Creation vs. Evolution

Recently, as I started out in my new Pastorate, I began the morning sermon series in Genesis.  I have never preached through Genesis, but like most Pastors the desire was there.  What better way to start out a ministry than to begin in the beginning.  I am just now coming to the end of Genesis 1 after two months of searching the riches of the power of God through His spoken Word in this first book of Scripture.  In the midst, I had the daunting task of addressing the topic of evolution.  Rather, God Himself in His own Word rebukes evolution.  I was surprised at how much God actually answers and makes clear those questions we all have being in a society that begs us to question God's creation work.  His Word truly is sufficient.  There was one book that helped me a long greatly to see this, showing how God addresses evolution from His Word.  That book was Doug Kelly's Creation and Change: Genesis 1.1 -2.4 In the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms.  I recommend it to you for your benefit and growth for the securing and defending of your faith.

The Garment Which The Savior Always Wore" by James Smith

HUMILITY is a most precious grace--it is filled with beauty, loveliness, and glory. This is the garment which the Savior always wore. This is the grace which gave such a charm to all that He did and said. It is one of our best garments, and without it the soul is generally naked. "All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another." 1 Peter 5:5.

For lack of humility--the Church is rent and torn with divisions. For lack of humility--believers bring many trials and crosses on themselves, and sow the bitter seeds of trouble and remorse.

If I were truly humble, I must be happy, for it is with such Jehovah dwells: "For this is what the high and lofty One says--He who lives forever, whose name is holy: I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and humble in spirit." Isaiah 57:15. To such He looks with esteem, love, and delight: "This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at My Word." Isaiah 66:2.

"I hate pride and arrogance!" Proverbs 8:13. Pride is . . .
most loathsome to God,
injurious to men, and
a stronghold of Satan within us.

"God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble!" James 4:6. He keeps the proud at a distance, and will not allow them to approach him: "Though the Lord is great, He cares for the humble--but He keeps His distance from the proud!" Psalm 138:6. He threatens them with everlasting destruction. "The Lord detests all the proud of heart. Be sure of this: They will not go unpunished!" Proverbs 16:5

Lord, give me true humility, and let me be clothed with it from day to day!

To the Person Who Keyed My Car During Tulip Festival

You couldn't have been more wasteful with your energy. And not just because it's a 23 year old rust bucket whose appearance was almost improved by your caper. But because there is probably no one who cares less. It could have been the almost new, very nice SUV, and it wouldn't have mattered.

Because the Lord actively sees to all of my needs in every moment. Because my treasure is where rust cannot destroy and thief cannot steal. Because that car is reserved for fire anyway, and the Lord is about to burn it up.

I doubt that I'll need a vehicle in glory. What I will be has not yet appeared, but I know that when Jesus appears, I will be like Him, because I will see Him as He is. God is preparing for me an imperishable body, because the new earth in which I am going to live is of a substance so foreign to me now that I am literally unable to inherit it in my current body. That body, since it will be like unto Christ's resurrection body, will be able to move through walls and to immediately transport from one place to another.

Even if I do get a vehicle, it is likely to be one of those cherubim-powered, spirit-steered, instant-motion-in-all-three-physical-dimensions vehicles like what we see in Ezekiel. So, I won't be needing my Honda much longer, and there's nothing you can do to deny me it, if God Most High intends to preserve it to me. I'm sorry that you wasted your time. You should also know that vengeance is God's.

I do hope that you will repent of this, and all your other sins, and that you will be found in Christ upon the Great Day. He will be Judge, Jury, and Executioner, then. And He doesn't take kindly to attacks upon His beloved ones. So, be one of those beloved ones; for, He came the first time not to judge but to give Himself as a ransom, so that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.

For further reading: Matthew 5-7; 1John 1-3; 2Peter 3; 1Corinthians 15; Ezekiel 1,10;  John 3

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Being More Biblical Is More Comforting: Applying the Scriptures to Two of the Most Painful Situations That Believers Face

I recently received a note from a Reformed Baptist believer. He has a friend who just lost a baby at almost 8 months, and finding the "age of understanding" and "innocence of babies" explanations biblically unsatisfying, he asked how I would comfort someone in that situation. Since our congregation also has recently gone through this, and since we do have some folk who are working through how the Bible views the children of believers, I thought many might benefit from the answer. May God bless it to you.

