Reformation IV: Solus Christus and Soli Deo Gloria | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratiae, and I'm here again this week with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany, and author and teacher of the Behold Your God study series for Media Gratiae.

We're in pretty good ways, and I think we've reached the last of our Reformation series. This is because Reformation month was upon us recently, and we wanted to go and look at what was the Reformation, and what were the ongoing and spiritual core, what was at the core of what these men believed, and why they did what they did.

In the first episode, we laid out a timeline, and we made some comment on it. In the following ones, we've been taking one by one the five sola of the Reformation, which are sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, sola Christus, and sola Deo gloria.

If you haven't listened to the preceding podcast, you can go to Mediagratiae .org, or TheMeansOfGrace .org, and go through those there, because we're now reaching the place where we can talk about the last two.

Christ Alone as the Ground of Reconciliation

Solus Christus. I mentioned sola gratia and sola fide, and we talked about that in our last podcast, but really, this is at the core, because faith in whom? Grace by and grace through whom? It's really refreshing and wonderful to realize that there's a person at the heart of all these truths.

There's not just another doctrinal concept here, but all these things flow from a person. Solus Christus, Christ alone. What does that mean?

Simply put, we could say that Christ, the person and work of our Lord, that alone, that without any additive of any type, is the ground of God's being reconciled to us, God for us. It's not Christ plus obedience to the law.

It's not Christ plus the ordinances or rituals or sacraments of a church. It is Christ alone.

So, where do we see this in the scriptures? Again, we see the entire weight of the scriptures speaking in this way, but some very explicit examples. 1 Timothy 2 .5, For there is one God and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

Galatians 2 .21, I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly. So, they're showing that where does my righteousness come from? It comes from Christ and His work on my behalf.

And Galatians 5 .2, Behold, I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. So, what errors in the day of the Reformation was this sola counteracting?

I think that, you know, some of the obvious ones was that the Roman church offered a series of kind of mediatorial people between you and God. And even between you and the mediator that God provided, which, you know, in a sense, you can see the reasoning.

Like, well, Jesus is just so glorious a being that I don't know if I can lay my needs before Him. I don't know if I can come to Him and through Him come to God, you know, so the Father. So, I need, I'll go to Mary and then she'll go to Him.

And she's got a lot of sway with Him. She's His mom. And then, and then He'll go to the Father or I'll go to a saint. So, there were a whole string of kind of mediatorial persons that you would cry out to.

You know, you think of the account of Martin Luther crying out to the patron saint of minors. His dad was a minor. So, he cries out to this minor saint and, you know, Saint so-and-so, I will be a monk.

Well, why not cry out to Christ? Well, because in the Roman Catholic Church, there were these intermediary agents in a sense. So, I think that, you know, whether it was the saints or Mary or the Pope who was apparently, you know, he has this treasury of grace he can give to people or the church itself.

There were many things that became the focal point of a man's hope other than Jesus Christ. And not as if Christ was set aside. I mean, we don't want to paint in these terrible black colors like, you know, the Roman Church said, well, you know, us, not Jesus.

No, of course.

Well, Jesus, but also. And that is such a deadly lie. And it doesn't look as bad as saying no Jesus at all, but it is as bad. You know, it's deadly. It's perilous to add anything to Christ.

Yeah.

Let's listen to Spurgeon again. Listen how clearly he puts this.

That's quite a statement, isn't it? No faith. One atom of hope on something other than Jesus Christ, you have no faith at all. I mean, we really have to stop and ask ourselves, would we write no faith over our soul?

I mean, an honest assessment. Is it Jesus plus for me? If so, Spurgeon would say, I would write no faith over you. What about our church, the way we're presenting Christ? Is it Jesus plus? And then would Spurgeon come and write no faith above the door of our church?

So quite a strong statement, but I don't think we would disagree with him.

Yeah.

Well, it's pretty clear how we might need to return to this today. And this whole idea of constantly reforming according to the Word of God.

Yes.

