faith.  For He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Hail the hev’n-born Prince of Peace!  Hail the Sun of righteousness!

Light and life to all He brings, Ris’n with healing in His wings.

Mild He lays His glory by, Born that man no more may die;

Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth.

Hark! The herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn King!”

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

Christianity In The Dock

Written by Rick Shrader

Christianity In The Dock

by Rick Shrader

Do you really believe the masses will be Christian again?  Nonsense!  Never again.  That tale is finished.  No one will listen to it again.  But we can hasten matters.  The parsons will dig their own graves.  They will betray their God to us.  They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable jobs and incomes.

Adolf Hitler1

 

It is not an unusual thing for societies to imagine that they can become judges of Christianity.  Totalitarian systems can outlaw the Faith and free systems can ridicule it.  Nietzsche called Christianity “Platonism for the people,”2 and Voltaire referred to Christianity as “the infamous thing.”3 But they are dead and Christianity is living.  G.K. Chesterton said, “Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.”4

In the first three chapters of the book of Romans Paul makes the case for the necessity of the Christian message.  Whether Pagan, Jew or Gentile, “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  “There is none righteous, no, not one.”  It is interesting to find that the excuses people gave in his day are the same we hear today.  The Roman world was a relatively free society (at least for its citizens) that gave the Apostles the ability to speak the gospel, organize Christian churches and evangelize.  Opposition was strong from the Jewish community and eventually from Rome as well.  When Paul wrote the great epistle to the Romans, common questions were arising from Jewish and Gentile minds as to the validity and worth of the Christian message.  In 3:1-8, Paul anticipates three questions to which he gives answers that are still foundational for today.

The first question is . . .

“If Christianity is the only way to God, then you are saying there is no truth in any other religion.”

3:1 has it: What advantage then hath the Jew? Or what profit is there of circumcision?  “If Paul is preaching salvation by grace through faith, then the Jewish Law and religion is of no profit to anyone.”  But Paul answers (vs 2) that the Jews have a great advantage!  They have the Old Testament Scriptures!  They have the greatest light of the gospel outside of Christianity itself.  They are not saved simply because they possess it but they are much better off with that knowledge than without it.

Our multicultural and diverse world today often accuses Christians of being hateful and narrow because we preach that Jesus is the only way to God.  Well, that is true.  He is the only way to God.  But that doesn’t mean that no other religion contains any truth about God.   Judaism contains much truth; Romanism contains a lot of truth; Mormonism contains some truth; Buddhism contains a little truth.  Paul had already argued that a man should be thankful for whatever amount of truth he has, because God will hold him accountable for how he uses it.  Ron Mayers writes, “There are elements of truth in most religions due to the universality of general revelation.”  But, “Christianity is more than the best among many.  It is the only.”5

The fact that Christianity demands exclusivity ought to commend it to a seeking person.  How could a religion-made-to-order satisfy our need for truth?  Bruce Shelley writes, “So far as I know, Islam has no Mohammedology and Buddhism has no Buddhology.  The debate in the history of Christianity is a monument to the uniqueness of the One Christians call the Son of God.”6

The second question is . . .

If God’s revelation doesn’t bring those people to Christianity, hasn’t God’s revelation failed?

In 3:3 Paul puts it, “For what if some did not believe? Shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?” “Maybe the Christian plan has failed because it is obvious that not everyone is going to accept it.” We hear the same today:  “If God’s plan is so great, why is there pain and suffering?  Why do people die at all?  Why would God even allow this thing you call sin to enter His creation?”  The most common retort against God has been that either He doesn’t care that people are suffering (or will suffer in hell), or He is unable to do anything about it.

Paul answers the objection by saying, “God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar.” The problem is not with God’s message that has been revealed, but the problem is that man has a basic problem—he will not face his own sinful situation!  Chesterton’s famous reply to this accusation was, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult;  and left untried.”7

The third question becomes a little more complex . . .

If man’s sin highlights how great God’s mercy is (since God must forgive sin), then isn’t sin good and God is bad if He condemns us?

3:5 has it, “But if our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what shall we say?  Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance?”  Paul, it seems, blushes even to write such a thought that he adds, “(I speak as a man).”  Yet that is exactly where man in his sinful thoughts always ends up.  Sin is not only excused because God has failed to sufficiently reach out to us, sin is good because it exalts love and forgiveness.  The only bad part of sin can be the refusal to excuse it out of love and forgiveness.

