Dr. James White, The Gospel, and Suffering

We'll do this.

Ready?

Yeah.

All right. Sync the sound.

Oh, okay.

Yes, I'm not trying to scare you.

He's like.

Is he gonna yell Allahu Akbar right now?

Justification by Faith Apart from Works of Law

All right, so this is Dr. White with Alpha Omega Ministries. Dr. White, you just did, we're at the Herald Society, Milton, Florida. You talked about justification by faith. And that's a subject you know very well.

Actually, I'm preaching about justification by faith tomorrow. I just talked about works of righteousness.

Yes, well, it was.

I'm glad you were paying attention.

I was, it was. I even talked about you during the sermon.

I know, I know, I know.

Okay.

He missed the beginning when you were talking about it.

For me, it was the issue of justification by faith apart from works of law.

Okay, so.

And you made a lot of really important points near the beginning that I thought would be really good to highlight. You talked about balance. That was very important. Balance in the Christian life and picking the right battles to fight.

That was in reference to Galatians 1 and Paul's anathematizing of the Judaizers. And I did sort of feel, in light of some of the comments that have been made to me, that I needed to address the fact that, yeah, on the one side, you've got the people who don't think we know the gospel well enough any longer or the Bible isn't sufficient enough to tell us what the gospel is, that, you know, they read Galatians chapter one and, eh, it must have been nice back there in the apostolic age for Paul to be able to say this was the true gospel and that's not, but that's not today.

And so they'll allow anything to be called the gospel. On the other side, you've got the folks that if you do not walk like them, talk like them, dress like them, and cross all of your Ts and dot all your Is exactly the way they do, they'll anathematize you the same way that Paul did.

And a lot of people struggle with where the balance is because in our society today, well, it's illustrated by what was Barry Lynn, when we debated homosexuality a decade, well, a decade and a half ago now, it's been a long time, he said that Paul was over the top in the book of Galatians.

Well, that really is more of the majority perspective now is you look at what Paul said and that's over the top, that's not appropriate for our culture, that's not appropriate for our day, et cetera, et cetera.

And so people struggle with where the balance is to be found, we want to be loving, we want to be accepting, we want to be accepted, and yet the cost can be very, very high if what that ends up meaning is that your gospel, whatever it is, is just as good as mine, we all have our own little private gospel type thing.

So what defines the faith? I think a lot of people will agree, if you don't have the right God, don't have the right Jesus, Jesus doesn't die on a cross, Jesus doesn't rise from the dead, sure, I mean, you know, C .S. Lewis, mere Christianity and stuff, the thing is, for many people today, it stops there and the gospel is left off over here.

That's right, that's right.

And it's no longer definitional, and that's really frightening.

Yes, and you talked about pseudo-Delphoi, false brethren, false brothers, that Paul could actually identify people and say those are false, Christian, those are not real Christians.

And because they were claiming to be Christians, that's the most important thing, it's not like, it's like looking at a Muslim and saying that person is not a Christian, they don't claim to be, the real issue comes is when someone's saying, I love Jesus, I wanna see the kingdom of God go forward, and you have to say, despite all of that, you are not a Christian.

Now, that's something to be taken with great gravity, I'm afraid some people do that rather flippantly and rather easily, and sometimes on basis of bigotry and bias rather than anything else, but there comes times where that has to be said if we're gonna follow the apostolic example, or we'll end up with massive confusion on the gospel, and if the gospel is the power of God and the salvation, you have massive confusion about it, oh, you've got the American church.

Yes, exactly. So, and you made a good point, I hope that more people hear, in light of all of that, talking about balance and picking a right fight to be in, people who will overemphasize particular points of their, say, eschatology or what have you, and they'll say.

I wasn't talking about you.

No, I know, I know that, you know, no, no, I hope I'm not, I would never give that off, but I thought that was really important because I feel the same way, that we can have particular positions we stand on, we say, okay, I think this is biblical, we need a heaven-house discussion about this, but people will identify those positions as, well, if you don't believe this, then you're not quite as Christian as me, or.