So the Word of God, the written Word, so wonderfully centered on the living Word from Genesis to Revelation. It is just this unfolding of God's glory in the face of Jesus Christ. So all our hopes are there, all the dread that the sinner has is in Christ.

And, you know, everything, you know, we talk about this a lot with doctrine. Christ is the great hub of the wheel and every great truth in Scripture, you know, it's connected to Him. And that's why we love those Scriptures.

Not only because they're in the Bible, not only because the men we admire love them, but because they are so intimately connected with our Lord. You know, Christ alone, solus Christus, forget the Latin, just Christ alone.

In a sense, throughout the centuries, that has been the distinguishing mark of every believer, no matter what race, what nation, what language, no matter what time. Even in a sense, what other church tradition, the true believer, even if he's got bad theology, from the heart erupts this statement over and over.

For me, it's Christ alone. And, you know, so I think of a number of ones that we admire, you know, Samuel Rutherford in prison for being a preacher and standing against the errors of his day. And he writes in a letter from prison and says, oh, what an only one is this Jesus.

In another letter, he kind of makes up a word. He says, we would, or I would omnify Him, not magnify, omnify. I don't want to just make Him appear as great as He is. I have to show you that there's just nobody else but Him.

He's everything. But, I mean, that's not just sentiment. The Apostle Paul writes and says, for the Christian, Christ is all in all. And so I think that's just a wonderful test of whether our theology is really accurate.

If it is, there is a person at the burning heart of redemption that has captivated us. You know, another, an opposite test would be this. Do you love the doctrines? And yes. Do you love getting the doctrine straight?

Yes.

Do you love doing church things?

Well, yes.

Do you love helping people?

Yes.

OK. Are you bored with Christ? And I mean, really, we were talking about it in our break. But for me, there was a period where graduating from master's degree, and it was a very dry spiritual year for me personally.

And that was my fault. And Misty and I, you know, my wife and I, we had two little ones. So John David was 20 months and Catherine was like three months old. They were pretty close. And they were wearing mom out and wearing me out.

And school was wearing me out. And I wasn't having much of a quiet time. And I was studying good books and not the book. And I remember when we went to Wales right after that, really realizing that I was impressed with Elijah because he was manly.

And I was impressed with John the Baptist because he was pretty manly too. But if someone would have said to me, you know, does it thrill you to think through the aspects of Christ, the truths of your Lord?

I would have said, well, he's perfect. He's great. Yeah, but no, no, John, but do you like to read about him? And I would have had to admit I'm a little bored with him. And, you know, what a wretched place for the Christian to reach.

But I was there and God didn't leave me there, you know, and I'm grateful. But that's a real thermometer for our soul.

It is.

You know, we both grew up in and around church, you in the Southern Baptist Convention and me in the Presbyterian Church of America. And so we heard about Christ and we understood how he works formulaically.

Where does he fit in the formula? From maybe birth.

Right.

So neither one of us would have said, well, there are lots of ways to God. And we know. No, it's Christ alone. And we knew even the mechanics of how the gospel works in Christ. But we were both much older when we were actually brought to a living faith because we encountered and had to go and do business with the person of Christ, not just the way he fits in the theological formula as the solution.

Right.

So man's over here. God's over here. There's a big gulf. How do we get there? Cross goes across it. Jesus.

Right.

I get that formulaically. But who is he to you? Is he precious? Is he really the one in whom all of our hope truly is on a daily, ongoing basis? I also think that it's a good challenge for our listeners and for us, not just to think about it for our own souls, but to think about it for the souls of a lost and dying world, that we need to run this flag up the pole and we need to loudly proclaim because Christ has died for those among every tribe, tongue and nation.

And that includes some who right now are Roman Catholics. And Rome has not changed. Rome still teaches that it's Christ plus the sacraments. It's Christ plus the tradition of the church. It's Christ plus membership in the church and all of the things that come through that, that saves you.

And you have a good news that you can go and share with people who are in the Roman Catholic church, and that is Christ alone. That is the gospel and it's good news. I think of another people group, too, our friend Conrad Mbewe, who ministers there in Zambia.