Paul deals at length with the implications of this thought.  Though the statement of such thinking may appear shocking, it is the root of much of the world’s thinking even today.

1.  The problem of naturalism.  Paul answers in vs 6, “God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world?”  By that reasoning, Paul says, nothing in the world could be called sin or wrong, and it would be impossible for even God to judge the world—but of course we know He will.  If no action has a moral connotation that can be punished, then we are in a natural world, one in which there is no “ought” and there probably is no God.  William Bennett wrote, “The thought that God’s grace, given to us through Christ’s death at Golgotha, would justify licentiousness has long been considered contemptible by saints and scholars throughout the ages.  And rightfully so.”8

2. The problem of nihilism.  Paul again answers in vs 7, “For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner?”  If there is no moral right and wrong, then there is no meaning in this world.  The terms “lie” and “God” and “sinner” are no more relevant to anything than a dog’s bark.  They are all just sounds that we have learned to make but they carry no real meaning behind the sounds.  Someone said consistent nihilism is an oxymoron.  C.S. Lewis wrote, “Most people, if they had really learned to look into their hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world.”9

3. The problem of hedonism.  The final outcome of the sinner’s outrageous statement is answered by Paul in vs 8, “And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come?  Whose damnation is just.”  If there is no moral obligation in the world, and if there is no eternal purpose to which we should strive, the only thing that seems to be worthwhile is our own pleasure.  This is what lost man has wanted all along, to give himself permission to do as he pleases.  The Christian message (of real sin and real forgiveness) must be ignored if this goal is to be accomplished.

The world will always put the Christian message on trial.  And the Christian message will continue to be the only key that opens the door to life’s fulfillment.  Pascal put it this way, “There are only three sorts of people: those who have found God and serve him; those who are busy seeking him and have not found him; those who live without either seeking or finding him.  The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy, those in the middle are unhappy and reasonable.”10

 

Notes:
1. Erwin Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross (Chicago:  Moody, 1995) 104.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche: Quoted by Paul Rahe in The Intercollegiate Review—Fall 1997, p. 30.
3.  Quoted by Bruce Shelley, Church History In Plain Language, ( Dallas: Word, 1995)  317.
4. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Wheaton: Harold Shaw, 1994) 126.
5. Ronald Mayers, Balanced Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1984) 82.
6. Shelley, 109.
7.  G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With The World (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1994) 37.
8. William Bennett, The Death Of Outrage (New York: The Free Press, 1998) 118.
9. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1984) 119.
10. Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York: Penguin, 1966) (160)  82.

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

Are We Too Sophisticated?

Written by Rick Shrader

Are We Too Sophisticated?

by Rick Shrader

Sophism:  false argument, one intended to deceive.  Sophist:  captious or clever but fallacious reasoner.  Sophistic:  related to sophism.  Sophisticate:  sophisticated person, related to sophism.  Sophisticated:  worldly-wise, cultured, elegant, highly developed and complex.

The Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1993)

G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things.”1 But I think that today such sophistry has become “sophistication” and it is the thing our generation covets the most.

We see examples of this on a daily basis. Recently I heard the word “iconographic” (usually used in reference to art) used in reference to words and language that defend morality and truth.  The speaker was arguing that words are merely icons (symbols, but not the reality) that have come to mean certain things, depending on how culture has affected them.  For example, I may say “adultery is sin” but the word “adultery” is only a symbol that has been crafted to produce a certain connotation in my mind.  It may or may not have anything to do with the actual act.  In this way “adultery” is iconographic.

These thinkers would insist that Puritanical Christians of generations past decided to attach a negative meaning to this activity by calling it adultery.  But today’s liberated thinkers are not bound by such moralizing.  Remove the attached label, or icon, and all such cultural prohibitions are also removed.  In such ways, today’s cultural sophisticates have become verbal iconoclasts.  Or, as William Bennett just wrote, “They have persuaded many that the sophisticated thing is to dismiss the scandalous as irrelevant.”2 They are effectively reaching into every area of sacred honor and belief and toppling every word that carries moral meaning.

