Recognizing the Spirit of God-Christology

Recognizing the Spirit of God-Christology

Jun 5, 2024 | Theology

For the first more than five years of my Christian life, theology was non-existent. There seemed to be this sense that theology was a distraction at best, and a waste of time at worst. If not overtly taught, I still picked up that theology would get in the way of the most important thing in the Christian life, my personal relationship with Jesus. That was mediated through the Bible alone, not books about the Bible. The Holy Spirit would enlighten me to the truth as I read, and that was all the theology I needed. In this version of Christianity, we read books about this relationship with Jesus, and how to live the holy life, but systematic study of doctrine was non-existent. Then I was introduced to Reformed theology at the ripe old age of 24, and it was as if I’d gone from street level up to the hundredth floor and could now see the panorama of the entire city.

One of the first things I learned is a word I’d never heard before, hermeneutics, or the general principles of interpreting a text. It came from Aristotle and can apply to any text, but given the importance of the Bible to the history of the world, it’s been associated almost exclusively with biblical interpretation. To say my Bible-and-me focus invited interpretive problems would be an understatement; it was a recipe for misinterpretation. Christians will obviously never agree on every interpretation, but once we agree the Bible is the authoritative, inspired infallible word of the Living God, the disagreements are relatively minor.

As we come to the text of Scripture, we need to keep these four things in mind if we are to interpret it rightly:

  1. Authorial intent: what we can assess the author intended when he wrote the words.
  2. Audience understanding: what the intended audience would have been expected to believe the words meant. This means context counts, specifically the moment in history in which it was written.
  3. Scripture interprets Scripture: never read a text in isolation from the rest of Scripture.
  4. Scripture is all about Christ (Luke 24): the overarching theme of God’s revelation to us is Jesus.

To fully benefit from the scope of redemptive history revealed to us in Scripture, we must understand how the puzzle pieces fit into the overall big picture. The pieces can only give us a limited picture, and an easily distorted one. Fortunately, we’re not in this alone, which is why we must read more than just the Bible. We have easy access to books, and the Internet, to help us grow in our understanding of the big picture, and all the little pictures that make it up. If we are to obey the imperative of Scripture itself to grow in our knowledge, then we will want to take advantage of the great minds who have come before us, as well as those of our contemporaries. The treasures are endless.

Christology: The Study of Jesus
The life of Jesus is one such puzzle, and people have been taking pieces of Jesus and distorting the picture for 2,000 years. It is important to understand that first century Jews had no categories for a Messiah like Jesus. Jews had been waiting for a Messiah for 400 years, and nobody expected who the Messiah turned out to be. For all of them, family, friends, and foes, Jesus was a conundrum. For 1,500 years Jews had proclaimed the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

Now here comes Jesus of Nazareth taking prerogatives belonging only to God, like forgiving sin and commanding nature. No wonder they were confused. His resurrection helped them make some sense of who Jesus was, but it took the church 300 years before there was a consensus that Jesus was who all Christians now believe he is, the God-man.

There were a variety of Christological heresies, but all erred in one of two directions. They either emphasized Jesus’ Humanity at the expense of his divinity, or his divinity at the expense of his humanity. The most substantial and dangerous of these heresies was Arianism, a form of Unitarian theology that asserts Jesus is not divine, but a created being. In the early 4th century it seemed like the whole world was buying into Arianism. But God raised up a man named Athanasius who stood fast against this heresy, gaining the appellation Athanasius contra mundum, or against the world. He stood against the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the time and was instrumental in the Council of Nicaea in 325 which established basic Christological orthodoxy and produced the Nicene Creed recited in churches throughout the world ever since. The orthodox doctrine of Christ is succinctly explained by Charles Hodge in his Systematic Theology:

The Scriptural Facts Concerning Christ
The facts which the Bible teaches concerning the person of Christ are, first, that He was truly man, i.e., He had a perfect or complete human nature. Hence everything that can be predicated of man (that is, of man as man, and not of man as fallen) can be predicated of Christ. Secondly, He was truly God, or had a perfect divine nature. Hence everything that can be predicated of God can be predicated of Christ. Thirdly, He was one person. The same person, self, or Ego, who said, “I thirst,” said, “Before Abrham was, I am.” This is the whole doctrine of the incarnation as it lies in the Scriptures and in the faith of the church.

Everything in Christianity turns on this doctrine, that Jesus was fully God and fully man in one person. Our salvation depends on it.

The Testimony of Scripture is Clear
Despite the church grappling with this issue for hundreds of years, this was the New Testament witness from the beginning. The Apostle John writes (I John 1:4):

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

John’s exhortation to “test the spirits” is how we know if a teaching is orthodox or heresy. And it follows if the incarnation is true, if God became a man, then the gospels are factually historical, miracles and all. It’s breathtaking as well when you consider that God paid the penalty, death, for man’s offense against Himself by becoming fully like the one who committed the offense. This fact is why there is no other religion on earth comparable to it, not to mention it claims all the others are lies and it alone is the truth about the nature of reality.

Tomes have been written on Christology, but I will highlight a few passages that declare the unequivocal divinity of Christ.

Paul says in Colossians 1

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Some think “firstborn” is indicating Jesus isn’t eternal like the Father, but all orthodox theologians in the history of the church agree this is in reference to the resurrection, as Paul says in v. 18, that Jesus is “the firstborn from among the dead.”

I Corinthians 1:30  and Jeremiah 23 are a powerful incarnational combination. Paul declares that, “Christ is our righteousness,” and in a Messianic passage, Jeremiah declares that Yahweh, Israel’s covenant making God, is “our righteousness:

5 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
The Lord Our Righteous.

Paul is definitively asserting that Jesus of Nazareth is Yahweh, Israel’s covenant making God!

Paul also makes the connection clear in Philippians when he says in Philippians 2,

9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

This is a clear reference to Isaiah 45 when Yahweh, Israel’s God, declares,

Before me every knee will bow;
by me every tongue will swear.

Without an anti-supernatural bias, the gospels also clearly portray Jesus of Nazareth as both man and God, which is why Paul can so definitely assert that Jesus is God.

