Bunyan Conference Houston 2008: Session 3A

Okay, one of the problems we have is that one of the qualifications for eldership is truthfulness. And unfortunately, we just heard a story, and once he started saying he found someone with a seminary degree, I'm like, oh yeah, right.

Maybe if you're a former CIA, and you might be, but I don't think so. We have a lot of ground to cover, and I've been asked to allow a little time for questions at the end, and so we're going to dive in.

I'm not going to tell you about my tie that contains Colossians 1 .15 -24, but it does. And it would have been very relevant last night, but you can only wear so many ties at the same time, so I'm going to try to do a double tie thing that would look rather silly.

The Centrality of Justification by Faith

Justification by faith. By the way, tomorrow evening, we will be looking at the Doctrines of Grace. I will be playing portions of a recent sermon here in the Houston area on the subject of Calvinism. And it will be starting and stopping, and I'll be responding to the things that are said there.

So if that's your bailiwick, then I just dated myself again, then maybe you'll want to be here tomorrow evening. But for this evening, the Doctrine of Justification by Faith, which is somewhat daunting to me in light of a Sunday morning sermon.

Grace Reformed Baptist Church, the pastor did a... I've never seen sermon notes like that in my entire life. And if you are used to that, you should be very happy that you get that kind of work. So it's a daunting task for me, but I'm going to do a little bit more of the historical aspects because of the context of our discussion this evening.

But I want to start with something that's a little bit more necessary, shall we say. And that is, we live in a day where many people do not believe that discussions like this are overly relevant anyway.

That is, we live in a society that no longer believes in something called absolute truth. If you believe that what you say is true and what someone else says is wrong, you're looked on as being either hateful or arrogant or probably both all at the same time.

And certainly we do know people who proclaim that they believe in absolute truth, but because of the fact that they don't do their homework. They do not honor truth by studying it in an in-depth fashion and by being careful about what they say and researching and so on and so forth.

They give all the rest of us a pretty bad name, in essence, is what takes place in that kind of a context. And so we recognize that the society has seen people who have abused truth and therefore we all get painted with the same brush.

There's not much we can do about that other than distinguishing ourselves by consistently handling the truth aright. But, that issue aside, there is an epidemic in the church. An epidemic where the issues of the gospel are really null.

Part of this comes from the fact that there's just so many different voices saying so many different things. And we live in an age of information overload. The brother was talking about the fact that I'm a geek and I am.

When people come to pick me up at the hotel, I'm sitting there and I've got my Blackberry out. I'm using my RSS feeds to keep up with news, keep up with Islam. I have apologetic sites and stuff like that and I'm sitting there in the lobby on my Blackberry.

We can do that today. But there is such an overabundance of information that honestly a lot of us recognize. There's no way that any of us could ever master all the information that's available today.

Have you ever heard the phrase Renaissance Man? The last Renaissance Man probably was Desiderius Erasmus. There was a day when basically you really could master the wide range of human knowledge. Because the wide range of human knowledge wasn't nearly as in-depth and wide as it is now.

And you could talk about science and literature and all sorts of things like that. But today there's just so much speciality. There's so much in-depth study in certain areas. That basically you have people who are an expert in one area but they may be completely ignorant of another.

And by the way, being ignorant is not a bad thing. That is not an insult. All of us are ignorant of certain things and we should be willing to admit that. But unfortunately today you're not allowed to say that.

So the result of all this has been that for most Christians they honestly look at someone like myself. And they look at old time writers who spoke with confidence on such things as justification.

As a little bit out of step.

As being intimidating. Out of sync with modern society. And this is what's behind a lot of the fact that you can go back and you can read the old writers. And they will confidently proclaim the truth of God.

But today that confidence and hence that authority is missing in a lot of the proclamation that you hear from the pulpit of today's church. And part of it is because, well, you know, we need to be epistemologically humble.

Well, that's a nice thing to say. Everyone wants to be humble, right? But that's another way of basically saying we need to confess that God really has not spoken with clarity on the key issues in which he glorifies himself.

And that's a rather arrogant thing to say. Isn't it ironic that you can actually be rather arrogant in trying to act like you're actually humble? The fact of the matter is that we believe that the Bible is the word of God.

It uses language that forces us to the conclusion that God has made a sufficiently clear revelation of the gospel. That we can know what is and what is not the gospel. And that we can say this is the truth of the gospel and say that is not the truth of the gospel.

And no matter how many different opinions are out there, it doesn't change the fact that the apostles certainly believed that the truth of the gospel had been revealed. I refer you to Galatians chapter 2.