We children of the sixties laughed when the Beatles sang, “I want to hold your hand” because we knew that Mom and Dad thought that’s all they meant.  But now we are reaping what we sowed.  We groan to hear the most powerful man in the world, himself a product of the sixties, say that adultery is not adultery.  He has traded a sacred trust for a mess of iconograhic porridge and he has “found no place of repentance,” even in tears.

As we continue to move from a print-based society to a visual, image-based society, such pillaging of words will continue.  The soil is ripe.  Attention spans will continue to drop while the demand for entertainment in media will increase.  Personal accountability in society and culture will wane while escape to virtual worlds will broaden beyond belief.  Reasoning, based on commonly accepted word meanings in conversation, will grow scarce if not disappear altogether.  The dictionary will become obsolete.

Technology, far from deepening our mental and verbal skills, has destroyed and replaced them with easier alternatives.  Neil Postman wrote, “To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative.  To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling.”3

A specific irritant in this emerging new age will be the preacher, the heralder of “thus saith the Lord,” one who must insist that a written text carries specific meaning, including the word “sin.”  He has no right, being only a messenger of the King’s words, to negotiate with the text.  His is only to proclaim it.  Of course, it will become difficult enough to relate specific truths from specific words to an illiterate society who has become too technologically sophisticated to listen.

The preacher will become contentious for Jude, the Lord’s brother, said he would have to contend.  He will need to define meaning and refuse multiple choice answers to eternal questions.  He will judge between truth and error by an unchangeable standard, and thus commit society’s greatest offense—that of judging something to be wrong.  He will be busily running behind the iconoclasts and propping the words up again, only to see them fall as soon as he walks away.

Lest we end our thinking here, on what could easily be defeatism, let me suggest the good news with the bad.  The bad news is that the western civilization we have known for a few hundred years, a civilization greatly influenced by Christianity and theistic thinking, is being overrun by paganism.  This paganism is bringing with it a whole new way of defining and coming to truth—a way that leads unto death!

The good news is rather ironic.  If our job as heralders of God’s truth is to put ourselves in a biblical frame of mind with the biblical writers, then our world has now become much closer to theirs and our job is much easier.  Their world was awash with pagan thinking about gods being known through nature, experience being the basis for truth, the natural world enmeshed with the supernatural world and therefore as changeable as the seasons, and (something we forget) sex being an integral link between physical experience and  celestial significance.  History had no significance to the pagan because meaning could only be secured at the moment.  “The supreme norm is always the status quo.”4

There is apparent danger with the good news.  We may grow to like the pagan world and begin to think too much like it rather than in a biblical way.  Our gospel is based in history.  Our Savior is a fact of history.  Our message is a revealed truth given in propositional form that transcends centuries and cultures.  And our task is now very much like those apostles who first delivered the gospel.  We are bringing light to darkness and hope to despair.  However sophisticated we become, whatever contextualizing we do, we now have the blessed opportunity to participate in “like precious faith” with them.

 

Notes:
1. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Wheaton:  Harold Shaw Pub., 1994) 5.
2. William J. Bennett, The Death Of Outrage (New York:  The Free Press, 1998) 10-11.
3. Neil Postman, Technopoly (New York: Vintage Books, 1993) 54.
4. David Wells, No Place For Truth (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 1993) 268.

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

Polling For Moral Authority

Written by Rick Shrader

Polling For Moral Authority

by Rick Shrader

Yet, within the Church as well as outside it, this perverted notion persists.  Truth is conceived on a quantitative basis—no doubt under the influence of statistical reasoning and public opinion polls.  It is being assumed that the more people there are with different opinions to contribute, the greater ‘truth’ will emerge from the mixing of these opinions in the melting-pot.  Truth is regarded as a kind of pudding, or brew, which you concoct from human opinions.  But truth is more like a rock than a pudding—a rock which you lay bare by scraping away the soil.  And the soil is largely compounded of human prejudice and passion.  — Harry Blamires, 19631

Over the last few months Christians in this country have had an uneasy feeling about the way governmental leaders have explained their morals and convictions by popular opinion polls.  Because a Christian has a Bible which he believes to be inspired of God and to be an unchanging standard of truth and morality, he recognizes false “truths” which are fabricated by popularity.  It is essential to the Christian message that truth be seen as coming from a transcendent God and not something that is created by the majority of people.

