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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.
This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.
Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 29th day of January, 2024.
And before I introduce today's guests, I just have a couple of brief announcements to make. Please mark your calendars for tomorrow, Tuesday, the 30th of January, because we are having as a guest tomorrow M .D. Perkins, who is on staff with the American Family Association, and he is also the author of the book Dangerous Affirmation, the Danger of Gay Christianity, which is a book highly lauded and recommended by Rosaria Butterfield, who many of you may be familiar with.
Rosaria, a former lesbian, Marxist, leftist, and tenured college professor in upstate New York who was saved by the grace of God and has become a born-again believer and heterosexual and married to a man and so on.
She highly recommends Dr. Perkins' book, and he is our guest tomorrow for the primary reason of responding to the very unfortunate, to put it mildly, and tragic comments of one of my favorite Christian speakers, preachers, and even guests on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio in the past, Alistair Begg, who recommended to a woman during a podcast interview, not mine, someone else's, who recommended to a woman, a grandmother, that she attend the transgendered wedding, so-called, of her grandson as long as that grandson knew of her positions as a Bible-believing Christian, knew that she did not recognize homosexuality and transgenderism as legitimate activities, in fact, sinful activities, and that the marriage is not a real marriage.
But even with all that acknowledgement, Alistair recommends that she attend this wedding and even purchase a gift for them. So, unfortunately, Alistair has even doubled down on his position, even after serious rebuke against him and even with the removal of his radio program from the American Family Association's radio network.
So, as I said, MD Perkins is going to be responding to Alistair's comments and also giving further explanation on why the AFA reached their decision to remove Alistair from their radio lineup. So, please mark your calendars and join us with your own questions tomorrow.
That's Tuesday, January 30th, 4 to 6 p .m. Eastern. And also, I wanted to give an urgent prayer request today for a very dear friend of mine who most of you, if you listen to this program regularly, you will immediately recognize the name Grady from Asheboro, North Carolina, because he submits questions to my guests so frequently during our live interviews.
Well, Grady has become a very dear friend of mine and that was through his eager and frequent participation as an audience member of Iron Trump and Zion Radio and even his very generous financial support of this program.
Grady has just gotten out of surgery fairly recently, just the other day, triple bypass surgery, and he is having, he's experiencing a setback with his ability to breathe properly. So, the doctors, at least at the point when Grady notified me of this earlier today, the doctors were not 100 sure what was going on.
So, please pray for Grady. I want him sticking around here on this side of the dirt for a lot longer, a lot more years ahead of us, and he's a precious, humble, sweet brother. If you've ever met him, you'd immediately fall in love with him.
He's such a wonderful, dedicated, passionate brother in Christ. So, please keep praying for Grady from Asheboro, North Carolina and his full recovery from the triple bypass surgery. But now, I am delighted to announce that today we have a first-time guest who comes with the highest and most enthusiastic recommendation of my dear friend, Dr. Joseph C. Moorcraft III, pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia, and his wife, Becky.
They strongly urge me to interview Marcus Servin, who's my guest today. He is pastor of Christian Discipleship at Redeemer Presbyterian Church of Austin, Texas, which is a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America denomination.
And today, we're going to be addressing John Calvin in the role of pastor, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Marcus Servin.
You are welcome, Chris. Glad to be here.
Well, please tell our listeners something about Redeemer Presbyterian Church of Austin, Texas.
Yeah, Redeemer Presbyterian Church has been in existence about 30 years. We are a downtown church. I actually came to Redeemer seven years ago after I had retired from 37 years of pastoral ministry in the PCA and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
And I came here to Austin, like many people do, to be in some warmer weather and moving from St. Louis, but also to be close to some of my adult children and grandchildren. Started volunteering at Redeemer, and they started noticing God was using me in ministry, and so they invited me to come out of retirement and to work part-time at the church.
It's a downtown church close to the university, a strong commitment to Reformed theology, strong commitment to Reformed liturgy in the church, and has a good impact upon the city of Austin. It's amazing to me that in such a liberal city, we have some very strong Bible-oriented churches, several of which are Reformed in their theology, not all, of course, but it's encouraging to see that here in Texas.
Yeah, a lot of people who are unfamiliar with Texas may be shocked to hear that there is a city in Texas that is extremely liberal, and that certainly is one of them, isn't it?
It absolutely is. Of course, it's the state capital. That's one reason why. But beyond that, the University of Texas is very close by the Longhorns, and even though I'm not a graduate from the University of Texas, I still have an affinity for the Longhorns, as most people do here in Austin.
So that brings liberal, progressive ideas very much into the forefront of this city. But at the same time, there is a hunger for the gospel because, as you know, and as I've experienced over the years, liberal answers point people to themselves, to their own humanistic aspirations.
They don't really have an answer for dealing with sin, and they're hungry for finding that answer, and it's only the gospel of Christ that gives that answer.
Hallelujah. And if anybody is living in or near Austin, Texas, or perhaps you have family, friends, and loved ones who live in or near Austin, Texas, or you're traveling through there, the website for Redeemer Presbyterian Church of Austin, Texas is RedeemerPrez .org.
RedeemerPrez .org. And once again, let me remind my listeners, if you wonder why sometimes my voice sounds strange, I'm still recovering from Bell's palsy. It is getting slightly better, but you may recognize occasionally a lisp or something else weird coming out of my mouth.
And I just thank God that it was not a stroke as originally suspected. And thank you for your continued prayers. Well, we have a tradition here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Pastor Marcus. Whenever we have a first-time guest, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.
And I would love to hear a summary of your story.
