There are basically three reasons for the chastisements of God; one is retributive; David experienced that after his sin with Bathsheba. God said, the sword shall never depart from thy house. Then there is preventive chastisement and Paul speaks about the thorn in the flesh, and he said God gave him the thorn and the flesh that he might not boast himself too much. That is to curb his pride. That’s one of the reasons that we suffer the discipline of God, too.
But probably most often we suffer the discipline of God for purposes of education. Job experienced that. He said he had heard of the God by the hearing of the ear, but now his eyes seeth God, wherefore he repented in dust and ashes. The psalmist, speaking about the way in which God seems to treat the wicked, they are prosperous, they have a good life, and on the other hand the saints were suffering, and unable to understand, went into the sanctuary of God and asked the Lord about it. He said this was a great problem to him until he went in the sanctuary and then he learned what God was really doing in the lives of individuals and he learned, and after he learned, he speaks those wonderful words about the future that God has for those who have truly trusted him. ~ S Lewis Johnson
Why does humanity naturally fear death, especially those who do not profess faith in Christ? It is because we are made in the image of God so eternity is in our hearts and scripture tells us that when we die we face God's judgement against our sin.
And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, (Heb 9:27 ESV)
Yet for those who process faith in Christ, there is no fear of judgement as Christ took the judgment for our sin! To be saved means that God has delivered us from his righteous wrathful judgment do us because of our sin against him. It means that we will not be judged for our sins and sentenced to eternal damnation!
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2Co 5:21 ESV)
Reading a Sermon on Genesis 42 by S Lewis Johnson to supplement my bible reading this morning and came upon a great quote that helps to see that lying broader than just not telling the truth . . . John Ruskin has some very good words about truth. Mr. Ruskin points out that a person can lie even by saying nothing, because the essence of lie is in deception not in words. A lie may be told by silence. A lie may be told by equivocation. A lie may be told even by an accent or a syllable or lie may be told by glance of the eye that attaches a peculiar significance to a sentence. All these kinds of lies Mr.Ruskin goes on to point out are worse and baser by many degrees that a lie plainly worded. So the essence of lie is not in the words that we knew. The essence of lie is in the deception that we practice. Now they are practicing deception. They say one is no more. That is true as far as they go. As far as they know, one is no more but that does not tell the real truth and they have never told Jacob the real truth since that time.
“We shall not only be called into account for the truth that we knew and did not apply, but also for the truth that we might have known and did not come to know." ~ Mathew Henry Think about this statement. We are responsible for both what we do know as well as what we could have known but did not put the time in to know! Study your bible!
This is a thought provoking article. . . Why Do People Listen to You?: When people sit in a chair and listen to you for thirty minutes or three hours…what keeps them in that chair? It’s never wise to assume or take for granted that people are listening as you talk. As…
A good reminder not ot limit our focus on preaching the cross. . . Preaching "Christ and him crucified" is core to the job description of any minister of the Christian gospel (1 Corinthians 2:2). Good Friday drives this home more than any other day in the church calendar. On that day, the preacher's task is to proclaim and explain why the bloody spectacle of the Son of God murdered upon Golgotha is "good news." How is this moral rupture the center of God's great act of atonement--of God reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19)?
Christ's cross itself has always provoked hostility and scorn whether among pagan Greeks or Jews and is, in many ways, no easier to stomach now than it was then; it still confronts us with our sins and bids the old Adam to come, submit to death, so that the New Adam may rise to new life. But that's not the only difficulty involved.
The fact of the matter is that many have rightly recoiled at some of the defective ways pastors have preached the cross--especially its penal and substitutionary dimensions--in the past. When we make mistakes in this area, it's easy to give people a distorted and destructive view of both God and the gospel. This is tragic. Both because we deprive people of the beauty of the cross, but also because, as C.S. Lewis points out, the more powerful and good something is, the more destructive it can be if it goes wrong. Much as a doctor cannot be careless in wielding a life-saving scalpel, so preachers cannot treat the preaching of the cross lightly or carelessly lest we bring death instead of life.
While there are a number of ways preaching the cross can go wrong, here are three key mistakes to avoid in your preaching of the cross this Good Friday.
Don't Break Up the Trinity
One popular, but dangerous, mistake that gets made is to speak as if the cross was an event that momentarily split the Trinity up into pieces. We sing hymns with lines like "The Father turned his face away" and think that on the cross God the Father poured out his judgment on God the Son in such a way that the eternal Father is somehow ontologically or spiritually separated from God the Son. To suggest this is to teach a split in the being of the eternal, unchangeable, perfect life of the Father, Son, and Spirit, which is unthinkable.