And of course the entire book of Galatians is one of the main reasons that my ministry will always be small. What do I mean by that? Well, if you want to make sure that your ministry always remains very small, then what you do is first of all you become a Calvinist.

And you actually believe it and live it. Not just, you know, well I like the five points but, you know, it's not that big a deal. You actually see that those five points have an impact on about 55 other points.

About how the church is organized and what worship is and the entirety of life and so on and so forth.

That's the first thing you do.

Secondly, you talk about Roman Catholicism. If you want to make sure that you're unpopular forever, be a Calvinist who talks about Roman Catholicism and debates the leading Roman Catholic apologists as well.

And then if you really want to make sure that you remain in the tiny category, then talk about Islam all at the same time. That's how you do it. That is the recipe for smallville for the rest of your existence.

Because you'll offend a wide variety of religious people in the process of doing that. But I've had to do all of that and primarily because of the book of Galatians. If Galatians wasn't in the canon, then maybe I might be able to close my eyes to certain things.

On one hand, talk about Mormonism, it's false gospel, but not be consistent and look at false gospels elsewhere. But Galatians is there and there's just no way around what the Apostle Paul says. We're going to look at a number of texts in Galatians this evening briefly, but I want to especially focus on this one as an introduction.

Because Paul is discussing what happened in the early church when men who were called false brethren began to enter the church.

Here are his words.

But it was because of the false brethren secretly brought in who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty, which we have in Christ Jesus, in order to bring us into bondage. But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

Now, I would like to spend just a couple of moments making sure that you hear what he is saying. First of all, these individuals were inside the church. They were not outside the church. They claimed to be Christians.

They claimed to follow Jesus. They would have claimed to love Jesus. And this is where a lot of times, I think honestly folks, and I'm going to get myself in a lot of trouble right here, this is one of the reasons you don't have women elders.

Because ladies, you have bigger hearts. And when someone looks at you with big puppy dog eyes and says, I really do believe, you're more likely to go. And the guy's going, excuse me, he's a raven heretic.

And sometimes you need to have the, he's a raven heretic part, because that's exactly what's going on here. Here were people, and they are pseudodelphoi, false brothers.

They claim to be brothers.

When they walked up to you, they stuck their hand out and said, hi brother. And the apostle Paul stood there and said, you're not my brother.

Oh, that meanie.

That terrible man. You see how our society thinks? How dare you call someone a false brother. How many people, standing behind pulpits today, would be willing to say someone is a false brother? Their profession of faith is untrue.

I mentioned a couple nights ago, Todd Mendel. This guy who's going around making a mockery of the gospel of Christ. He is a false brother.

He claims to be a brother. He's a false teacher.

And fortunately, I'm in the minority in being willing to say that.

It has nothing to do with me.

It has to do with whether there is a way of knowing who is a brother and who is not. The apostle Paul, there were false brethren, secretly brought in. They didn't even do this openly. There was deceptiveness involved in their activities.

And they had snuck in. There was a purposefulness. Rarely do the heretics show up at the front door wearing pink and purple polka dots. They dress like us. They act like us. They talk like us. And they had snuck in to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus.

There is a liberty that the truth of the gospel gives. And false religion, in its core, is always seeking to control people by establishing unbiblical parameters, perverting the gospel, adding things to the gospel so as to control the grace of God.

And that's what these people want. They want to have people following them.

And so they had snuck in.

They had spied out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus in order to bring us into bondage. A false gospel always has as a part bondage. Remember what he says in Galatians 5 .1. We have been set free.

Don't go back to bondage. It may look like it's setting you free, but in reality a false gospel will always in some way create strictures, structures, things that we do to control the grace of God. That is the nature of human religion.

But notice what Paul says about the apostles. We did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, for even a moment.

Why? What was at stake?

You see, for the vast majority of people in our society today, what you folks are doing here this evening is silly. Isn't there something better for you to be doing? Taking your time out, maybe traveling a good distance, especially with what gas costs these days.

To listen to some silly looking guy stand up there and talk about theology. How out of step you are. And yet, the apostle Paul said we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour.

So what was at stake?

For most people, religious authority or some odd understanding of some esoteric religious idea. What did he say? So that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. He recognized that if there was any compromise on this issue, the very truth of the gospel itself would be lost.

Now that, to me, absolutely means that the apostle Paul believes the truth of the gospel had been revealed and was knowable.

It is definable.

It's not just a matter of human opinion. And that there are certain teachings that will absolutely compromise that truth. And when you embrace it, you no longer have the gospel. That's why in Galatians chapter 5, some of the strongest language in all the New Testament, the apostle Paul says, you start down that road of works of obedience.

