God's Sovereignty & God's Glory — Rolfe Barnard

God's Sovereignty and the Cry to See God's Glory

The subject tonight is God's sovereignty and God's glory. I want to just start with reading this request from a man who believed in a sovereign, living God. He made the most tremendous request that a person could possibly make.

Out of the barrenness of his experience, he's akin to us, a man by the name of Moses, goes to the only one that it'd be any use to go to if one dared hope to ever see God's glory, since he knew he couldn't work it up himself, he couldn't manufacture it himself.

He goes to the Lord God and says, I beseech thee, show me thy glory. If any man ever sees God's glory or God in his glory, it'll have to be by God doing it. I want to face a problem with you, if I may, it's a problem for me at least.

The Reformation's Recovery of God's Living Sovereignty

In the matter of God's sovereignty, we're all sethors to the men whom God was pleased to use in what we call the Reformation. And the Reformation, that awakening, that movement of the sovereign Redeemer that went so far toward a recovery of Christianity in its fulness, that movement was characterized above all else by its fresh, not its new, but its fresh insistence on the present sovereignty and initiative of God.

They, with a freshness and a vividness and a conviction that had well nigh been lost, came to experience the truth that it is God, a present God, not an absent monarch, who forgives and saves, that it's a present God who reveals truth and life, that God, a present living God, not somebody who made a visit, instituted some laws and went fishing.

But a present living God is key, and man is utterly dependent upon him every moment that he lives. And that present God demands obedience. Now, this was nothing new as the content. The Roman Church, the medieval Church, also taught that final salvation can come only from God, that without his grace it is impossible to see God, that God is the source as well as the goal of life, that God is the seeker as well as the sought.

But the men God raised up and through whom this movement was born and grew, laid whole with a vividness of these truths, the vividness of which had been lost. What had been habitually believed became a matter of urgent conviction, and that's a desperate need of us.

What had been taught as ancient and accepted doctrine was realized as vital experience. The dead were sobbed and agonized and strained and prayed and wrestled with the solemnity of an ever-present living God.

He didn't come to believe it as a doctrine, he came to experience it as truth. That's the reason when he preached, men would reach up and grab ahold of the wraps of the and hope that God would not cast them into hell now.

Sovereignty Reduced to Abstract Doctrine

Now, this is a problem that we face. When the sovereignty of God has been reduced to a code of law of an ancient monarch, all the ideas connected with it at a time when this sovereignty was experienced as a living reality, all the ideas are lost.

That's the reason anybody's tempted to even speak on these things in the last few years. It's been the center of debate and made a million mistakes and everything else, because it's been a matter of debating doctrine against doctrine, a conception of one fellow's conception against another.

We've lost the fight of the truth that the sovereignty of God means the living of an ever-present God, upon whom men are utterly dependent at every moment of their lives. Now, if I can illustrate what I'm talking about.

Blessed men of God who have left us from heritage, men like Edwards and Hopkins and Whitfield and Finney and others, knew the sovereignty of God as the present activity and the present initiative of the being on whom men are dependent every moment of their lives.

But in your reading of history, by the time you get to one of the great successors of these men whom I mentioned, a man by the name of Lyman Beecher, a leader of his day, he and his colleagues preached or seemed to believe in an absolute monarch who declared his will and recorded it in some laws and went back to heaven to let us work it out.

The Living God Behind the Moral Law

One reason for the rebellion against absolute standards today in moral realms and everywhere else is that this generation knows nothing about the God of the law. We've lost the sense of the presence of the God whose character is revealed by the law.

And so men who have no conception of a living God feel free to throw the ten commandments out the window because we've isolated the law from the God of the law. Now to live under the sovereignty of an absent monarch who's just made some laws we expect him to obey, is to live not in relation to a divine being, but in obedience to law.

And there you have mechanical obedience. Where a living protest, like an undammed stream, has been reduced to a petrified prodder, and in that way institutionalized faith has thus reduced the sovereignty of God to a law and his activity to faith.

And so the divine determinism of an Edward becomes fatalism in his successors. Deeply ingrained in this generation, you attack these truths that were vivid and livid and warm-blooded on yesterday. You're preaching them to people who don't have the slightest idea what on God's earth you're talking about.

A Cry for the Glory of God in a Dead Church

It was to a living, active, ever-present God that Moses came and said, Show me thy glory. The sovereignty of God is that. He'll have to show his glory. Nobody can help it, I think, in Moses' heart. Surely something of what must be in the heart of every child of God in these desperate days of crystallized doctrines, institutional Christianity, and petrified laws, everything except the dynamic, life-giving stream of Christ Jesus alive.

