Living power

My friend Berlin commented:
If there is one thing needful in the so-called brethren assemblies, in particular, and the household of faith in general it is a fresh recovery of these recovered truths. Not just a recovery of doctrine, but a recovery of their living power over the soul.

I think that really gets to the heart of the matter.

The lack of truth in the household of faith is astonishing. We all (and I really mean that, no group is exempt) treat the word of God like it's not.  I've ranted about this before, but when we treat man's opinion like it's scripture, then we soon treat scripture like it's man's opinion.

I'm reminded of this frequently when I hear pithy sayings of "brethren" that really aren't biblical at all. But they're treated like received wisdom, and the Word of God gets filtered through them.

I could give examples, but I'm just not feeling it right now.

But truth alone isn't enough. The fact is, There are any number of people who have [some] truth and remain entirely unaffected by it. Possessing truth is no guarantee that the flesh won't try and use it as an "occasion" to fill some lust. Religious flesh is just as fallen as licentious flesh, and loves to substitute intellectual for spiritual. "Living power" is precisely what we are in such want of.

One reason I've been on such a kick about man's fallenness recently is that I recognize my own tendency to try and live the Christian life in fleshly power.

See, it's me I'm preaching at, not you.

Sovereignty (Reprise)

I finished reading God's Sovereignty and Glory in the Election and Salvation of Lost Men by R. A. Huebner (from Present Truth Publishers and available as a free PDF download). It is a good book, but not a perfect book. I thought I'd write down some of my impressions here.

There are very few topics so divisive as the question of God's sovereignty in salvation. People throw around terms like 'calvinist' and 'arminian', which I'd prefer to avoid. But the first question everyone is going to ask is, 'Calvinist or Arminian?' So let's briefly answer that question and get it out of the way: RAH's view definitely tends to the 'calvinist' side of things. He thoroughly condemns the notion that man has freewill, insists that men are entirely lost, defends the notion of 'unconditional election', and clearly teaches that it is only through God's effectual (i.e. compelling) call to the elect that any are saved. Interestingly, he doesn't really address the question of 'Limited Atonement', although he does spend just a small amount of time discussing 'Eternal Security'. The book does address the question of the 'Doctrine of Reprobation' and condemns it as non-scriptural. In other words, RAH presents a view we might describe as 'single predestination', or perhaps 'moderate Calvinism'.

So now that's out of the way, let's look at some of my impressions.

The Good

To start, RAH has a necessary ministry in reminding us of man lost-ness. This is one of the most important teachings of Scripture, because it touches every single facet of the Christian life. As RAH points out– as JND and WK pointed out before him– Christianity starts with man entirely lost. "[T]he mind of the flesh is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God; for neither indeed can it be: and they that are in flesh cannot please God" (Romans 8:7–8). The Christian life isn't the life of the forgiven sinner, it's the life of someone who has realized he cannot please God, and so he accepts Christ as his life (1 Corinthians 1:30–31; Galatians 2:20; Philippians 3:8–11). The Christian is "in Christ" where he has no righteousness of his own.

Of course the majority of Christendom doesn't accept that man is totally lost. So they spend a lot of time and effort trying to improve what God has already condemned (Romans 8:1–4). Ask me how I know… I've spent an awful lot of time down that path.

The single best thing about this book, in my opinion, is showing that man is completely lost.

Again, I don't want to use sectarian language, but many of the self-described 'calvinists' I have known seem to have a pretty mild view of man's lost-ness that doesn't quite seem to measure up to Scripture. Ephesians presents men as 'dead in trespasses and sins', from which some of my Calvinist friends conclude that unregenerate men and women are somehow in a passive state. They are not: consider Romans 1–3, where fallen men and women are very much alive in sins. The problem with fallen man isn't that he hasn't a will, it's that he is self-willed. And so some have concluded that God actively prevents the non-elect from repentance, as though a fallen man might actually be in danger of repenting without God's active intervention! But now I rant.

God's Sovereignty and Glory in the Election and Salvation of Lost Men is valuable solely on the basis that it sums up so well the teaching of Scripture that fallen man has absolutely nothing to offer God: neither before nor after God forgives us of our sins. And it points out some subtleties, including that Scripture doesn't view man as lost until Christ is rejected. God has put man on trial (not because God didn't know what fallen man is, but because He wanted to demonstrate it), and the trial wasn't over until the Son of God came here to be rejected. RAH points out that if Christ had come and hadn't been rejected, that would have proven that man wasn't entirely lost: that there is still something there God can work with.

