Why Is Your Soul Distressed? Then, A Bit More with Calvin

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for you, O God, my soul thirsts for God, for the living

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God. When shall I come and appear before God? So begins, and I don't have any screen in here,

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I have no idea what's going on, but so begins the 42nd

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Psalm, and it is, you may be aware of the fact that a lot of scholars believe that Psalm, Psalms 42 and 43, just Psalm 42 and Psalm 43, it would be correct to say

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Psalms 42 and 43, because I was using plural there, I didn't want anyone to get upset with me, are actually just one psalm, because there is really no cut between them as far as topic and things like that is concerned.

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But I remember, it's funny the things you start remembering when you get old, I guess your mind has lots of time to do stuff like that, because you can't remember anything that's going on right now.

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But I wouldn't put money on this or anything like that, but I just have this hunch that my friend

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Jeff Neal, Jeff was ahead of me at Grand Canyon, Jeff is a

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CREC pastor in Texas, he was ahead of me at Grand Canyon, I think by about two years.

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And then he worked at Bree and Christian Bookstore, he worked there for a while, and then so he started Fuller after I did, so he was behind me about the same amount of time

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I think. And so we both, we had a lot of the same professors and things like that.

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And I think when he took his Hebrew classes, that one of the projects he did was

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Psalm 42 and Psalm 43. I don't know why it is, I haven't really told

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Jeff this, but when Jeff tells stories, it's almost for me like I was there.

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I've told the story about when he went to Africa, and it was so riveting.

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And so when he came back and I went to his house and he filled us all in on his trip, and I've been to Africa, I wasn't to Uganda, which is where he went.

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But it's almost like I have memories of going to Uganda, it was just so real. And so it doesn't surprise me all that much that it seems to me that he wrote his paper on Psalm 42 and 43, and it just struck me that one of the things he said, maybe it's just the way he says things,

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I don't know, I just have so much respect for him, that he said, you know, there's never really an answer.

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So many of the Psalms will start off with a lament or a complaint to God, and then they will, by the end of the

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Psalm, there's rejoicing and worship and vindication, for example.

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But there are places in the Psalter where you don't have that. And what's good about that is that we often live in that middle time before rescue comes or an answer comes.

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And the reality is, there are a lot of things that happen in this life, you may think you have the answer, but then there are other times it's like, no,

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I've never gotten an answer as to why that happened or why this took place the way that it did. And for a lot of people, that is a reason for discouragement, despondency, a lack of faith.

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And we talk a lot about faith, but what does it look like and what does it require of us?

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And you know, I mean, it goes on to say, when shall

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I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food day and night. While they say to me all day long, where is your

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God? So there's a mockery, there's enemies who are not only questioning your fidelity, but questioning whether God is actually concerned about you, whether you're in a covenant relationship with God.

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These things I remember and I pour out my soul within me, for I used to go along with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with the sound of a shout of joy and thanksgiving, a multitude -keeping festival.

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And so the psalmist is looking back at what seems now to have been a more joyful time.

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And so it's easy for him to go, things have, I've been abandoned. Things have gone south on me,

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I've been abandoned. And so he asks the question in Psalm 42, 5, why are you in despair?

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Why are you sunk down in despair, oh my soul?

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And why are you disturbed within me? Wait for God, for I shall still praise him for the salvation of his presence.

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And so there is a patience, a exhortation to long -suffering.

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And in our microwave generation, that doesn't sell. And it is so easy to ignore the examples given to us in scripture over and over and over again.

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Joseph, what a, one example, how many years passed for a young man who simply sought to do what was right before God, and he ends up in prison.

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He ends up separated from his family, betrayed by his family, his brothers.

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Even when blessing comes, it's almost like God's playing with him. And at the time, put yourself in Joseph's shoes, wouldn't you have thought the same thing?

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When you think about what you've lost, the privileged position you had in your family, you're sold into slavery in Egypt, but God blesses your faithfulness, and then the wantonness of a woman casts you back into an even worse position, it's so easy at that point in time to start questioning

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God's goodness, God's purposes in your life, God's purposes overall.

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Now we sit back, hindsight's 20 -20 as they say, and we know the end of the story.

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And we know that in fact, all those things that he was going through was going to lead to life for many, not only for his family, but it was the mechanism whereby people of Israel came to be in Egypt.

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You might say, well, that's not a good thing. Well, yeah, actually it was. The exodus was central to God's purposes, very central to God's purposes.