Surely, if you went to St. Imbodium, you tried to public the preach, agonizing cry of your heart. Is it in our days? For this is only the day. This is our only day. Almighty might be pleased to uncrash this.

Is this the fuzzle? Religiously cocaine jizz glows. It's that God tells the prophet Isaiah to cry, cry, and make a noise. What shall I cry? What shall I cry? Go up and down the land and that shall just wind up in a grave.

Behold your God. This sovereign God that the prophet is to point men to when he's whittled them down to where they walk, a glimpse of the holy, that God to whom Moses went with a request, show me thy glory.

That is the unknown God of fundamentalism, of liberalism, of the whole raft. Us fundamentalists have got some creed and some law. The liberals have got some token dreams based on nothing. This world's going to hell without a glimpse of the glory of God.

The God of today was made for America, instead of America being made for God. Christianity, Calvinism, if you want to use little terms, the whole outfit is deistic to the core. We are suffering now because we've got an absent monarch who made some laws and left us alone.

The prayerlessness of your life and your church in this present emphasizes the fact that we just don't believe that God Almighty is alive in the acts today. This generation's never beheld its God, nor seen its glory.

Conviction, Holiness, and the Gospel of Mercy

I'm trying to say this. Women have been awakened to the nakedness of themselves to get a glimpse of the glory of God. That's how God saves men. They receive a deep conviction. Always multitudes are born into the kingdom of God.

Whenever there comes this sense of the holy, this sense of the awesome presence of the Christ. Read again, Jonathan Edwards, sinners in the hands of an angry God. The heart of it is he believed in a living God that actually held sinners in his hand and could drop them into the pit any moment.

It wasn't a cold option to be argued. It is that God's true life is in his heart. That of the awesome holiness and presence of God, stealing over the hearts of men. The great deep in their hearts have broken up.

Gone is the voice of the sinner, I've heard it till I think I'll go crazy, who in with the devil. I'm going to debate whether or not he'll patronize the Son of God by saying, Christ is knocking at my sad heart's door.

Shall I let him in? Shall I bid him forever depart, or shall I let him in? Instead of that blasphemous cry that every personal working, perfect preaching child of God hears until he has to bathe his soul in the pool of bread-loving revelation and dip his heart in it again to keep from throwing up his hands in it.

Instead of that, we shall hear men and women, from them shall come the heart-wrung sob, depths of mercy. Can there be mercy still reserved for me? Can my God's serious wrath forbear me, the chief of spare?

When I had a little taste of that, the only reason I didn't go to heaven was because my gallus kept me down. Oh, I love this living. You go around catching hold of coattails of God's people saying, got just a minute?

Do you suppose that a frightful would show mercy to such as me? Show me thy glory. The old Puritan said that grace is glory to God, and glory is grace completed. The Apostle Paul challenges us in a verse that challenges me more than any verse of Scripture, just for me, when he said, according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, which hath been entrusted to me.

Oh, brother, even you, whom I loved in the Lord, you didn't know him, but the man and some of the younger brethren you knew the last two, three, four years of his life, the old warrior, saint of God, used to say to me, Brother Barnard, sometimes I get a little weary, and I just want to fall in with what they call the gospel now.

Everybody's getting results except me, and everybody's just having fun, just taking the kingdom by storm. He said, I think they'll just get me a little text and some free illustrations and leave out what we've been hearing about what he blessed me in tonight.

But then he said, I can't. A godly pastor said to me the other day, Brother Barnard, why don't you just preach the simple gospel? He said, you get into too much trouble, raise hell to many places. And I said, I wish I could.

Under God I do. But I think about this generation of men and women that have got saved and never have felt anything of the awesomeness of the presence of a holy God who holds them in their hearts and have never had a glimpse of the glory of the Redeemer.

They're the results of this simple gospel that a man can get saved and never know it and lose it and never miss it. Somehow or other we ask God for grace in our blundering, stumbling ways to preach the gospel of the glory of God.

For the gospel of the glory of God is the gospel of the grace of God. And the sovereign God reveals himself and his heart and his purpose through his Son only in a gospel that unfolds and manifests and placards his glory.

Moses in the Cleft of the Rock

God answered the request of Moses, but before he did, he took note of the fact that Moses couldn't see God's glory in all of its fullness. And he said, before I answer your request, there's a rock over there, and he said, there's a cleft in it.