The Bad

All of RAH's books suffer from two characteristic faults: they are repetitive and hyper-focused. Honestly, this is nothing that couldn't be fixed with a good editor. I think if RAH's books were cut down in length, they'd be better books. Don't get me wrong: I appreciate that he is zealous for the truth, but at some point it gets hard to keep my attention. Doubtless he repeats himself to make a point, but there comes a point where the constant repetition actually gets in the way.

Hyper-focus isn't quite as big a problem in this book as in some of his others, but RAH has a strong tendency to tunnel-vision. That is, he tends to see everything as somehow a symptom of whatever he's addressing. This can make it easy to dismiss his writing at times. Again, this could easily be fixed by an editor. Simply reducing the length of these books would have the effect of removing some of the words and clarifying his message.

The Ugly

Roy Huebner's books tend to be more like scrapbooks than actual books. That is, he has a tendency to cut and paste huge quotations from J. N. Darby, William Kelly, F. G. Patterson, W. T. Turpin, A. P. Cecil, and H. H. Snell into his books. Some of those quotations occupy more than a single page! He's not trying to plagiarize, he's not trying to be dishonest, he's just recognizing that someone else has already said something so well there's no point in trying to restate it. The problem with this is that the books are choppy and long. It would have been better in, in my opinion, to try and reduce the quotes to a sentence or two and cite liberally. There comes a point where the extensive quotations actually make it hard to read.

That brings up another 'ugly' aspect of this book: the language isn't the most consistent. Huebner sometimes writes like a 19th Century writer, probably because he invested so much of his time reading them. I think it might have been a good investment of effort to rework his language and try to bring it up to the 20th or 21st Century.

In the end, there's nothing here that a decent editor couldn't fix. It would require some deep surgery of the text, perhaps; but I'm afraid there is some very valuable truth in this book that will be lost on people who might've read it, but for the awkward wording and [far too] extensive quotations.

Should I read it?

I found this a helpful book. Of course, with a title like God's Sovereignty and Glory in the Election and Salvation of Lost Men, some of my more 'freewill' friends won't even bother picking it up. More's the pity: there is a lot of truth in here that's been lost or forgotten. I would definitely recommend this book to a friend (and, in fact, I have), but I would caution them to read it slowly and try not to miss the forest for the trees.

Honestly, I think RAH has put together a good outline of what Scripture teaches when it comes to election. He addresses common objections from the 'freewill' point of view, while at the same time standing firm against ideas like a 'decree of reprobation' that Scripture simply doesn't teach.

One more thing I'd notice: I can't recall any discussion of the whole question of 'Limited Atonement' in this book. RAH is now asleep in Christ, so he can't comment on it. But I suspect I know what he'd say: Darby has answered that question quite ably in his little paper "Propitiation and Substitution". I'd definitely encourage reading this short article: well worth the time.

Sovereignty

I've been reading another book by R. A. Huebner recently: God’s Sovereignty and Glory in the Election and Salvation of Lost Men. What an amazing book! I highly recommend downloading it and giving it a look.

Salvation (reprise)

I've posted about this before (probably more than once). I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but this needs to be said. More, it needs to be heard. When scripture used the words "saved" and "salvation", it is not using them as synonyms for words like "born again" or "justified" or "regenerated". "Saved" includes those ideas:  anyone saved is justified, anyone saved is regenerate; but scripture uses the word "saved" to indicate that someone has arrived at the end of the path.

For some reason, Christians (especially here in America) have adopted the expression "so-and-so got saved" to mean someone has been born again. I don't know where this came from: it's not in scripture. The closest I can come up with its in Acts 16:30–31, and it's not very close.

Romans 5:10–11 makes it very clear what it means to be saved. Having been justified, we shall be saved. Having been reconciled, we shall be saved. Titus 3:5 says that there are two parts to salvation: there is a "washing of regeneration" and a "renewal of the Holy Spirit."

If we consider what the Scripture says about salvation in the context of the whole counsel of God, the idea that someone went to a gospel meeting and "got saved" is an unscriptural idea. I have no doubt that man has been forgiven and has peace with God: but Scripture doesn't ever use the word "saved" to mean that. Scripture uses the word "saved" to mean that a man has been brought all the way from sinner-ness to being in God's presence. That's why Paul says, "now [is] our salvation nearer than when we believed" (Romans 13:11). Peter says we are "kept guarded by [the] power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in [the] last time" (1 Peter 1:3–9).

William Kelly put it this way:

[Christ] is the power of God not merely to justification, but to salvation; and salvation, while it includes justification, goes far beyond it, because it takes in all the course of a christian man till he is actually in the resurrection state along with Christ. This is the meaning of the verse, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" — not your own forgiveness, but your own salvation. It is said to those who were already forgiven. Thus, salvation, in the sense spoken of there, implies the whole conflict with the power of evil we are passing through.
Lectures on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, p. 153

Why do I make a big deal about this? Because if we use Scriptural terms in non-Scriptural ways, we get ourselves into trouble. We end up having to fudge what Scripture says in one place because we adjusted what it says somewhere else. Indeed, many "trouble passages" are trouble passages only because we misquote them.

