New Thoughts (6/30/03-7/2/03)
But you are to speak. You cannot, dare not be silent in the face of such ill-informed belief and teaching. This command is not for Titus alone, it is for every teacher of the Truth. It is for every one of us. We have been made a nation of priests in the service of our Lord, an army of priests sent out to fight against the hordes of deception. As for our Lord before us, our weapons are not weapons that draw blood and kill. Our weapons are our words, words brought to mind in us by the power of the Holy Spirit within, words which strike to the heart and bring life.
In this battle of world views, the mouths of the deceiver must be stopped. This is what Paul instructed Titus to do earlier. They, too, use weapons of words to lure the living into a life of slow death. But our words are spoken with power from on high. The Truth spoken truly, declared in irrefutable argument, will force the opposition into silence. The Word, then, is both sword and shield to us. It is the shield by which the attacks of the enemy are stopped; not simply deflected, but stopped. It is a shield such as will actually disarm the attacker. It is also the sword by which we carry forward our own attack, and, as Paul commands in this verse, it must be wielded without restraint.
We cannot afford to be shy in our efforts in this conflict. Lives are at stake, and if we will not speak out, if we will not carry the message of life into the land of the living dead, then they are lost indeed. If we simply ignore the false messages being launched at us in constant waves, we risk losing our friends and family to the enemy. We risk losing ourselves.
Let's be clear, though. This is not a matter of simply shouting them down, of attempting to drown out their rhetoric by our own. If we attempt such an approach, our words will only be so much more noise in the ears of those listening on the sidelines. Shouting and angry words will not stop the mouths of the adversary. Declarations of belief with no apparent basis will neither stop their speech, nor convince a single listener. People don't want or need another blind faith. They've been given enough things to believe on credit. What they need now is something real to believe, a solid reason to believe.
Abraham Lincoln is famously credited with saying, "you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time." He completed this statement by saying that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Every false worldview out there has succeeded in the first two categories, it has fooled some sufficiently to be mixed in with their more accurate beliefs, and fooled others so utterly that truth has become meaningless to them. Every false worldview has succeeded that far, and every false worldview is striving to the uttermost to achieve that impossible third step. That is Satan's ultimate goal - to fool all of the people all of the time. His mouths must be stopped.
There is, however, an unstated corollary to Lincoln's conclusion, and this is the message of the Gospel: the truth presented clearly and reasonably in the face of such nonsense as popular culture now pronounces true, can deliver all the people all the time. The word spoken with power, the message delivered under the guidance of the Holy Spirit is effectual to the saving of the soul. Are we guaranteed 100% victory? No. We remain imperfect in our submission to the Holy Spirit, and imperfect in our delivery of His message. Also, there are those who, though they may recognize that they no longer have the least argument or refutation to offer against the truth they have heard, will still refuse to accede to that truth. They have willfully and willingly exchanged the truth of God for a lie (Ro 1:25), and God, in fitting and just reaction, has given them over to their own mental depravity (Ro 1:28). God will insist that we understand the truth. He has really left no room for us not to understand. All of creation reveals His truth. No, He insists that we can understand, and that therefore we do understand. He will not insist that we accept it. He will not coerce us into believing and obeying.
This is where many get lost in the arguments over free will. If He does not coerce belief, then how can it be said that belief is His doing and His alone? If He seeks those who will believe of their own free will, how can it be said that they could not have believed had He not intervened. It is a difficult mystery indeed. Yet, we also no that He saved us while we were yet His enemies. Clearly, we did not instigate the relationship. Yet, here we are in His camp, accepted before His throne, and joyfully serving Him as best we can. The truth of the matter seems to be that which Martin Luther and the other fathers of the Reformation said it to be. Before His work upon us, His merciful gift of faith, we were so deeply bound by deception that we could not acknowledge His Truth, and accept His offer of forgiveness. It was not in us to see Him as anything other than the enemy. Only after He had broken off those bonds were we truly free to choose. Only then could we actually see the choice before us. With eyes wide open, with the truth plainly displayed, how could we choose otherwise than to follow Him who is life?
We are not promised complete success in the conversion of all to whom we speak the truth. God retains the sovereign right of showing mercy to whom He will show mercy. He also retains the sovereign right of appointing the means by which His mercy shall be made manifest, and He has appointed the clear declaration of His truth to be the chief among means. A spokesman for truth is imperative. How shall they hear, except one preach to them? And if they have not heard, how then can we expect belief? They are being inundated daily with alternate viewpoints, alternate lifestyles. They are being prodded and provoked daily to believe such things as evolution and the 'rights' of homosexual behaviors. They are being requested daily to set aside the word of God, the clear, unequivocal word of God, and accept instead the nonsense being spouted by modern day philosophers and pundits. In the face of the message of Christ, that He is the only way provided by which men may be saved and come to the Father, they are told to accept all religions as equally valid. How can we accept that worshiping lifeless idols is as valid as worshiping the One who gives life, the One by whom all life is sustained!