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And so you think about, you know, we get to see all that, but when

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Joseph was in the middle of it, when he was a month into the worst part of his imprisonment,

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I know what I would've been thinking, because I think that way all the time, having not undergone any of the kind of trial that he did.

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It's so easy to lose your sense of peace and contentment and faith, because that's really what it's all about.

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And yet here the psalmist says, wait for God, for I shall still praise him. Oh my

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God, my soul is in despair within me, therefore I remember you from the land of the Jordan, the peaks of Hermon from Mount Mitzar, deep calls to deep, the sound of your waterfalls, all your breakers and your waves have rolled over me, by day

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Yahweh will command his loving kindness and by night his song will be with me, a prayer to the

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God of my life. And so though his soul is in despair, he doesn't look to himself, he looks to God, and he says the right things, by day

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Yahweh will command his chesed, his loving kindness, and by night his song will be with me, a prayer to the

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God of my life. But then he goes on to say, I say to God, my rock, so there's the faith, why have you forgotten me?

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Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? So here's faith continuing to exist in the face of opposition, when you look around you it doesn't seem like what you believe is going to take place.

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As a shattering of my bones, my adversaries reproach me while they say to me all day long, where is your

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God? Why are you in despair, O my soul, and why are you disturbed within me? Wait for God, for I shall still praise him, the salvation of my presence in my

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God, give justice to me, because 43 is really just a continuation of 42, give justice to me

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O God, and plead my case against the unholy nation, O protect me from the deceitful and unrighteous man, for you are the

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God of my strength, why have you rejected me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

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O send out your light and your truth, let them lead me, let them bring me to your holy mountain, to your dwelling places, then

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I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and upon the liar I shall praise you O God, my

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God. Why are you in despair, O my soul, and why are you disturbed within me? Wait for God, for I shall still praise him, the salvation of my presence in my

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God. And that's the end of the psalm. Three times in what we've read, there is the rhetorical question asked, why are you cast down O my soul?

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I think is that King James, it might be. Why are you in despair within me?

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And there really isn't, there's no resolution. And that's because there are times when

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God allows his people to experience that sense of, he knows he's not rejected and he knows he has not been forgotten, but that's what he's experiencing, that's what it feels like.

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And that's why we need to be able to look back at things like this. We need to look back at those who've gone before us. We need the example of those who've gone before us.

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Scripture provides it and then, you know, each one of us, the longer you walk with the

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Lord, the longer you're in the church, well, your list of faithful men increases and your list of unfaithful men increases.

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It sort of depends on what church age you're in as to which list increases faster,

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I suppose. But that's why we need those examples to go,

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I'm not the first one to be here. We always think that way. No one's ever had it as bad as I have. There have been.

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Hebrews talks to us about what people have gone through and we know that and it's part of the data in the file someplace, but it just seems so easy to enter into soul despair even while maintaining a orthodox confession, which is why you want to start with them young, to get to hear those words, to get to repeat those words, lay that foundation.

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It's such a blessing to have that. You know, we live in an amazing time. I've said this many times before,

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I've never, I'm sure there are a number of books written on the subject already, but I just don't think we're really designed to have the amount of information and especially the amount of bad news that if you want to expose yourself to it and if you want to dwell on it, it's easy to do.

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You can fire up social media today and you can go from source to source to source and you will find all sorts of well -written articles these days, maybe written by AI, I don't know.

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I think a lot of that stuff's going to be happening, but that will convince you that there will be no tomorrow, that it's all over with, it's all done and there's not even any sense in continuing to work today, just to give it all up, go home and get ready for Armageddon to take place.

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And if you wanted to dwell on that kind of stuff, I've often said, if you're an unbeliever in these days and you have no hope for the future, no belief in a transcendent

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God, it's like, I just don't even know how you would get through each day.

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And now with all the lies that are told, with people staring right into the camera and lying straight into your teeth, it doesn't matter which side of the aisle they're on, they all do it, it can get really easy to get just overwhelmed with the opposition to the ungodly, overwhelmed with the negative feelings and things like that.

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And that's when, well, you're listening to us online, so it seems somewhat counterproductive to say that's when you need to turn the computer off.

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But if the computer can provide you with some positive reaffirmation, a recognition you're not the only one going through these things, experiencing these things and fighting the battle, because it is a battle to not only maintain faith, but to do so seeking after joy.

