No Debating

I have a penchant for useless disputes. I’ve actually argued that Timothy and Titus were in fact the same person. I once got so swept away with predestination that I brought my dear wife to tears telling her that our kids may not be elect. Extremes entice me. I’m not into rappelling or white-water rafting, but as far my mind goes… Surf’s up! Being prone to the edges as I am, I need the balance that so many offer me in the Body of Christ. They reign me in time after time. The Bible itself does that too, if I let it. It’s amazing – I can spend hours reading each side of some theological slugging-match, and go away feeling so far from the Lord. Then, simply opening my Bible to read a passage totally unrelated leaves my jaw dropping at how ludicrously wondrous the Lord Jesus is. There’s no debating that.

The centrality and supremacy of the Lord Jesus Christ is so beyond dispute that I can safely spend all my days enraptured by Him, without a care for whoever might think such-and-such. It’s a freeing thing. Knowing that my personal theology is flawed in countless places, I can rest in the fact that I can’t get Jesus wrong. He’s made it too difficult to do so. “Altogether Lovely” is His uncontested title. What aspect of His life has ever been maligned? Except for the mystifying way the likes of Bertrand Russell may object to the withering of the fig-tree, the Lord Jesus remains the highest example of character the world has ever known. Religions of the world attest to his greatness. He has won the admiration of both the Believer and the Atheist – and the Agnostic. And He keeps winning mine.

Paul said, “To live is Christ.” Jesus is life. He’s a safe place to waste my time. He’s a worthwhile space to clear my calendar (and my head) for. His life began under a magnetic star that drew those thrice-gifted worshippers. All we know of his boyhood was that he baffled Rabbi’s not with answers, but with questions. As Mary searched for Him among her relatives on the road, she was simply rehearsing for the day when He would set His face like a flint toward Jerusalem once again, to be lost in the darkness of death. In both cases, He was found on the third day.

Whether He was getting the Man of the Tombs some clothes, or endearingly calling the Syro-Phoenician woman a dog to draw out her faith in Him – I can’t help being enamored with the Lord Jesus. Mary chose the better part than Martha, and her Lord promised that it would not be taken from her. Christ will defend me when I do the same. Sitting at His feet, I hear Him say the most with the fewest words – “Abide in me, and I in you.” May my reputation be that I am so heavenly-minded (because that’s where Christ is) that I am useless down here. My uselessness is no limit to Christ. “It is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me.” Fixated on Him, I am removed as a hindrance to what He wants accomplished here.

I will be distracted again by various winds of doctrine. I will get caught up in other vacuous endeavours. But at the back of the unrest I will find as I engage in all that has nothing to do with Christ – there I will find a longing to examine the face of Jesus with the eyes faith has provided. An open bible will be curtains thrown wide, tied-together, and climbed down, to escape from the Christ-less confine I make for myself all the time. He’s been throwing pebbles at my window as far back as I can remember. “Behold I stand at the door and knock…”

BJ

Selfish Faith

Only sinners go to heaven. I can still hear the voice of the preacher who phrased it that way. There was a touch of flabbergast in it and down-right stupefaction - “Only sinners go to heaven!” It’s a crazy thought. But it’s right. Here’s the way Paul phrased it in Romans 4:5 “But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness” – It’s about believing “on Him who justifies the ungodly” – On Jesus who makes right the wrong. When faith is placed in the one who makes sinners righteous by his death, salvation follows. That means that faith can’t change the fact that one is a sinner. It must be possible for faith itself to be an unrighteous act.

There has been a controversy in Theological circles about whether or not people can believe on Christ in an unregenerate state. I think I might have just glazed your donut. I need a can of Vacant-Expression-Be-Gone. There’s nothing like big theomological words to shut down discussion. Ok, let me say it another way: Faith sounds like a good thing, so how can bad people do that? Well, faith can be a good thing, but it doesn’t have to be. You can place your faith in the wrong object, and then it’s not so good is it? You can believe that the Sock-Gremlins have created one giant knee-high and are planning to slip it over the CN Tower. But even when faith is placed in the right thing – the Lord Jesus – it still might not qualify for being a good thing.

You have to ask yourself, why do people put their faith in Jesus? Well, they want to be saved. It’s a pretty selfish thing, really. You’re looking out for number one. It involves the instinct of self-preservation. They know they cannot save themselves, because they are sinners through-and-through. They reach out with the hand of faith to take the free gift of salvation. Can that be considered a righteous act worthy, even in part, of the salvation offered? Well, if you think a depraved person selfishly taking something that only benefits him or herself is a righteous act, then that’s a strange kind of righteousness, for sure.

Sin has left no part of our existence untouched. There is no little vestige of pre-fall life in us. We are in complete and utter need of saving. Even the faith we would exercise to receive the gift of life in Christ is messed up. Belief precedes life. That’s the Biblical order of things. But faith is not seen by God as worthy of righteousness. The way our verse about puts it is: “his faith is accounted for righteousness”. That’s a re-valuation of faith. It’s like a pre-Euro currency today being converted into gold. It’s not a good deal. But it’s the deal God has offered. His graciousness has made it possible.

So, only sinners go to heaven, and a sinner’s selfish faith in a self-less Christ is the way. Depravity and faith are friends after all. There is more to the story of salvation than this, of course. Is there any divine influence (or wooing) that goes on before a person exercises faith in Christ? There sure is. But we cannot think for one moment that any given person might have no possible chance of being born again. That would negate the words, “God is not willing that any should perish.” Faith is our responsibility, but that doesn’t mean that we have a hand in saving ourselves. God does it all. He gets all the glory. He even uses our selfishness to bring us to him.