Let's take an example: 1 Peter 3:21 and Mark 16:16 both say we are saved by baptism. These are difficult passages for several reasons, let's consider just a couple: First, Scripture very plainly says that we are justified not through baptism, but through faith (Acts 13:38–39; Romans 4:5). Second, Scripture gives a clear example of a man who believed, was not baptized, and was given a personal guarantee that he would be with Christ in Paradise (Luke 23:39–43). So what gives? Does baptism save or not?

The problem here is confusing "salvation" with "justification", "new birth", "regeneration", etc. Scripture doesn't teach baptism justifies, regenerates, gives new life, gives eternal life, but it does teach baptism saves. These are not the same thing.

Of course baptism saves! Scripture teaches clearly salvation by baptism (Mark 16:16, 1 Peter 3:21). It doesn't teach justification by baptism, it doesn't teach regeneration by baptism; but it teaches salvation by baptism. If we start to confuse these things, we start to deny the gospel.

Of course, many who use the word "saved" incorrectly will insist that scripture doesn't teach salvation by baptism. They're wrong: it does. What it doesn't teach is an equivalence between salvation and justification. Their attempts not to teach baptismal regeneration are actually amusing, if you can laugh at that sort of thing.

Here's another example: what does Romans 10 teach?

8 But what says it? The word is near thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach: 9 that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord, and shalt believe in thine heart that God has raised him from among [the] dead, thou shalt be saved. 10 For with [the] heart is believed to righteousness; and with [the] mouth confession made to salvation.
Romans 10:8–10

I had trouble with those verses for a long time, because they sure sound like justification by works. I couldn't get over the "with the mouth confession is made to salvation" clause. Does that mean we have to do something to earn forgiveness? That doesn't seem to jive too well with Romans 4, does it? In fact, it doesn't jive with itself.

The two clauses in verse 10 are read as equivalent, but they're not. There are two blessings taught in verse 10: righteousness and salvation. We are righteous by believing "with the heart", we have salvation by confession "with the mouth". In one verse we have justification and salvation both. They're not the same thing, and the idea that they are equivalent is carefully guarded against when we consider one is in the heart and the other in the mouth.

Does scripture ever use the word "saved" as the present possession of the believer? It does, particularly in Ephesians, where God's eternal counsels are the subject. In God's eternal counsels we are already saved. And this might give us a hint as to the distinctions between Romans and Ephesians. Romans, the most careful exposition of the gospel in scripture, only uses "salvation" as a future thing.

I should probably mention 2 Thessalonians 2:13–14 here. The subject is salvation, and it's certainly eternal salvation: the Thessalonians were chosen by God "from the beginning" to salvation. But there are two parts to salvation here, just like in Titus 3:5. The two parts in 2 Thessalonians are "sanctification of the Spirit" and "belief of the truth". The second is what we call justification: God freely forgives all who believe. The first is the present work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer, sanctification. Again, "salvation" doesn't mean new birth or regeneration, it means the whole package: it means God's taking a sinner, forgiving him, giving him eternal life, and bringing him eventually to full maturity in Christ.

Here's the thing: we don't want to make a man a transgressor for a word. At the same time, I hear teachers among God's people going around with careless language and sloppy exposition. When the apostles we asked,  "what must I do to be saved?" they didn't launch into a  dissertation of soteriology. But when they taught the people of God, they were extremely careful of their language. Nothing makes this more evident than the epistles.

Free PDFs!

My good friend Rodger posted this to Facebook, and I thought I should repost it here. Present Truth Publishers has posted many of their books online as PDF for free download: Free PDF Downloads.

I definitely recommend From New Birth to New Creation, and I've been interested in reading God’s Sovereignty and Glory in the Election and Salvation of Lost Men for quite some time.

Time to get reading! I've loaded several of them into the Kindle app on my phone for the commute.

Impossibility

I found this while reading on the train this morning:

It is important to know that the effect of the new birth, and of the grace of God, is not to bring about some change in us on which we could rest, but to convince us of the impossibility of finding righteousness, or suitability to the favour of God, in ourselves.

C. A. Coates, Spiritual Blessings (p. 31)

Futility

A couple weeks ago I put this post up… well, a version of it. There were some definite problems with the original post, so I've done some editing. And some more editing.

Luke 13:6–9; Ezekiel 11:16–21; Colossians 3:1–5

When I was around 20 I could quote Romans 6. Eventually I started believing it. Many years later I realized it's not only true, but also inevitable.