Or not Christian at all.

Or not Christian at all.

And use the anathemas, and I think a lot of us have seen what might be called, you know, fiery fundamentalists who have utilized Galatians 1 as a means of condemning anything and everything, and it turns us all off, we don't want that, and my concern is that there are times to do that, but if it's sort of like the boy who cried wolf one too many times, you know, when you've got people that are constantly doing that, then when it really does need to be said, the warning really is not heeded, and I think that's what's happening a lot today.

That's right. Okay, so you moved ahead into Galatians, and you talked about the fact that the Apostle Paul, he's delivering a right cross, he's giving.

I knew you'd appreciate that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I love it.

He's giving a letter that contains some of the most powerful, strong language in all of the New Testament, and he talks about, I hope these people emasculate themselves, I hope they cut themselves off, in Galatians chapter five.

You know, they like to play with knives, like you said in your book, The God Who Justifies, they like to play with knives, I hope they go all the way, essentially, and so the letter itself displays to us as Christians how we're supposed to feel, how we're supposed to respond when somebody messes with, begins to try and distort God's gospel of grace, justification by faith, apart from works of law, so talk about that, the emphasis that Paul has on this is a gospel issue, when Peter's doing this, it's actually not walking in line with the gospel, that I think needs to be heard by us today as Christians.

Peter and Paul at Antioch

Yeah, when you think about what really happened in Antioch, when Peter comes and he, when the men come from James, and Peter sees them, and he is concerned about the traditions, he's concerned about these people who are Jewish, and his freedom that he has developed in having fellowship with the Gentiles, and so he pulls away, and now you have this division taking place, and here's a guy who's received supernatural revelation as to what God has called clean and what God has not called clean, and boy, it surely tells you the power of tradition in someone's life when Peter can do that, but Paul sees this, and he doesn't do the, hey, hey, shh, shh, shh, shh thing with Peter in front of everybody.

Now, here's Peter. This is Mount of Transfiguration Peter, okay? This is Peter walking on water Peter, and Paul is none of these things. He wasn't even around, and yet he calls him out in front of everybody and says, you know how we are justified.

You know that by works of law, this is never gonna happen. You know that we stand by faith. We have died to this. If you reinstitute these things, you're making the cross of Christ with no effect. Wow, obviously, I want to believe that Peter accepted this right up front, and there was an immediate repentance, and so on and so forth.

Paul doesn't say what the following conversation was like, but the point is he was obviously risking a lot to do what he did, and the reason he did it, as he said in chapter two, is so that the truth of the gospel might remain with you, and that has to be our highest priority, but let's face it, in a lot of the church today, the truth of the gospel is sort of, it's a given on a theological level, but functionally, it's growth of the church, unity of the church, avoiding conflict.

Right, right.

All these other things end up taking a much higher priority than the truth of the gospel abiding or remaining, and the fact is God uses us as the means of safeguarding his gospel, and that's a high calling, but it means that we're gonna have to be very passionate about it, and that passion has to be a knowledgeable passion, or it'll become an unruly passion that will just lash out at everything and anything, and that doesn't honor or glorify God either, so we have to know what the gospel is, why it's important to safeguard those key issues of it, and just in our day, let's be honest, I've done I don't know how many conferences on justification by faith or whatever else, and we'll have a small little group there.

If we were doing a prophecy conference or something like that, we couldn't have had enough people to sit in all the chairs. That's what we're facing, that's what we're facing.

Why Justification by Faith Matters in a Secular Age

So what would you say right now for us as Christians we should invest ourselves in? What are the great dangers to justification by faith today, movement-wise, what have you? What do we need to pay attention to?