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I do know joy -filled Christians, but in general, just ask yourself a basic question, are most

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Christians that you know, would you describe them as joyous? And I know we tend to conflate joy and happiness are not necessarily the same thing.

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We're not talking about a happy -go -lucky lack of seriousness.

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There's all sorts of things to be very serious about in our world. There's no question about that.

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And in the faith as well. But how many

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Christians do you know who, when they face serious challenges and difficulties, face it joyously?

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That's available to us. That's a promise that's given to us.

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The peace of God, which passes all understanding. Keep your hearts and minds. We might look at that if we have time to.

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So it's available, but how many really avail themselves of it?

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It just seems so much easier to, if you're going to soldier on, just do it with a real grim look on your face.

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Make sure everybody around you knows that you're not having a good day type of situation.

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So, we are literally in a, today, tomorrow is

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June 14th, no, June 13th, so Saturday, I guess, yes, is

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June 14th, and there's all these, supposed to be all these demonstrations.

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Palettes of rocks and bricks and stuff magically appearing in cities and gas masks parachuting down from heaven.

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No, I didn't. Well, good. Now, if they can just figure out who's paying for it.

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You know, there's this kind of stuff going on that, you know what? It didn't happen when I was a kid. OK, when

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I was a young man. Well, it's not that there weren't riots. There were riots in the 60s, anti -war protests and stuff like that, but not organized the way that it is now and paid for by, how much you want to bet there's

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USAID money in that? Of course, we're paying for our own destruction. Oh, you ain't taking that bet yet, huh?

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OK, so we've got stuff coming up on Saturday. Civil unrest, further demonstration of just how divided the nation is, the possibility of war in the

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Middle East. I love that. My wife's overseas right now.

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That's not like they could have seen this coming, been planning this for over a year because she didn't get to travel with me when

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I was going overseas all the time. And so she was hoping once she retired, she'd get start doing stuff like that.

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And then she retires early, gets fired by the airlines during COVID.

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And I stopped, I stopped flying to those places, poor thing. But it's just so much.

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I mean, again, if I wanted to, you could just start listing all of the corruption scandals and legal stuff, and you could just go on and on and on.

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And it seems endless. And so it is easy to understand why someone might might go, look, the world seems to be spinning out of control.

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And the funny thing is, I remember having a conversation with a brother about this about 30 years ago. And back then we were saying, it seems like the world is spinning out of control.

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But that's really an act of unbelief. To say that the world is out of control, your theology may not give you a foundation upon which you can say

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God is in control. You may have a God has no divine decree.

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He's only promised that the end will work out. But everything between now and then could be whatever.

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But there needs to be a foundation for all of us, no matter how old we are.

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It looks really there. I just have to look over like you don't need to see my

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Cain's cup in the shot there. Cain's is really good.

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I got to admit, that's really good stuff. A little positive, positive thing.

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There's got to be foundation upon which you stand day in and day out, the good days, the bad days, the mediocre days, and that foundation can't constantly be changing.

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It's one of the greatest things you can deliver to your children. Is that foundation that will last them a lifetime if it's joined with faith, the work of the

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Spirit of God, obviously. And so, I mentioned earlier,

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I was thinking about, I was talking about Hebrew class and seminary, and I've mentioned that I took more

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Hebrew than was required. I had to petition to take extra Hebrew classes, which

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I guess is a good thing. Corey Mahler means I'm a terrible, horrible person because Corey Mahler thinks studying

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Hebrew is a waste of time. But at some point in some class,

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I don't remember which one it was, we, or I, it may have been just myself by that point in time, translated the 97th

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Psalm, and it really struck me what was said in Psalm 97.

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Yahweh reigns, let the earth rejoice. Let the many coastlands be glad.

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Clouds and thick darkness are all around him. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.

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And I remember translating that portion.

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The term righteousness, tzedek, tzedekah, the tzedek word group, and then mishpat, judgment, justice, these are concepts that you will see all across the pages of the

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Hebrew Scriptures. And they, of course, are the foundation upon which the

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New Testament then builds to discuss what justification is, what God's purposes are, atonement, everything else, all goes together.

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And I just, I don't remember why, and this would have been probably 1988, 89, somewhere around there,

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I graduated fuller in 89. So somewhere in that time frame. And sure, there was things happening on the international scale.

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USSR was falling apart and stuff like that. But I don't know why it was, but I just remember being very much influenced by, taken in by the thought of righteousness and judgment are the foundation of his throne.

