Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: John Calvin, Part 1

The following message is by pastor John Piper more information from desiring.

God is available at www .desiringgod .org

I Want to begin By directing your attention to the self -identification of God in Exodus chapter 3

Verses 14 to 15 you can look at it if you want by the way with regard to the manuscript as in the last several years just to spare you the trouble of trying to Listen and write at the same time if you want it.

We will put this manuscript in your hands right after this Gathering free of charge so that you can focus all your energies on listening and if there's any juicy quote or Anecdote that I tell it'll be on paper in your hands five minutes after we're done

And you don't have to worry you can be thinking about questions You want to ask me at the end instead of trying to keep track on paper of where I'm going

Exodus chapter 3 verses 14 and 15 now You remember Moses has been called and commissioned by God to go down to Egypt to set the people free and lead them out of bondage and Moses is frightened and he

Says to God that he doubts that he's the man for the job and God says to him in verse 12

I will be with you and then

Moses says when I say to them The God of your fathers has sent me to you

They may say to me What is his name? What shall

I say to them? And God's response at this point is I believe perhaps the most at least one of the most important self -revelations of God in all the

Bible God said to Moses I Am who

I am And he said thus you shall say to the sons of Israel I am

Has sent me to you And God furthermore said to Moses thus you shall say to the sons of Israel Yahweh Which is simply another form of a yeah

Yahweh The God of your fathers the God of Abraham the

God of Isaac The God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name

Yahweh This is my name forever This is my memorial name

To all generations and so it's very clear that the a

Thousandfold Used name of God Yahweh in the

Old Testament is rooted by God Explicitly in the phrase.

I am who I am. Yes. Yeah share. Yes. Tell them

Yahweh Has sent you tell them that the most significant thing you can say and The most wonderful thing you can say is that I simply and absolutely am now

I begin with this self -designation of God because my unhidden and unashamed aim in this message on John Calvin and in ten years of hosting the

Bethlehem Conference for pastors is to fan a flame in you That you might have a passion for the centrality and the supremacy of God in your ministry

This is not Distanced merely objectified

Historiography I have an agenda a very clear theological

Sermonic agenda and Calvin is my guinea pig this year And it's the same message every year

And it hangs on the wall up there and it's written on everything I write and it's what

I live for and so there's no Hidden agenda here. My aim is to fan a flame in you

That your heart would burn for the centrality and the supremacy of God in ministry my heart burns when

I hear God say Moses tell them I Am Doesn't yours tell them

I am Sent you my heart just burns when

I read that I want to get that I want to see that I want to taste that I want to live that It burns in me when

I think about the absoluteness of the being of God never beginning never ending never becoming never changing never

Improving to be dealt with on his terms or not at all

I just trembled inside when I hear God talk like that.

So let it hit you brothers God This God in whose name this conference exists this

God never had a beginning Let it hit you

Everything changes if you see that this God never had a beginning

Every kid I've ever had all five of them the only ones not there yet at age three asks

Where did God come from that's the biggest question

God came from God God is

What a statement Oh Calvin One who never had a beginning

But always was and is and will be Defines all things

Whether we want him to be there or not, he's there We don't negotiate with him for what we want reality to be the arrogance man all the way

God is talked about today the arrogance of human beings as If we can negotiate the kind of God we get

When we come into existence we stand before God who made us he owns us we had

Absolutely, no choice in this you have absolutely no choice and whether you come into being and stand before God and Reckon with God or not and no ranting no raving no sophisticated doubt or skepticism

Has any effect whatsoever on the existence of God? He simply and absolutely

Is tell them I am has sent you if we don't like it

We can change for our joy or we can resist to our destruction

But one thing remains absolutely unassailed God is

He just is You gotta reckon with him or die

There is no choice. He is There he's

God Therefore brothers Let it hit you what matters in ministry is

God above all things I cannot escape

The simple I used to think it was something you moved beyond I Cannot escape the simple obvious truth that God Must be the main thing in ministry because God is the main thing in life and He's the main thing in life because he's the main thing in the universe and he's the main thing in the universe because every atom and every emotion and every soul and every angelic and demonic and human being belongs to God Who absolutely is he created them all these?

sustains them all he directs them all because as the Apostle says from him and through him and back to him is everything to him be

The glory he absolutely is tell them I am has sent you and so on this 10th anniversary of the

Bethlehem Conference for the supremacy of God in pastors My desire is as strong as ever that God might inflame in you a passion for his centrality and supremacy in your ministry so that people will say of you when you are dead and gone he knew

God He loved God He showed us

God Weekend and week out. He was as the

Apostle says filled with all the fullness of God Ephesians 319 make that your prayer like it was the

Apostles prayer for the Ephesians now, this is my aim and this is my burden

For the Bethlehem Conference and for my life and for this church and for you and for your churches and for the nations

Because it's implicit in the sheer being of God It's Explicit in the teachings of the

Bible from him through him and to him are all things in him We live and move and have our being he's the end point as John MacArthur ended on this morning

The glory of God is where Paul ends it all he ends it all there every time the glory of God But also not just those two reasons

But because next year speaker David Wells, thank God he said yes, finally

I've asked him for year after year after year because I love this man Everything he writes.