What's more, this is not the historic, orthodox view of penal substitution--at least not as we encounter it in the best teachers in church history. John Calvin himself is quite clear on this:
Yet we do not suggest that God was ever inimical or angry toward him. How could he be angry toward his beloved Son, "in whom his heart reposed" [cf. Matthew 3:17]? How could Christ by his intercession appease the Father toward others, if he were himself hateful to God? This is what we are saying: he bore the weight of divine severity, since he was "stricken and afflicted" [cf. Isaiah 53:5] by God's hand, and experienced all the signs of a wrathful and avenging God (Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xvi.11)
This is where having a properly Chalcedonian Christology matters. We have to remember that Christ the Mediator is not solely divine, nor solely human precisely because he is fully divine and fully human. The teaching of Scripture is that divine, eternal, perfect Son assumed human nature (adding humanity) to himself in the incarnation in order that he might live, die, and rise again on our behalf as man (John 1:1-14; Col. 1:15-20; 2:8). This is why Calvin (along with the Fathers), said it is appropriate to speak of some realities being "according to" his divine nature (eternality, omnipotence, etc) and others according to his human nature (thirst, hunger, sleepiness) even though they are both properly spoken of Christ as he is one person in two natures.
When we speak of the Son suffering the consequences of sin, judgment, the wrath, or the abandonment of God on the cross, we speak truly, but we speak these things according to his human nature. You have to be able to say that the divine Son suffered these things because Jesus is the divine Son. But you also have to say that the Son suffered them according to his human nature. This is not a dodge or over-subtle, logic-chopping. This is the metaphysical logic of the incarnation--God is unchangeable and impassible. God cannot suffer in his own nature, so the Son takes on our nature in order to suffer with and for us in his human nature, which is now really and truly his, alongside and on behalf of his brothers and sisters (Hebrews 2:14). God the Son suffers and dies in his human nature.
In other words, if you forget orthodox Christology in the preaching of the cross, you'll be in danger of losing the Trinity and the gospel itself.
Don't Forget--Love Comes First
A second mistake we can make in preaching the atonement is connected to the first. Many critics have rejected the atonement as the satisfaction of God's justice and wrath because they've gotten the impression that somehow the picture is about a loving Jesus going to the cross in order to satisfy an angry Father who's just out for blood. And even when it's not explicitly taught this way, unless corrected, many people in the pews can get the impression that God somehow has to be convinced he ought to be merciful.
But this is not what we see in Scripture. Instead, we have a portrait of the triune God of holy love who purposes from all eternity to redeem sinners for himself, before it ever entered their minds to repent he looked to embrace us in Christ (Eph. 1:4-5; 1 Peter 1:20). God revealed his love for us in that while we were still sinners, cursing God with every breath, that the Son came to die for us (Romans 5:8). God doesn't have to be convinced or persuaded to love us, nor does the Father need to be convinced by the Son.
Indeed, Jesus makes it clear that the Father loves the Son precisely because the Son goes willingly to lay down his life for the sheep just as the Father desires because of his great love for us (John 10:14-18). Hebrews makes clear that the Son does so in the power of the Spirit (Hebrews 9:14). This is the triune shape of the gospel: Father, Son, and Spirit beautifully and harmoniously accomplishing the salvation of sinners.
In that case, we have to understand that God is not moved from wrath to love because of the death of Christ. He is moved by love to satisfy his wrath (ie. judicial opposition to sin) against us by removing our guilt and enmity through the blood of his cross. Whatever else our people understand, they must see that mercy and grace are God's idea and accomplishment before it ever enters our minds, because God, by his very nature, is love.
It's Not All About Wrath
Finally, I've focused on issues connected to wrath and punishment simply because Reformed and Evangelical preaching tends to focus on some form of penal substitution in its cross-preaching. Don't forget, though, that the cross is about much more than those issues. Scripture is clear that Christ got a lot of work done in his life, death, and resurrection. Herman Bavinck notes the diversity of the New Testament witness at this point and says, "Like the person, the work of Christ is so multifaceted that it cannot be captured in a single word nor summarized in a single formula." We must remember not to sideline the various other aspects of Christ's cross-work.
For instance, when was the last time you preached on Christ's conquering over the powers of sin, death, and the devil? The drama of the gospel isn't only about interpersonal reconciliation between God and humanity, but about the liberation of God's people from the clutches of his enemies. The same apostle John who tells us that Christ came to make atonement for sin (1 John 2:2) also came to utterly destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8) . Paul says that through his death for our sins, Christ removed the record of transgressions that stood against us, bringing our forgiveness, and thereby disarming the powers and principalities (Colossians 2:13-15). Satan can no longer accuse the saints (Revelation 12:10-12). In doing so he liberates us from guilt and the fear of death (Hebrews 2:14).
And this is just one of the many aspects of Christ's multi-faceted work on the cross beyond the satisfaction of God's justice.
We need to be careful, then, to avoid giving our people a lopsided view of the cross so that they might begin to perceive the height, breath, and depth of the good news of Good Friday.
Derek Rishmawy is a Ph.D. student in Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.
- See more at: http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2016/03/three-mistakes-to-avoid-in-goo.php?utm_source=TGC+List&utm_campaign=82010cf4aa-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_621531349f-82010cf4aa-118240461#sthash.I8kmik2T.dpuf
I heard Voddie Baucham at a Gospel Coalition conference a couple of years ago and was impressed then by the way he preached not only to the convinced but also to the unconvinced. A book that every preacher should add to his reading list!