[edit: in the absence of a "read more" link on this blog's front page, please click this post's title to read the rest of it]

Upon the death of a young child, we must direct the believer for comfort and hope to the same place that we look for those things in every other circumstance: the grace of God to us in Christ. 

It is remarkable that David, in the midst of a situation in which his child's death was a case of discipline upon him, still had the confidence in God to say, "he will not come back to me, but I will go to him" (2Sam 12:15-23).

His faith surprised his attendants, but it demonstrated sturdy confidence in the eternality of the soul, in the resurrection of the body, and in God's grace toward his child. There is also the passage in 1Cor 7, where Paul says that God treats believer's children different for their attachment to the believing parent. And there are so many encouragements given to us in covenant promises throughout the Bible!

It is, of course, possible to be sinfully presumptive about this.

But it is possible to be sinfully presumptive about any promise of God.

If I think to myself, "here is a guarantee of what will happen, no matter what I do," then I have no grounds for such an idea with respect to any of the promises of God. The unrepenting sinner, who yet says that he has faith, has no legitimate claim to God's promise for himself.

But the possibility of thinking and acting presumptuously does not take a single thing away from the promise: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved!" or "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." So the possibility of presumption doesn't negate or weaken the promise.

This is why, when we bring our children for baptism, we vow that our only hope that our children will be saved is that Jesus Christ will save them in the same way that He has saved us (through faith). This is the hope that the Bible holds out to believers.

But then, we proceed to vow that we will therefore be diligent with all of the means that God has appointed, through which He gives faith. Why? Because the person who genuinely hopes in God will also do whatever God says--we trust that His commands are good, not just that His promises are good.

We don't just hold to the hope that the Bible extends to us; we also obey the directions that the Bible gives us. Both must result from a hearty confidence in God's Word. And if we are missing either one, then something is broken about how we view the Bible.

So, the question about the covenant promises about our children does come down to this: are there any other promises of God that we refuse to believe in, because we are afraid that such belief might turn into a presumption? ... I hope that we're hearing crickets now!

Will our children therefore be saved without faith? 

Absolutely not! For what we hope is the very opposite. And, if they cannot be saved without faith, then we urgently press upon them to believe.

How about the Christian parent, whose child rejects God? 

Would we blame God for this? We cannot, when we have confessed that it is merely His sovereign grace that must save them, and when we ourselves do so much that is blameworthy in the rearing of our children, whereas God is only ever good and merciful to them.

But the parent whose child continues in rebellion against God, can yet continue to hope that God will save his child, and continue to press that child with the gospel. Why? Because such children continue in the same condition in which they have been from birth.

They haven't gone from a state of neutrality toward God to a state of rejecting Him. So the parent also may (and must!) remain where he has been since the child's birth: clinging to God's character, hoping in God's promises, and using God's means.

For the parent whose grown child continues rejecting Christ, this is far sturdier comfort and sounder counsel than what we usually hear. Most of the time, we hear instead an abuse of the text "train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." That text speaks of children who have been converted, and says that they will persevere. And of course converted children will! For this is a biblical doctrine.

What the "train up a child" text does not say, is what so many take it to say: that if your child failed to be trained in your home, so that he ended up wild in high school or college, that your pseudo-biblical and sin-stained attempts at rearing him are still some sort of guarantee that he will "come back" in later years.

So, just as with the presumed innocence of babies, the non-covenantal position must rest upon promises that don't exist in the Bible--precisely because it has not embraced those covenant promises that saturate Scripture from cover to cover.

Well, is God able to do this? 

To save babies in the womb? Well, there is the obvious answer: "God can do anything. And this must be our starting point, because otherwise we are implying that adults are more savable because they are more intelligent or more knowledgeable.