I will end this brief survey with the words every true Christian should proclaim, confessing of Jesus with Doubting Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” In reply Jesus promises: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Test the Spirits: It Takes Work
Few people are called to be theologians or pastors, but Christianity is a religion of a book, and thus we are enjoined throughout that book to grow in our knowledge of the faith. Too many Christians think that is for others, intellectual types or pastors and such, but it is for every single Christian. Given we live in the 21st century when knowledge is inexpensive, often free, and easy to get, we have no excuse to not “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness.”

The question for every Christian is whether we see Christianity as a spectator or as a participant, are we on the field, in the battle, or just observing from the cheap seats. Obviously, that’s a rhetorical question, but we might want to make ourselves familiar with the Bereans. Paul and his companions had been in Thessalonica, in modern day Greece, and the Jews in that city were none too happy, so they were kicked out and sent on their way. They travelled to the city of Berea, two days walk, and the Jews there were of a different sort (Acts 17:11):

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Noble, I like that word. It speaks of qualities that are admirable, dignified, regal, and all of us would rather be seen as this than the alternative. And what made the Bereans (the only time they are mentioned in the New Testament) noble is that they were not willing to just take Paul’s word for it. Christianity doesn’t work that way, or shouldn’t. Keep in mind whenever the New Testament speaks of Scripture, graphé or the writings in Greek, they are speaking of the Old Testament. The entirety of New Testament Christianity is built on the foundation of the Old Testament writings, and since all of it is about Jesus, the ultimate biblical hermeneutic, the Bereans felt compelled to see if the writings really did testify that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah.

That too is our charge, except now we have the New Testament and 2000 years of Christian history to look back on to examine and test the spirits, as John exhorts us to do. For those of us who are Protestants, our ultimate authority is not in any church or man, but in Scripture, and it is up to each one of us to examine the Scriptures to see if what we’re being taught is true. We’re not in this alone, however, as if it’s just us and the Bible. We have an advantage over the Bereans in that we have the great creeds of the church, the Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, as well as the Protestant confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries, such as the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Belgic Confession (1559), The Canons of Dort (1618-19), and the most famous, the Westminster Standards (1643-1649). The Baptists have the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. These are all from the Reformed tradition, but modern Evangelicals can espouse most everything in them.

From the very beginning, as John’s exhortation implies, anti-Christs have been a part of the church’s experience. The narrative of the fall in Genesis 3 tells us that our experience against evil in this fallen world is to be a constant feature of existence. The offspring of the serpent is given the ability to strike the heel of the woman’s offspring, which is Christ and his church, but Christ and his church (his body) will in turn be able to strike the offspring of the serpent’s head. The damage we can inflict on our mortal enemy is far worse than he can inflict on us, but it takes diligence, persistence, and dare I say work, to do that.

In our secular age that often looks different than previous eras. The cults of today bear little resemblance to the Jim Jones or David Koresh’s of the world. They look more like Hollywood movie stars or “influencers” on the Internet, business titans, or politicians, all thoroughly secular. Though they are not overtly “religious” they are all religious nonetheless, and the spirit of antichrist is everywhere. So in the face of this vacuous secularism we declare with John that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh from God, and is God, and at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father, now and forever.

 

The Lord is Our Righteousness

The Lord is Our Righteousness

Apr 3, 2024 | Theology

The most important truth of the Christian life for me, the one that has had the most enduring impact is learning through time and experience, that Christ is my righteousness. In a dry and struggling time in my Christian journey, I decided no matter how I felt, I was going to read the Bible and get on my knees and pray every morning. That was somewhere in the 2010-2012 range. That made all the difference in the trajectory of my Christian life. It is not for nothing that Jesus tells us to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,” and all the other stuff we might want will be added as well. Somewhere as I began doing that, I rediscovered a verse where Paul communicates what Christ is to us in a way I seemed to have missed for over three decades as a Christian (I Corinthians 1:30).

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

It’s not that I didn’t understand the theology behind this, having studied it all in depth in seminary and beyond, but for whatever reason in my lived experience, the deeper meaning of imputation wasn’t mind blowing enough to me. That’s a strange theological phrase (I made it up just now so I want credit when it’s used!), but being blown away is central to the dynamic of the exhilarating Christian experience I now live. If it’s going to be real for us, it is because we constantly marvel at it.

Philosophy Begins in Wonder
Going from experience and theology to philosophy might seem like a strange connection, but not as the Ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle understood it. This phrase, philosophy begins in wonder, was a primary motivation of their lives. To them, because they didn’t have the revelation of God in Scripture or Christ (having lived BC), the most important thing to them was philosophy because it was about understand truth and the nature of things. Philosophy in Greek means the love (philos) of wisdom (Sophia).

Both men started their philosophies in observation of nature and human nature, which leads to wonder. How could it not! Especially nature. It also assumes human ignorance, and revelation, although being pagans they wouldn’t have a category for that Jewish and Christian concept. To wonder is to cause to be astonished in admiration and amazement of something. We can’t help but wonder when we see a beautiful sunrise or sunset, a full moon, a newborn baby, or marvelous work of art or music. God, the master artist and engineer, made it that way; it’s called creation. But given we live and swim in the suffocating atmosphere of secularism, wonder doesn’t come easy. It’s beaten out of us in a life focused on the mundane, the here, the now. So Plato and Aristotle said we have to be taught how to wonder, to learn how it’s done to make it an habitual part of our lives. It is the same in our relationship to God in Christ.

Coming out of my dry and struggling period, I realized being aware of the depth of my sin, and my shame for it, was a blessing. Putting it crassly, the job of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of sin, as Jesus explains to his disciples prior to his crucifixion (John 17):

8 When he comes, he will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: 9 about sin, because people do not believe in me; 10 about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; 11 and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.

There is a theological tsunami for good in those verses revealed in the gospel we cannot explore here, but the word convict is central to the flourishing of good in our lives and in this world. The Greek word means to expose, convict, reprove. It’s extended meaning is to convince with solid, compelling evidence, especially to expose (prove wrong, connect).