I just say yes, David Yes, David, and one of the things he said that is so right is

It is this God majestic and holy in his being Who has disappeared from the modern evangelical world

And then just in the most recent notes December Christianity today You see that article by Leslie Newbigin about Leslie Newbigin raise your hand if you read that article.

Okay, not many but it's good It's good article. You remember what he said there. He said

I suddenly saw now This is just David Wells from a British perspective. I I suddenly saw

He writes that someone could use all the language of evangelical

Christianity and Yet the center was fundamentally the self my need of salvation

God is auxiliary to that. I Also saw he writes

That quite a lot of evangelical Christianity is can easily slip

Can become centered in me and my need of salvation and not in the glory of God and oh have we slipped

How many are the churches today? I ask you how many churches do you know where the dominant?

aroma sound feel expression is

Preciousness of the weight of the glory of God How many are there now

John Calvin? Saw in his own day the same thing that Leslie Newbigin saw in India and in Britain the last 50 years and in 1538 the

Italian Cardinal Sadole Trying to win back the city of Geneva which had turned over to the

Reformation just before Calvin came Trying to win them back writing to the

City Council had written a long introductory section

Extolling the preciousness of eternal life Before he gets to his vicious criticisms of the

Reformation and John Calvin in particular Well Calvin was asked to write the response to this in the fall of 1539

He did it in six days Luther read it and said here is a writing with hands and feet

Luther was 25 years older than John Calvin and admired him Melanchthon stood in awe of John Calvin John Calvin called him the theologian with trembling

Calvin's response to Sadole is Important because you can read it in this book.

I recommend that you all have this book in your library This is a collection. This is this is for Luther Dillenberger did for Calvin what he did for his

Luther collection get the Luther collection and the Calvin collection Then you got everything you need right here. You don't need to buy anything else of John Calvin You don't need it.

You can if you want to I have a few others under here like these You can read this there that the response to Sadole One of the first things

John Calvin wrote established him as the reformer of Europe when he wrote it Didn't deal first with justification

Didn't deal first with priestly abuses didn't deal first with transubstantiation Didn't deal first with praying to the

Saints didn't deal first with Papal authority all those come in for powerful treatment

But what he deals with first proves to be I believe the integrating issue of his life

The whole explanation of how he got to be who he was and why his theology was what it was why the world is today what it is under the influence of Calvinism it is the

Fundamental issue for John Calvin it comes out over and over and over again namely the centrality and the supremacy of the majesty and the glory of God for example, he sees in Sadole's Puff of piety at the beginning

Something that new begin saw here's the way Calvin puts Your zeal for heavenly life is

The zeal which keeps a man Devoted to himself and does not even by one expression

Arouse him to sanctify the name of God Sanctify the name of God your whole treatment of eternal life never even got to the main issue of whether Going there should be for the glory of God Calvin's chief contention with Rome Comes out in his writings over and over again is that you can take true language and Skew it so badly that it loses its whole center and foundation

What Calvin aims to do is something very different? So he goes on and he says this is what you should do settled a quote set before man as The as the prime motive of his existence zeal to illustrate the glory of God now, there's the banner over John Calvin's life preaching and theology zeal

There's passion to illustrate the glory of God the essential meaning of John Calvin's life and Preaching is that he recovered and he embodied a passion for the absolute reality

God is and majesty of God Benjamin Warfield wrote a big book that David Livingston loaned me on Augustine and Calvin and it's pretty profound stuff and he says

No man ever had a Profounder sense of God than John Calvin and that's the key to his life.

No particular doctrine not predestination not election not

Justification by faith is the key that unlocks the life of John Calvin Gerhardus Voss wrote a very powerful essay

You should get Voss's collective shorter writings um

Pure they were called Puritan reform Presbyterian reform it was called when it was published in 1980.

Maybe it's still that but you can get it and in this essay He writes about reformed theology versus Lutheran theology, and he asked why?

What is it about reformed theology that is the heirs of John Calvin that enables that tradition to grasp?

the fullness of Scripture Unlike any other branch of Christendom.