But 1 Corinthians 2 teaches us that the "ability" to believe is not a function of the intellect, but a function of the Spirit teaching the person's heart and the Spirit also enabling the person to believe it."  So the ability to know and the ability to believe are both gifts of the Holy Spirit that employ our minds, not abilities of our minds that employ the Spirit. It is no more difficult for the Spirit to do this with the first thought of the new soul, than it is with a seasoned theologian!

And we can go still further than this, because in addition to biblical theory, we also have a biblical example of this very thing. God isn't just hypothetically able to convert in the womb; He has done it before.

John the Baptist, while yet in his mother's womb, was enabled by the Spirit to recognize Jesus Christ in a manner that far exceeded our expectations of his physical (to see through two mothers' wombs?!) or mental capacity, and to respond to Jesus with believing joy.

And this believing joy is what the Bible encourages us to believe is the immediate experience of every child of a believer who dies in the womb--a believing joy that is almost immediately fulfilled, when the first human face that the child ever sees belongs to the resurrected Savior!

Appendix: What about children of unbelievers? 

Well, the Bible doesn't give us nearly as much reason to hope in their case. I should couch this by saying that if I get to glory, and I discover there that every last child who died in the womb or in infancy turned out to be elect, I would not at all be surprised. Imagine how immensely populated glory would then be--and doesn't the Bible teach us that it is immensely populated?

However, there is so much less biblical warrant for this hope in the case of the child of an unbeliever. So although I would not be surprised, I do not think that the Bible anywhere gives me sufficient ground to hold out this hope to an unbelieving parent.

And if my reasoning for that hope had to include the presumed innocence of the child, then it would not just be unbiblical but even antibiblical. And of course, it is impossible for the unbelieving parent lay claim to the wonderful comforts in the first two paragraphs above, even if he could understand them.

A Creational Quibble from a Saved Steward

Kevin, I'd like to quibble with the last paragraph there (of course I would! When do I not enjoy a good quibble)?

Although Christ will most assuredly make a new creation, are you sure that the sentence "Christ died to redeem creation" is entirely biblical?

What Christ Does with Creation v.s. What Christ Does with Christian
It seems to me that what Rom 8:18-23 says is "Christ subjected creation to futility until He is done redeeming--soul and body--those for whom He died. But, when that is complete, He will release the creation by making it to enjoy the glorious freedom of those children of God."  
[edit: in the absence of a "read more" link on this blog, please click this post's title to read the rest of it]

Earth Day 2011--Another Opportunity to Worship the Creation Rather than the Creator

(Kevin) For the record, this post is recycled, which makes me feel all warm and environmental inside.

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If you plan to celebrate Earth Day today, Gentle Reader, consider well before you do. I am not a big fan of Earth Day because of its history and goals.

Celebrated each April 22 since 1970, Earth Day is the brain child of Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI). Nelson, who was also a big advocate of the Zero Population Growth movement, believed that stablilizing population growth was a necessary pre-requisite of enviromentalism. He said, "The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become ...We have to address the population issue."

The outworking of Nelson's vision has been a dramatic spike in radical enviromentalism, explosive growth in the abortion industry, and the creation of a new-Socialism that seeks to promote its wealth redstribution programs behind cute pictures of polar bears or heart wrenching images of starving, crying children.

In their own words, organizers seek to,

"Mobilize public action and support for effective climate policies and a strong global agreement; large scale investments in renewable energy; a comprehensive green jobs program; poverty-alleviation measures that are compatible with sustainability, and other public actions that will support a resolution of the climate crisis." [Epmphases added]

Innocent enough sounding words but their adoption would lead to dramatic loss of freedom and massive increases in taxation, as the highlighted buzz phrases imply.

What is the common denominator in all this? Simply put there are two:

1. 
   

   The Creation, and not the Creator, become the focus. Nowhere is God mentioned in Earth Day literature. Rather the earth is personified in an almost idolatrous fashion, as people everywhere are called upon to help Mother Earth. 
2. Man becomes the greatest enemy of Creation, and not the steward of it. Modern enviromentalism believes that man is the greatest threat to the planet, but not all of us. Reading between the lines demonstrates that it is usually the affluent West (especially the United States) that is the locus of all environmental and social evils in the world.

