Category: Theology Page 58 of 67

“For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”
> Romans 3:20

What a remarkable verse this is. It sums up so much thought on religion, moralism, and every other way, besides the gospel of Jesus Christ, of entering the Kingdom of Heaven. If the scriptures are the inerrant Word of God, given to us as God’s words Himself, then this verse is saying what God states concerning works of the law. And what He says, through the apostle Paul, is that by works of of the law, by your own moral toiling and by the sweat of your brow, you cannot present yourself clean, without impurity before the God of the universe. It is not possible. In fact, just to go a step further, Paul didn’t just leave it there, but he then adds, “Since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” But what does that have to do with anything in this context? We go from speaking of justification to talking about the knowledge of sin coming through the law.

So what’s the point? He’s saying that you cannot be justified by works of the law because through them comes the knowledge of sin, and through the knowledge of sin you then, because of your sinful nature begin to do the very things the law tells us not to do. And in reading further on in Romans 7:7-8, Paul qualifies this by saying, “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.” And so we see that the law cannot justify us because we are that desperately wicked.

So many Christians out there will say, “God helps those who help themselves.” But the Biblical response to people who think this, is that God helps those who can’t help themselves and give up on their own righteousness and trying to please God on their own moral strength (Isaiah 65:1-2). What’s the answer though if we’re helpless to help ourselves? Faith in the blood of Jesus Christ. Belive in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Justification before the Father, being presented clean without spot or blemish, cannot be accomplished of your own moral working, but can only become yours through faith in Jesus Christ. You see, through Christ, we can be presented clean because He was clean and yet still went to the cross for us who believe, taking on our filth called sin and its deserved penalty, that we might be clean before Him forever. It’s called the Great Exchange.

By faith in Christ, He being perfect, takes on our sin and its penalty, and then in exchange gives us His very righteousness. Or to put in theological terms, by faith in Christ, our sin and the deserved wrath of God as a result is imputed to Him on the cross, and in return, He imputes His righteousness to us. This is the only way we can be presented perfect and righteous before God almighty. Nothing else will do. Christianity is the only religion with a suffering deity, where God actually humbles Himself and becomes one of His own creation, uniting His deity to humanity. His name is Christ. He was fully man and fully God at the same time. Two natures consisting in one Messiah.

Many people think of God as being angry and furious and asking, “How can He allow such awful things to happen in the world? If He only knew what it was like.” Well, actually, He does. Christ experienced more pain and torment than we can possibly imagine. And I’m not talking about the physical pain He experienced on the cross. I’m talking about the pain deep within His soul as He experienced the full fury and wrath of God for sinners. God knows what pain is and has Himself experienced it. And we cannot even begin to compare our pain and misery to His. And it is through this pain and suffering that christ has purchased pardon for any who would believe in Him. Believe in Jesus and you will be saved. There is salvation in no one else. Acts 4:12 confirms this, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

I was reading in Zechariah today and it has made me so excited about the day of the Lord, where He will destroy the wicked and all wickedness, and bring perfect restoration and fullness to His people. Man, how I yearn for that day! I started reading from ch. 9 to the end, and it just makes me so hopeful in the perfect promise God has made to bring eternal renewal to those who believe in His Son for salvation, where He cleanse us once and for all from all sin, that will be rid of that which temporarily bears down on us now. We will be free sin! After reading Zechariah, I then flipped over to Revelation 22 where the river of the water of life is coming out of the new Jerusalem and how all things will be perfect! What an amazing hope we have in Christ, that one day He make all things new, where there will be no more destruction, war, death, suffering, famine, chaos, drout, financial woes, pain, strife, tears, persecution, corruption, futility! It just makes me want to push on to know Christ more and make Him known to everyone I know that we might all be saved from His wrath. On that day, all the things wrong with this world will be wiped away and all things will be made new; a place where there will be no more need for the light of the sun and stars, but God Himself will be our light, and so much more infinitely beautiful and glorious! How I love You, great and mighty King, You are faithful through the ages, You never change!