Soren Kierkegaard once said, “The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”2 If we were told up front that this statement came from Kierkegaard, we would immediately label it as existential and we would, of course, be right.  Now consider the following statement, “Our task is to grasp and articulate God’s vision for our future and to facilitate the change necessary to create that future.”3 Though this statement is very close to Kierkegaard’s  existential statement, we embrace it because it comes from George Barna and has been proven by polling to be the key to success in ministry. In such ways, what was once considered unworthy of the Christian ministry has become its mantra.  And the justification for the change is the power of public opinion.  As one observer of modern culture has said, “What is at stake here in the debate over postmodernism’s vocabulary is ultimately our vision of the truth and moral order.”4

Can anyone doubt that we have come to a day when Christian ministries are designed and guided by what the audience wants, and often in direct contradiction to our own knowledge of right and wrong?  I have no bone to pick with Rick Warren’s ministry, but in reading his book I can’t help but notice this very thing.  At one point he insists, “Faithfulness is often defined in terms of attendance rather than service.”6 And yet when he is deep into the reasons for his successful ministry he says, “After surveying who we were reaching, we made the strategic decision to stop singing hymns in our seeker services.  Within a year of deciding what would be ‘our sound’, Saddleback exploded with growth.”7 And true to our postmodern way of thinking, the only thing that will be seen as wrong about this is that I have criticized it!

The culprit in this waning standard of truth is two-fold.  First, we are selfish creatures who, since Eve and Cain, have found a way to make God’s Word fit our own wants and desires (insert “vision,” “success,” “growth” etc.).  Second, our wants and desires find their fulfillment in the approval of our fellow creatures.  The approval of the crowd simply feeds the ego which in turn seeks for more approval.  In this way truth is “constructed” by popular opinion.  The dangers, however, are these:  what is truth today may not be truth tomorrow if the crowd’s desire has changed; morality is replaced by “values” which are seen as belonging only to a specific group; and the most base displays of sinfulness become the norm, according to biblical warning (Rom 1:22-28).

The defenses for this method of structuring philosophy are numerous:  none of us can follow the ideal completely and so it is judgmental to hold someone to part of it; the quantity of good accomplished by such structuring far outweighs the lack of quality used in obtaining it; and who, after all, can really be sure of what the Absolute Standard says?  Isn’t that all a matter of subjective interpretation anyway?

My concerns in approaching such a topic are these:  1) If repentance is necessary for true salvation, what are we saying about that when we ask the sinner what he would like in order for him to come to God?  Though I am not a Calvinist and am not recommending the old Puritan “seeking” period for the sinner, I do believe that a sinner has to completely give up his own desire, pride and self-worth in order to accept God’s help.  I fear we have created a way for sinners to have their religious cake and eat it too, by placing their interest first in themselves and secondly in Christianity.

2) I fear that we are adding to the consumer mentality which already has engulfed our culture.  Bruce Shelley wrote, “The Christian message and lifestyle, which in an earlier day could be more directly imposed, now must be ‘marketed.’ It must be ‘sold’ to a clientele that is no longer constrained to ‘buy’ . . . . Most churches and parachurch ministries are dominated by the logic of marketing agencies.”8 One of George Barna’s books is titled, A Step-By-Step Guide to Church Marketing.

3) We are in danger of quickly taking the direction of our churches out of the hands of our elder saints and placing it squarely on the young.  We are committing Rehoboam’s error.  In a polling mentality, the squeaking door will get the oil while the well-oiled door will patiently endure.  That doesn’t mean it is right.  It’s just the way it is.

John Wesley once said,  “I love Calvin a little, Luther more; the Moravians, Mr. Law and Mr. Whitfield far more than either . . . But I love truth more than all.”9 Perhaps we should hear Solomon’s words to Rehoboam, “Buy the truth and sell it not.”

Notes:
1. Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind (Ann Arbor:  Servant Books, 1963) 113.
2. Quoted by Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God? (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1994) 205.
3. George Barna, The Second Coming of the Church (Nashville: Word Publishing, 1998) 98.
4. Roger Lundin, “The Pragmatics of Postmodernity”, a chapter in Christian Apologetics in a Postmodern World (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 1995) 34.
5. Gene Veith, Jr. Postmodern Times (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994) 50.
6. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995) 104.
7. Ibid, 284.
8. Bruce & Marshall Shelley, The Consumer Church (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 1992) 20.
9. Quoted by J.S. Baxter, Christian Holiness (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, 1977) 174.