You start down that road of works of righteousness. You allow yourself to be circumcised. They only added one thing to faith. They said you had to believe in Jesus. But, that wasn't enough.

There was more.

And what does the apostle Paul say?

You've been severed from Christ.

You've fallen from Christ.

And people misuse that as if somehow, ooh, so you can be truly in Christ and then lose it. He says, to you who are seeking to be justified by law, you have done these things. So if you're not seeking to be justified in the only way that one can be justified, then you have been severed from Christ.

The gospel has been revealed.

What we're doing this evening is meaningful. If we didn't believe that, there wouldn't be any reason to be doing this. We'd be sitting around talking about opinions. Sadly, that's how even my systematic theology class was when I was in seminary.

It was nothing more than a class of going, well, people in the past believed this,.

And people in the past believed that.

And this person argued with that person. And that's all systematic theology was. And for the vast majority of people in seminaries today, that's still what it is. Because there's no longer a belief that there is a coherent truth revealed by God.

And so keep this text in mind.

We're going to be looking at a number of other trips in the wrong direction.

Instead, we do that.

Hopefully, if all works, we're going to start getting some cool woodcuts. All right. Martin Luther, of course, called the Doctrine of Justification the article of the standing or falling church. That is, in his estimation.

A church that was preaching the Doctrine was standing. And one not preaching it was, or had already, fallen. In other words, it was in the very essence or definition of what the church is to be preaching the central element of how a person is made right before God.

And specifically, in doing so, he likewise indicated that that centrality was not just for his day, but that this was always the case with the church. Yet, interestingly enough, modern Protestants have taken aim at justification centrality.

Recently, Steve Schlissel of the Messiah's Congregation in Brooklyn referring to this very claim on the part of Luther, called it hui en hagwash. That justification is the central element of the Christian proclamation.

Now, here we have a picture, by the way, and sometimes it might be a little bit small for people to see. Actually, I can read it, so maybe you can too. That is a woodcut of John Tetzel's indulgence processional.

We don't have time to get into all of that, but it will be necessary to make references to it. Well, the key beliefs taught in Roman Catholicism that drove Luther to his love of justification was the belief in indulgences.

I can't tell you how many people have told me, well, you know, Vatican II, get rid of all of that. Well, that's somebody who hasn't been reading much of modern Roman Catholic theology. Here is the Catholic Catechism of 1994, section 1471.

An indulgence is a remission before God of a temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions.

Through the action of the Church,.

Which as the minister of redemption dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints, end quote. I think you might be interested in knowing there are more sections on indulgences in the modern Catholic Catechism than there are on justification itself.

In fact, I would like to recommend to anyone who wants to have one of the clearest contrasts.

Between the biblical doctrine of grace.

And modern Roman Catholic theology, read the post-Vatican II document, Indulgentiarum Doctrinae. It's available online. Believe me, even Google can figure out how to find Indulgentiarum Doctrinae. That's not exactly a phrase that is overly common.

There are a number of editions of it online. You can read it in just a matter of minutes. And I would recommend it to your reading. It is probably one of the best ways of disabusing someone of an inordinate ecumenical spirit to read that particular document.

It is quoted a number of times in the Catholic Catechism. Now, in the past, in the last quotation, there was a reference to this treasury, the treasury of merit, the thesaurus meritorium. The modern Catechism defines the treasury of merit as following.

This treasury includes, as well, the prayers and good works of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They are truly immense, unfathomable, and even pristine in their value before God. In the treasury, too, are the prayers and good works of all the saints, all those who have followed the footsteps of Christ the Lord, and by His grace have made their lives holy and carried out the mission the Father entrusted them.

Historically, very briefly, how this developed was in the medieval period. One of the Popes taught that Christ only needed to shed a single drop of blood to redeem the world. But since he bled copiously, there was created by this the treasury of merit, all this excess merit that is provided.

But it is not just the excess merit of Christ. The treasury of merit, likewise, contains the excess merit of the Virgin Mary, which is immense, because, according to Roman Catholic theology, she is sinless.

And this becomes the basis, the beginning, of this uber-exaltation of Mary that we eventually see in the definition of the bodily assumption and now those who wish to see the 5th Marian dogma, the idea of co-redemptrix, likewise defined.

But it also contains the excess merits of all the saints. You need to realize that in Roman Catholic theology, a saint, one that is canonized by the Church, there is a whole process that you have to go through to be canonized by the Church.

You hear about that right now, about Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and Padre Pio. They brought his body out recently and people were standing there staring at his body and things like that. And most of us Protestants go, why do you do that?

Leave him in there. It's okay. Isn't he going to happen? What's going on here? But the whole concept of indulgences is associated with this. And to be a saint is to be a person who, when you die,.