Let me put in parentheses here I argue a lot with our minions and I used to I used to buy the criticism that Calvinists were driven by an ironclad logic and ride rush shot over the scriptures never have

I Seen such a hocus -pocus in my life now that I've spent 20 years on this

It's exactly the opposite in all of my discussions This is a system.

I give a hoot about systems. I don't care about Naming systems, but this is a theology that has embraced scriptures and when you press

Scriptures on the Armenians in my denomination. They just go everywhere into philosophies

How can this be? How could God do that? How does this fit with that? How can this I said, I'm the logic chopper

Don't talk like that. It's text after text and so this is true

Historically whether whether you met some Calvinist along the way who just argued because well if this is true

This has to be true blah blah blah and never quotes text forget that guy go to the Bible But historically this system has been able to comprehend 1st

Timothy 2 4 2nd Peter 3 9 Ezekiel 1833 and many other texts along with all the great

Calvinist pillar texts into one authentic Integrated whole counsel of God and your hardest boss is very easy to find out why that is why and here's his answer because Quote because reformed theology took hold of the scriptures in their deepest root idea

That's why this root idea Which served as the key to unlock the rich treasuries of the scriptures was?

Then he puts it in italics the preeminence of God's glory in the consideration

Of all that has been Created it's the relentless

Orientation on the glory of God that gives coherence to John Calvin's life and the reformed tradition

Voss said the all -embracing Slogan of the reformed faith is this quote

The work of grace in the sinner as a mirror for the glory of God Mirroring the glory of God is the meaning of John Calvin's life mirroring the glory of God now when he gets to Justification which he did very quickly to settle a when he gets to justification.

This is what he says You touch upon justification by faith

The first and keenest subject of the controversy between us

Wherever the knowledge of it is taken away the glory of Christ is extinguished

There's the bottom line for Calvin. You don't begin with justification. This is what sets him apart from Luther and This is a fundamental.

That's too strong a word a very significant difference in the two traditions as they come down and these men were eye -to -eye on the glory of God and the

Sovereignty of God and the predestination of God in the election of God Luther and Calvin stood on the same footing but there was a slight nuance starting point difference that has

I believe made a difference in those traditions and the glory of God is

The starting point for John Calvin and those who have followed in his footsteps, that's the deeper root than justification for Calvin the need of the

Reformation is This this is a quote now from Parker THL park

Rome this is his interpretation of Calvin I think it's right Rome had destroyed the glory of Christ in many ways

One by calling upon the Saints to intercede when Jesus Christ is the only mediator

Between God and man to by adoring the Blessed Virgin when Christ alone is to be adored

Three by offering continual sacrifices in the mass when Christ the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross is complete and sufficient for by elevating tradition to the level of Scripture and even making the

Word of God dependent for its authority on the Word of Man Calvin asks in his commentary on Colossians How comes it?

That we are carried about with so many strange Heresies He asks that and here's his answer

Because the excellence of Christ is not perceived by us

That's what I was praying about brothers at the beginning something happened to this man the

Excellence of Christ is not perceived by us

Which means I believe that where a passion for the glory of Christ weakens and the center shifts

Everything shifts Which bodes very poorly for us today

Indoctrinal faithfulness and you can see it Just think of them think of the shiftings that are happening today

There's a root It is a marvelous thing how conserving as Spurgeon said how

Conserving are the doctrines of grace to a hundred other doctrines

How preservative is an orientation on the absolute supremacy of?

the glory of God in all things and when it is forsaken and Not talked of much and in fact seminary teachers will say

I think the love of God should be stressed more So many things follow right in the train doesn't even take a generation before heresies begin to follow in the train of the loss of the

Centrality of the majesty and the glory of God For Calvin The Reformation was needed because the glory of Christ had been

Extinguished So the unifying root now I'm arguing of Calvin's life and labors is his passion to display

God in Christ in his majesty and glory when he was 30 years old he looked to the end of his life and he described an imaginary scene one of his writings of Himself at the last judgment giving account to God and this is what he anticipated saying.

Oh God the thing at which I chiefly aimed and For which

I most diligently labored Was that the glory of thy goodness and justice might shine forth?

conspicuous That the virtue and blessings of thy Christ might be fully displayed then 24 years later

One month before he gave an account to the judge in death he wrote in his last will and testament

I Have written nothing out of hatred to anyone

But I have always Faithfully propounded what I esteem to be for the glory of God That was his estimation at least of his writing and his life.

Now. Here's my question This is my key question that I want to try to answer and unfold with you

What happened to him? Because I want it to happen to all of my people.

I Want it to happen for the joy of all the nations. That's our mission statement up there on the wall

I want to happen in your churches or in you if it hasn't happened yet What happened to John Calvin to make him a man?

so mastered by the majesty of God and second part to the question