Sure. Happy to do that. Yeah, I grew up in Southern California and didn't really know much of anything about the Christian faith. My family, we attended church somewhat irregularly. It was a very liberal Protestant church in Glendale, California.
And the pastor was a great speaker, but he never really preached the gospel, never called anyone to repentance from their sins. And so Christianity to me just seemed like a social gathering in many respects.
But in my 17th year, I had a couple of friends who came to faith in Christ and they went away for Christmas break to a camp. And at that camp, the speaker encouraged all of the young men and women to, when they came back to school in January, to share the gospel with somebody.
And so these young guys who were my friends all prayed over who they should ask or who they should speak to, and they all came up with my name. And I remember it very vividly, spinning the dials on my high school locker, hearing my name called out, looking over my shoulder and seeing these three friends of mine, all coming up, Bibles open, ready to engage me in the gospel and that discussion.
And I was a little bit frightened by that. And so for the next three months, they continued to speak to me at every opportunity about the gospel of Christ, my need for repentance. God had already been working in my life.
I had become more acutely aware of my own sin and different questions about who is Jesus and what was his real identity began to surface in my mind as I started thinking about these things. So God was already at work pulling me and drawing me.
But it was finally in hearing the gospel from these friends and their encouragement to start reading the scriptures for myself that a change came about. And for me, it was a very dramatic conversion change.
That's not true for everybody, but it was true in my case. My parents were pretty alarmed when I started identifying myself as a Christian. God had changed my heart and changed a lot of things in me. They were worried that I had gotten involved in some sort of cult group.
But these three friends of mine, they were involved at the local Presbyterian church. And so I assured them that it's okay, Mom. It's okay, Dad. I'm just becoming a Presbyterian. They didn't know what quite to make of that.
At any rate, it was there in that church at Glendale Presbyterian Church was the Presbyterian Church USA congregation, which back in the early 70s still had a very strong commitment to the gospel, to Christian orthodoxy, to the truthfulness of the Bible.
Yeah. And amazingly, there are or there is, I should say, a tiny remnant of such congregations still remaining in the PC USA. Now, I have strong disagreements with leaders in those biblically faithful churches for remaining there, but they still do exist.
I know a number of men who are very committed to the truths of Scripture and simultaneously remaining in that denomination, hoping to be 21st century Martin Luthers or something. But anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there, that even though I think the majority of the denomination is apostate, there exists a remnant there of faithful men.
It's getting harder and harder to remain. I was first ordained in 1981 in the Presbyterian Church USA, served a church in the San Francisco Bay Area for five years. But I could see as time went along that there was a growing divide between what I would call light and darkness.
And the impression of darkness growing amongst our fellow presbyters and ministers was growing so great that I couldn't stay in that denomination any longer. And I gave that up, went back to school for a little while, trying to figure out where the Lord would take me next.
And then it would be in 1987 that I joined the PCA and was able to get reordained in that denomination and served in the more smaller Presbyterian denominations ever since then. And that was a faithful and a very good decision that God led me to in terms of ministry.
As far as called to ministry, I was an 18-year-old. One of the pastors at Glendale Presbyterian Church called me into his office one night after youth group. And he looked across his big desk and he said to me, Marcus, God is calling you to the ministry.
And I just about fell out of my chair. I couldn't quite believe it. I was heading toward military service and much like my grandfather and my father. But he persisted and gave a lot of good reasons, came up to see my parents and explained that, had our senior pastor come up.
And that made a big impression, enough so that I changed direction and went toward ministry as a first year college student. And after getting a year of ministry under my belt, there was no looking back.
I was totally convinced that God had called me into ministry. I didn't know all that it would mean, but that's the direction I was going to go for my life. So here we are many, many years later. I just hit 70 years old here last month and still in ministry after all these years and glad for it.
Praise God. I hope you don't mind me bringing up the elephant in the room. About the PCA. Although I know of many, many, many fine pastors and congregations within that denomination. I'm assuming you admit that is not a denomination without problems as far as things like the Revoice pro-chaste homosexual movement, where somebody, as long as they are refraining from physical activity, are welcome into leadership and so on after a profession of being homosexual as their identity and things like that.
This is something that the PCA still is in a bit of a tug of war within their own ranks about, right?
Yeah, that's very true. And as I mentioned, I served for many years in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church where some of those issues are not at all on the radar. When I came here to Austin, I found what I thought was a very good church, and it is.
And they invited me to transfer my credentials into the PCA. There was a little bit of reluctance on my heart in doing so. I had been in the PCA before. I kind of knew what the issues were. And thankfully, in this particular church, those issues are not in the forefront.
I'd like to be able to tell you that the Lord is cleaning house entirely in the PCA. There have been some changes in a positive way over the last year or so. But there still are a number of men who might question the whole matter of homosexual desires, that same-sex attraction, insisting that that is not sinful.
What I'd like to remind those men, when we have opportunity to talk and to debate some of the issues, is that Paul is very clear that the desires, the unnatural desires, as he calls them in Romans 1, are just as sinful as the actual act.
Our Lord makes that same distinction in the Sermon on the Mount when he declares that our infatuations or desires or lusts are just as sinful as the act. And so it's an artificial distinction, I believe, that's part of the sort of the odd and upside-down thinking of our current era that we live in, to call those things that are wicked good and those things that are good wicked.
So I want to continue to labor, if I can, for many years yet in the PCA to try to be a voice for biblical orthodoxy and the calling of people in this world to repentance and not giving them an excuse or rationalization for wrong behavior.
Amen.