There is...

For your sins. And when you die, if you have more merit than temporal punishments, then you go directly into the presence of God. If you have more temporal punishments than you have merit, you have to go to purgatory to be cleansed to enter into the presence of God, you see.

And so when you have extra merit, when you have more merit than you have temporal punishments, that merit is likewise placed into the treasury of merit. And that's what's being referred to here in the Catholic Catechism.

It continues in saying, in this way, they, the saints, attained their own salvation.

And at the same time cooperated.

In saying, being their brothers in the unity of the mystical body. Again, this is the Catholic Catechism, section 1477,.

If you would like to check the facts,.

And I would suggest you do so. Truly nothing has changed since the days of Luther. Rome's teachings on this topic remain the same, even if expressed in more careful terms. The same issues separate Biblical believers from Rome today as then.

The doctrine of justification is at the heart of the issue. Reformers believed it defined the gospel itself. They believed the gospel taught by Rome was a counterfeit that could not save it. The question is, were they wrong?

Were they just unkind men who were trying to make divisions where there was no need to be divisions? There would be many people in our society today that would say so. Notice I said nothing has changed.

Yes, the doctrine remains the same, but the expression of belief on Roman Catholicism today has become very, very wide. While there was a much more focused theology in the past, there is a much wider expression that is found today, and yet the official documents of the Church continue to teach these things, even if the liberals, especially in the United States, aren't overly fond of these things.

I would just suggest to you, if you're interested in seeing some of these changes, look at the way purgatory was viewed pre-Vatican II in comparison to today. Some of you who are older, if you know older Roman Catholics, you know that the view of purgatory at that time and what is held by many people today, not even on the same planet, the amount of fear of the doctrine of purgatory that existed then.

Today, there are so many Catholic apologists who want to go, oh, you know, purgatory is just, it's where you get all cleaned up before you go to heaven. It's a wonderful thing. It might just happen in one instant, too.

Or I had one Catholic apologist once say, purgatory is where God hugs the hell out of you. Okay, that's interesting. Go back and read the pious history of literature written by saints and doctors, the Roman Catholic Church, describing the horrors of hell and how long people are there and the horrors that they're experiencing.

And you'll see that Western Catholicism has definitely cleaned things up just a little bit, shall we say,.

Along those lines.

Galatians and the Gospel of Grace

Now, I turn to the scriptures for some of our presentations this evening, especially to Galatians chapter 1. We looked at Galatians 2, but before that happened, the Apostle Paul made it very clear that what he was going to be presenting was going to be something that wasn't going to be overly enjoyable when this letter was read in the congregations of the Church of Galatia.

Because these false teachers were sitting in the congregation at the time these letters were read. Can you imagine the tension that filled that congregation that day? Because the Apostle Paul says, I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another.

Only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed.

He is anathema. Now notice what the Apostle says.

He says that he is amazed.

That they are deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ. You cannot claim that you are a follower of Christ when you have no concern for his gospel. That's why I appreciate so much what the Lord said in Mark chapter 8 when he said, If anyone is ashamed of me and of my gospel.

It is so common in our society, especially, let's be honest,.

Amongst politicians,.

To say nice things about Jesus, but clearly live and profess something completely opposite than the gospel. That is hypocrisy.

And it's a lie.

And you cannot live in that fashion. The Bible will not allow it. Jesus would not allow it. The Apostle Paul does not allow it. When he talks about a different gospel, he says, which is really not another.

And as you know, in the original language, he uses terminology. He says, this is a different gospel, but it's not a different gospel of the same kind. It's not alas, it's heteros. It is a different kind of gospel.

It's not like there are multiple gospels. There's only one true gospel. When you have something else, it is of a different kind. And he says that there are some who are disturbing you. And they want, notice it says, they want to distort the gospel of Christ.

And this term to distort.

Could refer to a complete distortion, just a complete twisting of the gospel. But it could also refer to twisting something just enough so it no longer fits into the place where it used to fit. Not every distortion of the gospel is as obvious as Mormonism pertains.

You know, well God actually is a man from another planet, and there are actually billions of gods, and Jesus is the spirit brother of Lucifer, and we have this temple you get to go through, and you wear temple garments, and you draw your fingers across.

Okay, alright, alright,.

That one stands out pretty strongly. But not every false gospel stands out that strongly. Not every false gospel, and as we saw what the Judaizers were doing in Galatia, was just adding one little thing, and it sounded so biblical.

And yet the Apostle Paul says it's another gospel. They want to distort the gospel of Christ. By the way, you have to know what the gospel of Christ is before you can distort it.

It has been revealed.

