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.

 

Ezekiel: “Then They Will Know That I Am the Lord”

Ezekiel: “Then They Will Know That I Am the Lord”

Jun 27, 2023 | Theology

As I was reading through Ezekiel I was struck by how many times the Lord used this phrase, approximately 65 times. It’s fascinating because there is nothing like it in any other book of the Old Testament, and it’s not even close. It seems the Lord was trying to get across a message that was unique to this specific period of redemptive history. First, a little context. Ezekiel was a prophet is a period of terrible upheaval for Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel. The Lord had previously declared judgment on the wickedness of the 10 northern tribes who were destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BC, and now was the time for judgment against the two southern tribes of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar and the armies of Babylon conquered Jerusalem in the late 500s BC, with the city falling officially in 587 when the temple was destroyed, and most of the population exiled to Babylon, including the prophet Ezekiel. There are plenty of prophecies against Judah and Jerusalem, but also against the nations who were contending with them. Throughout all Ezekiel’s writing about this in practically ever declaration we read, “Then they will know that I am the Lord.”

It is important to understand that God’s judgment is never an end in and of itself. We tend to think that because it often appears so final, but mostly because our timeline is so limited. God, as I never tire of saying, is never in a hurry, and his purposes extend over millennia. We also forget that God’s judgment against sin, his wrath displayed, is not merely to hand out penalty, but to bring about restoration. That’s why I look at this this phrase as revelatory; The Lord is revealing to His people who he is, and to the nations that He is. It’s also important to understand that God here is using Israel’s covenant name, Yahweh, and not the generic name for God. There is something in His judgement against His people by the kingdom of Babylon that reveals His covenantal character, that He is a God who fulfills his promises to His people. This is more than clear from the entire scope of redemptive history from Genesis to Revelation, but it’s especially powerful in condensed form in the Book of Ezekiel.

Reading through the prophets is not for the faint of heart. It is almost all unrelentingly negative, almost. For example, this morning I finished reading the book of Hosea, and I was feeling weighed down by that unrelenting negativity, and in the midst of all the judgment and anger of God against Israel’s sin I read this verse (chapter 13):

14 “I will ransom them from the power of the grave;
    I will redeem them from death.
Where, O death, are your plagues?
    Where, O grave, is your destruction?

The point of God dealing with sin, and sin must be dealt with, is to bring life out of death! This promise is communicated through Ezekiel with metaphorical power

Ezekiel’s ministry to the exiles in Babylon is to be a prophet of hope amid the despair while reminding them of the horrible wages of sin. Those wages are transacted on a societal level as we see throughout Israel’s history; sin is never merely personal. The wages and the restoration God promises through them were also not just for the nation of Israel as we see throughout the Old Testament. God’s covenant promises were always to be for the nations, something Israel seemed to miss. Many, dare I say, most Christians miss this as well because our basic understanding of the Christian faith is that it is primarily a religion that affects us personally here and our souls forever in a new heavens and earth. I’ve referred to this previously as pietism where our focus is almost solely on personal piety, a very good thing, mind you, but not the only thing.

When Jesus gave his Great Commission in Matthew 28 it was to make disciples of all nations (ethnos) not individuals (anthropos). You’ll remember his commission after baptizing them in the name of the Triune God, is “teaching them to obey everything” he commanded them. The Greek word for disciple (mathéteuó- μαθητεύω) means to train and instruct. When I first became a Christian in college, I was involved with a campus ministry that was big time into discipleship, but it was always assumed that discipleship only applied to individuals. Applying it to nations would have been, literally, inconceivable to us. You baptize individuals, silly, not entire nations! Well, maybe their connected? Jesus obviously thought so. Which, believe it or not, brings me back to Ezekiel.

For the first 33 chapters we get unadulterated judgmental gloom and doom, to Israel and the surrounding nations. Then in chapter 34 we start to see a change that in redemptive-theological hindsight is a declaration of the good news, the gospel to come as the Lord compares the current failed shepherds of Israel to the “good shepherd,” God himself, to come. It’s stunning to read the entire chapter and realize that when Jesus said in John 10 he was that shepherd who would lay “down his life for the sheep,” that he was almost surely referring back to this chapter in Ezekiel 34 and proclaiming himself to be Yahweh, Israel’s covenant God come in human flesh. These words from Ezekiel capture the mind-bending mystery of God’s revelation of his Triune nature in the salvation of we His people:

 22 I will save my flock, and they will no longer be plundered. I will judge between one sheep and another. 23 I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. 24 I the Lord will be their God, and my servant David will be prince among them. I the Lord have spoken.