Well, we are now going to our first commercial break, and when we return, we will begin our primary theme, John Calvin and the Role of Pastor. If you do have questions about the life and legacy of John Calvin, please submit your questions to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.
Please give your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Let's say something that we're discussing is an area where you are at odds with your own church.
Perhaps you are seeing the legitimacy and biblical integrity for the doctrines known as Calvinism, Reformed theology, and the doctrines of sovereign grace, and the doctrines of free grace, and other nicknames.
And perhaps this is a matter of strong tension with you and your elders. It may even be that you're the pastor, and you have developed the affirming belief in the doctrines of so-called Calvinism, which we repeat as only a nickname because we believe these are biblical teachings.
But you are at odds with your own fellow elders or your denomination. Well, we would understand that these would be reasons for you to remain anonymous, but if your question is general in nature, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.
We'll be right back. Do not go away.
I'm Pastor Keith Allen of Lindbrook Baptist Church, a Christ-centered, gospel-driven church looking to spread the gospel in the southwest portion of Long Island, New York, and play our role in fulfilling the Great Commission, supporting and sending for the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.
We're delighted to be a part of Chris Arnzen's Iron Sharpens Iron radio advertising family. At Lindbrook Baptist Church, we believe the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired Word of God, inerrant in the original writings, complete as the revelation of God's will for salvation and the supreme and final authority in all matters to which they speak.
We believe in salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. This salvation is based upon the sovereign grace of God, was purchased by Christ on the cross, and is received through faith alone, apart from any human merit, works, or ritual.
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It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast of the Lord's blessing and the knowledge of himself.
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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with my guest today, Marcus Servin. We are talking about John Calvin in the role of pastor. If you have a question, please submit it to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.
Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. And John Calvin, I'm sure you would agree, Pastor Marcus, is one of the most slandered and vilified figures from church history, especially, of course, by those who reject his theological conclusions.
And it's mind-boggling how men who are even in a position of academic credentials should know better, who still perpetuate lies about Calvin. But if you could, just give us an overview of Calvin the man in summary form, of course, before we move on specifically to his role as a pastor, because that is not typically what comes to mind, at least I don't think it does.
When people think of John Calvin, they think of a theologian, whether they agree with him or not. They think of somebody perhaps even erroneously just locked in a study who is burying himself with books.
And that, I believe, was his preference. But he did labor as a pastor nonetheless. If you could, tell us about John Calvin.
Sure. I first became acquainted with John Calvin when I was a student in seminary. I was studying at Fuller Seminary back in the day in the late 70s, and my professor had us reading Karl Barth and various other neo-Orthodox theologians.
And a number of us went to him and protested that and just said, we wanted to read somebody who was holding to a higher view of scripture. And so he suggested perhaps we might like to read Lewis Burkhoff and John Calvin.
And we said, fantastic, let's do that. And so I remember getting my first set of Calvin's Institutes from my parents when I was 25 years old and beginning to read through the Institutes. And that began a strong affinity to Calvin and his writings.
These are the same parents that thought you were an occult when you started to really believe your Presbyterianism?
Yes, it was.
That's an interesting choice of gifts.
Well, it probably wasn't my suggestion that I said, this is what I would really like, Mom and Dad. And they, yeah, they got me that. And that was kind of the best Christmas gift ever. I mean, I still have those books.
I've read them through many times. They're full of my underlinings and thoughts and comments and margins and so forth. But that began my interest in Calvin. But you're right. So many people have had odd and unsettled feelings about John Calvin, partly because they have either never read a line from the Institutes.
They've never read any of his commentaries. They've never read any of his sermons. And they've been fed lots of misinformation about his role in Geneva. Those are some of the reasons why people have negative impressions about John Calvin.
Yes, people have to be very careful not to only read the claims about someone from that person's enemies. And that's what many people do. Either they rely on books where Calvin has been vilified and slandered, or they just rely on sermons and the audio recordings or videos of preachers who are vehemently anti-Calvinist spewing out lies about him.
And that's a very dangerous thing to do with anybody, even if you're a Calvinist.
Yeah.
Don't start vilifying Wesley until you know what he believed. And I'm not even saying you should vilify him after you know what he believed. Don't be bad-mouthing, publicly especially, men of God who disagree with you without even taking any effort to explore what they actually stood for.
Yeah, that's so true. It's easy to come up with straw man arguments about what a person believed or how they represented themselves or how their logic worked out without really doing the hard work of reading them yourself.
So as I read Calvin, I came to a far different opinion about him than what I might have learned in college and so forth. I found that he was a man who had strong beliefs, no question about that, but he also had a very gentle pastoral approach.
He doesn't come across as a polemical arguer in the Institute so much, maybe a little bit more in his commentaries where he's trying to make strong arguments in a precise, logical way. But in the Institute, he's much more agreeable and is willing to speak about issues that really encourage one's faith.
So a little bit about him. First of all, he was born in France. That's the first thing you need to know. He was a Frenchman and he came to faith in Christ in his early 20s. He had been sent off to the University of Paris to a number of the different colleges there where he distinguished himself as a student.
But it really was through the impact of a older uncle of his and then through some of his professors and also a few roommates and friends, and then probably from reading a tract or two from Martin Luther, that he began to realize that his faith was hopelessly mired in many of the wrongheaded beliefs that went along with medieval Catholic theology.
And as he began to read the Bible for himself, that all began to change. He speaks of his conversion and he doesn't speak only really in his preface to the commentary on the Psalms. He speaks of it being a sudden conversion where the lights came on, so to speak, in his mind.
As he would write about it later, he very clearly made the statement that regeneration precedes faith, that God was the one who regenerates his heart and gives the gift of faith, as Paul would also enumerate in Ephesians 2.