Both views are unbiblical. Genesis 1-2 clearly teaches that God created everything, out of nothing, by his powerful word, in six days, and all very good. The Creation itself testifies to the existence of God and puts on display indisputable proof of his majesty, glory, and power. (Psalm 19) The problem is that man looks at the evidence and rather than glorifying God in heaven, he turns to worship the Creation rather than the Creator.

The second problem is that the Bible does not cast man as the enemy of Creation, but the steward of it. Genesis 1:28 says:

And God blessed [the man and the woman]. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Far from being the enemy of the world , mankind was created both to use it and to be its protector. Here however, is where Christians need to be careful. In aligning ourselves with Earth Day we align ourselves with a movement headed by idolaters and murderers. That is not the sort of company God's people should keep.

We can, however, by environmental in a redeemed way. Christ died not only to redeem his people but also to redeem Creation. That does lay upon believers, then, an obligation to be careful with what God has given us and to try to leave the Creation in good shape for subsequent generations. But it also reminds us that human efforts will ultimately prove fruitless. In the end, this world and everything in it will pass away. We look for a new heaven and a new earth to appear when Christ returns.

Those Everlasting Arms! by James Smith

"Underneath are the everlasting arms!" Deuteronomy 33:27

That is--underneath every believer.
Those everlasting arms are there . . .
  to bear him up,
  to bear him on, and
  to preserve from all real danger.

The arms of God are . . .
  invisible--no one sees them;
  spiritual--no one feels them;
  careful--no one falls out of them;
  omnipotent--no one overcomes them.

If the everlasting arms of my God are underneath me, then . . .
I may quietly yield myself unto Him;
I may confidently expect divine protection;
I may be certain that He will lift me above my foes;
I may feel assured that He will safely convey me home.

Aged saints may rejoice in this; for to them the Lord says, "I will be your God throughout your lifetime--until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you!" Isaiah 46:4

And weak believers may rejoice in this, for "He will carry the lambs in His arms, holding them close to His heart!" Isaiah 40:11

O to realize this sweet and encouraging truth: underneath me are the everlasting arms!

You Shall Not Surely Die

graphic by www.danspulpit.com (click to enlarge)

The cleverness of his video and the clamor of his defenders give the impression of a newness to Rob Bell's latest folly, but there's nothing really new about it. As Sean Lucas has pointed out, the church has seen this kind of thing before.

And even when it comes to Bell himself, there's nothing new here. Rob Bell's heterodoxy on the Bible and the atonement isn't new. His vague but deadly confusion of the gospel isn't new. Even his technique of teaching his heresy through questions then teflon-coating himself later with more orthodox sounding statements (that never correct the heresy) isn't new.

So, this idea that the jury's out until you read the book, or that you have to speak to him or read it before you can critique the video is bogus. What may surprise you is just how old Bell's view is.

Eve Was Deceived

Most of us have known that for so long that we don't marvel like we should. Unfallen, perfectly created, obedient, wholehearted-for-God Eve was deceived. Adam wasn't, 1 Tim 2:14 tells us, but Eve indeed was. She thought she was doing the right thing when she took the fruit. She thought she was doing the right thing when she gave some to her husband.

Has God Really Said?

You have God's words. But you might not have God's meaning.

That's the idea behind Satan's first clever attack. Here's a being that can talk. Hmm... that's different from the animals.

And it knows the words of God. Maybe it's testing me to see if I will be faithful. Maybe it's sent from God to see if I've been paying attention, and if I'm really following with a whole heart.

I know the words, but maybe I haven't gotten the meaning. Maybe this creature is here to help me.

The Big Lie

You shall not surely die. It seemed a direct contradiction of what her husband said that God had said.