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

Idolatry and Conscience

Written by Rick Shrader

Idolatry and Conscience

by Rick Shrader

“In this connection it is not claimed that an unsaved person must come to know every phase of truth about the atonement of Christ before he is divinely prepared for salvation; but it is claimed that the Spirit proposes to make the meaning of the cross sufficiently clear to that person as to enable him to abandon all hope of self-works, and to turn to the finished work of Christ alone in intelligent, saving faith.”

L. S. Chafer1

 

Whereas in 1 Corinthians 8, Paul deals with how weaker and stronger brothers should guard against offense, in chapter 10 the Apostle has a different picture in mind.  What does the Christian do with his liberty when a lost person’s soul is hanging in the balance?  Whose conscience is more important and for what reason?  Aren’t the stakes quite a bit higher?

In a day when the average citizen cares little for manners and deportment and is concerned above all else with protecting his own space, it is easy for God’s people to also be more concerned with their personal rights than with the effectiveness of the gospel.  But Paul writes, “Conscience, I say, not thine own, but of the other” (vs 29).  He then ends the chapter by writing, “not seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved” (vs 33).  The salvation of the lost person depends much on how the believer allows the conscience of the unbeliever to be affected by his words and actions (see 2 Cor 4:2).

Before Paul gets to his story of the believer having dinner with an unbeliever, he places it in the context of idolatry.  We are to flee idolatry because we have the sad examples of the Israelites’ repeated failures (vss 1-10).  We should not think that we are so enlightened that we could not fall into this insidious sin (vss 11-14).  In the next few verses Paul makes an interesting point that I think could be stated like this:

Our indulgent action around other people’s actions attaches us to the beliefs of that group. This is an integral part of idolatry and why otherwise innocent action like eating, bowing, clapping, etc, becomes part and parcel to the sin.  Three obvious examples are given.  The first is the observance of the Lord’s Supper (vss 16-17).  Believers show their unity of belief and their communion with their God through this common action of eating and drinking.  The second is the sacrificial system of Israel (vs 18).  The entire nation was, in reality, “partakers of the altar” because they all participated to some small degree, although the priest was the primary participant.  The third example is the pagan idolatry often seen in Corinth itself (vss 19-21).  Participation in the sacrifice to sticks and stones was in reality to “have fellowship with devils.”  Strong warning is given to any who would attempt to participate in the Lord’s Table as well as the tables of demons.

After Paul answers the questions of selfish believers (“aren’t all things lawful unto me?”) he advances to the hypothetical story and makes, I think, this point:

The actions and beliefs of a pagan group make otherwise innocent action pagan to them. Here is a believer who is invited to dinner by an unbeliever.  They go to a “feast” where there is a real mixed multitude of people as well as appetites.  The believer knows that some of the meat being sold and eaten was sacrificial meat, but his conscience is clear and no connection is held in his own mind.  He is right, if that were the end of it.  But out of the blue his host says, “This is offered in sacrifice to idols.”

Note:  I must inform you that many commentators take both of these men to be believers but I do not.  I agree with G.C. Morgan and also F.W. Grosheide who says, “A pagan might say this to a Christian to warn him . . . he might also do it to embarrass the Christian and to see what he would do.”2

Immediately the believer is to stop eating.  The unbeliever has now attached his belief system to the meat.  “This is pretty good stuff, huh?  It was sacrificed to my god today.”  It would be easy at this point to go on without saying anything, as when a Christian laughs at someone’s ugly joke.  But that would bother the believer’s conscience, though it would not affect the unbeliever’s.  Instead, the believer is to purposely awake the unbeliever’s conscience and make him think about what he is doing.  He does this by abstaining, and by doing so, refuses to participate in his idolatry with him.

In Paul’s concluding remarks, I think he reinforces this principle:

A believer places himself in jeopardy willingly for the spiritual profit of an unbeliever.  The jeopardy in which Paul has placed himself is potential ridicule.  He asks, “For if I by grace be a partaker, why am I evil spoken of for that for which I give thanks?” (vs 30).  Why indeed!  His own answer is for the sake of the unbeliever, “that he might be saved” (vs 33).  Calvin wrote, “What is opposed to their salvation ought not to be conceded to them.”3 They will thank us for eternity.