He came and did a conversation with some of the ministerially minded men in our church when he came and preached for us one of the times that he's been here. And I remember asking him, what's one of the main pastoral issues that you face in your church?

And he smiled a wide smile and said, well, it's very different from the issues that you probably face. And he explained how in his context, people believe in God and people know that man is here. But in between man and God, there's this whole spiritual layer of reality called the spirit of our ancestors.

And how a big, big part of his pastoral ministry is people come into him and saying, you know, pastor, I think that my ancestors are angry with me because these bad things are happening in my life. And he has to go back to them and lay a biblical grid on top of what they believe and say, now we see what the scripture says,.

Right? Right.

OK, so where does the spirit of your ancestors fit in that?

Oh, well,.

It doesn't. I can go directly to God. I don't have to go to my ancestors and then they go to God for me. You know, there must just be something inherent to the human fallen condition where we feel like we've got to make up saints.

So we've got to make up spirit of ancestors or something to go to God for us. Another reason we've got to lead with this wonderful banner is that we have good news for people who are thinking like that, that we really do have access to God through Christ alone.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, a personal test would again would be, are you satisfied with a knowledge of Jesus that's kind of disconnected, not just from life, but at a distance? Maybe it'd be a good word for it in the Behold Your God study.

We found a great quote and stuck it in there by Spurgeon. And imagine that.

Yeah.

And where Spurgeon says along these lines, you know, I cannot love Christ with another man's heart. I cannot see Christ with another man's eyes. I cannot, you know, believe Christ with another man's mind.

You know, he said, I must know Christ myself. And I think that really, you know, that does lie at the core of every believer. We appreciate the help that we have from other believers. We appreciate books.

But I've got to taste and know that he is good. And not just back then when I got converted, but daily. I mean, that really is surely the only thing that keeps us on course. His faithfulness. But like, you know, Paul says, the love of Christ constrains me, not my love for him.

But so the awareness of Christ's greatness and goodness holds me to the course when nothing in me wants to hold the course, you know.

Yeah.

Solus Christus. Well, we've reached the final in this list of five sola from the Reformation. Soli Deo Gloria. And in so many ways, it's the crowning sola. There's a reason that we've put it last and that it is presented last because it is ultimately, it's reflective of the fact that all things are through God and from God and ultimately to him.

But what does that Latin phrase, Soli Deo Gloria mean?

Well, we could simplify this explanation and say that every aspect of the Christian life is to be seen as to God, as you mentioned, as meant to be for the glory of God and not just the Christian life, but everything in creation.

John Piper gave a wonderful statement. He said this, the entire design of salvation by grace from before the foundation of the world was that the glory of grace would be praised. And so that is the ultimate object of what we're talking about.

Yeah. So where do we see that in the scriptures? We see it again all throughout, but we see in Ephesians 1, 5 and 6, he God predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself, according to the kind intention of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved.

And then in Romans 11, 36, the passage that I referred to again and again, for from him and through him and to him are all things. And that all things is not an overstatement. Literally all things to him be the glory forever.

Amen. So it's a wonderful statement to the glory of God alone, Soli Deo Gloria. But why did it have to be said and stated so strongly in the days of the Reformation? What errors was it counteracting?

Well, we might think that the great enemy of God's glory is secularism. I mean, in our day, it's like, oh, Hollywood and those professors at universities and those evil judges. But really in the day of the Reformers, it was a very religious, Christianized, you know, air quotes kind of day.

You know, everybody kind of took it for granted in that area. Like, OK, so, yeah, there's God, there's Jesus and there's the church. And like we're signed up for all that. But shockingly, the competitor to the glory of God was in many ways was the Roman church.

You know, so we, you know, getting Soli Gratia, getting by grace alone, by faith alone, in Christ alone wrong. God shared the glory with the Roman church. He shared the glory with the saints. He shared the glory with the pope.