If you’ve heard Voddie Baucham preach, you’ve heard “that thing” he does: making points, arguing with himself by raising objections, then answering those objections and thereby strengthening the case he’s made (13–15). He calls this “expository apologetics”—the title of his latest book. And expository apologetics isn’t just “that thing” he does—he wants it to be that thing you do too.
In Expository Apologetics: Answering Objections with the Power of the Word, Baucham takes the reader through the question of what expository apologetics is (ch. 1); a thoughtful and contextual interpretation of 1 Peter 3:15 (ch. 2); a probing of unbelief and how to respond to it (ch. 3); Paul’s methods of engaging Jew and Gentile audiences (ch. 4); the apologist’s tools of creeds, confessions, and catechisms (ch. 5); the role of the Ten Commandments and other Old Testament laws (chs. 6–7); and some broad steps for apologetic encounters, including help for preachers and teachers (chs. 8–9).
Not Just for Experts
The idea of apologetics is to provide a defense of something, anapologia. According to 1 Peter 3:15, Christians must be ready to make a defense for our hope. As we share and declare the gospel, it will be met with objections. What will we do when these objections arise? Baucham’s aim is clear: “If legitimate objections are standing between someone and his embrace of Christ, I want to address those objections and point him to Christ” (19). In order to do this, we must know what we believe and why we believe it.
Expository apologetics isn’t a task for the “experts”; it’s a tool to aid believers in evangelism (20). And the endgame isn’t winning arguments. The reality is that there’s nothing new under the sun, including objections to the gospel. Since no new truths are being revealed, then, the objections that must be answered cannot exceed the propositions being put forth (21). Sometimes objections are genuine; sometimes they’re smokescreens.
Expository apologetics is the practice of—as book’s subtitle so clearly states—answering objections with the power of God’s Word. Why biblical dependence? Because we know man’s true problem, and we know where to go to find the solution (63–64).
Baucham aims to steel your spine. Like a good coach, he wants to expose your excuses for not wanting to get in the game. Apologetics isn’t about finding the “debater” within you, or about discerning whether you have the right personality for it, or about pursuing higher education, or about a subjective “calling” to apologetics. We have “a biblical mandate . . . staring us in the face” (21). This implies that “many Christians are actually disobeying God’s Word by refusing to engage in apologetics” (35).
Biblical, Memorable, Conversational
Baucham says that expository apologetics is about three things: being biblical, memorable, and conversational (20).
First, being biblical. In our culture, and unfortunately in some of our churches, biblical illiteracy prevails. We cannot assume anything. Indeed, we “must be repared to defend the most basic claims and ideas of our faith” (25). And this means we must know our Bibles—a need that’s all the more urgent when we consider “postmodern/post-Christian thinking, open opposition to biblical truth, and the growing presence of opposing religions” (24).
Second, being memorable. We need truths and tactics we can use in everyday encounters with people. Crucial tools for the apologist’s toolbox are creeds, confessions, and catechisms. Early creeds summarize gospel truths and doctrinal convictions and “are almost poetic in nature, and, therefore, easier to remember” (88). Consider that a “rich, consistent history of confessions . . . flowed out of the Protestant Reformation” (95). A confession is an extended answer to the question, “What do you mean when you say you believe the Bible?” (98). Additionally, catechisms are useful because we learn what we believe by memorizing answers to questions (102), and they generally concentrate on four basic areas: creation and the fall, the truth about salvation/redemption, the fundamentals of prayer through the Lord’s Prayer, and ethics from the Ten Commandments (103).
Third, being conversational. We’re dealing with people, so everyone is different and no situation is the same. Peter says to make a defense “with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Pet. 3:15–16). In Baucham’s words, “We must be able to share truth in a manner that is natural, reasonable, and winsome” (20). But make no mistake: “Gentleness is not a lack of strength; it is strength under control. . . . It’s instead a fear or respect for God. In other words, our defense should be given as though we are keenly aware that God is watching” (46).
Listen, Then Preach
Proverbs 18:13 says, “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.” This wisdom is especially pertinent in the task of expository apologetics. Baucham calls it “the most important and least appreciated skill” (147). We must listen to people because people matter. And we must care about understanding their assumptions and summarizing their positions. How can this happen apart from careful, diligent listening?
Only once we’ve carefully heard our objector can we offer feedback, point to inconsistencies in their position, understand the sources for their convictions, correct misunderstandings about the Christian faith, and ask follow-up questions to advance the dialogue (147, 151, 153–154, 157–158).
When engaging in expository apologetics, believers should remember that it’s not an end in itself—the “goal is the gospel” (168–169). As we remember how the Lord saved us and what he saved us from, we should pray for humility in our encounters with others. And since every Christian will have apologetic encounters at some level, Baucham’s book is for everyone. He is a trustworthy and veteran guide on its subject. And his challenges to readers are couched in encouragement as he writes with a pastoral heart and prophetic unction.
May God use Expository Apologetics to stir in its readers a passion for God’s Word, boldness to speak the truth in love, and wisdom to make a defense for the hope within us.