And he said, you see that over there and get in the cleft of the rock. And he said, when the glory passes by, he said, I'll let you start. That's all he said. That's the reason for the incarnation of Christ as a man.

There was no hope of the glory of Christ. The glory of the sovereignty of God is manifesting the verge and the use of, in verse 19, he said, now you get over there in that rock and say, come now, I'm going to show you my glory.

I'm going to placard my glory. I'm going to unveil my glory. I'm going to manifest my glory. I'm going to let you get a little glimpse of my glory. He said, I will make my goodness pass before the earth.

He said, I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. Just a little glory takes you so you can't lie for a solid moon.

God Does the Preaching and Shows Mercy

Oh, to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, that salvation. I want to look at this parade of God's glory. I think he says the same thing. I say, I think he says the same thing three different ways.

You want to see my glory? Here it is. Watch me in action, as I will cause my goodness to pass before thee. I don't want to wait until I learn anything about the grace of God to watch God in action. I don't want to wait until I learn anything about the glory of God to watch him in action.

Join the parade, Moses, hidden in that crest of the rock, and I'll make all my goodness to pass before you. I think the same thing he said. How are you doing? I'll proclaim when we'll ever learn that God does the preaching.

He just uses our little mouth. Oh, he's not called us to go around electioneering and try to get some votes for us. Vote for him. He is still the one voice that can wake a dead sinner. And the glory of incarnation from top to bottom is that he has been freed to let man give voice to our voice.

That's the greatest challenge that God's people are knowing about. I'll proclaim the name of the Lord before thee, and I'll speak gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I'll show mercy to whom I will show mercy.

I think that's saying the same thing three ways. There can be no goodness apart from the action of this Lord, for the name means authority. There can be no goodness and no mercy except that it is dispensed by a living hand, the living Lord from the throne.

Mercy as God's Sovereign Gift

And so I don't know whether this is good theology or not, but you don't either. So listen to me as I approach this message very briefly now, and just say three things. Oh, God support us. The cry of this poor abundant preacher's heart has been, and the older I get, the more keen it gets until some time comes that, God, I think I'll break with it.

I wish I could be used as God in my little potato patch to restore the mercy of God to the place where to be a source of wonder that he showed it to anybody, especially me. Oh, the wonder of it all. Yes, since I got a letter from Brother E. W. Johnson, he's forgotten.

And he says, Brother Barnes, I tried to wrangle him, and so forth and so forth. He said, Do you know any group of people in America where a man could have some cheese and sell it for some jobs and such?

I wrote him back, and he said, Like the old Baptist, the old primitive Baptist. How about them? I said, We got them seven different brands of the primitive Baptist, and we instigated them along. They fuss like us.

The old Baptist church is present. The company accepts it. You have to have a pro bono deputy sheriff to have a business meeting. It ain't safe otherwise. And I wrote him back and said, I didn't know where to go but if he could find the congregations and made-up people that obtained mercy.

It would be hard to do. Oh, you folks. And God ought to have shown you mercy. You're such a sweet little fellow. You prayed so long, and you gave a dime to that beggar, and you did this, and you did that, and you did that, and you told God he'd do this, you'd do that, and you made a bargain, and you're going to hell.

But if we had a congregation made-up of people who'd obtained mercy, and didn't have to start with, and didn't have nothing to buy it with, and had no claim on it but a sovereign God who alone could do it out of the goodness of his own heart.

And he said, look down, instead of opening up a hole and sending you to hell without time to practice those things, he showed redeeming, sovereign, gracious, saving mercy to a soul like us. Those people would be like those to whom the apostle Peter wrote and said, to you who have a pain like pressure.

They'd obtained it. They'd obtained it. They didn't buy it. But they obtained it. Since God is always the giver and man the receiver, they obtained it because God gave it. The one who can give something is the possessor and owner of it, and that's the sovereign God.

Yes, since I got on a train in Western Salem, and Monday at noon, and went to Illinois, I had the flu. I closed the meeting Sunday night, and the doctor had given me shots and everything. I was sick as a mule, but I rolled out, and Monday noon I skedaddled up to evangelize the anchors.

And I got to the place there about noon Tuesday, and I was really sick. That flu bug had me. And the pastor met me at the train, gracious man, and began to apologize. It was Tuesday night, and he said, Brother Barn, I feel awful bad.

He said, we won't have much to cry about tonight. He said, they're having something up at the schoolhouse, and most of our folks will be up there. So I propped myself up and preached a nice little sermon on Tuesday night.