And so we see Calvin coming to faith and right away he gets involved in the evangelical movement, so to speak, in Paris, France, which was not welcomed by the religious leaders or by the French nobility or monarchy.
At one point, one of Calvin's friends, a man by the name of Nicolas Copp, who was the rector of the University of Paris, at the year 1533, this sermon becomes a lightning rod in Paris and Calvin has to flee because he's a friend of Nicolas Copp.
And as a result, the fleeing is quite an interesting story. Would you like to hear the story?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Well, Calvin, it turns out, when the secret police from the Sorbonne begin to investigate Nicolas Copp, they find that Calvin helped him to write his sermon that everybody got so worked up and inflamed over.
And as Nicolas Copp fled Paris himself, it was a few days later that they came to realize that Calvin had had a hand in this, and so they tracked him down pretty quickly. They found him in his apartment late at night.
He had already gotten ready for bed, and they came and started pounding on the doors downstairs. Some of Calvin's roommates refused to let them in and made all kinds of excuses. They went up and warned Calvin, who at that time was a pretty young guy in his mid -20s, and he threw on his clothes.
They tied together some bed sheets, and he slipped out the second-story window in back of the apartment and ran into the night in Paris. And eventually, he made his way out of the city, and at that point, Calvin really became a fugitive.
There was no turning back at that point. He could not be, quote, that sort of secret academic type of Christian who could write and speak about things in friendly places, but he was identified as a fugitive, and the religious police were after him.
By the way, this is one of the few reasons I find consolation that the Roman Catholic Church of our modern day does not believe in the death penalty. But anyway, I'm sorry for interrupting you.
No problem. Well, since Calvin is now a fugitive, he begins to seek out refuge in various places. He had a friend who let him stay at his family's home in Angoulême, and it's there that Calvin begins to lay out a draft for what would become the Institutes of the Christian Religion.
He returns to his hometown in 1534. He resigns some of the benefits that had been arranged for him by his father so that he could study at the University of Paris. Those are financial rewards, basically.
He gives those up, and he begins to part ways in an official way with Roman Catholicism, and he makes his way to Basel, Switzerland, where he writes the Institutes of the Christian Religion. At that time, it was only six chapters long.
Later, the Institutes, in the fifth edition, is going to grow to 80 chapters. And so you can see the way that that particular book of Calvin, through various editions, grew and matured over time. The first edition Calvin called his little book.
It was little so that you could slip it into your coat pocket, and you could have a treatise based on the Apostles' Creed that would delineate what the Bible teaches about who Jesus Christ is and about what the gospel is and what it means to be a Christian.
And so people could hide it in their coat pocket. But as I mentioned, over time, it grows much, much larger. And Calvin gets not only the notoriety of being a fugitive, but he also gets the notoriety of being an author, of having written the Institutes of Christian Religion.
So in 1536, Calvin goes back into France. He is able to make contact with a younger brother and a younger sister, and they begin to make their way out of France. The problem is he starts running into French troops who are looking for people like Calvin.
And so he makes a detour to the south. And rather going back to Basel, he takes the long way there through Geneva. And that's when he encounters William Farrell, the fiery redheaded evangelist.
The thorn in his side.
Yes. And Calvin's plan at that point is only to stay one night in Geneva. He's on his way to Basel where he's going to continue to write. He's seeking after a quiet life of scholarship. That's his stated goal.
And Farrell begins to enlist him to stay in Geneva. And earlier that year, Geneva had decided in a great debate that happened in the city for the Reformation. They had kicked out the Roman Catholic bishop and the various monks and various nuns that were headquartered there in Geneva.
They removed all those things. The city government took over those properties. And so Farrell was looking for people to help him to continue the effort of reform in Geneva. And he sought to enlist Calvin.
Well, Calvin started giving him all these sort of worthless excuses. God had called him to write books. And God had called him to not engage in the topsy-turvy world of debate and ministry and so forth.
Farrell got angrier and angrier as Calvin kept talking. And he finally jumped up on top of the table, knocking all the dishes off. And he put his finger down in John Calvin's face and he said, You are not following your own wishes.
And I declare in the name of God Almighty that if you do not assist us in this work of the Lord, the Lord will punish you for seeking your own interests rather than his.
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Calvin was horrified. Keep in mind, he's a much younger man, probably 27 years old at that point. And even though he's written a book and he's got some scholarly credentials and so forth, he melted in the diatribe of Farrell.
And he determined that from that point on, that he would come to Geneva and he would be faithful in his call. He wrote later, he said, I felt as if God had from heaven laid his mighty hand upon me to arrest me from my course.
And I desisted from my journey, which had undertaken. And so he ends up after a short trip over to Basel to settle a few affairs, he comes back to Geneva. And in September of 1536, he is given the title of being the teacher of sacred scripture.
And so from that point on, he sees himself as as very much committed to the ministry of Geneva. It was not going to be easy. And Farrell and Calvin, various other people, Pierre Vire, an older man, Antoine Corot, and several other pastors that come their way, seek to bring reform in the city.
But it's far easier to get people to sign a statement of faith than to change their morals. I think you would agree with that.
Oh, yeah.
So Calvin and Farrell begin to minister to the church. Calvin continues to teach, but he also is brought into the pulpit numerous times. And as the first couple of years go by, there's a growing opposition to what Calvin and Farrell in particular want to do.
Geneva was very much of a cosmopolitan town. It was right at the end of Lake Geneva. It was the gateway into France. There was a lot of commerce. And as a result, there was a lot of vice in Geneva, not only gambling, but also prostitution and very much of a cavalier attitude about morals in the city.