Given we are born rank sinners, haters and enemies of God, and deeply evil, this shouldn’t be a tough job for the Holy Spirit, but we’re duplicitous self-delusional little buggers. We’re very good at denial, especially self-denial. We’re also living in a spiritual war we can’t conceive, and Satan is good at feeding our ego, so becoming fully aware of the true nature of our sinful state isn’t easy. In fact, it can be quite painful, which is why I Corinthians 1:30 is so important. For me it was life changing.

A Life Altering Relationship with God Also Begins in Wonder
I learned through this process that grace is a difficult thing to wrap our minds around, and sinners that we are, we easily tend to disfigure it into something it is not. On one side of the divide we can turn it into a license to sin, as if obedience is somehow optional when we’re under God’s grace. On the other is believing we have to merit his grace, which is a contradiction in terms; you can’t merit what cannot be merited. Often we go like ping pong balls between the two. For me, I subconsciously thought if I do certain things, and don’t do other things, God will like me just a little bit more.

The revelation that changed everything was that this was a lie. God can’t love me any more or less than he loves me in Christ. Nothing I do or don’t do, have done or haven’t done, can change that. At the same time what I do or don’t do matters very much, but more on that below.

The reality of God’s total acceptance of me finally hit home when I heard a pastor I know say, God’s wrath was fully satisfied in Christ. I knew this. I went to seminary and studied this. What was different? Life! After more than three decades buffeted by the headwinds of existence in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body, things looked different. Everything had a different shade of meaning to it, a different texture, a different feeling. It was kind of like Dorothy in Kansas before the storm, everything was in black and white. Then the tornado comes, blows the house off the ground, and it eventually lands in the technicolor land of Oz. In the gospel land of Oz, however, the man behind the current is the living God!

You might wonder how exactly this works. Unfortunately there’s no step-by-step gospel manual because it’s a relationship with a real person, but one who happens to be invisible and communicates to us primarily through a book, and also somehow through His presence living in us. It starts, though, with acknowledgment of our sin. We call that repentance, and because we are naturally adept at sinning, both sin and repentance are daily features of the Christian life. And going back to what I said above, if we’re not reading Scripture and praying daily, how in the world are we going to repent.

The word repent in Greek, metanoeó-μετανοέω , means to change one’s mind or purpose. It requires deep thinking and assessment of our lives and actions. The extended meaning is literally to think differently afterwards. After what? Giving thought, or contemplating our actions and how they reflect our sinful selves, and determining by the grace of God we will not be that kind of person anymore. Because we are not very good at not being sinners, we repent daily. Then we put on Christ’s righteousness, and revel in God’s acceptance of us in spite of who we are. That is called love, and as Paul describes it in I Corinthians 13, keeping no record of wrongs.

As this process and dynamic became habitual in my life (I start my daily morning prayers with praise, repentance, and thanksgiving), everything looked and felt different, as I mentioned above. At various times, be it at church services or reading or talking to someone, I get emotional, as in tears emotional. These times come when I seem to grasp that Christianity and God are real, that what we believe is true, and not some made up stuff by a rag tag bunch of first century Jews. In other words, as Paul declares, they were not liars. If it is real, and we really grasp what it means as sinners to have a relationship with our infinitely holy almighty Creator God, how could we not get emotional! As I said, we’ll be continually blown away as we realize He really does love us even though He ought to condemn us.

The Christian Life of Wonder Leads to Obedience
This love will then naturally flow out into love and service to others. That’s the entire point of the gospel, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. I’ve always thought God commanding love is a strange thing because I subconsciously fell for love being an emotion, and emotions can’t be commanded. But biblical love is a verb, or actions born of decisions to love God and others, and ourselves. If we truly love we will act, and one of the most important of those actions is forgiveness. John tells us in his first epistle that we can love because God first loved us, and God loved us in Christ on the cross in the ultimate act of sacrifice imaginable, the Creator himself becoming one of us to die for us to pay the penalty we deserved. It’s absurd! Which is one of the many reasons I believe it’s true. And If He loved us so absurdly, so to speak, how could we not love others!

We can read I Corinthians 13 and contemplate what that means in relationship with others. There are many directions and exhortations in the epistles to help us put the puzzle pieces of love and service together. We must never, though, be under any illusion that loving others, or ourselves for that matter, will be easy. It’s the hardest thing we’ll ever do because we are absolutely self-centered, but it is also the most rewarding. We also, if we claim the name of Christ, have no choice. It is the perpetual imperative of the Christian life: Thou shalt love, whether thou likes it or not! But that shouldn’t be all that difficult if we really buy into God’s promises of blessing for obedience to Him. I got a glimpse of this last time I was making my way through the Old Testament, and came upon these, sorry, mind-blowing verses in Jeremiah 23 that perfectly connect with I Corinthians 1:30:

5 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
Yahweh our righteousness.

I changed the capitalized version of The Lord in my NIV to Yahweh because anytime you see that in the Old Testament it is the name of Israel’s personal covenant God. And putting two-and-two together, this means that Jesus is Yahweh! We know and are taught this because we are Christians and thus Trinitarians, but if we’re to lead a Christian life of obedience that is honoring to our Savior God, it will begin in the wonder and marvel of God himself coming to rescue us from the wages of sin, death. And that isn’t just eternal death with a resurrected body, but living that eternal life here and now, spreading salvation through love and service to all those we meet.

As I said, knowing we will benefit by our obedience gives us the motivation to do it, or at least try, and God will give us the ability. Yes, it’s mostly baby steps, three forward, two back, but we can by his grace and Holy Spirit in us (convicting us), make progress. What makes these verses so beautiful in this regard is the promise of blessing we see in them.

The Lord through Jeremiah is not speaking about physical land or places. God’s covenant promises to Abraham and the Patriarchs were never about a mere plot of land in the Middle East. They were always for the entire earth, and the peoples who inhabit them. Because our King Jesus is now sitting at the right hand of God with all authority in heaven and on earth, he reigns wisely in our lives and in the world. He is in control of all things, as Paul says in Romans 8:28, for our good which is His glory. We, His church, are now Judah and Israel who are living in safety.

The guide to living in safety is His law-word, and our obedience to it. When we stray, as we always will as sinners, He guides us back through loving discipline as a father lovingly disciplines his children. His wrath fully satisfied, He can no longer punish us, so nothing He does to or for us is in anger. We must believe in the message of the entirety of Scripture that the love of God lavished on us in Christ can never fail because He himself in Christ is our righteousness.