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So obviously, as you know, throne, rulership, authority, power, and what's the foundation of God's rulership and authority?

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And it's righteousness and justice. These mark who

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God is. And how far is that from what we think we are seeing today?

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So in other words, as I look at what's going on, as I look, as I watch people that I honestly believe are traitors to the nation, traitors to what is good and honest and just and pure and lovely and good repute and so on and so forth, standing in front of television cameras or these days iPhones or whatever, lying through their teeth, and you know they're lying, and they know you know they're lying, and you know that they know that you know, you know how that goes.

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Doing everything they can to steal you blind, steal your children blind, steal your grandchildren blind, steal your great -great -great -grandchildren blind, and in fact, try to kill them with abortion or mutilate them with transgenderism or mutilate their families with same -sex marriage and all the rest of the stuff.

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And yet there they stand, and they can lie like it's as natural for them as breathing.

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And you see that, and you know, remember the psalmist elsewhere almost stumbled when he saw how the unrighteous lived lives of ease and died with plenty.

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But remember what the psalmist said then, I almost stumbled, and I would have if I did not enter into your temple, and he did not start thinking from an eternal perspective.

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It's so easy to start looking down at the earth, down at what's happening right now, and when you think about it, that's the only way we can think.

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We are time -bound creatures, and what we know of the past has been mediated to us through various sources, some of which are more accurate than others and reliable than others, and we don't know the future.

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We can make predictions, but those predictions have been proven erroneous many, many times.

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And so it just seems to us that everything's random, and we can't see righteousness and judgment, and the secular worldview denies that there is such a thing as righteousness or judgment or justice.

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Secular worldview talks a lot about justice, but as you know, as you've seen, it's just a, it's an empty plastic bag.

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You stuff into it whatever you want to stuff into it and call it justice. If you don't have an objective external standard by which to define what justice is, what is just, by what standard, then that's why you can go online right now and you can find a leader from this side over here talking about doing what's just and right and defending democracy and all this kind of stuff.

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And then you can, it used to be change the channel, flip over the next channel. Sorry. You can click onto the next news feed and the next guy is going to be saying the exact opposite of the guy, but with using the same language, using the same words.

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And there's no agreed upon meaning of what righteousness or judgment or justice is.

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And because of that, you see the results. You see what's going on in the streets.

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And so there has to be, you cannot lose that conviction that righteousness and judgment are the very foundation of God's rulership over his creation.

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It's far too easy to throw up your hands in despair and say, God's lost control.

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In fact, some of the worst theological aberrations in regards to God's nature, knowledge, providence came out of the world wars.

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When we, especially World War I, we struggle to understand the meat grinder that that war in Europe was.

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You just threw human flesh into a meat grinder. You'd go running out of those trenches and just get mowed down.

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I mean, just unbelievable. The human suffering, entire generations were wiped out on both sides.

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And it really impacted things. Why is Europe committing cultural suicide?

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Because it is. It's committing cultural suicide. It's like they hate themselves.

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I remember this was 20 years ago. I visited the UK for the first time 20 years ago this year.

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And I remember at that time I was told that they were really being discouraged from flying the

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Union Jack because it was considered inappropriate. In England, of all places.

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And that's just gotten worse and worse and worse and worse. And they're committing absolute suicide.

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They've thrown their borders open. And I trace so much of it back to those two world wars.

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I think not only were so many people lost, but many of those who came back were deeply, deeply impacted by what they experienced and not in a positive way.

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And the Christians there in Europe as a whole, and the

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United Kingdom, I was just talking about that, did not, as a whole, respond in an appropriate fashion to what had taken place.

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And I think, what is it, 1%, less than 1 % of, oh yeah, it's well less than 1 % of the

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UK population attends a Christian church, or especially the Church of England itself.

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And that's why you see Muslims taking over the

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United Kingdom. There's a reason for all this stuff.

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Why would a culture commit suicide? Once you enter into that deep despair, that there's the

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Nietzschean void, the purposelessness. The United Kingdom was a very religious nation,

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Christianly religious. The rocks still cry out. The walls still have the chiseled names of great

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Christians that passed upon them. But once that just becomes cultural, rather than truly reflective of a person's faith, it becomes empty.

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It just becomes an external formality. That's why you can have Muslims taking oaths of office in the

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United Kingdom that the people who designed those oaths never dreamed that they would be used in this way.

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The meaning has been redefined. The language has been redefined.