A handful of folks got sick and couldn't get out of heaven with a crowbar. I thought I didn't preach very good, but I must preach the quarter, because after I shook in two or three folks, I skedaddled and went back to bed because I was sick.

The chairman of the board of deacons rushed out to the front, stood on the pulpit and said, he's a false prophet. He said, we ought to run him out of town. The pastor finally came, and that man said, I'll give you a check for $400.

You get that preacher and send him home. I wished they had taken him up, but they didn't. I didn't know nothing about it. I took some dope and went to sleep, and the doctor came and gave me a shot or two the next day, and I propped myself up and had about three or four more folks of the Saints that slid out for Wednesday night and got back from the school.

I must have preached another whale of a sermon. It was bound to have been powerful, because I was still sick and I got out as soon as I could and went back to bed. I remember the pastor said, I want to meet the deacons down in the basement, soon as they have been evicted.

So they had been evicted and the deacons went that way, and I went to bed. I found out later that the dear pastor was tearing up his playhouse like McDonald's. I held a meeting for him, and he wouldn't go to the same place.

I still don't know how to find that outfit, because he didn't want me to find out, so I'd come back. That pastor began to walk the floor and said, Oh, Brother, what are we going to do? We're going to tear our church all to pieces, Brother.

I must have been powerful to tear our church up in two nights, sick as I was. But he said, We're going to tear it all to pieces. The Lord just rang in his hands, and he asked Brother Dale Pickle, and he said, Brother, what's the matter with that deacon?

And Sister Spoon died, and she agreed with him. And everybody agreed there was an amess, and they didn't hardly know how to get out of it until it came to an old white-haired deacon. I've had a few dear men like that stand the breach and got on it.

They got to him and he said, Now, boys, that's what he called. He said, Boys, and he praised the new pastor, You've got to keep your hands off of that guy. He's preaching the gospel of a living, sovereign Lord.

And said, You ain't never heard it, for you've never seen it blow. And bless God, he cried. I didn't know a thing about this, for a fact. Well, Thursday night the house was jam-packed. I told you about such a big preacher.

But what happened was, it got out all over town, about how the next Friday the preacher missed it, too, and how crazy he was! And a pretty Thursday night, and a pretty Friday night, and Saturday night, I didn't get to preach!

A fella stood up, he'd been practicing about six weeks, but he made a mistake. And he began to sing in the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit used the song that had the gospel in it to explicate and interpret what I preached.

Since I can't show anybody God's glory, the Holy Spirit had to do it, and he used the song. And the fella stood up, he had it all practiced, and he forgot it, and he began to sing, Love sent my Savior to die in my head.

Why does he love me so? Oh, the wonder that I can't create in anybody's heart. The Holy Spirit did, in hearts that night. Meekness at Calvary's cost, he was led. Why? Instead of this bargain-based gospel, there's God's own obligation to do so-and-so.

God does give everybody a square deal. That way that I've endured for forty years. Oh, no, not that. But why should he love me? And the organist went clear, and he began to scream, Bravo! Down on his feet was the.

And the pastor began to scream down on his feet in the presence of the felt strength of a sovereign God who holds man in his hand. That deacon was going to claim that he got saved. I think he did. For a good moment, Catholics have never been in the gospel service.

They claim to get saved. You can tell the sons, too, that it's a sight only. The next morning, the man who owned the biggest saloon in town came and interrupted us for breakfast and threw down some tea.

I hadn't said anything about a saloon, nothing there. I didn't know him, Adams or Fox, said, Pastor, there's the key. I locked that thing up and never opened it again. And that news spread all over the city.

We had a little taste of God. Doing what only God can do. Melting men and women down to the place of thanksgiving, to the place where he could open the skies and their eyes and reveal himself in Christ to them.

Mercy Revealed in the Son

Or if we could have the wonder of it. The second thought, desperately do we need to affirm over and over again that God shows his mercy in, not apart from, the Son of his love. Mercy is not a great pool of mercy that a man can dip his dipper in that his can be used.

But God shows his mercy in and through his own Lord. That man is separate from his giver. When have you heard anybody blessing God? Because he does. All we know, Lord did this for me, Lord did that for me, Lord did that for me.

I wonder if we know anything about salvation. Oh, the mercy of God is in the hands. And that hand has a nail printed in it. And it's in the hands of a man. And that man can go there. And there's no way on God's earth he can experience his mercy, except he does what he says he does.