As believers in the Son of God, who purchased us with His own precious blood on the cross, who are we to become proud or boastful in anything we ever do? “All things are from Him and to Him and for Him,” to His glory. “What have you that you did not receive?” The point of the Christian life is not so much that we merely get blessed by God and then move on with our lives, that we just store up and receive blessings. No, the point of the Christian life is that we are so caught up in God, who He is, what He’s done in Christ, and giving glory to Him for all of it, that our lives are radically changed to love Him more, in word and deed, to the point of selflessly pouring ourselves out for others to bring them into the kingdom of God.

The Christian life is forgetting about yourself, being so caught up in and awestruck by the power, might, love, justice, and mercy of God toward you and I, wicked sinners, and by the power of the Spirit in the regeneration of our souls, living a life that reflects the work He’s done in us to give us the knowledge of Himself and His worth. The Christian life is about finding your ultimate joy, ultimate satisfaction, finding your reason for being, in the person and work of Jesus Christ, every single day. And in finding all of these things in Christ, we can’t help but want others to know of His value, telling them about what we’ve “seen and heard,” so much to the point that we should be willing to give our lives to that end!

“He must increase, but I must decrease.” This is the Christian life. It is by God’s power through the cross that we come to Him, are changed by Him; then we see that we are nothing, that even the best of us (like Isaiah 6) are morally bankrupt compared to Him; and that He is everything, gave up everything on our behalf in order that He should be our portion forever. It is about getting out of the way of God’s glory, participating in giving it to Him, and spreading the knowledge of His glory to all people, by preaching the Gospel loud and clear, without fear. The Christian life is about loving God, not just in theory, but in reality, because we’ve been so radically changed by the work of Christ.

How can we not love Him with our lives, self-sacrificially, and fall on our faces with tears of joy at the work Christ did on our behalf on the cross? What kind of mercy is this, that God Himself would take upon flesh and purchase people for Himself from every tribe, tongue, and nation? It’s simply astonishing. The Christians’ delight is not in the blessings He gives to His people, or merely the fact that He’s rescued from His fury against sinners, but our delight is in God Himself, the ultimate blessing. There is no joy or blessing greater, because He’s the highest of all, the one from which all joys and satisfactions were thought up!

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”
– 2 Timothy 4:3-4

Man has that time come. It’s been around for quite a while (mainly since the birth of the church), but it seems to be getting worse and worse in the world, and particularly in Western Christianity. “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons” (1 Timothy 4:1). What are these teachings of demons? They are teachings that take the truth and distort it just enough to appear as the truth to unsuspecting people, but really they are lies spawned by Satan to blind people from the truth of the Gospel and rather lead people straight to hell with him. Just as Satan lied to Eve in the garden, so also he lies to people by taking that which is true in Scripture and distoring it to lead them astray.

Liberal theology is taking hold in the church in places where the solid truth of the Word of God was once proclaimed loud and clear (PCUSA churches, many Methodist churches – though not all, Discpiles of Christ, some Episcopalian/Anglican churches, and others). Liberal theology essentially denies the inerrant authority of Scripture (believing them to be helpful but not authoritative), denies the resurrection, denies his justice against sin, as well as the omniscience of God, amongst many other things. It’s essentially an abandonment of the objective truths about God revealed in Scripture that is replaced by experiential feelings. Many people have set aside the inerrancy of the Scriptures to do this very thing: “accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and [they have turned] away from listening to the truth and [have wandered] off into myths.”

If we do not use the inerrantly authoritative Scriptures as our rule of life and faith, then we will inevitably wander off into myths, man-made intellectual thoughts, and the doctrines of demons. But we must preach the whole truth from Scripture, not just parts of it that sit well with our sinful souls. God’s truth is a hard reality, not because there is anything wrong with Him, but because everything is wrong with us. We have twisted, denied, stomped on, rejected the truth about God, and exchanged it for a lie. Yes God is love. But He is also just and righteous. We are sinners. Sin, when preached using Biblical terminology, is a hard reality. Predestination, damnation, wrath, justice; these are hard truths that don’t sit well with us sinners! But it’s truth from His Word. We must return to the Scriptures though and know them through and through, with all of their hard edges in order that we will live in the reality of who God actually is.