We often quote vs 31, “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”  Perhaps by “eat” and “drink” Paul had in mind the Lord’s Table as opposed to the demon’s table.  If we do eat of the Lord’s Table, we can only bring glory to Him by not eating of the demon’s table.

J. G. Machen once wrote,  “The worst sin today is to say that you agree with the Christian faith and believe in the Bible but then make common cause with those who deny the basic facts of Christianity.”4 One of Spurgeon’s famous sayings was,  “Fellowship with known and vital error is participation in sin.”5 The issue revolves around idolatry and conscience.  Are we going to participate in idolatry and suffer from our own conscience?  Or are we willing to abstain and receive the abuse from the unbeliever’s pierced conscience? Is this not what Paul meant when he admonished, “commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.  But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost” (2 Cor 4:2-3)?

May God give us the grace to submit ourselves to the scrutiny of the lost, “that they may be saved.”

Notes:
1. L.S. Chafer, True Evangelism (Chicago:  Bible Institute of Colportage Ass’n, 1929) 68.
2. F.W. Grosheide, The New International Commentary (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 1979) 242.
3. John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentary, Vol XX (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981) 348.
4. Quoted by Eanest Pickering, The Tragedy of Compromise (Greenville: BJU Press, 1994) 26.

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

Puffed Up Or Built Up?

Written by Rick Shrader

Puffed Up Or Built Up?

by Rick Shrader

If a person is offended by God’s Word, that is his problem.  If he is offended by biblical doctrine, standards, or church discipline, that is his problem.  That person is offended by God.  But if he is offended by our unnecessary behavior or practices—no matter how good and acceptable those may be in themselves—his problem becomes our problem.  It is not a problem of law but a problem of love, and love always demands more than the law.

In a chapter typically forgotten amidst other important subjects, the Apostle Paul writes, “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Cor 8:1).  I like the simple and correct way the NIV puts it, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”  One creates a false illusion, the other exudes with strength.  We might pay lip-service to this truth but I doubt if we often heed its warning.

Our information age loves to turn trivial facts into knowledge.  Alvin Toffler has said, “We are interrelating data in more ways, giving them context and thus forming them into information; and we are assembling chunks of information into larger and larger models and architectures of knowledge.”2 We have now done what George Orwell described some time ago, “sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of the intelligent man.”3 But knowledge is power and left to itself is myopic: it blinds as it grows.  It is a strangling weed that needs a persistent gardener that desires proper growth.

The gardener is agape love.  Not because it makes things easier, but because it is willing to do the difficult.  Bonhoeffer wrote, “And who needs our love more than those who are consumed with hatred and are utterly devoid of love?  Who in other words deserves our love more than our enemy?”4 If that is true with our enemy, is it not true with our brother?  But Paul, in 1 Corinthians 8, is telling us that it is easier to be puffed up in our own knowledge about the situation than it is to build up our brother through self-sacrifice.  Denying our own selfish wishes (which are always for personal comfort, not sacrifice) is the most difficult thing in the world to do.  It is what kept us from repenting of our sins sooner than we did and it is what often justifies (“puffs up”) our personal comfort and keeps us from the cost of building up a brother.

You may remember the story of this chapter.  It is a scene that probably happened often in Corinth. A believer of some years, maybe a converted Jew who has never placed stock in stone idols and sacrificial meat, sits in a convenient market to eat a high protein, low carb lunch (“meat”).  All the hub-bub of Corinthian idolatry doesn’t distract him in the least.  He bows his head and gives thanks to God for being a Creator who grows things that have to die so we can eat them and live.  He is truly thankful for all things.

Earlier, a new Christian had come in to eat, perhaps a converted Gentile, a former idolator, one “with conscience of the idol” (vs 7).  His lack of knowledge about these things, being a new Christian, keeps him from ordering a piece of meat which he knows was sacrificed yesterday to a local idol.  His former friends believe (as he used to) that the meat contains demons that otherwise would have inhabited the worshiper.  Unlike his Jewish brother, he cannot take it or leave it.  The memory of his old life, as well as the lack of doctrinal understanding, awakes a conscience that ought to remain asleep.