Yield. Yield. Yield unto them eternally. Who does it? A freed notion, a living Lord. Where is he? He's on God's throne. Contact by faith must be made, not with a dead Christ, but an enthroned Lord. For he, himself, has mercy.

And in that expression, I do not know that I'm capable of talking about it. I'll make a stab on it. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious. Thou show mercy to whom I will show mercy. The longer I live, the sweeter that passage grows to me.

I'm almost to the place where I can say, now thank God for the blessed privilege of looking him in the face and telling me that God Almighty has stated and he exercises that right, and he does it. To show mercy upon whom he will.

I'll tell you, that's the widest application could be made of that. Just as Scripture said he showed mercy to the man who desired it, left alone of God. He never showed mercy to anybody. The saddest, most pessimistic version of the Bible is, he will not come unto me, that you might have life.

There's no hope there, that's just plain faith. That's just telling the truth about everybody from Adam down to the last man. Let a man get in a resting place like these people did in the scriptures, or dig him a well and find the water and it satisfies them, whatever it is.

And they never will, left alone of this suffering spirit, come to Christ. Thank God there is a note of hope. No man can come unto me except the Father draw him at the toes and send openly wide into the heart and will of God.

We try to learn how to preach the gospel far and good people do. They talk so much about the freedom of the gospel, the wide openness. It's as wide as the heart of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And since he's the only one that can show saving mercy, I'm glad it's left into his hands. I believe he'll do a better job of dispensing it than any of us could if we would, or would if we could. It's the only alternative to what they call the gospel of the sinner.

If we suffer today by living in a day when men feel no need of mercy, it is because for these years and years and years, mercy has been what God owes men, not what God gives men, as he wills. It's the alternative to a pay-as-you-go religion.

It's the door of all hope. The offense of this has amazed me, the fact that I stand in focus on the Baptist churches, or I could stand in a preacher church or a congregational church, or any of the churches that started as a burden, broke their merit.

Ever last one of them was founded in the sovereignty and pleasure of God. And yet I am preaching to their children, and to look me in the face and say, that's heresy, that's our problem. Don't get mad about it, but our hearts need to be broken about it.

This is a desperately deceived generation. I'm so glad it's in his hands. I couldn't produce a Savior, thank God he could. I couldn't write a Bible, thank God he did. I couldn't show any man how to be holy, thank God he can.

I haven't got any mercy to show anybody, to do anybody good. Thank God he said, I'll show mercy, I'll run it, I'll determine it, in the Son, to whom I will. There is a freedom there that enables us to preach and extend this to every human being.

Oh, my Lord will say, but God, who is rich in me, will say, he is rich toward all who call him, mercy. The revelation of God's glory, God's glory in action, the glory of a sovereign, living God in action.

A Revival Among the Spiritually Dead

Many years ago in Canada, I went to hold a meeting for a fundamental, independent, premarital, separated, dead church. Well, they were separated, no question about that. They hadn't spoken to us in years.

They could get that those days. And they were sound as a dollar. They had a man that leased his land and somebody blew the back on it and turned the man out of the church. But they hadn't had a conversion for 12 years.

They were separated and dead. Well, I come in, getting them up on one hill and down the other. It was 20 below zero. And they'd come a-sliding up there as bunnies go, they came in. And the first thing I knew, I got them out, ringing doorbells.

That's liable to get some of them non-elects to stay. They'd stay over in North Carolina. We wasn't going to do that. So a deacon and I, we were ringing doorbells. They never had done anything, any of it, in the average, whatever sentence in Calvin it is.

He ain't neither, you know. And, oh, we came to a little old home with a wicked deacon. Deacon Isaac, and I started to un-elect the deacon. He said, Brother Prager, I wouldn't go in there. I said, Why not?

He said, I wouldn't want to stay. I started to go in. He said, Please don't go in there. I said, Why not? Oh, he said, I wouldn't want to stay. And I started to go on in. He said, Prager, you're determined to go in there.

And I said, Yes. He said, It'll ruin the meeting if you go in there. And I said, There ain't got no meeting. It can't be ruined. It can't be heard. It's too dead. I said, Why would it ruin the meeting?

He said, Why, you don't know who's in there. I said, I'm fixing to find out. Oh, he said, if the people found out she's knocked on that door, it'll just cause terrible trouble. I said, I'd welcome a little of it.

And so I finally, the dear brother didn't want to speak evil, and I said, That's the most notorious woman in all this province that's coming in. And I said, Well, that's where I'm going. I went up and knocked on the doorbell, and the beautiful woman came and said, Hello, And I said, Hi.