And so Calvin and the others really had their hands full in trying to bring about changes. Some of these matters really came to the test as the people began to speak against him. Since Calvin was a Frenchman in the minutes of the city council, they just referred to him as Il Gal, that Frenchman.
They didn't even mention his name in the city council minutes. People started being opposed to what he was preaching and teaching. They started naming their dogs after Calvin. And so as he would walk down the street, there would be people who would whistle for their dogs or call after their dogs.
He would turn around and see that they were maligning him by naming their dogs after him. And finally, the crisis point finally came in the spring of 1538, just really two and a half years since he had started his work in Geneva.
When Calvin and Pharrell and Antoine Corot all determined that they could not possibly serve the Lord's Supper on Easter Sunday of that year, 1538, that would have been April 25th that year. The city council pressured them and ordered them to serve the Lord's Supper, but they refused to do so given the moral depravity of the city.
By the way, could you pick up right where you left off there when we return from our midway break?
Absolutely. I'm ready to go.
And if anybody wants to join us with a question of your own, once again, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. We'll get to as many of your questions as possible, God willing, before the end of the program.
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And if you could pick up where you left off about that point in history when there was an issue of refraining from administration of the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper on Easter in Calvin's Geneva, if you could.
Absolutely. The kind of the conflict or the issue was that in previous decades in Geneva, they had the problem of the Lord's Supper only being administered somewhat irregularly, maybe four or possibly six times a year.
And it was always under the authority of the local Catholic Catholic bishop. And the Catholic Church used the Lord's Supper and especially excommunication from the Lord's Supper as a bit of a tool to bring conformity to the church, but also to advance their own agenda in allegiance to the pope and Roman Catholic theology.
So a lot of the city council members had a sour feeling about the church holding back from the people, the Lord's Supper, as Calvin and his fellow preachers wanted to do. They felt like the city at that time of Geneva had made some progress in the gospel, but they still were holding to many of their immoral practices.
And they would say that they believed the gospel and upheld the confession of faith that Calvin had written, but they didn't seem to have any change in their lifestyle. So that that's what motivated Calvin and Pharrell and Corot, the the other pastor who was helping them at that time from prohibiting the Lord's Supper.
Now, as the pressure grew, some of the people, local people began to get pretty belligerent. So one night outside of Calvin's house, not far from St. Pierre, the cathedral there in Geneva, there were 60 musket blasts that this sort of rowdy crowd was doing right out in front of his house.
And Calvin was terrified by that, thinking that he would lose his life. Beyond that, the city council ordered the three pastors to administer the Lord's Supper on Easter Sunday. They're in 1538. And if they refuse to do so, they would be in lots of trouble.
Well, the reformers refused to do so. There was no Lord's Supper on that Easter of 1538. And so the very next day, the city council voted the small council of 25 participants to exile William Pharrell, Antoine Corot and also John Calvin from the city altogether.
They gave them three days to leave and to get out of town. They were declared persona non grata, not welcome here any longer. So here's Calvin, who felt that God had called him to minister in Geneva and to be a steady and faithful pastor.
And now he's being thrown out of the city by the civil authorities. And it was a very bitter pill for him to accept. In fact, the story of what happened to Corot, who was partially blind, is really sobering.
And that is that as he left the city, he took residence in an inn not far from Geneva. And he was poisoned while he was there and died. And that gave Calvin and Pharrell much to be fearful about. They attempted to get Bern, one of the other prominent Swiss cities, to intercede for them.
But Bern refused to get fully involved. And eventually Calvin was recruited by Martin Busser in Strasbourg, in God's providence. And that is where he landed. William Pharrell went to Neuchatel in Switzerland and he had a prosperous ministry there for many, many decades afterwards.
But Calvin went to Strasbourg where he took up the role as a pastor of a congregation of French refugees, people who had fled from France and who had come to Switzerland to find religious liberty, especially in Strasbourg.
It was there that Calvin, at times, was so poor he had this congregation of refugees. So they could hardly pay him for his role as a pastor. But he was so poor he had to sell a number of his books just to kind of make ends meet.
He taught in a local Bible college that was there in Strasbourg. Probably the most significant event of all was that he met a young woman by the name of Adelette de Bure. And she was a young widow, a lovely young widow of French background.
Her husband had died in a plague. They had become members of Calvin's church. The husband died. Several friends were trying to find a spouse for John Calvin. None of them recommended Adelette de Bure, even though she was right at hand.
They recommended various other women.
Now, was that intentional or just an oversight?
It probably was an oversight. Given Calvin's gifts, they wanted someone of prominence, someone who was wealthy, someone who would be able to support him in his pastoral ministry. It wasn't exactly the road to riches, so to speak, being a pastor at that time.
But he just didn't find himself interested in any of those ladies, much to the surprise of some of his friends who kept trying to set him up. And he found himself, though, very much attracted to Adelette de Bure.
And so they married on August 6th of 1540. And he adopted as well her two children, who had no father at that time, Jacques and Judith, and brought them all into his own family. And they had another year or so in Strasbourg.
During that time, God was cleaning house in Geneva, and some of the various people who were opposed to the ministry of Calvin in Geneva either were found to be unscrupulous in their ways and were driven out of the city.
Others were growing aged, and they gave up their role on the city council. A few others died, and everything changed in Geneva. And suddenly they began to realize what fools they had been in driving Pharrell and Corot and Calvin out of the city.