And ultimately, we'd have to be honest and say he shares the glory with us. So it's strange. But the glory of God was being robbed, not by the pagan, not by the Muslim, but by those who were saying they represented him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And what a wise move by the enemy. You know, upon realizing soon after, upon realizing that this when he possesses Judas to betray Christ, thinking that he's going to be surely thinking he's going to be finished with him.

Paul, Peter later tells us in his sermon that if the world leaders had known that this was God's plan all along, they would have not crucified the Lord of glory. And so right after we, I assume, realizing, oh man, you know, I didn't wind up ending it all along.

What does Satan do? He creates a religion that uses all the same words and has a lot and talks a lot about Jesus, but just changes it enough to make it not Soli Deo Gloria, but to make it Soli Deo us, man.

He creates a man centered and wicked religion that uses all of the same words and all of the same things. And that's not isolated to the Vatican.

Yeah.

I mean, we've been mentioning the Roman Catholic Church because it's the Reformation, but it's natural to every century. And, you know, it doesn't matter what name is written over the door of the building when you walk into it.

If it is not Soli Deo Gloria, then there's something very wrong with that religion. And it doesn't matter how many Bible phrases it quotes.

So how did the Puritans continue to hold this truth, the men there in the Puritan era? Well, the Westminster Shorter Catechism has a very famous beginning. It asks, what is man's chief end? What is the chief end of man?

Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

Yeah.

This is wonderfully laid out in a pretty complex argument by Jonathan Edwards later, you know, a few centuries later in the 18th century. But if we simplified it, we would say this. Edwards talked a lot about the ultimate or chief end being God's glory.

And when he talked about that, he distinguished between, you know, because we don't use this kind of logic really as much anymore. He talked about subordinate ends and chief ends or subordinate ends and ultimate ends, we might say.

Now, a subordinate end, that is, there are many things in our Christianity that are wonderful. There are many worthy things to do. And the activity itself is good and pleasing to the Lord. Or the gift that God gives us is good in itself.

But if we disconnect that from its ultimate or chief goal, these subordinate ends lead to something greater than themselves. Disconnected from that greater end, they have value, but not nearly as much as they have when you plug them into the great scope of God's work.

And you realize, you mean my forgiveness, as sweet as it is that I wake up every morning and I'm aware that I still have shame and guilt and sin. And yet it has been placed upon Christ and it's washed.

Or, you know, or the gifts that God gives us, the family, friends, church, whatever. The scriptures or the things that I'm doing that are good in themselves because it's an act of obedience. You mean that all of these, as wonderful as they are, are exponentially more wonderful because I plug them into the scripture and I realize it's all leading to the ultimate glorification of my King.

So it's not just that the thing is precious, forgiveness. It's precious because my forgiveness is going to be like one of the great beam shining on the perfection of my God. And so that makes it so much more sweet to the believer.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the another way that theologians have used terms to say the same thing is proximate ends and remote ends or proximate purpose and remote purpose. And so to use a sports analogy, the proximate goal of the offensive line is to get a first down.

Right. And you have to work really, really hard to get that to accomplish that proximate or close purpose. But there's a remote purpose behind that as well. And that's the one day, you know, win the Super Bowl.

You want you have to get the first down so that you can win the Super Bowl. If you don't, you don't win. You don't get the remote. And that's helpful for us, I think, to think about how it look. We're down here working out our salvation with fear and trembling.

We are working through these things, laboring to lay hold of Christ every day. And that is the the the proximate end. That's the close end that touches us. But it's so sweet and helps me so much when I'm fighting for that first down, so to speak, to remember that there's a Super Bowl here.

You know, there is a day, a great capital D day that is coming when everything is going to be consummated to the glory of God. And it helps me to see, you know, that my salvation is from him. My salvation came to me through him.

But ultimately, my salvation, which I'm working out in fear and trembling now, will be to him on that day. And it will wrap itself up in the greatest end that there could possibly be, which is to glorify the one who is most worthy of glory.

Yeah, that's a really good illustration. And for those of you in podcast land, that is the first time I've ever heard Matthew Robinson use a football illustration.