 

 

The Importance of Knowing the History of Redemption for your Faith

The Importance of Knowing the History of Redemption for your Faith

Jan 31, 2024 | Theology

My favorite metaphor for the Christian life is puzzles and puzzle pieces. Without the big picture into which all the pieces fit, the puzzle pieces are, well, puzzling. Without God in Christ, the ultimate big picture, the pieces never seem to fit. We look at one piece and wonder what in the world it means. Life becomes like a Woody Allen movie ending in frustration or resignation. Why do you think he always seems to have that look of sadness on his face? A God-less universe can do that to a person. This metaphor is why my favorite quotation from C.S. Lewis is on the cover of my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Even in the conundrum that is life, in Christ it can make sense because we can trust him in his Almighty power and goodness and wisdom to make sense of it for us. And in him the pieces really do fit, which is why I was so confident in raising our children in the Christian faith. I knew they could never find in any other worldview the comprehensive understanding of every single puzzle piece of life, even those that take some time to figure out, and those to which we’re just not given answers. Which brings me to the history of redemption, and its importance for our faith.

That history is found in our Bibles, and our Christian life has no meaning apart from the entire story we read there. The Bible is God’s breathed out revelation, his word, about what this puzzling thing called life means. Without it, we are stuck in our own minds with the pieces trying to figure it all out, an impossibility as the history of philosophy and religion apart from Christianity makes abundantly clear. Without revelation all we have is speculation after endless speculation, and more endless speculation. What makes one speculation right and another wrong? Who knows! Nobody. That’s the point. Without revelation we’re stuck in a box with no exit or window for light to shine in. Eventually, the only way to determine right and wrong is power, might making right, which is why life in a God-less universe is so dangerous. Inside the box we initially got paganism, and through the Hebrews and the Jewish religion’s fulfillment in Jesus Christ, paganism was eventually defeated in Christendom. In the 18th century, however, revelation was rejected and mankind decided it liked life in the box better by trying to figure it out through reason, and secularism became the new paganism. We’re right back to might makes right and the will to power.

Thus the necessity of God’s revelation in Scripture and Christ, not only for civilization to survive, but also to thrive. This starts with each individual Christian understanding the importance of redemptive history for their own faith, and then together we’ll be capable to obey Christ’s command to the Apostles to disciple the nations. Being familiar with the ultimate big picture is critical if we’re to successfully be part of advancing God’s kingdom on earth, also in the Lord’s Prayer in obedience to Christ’s command.

What Exactly is the History of Redemption?
That’s an easy question to answer. We find the entire story in Genesis 1-3. God created the world good, man rebelled, everything went to hell, and man’s Creator promised to make it all right. The story plays itself out from Genesis 4 to Revelation 22, and we are right smack dab in the middle of it! Of course there are a few details, and they make all the difference. It is unfortunate so few Christians know those details because all those pieces make the frustrating pieces we have to deal with every day fit so much better.

I was prompted to write this because of a conversation I had recently with a family member. She asked me what a zealot was because someone told her Jesus was a zealot and not what the gospels proclaim him to be, Lord and Savior. It was gratifying that I knew enough through my years of study and learning to walk her through the history of Israel, and how the zealots came to exist as a response to Israel’s oppression by foreign powers.

Oppression in Israel’s history is a critical part of redemptive history. God called Abraham and the Patriarchs specifically to lead them into 430 years of slavery, which is a very odd thing for a god to do to his people in the ancient world. And four centuries is a very long time! In the history of His people, God often communicates in metaphor, and this was an extended metaphor for the slavery and bondage of sin. The Exodus continued the metaphor. The only possibility of escape and freedom from the bondage of sin is revealed to be the power of God. We get a strong hint of God’s power, not our choosing, being the operative principle in the redemption from sin in the life of Abraham. He’s called by God from his homeland to go to a land He will show him. God makes a covenant promise with Abram that his offspring will be like the stars in the sky and sand on the seashore, and be a blessing for all the peoples of the earth (Gen. 12). He then tells Abram he will fulfill both sides of the covenant promise, His side and man’s (Gen. 15).

The problem is that Abraham, his name since changed to mean, “farther of a multitude” (Gen. 17), and his wife Sarah are old, and not just old but really old, as in it is impossible for them to have children old. God made the initial promise when Sarah was already beyond child bearing age, but he then made them wait 25(!) years before Isaac would be born. That would put Abraham at 100 and Sarah at 90. Having a child at that age is obviously impossible. A year prior to the birth, God in the form of three men visited the childless couple and said He would return in a year and Sarah would have a son. She laughs because the idea is ridiculous, and He asks the rhetorical question: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Of course not! God wanted to get across the point that with man what is impossible with God is made possible, and God made this abundantly clear throughout redemptive history.

After the Hebrews are freed from their slavery, they celebrated their deliverance every year, and still do, at Passover. For the Hebrews and the Jewish people to this day, the Exodus is central to their image as a people: they were never to be the slaves of anyone. Unfortunately, Jews who rejected Jesus as their Messiah failed to realize the Exodus was a metaphor for sin, not God’s promise that they would never experience political oppression. They also thought the promise was for a physical plot of land in the Middle East and not the entire earth. That is a big miss! Having misread God’s message, the Hebrews thought God’s promise was fulfilled 400 years later with King David and the glorious reign of Solomon, but as soon as Solomon died, everything started going back to hell. Israel split into the northern ten tribes, called Israel, its capital was Samaria, and the southern two kingdoms were called Judah with Jerusalem being their capital.

The Rise of the Prophets and Israel’s Oppression
As you read through the Old Testament it is vital that you connect what is going on with and through Israel to you as part of God’s chosen people in Christ. Remember and commit to memory Matthew 1:21, a verse vital to understanding where you fit in this vast history. The Lord appeared to Josph in a dream and told him that Mary “will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua (Yeshua), which means The Lord Saves. Jesus didn’t come to try to save his people, or to make it possible; he came to make it actual. That’s what God does; He makes the impossible possible. We begin to see this much more clearly when the prophets come on the scene.