While Pharrell was deeply ensconced in Neuchatel, Corot was deceased. And so they began a campaign of trying to get Calvin back. And he had deep questions about that. But he finally did agree to come back on September 13th of the year 1541.
You can imagine what that first service was like in St. Pierre. Here's the exiled pastor who has now returned. The church undoubtedly was crowded with people ready to hear some flaming rhetoric against them all or how they had wrongly thrown him out.
But that is not at all what Calvin did. What he did was he just started in the very next verse of the book that he had been preaching in back near Easter of 1538. He took the very next verse and just continued to expound the word of God as he had committed himself to do in the previous years.
It was the most remarkable service.
That's a true reformed pastor.
Well, Calvin believed in what he called lectio continuo. And that's the idea of a continual exposition of the word of God verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book. And that's what he committed himself to do through his entire ministry.
And that's why we have so many wonderful commentaries based on his scriptural teaching and also a pretty large collection of sermons.
Yeah, today more commonly known as expository preaching.
Yeah, exactly right.
Exactly right.
So Calvin comes back to Geneva and he picks up his ministry again there. And he has a number of challenging years from 1541 all the way up to 1555. During those 14 years, it was a crucible at times of difficulties and hardships.
But he continues to persevere. He writes his first commentary on the Bible, which was from the book of Romans, from sermons he had preached in Strasbourg. He also writes a second edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, this time not in Latin, but in French.
And so you can buy copies of that second edition of the Institutes. It's published currently by Banner of Truth and obviously been translated into English. But a very warm hearted treatise on the essential doctrines of the Christian faith.
And so while he's in Geneva during those 14 years of hard ministry, challenging ministry at times, he sees the rise of an opposition party in Geneva called the Libertines or the Infants de Geneva. And one of the key things they were unsettled about was that as Calvin sort of settles into his ministry in Geneva, as the pastor there at St. Pierre, he begins to attract the notice of many, many thousands of refugees who are fleeing from other nations in both Western and Eastern Europe.
And they begin to flood into Geneva. And that, of course, alarms some of the people who were the citizens of Geneva. They didn't know what to do with that. And Calvin had some very wonderful things to do to help them.
But many of the citizens were alarmed by that. So that was one issue. The other issue was, as I mentioned earlier, it's far easier to reform a person's set of doctrines than it is to reform their morals.
That's where you go from the head to the heart. And so through Calvin's preaching and his teaching, he certainly set about to do that. But it was a hard sell to some of the people who were committed to gambling, for example, or to drunkenness on a regular basis, to engaging with prostitutes and so forth, and various other licentious activities in Geneva.
Just like what Martin Luther experienced during his pilgrimage to Rome. That shocked him.
Oh, yeah, exactly the same. It was pretty shocking. And so through a number of different changes of various laws as he worked through the city council, to his preaching and teaching, to his establishing of a leadership in the church, not just pastors, but pastors, elders, deacons, and a fourth office that he called teachers. He began to see the progress of the gospel continue to go forth in Geneva.
Now, one thing to keep in mind about Geneva was, as a city, they had declared themselves to be Protestants. They had removed Roman Catholic influences and Roman Catholic authorities. But that didn't mean that everybody necessarily went along with that.
And so there were some who continued to practice Roman Catholic devotional things in their own life, using rosary beads, praying to saints, naming their children after saints, doing various other things that were a part of the Roman Catholic way of thinking and their theological expression.
And so that also had to be dealt with. And one of the ways that Calvin and the ministers there dealt with it is they developed what they called the Geneva Consistory. Are you familiar with that, Chris?
No, I'm not.
Okay, well, that was a group that met every Thursday in Geneva. It was comprised of one or two of the pastors. And it's interesting to read through the consistory records, which have been translated into English, thanks to Philip Hughes, who was a Reformed pastor and theologian of the last several centuries.
He translated that into English. So we have it. And it notes how Calvin was hardly ever absent from the Thursday meetings of the consistory. He was always there, which is a tribute to his long-suffering commitment to be a part of bringing discipline and order to Geneva.
But there were the pastors. Then there were some elders who were present. There were some deacons who were present. And there also were representatives from the city council and the local magistrate who were present.
And that gives us a picture of government in Geneva, which was somewhat different from what we know in 21st-century United States, where we see a broad separation between the ecclesiastical powers and the civil powers.
That's our tradition here in the United States. Well, it was not so at that time in 16th-century Geneva. The civil authorities and the church authorities were very closely working together to bring about moral changes in the city.
So if there was someone who, for example, missed church for three or four Sundays in a row, they would be contacted by one of the local elders. And the elders all had parishes that they related to. They kept in touch with all the families there.
And they would go and question that person if they had a good excuse, and, well, we've been sick or we've been traveling or for some other reason we couldn't attend the regular worship services, then that would be fine.
But if they couldn't give a good excuse, they would be asked to appear before the consistory.
So is this a Reformed Baptist group you're talking about? I'm just kidding.
No, this is a Swiss Reformed endeavor to bring about a change in morals and practices. And we can think of all the negatives of such approach, but you have to think also about all the positives of such an approach.
Right, especially because of the climate that you're talking about, the moral climate.
Right, exactly. So, for example, if someone was sick any more than three days in a row, there was an expectation that the local elders would call on that person, and they would go and meet with them and pray with them and see if there was any way they could help them.
They would get the deacons involved and so on. Same thing with all the refugees that have flooded the city. The deacons started several hospitals. There were no such institutions in Geneva prior to the coming of Calvin, but they started these hospitals to deal with medical emergencies, with people who have come down with life-threatening diseases and so forth, where they could find treatment and care based on Christian principles and overseen by the deacons.