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The rituals might stay just because, well, that's the way we do things. But they become meaningless.

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They don't communicate anything to the next generation, which is what good rituals do.

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But that's one of the major things that has changed. So, it was easier when everybody said the same thing and believed the same thing to hold on to a culturally normal profession of faith, in essence.

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But what happens when that has been abandoned by the vast majority of culture?

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It seems that Christians follow suit, but we can't. We have to believe righteousness and judgment are the foundation of God's throne, and that will always be the case.

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And I think a lot of Christians have the idea, well, that's Old Testament anyway. It doesn't matter. You cannot read Romans without that in the back of your mind and follow what

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Paul is saying. That is part of the entire matrix of the argumentation.

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In fact, Romans 3, you know, talks about theodicy, how shall, you know, how shall

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God be justified? What do you mean justified? Will there be a sufficient reason for the existence of evil?

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And Paul's response is, well, of course, it's a given, has to be a given.

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And that's what the psalmist is saying in Psalm 97. So, that confidence that comes from having that foundation, knowing

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God's truth about these things. Just because you experience a day where you're sort of like, man,

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I just can't believe what's going on. Man, this is amazing. I'm concerned. Doesn't mean you've lost your faith or you've become a heretic or something like that.

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But we do need to be encouraged. That's why

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I don't know how anyone survives outside of the fellowship of the saints. And that's why

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I certainly encourage our church. We do it a little bit differently than a lot of Protestants do.

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And I use that term very broadly there. Evangelicals, whatever. We come forward to receive the bread and the wine.

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And I really like that. There's something wrong with being seated and having it passed.

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And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But in the Lord's Supper, it is specifically said, you proclaim the

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Lord's death until he comes. It's a little bit easier to proclaim Lord's death standing up than sitting down.

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In the sense that I often encourage folks, when you see those two lines of people coming forward, you look over and you see someone you've seen for years.

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You look over and you see someone who's walked the Lord for years. You look over and see someone who's brand new in the faith.

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That's the continuity. The spirit is still building the church. Even in great times of judgment, challenge, and opposition.

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And you can take courage from the fact you're not alone. Here's someone who's been walking with the

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Lord for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And they're still here.

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And it's not because they're better than someone else. It's because they have been preserved by the work of the

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Spirit of God. So yeah, that's a vitally important thing.

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To work on that foundation, to remind yourself of it, and to take advantage of what we call the means of grace.

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The things that God has given us. There's a reason why he commands us to come into fellowship with one another, and to hear the

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Word, and to sing the Psalms, and all these things. It's important. So anyway,

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I just was looking at a few scriptures and thinking myself, and honestly, just turning the social media off.

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Because there's lots of stuff going on. And it can be real easy to let...

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We've got Saturday coming. Oh, this could be bad. Maybe.

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But if thinking about it robs me of all my joy today and tomorrow, what did that actually accomplish?

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Is there something I can do about it? If there isn't, then... Yeah, but it's easier for many of us to go ahead and do it anyways.

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Even though we know up there, we're not accomplishing anything. That's how it goes.

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All right, let me shift gears a little bit. Whenever you see me putting the old man glasses on,

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I have a good idea where we're going there. I mentioned,

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I want to talk about eternal stuff. And so we had been doing some reading in the institute, and we had gotten to this section.

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And like I said, there's just so much of stuff that's marked.

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And this stuff was marked back about 1989, I'd say.

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I think is when I marked most of this stuff. And I said last time,

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I'll say it again, the ink smudges. Ink smudges. So still relevant.

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Those of us who are authors know most of the stuff that we've written. I hope a few of my books will still be relevant 20 years after I'm gone, but the institutes are truly amazing along those lines.

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So if you have a copy, I'm in Book 1, Chapter 1,

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Section 3. It's the last section of Chapter 1, so I'm not very far in. But important stuff here.

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Hence that dread and wonder with which scripture commonly represents the saints as stricken and overcome whenever they felt the presence of God.

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Thus it comes about that we see men who in his absence normally remain firm and constant, but who, when he manifests his glory, are so shaken and struck dumb as to be laid low by the dread of death, are in fact overwhelmed by it and almost annihilated.

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As a consequence, we must infer that man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.

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I double underlined that one. Double underlined. As a consequence, we must infer that man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.

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So when the preaching of the church does not regularly lay before us the heights of God's power, majesty, and holiness, then what's our natural result?

