There continues to be confusion about the precise relationship between the Law and the Gospel, the Law and the Covenant people, and the Law and the Mosaic Covenant. This is the case because there is confusion over the different uses of the Law, as taught in Scripture. There have been a plethora of views, even within the writings of Reformed theologians from the Reformation forward, with regard to the various uses of the Law. It is similar to the variety of views that exist  in attempts to define the marks of a true church. There is great overlap between the answers given, but there is certainly not absolute uniformity. I have read a number of views and opinions, over the past decade, and am left wondering why Reformed theologians do not more readily appeal to the Westminster Larger Catechism for a balanced and robust expression of the biblical teaching on the Law and its uses. Questions 91-97 clearly articulate the Puritans’ understanding of the Law:

Question 91: What is the duty which God requires of man?

Answer: The duty which God requires of man, is obedience to his revealed will.

Question 92: What did God at first reveal unto man as the rule of his obedience?

Answer: The rule of obedience revealed to Adam in the estate of innocence, and to all mankind in him, besides a special command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was the moral [read more»]

There is a striking progression in the life and ministry of our Lord Jesus, in which He is shown to be the One who alone can bear the wrath of God on behalf of His people. At the beginning of the Gospels He has multitudes surrounding Him. Then He narrows it down to the seventy. From that group He chooses twelve. Then He takes eleven into the Garden and pulls three aside with Him. Finally He is left alone to look into the cup that the Father has prepared for Him to drink to the full by Himself. Eric Alexander notes:

Isaiah foresaw this when he prophesied that Jesus would be “cut off from the land of the living” (Isa. 53:8). He was cut off in a two-fold sense. First, He was cut off from men by physical distance. This was a progressive attribute of the life of Jesus. He had the multitudes at the beginning. Out of the multitudes, he had the seventy, to whom He committed special tasks as He sent them out to by two. Within the group of seventy there was the Twelve, and then the three who went with Him into peculiarly important and sacred places. But in the supreme hour, when He faced the deepest of agonies, He was alone, cut off from man by His holiness. But He also was cut off by the sins that He was bearing—not His own, but ours. “He looked, and there was no man, neither any to regard him” (Isaiah 59). It was a cup of loneliness.1

1. Taken from “The Cup of Bitterness, the Cup of Blessing,” delivered by Rev. Eric Alexander at Keswick Convention.

There is an interesting development in the account of the lost and found parables of Luke 15. There are 1 out of 100 sheep, 1 out of 10 coins, and 1 out of two sons. Sinclair Ferguson notes:

Luke 15 contains three parables. In some ways, they are three parts of one larger parable–a single message about lost things being found, each episode told in a context of increased complexity and heightened tension.

Scene one describes a Shepherd who has lost one of his sheep. Sheep were, and are, valuable. But he has lost only one out of one hundred–one percent.

Scene two describes a woman who has lost a silver coin. The coin is valuable to her; perhaps it was saved for a rainy day. She has lost one coin out of ten–ten percent, a much higher percentage loss.

The third scene, however, is much more poignant. The father of two sons looses one of them. He has lost fifty percent of his sons, not a sheep or a coin–an unbearable loss.

Jesus was clearly building up to the main point. The scenes in the third parable are described in much greater legnth, with much greater complexity and depth of emotion. In addition, there are more characters in the third story–two sons and their father–each of whom express his thoughts and feelings about the situation.1

1. Sinclair Ferguson By Grace Alone (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust Publishing, 2010) p. 15

In the midst of current debates over the precise relationship between the pre-lapsarian Covenant of Works and the Mosaic Covenant, it would do us good to remember that many of the Reformed theologians of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries understood that the Law given at Sinai, with its promise of blessing and cursing in accord with its subsequent demand for perfect obedience, was  the reflection of the Covenant of Works. Because of developments in Covenant theology in the 20th Century in the writings of  Meredith Kline and John Murray, many have neglected to see the categorical relationship between the two. Geerhardus Vos, who some appeal to as rejecting such a relationship, made the following observation:

We can also explain why the older theologians did not always clearly distinguish between the covenant of works and the Sinaitic covenant.  At Sinai it was not the ‘bare’ law that was given, but a reflection of the covenant of works revived, as it were, in the interests of the covenant of grace continued at Sinai.1

The inability to know God’s essence is not a puzzle to be solved. It is instead the motive of worship and adoration. Bavinck saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness attempting to find God without the aid of sense-mediated signs and signifiers. For them the result was agnosticism steeped in a rejection of all metaphysical inquiry. So how does a dogmatician outfox the philosopher? Remain objectively certain, or as Bavinck says: stick to your guns.