Adam had explained to her about that wonderful tree of life, that sacrament of their covenantal agreement with God, that testified with each bite to the lavish provision and love of God in giving them all of their life, all of their pleasure.  And Adam had explained to her about the one non-negotiable term of the agreement: you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And Adam had explained the consequence: in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

The punishment sounded so dreadful! And, we don't know whether it was Adam or Eve who had come up with the idea that God had said not even to touch it. But in Eve's mind--remember, she was deceived, rather than willful here--it must have seemed so inconsistent with everything else that she knew about God. Really? Die? But God is the One who has given us life. God is the One who has given us every tree that is pleasant for the eye. God is the One who has given us every tree that is good for food. God is the One who has given us the very tree of life!

Still, the Word of God is the Word of God, so we must not eat, or else we will die. But, what if this is really a question of hermeneutics? What if "you shall surely die" isn't a statement about what will happen to us, but God's rhetorical attempt to get us to advance spiritually? [if you've listened to Rob Bell, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?]

And what if the one who showed this to you was undeniably impressive, almost as if a messenger [angel] from God with just the light [an angel of light?] to rightly understand God's strange statement that "you shall surely die"? Perhaps he would distinguish himself as unlike the beasts of the garden by being able to talk. Perhaps he would come with some secret knowledge of God that would make all that dying stuff go away.

But in order for her to be deceived into thinking "you shall not surely die" didn't mean that there was such a thing as divine wrath for disobedience, a perfectly intelligent, perfectly righteous woman would have to have a pretty good reason to understand it differently.

The Big Lure

This is where Genesis 3:5 makes Genesis 3:4 plausible for a godly woman to believe. Eve knows that she and Adam exist to image God in the creation. The first words that ever rung in her perfect ears were, "this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." Her uniqueness, her purpose in creation was clear: complement and complete your husband as the only creatures in all of creation who bear the very image of God.

So, perfect-hearted Eve would want more than anything--more than anything--to image her God.

For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God. What if eating the fruit was a way to fulfill my God-given purpose? What if it was a test? What if the warning about death wasn't because death would actually happen but rather a test to see if I love to image God more than I love even my own life?

Right now, my eyes are closed; I cannot see His purposes. But when I eat, then my eyes will be opened. When I eat, I will be like God. And I will have served Him by attaining, through faith, to a new level of imaging Him in the creation.

Eve was deceived.

Her sin in the fall was not willful, as Adam's had been. She actually thought she was pleasing God. An angel of light had appeared to her and convinced her that God was not as hard as she had supposed Him to be; she had simply misunderstood His words.

You shall not surely die.

The Original Trajectory Theology

So you see, using Vimeo may be new. And the hipster glasses. And the edgy jitter, that creepy motion in the video that attempts to knock you off balance visually, as his questions knock you off balance theologically and spiritually. That stuff might be new.

But the trajectory theology--that wonderful new thing with which Rob Bell is supposedly saving us from our atonement-obsessed selves--that's not at all new.

What's trajectory theology? It's Rob Bell's doctrine of Scripture. It's the idea that truth isn't found in the mere grammatical content of the words of Scripture, but that God was doing something "bigger" with the Bible--that He was using the Bible words to initiate a trajectory in which His dealings with man, and our understanding of Him, would combine with our increasing understanding of what Scripture means (as opposed to what it actually says). There's plenty on the net about Bell's trajectory theology. Google it.

I started this article  by saying that Rob Bell's ideas are older than we think. Any believer who hears someone say, "has God really said?" and then follow it with "you shall not surely die" should be thinking, "hmm... where have I heard that before?" Yes, Bell's ideas are literally as old as sin.

I honestly don't know if Bell is deceived. It seems to me that the most charitable thing is to hope that he is. The greater grief in Genesis 3:1-6 isn't that Eve was deceived; it's that Adam wasn't.

So, whether or not Rob Bell is deceived, I write this article in the hope that you, dear reader, will not be.

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (ESV) Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

That, dear Rob, is how to be one of the few innumerable multitude like grains of sand on the ocean shore.

People Who Think They Are Christians but Aren't

I have a young pastor friend from an Arminian background who has been reformed by Scripture (with the help of good books and men) within the last few years. It's very exciting for me to interact with him, because everything is being reexamined under the lens of the Bible now; nothing is off limits. So worship, pastoral care, preaching, discipling--as he discovers these things again for the first (biblical) time, he's bringing me along by making me rethink them all as well.