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Our natural result, our natural tendency, is to see our own holiness in a completely disjointed and erroneous fashion.

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And I don't know if I double marked this because I was already experiencing this. Probably was.

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But it truly seems to me that so much of the sub -biblical theology that we see in evangelical churches can be traced back to having a very high view of man because there's almost no time spent looking at the doctrine of God and who

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God is. And he gives a number of examples here of what happened when men encountered the revelation of God of himself and how they were, you know, undone by this and I'm going to die and so on and so forth.

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I won't read all those. But yet, however, the knowledge of God and of ourselves may be mutually connected.

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The order of right teaching requires that we discuss the former first, then proceed afterward to treat the latter.

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So Calvin's assertion is there is a necessary proper order.

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And then this next section, chapter 2, begins with a subtitle,

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Piety is requisite for the knowledge of God. Piety is a term that has come into a lot of disrepute.

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To be sure. And I understand some appropriate warnings about past imbalances, but piety in general, in fact, there's a note in my translation that says, there's a favorite emphasis in Calvin that pietas, piety, in which reverence and love of God are joined is prerequisite to any true knowledge of God.

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So one must have reverence of God and one must have love of God together as the foundation of having any true knowledge of God.

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So if you don't revere God and you don't love God, you can have all the true doctrine in the world, but it will not bring you to true knowledge of God.

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And if I could say anything about state churches in Europe, why are they so empty?

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Why have they so easily succumbed to secularism and have decayed to the point of full -on abject apostasy?

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Well, it is important to communicate true doctrine, but true doctrine apart from reverence and love of God being joined together will never bring you to knowledge of God.

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It's true. He says, now the knowledge of God, as I understand it, is that by which we not only conceive there is a

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God, but also grasp what befits us and is proper to his glory and find what is to our advantage to know of him.

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Indeed, we shall not say that properly speaking God is known where there is no religion or piety.

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Here I do not yet touch upon the sort of knowledge with which men in themselves lost and accursed apprehend

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God the Redeemer and Christ the mediator, but I speak only of the primal and simple knowledge to which the very order of nature would have led us if Adam had remained upright.

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Notice what it says, but I speak only of the primal and simple knowledge to which the very order of nature would have led us if Adam had remained upright.

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Now, there's an interesting, very interesting note here, and I think it's a good note.

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The controlling thought of Book 1, Chapters 2 through 5, which is the locus classicus for a discussion of natural theology in Calvin, is contained in this phrase.

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Now listen, this is important. There's a lot of argumentation going on about this right now. The revelation of God in creation for Calvin would have been the basis of a sound natural theology only if Adam had remained upright.

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Because of sin, no sound theology of this type is possible. Scripture is the only medium of knowing the

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Creator and of apprehending his revelation in creation. Now, there's an

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Aristotelian Thomistic influx happening amongst Reformed people today, and I've noticed a lot of Reformed people have decided that they're considerably wiser than Calvin was, and Calvin's not an inspired source of information, obviously.

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But to understand, to say that to be

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Reformed is to allow for some kind of natural theology that in some way becomes the lens through which you need to look to be able to truly understand

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Scripture, it's completely to reverse Calvin's position. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin did not view the fallen man and did not view nature and grace in the same way, and trying to fit the one with the other is a fool's errand, as much as people want to do it for reasons that I won't get into now.

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But anyway, so, but I speak only the primal and simple knowledge to which the very order of nature would have led us if Adam had remained upright.

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In this ruin of mankind, no one now experiences God either as father or as author of salvation or favorable in any way until Christ the mediator comes forward to reconcile him to us.

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Nevertheless, it is one thing to feel that God, as our maker, supports us by his power, governs us by his providence, nourishes us by his goodness, and attends us with all sorts of blessings, and another thing to embrace the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ.

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So, catch what he says there. A lot of people miss it. You can have one, somebody say, oh, well,

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God's our maker, he supports us by his power, governs us by his providence, nourishes us by his goodness, attends us with all sorts of blessings, but that's not the same thing as embracing the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ.

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That changes everything. If you're reconciled to God in Christ, it changes everything, including noetically the mind.

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First, as much in the fashioning of the universe as in the general teaching of scripture, the

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Lord shows himself to be simply the creator. Then in the face of Christ, he shows himself the redeemer.

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So, yes, it's obvious there's a creator, and only in the past couple hundred years have we found a way to get around that.

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Darwin opened that door. But redeemer? No, that's only found in Christ.