Karl Barth said that “back to,” is not a good slogan for dogmatics. All science must move forward. Problem is how to do it in a positive climate that rejects all metaphysical investigation. The rationalism in favor of innate ideas confuses the light of reason with revelation. We have potential to grow in knowledge (all of which is mediate) but the concepts themselves are not innate. Granted, argues Bavinck, things are grasped because they are apprehended only in God (Malebranche) and in the soul by recollection (Plato). Natural theology cannot equal ‘revealed’ religion (illumination/inspiration) because it’s a reflection of the work of God in creation: if it’s natural it cannot be the product of human reason. In that limited sense the world does not take us away from God but leads us to him.

Bavinck’s analysis is dense but his ability to navigate wildly competitive views of is profound. If [read more»]

Here is the audio from the last Sunday morning worship service at New Covenant Presbyterian Church. The text was Acts 2:40-47 and the title was “The Growing and Living Church.”

If you are in Christ Jesus, by grace through faith, you will be married forever. And Jesus will be married too. He will not remain single forever.

Jonathan Edwards wrote:

The end [goal] of the creation of God was to provide a spouse for His Son Jesus Christ that might enjoy Him and on whom He might pour forth His love. And the end of all things in providence are to make way for the exceeding expressions of Christ’s love to His spouse and for her exceeding close and intimate union with, and high and glorious enjoyment of Him and to bring this to pass. And therefore the last thing and the issue of all things is the marriage of the Lamb. And the wedding day is the last day, the day of judgment, or rather that will be the beginning of it. The wedding feast is eternal; and the love and joys, the songs, entertainments and glories of the wedding never will be ended. It will be an everlasting wedding day.

Jonathan Edwards, “Miscellany #702″ in “The Miscellanies”: Entries Nos. 501-832 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 18, ed. Ava Chamberlain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 298.

Hosea 2:14-20 – Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.   And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.  And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when [read more»]

There is an interesting and important representation that runs through the Old Testament, concerning the process by which idols were removed from God’s people. Israel’s history was marked with idolatry. From the moment they were redeemed out of Egypt, Israel worshiped other gods. Standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, where they were to wait for God’s Law, Israel made a golden calf to worship in the name of Yahweh. When Moses came down the mountain he burned the idol, crushed it to fine dust, and poured it into a nearby river. In Deuteronomy 9:21 Moses recounts this event for Israel’s remembrance:

Then I took your sin, the calf which you had made, and burned it with fire and crushed it and ground it very small, until it was as fine as dust; and I threw its dust into the brook that descended from the mountain.

While Moses made the people drink the water into which the idol dust was thrown, he simply notes that the dust of the idol was thrown into the “brook that descended from the mountain.” This sets the stage for actions of the righteous Kings throughout Israel’s history. Each and every time that the Lord raised up a righteous King to deliver His people from their evil practices and enemies, they would remove the idols from the land in a manner similar to that of Moses. In the days of righteous King Asa we see this pattern:

Asa did what was right in the [read more»]

Last week Bavinck led us onto the negative path to knowing God. Even in the modern age, John Lloyd has humorously noted that we can’t see anything that matters. We know little about the world and we know even less about God. In Bavinck’s day the doctrine of God’s incomprehensibility tended to agnosticism (Hegel) or a theology equal to anthropology (Fichte). What is gained by the ‘recovery’ of God’s incomprehensibility? Peace that passes understanding? Inexpressible joy? Bavinck can’t wait to find out.

Theology since scholasticism lost the impact of God’s incomprehensibility. Philosophy took it up especially in the thinking of Kant and Hegel. For Kant, God’s being is lost in the critique of pure reason because, “the soul, the world, and God cannot be objectively demonstrated.” Attributing intellect and will to God is “practical knowledge” but adds nothing to the volume of human science. Hegel attempted to strip the concept of God from all sense-related forms but ran aground in the claim that, “a sense-related representation could never be overcome in the idea of God and therefore (Hegel) ended up in atheism.” Atheism usually retreats to agnosticism, says Bavinck, because Hegel reasoned that “our God-consciousness is nothing other than God’s self-consciousness. God exists to the extent that he is known by us.” Man, the measure of all things [read more»]