Throughout the chapter prior to this the Lord refers to himself as Israel’s shepherd repeatedly calling them “my sheep,” and “my flock,” and that He will “tend them in a good pasture,” and “they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel,” and He will tend his “sheep and they will lie down.” Yet here is “His servant David” who will be the “one shepherd” over them, and it is he who “will tend them.” Which is it, David or Yahweh? Or are they one and the same? Also in John 10 Jesus tells us the sheep listen to his voice, he knows them, and they follow him. He in fact gives them “eternal life, and they shall never perish,” and no one can snatch them out of his hand. All of this incomprehensibly amazing theological truth points directly back to Ezekiel 34 after 33 chapters of judgment.

This is even before we get to chapters 36 and 37 where the Lord gives us two more powerful metaphors for the supernatural work in the souls of His people to show us He is the God who brings life out of death. In chapter 36 we read of him turning hearts of stone to flesh, and in 37 He brings a valley of very dry bones to life. Keep in mind what I said above, this is after 30 plus chapters of unrelenting judgment. All of this needs to be seen in light of God’s covenantal nature in redemptive history, a God who legally binds his creatures through promises of curses and blessings, most specifically laid out in Deuteronomy 28. God’s creatures must act in accordance with God’s nature because it cannot be any other way. If it was we would have cosmic chaos, exactly the goal of the accuser of the saints, Satan.

Thankfully, Jesus, as our Good Shepherd, stood in our place, to take both the covenant curses of the law for us, and grant to us the covenant blessings of obedience. As I read and heard Tim Keller say many times, Jesus lived the life we should have lived, and died the death we should have died. In that alone is our hope, that Jesus is our righteousness, holiness and redemption, as Paul says in one of my favorite passages in Scripture, I Corinthians 1:30. In this is the fulfillment of what we read in the challenging book of Ezekiel. Praise the Living God!

 

Christ Or Caesar? Theonomy or Autonomy? Liberty or Tyranny?

Christ Or Caesar? Theonomy or Autonomy? Liberty or Tyranny?

Jun 21, 2023 | Politics & Government, Theology

These stark choices confront us like a brick in the face as they haven’t for a long time in Western history. They offer us a moral clarity that comes from the blessing of leftist, woke cultural Marxist overreach that began when Barack Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009. That’s not exactly true because the seeds of our current discontents go back to the fall with Satan’s temptation that if we just disobey God we can ourselves become God being able to call the shots about the nature of reality (“knowing good and evil”). That is man, we, could be a law unto ourselves, autonomy, sovereign self-rulers who get to sit on our own little thrones in our own little kingdoms. How’s that working out for us? The more proximate origins of the radical leftism of Obama that began to infect government in America and dominant the culture goes back to the Enlightenment out of which inevitably was to come the current secular Utopia of the modern West. Ain’t it grand!

I say blessing because the constant overreach of the left (they can’t help themselves) is opening eyes to the truth (and I would argue the Truth as well) like no mere words ever could. Events have a persuasive power all their own. When America and the West was nominally Christian as it was since World War II, it was easy for people to live in the mushy middle where the above questions were invisible, as if they were not the ultimate choices that confront us every day. Every person and society must choose Christ or Caesar (the state), God’s law or self-law, and those choices will determine whether we get liberty or tyranny. Christ and God’s law (theonomy) is the only true source of liberty as developed in the West through English common law and the “rights of man” eventually brought to fruition in America. The state ruled by man’s law apart from God can only lead to slavery and tyranny as we see all around us.

Christian Western civilization and the liberty it brought should have never happened. Of course, I’m speaking from a merely human perspective, but it’s a compelling one. The odds of a ragtag crew of manual laborers in a small corner of the Roman Empire eventually turning the world upside down, or should we say right side up, were as close to zero as it is possible to get. From God’s perspective, it was inevitable, baked into the salvific cake. The entire life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God was the inflection point in human history. Literally everything changed, only it didn’t look like it, at all. On a societal level we witness a specific moment in Jesus’ ministry with mustard seed significance (Matt. 13:31-32).