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Then in the face of Christ, he shows himself the redeemer. Of the resulting two -fold knowledge of God, we shall now discuss the first aspect, the second will be dealt with in its proper place.

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So what he's talking about here, the distinction in two -fold knowledge added to the institutes in 1559.

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So the final sort of official edition was the 1559

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Latin, which is what this is the translation of. It's basic the structure of the completed work.

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Calvin calls attention to this repeatedly in a striking series of methodological statements, all added in 1559 to clarify the course of the argument.

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Hence, nothing in book one belongs to the knowledge of the redeemer, although everything after chapter five is based in the special revelation of scripture.

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So when he starts talking about Christ and redemption, that's later on.

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He's talking here in book one much more about general things. Moreover, although our mind cannot apprehend

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God without rendering some honor to him, it will not suffice simply to hold that there is one whom all ought to honor and adore unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of every good and that we must seek nothing elsewhere than in him.

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This I take to mean that not only does he sustain this universe as he once founded it by his boundless might, regulate it by his wisdom, preserve it by his goodness, and especially rule mankind by his righteousness and judgment.

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Righteousness and judgment, where have I heard that before? Yeah, we're just looking at that in Psalm 97.

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Bear with it in his mercy, watch over it by his protection, but also that no drop will be found either of wisdom and light or of righteousness or power or rectitude or of genuine truth, which does not flow from him and of which he is not the cause.

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So he is the ultimate source of all truth. Now, some people will then say, ah, all truth is

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God's truth. Well, that's true, but when you use that to introduce sometimes even an inversion of the proper order of special revelation versus natural revelation, for example, that's not what he's talking about.

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Thus, we may learn to await and seek all these things from him and thankfully to ascribe them once received to him.

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For this sense of the powers of God is for us a fit teacher of piety from which religion is born.

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I call piety that reverence joined with love of God, which the knowledge of his benefits induces.

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For until men recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him, they will never yield him willing service, nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in him.

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They will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him. So there is a assertion here that, again, when was this being written?

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1559 Geneva, it's a theocracy, it's a theocratic state.

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By 1559, Calvin's enemies have been pretty much banished and he has some period of peace in the last few years of his life.

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He dies in 1564 and it is a sacral society, if we want to touch upon that, most definitely.

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But what that meant was atheism, secularism, all the isms that we're dealing with weren't in Geneva, not at this point.

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They would literally be illegal. But what that also meant was that Calvin had encountered, as all his readers had, many people with great head knowledge of the

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Christian faith, but no grace, no living faith.

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In Christ. And so they have no piety because they had no reverence for God and no love for God joined together.

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And without that piety, knowledge only condemns. It does not save.

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And without, they will never yield him willing service, which means that is the result of the spirit of God.

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What is God? Men who pose this question are merely toying with idle speculations. It is more important for us to know of what sort he is and what is consistent with his nature.

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What God is it to profess with Epicurus some sort of God who has cast aside the care of the world only to amuse himself in idleness?

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What help is it, in short, to know a God with whom we have nothing to do? Rather, our knowledge should serve first to teach us fear and reverence.

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Secondly, with it as our guide and teacher, we should learn to seek every good from him and, having received it, to credit it to his account.

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For how can the thought of God penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation that you owe your life to him?

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Let me just, that's a little of a sentence, but how many

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Christians really grasp that, understand that?

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We'll close with this. For how can the thought of God penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork?

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There it is, there it is. Why have I spoken so many times in conferences and things like that about the impact of Darwinism?

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How can the thought of God penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork? No, you're a blob of fizzing chemicals.

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Since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation that you owe your life to him.

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Can you see how, even as we talk about government and law and the

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Constitution of the United States, whatever it might be, these institutions were founded by men who believed that we were the creatures of God, that we were made by him, and that, as an absolute result of that, we have responsibility before him.

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We are responsible to him. He has the right to define what is right and wrong. Why do you think you look at these rebels who are pretending to be women, and you listen to their arrogance, their pride, their self -centeredness, everything revolves around them, and they can become so absolutely unhinged if someone just dares to point them to the reality of their own created nature?

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Why is that? Well, that is the clearest example of rebellion against the

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Imago Dei, rebellion against the existence of God. I have the right to determine who

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I am, not anyone else, and in my rebellion, I will exercise a right that I don't even have, and that's where this willingness comes from.

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It is rebellion. It's the sin of rebellion. That's all it is, and it's all around us.