BJ

Calvin And Jesus

Calvin – “I've decided to be a fatalist. All events are preordained and unalterable. Whatever will be will be. That way if anything bad happens, it's not my fault. It's fate.”
Hobbes trips Calvin and responds – “Too bad you were fated to do that.”
Calvin shouts back – “THAT WASN'T FATE!”

Bill Watterson named our favourite 6 year old after John Calvin. Predestination is a hard thing to avoid if you spend any time tinkering with Calvinism. But I have a question for John, or anyone who would call themselves a Calvinist. It’s this: Can you really believe all that you say you do and still say that justification is by faith? Where is that coming from, you ask… OK, I’ll back up a little. (beep, beep, beep…)

Calvinism says that regeneration precedes faith. English translation: You have to get the AC hooked up to the bolts sticking out of your head before you can believe. That appears to be Calvin’s view of us “dead in trespasses and sins” – We’re all Frankensteins. If that’s the case, life begins not with faith, but with, well… life. God must just zap us, regenerating us, and then we start to believe. So, justification, or giving us a right standing with God, is because He regenerated us, not because of faith. Faith then, would be a byproduct, not a cause.

Now don’t get me wrong. Faith doesn’t save anybody. Yes, you read that correctly. Jesus saves, not faith. It’s the object of faith that makes saving faith saving, not the faith. I don’t have to have a certain kind of faith or a particular degree of faith to be saved. I just have to have my faith (or confidence) in the right object – The Lord Jesus. He even saves those with weak faith (Romans 14:1). But if we are honest Calvinists, we can’t say that justification is by faith. We would have to say that justification is by regeneration. Faith isn’t a part of the equation at all.

As much as I appreciate Calvin’s contribution to Theology at a very dark time in the history of the Church, there’s been quite a bit of light since. He was dealing with folks that had stripped the Gospel of grace, and made the shed blood of Christ insufficient to save anyone. We can thank the Lord for the Reformers in many ways. But Calvin believed in infant baptism and Luther thought James should be fired from the Canon like a circus performer. They didn’t have the monopoly on truth, to say the least. They leaned heavy on the Sovereignty of God, and not heavy enough on man’s responsibility. They got off kilter.

We are “justified by faith” (Romans 5:1), and not by regeneration. Jesus asked sinful and utterly depraved people to believe in him, because in fact they could. It would have been an evil taunt otherwise. When Hobbes tripped Calvin, he discovered that even in a predetermined world, there was a little elbow-room. There’s not much, and it’s no “island of righteousness”, but there’s just enough to say, “Lord I believe – Help my unbelief!” You know what, even “dead faith” is a candidate for salvation. That’s how gracious the Lord Jesus is.

BJ

More Than All Of This

More than seeing harvest moons
Swaying hills of green or seas of brilliant blue
More than seeing snow-capped heights
Dawns give birth to days or stars redeeming nights

More than all of this, is a glimpse of Jesus’ face
More than all of this, is a glance from Him
May this hope of hopes make all else beside it look dim

More than seeing smiles chase tears
Hearts allowed to love or hopes abandon fear
More than seeing foes forgive
Conscience coming clean or life still left to live

More than all of this, is a glimpse of Jesus’ face
More than all of this, is a glance from Him
May this hope of hopes make all else beside it look dim

More than seeing angels fly
Scriptures etched in stone or written in the sky
More than seeing earth made new
Heaven’s golden street or loved ones gone too soon

More than all of this, is a glimpse of Jesus’ face
More than all of this, is a glance from Him
May this hope of hopes make all else beside it look dim


BJR

Have You Seen My Glasses?

A story is told about a teenage boy who asked his parents for a car, for his birthday. So, on the big day, it was rather disappointing to him to find that his folks had got him a new Bible, with no car in sight. He was angry, and going to his room, he threw the box the Bible was in against the wall, leaving it to lie on the floor where it fell. Some time passed - days turning into weeks - until one day, the boy picked up the box to take a look at his birthday present. As he flipped open the cover of the Bible, he was amazed to find a key taped to the inside flap. Running to his parents’ room, he showed them what he found. They then told him where the car was that belonged to that key. Yes, this is most likely a fictional story, but I think it illustrates the point: God’s Word is the key to understanding all we have in Christ – and that we have all in Christ! The problem is that so often we are unaware of our spiritual resources in Jesus.

You’ve probably been approached by someone looking for their glasses, who is unknowingly sporting them on their head. You almost don’t want to tell them, but with a snicker you finally do. Looking into a mirror would have saved that person some embarrassment. The Bible is a mirror we can look into to see who we are in Christ, and all that we have available to us. We need not look anywhere else. If we are not looking, we assume that God has not given us all we need. When we do look, we find that our circumstances do not bar anything we have in Christ. The truth of what we have in him actually changes the way we handle the things we face in life.

In a German prison camp in World War II, unbeknownst to the guards, the Americans built a makeshift radio. One day news came that the German high command had surrendered, ending the war—a fact that, because of a communications breakdown, the German guards did not yet know. As word spread, a loud celebration broke out. For three days, the prisoners were hardly recognizable. They sang, waved at guards, laughed at the German shepherd dogs, and shared jokes over meals. On the fourth day, they awoke to find that all the Germans had fled, leaving the gates unlocked. The time of waiting had come to an end.* They knew the truth, and lived like it was true! That can be your story and mine. Believe God. Hold him to his word.

The Children of Israel had been delivered out of Egypt. They had crossed the parted Red Sea, and were now in the Promised Land, but the first thing they found was the bitter waters of Marah. They complained to Moses, but God solved their problem. The Lord showed Moses a tree. Moses then tore it up and threw it into Marah, and the water became drinkable – sweet. May the Lord keep pointing us to the tree – The Cross of Christ.

BJ

*Philip Yancey tells this story in an article published by Christianity Today.