faith for faith

As I told a friend when speaking to him concerning the subject of images and their place in Christian life and worship, I told him that I am a man of strong convictions. Upon things that I believe to be certain in life, I believe on them strongly and fight opposition to them strongly, and, upon things that are not so certain, I tend to let those things slide as matters of opinion until it is demonstrated to me otherwise. For living in such a manner, I have been called by some to a legalist, by some to be divisive, and by some to be nitpicky and overbearing. Despite this, I pray that in this particular matter at least you will see in my discourse the same love that you see in yourself when you in tears tell a beloved person of their future judgment and desserts in hell. For of the Ten Commandments, there is but one that carries with it a particular judgment, and it is a weighty judgment indeed. Therefore, for the sake of your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren, I pray that you take heed to what I write in this post, because whether or not you affirm it, your failings with regard to this commandment will surely as the Lord lives affect all of them.

By and large the subject at hand, expressly images that are supposed depictions of Jesus Christ, is relegated to the realm of opinion rather than to the realm of certainty. I am not sure why there is such lack of questioning with regards to this subject, but I suppose is greatly based upon the Catholic influence on the church, to whom images are not merely decorations but aids for worship and have been so for centuries. Also, visual depictions of Jesus Christ might very well fall into the same realm as notions such as regarding the church as a building, tithing, and taking the communion elements off a silver platter—such things have been practiced so long that no one knows differently and therefore assume that they are proper notions. I therefore challenge you in this matter, as I would in all matters, to allow a bit of doubt to creep into your religious practices and to test them with the declarations of Scripture. Do not merely say to yourself, “I do not see in the Ten Commandments a command that specifically says, ‘Do not draw pictures of Jesus Christ,’” but ask yourself, “How can I glorify God more with my practices?” “How can demonstrate the glory of God in face of Christ better to world that spits on images of him?” (cf. 2Cor. 4).

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But I ask, did Israel not understand? First Moses says, “I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation; with a foolish nation I will make you angry.” Then Isaiah is so bold as to say, “I have been found by those who did not seek me; I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me” (Rom. 10:19, 20).

Like the verse that precedes it, v. 10:19 begins with a question that has a “yes, but…” answer. For, as in the preceding verse where the apostle asks, “Have they not heard?” and in the context we must answer, “Yes, they have heard, but they have not heard,” so in v. 19, we must say, “Yes they have known, but they have not known.” The ESV picks up on this notion of knowing and yet not knowing in v. 19 where it interprets what is literally “know” in “But I ask, did Israel not know? as “Did Israel not understand?” for it is clear in the context that Israel knew on the one hand but did not know on the other.

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At the end of Romans 10 and going into Romans 11, there is this idea that a person can at the same time hear the Gospel and not hear the Gospel. That is, God and his Gospel can be rightly perceived on the one hand and yet totally missed on the other. In other words, evangelism is as much based upon the work of God as it is upon the glorious commission of the church outlined in vv. 10:14, 15, namely sending out preachers, preachers preaching the Gospel, persons hearing it, believing it, and then calling upon the Lord. The reason that Paul brings up this point is because of the subject of his present discourse, namely “They have not all obeyed the Gospel” (v. 10:16). Israel has heard more than any other people of the Messiah, of God’s redemption and patience and lovingkindness, and yet they have not believed. For this reason, the apostle writes, “So faith comes from hearing, but hearing comes by the word of Christ. In other words, faith never comes about apart from the hearing of the preaching of the Gospel, but genuine hearing, hearing as a living man instead of as a dead man, comes from the word of Christ. For it is the Spirit of Christ who speaks life to soul and causes him to be born again (cf. 1Pet. 1:3) and to believe in his heart that Jesus Christ is Lord and from the abundance of his heart to confess that truth with his mouth.

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I am not sure of its history, but nowadays it seems that there is a prevalent divide between what is called systematic theology and biblical theology and how each should be applied in a Sunday morning setting. The ways the two are typically defined places systematic theology as what one does if one’s a theologian and biblical theology as what one does when one encounters a particular passage. For example, my prof last night put it this way (as I have heard several others before him say), that when he preaches through passages like Romans 8 and Ephesians 1 he preaches predestination, but when he preaches Romans 10, he preaches free will. In other words, he, like many others, believes that the Bible is ambiguous to human reason and is a collection of ambiguities that must be preached as the preacher believes they are presently presented.

The problem with this notion of the Bible and on biblical theology is that texts like Romans 10 do not exist in a vacuum, but they exist in their immediate contexts, Romans 10 particularly sandwiched between Romans 9 and 11, and in their greater context upon the Law and the Prophets. Nothing, as this notion of biblical theology propones, can be taken simply as one thinks that it is alone, but it must be considered along side the declarations of whole of Scripture.

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Time Magazine, in a series entitled “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now,” posted this article below, entitled “3. The New Calvinism.” A good read and quite fair in my estimations.

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard “The Old Rugged Cross,” a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are…well, hark the David Crowder Band: “I am full of earth/ You are heaven’s worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity.”