Jesus is confronted by his enemies (Mark 12, Matt. 22) with what they thought was a question that would land him in hot water with the Jews and Romans; there should have been no third option. Jesus’ reply was completely unexpected, as was normal with Jesus. They asked if the Jews should pay tax to Caesar knowing if he said yes, he would be condemned by Jews, and if no, by Roman authorities. It was one or the other, they thought. But Jesus surprised them by asking whose likeness and inscription was on the coin, which he obviously knew. When they told him Caesar’s, he replied: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Thus political reality changed forever in the Western world. Yes, it took the slow outworking of this principle for almost 1,800 years to finally see what the full fruition of this principle would look like, but it started that day.

Jesus was saying the state (the ruler, the king, the Caesar) could no longer be the ultimate source of authority because the state is accountable to God and whose role is to dispense justice based on God’s law. Prior to that moment everything belonged to Caesar. The entire messy history of Western civilization is the story of the triumph of Christianity and God’s law over paganism and man’s law, and justice based on the rule of law or the will to power, might makes right. We’ve come full circle in the twenty first century where the modern form of paganism, secularism, makes the same claims as Caesar did: everything belongs to the state. There are some Christians who think the Christian faith is not or doesn’t have to be “political,” that somehow it can exist apart from the political, how we are governed and by what standard. That is impossible.

We see an example of why it is when Christians of the early church refused to say, “Caesar is Lord,” and many paid with their blood. To say, “Jesus is Lord” is ultimately political because he is the Lord over all of reality, as Paul tells us in Ephesians 1, “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” All means kings and presidents and prime ministers and governors, you name it, all. This was accepted and not in the least controversial in all of Western Christendom until the twentieth century when the Pac Man of secularism gobbled everything up and declared, thou shalt have no other gods before me! I wrote about Joe Boot’s response to the CBC hit piece against the Ezra Institute in my last post, and so loved his conclusion I wanted to share it here. Few Christians, let alone non-Christians, understand what Christ’s Lordship looks like over all of life, including the state and its laws and how we are governed. Boot does a great of distilling this in two paragraphs, and it applies not just to Canada or America or the West, but to the nations, all of them, as the Bible consistently declares.

The West has long been in revolution against God’s law, repealing it from the statute books for about seventy years i.e., divorce law, family law, sabbath law, blasphemy law, marriage law, abortion law, laws about euthanasia, murder, rape, taxation etc. Faithful Christians prophetically propose, not impose, a return to the Ten Commandments and the guidance of God in all Scripture for civil governments, which takes us right back to the first codification of English law and beginnings of the English Common law tradition under Alfred the Great. We do not believe that biblical truth and law can be imposed on a secular non-Christian culture unwilling to hear or obey. We believe in the need to evangelize, teach, engage and reshape socio-cultural and political life in faithfulness to Christ so that, over time, civil law will return to its biblical foundations as a Christian people insist on righteous laws.

Theocracy simply means ‘God’s rule,’ and the living God has always dealt with humanity in terms of a true or false theocracy – the worship of God or idols – in terms of the standards of His Word. As the Scripture says, “righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34). Today’s Canada is the theocracy of a false god where ‘man enlarged’ in the state is the ‘divine voice’ and pretended source of all law and authority, redefining life, marriage, family, identity and sexuality by political fiat. If to oppose that pagan religious ideal makes us dangerous fundamentalists, so be it. Take your stand with Christ or Caesar.

 

Heart of Stone and Flesh, and a Valley of Dry Bones

Heart of Stone and Flesh, and a Valley of Dry Bones

Jun 10, 2023 | Theology

I can’t be reading through the Bible and just pass Ezekiel 36 and 37 without comment. It has to be among my favorite passages in Scripture because it so wonderfully captures the monergistic nature of God’s working in us as I understand our salvation from sin. The word comes from a Greek compound meaning “one” and “energy.” Applied to our salvation it simply means it is God’s work alone from beginning to end (1 Cor. 1:30, Jesus is our righteousness and our sanctification). It’s contrast is synergism which means combined or together energy, and it indicates salvation is a cooperative work between man and God. It’s hard to argue for synergism when you read these passages. I know most Christians are synergists, but that doesn’t make it true. Deep down all Christians are monergists because they know they didn’t and can’t save themselves. It is obvious that somehow our decision making and will are involved, but the degree to which those determine what ultimately happens is the issue.