His most recent question had to do with something he came across in Lloyd-Jones's Preaching and Preachers: people who think they are Christians, but they are not. My friend wanted to know: is there really such a category of person? and how, pastorally do we deal with them? Just what is the reformed (biblical) view of conversion?

The following is my response:

I think that a careful reading of some of the "in vain" passages in Paul's letters does indeed make the point that many who are named saints, and who believe themselves to be converted, have been called such "emptily"--and go to Hell. Also to the point on this are those people who claim to be Christians (note the "in Your Name," stressed by word order, not once but three times), and who do many thinks that they consider works of service and witness unto Christ, and yet who perish. And of course there are the warning passages in Hebrews, and those who do not endure in Revelation, etc., etc.

Probably the easiest, most recent treatment of conversion that I would recommend is Piper's Finally Alive.

The Puritans wrote much on what they called "gospel hypocrites" (someone who understood the gospel, and thought themselves converted, but were self-deceived, and should have known so by their actions and by their attitudes toward sin and the law, among other things).  I think that the best thing I ever read on this topic was The Almost Christian Discovered by Matthew Mead. There was one written about the same time by Thomas Shepard, called The Parable of the Ten Virgins (or something like that).

Pastorally, let me give you this counsel: follow the model of 1 John. It is next to impossible to differentiate between a gospel hypocrite and a struggling believer (as the Heb warning passages demonstrate). So, it is helpful that there is a letter in the New Testament that has as its stated purpose to give the believer assurance (1Jo 5:13). So point them... you know that you are converted because you love God, you love Christians, you love God's commands. And if they say, "but I fail," that is very different than saying "but I don't." The answer to "but I fail," is 1Jo 1:7-10. The answer to "but I don't love..." (any one of those three: God, believers, the law) is 1Jo 1:5-6. That's the person that you then tell to ask God to change his heart and grant him repentance, and you too must pray for such people.

The last of the three (love to law) is the most helpful test, practically, to me, although the first of them (love to God) is the strongest love.  This is because I think it is easier to deceive oneself that we love God, or even that we love our brother (notice the specific examples, however, of what genuine love to the brother looks like--John won't let us off the hook so easily).  However, there is many a sourpuss who thinks that the pool of acid that oozes out of his pantlegs everywhere he goes is the "love of the law." Such a person should be pressed with whether or not he has (or even desires) any fruit of the Spirit.

In addition to the three "loves" that God works in the heart of the converted, 1John refers often to the 1 great doctrine that God convinces the mind of the converted: "that the eternal Son, God Himself, has come in the flesh, died, risen, and is returning in a glorious resurrection body, and that we shall see Him face to face." Everyone that hopes thus purifies himself. So, if there is someone who doesn't love God's law, there may be a doctrinal problem: not that they don't get the "logic" of the gospel, but rather, they are not convinced of the reality of it. Those who are convinced that we are going to see the resurrected Jesus from our own resurrected flesh love the commands of God, both for the opportunity to please Him, and for their usefulness in sanctification, as we pursue glory.

So, I guess this answer isn't entirely comprehensive, but: 

yes, it is a biblical reality that there are many who think themselves Christians now that will curse God forever from the flames. But if you suspect that to be the case with someone in your congregation, I would suggest starting out by trying to minister assurance to them, and allow the tests for assurance to expose them to themselves. (it is generally unhelpful to tell someone that is indistinguishable from a struggling believer: "I don't believe that you're converted." If the elders, collectively, are forced to make such a public statement at the end of a discipline process, so be it)

I hope this helps,

James

So, pastor, do you just ignore that there are congregants whose lives are inconsistent with their professed faith in Christ? And, dear struggling Christian (or self-deceived child of wrath!), won't you please put yourself under the revealing microscope and healing balm of 1John? If you are struggling, you need some gospel therapy. If you are self-deceived, you had better find out now!