I said, I'm a southern preacher from down south, and I'm preaching out here at this little church building, and I've come to give you a special invitation to come hear me preach tonight. She said, You really preaching?

I said, Yeah. You want me to come hear you preach? I said, Yeah. She said, You know who I am? I said, No, but they tell me you're the biggest prostitute in this province of Canada. She said, Yes, that's right.

He said, Do you really want me to come? I said, Yes. She said, If I went up there, those people would faint. I said, They've been dead so long, they couldn't faint. And that is the truth. And she said, I said, I double don't dare you to come hear me preach.

She said, You mean it? I said, I do. And bless God she came. She came. She came. And when I finished preaching, we stood up, and there she came, just sobbing like a firewood brazier. And she fell down the first closet on all fours, and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

I don't know where she got saved, and I don't want to get too gloomy. But after a while she stood up, and there was a kind of glow red on her face. You know, we are products of what we look at. And she got a glimpse of glory.

The glory of God and the peace of Christ is revealed by the Spirit and the Holy Ghost. And it still settled on her face. And tears were streaming down her cheeks, and I went up to her, and I said, How is it?

And thank God she hadn't lived long enough to learn some theology. She pointed here, and she said, He's in here. I doubt not she told the truth. And I wondered what on earth such a bunch of octopi separated Baptist would do.

With a starless woman down there in front, what would you do with her? And I looked back, way back down to the old ADL, old mother Israel of the church, fries and spring chicken, pink cheeks and white hair, beautiful, godly woman.

I knew whatever she did, everybody else would do. And I saw her take her glasses up on the floor and wipe her eyes. And right there she came in a matronly walk, beautiful to behold. And she started walking, and then, aye-oh, she began to run.

And she ran down and took that one starless woman in her arms and planted a kiss on her cheeks and then on her mouth. And then with a rhyme about her, she turned to stone and said,. And the congregation and the older lady said,.

So everybody could hear her. Welcome, sister. Nobody but a God of all grace could act that way. Nobody but a God of all grace could manifest his glory by acting that way. He would put the impact of himself on the countenance of that woman, make her white as snow and pure as gold, give her a new start and a new heart and a song.

That's God's glory in action. And those Canadians would sing like none of us can. They began to sing, Amazing Grace, Amazing Grace, Amazing Grace, from terrific attendance. How great to save the wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see. And the glory of God came and filled the temple. If you just revealed his glory, you could walk in a little church building and say, I've done it.

And he'd already got there. And the sinners come in and they'll be melted with the awesome sense of the presence of God. Candidates for the experience of his mercy. Amazing Grace, as I read, we're going to stand and sing the song I love so well, Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.

Hear my humble cry, while on others Thou art calling, do not pass me by.

This Reformation audio track is a production of Stillwater's Revival Books. SWRB makes thousands of classic Reformation resources available, free and for sale, in audio, video and printed formats. Our many free resources, as well as our complete mail-order catalog, containing thousands of classic and contemporary Puritan and Reformed books, tapes and videos at great discounts, is on the web at www .swrb .com.

We can also be reached by email at swrb at swrb .com, by phone at 780 -450 -3730, by fax at 780 -468 -1096, or by mail at 4710 -37A, Edmonton, that's E-D-M-O-N-T-O-N, Alberta, abbreviated capital A, capital B, Canada, T -6-L -3-T -5.

You may also request a free printed catalog. And remember that John Calvin, in defending the Reformation's regulative principle of worship, or what is sometimes called the scriptural law of worship, commenting on the words of God, which I commanded them not, neither came into my heart.

From his commentary on Jeremiah 731, writes, God here cuts off from men every occasion for making evasions, since he condemns by this one phrase, I have not commanded them, whatever the Jews devised. There is then no other argument needed to condemn superstitions than that they are not commanded by God.

For when men allow themselves to worship God according to their own fancies, and attend not to his commands, they pervert true religion. And if this principle was adopted by the Papists, all those fictitious modes of worship, in which they absurdly exercise themselves, would fall to the ground.

It is indeed a horrible thing for the Papists to seek to discharge their duties towards God by performing their own superstitions. There is an immense number of them, as it is well known, and as it manifestly appears.

Were they to admit this principle, that we cannot rightly worship God except by obeying his word, they would be delivered from their deep abyss of error. The prophet's words, then, are very important, when he says that God had commanded no such thing, and that it never came to his mind, as though he had said that men assume too much wisdom when they devise what he never required, nay, what he never knew.