Now Paul presents two endings to our story.  In one scenario, the Jewish believer who is stronger in knowledge, becomes puffed up with pride because of the liberty he feels and which his Gentile brother does not.  “He needs to watch me eat and learn that those stupid idols of his past mean nothing!”  The weak brother does indeed watch him eat.  He becomes “emboldened” (vs 10), through the example of this older Christian, to order the meat and eat it.  He is started on a new path of freedom,  so he believes, for Paul simply says this process destroys him (vs 11).  Why?  Because he quickly regresses back to the idol worship itself, attaching again a religious significance to the whole process (see chapter 10:20).

There is a second scenario which ought to have occurred and would have if our Jewish brother had added to his faith, knowledge and to his knowledge, love.  He would have eaten “no flesh” (vs 13) in front of a brother he knew was unlearned and immature.  After all, what is meat to him?  He should have been able to take it or leave and had he left it, his brother would not be destroyed.

Who is it that wanted to eat the meat most?  It was not the weak brother, for he would have shunned it if his older and wiser brother had.  It was the brother with knowledge that wanted to eat the meat so much that he could not be denied.  And, after all, he could prove that his actions were right.  In either case selfishness took over, a selfishness of which  agape love knows nothing.  “Dwelling too much upon self produces in weak minds useless scruples and superstition, and in stronger minds a presumptuous wisdom.  Both are contrary to true simplicity.”5

Haven’t we all made the case for liberty or permission in some area by saying, “If I go there or partake of that, this person will be more comfortable around me.  Then I can reach out to him.”  But the fact of the matter is that I am allowing myself to do what I have wanted to do all along.  I have not changed because such change attracts the weak brother, I have changed because I am the one who likes it.  And as an added bonus I can prove by my knowledge that what I am doing is permissible to do!

Lenski writes, “It is rather usual when Christians are released from the fetters of legalism by throwing open to them the beautiful gates of Christian liberty, that they tend to turn this liberty into license.”6 Knowledge has a way of helping us do this.  Facts and figures give us power, especially when the other person lacks access to them.  But knowledge needs to be tempered by love.  Love builds up the other person by doing the hard work of self-denial.  George Macdonald said, “Never soul was set free, without being made to feel its slavery.”7 Ah, there is the liberty that a believer seeks but which knowledge alone cannot give!  It is a freeing liberty that denies the flesh the personal desires and in so doing grants the soul release from the law.

This is a nearly impossible virtue to preach in a selfish age.  We want what we want and we know how to get it, or at least supply the data necessary to prove it.  “But speaking the truth in love, [we] may grow up into him in all things.”  Truth needs to be tempered by love.

Notes:
1. John MacArthur, 1 Corinthians (Chicago:  Moody Press, 1984) 213.
2. Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Creating a New Civilization (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1995) 36.
3. George Orwell quoted by Douglas Groothuis, Christianity That Counts (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994) 118.
4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995) 148.
5. Francois Fenelon, “Simplicity and Greatness” Orations From Homer To Mckinley (New York: Collier, 1902) 1639.
6. R.C.H. Lenski, Interpretation of First Corinthians (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1961) 254.
7. Quoted by Os Guinness, Dining With The Devil (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993) 66.

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More

Three Biblical Baptisms

Written by Rick Shrader

Three Biblical Baptisms

by Rick Shrader

I confess three types of baptism:  that of the Spirit given internally in faith; that of water given externally through the oral confession of faith before the church; and that of blood in martyrdom or on the deathbed. . . . John names these three baptisms with which all Christians must be baptized “the three witnesses on earth.”1

Balthasar Hubmaier, “A Short Justification”, 1526

Francis Schaeffer wrote, “Finally, we must not forget that the world is on fire.  We are not only losing the church, but our entire culture as well.  We live in a post-Christian world which is under the judgment of God.”2 How is it that we keep ourselves and our children from being consumed, in biblical terminology “overcome,” by the world?

John wrote that faith is the victory that overcomes the world (1 Jn 5:4).  The word always translated “victory” is our popular name Nike.  She was the goddess of wingless victory, the one who fought the battles for Greece at Zeus’ command.  Her temple can still be seen today on the Acropolis in Athens.  Today’s Nike says, “just do it!”  But is it sheer determination that will give us victory over the world?  The whole world wants to “be like Mike” but not too many want to be like Jesus!