Israel’s civil war was a period of geopolitical conflict. Isaiah was the first prophet coming approximately 730 BC, and his writing is probably the most pointedly eschatological of all the prophets. The northern kingdom was destroyed in 722 by the Assyrians and the ten tribes scattered and lost to history. Judah lasts approximately another 150 years when Jerusalem is destroyed and the Babylonians take most of the people captive to Babylon. After 70 years, God brings the now called Jews back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple and their religious life, and it stands until 70AD when it is destroyed by the Romans. This entire period is also metaphorically rich for our personal journey of faith. The prophets warn and promise, the people do well, then rebel, and this happens over and over, not unlike our own struggle with sin. God consistently promises that He will be their Savior because they obviously can’t save themselves. The verses promising this are practically innumerable, but Jeremiah 23:5,6 are a powerful reminder that this salvation in which we trust is God’s work in us out of which we work out our salvation with fear and trembling:

5 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
and do what is just and right in the land.
6 In his days Judah will be saved
and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
The Lord Our Righteousness.

This branch is Christ who is king now sitting at the right hand of the Almighty ruling over all powers and authorities to the end of ultimately fulling the redemption of His creation. Jews thought the references to Judah and Israel were literal references to land and the people who inhabit it instead of the salvation from sin. That is also a very big miss.

The Unexpected Messiah
Micah, the last prophet to speak God’s words, lived 430 years before John the Baptist arrived. He tells us about a messenger for the coming of the Lord which would be fulfilled in John. During those years of silence the concept of a Messianic Savior developed that had nothing to do with the actual Messiah who was born in Bethlehem, Jesus of Nazareth. Part of the reason had to do with what transpired for the people of Israel during those 400 years.

After the Babylonian exile (586-538BC), the Jews were ruled by the Persians until Alexander the Great defeated them in 333, who then conquered Judea shortly thereafter. When Alexander died, the Jews were ruled by a combination of Greco-Macedonian kings, until finally in 160s to 150s they gained some semblance of independence under the Maccabees. Less than 100 years later, however, the Romans gained control over Judea; and in 37, Herod the Great, a questionable Jew, was appointed “King of the Jews” by the Romans. There was a whole cross current of ideas among the Jews trying to deal with this centuries long upheaval, some through violence, some isolation, others religious observance.

As a people whose self-conception would not allow slavery and oppression, living under hundreds of years of it developed a burning desire for Yahweh to send his Messiah to finally deliver them. There were many conflicting conceptions of who this Messiah would be, but everyone agreed he would be a human ruler like David anointed by God (the meaning of Messiah) to wipe out Israel’s enemies and finally restore Israel to its former glory. The disciples were still thinking along these lines when just prior the ascension, they asked Jesus, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” The Zealots were among the most, well, zealous of those fighting against the oppression of the Romans, and they often used violence to do it. Needless to say a Messiah like Jesus was the last thing they would ever accept.

The History of Israel and Me
From a Christian perspective, we can see in this broad overview of redemptive history God’s plans through it all to save me personally. I wasn’t an afterthought who God would possibly be save if I just made the right choice. God choose me! And in Christ before the world was even created. Once God choose Abram to get the ball rolling, it only took 2000(!) years for the plan to unfold to fulfillment. We have much to learn from all of that time, and the more we learn about it the more profound will that fulfillment be in us. As Agustine famously said, “The New (Testament) is in the old concealed, the Old (Testament) is in the New revealed.” The more effort we put into unearthing what is concealed, the more what is revealed will absolutely blow us away, not to mention transform our lives and our world.

 

Calvin and the Three Uses of the Law

Calvin and the Three Uses of the Law

Dec 7, 2023 | Theology, Uncategorized

In the last year I’ve come into a new understanding and appreciation of God’s law, and it’s been a thrilling journey. Up until August of last year when I had what I call an eschatological awakening, I looked at God’s law much the way almost all Evangelical Christians do. It was kind of an Old Testament thing, whereas Jesus came in a sense to supersede the law so we would no longer be condemned by not fulfilling it. It’s not that I thought God’s law was irrelevant, but I didn’t think of it much at all. It did its job bringing me to Christ, and now I live by grace and the Holy Spirit guided by God’s word. This, however, is only one aspect or use of the law as I’ll explore below. For example, one passage among many that gave me this impression is in Romans 3. Paul seems to imply God’s law is no longer necessary, although I would never have said that:

21 But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

Reformed theology had given me an appreciation of God’s law. I knew it reflected God’s character, who he is, and it is as perfect as he is. I’d read Psalm 119 many times in my Christian life, the longest chapter in the Bible, and every verse but two mentions some variation of the greatness of God’s law. I believed it all, but nonetheless, God’s law was never a focus for me. Now it is—all the time.

I was prompted to write this because I recently went to the Baptist church my son attended (he’s since gotten married and now lives across the state), and the pastor made a statement that made me cringe. He said, “The Ten Commandments are not your friend.” I screamed out in my mind, you are wrong! He then went on to contrast the law with being under grace, as if they are mutually exclusive. He doesn’t seem to realize that God’s law has more than the one use of condemning sinners and driving them to Christ. We might think this is some esoteric theological debate like scholastic theologians in the Middle Ages arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but for me it changed my perspective on everything. It was like watching food coloring drop into a glass of water—soon it changed the color of everything.

Calvin and The Three Uses of The Law
Not long ago I learned this idea came from John Calvin, and I recently came across his explanation of it in the preface to his commentary on the book of Isaiah:

Now, the law consists of chiefly three parts: first, the doctrine of life; secondly threatening and promises; thirdly, the covenant of grace, which, being founded on Christ, contains within itself all the special promises.

The three are numbered differently and described in various ways, which I will do below, but all three are relevant for all time until Christ returns. Here is how Calvin describes the perpetual relevance of God’s law:

To make this matter still more clear, we must go a little farther back, to the law itself, which the Lord prescribed as a perpetual rule for the Church, to be always in the hands of men, and to be observed in every succeeding age.

So contrary to the pastor mentioned above, the Ten Commandments (the law) is indeed our friend, and our guide for life. We’ll go through each use and see what the implications are for us and our world.