These are deep and ultimately mysterious questions, so being too dogmatic gets us into trouble. I Corinthians 8:2 is a good verse to commit to memory when discussing or thinking about these things. None of us can come close to understanding the being or ways of an infinite God. It’s unwise to think we can. How does God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom work so God can decree and cause or allow something to happen (a distinction without a difference because he’s responsible for it either way)? Nobody has the faintest idea. We just know from the plain witness of Scripture both are true. People will often bring up the concept of “free will,” but such a thing doesn’t exist. I was once explaining Calvinist soteriology (the nature of salvation from sin) to someone who didn’t accept it, and she said, what about free will? I responded, there is nothing in the Bible about free will, not a single thing. It’s not a biblical concept. She was taken aback at first, but eventually had to agree with me. As I was thinking about this I decided I would write a separate post about that, so I won’t explain my thinking about it here.

The reason the Calvinist position is so powerful in these passages is because of the images God uses to reveal the nature of salvation through Ezekiel. The context is historical Israel and God’s judgement against their wickedness driving them out of the promised land, then bringing them back and transforming them in the process. It is important to understand in reading the prophetic testimony of Scripture that God is always weaving historical and eschatological realities into the text, and it’s often a challenge deciphering which is which. Much of the time it’s both, as in these passages. To say something only applies to historical Israel or only to those saved from their Sin by the risen Jesus leads to distorting the meaning of the text.

The first image from chapter 36 is one most Christians are familiar with, and the words and phrases God uses speak powerfully to the Isaiah 53 nature of our salvation from sin.

24 “‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

The contrast between stone and flesh could not be any greater, one inert, hard, lifeless, the other the center of beating life itself. God replaces the former with the latter, and does not ask our permission to do it. Once it’s done, we choose him, not before. Stone does not choose. A comparable image is death. As Paul says, “the wages of is death” (Rom. 6:23), a la God’s declaration to Adam if he eats of the tree he “will surely die.” Also, prior to Christ, we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), and he “made us alive even when we were dead in transgressions” (Eph. 2:5). Dead people, hearts of stone, don’t make choices to raise themselves, hearts of flesh. Verse 31 confirms the nature of this change:

31 Then you will remember your evil ways and wicked deeds, and you will loathe yourselves for your sins and detestable practices.

It is only the Holy Spirit transforming the heart with the conviction of sin and the need of a Savior that confirms the transformation is real. God changes our affections from self and sin to Him and holiness, thus we loathe because we now know, and accept, how infinitely we fall short of the holiness of God required for a relationship to him. Because Jesus fully absorbed God’s wrath for our sins we are clean from all our impurities (I John 1:9).

The second image from chapter 37 is of a valley of dry, very dry bones God brings back to life. It’s a thrilling passage as you contemplate the almighty power of God, a God who raises the dead, including our dead spiritual selves, a God who does the impossible. As the Lord is leading Ezekiel back and forth in this valley he sees massive numbers of these very dry bones. He asks him a question with a seemingly obvious answer: “Son of man, can these bones live?” Of course not, they’re dead! Ezekiel gives the right answer, “O you Lord God know.”

4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Lord God says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”

Notice the power of our God who can simply decree what to us is an impossible thing, I will, I will, I will, and it happens! Notice also the echo of the you will the same perfectly biblical three times—when God wills, we will! Our Almighty God never tries. We see this same almighty power in Genesis 1 where our Creator God is revealed to us as the one who simply says, and it is.

Then Ezekiel describes how this bringing life out of death happens, watching as the bones make a rattling sound and come together, bone to bone, tendons and flesh magically appearing as skin covers them. He watches as the Lord sends a wind that breathes life into them “that they may live.” That is our God! He makes the dead alive, in his first advent spiritually, and when he returns he will raise all His people physically and bodily at the resurrection of the dead (I Cor. 15).

The Lord tells Ezekiel, “these bones are the people of Israel,” God’s people, us! I reference Matthew 1:21 here all the time because our God is a God who actually saves, not a God who tries to save or makes salvation possible. Jesus is given his name “because he will save his people from their sins.” There it is again, he will! Then to Ezekiel, the Lord says twice the exact same words, a promise to His People, that he will “open your graves and bring you up from them.” His will to raise us physically, bodily, as he raised Jesus from the dead is our forever hope. We can take that to the eternal bank!