01:00:34

Well, I went a little bit longer there, but hopefully some of these thoughts, it's not a usual program at all.

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I just wanted to do something very different than what we would normally be doing.

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That doesn't mean what we're doing normally to be doing is not a good thing to be doing, but a little bit of a switch up before what could be an interesting weekend.

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Talk about eternal stuff that will still be eternally important and vital and true no matter what happens this weekend.

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That's something to remember. So real quickly before we sign off, work is ongoing as we mentioned on the mobile command center.

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I told you that last trip I had felt this odd new, I guess

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I wouldn't call it a bump, but ridge at one point in the flooring right at the end of the bathroom, and lo and behold,

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I don't know if they're going to be able to tell exactly when this water leak began or where it started or anything like that, but pretty major.

01:01:55

I guess they're relaying the laminate today, so they've already torn all that stuff up and that stuff's been repaired, but there's some stuff to do on the front slide and things like that.

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So yeah, repairs to be done and then of course once we get going, and by the way, only a matter of,

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I think it's less than a month now, I'll be teaching apologetics at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas.

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I honestly don't know how all that works out as far as auditing or anything like that goes, but looking forward to be teaching that.

01:02:45

You were going to say something? Yeah, no, no.

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It is a class. It is an intensive class. There is registration. I know that we have auditors, so people who aren't taking it for credit, but yeah, go ahead.

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But they would need to contact Grace Seminary to work all that out.

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That's not going to be done through us. Right, yeah. Rich wanted you to know that in case you wanted to try to call us instead of somebody else.

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And then we'll be heading up to Colorado. Don't have any debates set up there in Colorado.

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That does not shock me at all. I wanted to try to find someone who would defend the insanity of the

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Senate Bill 1312 up there that, of course, the Colorado governor signed into quote -unquote law, misgendering a crime and context and things like that.

01:03:50

And they didn't get everything they wanted, but we all know they'll be back next year for the rest of it.

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So the battle continues, but everybody up there knows they have the media in their back pocket. So why in the world would they come out and actually try to defend what they're saying against knowledgeable opposition?

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That'd be stupid. And so, you know, that might still change, but so far those promoting that evil in Colorado lack the courage of their convictions, and they won't come out and do battle.

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But we'll keep working on things like that. But just so you know, the travel fund is how we repair things and buy gas and do all the rest of that kind of fun stuff.

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I saw an EV today when I was at the trucks in for some repairs.

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A check engine light came on. Well, that's another thing the travel fund pays for is whatever they find today.

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It has something to do with the emission systems, probably the DEF tank or something like that. We hope so.

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We'll find out. That DEF tank has caused me some issues.

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It's hard to fill. But when I was there, I saw an EV truck on the lot, and I was sitting there.

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I was in a rush, but I was sitting there thinking, I wonder how many miles I could pull my RV with that before the battery would die.

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I've gone up to that dealership, and as I sit there and wait, I look at those EV trucks, and I just shake my head.

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I look, and I just shake my head, and I just go, why?

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Why? Why would any... Why? This is not a grocery getter.

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This is not a tool around town. You're going to turn the air conditioner on on this beast in July in Phoenix, Arizona, and get about 10 feet down the road.

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Why? Anyway, that's my editorial is over now. All right. Well, I read something about the

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Chinese have come up with an EV that has a generator in it.

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It's not a fossil fuel generator, but it has some kind of a generator. They've gotten up to a thousand kilometers on a charge.

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Once you get there, cool, but you're still not pulling... Our RV, when she's loaded, is about 16 ,000 pounds.

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14 -4 dry, but it's about 16 ,000 pounds. If I go the northern route,

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I have to go up to Flagstaff. Flagstaff's 7 ,000 feet above sea level. We're at 1 ,200. If you've ever driven up Five Mile Hill outside of Black Canyon City, or then out of Camp Verde to Flagstaff, yeah, that tech ain't there yet.

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That tech isn't there yet. I'm seeing a whole lot more autonomous cars. When I dropped

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Kelly off at the airport yesterday, all those Waymos were just all over the place, and there was nobody in that driver's seat.

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Yeah, but they don't burn very well. Well, I guess, actually, they burn really well. No, they burn really well.

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That's what I've heard. I hope we don't find that out this weekend, but there you go. All right, but anyways, so trip upcoming.

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The Travel Fund is how we do that stuff. Just let folks know about that, and we appreciate your support.