Instead of the narrow view I used to have, I now realized Christ’s mission affects not only how we live, but how we see the church’s mission in this fallen world. Negatively, the purpose of the gospel is not only to go to heaven when we die and achieve personal holiness. That is an entirely too constricted understanding of the Christian faith, as if it’s implications were solely personal. Not only are the implications societal, impacting every area of life in which people interact, but that is the purpose for which Jesus came when he accomplished redemption. He came to save and transform the entire world, not just us! Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” for a reason. He gave the Apostles the Great Commission to disciple the nations because he expected that to get done. An accurate understanding of God’s law will help us to obediently contribute to Christ’s mission.

The Three Uses of The Law Distinguished
Since they come in no particular order, let’s start with the use we’re most familiar with:

1. The Law Condemns Us – One of the purposes of the law is to condemn sinners. Some have called this the law as a mirror because when we see ourselves in it, it is not a pretty sight. In fact, the closer and longer we gaze into this mirror, the worse we look. Most of us don’t feel so bad about ourselves when we compare ourselves to other sinners, and we often feel quite superior to those wretches. When we look at God’s perfect law, by contrast, we can’t feel superior to anyone. That’s the point. Paul’s two great letters regarding the essence of salvation, Romans and Galatians, have over 50 and almost 30 references to the law in them, and most are in reference to this first use. The law is meant to show us our inadequacy, and highlight our need for a Savior who fulfilled the law in our place. The danger, as Paul indicates more than once, is thinking that if we obey the law we will gain acceptance before God, that the law becomes a means to save ourselves. I won’t spend anymore time on this use because it’s one all Evangelical Christians are familiar with. Unfortunately, we tend to think it’s the only use.

2. The Law Restrains Evil – This is the civil use of the law necessary for civilizations to exist, and where I will spend the most time because it’s the most contentious. The law in the civil realm has no power to make bad people good, but keeps them from fulfilling their evil desires on innocent people. This use is where we Reformed types get into a bit of a tussle. It gets bloody sometimes, and I’m in the distinctly minority position, for now (that’s called positive thinkin’!). Those who are not Reformed tend to think we are absolutely nuts, even dangerous.

Natural Law/Common Grace verses God’s Revealed Law-Word
The primary distinction in our understanding of the law comes between Old Testament Israel and the New Covenant Church. Most Christians believe that God’s civil law to Isarel was abrogated when Israel ceased to exist and Jesus ushered in a new kingdom. I do not believe that because God’s law and the gospel are not in any way at odds. It is always and everywhere for all time a reflection of His being, and He calls all to obedience to it if they are to experience His blessing and true human flourishing. If they don’t, the results will always be bad. On societal law we keep the badness to a minimum through the common law, which developed over a thousand years going back to King Alfred the Great of England in the 9th century. King Alfred based his law on the Ten Commandments.

Most Christians and conservatives, by contrast, believe we can have a basically secular society, and natural law or common grace is enough to keep society’s dark impulses in check. This doesn’t work because God’s revelation, and thus the knowledge of how fallen human beings are to live in harmony with other sinners, is not limited to creation. God has also revealed His will in his word, the Bible, and in Christ. Jesus commanded discipling the nations to include, “teaching them to obey everything” he commanded them. This means a nation if it is to be obedient to God and experience his blessings, it must be affirmingly a Christian nation. America was founded as a Christian nation, and that is how Americans saw themselves until well into the 20th century. The Supreme Court affirmed as much in 1892 in a case providentially titled, Church of the Holy Trinity v. The United States:

These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.

Today, most Christians, let alone non-Christians, would accuse me of trying to make America into a theocracy, apparently a scary proposition. In their minds when they see or use that word, they don’t see what it means, a society ruled by God, but the Christendom of Medieval Roman Catholicism and the Spanish Inquisition, or the Salem witch-trials, or in a modern fictional horror story, The Handmaiden’s Tale. In other words theocracy equals tyranny. R.J. Rushdoony counters these spurious claims:

Theocracy is falsely assumed to be a take-over of government, imposing biblical law on an unwilling society. This presupposes statism which is the opposite of theocracy. Because modern people only understand power as government, they assume that’s what we want.

Those who misunderstand theocracy think secularism is the only means to liberty, except the evidence doesn’t back that up. All we need is to open our eyes. Secular societies inevitably lead to tyranny exactly because of what Rushdoony said. Modern people think government is sovereign, and the individual and the family is limited. Christianity and God’s law, by contrast, sees government as limited, and the individual and family as sovereign. We either bow down to power, or we bow down to Christ. There are no other options on a societal level.

The key words Rushdoony uses are “imposing” and “unwilling.” All secularists, be they religious or not, believe if we bring Christianity and God’s law into the public square, we will be “imposing” our faith and it’s moral values on others. Believing this, skeptics of an ignorant type make the statement, “You can’t legislate morality,” which is like saying, you can’t cook food; food is what you cook, as morality is what you legislate. The only issue is whose morality, and from whence it comes. As we see clearly, the secular leftist state is tyrannically imposing its morality, the latest example being transgenderism enforced by the state. Talk about “imposing” law on an “unwilling” society! Few people in Western societies are secular progressive absolutist woke leftists who believe sex is merely a social construct changeable at will, yet the woke have no problem imposing their policies on an unwilling society. That’s the way it works—no neutrality, God’s law, or man’s.

The difference is God’s law is the “law of liberty” (James 1:25, 2:12). When Jesus proclaimed “liberty to the captives” in Luke 4:18 quoting Isaiah 61:1, he wasn’t proclaiming liberty from the law of God, but the liberty coming from obedience to it. As the Apostle Paul states in I Timothy 1, “the law is good if used properly,” and it “conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God.” It will be either God’s law or the will to power of paganism. Liberty was established in Christian Western civilization because Christians affirmed God’s laws as normative for the nations. It’s either God and liberty, or secularism and tyranny or anarchy, the logical conclusion of man’s law without God.

Secularism is a jealous god, and it will have no other gods before it which is why a proper understanding of theocracy is so important. Christians must understand something the Christians of the first three centuries of the church understood all too well: “Jesus Christ is Lord” is a political statement. If they refused to confess Caesar as Lord they were seen by the Roman state as a threat to its absolute power. This is exactly where we are in the twenty-first century West. It is Jesus as Lord, or the state as Lord. My goal is to persuade Christians to simply be open to the concept of the law of God in Christ as the only Christian option against secular totalitarianism.