Their arguments, if such are sought, are fraught with vanity and illogic. They will appeal to the pragmatic, but the pragmatic is not proof. They will appeal to our sense of justice, but our sense of justice, apart from Scripture, is a corrupted mockery. They have fought hard to suppress the understanding of logical presentation, and sound reasoning so that their sophistries and foolishness can be passed undetected. Even from the pulpits of modern day 'Christian' churches, you will hear these messages. You will hear that we should accept same sex marriage, that we should accept whatever modern culture chooses to declare acceptable. You should accept your Muslim and Hindu neighbors as being just as righteous as yourself. It's not what you believe in, they tell you, but just that you believe it earnestly. Who cares if there's any basis! It's the thought (or lack of it) that counts. Their mouths need to be stopped.
In the face of this, we dare not cast aside the logic and reason that God created us with. From the camps that seek to oppose this nonsense, I have heard it declared that we should indeed set aside the infiltrations of Greek philosophy into Christian religion, and return to the Hebrew roots. Stuff and nonsense! God chose His timing with great care. He made certain by His timing that there would be a fusing of the Greek and the Hebrew. He shouts out that He makes no distinction between them. Both Hebrew and Greek have their contribution to make to the work of the kingdom. If we refuse to understand the rules of logic, we leave ourselves open to attack. We leave ourselves vulnerable to every lying argument that is used against us. We leave ourselves open to falling into these false beliefs, because we deprive ourselves of the very tool God has given us to detect their falsehood!
If we cast aside these God given faculties, we also leave our own message open to attack. If we offer unreasoned arguments, if we insist on carrying forward the attack with logical fallacies two things result. First, since one of the major logical fallacies consists in making false statements regarding the other's position so as to more easily create a refutation, we expend incredible amounts of energy knocking down one batch of nonsense by spouting another. This is no more than tilting at windmills. We create a lie for our enemy and then attack our own lie to show how strong we are. Only a fool will be fooled by this. Secondly, by playing such foolish games, our very attempts to show ourselves strong will show the observant that we are indeed very weak.
Neither Jesus nor Paul nor any of the apostles offered such nonsense as the Gospel message. They declared the news of the kingdom clearly and succinctly, in terms that their hearers could clearly understand so that the conclusions of their message could not help but be understood with equal clarity. Consider the parables. Every one of them takes an example that every hearer was familiar with, and reasons through how one would act in that situation. Every hearer knew without doubt what their reaction would be, or at least what the appropriate action would be. Thus was Jesus able to lead them to understand higher truths, having convinced them of the underlying principle. The truth was made inescapable, no excuse of ignorance could possibly remain.
Paul made certain to know the culture into which he was bringing the Gospel. In Athens, he presented a message that the Athenians could grasp. He knew their culture, knew their belief systems, and presented the Gospel in a fashion fitted to their worldview. He presented it in a fashion that countered every fallacy they were clinging to, using their own finely honed skills at logical reasoning to make his case. No excuse was given for them to brush him off as an ignorant fool.
Here, we see him again tuning his presentation of the same Truth to meet the particular conditions of the Cretans. This is not the place for the fine speeches and gentle persuasions of the Athenian presentation. Here, there is need of strong and forceful presentation to counter both the stuff and nonsense being taught by others, and to break through the natural tendencies of the populace. No excuse must be given them to continue as they are. There can be no tolerance of their sins, because the grip of those sins is too strong upon them. Every infraction against the holy must be clearly noted and firmly corrected, to serve as a further inducement for the Cretan church to set aside the ways of its fleshly past.
All the arguments of these opposing views, when seen through the lenses of Scripturally informed logic and reason, will be seen for the trifling nonsense they are. When the solid message of sound doctrine is taught in solid fashion, the nonsense they have offered as a substitute will quickly be cast aside on the dung heap. At least, this will be the result where the people will listen. But the Bible tells us that this the people will, in large part, not want to hear it.
In 2Timothy 4:3, Paul speaks of that time. They won't be willing to hear sound doctrine, but will seek out 'teachers' who give them only what they want to hear. They will no longer be interested in the truth, but will only listen to words of cheap grace, faithless words of a god who isn't really there after all, messages of a heaven that will be open to all regardless of their beliefs. That time is now, folks. That time has been now for a while. Many would prefer to hear that God will accept everybody and anybody and seek out churches that will teach that message. Face it. Whatever you wish to mix with the word of Scripture, you can find some pastor who will teach that mixture. Need a church that goes light on sexual sins? We've got it! Need a church that will accept you as a Hindu, and still manage to declare you a Christian? We've got it! Need a church that doesn't really care if you believe in much of anything? We've got it! It's a world of roll your own, it's Burger King Christianity, and you can have it your way.