Scripture presents man's heart as incurable (Jeremiah 17:9). Of course God knew this from the very start: God tells the end from the beginning. God has known from the Fall in the Garden that man's was incurably wicked. But the Old Testament is largely the story of God convincing us of what He already knew. I suppose that's really an act of grace on His part.

Johnny D. put it this way:

What then was God doing with men before? Quickening souls assuredly from Adam on; but in His dispensations with men testing their state for their own instruction; in the former world setting them in innocence in the garden of Eden, where they fell, and then on to the flood without any special institution, though not without testimony. That world became so bad, that it was destroyed by the flood. Then in the new world came government in Noah; promise to Abraham called out from the midst of universal idolatry; the law, testing men and bringing in transgression; the prophets, to recall to the law and testify of Christ. Then God said, I have yet one Son: it may be they will reverence my Son. And when they saw Him they said, Come let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours. Not only was man lawless without law, and a transgressor under law, but when grace came in the Person of the blessed Son of God, they would none of it. The presence of a divine Person drew out the enmity of the heart of man against God: "Now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father." So far from their being a link with humanity, or man as a race, it was the final test of their state: God come in grace, as a man in their midst. The result was: Now is the judgment of this world.

(Union in Incarnation, the root error of modern theology, Collected Writings of J. N. Darby, Volume 29, p.193)

So God spent many, many years demonstrating that man is thoroughly evil. The Old Testament prophets give us the conclusion: Isaiah says it this way, "What was there yet to do to my vineyard that I have not done in it?" (Isaiah 5:4). Jeremiah says our hearts are incurably evil (Jeremiah 17:9). But I find Ezekiel's presentation the most striking.

Ezekiel presents God's findings in chapter 11. When things have gotten so bad that the glory of God is leaving the temple in Jerusalem, the Lord tells Ezekiel that He will still bless Israel, but it will require a drastic measure: "And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 11:19). When Jeremiah says man's heart is "incurable", he really means it. God looks on our hearts and He doesn't see a project for renovation. When God considers our hearts, He says the solution is a total replacement.

Human nature is like the fig tree that the Lord Jesus talked about (Luke 13:6–9). When a fig tree doesn't bear any fruit, there's no point having it. You might as well cut it down. Not only is it fruitless, but it makes the ground useless, because it's using up space, water, and sunlight that could be producing something else.

In the parable, the vine-dresser asks the vineyard owner to give the tree one last chance. We don't really know how the story ends, the Lord Jesus didn't tell that far. But we do know how the vineyard in Isaiah 6 ended: eventually the Owner said, "I will send my Son, perhaps they will respect Him" (Luke 20:13). But we didn't respect Him, did we? The Son of God came here and walked with men and women, and told them heavenly truth. And almost from the beginning, they tried to kill Him. They finally took the Son of God, nailed Him to a tree, and left Him to die.

This is the point that is so easy to miss: God Himself has tried to work with human nature. He has given them His Word, He gave them His Law, and He sent them His Son. The end result is that His Son was killed. And notice that it wasn't just the lawless Gentiles who killed the Son of God: it was God's own chosen people who handed Him over to be killed (Acts 2:23). God Himself has been unable to make human nature good. It's simply not possible.

Again I'll point out that this wasn't a surprise to God. He didn't set out to try and fix human nature and then give up when He found it was too hard. That's not what happened. He knew from the start how this would end. The point of the whole history of God's dealing with man was to convince us what He already knew.

So what does God do? Does He give up? In a way He does. He is not trying to reform human nature. He says, "you are dead, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3). God has only one solution for sinful flesh. God forgives sinners, but He doesn't fix them. So He looks at me and He says, "as far as I am concerned, you are dead". And this is the key to the Christian life. I have died, and now Christ is my life (Galatians 2:20). I can't ever be good: God Himself hasn't been able to make me good. But He has offered me something else: He won't make me good, but He will kill me off.

In a way, God has actually gotten what He wanted from Man, but only exactly one Man. The Lord Jesus came here as a Man and did everything God wanted. And really, this was God's plan all along, wasn't it? God has placed no demands on us that He didn't intend actually to fulfill in Christ.

God has found what He was looking for in man, and He has stopped looking. So the real question is, since God is content with Christ, are we? Are we still looking for good in fallen man? Or have we agreed with God that all our goodness is in that one Man who has completely pleased the heart of God?

I know I keep harping on about this: really, I do. But that's because it needs to be harped on about. The fact is that this is foundational truth. The Christian life begins with God giving up on Adam's race. Fools that we are, we generally keep trying the very things that God has demonstrated don't work.