3. The Law is our Moral Guide – Finally, because we are saved by grace doesn’t mean we become antinomians, or against law. We do not use our liberty in Christ, as Paul argues in Romans 6, to go against God’s law, i.e., sin; the reality is exactly the opposite. When our hearts are transformed from spiritual stone to flesh ( Ezk. 36:26), we go from being God’s enemies (Rom. 5:10, Col. 1:21), his implacable foes, to his beloved children. The transformation includes our affections. We now want to obey and please him, and are distressed when we don’t. His law is our delight, holiness our aspiration, and our chief desire in life is to please Him. What ties God’s law together is the beautiful bow of love, as Jesus taught us, the greatest commandment.

 

Believe It or Not, God Wants to Bless Us

Believe It or Not, God Wants to Bless Us

Oct 23, 2023 | Theology

Most of my life I didn’t really believe this. I would never have said that explicitly, but somewhere inside I think I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, something bad to happen. We all know life can be really hard, but “life” is not sovereign, God is. We all, however, tend to live by circumstances and not by faith or trust in God (faith and trust are synonymous). We in effect judge the character of God by our circumstances. How many people rejected or leave Christianity because their lives are a horrible disappointment, and they blame God? A lot. Loss and grief have created many a heathen. Yet from Scripture we see that this has always been so for God’s people. They, like we, are always confused and wondering what God’s up to. Living by sight and not trust is nothing new, and God doesn’t seem the least bit embarrassed telling us this is par for the course; get used to it.

Before I get to justifying my assertion of God’s intention to bless us, one of the most powerful passages in Scripture of trusting God in spite of the circumstances comes from the last verses of Habakkuk. In the face of impending judgment things are looking really bad to the prophet, but he utters these amazing words:

17 Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.

19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
    he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
    he enables me to tread on the heights.

In the ancient world it could not get any worse, but he decided to trust the Lord anyway. That’s always the bottom line, isn’t it? Are we going to trust God, or our lyin’ eyes. Knowing and believing God’s intention is always blessing is critical if we’re going to resist the temptation to live by circumstances. The temptation itself comes from the pit of hell. It’s the same one Satan used to seduce Eve to distrust the goodness and love of God by implying He’s a liar. Because this is the fundamental temptation of human existence, to trust God or not, we need to be rooted in what God actually says about the life He’s granted us in Christ. To do this we need to go back to the very beginning and build from there.

In the face of man’s rebellion, God pronounced judgment on Adam and Eve, but provided a solution by clothing them and covering their nakedness and shame, promising a deliverer, a Savior. He promised them the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head, and the serpent would strike this offspring’s heel. In other words, this was going to be a nasty business—ergo life! Conflict is at the heart of existence, and the biggest mistake people make is thinking it shouldn’t be, that life should be smooth sailing or . . . . something is wrong! No there isn’t. Our confidence and hope is that God uses the friction of life, the challenges and unpleasantness of it for our good and His glory. Trust says He loves us and everything that happens in life, good, bad, and in between, is for those ends. Without trust, we are slaves of circumstance.

Believing this, I am convinced God’s purpose for our lives is blessing, our happiness, our flourishing, our fulfillment, our joy. He doesn’t just want us to survive but to thrive. Does that mean there will not be struggle and real suffering? Of course not. If what God calls us to is really hard, serious suffering, we live forever so it’s all temporary. As Paul says, himself no stranger to suffering, “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17). The point of suffering in the Christian life is that it has a purpose; it isn’t just to crush us, but to crush us and remake us in the image of His Son. And so Paul also tells us, our “labor in the Lord is not in vain” (I Cor. 15:58).

As for the big picture of blessing, some time ago I came across a lecture by Dr. Mark Futato of Reformed Theological Seminary overviewing Genesis. For him the key text of the book comes from Chapter 12: 

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. 

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.”

He argues the key theme from these verses is “blessing for the nations.” God is specifically establishing his covenant with Abram so through him and his offspring the nations will be blessed. If Dr. Futato were to reduce Genesis to one word it would be blessing which is used over 65 times. What struck me was his definition of blessing: empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he puts it, “God empowers people to flourish.” I love that! Secularists paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10): 

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly. 

From Genesis 3 on, God promised this blessing in spite of the damage of the Serpent’s strike. Jesus tells the obvious us in John 16:33, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” We know from God’s own words, from the very beginning the fallen world, i.e., Satan, has no chance—he gets crushed! That doesn’t sound ambiguous to me; it has the scent of victory. I’ve come to see God’s promise in the garden as the microcosm of all of history, and Jesus’ words reflect that. Jesus’ resurrection and ascension to reign at the right hand of God overcomes Adam’s sin in space and time, and fully at his return and the consummation of all things.

We see throughout Genesis and in God’s covenant promises to Abram that these blessings are to touch so many people they literally can’t be counted (sand of the seashore, stars in the sky, and dust of the earth). God is not miserly in spreading his blessings on earth! And because of His covenant promise immediately after the fall, we realize all of it is done in the face of a cosmic spiritual war to frustrate the devil’s plans. We, the fallen myopic sinners we are, think the devil is there to frustrate God’s plans. He can’t do that! He’s a puppet on string in this unfolding drama. God, however, gives him sway so it will never be easy and will be done in the face of constant adversity and opposition, but through which we can rejoice in the victory already won by our risen Lord. We must always remember this big, huge, gargantuan picture is the context of our lives (Eph. 6:12). And we must also remember Christ ascended to heaven after the resurrection to be seated at the right hand of the Father to reign over all things, again for us and His glory (Eph. 1:15-23). It is no coincidence that the theme of the first book of the Bible, the foundation upon which our faith is built, is blessing. God wants to bless us! And the nations!

Looked at personally, for each one of us, Jesus confirms this in Matthew 7:

11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! 