I just. I have a wife and a son who is crazy into football.

Because Matt's family, they're pretty sports minded. But yeah, but Matt's just being sweet.

And there was no skateboarding illustration that I could really use for that.

I wouldn't understand.

So how do we need to return to this in our day?

Well, again, it's easy to embrace the first four solas and do it all for me. I mean, the enemy would say to us, sola scriptura, great, you know, sola gratia, sola fide, sola Christus, man, you got it now.

And it's all about you. And, you know, and then it gets warped. And we don't want that. We don't want to miss the sweetest part that, you know, that it's all leading to something bigger and better than just my individual rescue.

And so I think that, you know, we think of the gifts that God gives us, the pardon of our soul, justification, the ability to do good to souls around us in evangelism or in loving each other. And, you know, we think of all the many sweet things we have, but they are all so much better if we understand that they're part of Christ's exaltation.

But one other thing I think that's really helpful with this is if we can think of it as a destination. If you know the destination and you set off on the journey. And so, you know, with us, we have our iPhones or whatever, you know, that our GPS.

You may make a couple of wrong turns and get some delays that were unnecessary. Like in the Christian life, we disobey the Lord sometimes. And there are some diversions and God lovingly disciplines us and brings us back on.

But, you know, we've not been on the straight path perfectly. But if the goal of every one of our decisions could be, but whatever I'm supposed to do, I want it to be for the glory of God. You may misunderstand scriptures.

I mean, you think like as a younger Christian, how many times we did things that we thought would be really pleasing to the Lord, but it really wasn't what the Lord wanted. But if that is the goal, it's like I feel like it's like a it's like the magnet, you know, it does hold us to the course.

Even when there are inconsistencies in our theology, inadequacies in our response, you know, immaturity in our grasp of scripture. But the heart of the believer is bent in the same direction that God's heart is bent.

You know, as you've said before in a podcast, like God has birthed in us a desire for his glory. And that holds us, even when my immature understanding of scripture sometimes leads me to some stupid things.

One of the things that we love about going to conferences is being able to interact with people who have gone through the studies that we produce or seen the films that we make and hearing feedback from them about how those projects have impacted their families, their small groups and their churches.

Eventually, we started asking them if we could record their stories so that we could share those with you. Nolan and Melissa are from Mississippi, and their church went through Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically.

I mean, we took we were fortunate enough to take some families through it with us along that journey. And like we had talked about earlier, it is an investment of time. And it was a 12-week study, but to watch not only other families, how it just transformed other families and watched out, watched how God through the spirit of through his spirit just transformed and knocked down these idols that they had built up in their life.

And the God that they thought they worshipped of the Bible was different. Once they came out of this study, they found themselves worshipping the one true God. And just the theology and the doctrine and watching it change these people's lives was something I don't think we'll ever forget.

Well, that's the five solas. And we've spent a month on this, but that was that's too short of a time. It's really just meant to kind of whet your appetite. And, you know, it's like it's, you know, this whole beautiful mountain range, this whatever you like, this ocean is before you.

And, you know, and God, every believer is called to just just go as far as you can through this life, just never stop. And that's one question we've asked each other. Is there a place where we can say we've done enough?

Well, we understand that enough. We can stop there. And no, each one of these is a lifelong pursuit of an ever clearer understanding and more thorough application. And it is a sweet task, not a bitter one.

But we wanted to end with this question that John Piper got on this, and that was which of the solas is most important? And Piper's answer, pithy, wonderful, said this. Well, which wing on the plane is most important?

Well, we say, well, both wings.

All of them.

Yeah, all of them. So it's the same thing with the solas. There is an organic connection to these truths. And so we cannot let ourselves kind of focus on one to the exclusion of the others. We won't. Our Christianity will suffer.

God will not be honored in the way he ought to be. The best way is to take them all as intertwined, organically connected, and hold them before your heart. And let that fullness and balance that the reformers rediscovered in these things, let that be a fuel for all of life.

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