They also developed a ministry called The Purse, and that was a building in Geneva where refugees could come, and they were taught skills because many of them had no skills. They came to Geneva, which was a highly industrious city, and they would teach them new skills.
They would provide clothing. They would provide opportunities for small business loans for people to start a new business. There were several people who came who had a background in printing, and so you see in Geneva over the 25 years or so that Calvin labored there, you see a just flourishing of a printing industry in Geneva where hundreds and hundreds of books were printed of reformed and biblically-oriented literature.
And so all of those things came about because of this positive impact of the Genevan consistory. Now, there were obviously some people who didn't like that, and they were called to account for one man for beating his wife or a wife for beating her husband or for doing other scandalous things.
They were brought before the consistory. There were people who took umbrage against Calvin's preaching, and they would be in a drunken rage in a Genevan bar or place, you know, where they could get liquor, and they would curse Calvin, and they would be brought before the consistory.
So there were all these different things that were going on, but you have to remember that it both was positive for many, many hundreds of people who came to see Geneva as this amazing Christian refuge, and then a few others who were outspoken critics of Calvin who tended to have very loud voices, and they were amplified by the group called the Libertines who became the opposition party in Geneva.
Now, can I just interrupt you for a second to get a….
Yeah, no problem.
Just to get a clarification on the Libertines. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that they really turned the grace of God into licentiousness, and I'm wondering if Libertinism came out of a grotesque distortion and twisting of the doctrines of sovereign grace.
Well, that is a very perceptive question, and the answer would be yes. There definitely was that kind of a problem. There were those people who, relying upon their Roman Catholic baptism, relying upon their attendance at church, their giving of tithes and offerings, their participation on the feast days and so forth, well, they would claim that they were Christians.
Calvin, like Luther and many other reformers, felt that the teaching in Titus 3, that it's not on the basis of things done, religious things done, but it is only by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit and the renewal of the Spirit that one can identify as a Christian.
That was the primary thing that made us Christians, not all the externals. So the Libertines arose in opposition to Calvin, but in many ways they were like what Paul talks about in Romans 6. He says, Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?
Paul says, By no means. How can we who died to sin still live in it?
Yes, and there are sadly many within, not all, you have exceptions like our dear brother John MacArthur who is radically opposed to this, but there are many in dispensationalism who believe that as long as you make a profession of faith well-intentioned, even if a person lives like Satan himself for the rest of his life, even decades, that person is guaranteed heaven.
And it's even more of an issue in hyper-dispensationalism. People who follow what is called free grace, and that is an unfortunate thing because there has been a historic term, free grace for the doctrines of sovereign grace.
So am I correct here?
Yeah, and we can all thank God for raising up John MacArthur to write his gospel according to Jesus back in the late 1980s to show the fallacy of that kind of thinking, that a person can be, quote, a carnal Christian who points back to a remote past experience or to some things he might even be doing in the present.
But if there isn't what Luther would call a fides vive, a living faith, then they are delusional in thinking that they are truly Christians.
Yes, and that's an important thing to bring up Luther because unfortunately that problem that we just mentioned exists in modern-day Lutheranism. I'm not even talking about the apostate evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
I'm talking about conservative men. And, of course, I'm not broad-brushing. I'm just saying men who are even confessional within Lutheranism in very historically sound denominations but seem to so overemphasize justification by faith alone that they care not about conducting church discipline in their congregations.
Well, yeah, there's a sad lack of a call to holiness, and that would be true in many Presbyterian churches just as well. Of course, that's my background in being in the Presbyterian world for all these years.
But an emphasis on coming to faith in Christ, you've been justified, and then somehow having almost an antinomian type of approach of we're never going to use the words ought and should and so forth. The trouble with that is the Bible uses those kind of words all over the place and calls us to holy living.
Calvin did much the same, and as a result, a number of people were not happy with him in Geneva. But those numbers, thankfully, began to diminish over the years, and we see him finally making a really solid impact upon the city.
And in 1555, the Libertines were finally defeated, and the number of men who served on the small council in Geneva, the civil government, all were ardent Calvinists in support of the efforts of reform.
In fact, could you pick up where you left off there? We have to go to our final commercial break.
Sure.
And don't go away, folks. We'll be right back.
James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here. If you've watched my Dividing Line webcast often enough, you know I have a great love for getting Bibles and other documents vital to my ministry rebound to preserve and ensure their longevity.
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Have you noticed the gap that exists between the Sunday morning sermon and the Sunday school classroom or the small group study? So often we experience great preaching from the pulpit, but when it comes time to study God's Word in those smaller settings, well, let's be honest, it leaves a lot to be desired.
It seems like it is nearly impossible to find good curriculum out there today that is true to the Word of God and is built upon sound doctrine, much less it's hard to find curriculum that will actually teach people how to study the Bible.
Hi there, my name is Jordan Too, and I am the Executive Director of the Baptist Publishing House. Our ministry is dedicated to providing local churches with sound Bible study resources. Our quarterly curriculum is titled The Baptist Expositor, and for good reason, we are Baptist and we exegete the scriptures.
If you want to have a curriculum that teaches your people how to study the Word of God, I invite you to go to our website, download a free study, baptistpublishinghouse .com. May God bless you.
It's such a blessing to hear from Iron Sharpens Iron radio listeners from all over the world. Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland who wants you to know about a guest on the show he really loves hearing interviewed, Dr. Joe Morecraft.
I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener here in Atai in County Kildare, Ireland. Going back to 2005, one of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is Dr. Joe Morecraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio, Dr. Morecraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.
Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan area. Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church, unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards and Dr. Joe Morecraft is the author of an eight-volume commentary on the larger catechism.
Heritage is a member of the Hanover Presbytery, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone and tracing its roots and heritage back to the great Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.
Heritage maintains and follows the biblical truth and principles proclaimed by the reformers, scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone and God's glory alone. Their primary goal is the worship of the Triune God that continues in eternity.
For more details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit HeritagePresbyterianChurch .com. That's HeritagePresbyterianChurch .com or call 678 -954 -7831. That's 678 -954 -7831. If you visit, tell them Joe O 'Reilly, Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener, from a tie in County Kildare, Ireland, sent you.
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This is Pastor David Rees of Puritan Reformed in Phoenix, Arizona. Join us in the glorious cause of advancing Christ's crown and covenant over the kings of the earth. Puritan Reformed Church. Believe.
And before we return to our discussion, I just want to make a couple of announcements. Folks, you've been hearing ads every day for years now for the Historical Bible Society. Please remember that that fine ministry was founded by its president, Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law.
If you're the victim of a very serious personal injury or medical malpractice, please call Dan Buttafuoco of Buttafuoco Associates at 1 -800-NOW-HURT, 1 -800-NOW-HURT, or visit his website, 1 -800-NOW-HURT .com, 1 -800-NOW-HURT .com.
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That's 1 -800-NOW-HURT or 1 -800-NOW-HURT .com. Also, men in ministry leadership, you're all invited to my next free biannual Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Pastors Luncheon to be held June the 6th, Thursday, June the 6th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, which is Perry County.
And for the very first time, my guest speaker will be Dr. Joel Beeky, founder and president of Puritan Reform Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not only is admission free and the food free, but every man attending will receive a very heavy sack of free brand-new books personally selected by me and donated by Christian publishers all over the United States and the United Kingdom.
So if you'd like to register, please send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com and put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line. And before I have you pick up where you left off, Pastor Marcus, where we were talking about the defeat of the Libertines, I just wanted to squeeze in a couple of listener questions, especially since one of them is from the aforementioned Grady in Asheboro, North Carolina, for whom I requested prayer in the beginning of the show as he is recovering from triple bypass surgery and was experiencing a setback in his ability to breathe properly.
So I hope you're going to continue to pray for Grady. But Grady asks, Greetings, brothers. It amazes me the number of sermons pastors preached back in that era. How many sermons did Calvin preach in a week?
The answer to that varied at different times. And normally he would preach twice on Sunday, had a morning service, then an evening service with a catechetical instruction in between for youth and for adults who had just come to the faith.
So Sunday was a busy day. And then he would give lectures or sermons in the auditorium that was right next door to St. Pierre, the cathedral in Geneva. And he would do that on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, three days a week.
So that was a normal pattern for Calvin. Also on Thursday, he had the consistory. And on Friday, he would gather with the other local pastors for a pastor's time of exhortation and encouragement in their pastoral ministries.
But as time went along, Grady, the requests that were coming for Calvin to preach more and more increased so that eventually he was preaching on five days during the week, Monday through Friday in his lectures that he would give in the auditorium.
And thankfully, a lot of those sermons and lectures were written down by a French man that the deacons hired. His name was Denis Raganot. And for 12 years, he recorded or just by his handwriting, he would write down in shorthand method the sermons that Calvin preached.
Then he would submit the manuscript to Calvin for any corrections. And eventually those would be published. And so that's why we have about 5000 sermons and lectures from the pen of John Calvin.
Praise God. Thank you, Grady. We're still praying for you. And we have Ted in Moundville, Alabama. Your guest mentioned the practice of naming children after saints as a as part of a litany of Romanist practices that Calvin's administration tried to stamp out.
It reminded me of an off-sited anecdote about a Genevan resident who was jailed for four days because he insisted on naming his newborn son Claude. Two questions. Does he know if this is a true story?
And number two, if it were true, do you think that would be an acceptable exercise of church state power?
The the antidote that you refer to is one that's widely circulated. And there are certainly in the records of the Genevan consistory in the book I mentioned earlier, edited by Philip Hughes and published by Eerdmans.
There are examples similar to that in the records of the Genevan consistory. So I'm going to say that anecdotal story is probably true in many respects, if not in every particular. The problem was that the people in Geneva were very superstitious in their view in regard to infant baptism and also in regard to the naming of their children.
And they felt that there would be special favors of God that would go with the naming of them after a saint. The reformers rightly, I believe, saw that as a very unhealthy practice and they tried to change the dynamics there and to get people to do different things.
It proved to be very troublesome to try to make that come about, but they tried.
Is that where the names like Tucker and Bucky and Sport came into being?
Possibly so. At least in our family, I have five sons and four daughters, and we decided to go with just biblical names. And so all of our kids are named after Bible people.
And, of course, those are very often the same names as saints.
So but the larger question you ask is church state relations. And I would say that the principle of the church and state working together could be very beneficial in our current society of having a magistrate who recognized that there was value and wisdom in the law of God.
And there was value in wisdom to be found in the Christian church. Instead, what we find today is an antagonistic approach that somehow the law of God and Christian churches are to have no realm or no role at all in the civil realm and in the marketplace of ideas or in the general marketplace of society.
And unfortunately, unfortunately, brother, we're out of time. But I already know I want you back for part two of this conversation and I'll try to pick a date with you when we go off the air. I want to remind our listeners that the website of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, is RedeemerPrez .org.
RedeemerPrez .org. Thank you so much for being an absolutely exquisite guest. I look forward to your return, in fact, many times in the future, God willing. And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.
And I'll see you next time.