How . . . much . . . more! If you have children you know what he means, and multiply that by God and you have a sense of just how much He wants to give us good gifts. Luke’s version (I’m sure Jesus said both many times) is that we ask for the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13). That’s the perfect complement to Matthew’s because it is the Holy Spirit who applies the redemption accomplished by Christ in our lives and the world. At the individual level that’s called the blessing of sanctification. At the societal level that’s God advancing His kingdom as Christ reigns for the building of his church to accomplish that, spreading his blessings to the ends of the earth just as he promised Abram.

John Calvin Believed in Free Will: Who Knew!

John Calvin Believed in Free Will: Who Knew!

Sep 12, 2023 | Theology

For the Calvin haters, and they are legion, I might have just uttered a heresy. I can imagine the reply in their fevered brains: No he does not! It’s been interesting since I became a certified Calvinist in 1985 to witness how some people respond to the name Calvin or the word Calvinism. It’s an alien concept to most, and even if they know nothing about it, they do know for sure they reject it. I’ve seen visceral responses to Calvin that make him out to be a Christian tyrant who wants people to be controlled and miserable, or that he believed human beings are robots without “free will.” I would often say or think to myself, if you had read any Calvin you would not think such things. Everything I’ve read by the man implies he believes people are volitional beings who have agency, whose choices matter and come with consequences. Now I can say with indisputable proof, he believed in “free will.” 

Let me give a little background before I get to that. Back when I decided as a snot-nosed 25 year-old that I was going to seminary, I purchased Calvin’s commentaries. These voluminous writings take up 22 hard bound volumes. And this didn’t include his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion which clocks in at over 1500(!) pages. Mind you, this was before computers and lightbulbs. I’m sure much of it was written by candlelight. Writing utensils in the early to mid-16th century were likely quills dipped in ink. It’s hard to fathom that kind of productivity with that technology. The same can be said for people like the prolific Aquinas three hundred years before Calvin, and Augustin seven hundred years before Aquinas. Those guys spent a lot of time writing! I don’t know if Calvin was the most productive writer up to his time, but if not he was among them.

So, how do I know Calvin believed in free will? Before I prove he does, I’ve written here about the topic. In one post I argue that “Free Will Does Not Exist,” by which I mean a certain concept of free will. The idea is that our choices exist in a vacuum of complete independence from any influence other than our own choosing. Such a thing does not exist. There are almost an infinite variety of causes that act upon our will, upon our choosing, so in that sense we most definitely are not “free.” In another post on “Calvinism and Free Will,” I discuss the implications of sin for our choosing God. Sinners are enemies of God, so in no sense are we “free” to choose him. That only happens because the Holy Spirit transforms our hearts from spiritual stone to flesh so that we can trust him for our salvation. Our brains are not floating in a vat of neutral liquid where we are presented with information and then decide of our own volition what to do with it. Given the choice without God’s intervention, we would never choose Christ, never.

Then, in what sense does Calvin believe in “free will”? I’m reading some of Calvin’s commentaries on the Psalms. It seems those who interacted with him in his ministry as a pastor encouraged him to commit his lectures on the Psalms to posterity in writing. He mentions other writers who he feels have done such work that he doesn’t feel like he has anything to add, but then he writes this in the introduction:

One reason which made me comply with their solicitations, and which also had from the commencement induced me to make this first attempt, was an apprehension that at some future period what had been taken down from my lectures, might be published to the world contrary to my wishes, or at least without my knowledge. I can truly say that I was drawn to execute this work rather from such an apprehension, than led to it from my own free will. I began to perceive more distinctly that this was by no means a superfluous undertaking, and I have also felt from my own individual experience, that no readers who are not so exercised, I would furnish important assistance in understanding The Psalms.

There you go! Calvin was just like you and me believing his choices were not an illusion, that what he did or didn’t do for the reasons he did them really mattered, and actually determined the direction of his life this way or that, one way or the other. Calvin also believe these choices as free as they are, however, are always in the context of God’s sovereign ordaining of all things. To me that is true freedom because I never have to worry that God’s sitting up on his throne in the heavens and is taken by surprise by anything that happens. If he is not absolutely in some way in “control” of all things, then Romans 8:28 cannot be true: 

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Not 99%, but all. How is he sovereign and ordaining all things for his perfect ends, and we’re still actual free beings whose choices matter? We have no idea because, well, we’re not God. We get into trouble thinking we can figure that out or can some way understand it. We can’t! What we do know is that His sovereignty doesn’t mean He’s a cosmic puppet master and we’re all on strings He’s pulling to move us one way or the other. When the Bible says He is “the ruler of all things,” it means He directs human action and choosing in the context of how human beings exist without ever violating their nature. We are accountable and we know it! We have significance because we are choosing beings and our choices matter. We have agency. We can change things! Scripture, God Himself through His inscripturated word implores us to choose wisely.

Back to Calvin’s voluminous commentaries. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve almost ignored them these almost four decades, although more sad because I’ve left all that wisdom I could have been learning sitting on the shelf gathering dust. Shame on me it took this long, but God is merciful and gracious to us in his Son! Please don’t tell anybody this, but I even wanted to sell them amidst our several moves over the last number of years. Thank God my longsuffering wife talked me out of it! There are two reasons they are no longer on the shelf gathering dust.

As you may know, Calvin was a Frenchman, so when he preached or lectured it was in French, or as a scholar he sometimes wrote or lectured in Latin. The commentaries we have were translated in the mid-nineteenth century, and as you can see the English from that time is kind of stilted and foreign to our ears. It takes a little more work to get at the meaning, and I guess I was too lazy to do it, doggone it! No more! Which brings me to the second reason.

I recently read a biography of one Calvin’s contemporaries, the great Scottish Reformer John Knox, and it helped me realize what a treasure I have right under my nose. Knox and other British Protestants fled England to Calvin’s Geneva from the wrath of the Catholic “Bloody Marry” from 1553-1558. Over 300 Protestants who didn’t flee were burned at the stake. These sentences from a paragraph in the book blew my mind:

Many of the city’s exiles came to listen to Calvin, and a system had been organized with a speed writer to transcribe his sermons as they were preached. The text was copied and circulated and, after Calvin had revised it, formed the basis of his printed Biblical commentaries.

And they’re sitting on my shelf! And in English! And by God’s grace, no longer taken for granted.