Yet there is a remnant, preserved by God as He has always preserved His own. They will not accept the popular culture church. They will not accept what does not accord with the clear testimony of Scripture. They will not accept doctrinal 'proofs' that twist God's word out of recognizable shape in order to support the doctrine being taught. They won't even accept that when the doctrine is right! They're not interested in being comfortable in church at the expense of being uncomfortable in eternity. Their interest is in one thing: being sound in doctrine so as to be sound in faith.
Doctrine has come to have a bad connotation in our time. What a sad thing! People have come to equate clear and well reasoned statements about the nature of God, heaven, the church, and religion with legalism and death. Indeed! So bad have things become that religion itself has become a negative thought in the minds of many Christians today. Why? Because so many churches have become lifeless, all form and rite with no life or power. How has this come about? Because the church no longer wanted to hear about sound doctrine, but only about the social issues of the day. People didn't want hear about the gospel anymore, so the pastors stopped teaching it to preserve their jobs. But the doctrine wasn't to blame, religion wasn't to blame. God, in His justice, allowed those who turned away from the solid meat of the word to receive what they proved to desire, watered down pap unfit to sustain even an infant. They sought a dead religion, and a dead religion is what they have.
For the rest of us, it's time we reclaim the lifeblood of religion, it's time we restore these good things, religion and sound doctrine, to being good in our sight. Not that we ought to, or even could, condone what has happened in these sepulchers of unbelief, but we can and must, in our own churches and in our own lives, bear witness to what sound doctrine is, what true religion is. It is for us to display the power of the real thing, by living like we believe it. As Mr. Clarke writes, "Principle and practice must go hand in hand." But before we begin living out our beliefs, we'd best be certain of them. That's the purpose of sound doctrine, to give solid foundation to our beliefs, to give reason for our faith. Yes, faith is the evidence of things not seen, but it's not the evidence of things not known at all. It's not to be evidence of things never even thought through. That's not faith. At best, that's gullibility. At worst, it's delusion.
Calvin has given us some good guidelines for recognizing sound doctrine when we hear it. First and foremost, he tells us, that doctrine which is real will ever and always magnify the grace of God in Christ. What does that mean? Webster's defines 'magnify' as follows: It's primary meaning is to extol, 'to cause to be held in greater esteem or respect.' In a secondary sense, it means to increase in significance, or intensify. Only in its tertiary sense does it actually address the idea of enlarging, and even then, it may be only in appearance and not in fact. Clearly, when we magnify the Lord, or magnify His grace, we are not seeking to make it look bigger than it is. How could we make the infinite appear any larger? No, the point is that what we hold to be true, what we teach as holy truth, ought always to extol the grace of God in Christ, ought to cause His grace, His Christ, Himself, to be held in greater esteem.
As for grace, as it applies to God, we have a sense of what that is. It is not His mercy, but it is because of His mercy that He is gracious towards us, and because of His graciousness that we experience His mercy. His grace towards us is His giving to us all that we are, all that we have, and all of it given by Him without regard for any deservedness on our part. It has been given to us freely for the simple reason that He chose to do so. There is, however, one particular aspect of His grace towards us that is of particular concern, that grace shown to us in Christ, the gracious gift of salvation from our sins. That is the root and core of the Gospel message, and that ought to be the focus of all of Christian doctrine.
We recently had a class at our church which followed the message of redemption and salvation in Christ from the opening pages of Genesis right through to the end. Indeed, the whole of Scripture is the unfolding of that message, the flowering of God's purpose of salvation throughout the ages of human history. That's the point. His plan wasn't going through revisions to make up for the vagaries of man's free will in action. His plan was settled in every detail before ever the world was created. His knowledge is perfect and complete. Nothing in all of history has ever taken Him by surprise. His wisdom is perfect and complete. The plans He has laid out have been perfect in every detail, accounted for every least event, and unfolded exactly as He has purposed. His power is perfect and complete. What He has chosen to do has been done, and it has been done exactly as He determined it should be done. His grace is also perfect and complete. Where He has chosen to give the gift of salvation, His gift has been given and it has been received.
All of these things; knowledge, wisdom, power, grace - they all describe the essence of who God is. None of them describe it in whole, but all of them describe a part of God's nature, part of what makes God God. They are all equally unchangeable in their perfection. They are all equally lacking in nothing. They cannot be improved, and they cannot be set aside by Him. This should strike us with awe. This should bring us to a place of higher worship, for the same God who determined our salvation before creation started, who planned out every step of that salvation and put that perfect plan into action, that same God also delivered the gift He had planned for so long to give us, and His giving was done with perfection. He gave and gave with guarantee. What is more, He gave and our receiving of His gift was equally guaranteed. It was guaranteed because it did not in any way depend on any working of our own, but rested solely upon His grace, His giving. He gave us the gift of salvation, and He gave us the gift of freedom to receive that salvation.