The apostle John wasn’t impressed in his day with slogans and mythological stories when it came to overcoming the world.  He writes, “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.  Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” (1 Jn 5:4-5)  Paul wrote, “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors (literally “hyper-Nike”) through him that loved us” (Rom 8:37).

Where is such Christian victory today over the world, the flesh and the devil?  Why is it today that one who claims to have this faith can be overcome by the world at the first sign of temptation, the first test of stewardship, as soon as the Tempter demands?  According to John in this fifth chapter of his first epistle, the victory is in the 3-fold witness of Jesus Christ that He bore while on earth and which we as His followers bear, if we are to overcome as He overcame.  “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself” (vs 10).  John calls the witness of Christ, “the spirit, the water and the blood.”

In the opening quotation, from one of the greatest Anabaptists who lived and died for Christ, Hubmaier gave a very common understanding of the believer’s 3-fold identification with Christ.  This was their way also of reconciling the “one baptism” of Eph 4:5 and the “baptisms” of Heb 6:2.  John says, “these three agree in one” (1 Jn 5:8).

The Baptism of the Spirit

Though some later Baptists have had trouble with this terminology, I find early Baptists did not and many today use it beneficially.  From the day of Pentecost, believers have been placed into the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit’s operation (further discussion would iron out finer details).  I believe 1 Cor 12:13 does mention this baptism by the Holy Spirit which happens to us at salvation.  It is our identification with Christ’s own resurrection back to life.  At the moment we believe we are raised to walk in this new life with Him (Rom 6:3-5).  In Christ’s work for us, His resurrection bore witness of escaping the corruption that is in the world.

In John’s fifth chapter, this baptism is placed first in verse 8 because it is the first witness we bear and our first identification of a new life.  Our salvation experience testifies to a lost world that there is hope of overcoming the world’s corruption.

The Baptism of Water

The second identification we have with Christ is in water baptism, where we show His death, burial and resurrection all in one picture.  At Christ’s baptism He bore public testimony to His sonship and started His public ministry of proclaiming that sonship.  So at our water baptism we bear public testimony of a regenerated and changed life.  It is the most powerful medium for preaching the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ.  It testifies of an old life being buried and put away for good.  It testifies of a new life that will overcome the corruptions of this present life.  The faith that overcomes the world is one which makes this identification and follows through with its symbolism into real life.

The Baptism of Blood

Jesus finished the work of God by His shed blood on the cross.  His bodily resurrection was proof that He was the One worthy to be such a sacrifice.  When He asked His disciples if they thought they could be baptized with the same baptism (Mk 10:38), they knew He meant the baptism of blood, or martyrdom.  Baptists have known this testimony well.  Many believers have been called upon by God to identify with Christ with their very lives.  How could we do less, in light of what His death accomplished for us?

Though death is a sure way to overcome and escape the corruption of the world, we can have a smaller part in the same by bearing our cross for Christ’s sake every day.  But we must have the same mind-set.  We must desire and be willing to part with the world in every area of our lives, to live out our crucifixion with Christ, if we will ever escape the world.

This is our Faith

John writes, “This is the witness of God which he hath testified of his Son.  He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself. . . . And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life and this life is in his Son” (1 Jn 5:9-11).  Menno Simons, in 1539, wrote, “Oh no, outward baptism avails nothing so long as we are not inwardly renewed, regenerated, and baptized with the heavenly fire and the Holy Ghost of God.”3 Bernhard Rothmann, in 1533, wrote, “Whenever the believer in baptism sincerely forsakes the old sinful life and accepts the new in Christ Jesus, baptism is like a betrothal of the believer to Christ.  It means that, cleansed from all sin, he surrenders himself to Christ and pledges to live and to die according to his will.”4 We can say with John, he “overcomes the world.”

Notes:
1. Walter Klaassen, Ed., Anabaptism in Outline (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1981) 166.
2. Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton:  Crossway Books, 1992) 90.
3. Klassen, 188.
4. Ibid, 177.

 

Click here for more “Senior Saints & Sensibility” articles.
Articles
Leave a Comment
Read More