Many within the visible church have set aside the Scriptures as being the written revelation of God altogether, or they have twisted the Scriptures to fit what they want to believe concerning God and their human nature, living out existentialism (that what they individually perceive as reality is what is true). What we now have in many churches are unbelieving pastors teaching unbelieving people. One such church nearby is University Christian Church. Many pastors will just preach on Scriptures (or not preach from Scripture at all) that make people feel good about themselves and ignore the other half of the Scriptures chock full of harsh, hard warnings (such as in James and Hebrews and pretty much all of Jesus’ difficult statements). These same pastors are simply gutting the contents of Scripture (such as James, Romans, Hebrews) to fit a light-hearted, feel-good message that doesn’t preach the word of God in its entirety and challenge people to turn from sin and believe in Christ. They will take scripture out of context in order to fit their own agenda and it’s disgusting.

It is a lie of the world that says you find significance and worth in making much of yourself. And yet this is what many churches are resorting to, and it couldn’t be further from the truth of the Scriptures. There is no truth in us. There is no reality that we can define for ourselves. If that were so, we would be God. But God defines reality, not us. Below I’ve compiled a list of some of these modern day teachings that all of us would do well to be on our guard against. We must return to sound teaching or else forfeit the glory of God in the proclaimation of the Gospel to all people from Scripture.

Open Theism
Liberal Theology
Legalism and Antinomianism
Post-Modernism
Oneness Pentecostal
Universalism

“…the first effect of the power of God in the heart in regeneration is to give the heart a Divine taste or sense; to cause it to have a relish of the loveliness and sweetness of the supreme excellency of the Divine nature.”
– Jonathan Edwards

“Can we possibly, without utter absurdity, maintain that there first existed in anyone the good virtue of a good will, to entitle him to the removal of his heart of stone? How can we say this, when all the time this heart of stone itself signifies precisely a will of the hardest kind, a will that is absolutely inflexible against God? For if a good will comes first, there is obviously no longer a heart of stone.”
– Augustine

“For we are now speaking of the desire for goodness. If they want to say that this begins from ourselves and is then perfected by God, let them see how they can answer the apostle when he says, ‘Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God’ (2 Cor. 3:5)”
– Augustine

“Indeed the Word of God is like the sun, shining upon all those to whom it is proclaimed, but with no effect among the blind. Now, all of us are blind by nature in this respect… Accordingly, it cannot penetrate into our minds unless the Spirit, as the inner teacher, through his illumination makes entry for it.”
– Calvin’s Institutes 3.2.34

“Faith in the living God and his Son Jesus Christ is always the result of the new birth, and can never exist except in the regenerate. Whoever has faith is a saved man.”
– C.H. Spurgeon

“We are dependent on God, not only for redemption itself but for our faith in the Redeemer; not only for the gift of His Son but for the Holy Ghost for our conversion.”
– Jonathan Edwards

“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”
> 1 Corinthians 3:16

Though Paul was rebuking the Corinthians for succumbing to fleshly, worldly, sinful desires, I just love the point he makes because I believe we can all forget this truth during the course of each day: The Spirit of God now dwells in those who have believed in Christ for salvation. In the Old Testament, God’s Spirit dwelled within the temple made by hands, and no one could go into the Holy Place without the shedding of blood; and even then, the High Priest could only go in once a year into the Most Holy Place to make atonement for the sins of the people. But now, how wondrous it is indeed that when Christ offered Himself up in obedience to the Father by submitting Himself to the cross, He opened the way for the Spirit of God to indwell the hearts of those who believe in Him! We are temples of the living God! When Christ was crucified for sinners, the vail of the temple separating the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place was torn in two, displaying that the Holy Spirit no longer resided there, but would reside in the hearts of His people. And how wonderful it is, that the same Spirit that dwelled within the temple, where everything had to be ceremonially done in a certain way or else the priests would die, is the same Spirit that now dwells within His people, those who have believed in Christ for salvation! It took an act of God alone, exhibited through the cross of Christ by the shedding of His blood, to make this possible, that the Spirit of God Himself would indwell sinners. The Spirit within us, residing there as a result of Christ’s work, is our strength and supplies all that we need. How awesome and powerful is God!? If He can do this and He resides in us, why should we fear, why do we despair? Christ has conquered that which had a hold on us, sin, death, hell and Satan! It is finished. May we all rest in the knowledge of this truth from scripture, and receive the deep soul rest we all need so desperately. He is the great Satisfier and Comforter. There are none like Him. If God is for us, who can be against us?