It is known to man. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be anathema. He is to be a curse. That's not the curse of man.

That's not Paul saying, I'm placing the curse upon him. That is the very curse of God that comes from the Old Testament and the use found there. These are strong words. I remember when I debated Barry Lynn on the subject of homosexuality a number of years ago.

He's, believe it or not, a United Church of Christ minister. And when I asked him about Galatians and things like that, he dismissed the inspiration of Galatians saying Paul was over the top. And for a modern man,.

That's what you have here.

Paul is over the top. And if you don't believe that God has spoken, if you don't believe that there were men who were entrusted with his gospel,.

Then none of this makes any sense.

That's why as the view of Scripture deteriorates, theology cannot stay together.

They go hand in hand.

And given how low the view of Scripture is in most seminaries today, it's no wonder that the theology is quite simply laughable.

From a historical perspective.

Later in Galatians, after he's talked about the truth of the gospel,.

He says,.

I do not set aside the grace of God for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing. If there was some means...

And remember, for Paul, the law has been given by God Himself.

The law is our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ. The law is just and holy. We establish the law through the preaching of the gospel because it testifies to God's holiness and all these other things.

But even if through the law there was a way to gain righteousness, then the death of Christ was needless. And we're talking about a pretty extreme remedy for an extreme problem. And if there were other remedies than for the Son to give His life, for the Father to put His Son to death would be a mockery.

What he's saying is, if you start down these paths, if you start down this path that says, I'm going to join the grace of God, the activities of man, the merits of man, the righteousness of man, it's 180 degrees opposite of the way of faith and grace.

And you can't go down a path that goes opposite directions very far. Both directions at the same time. You have to choose one or the other. And if you start down that path, that's why he says,.

Christ will be of no benefit to you.

All these people claim to Christ.

They claim to believe in Christ.

And Paul's whole point is,.

Christ will not be a co-savior with you.

It's an either or.

It's black and white.

Our society doesn't like black and white. And that's why this kind of theology is over the top for many.

As he said in Galatians chapter 5,.

You are trying to be justified by law.

And they would have said,.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

We believe.

We believe in Christ.

We believe in the necessity of Christ.

Fine.

But you say the person must do these things so as to place himself in a position to be able to receive the righteousness of Christ. You are trying to be justified by law. You have been alienated from Christ.

You have fallen away from grace.

What does that mean?

Well, grace is only on one path. It's not on the path of law. You start going down that path of what you do determining your relationship to God rather than what God has done in Jesus Christ,.

And you're no longer walking the realm of grace.

You can claim it all you want. You can sing about it all you want. The apostle's point is you're lying.

You're lying.

Grace, by necessity, must be free. It is a divine act to justify someone. And when you say that actually man is in control of that, don't call that grace anymore. Don't call that grace anymore.

You have been alienated from Christ.

He's not on that road. When you walk down that road of works righteousness, you're alone.

You're alone.

The one who lives by the law,.

Well, that's your standard.

Hope you do it perfectly,.

Because if you fail in one place, that law condemns you. Unless somehow someone can be made that curse for you,.

Which of course brings us back to Christ.

But notice the stark contrasts.

This is why Paul is so disliked by many in the modern world who don't like the idea of one thing is right and one thing is wrong. That's why he is dismissed by so many today. The Council of Trent taught in 1547.

When God touches man's hearts in the illumination of the Holy Spirit, man himself is not inactive while receiving that inspiration. Since he can reject it,.

And yet without God's grace,.

He cannot by his own free will move himself toward justice.

In God's sight.

This is quoted in 1994, Catechism No. 1993. This position is historically known.

As semi-Pelagianism,.

The idea that grace is necessary, but grace is not in and of itself sufficient. And here is where we have so much problem in the modern context. I remember back when, remember when, well, some of you don't, but ECT first came out in 94.

Evangelicals and Catholics together. And ECT tried to get around this problem by basically stating, well, we believe that we are justified by God's grace through faith. We can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.

Well, there's a little problem. Anybody with a historical bone in their body recognized that there was a word missing. It was the word alone. And that by just skipping over it, like, you know, we're just all out in a daisy-filled sunlit field just loving the world together and holding hands and doing the old Coke commercial.

Remember the old Coke commercial? You know, the world needs love, blah, blah, blah, blah. Somehow that was going to make.

All our problems go away.

It didn't.

It's still not answering the question. When you don't use the solos, you are denying the solos. I mean, unless you're totally ignorant of history. And so I remember so many people. I remember a fairly well-known Christian apologist on a fairly well-known Christian radio station talking about this subject.

And there was a whole bunch of people.

Who basically started reading.