Recognition of this great truth should bring us to a point of 'proper fear,' which is the second check Calvin gives us for the soundness of doctrine. Proper fear does not grovel in desperate attempt to avoid punishment. Proper fear sees the awesome power of God displayed, understands the extremity of reverence that is due such a One, and falls upon its knees in adoration. Proper fear has given up on seeking to earn the favor of this marvelous God, because it has seen the impossibility of such a thing. No, it no longer seeks to earn anything from God, because it knows it has already received all and more. The love that has been engendered in the heart of faith cannot, however, resist the urge to please the God who has given so much, who is so much. His love for us is so great that He has not only forgiven us our sins, not only redeemed us from the penalty of His own just law, but He has given us the Scriptures as reference, so that we may know how to please Him as our desires turn in that direction.
How frustrating it would be to want to please such a One, and have no idea how we might do so! How painful for the child that knows not how to please his parents! He wants nothing more, but cannot fathom from their confused messages how he might do so. He tries this, he tries that, but it's all simply taking chances that maybe what he does might be pleasing to them. Yet, he knows that every attempt he makes stands an equal chance of causing their displeasure. How long will he continue to try, before he decides that it's hopeless? How long would we seek to please God in such fashion before we became hopeless, and returned to doing whatever we pleased? God has not suffered us to experience that frustration. He has declared to us what is pleasing to Him, and He has given us teachers of sound doctrine to ensure that we understand His declarations. He has given us the fellowship of other believers to encourage us, and to lovingly correct us when we go astray.
That is the purpose of sound doctrine - to train us towards a life of proper fear, displayed in doing those good works He has prepared for us to do. Proper fear of God is no more than the loving labor of pleasing Him who so graciously saved us, and what is more pleasing to Him than a life lived out in good conduct!
Where faith is real, where it is not simply a matter of believing what we choose, but is a matter of believing what is true, doctrine will be sound, and the one who holds that doctrine will also be sound. To be sound is to be healthy and strong. As Thayer's dictionary puts it, it is to be 'strong in grace, true in doctrine.' Sound doctrine is true. It is firmly planted in the unaltered message of Scripture. Sound doctrine builds upon God's grace towards us, grace upon grace, producing in us a more fruitful life, a spirit of submission to Christ, a spirit of love towards God and man, a spirit of service to the kingdom of God. Where doctrine is true, faith and belief are real, and God's grace is shown all the more powerful towards us. His grace is magnified by our very lives.
"Nothing," writes Calvin, "is better fitted to restrain the wandering curiosity of men than to know in what duties and good works they ought to be employed." Wandering curiosity is the bane of sound faith. It is the trap into which the Cretans were falling, led by teachers captured in the same trap. Truth and sound doctrine is the antidote against this disease of the soul. It gives the believer direction and purpose, because it shows us what we ought to be about doing. It gives purpose to our existence. It gives direction to our energies. It gives reason to our being. A man who knows his purpose, who knows where he is going, no longer casts about with endless questions. He already has all the answer he needs, and is now fully engaged in the doing of that which the answers have indicated. He is as a soldier under orders now. He need wonder about his assignments any longer, for his Commander in chief has delivered his orders directly, and he will now move with equal directness to fulfill what has been commanded of him.
What joy there is when all confusion has been cast away from us, and our goal and purpose is clearly before us! What peace when we know exactly what must be done and how we are to do it. This is what God offers to us in sound doctrine. This is what we are to believe, to the building of our faith. This is what we are to teach, to the strengthening of those who hear us. This is what we are to live, as the witness and magnification of Him from whom all blessings flow!
Thank You, Father, for the sheer joy of knowing You. Thank You, that You have sovereignly put into place all that has led to my salvation. Thank You that You have chosen to display Your power, Your mercy, Your grace, in preserving me for the day when You would reveal Yourself to me. Thank You for the incredible mystery of Your ways. How could I ever find any cause to take credit for myself in the salvation You brought! How could I explain, my God, the way You spoke into my soul while still my ears were closed! Who can believe our report, dear Lord? You have led me by ways most wonderful and astonishing. My love for You grows daily, though I grow weary at times. Am I pleasing to You, my God? I pray it is so! Oh, Lord, let not my labors be in vain. Let them bring for You a fruitful harvest. Let the very life I live be a labor of love for You!
Holy Spirit, my Teacher, I know not when You may choose to put me back into service as a teacher again. But I pray, that when and if You do so choose, You will inform all that I speak and teach. I pray that You will ever check my words before they come forth, should they stray from the sound message, the true doctrine You Yourself have recorded in the pages of Scripture. In the meantime, sweet Spirit, dwell in me more fully, make of this very life a lesson from which others may learn of Your goodness.