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin’s 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism’s buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism’s latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination’s logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time’s dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

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USA Today in an article based upon polls has reported that religion in general, mostly Christianity, is losing numbers in the American populous. A co-worker shared the article with me yesterday morning, and I read it with a sort of “duh” mentality, thinking that the information was not really new news. I was shocked, however, when I got to my class at the seminary last night and discovered that some people there were shocked by the news in the article. They did not have a clue. In this way, this article today might be a good thing, for perhaps it will wake up the clueless to certain fatal flaws found in the American church today:

The “Field of Dreams” Model Does Not Work
For the past several decades, the church in America has adopted a “if you build it, they will come” mentality of church growth. This mentality has become so engrained in our Christian psyche that we do not even realize it any more. We demonstrate it with the language that we use (we invite people to “church” and with all our mind refer to a building when the church is by the etymology, “the elect”), in our methods of evangelism (Upward Basketball, etc.), in our “Christian” advertising, in our building programs, and in our measuring of success by numbers not by lives characterized by holiness. It is demonstrated in our focus on liturgy, on music styles, on carpet color, and everything else that Christians bicker and argue about that have nothing to do with the Church. The Church has been watered down, deformed, and beaten into a building where Christians meet on Sunday mornings, instead of being the ekklesia (“kle-”: called; “ek”: out)–those who have been called out by God to be holy as he is holy.

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From The London Confession, 1644 (a.k.a. First London Baptist Confession)

XXI. That Christ Jesus by his death did bring forth salvation and reconciliation only for the elect, which were those which God the Father gave him; and that the Gospel which is to be preached to all men as the ground of faith, is, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the ever blessed God, filled with the perfection of all heavenly and spiritual excellencies, and that salvation is only and alone to be had through the believing in his Name.

XXII. That Faith is the gift of God wrought in the hearts of the elect by the Spirit of God, whereby they come to see, know, and believe the truth of the Scriptures, and not only so, but the excellency of them above all other writings and things in the world, as they hold forth the glory of God in his attributes, the excellency of Christ in his nature and offices, and the power of the fullness of the Spirit in its workings and operations; and thereupon are enabled to cast the weight of their souls upon this truth thus believed.

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All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all, despite their connection with Jesus Christ, continue to sin and to fall short of the glory of God. This is not surprising to us, for we who are in Christ are continually commanded to forsake our flesh and to turn away from our sinful passions and to turn to our Advocate and our Righteousness for forgiveness when we do fall into various sins. We know full well that our salvation is not of ourselves and that our righteousness is not our own, yet at times when we do sin, the Adversary swoops in and attempts to place on us again a burden we were never meant to bear. It is in times such as these that we, instead of falling and immediately running back into our Father’s arms, are convinced that our shame is too great, and we sulk in our sin for days and weeks. We feel that are communion with God is severed, and we feel more like sons of the devil than like sons of God. In these times, we must be all the more vigilant to place upon our heads the Helmet of the Gospel that declares to us afresh that we are clothed with an alien Righteousness and have unbroken communion with the Father through our perfect Mediator, Jesus Christ. The Adversary wishes us to think that we are cut off from God because our failings; we should not give him the pleasure of such a victory.

The great theologians of centuries past were correct when they saw in the Scriptures two covenants–the Covenant of Works and the Covenant of Grace. Both have existed since before the fall of man in the Garden, and both continue to exist to this day. Moses, after writing of both covenants in the historical account of Adam’s Transgression of the Commandment and the Promise of a Crusher of the Serpent’s head, continues to write of both after he has received from Yahweh the Law. Concerning this, the apostle Paul writes in Romans 10, “For Moses writes about the righteousness that is based on the law, that the person who does the commandments shall live by them” (v. 10:5). This is, by Moses, the acknowledgement of the perpetuation of the Covenant of Works, viz. that he who obeys the Law will be declared “just” by the Law. However, since it is made quite clear by the apostle in the preceding chapters of his letter that no one has kept the Law, the apostle appeals to Moses’ appeal to the Righteousness that comes by faith. For Moses writes and the apostle adds:

But the righteousness based on faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (i.e. to bring Christ down) or “‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (i.e. to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (i.e. the word of faith that we proclaim) (vv. 10:6-8). 

The apostle’s appeal to the revelation given to Moses demonstrates that there are, even now, two methods to approach Jesus Christ (i.e. God) and his righteousness. The first way is the way of works. This method is a declaration by the heart that one will pull himself up by his own boot straps and rise to meet God halfway. It is rule keeping that manifests itself in self-righteousness based upon tithing, wearing nice suits on Sundays, and not being a drain on the government as other low-lifes are. These might acknowledge with their lips that Jesus Christ is God and that he came down to Earth and dwelt among men and died and rose up from the dead, but they do not base their righteousness upon him. They instead look to themselves and their own law-keeping and think that they are right with God simply because ten percent of their gross income goes to the local church.

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Being from North Carolina, it is difficult not to love the sight of snow. It is a sight that is seldom seen, and when it sticks it transforms everything on which it falls. Regardless of where the snow lands, be it on the lawns of the wealthy or on the trash heaps of the landfills, everything is made beautiful. It is, in some ways, a perfect picture of the Gospel. For the Gospel, like the snow on divers landscapes, is not a respecter of social class, race, nationality, or political position, and it falls upon God’s dispersed elect and covers them beautifully with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. God’s people, called forth from every tongue and every tribe, from paupers to kings, who are as muddy and filthy as the natural landscape, find themselves fully blanketed with the whiteness of Jesus Christ and, when the clouds give way to clear skies, reflect with blinding radiance the glory of their Father. They who were once dirty are now clean; they who were once dull are now radiant–not by any merit of their own, but because God came near and gave to them his cleanness and his radiance and thereby made them beautiful.