Well, sadly, and completely leaving aside, completely leaving aside, what's going on with the secularization of Western culture and the persecution that's coming our direction and the fact that we are going to be put into a situation where we're in an ever smaller circle, unless God changes, unless God grants repentance to a nation, but if things keep going the way they're going, we're gonna be forced together with people who do not believe these things, and when under persecution, it's very easy to determine that those things just don't matter anymore, and so we lay all the distinctives aside.

Interestingly enough, that's not what happened in the early church. In the early church, even when they were experiencing the worst persecution from the Roman Empire, they remained very focused upon the things that they felt were definitional, which in those days had to do with who Jesus Christ was, so the issues concerning Christ's deity and things like that.

But there is a temptation, and what I'm seeing, what I think is a real danger is what I call this mere Christianity movement, where you have the, the old phrase was ecumenical movement, and it sort of is ecumenical in its essence, but it's the idea that you've got the Trinity, you've got the deity of Christ, you've got the cross, you've got the resurrection, that's enough, that's it.

Don't ask what any of that really means, but as long as you profess those things, the gospel's out here, and we don't have to worry about that, and that's what's causing so many historic Protestant churches to collapse in regards to, well, Rick Warren saying, our pope, Francis, and that kind of thing.

And that, I think, is really demonstrating how few people there really are that understand the centrality of justification by faith. And when I talk to people about justification by faith, I just basically, I like to start off classes by asking everybody, when you woke up this morning as a Christian, why did you not fear the wrath of God?

And most people have never even given it a thought. Wrath of God, God's lucky to have me, what do you mean?

Yes, yes.

And then I say, look, you know your heart, you know the thoughts that you've had that preceding 24 hours, you know the times you sinned, if you know anything about Isaiah chapter six, even the holiest man, when he stood before God, and said, I am undone, woe to me.

And so why did you not fear the wrath of God? It's either because you're apathetic and don't care, don't really believe God's holy, and don't really believe you're a sinner, and may not even be a Christian.

That normally wakes people up.

Yes, it does.

But the reason that as a Christian, I did not fear the wrath of God this morning is because of Romans 5 .1. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

So justification is the very ground by which we can even claim to have peace with God. A lot of people don't care about peace with God today. It was Murray who said in his commentary on Romans, I think it was his commentary on Romans, he said, justification no longer rings the bells of men's hearts like it did at the time of the Reformation.

And the primary reason for that is we don't recognize how mortal we are. We don't see death around us. Well, okay, I don't wanna date this too much, but right now, the German wings plane crashed in the Alps.

And man, I fly around over there. And this was a guy who purposefully crashed a plane into a mountain.

But he had a brain disease.

Yeah, well, there you go.

You don't have a secularist trying to solve that problem.

Exactly, exactly. Well, that didn't help the other 150 people on the plane. And the point is, back then in Luther's day, a woman normally had to have 10 live births to get one through to maturity. That's how many children died of the diseases and things like that.

The plague was still running around and would come into a town every once in a while. It had only been a little over a century since a third of Europe had disappeared. And so you would see dead bodies.

You knew that eternity was right around the corner. We have sterilized all of that. We watch television shows where a dozen people can die. And by the end of an hour-long program, everybody's fat and happy again, and all is well.

They never have to deal with the broken hearts and everything else that comes with it. We as a society stink at talking about and dealing with death. And so as a result, the idea of that pressure to be right with God.

I need to know that I'm right with God because I don't know that I'm gonna get home. The fact is, you don't know that you're gonna get home. And we've all seen the accidents. We've seen the cars crumbled up on the side of the road, and we just have a switch that we flip.

And that could never be me.

Because they clean it up in 60 minutes.

Exactly, that could never be me. That could never be me. So we hide ourselves, and we don't think about these things. And eternity is a long, long, long ways away. And so we just, that's why we don't have passion about these things.

It's because we're self-deceived. And I honestly think that it's a part of the judgment of God on this nation. And we're talking about evangelism here. You can't evangelize that the Holy Spirit of God is not bringing conviction of sin.

It's just not gonna happen. And we're gonna have to remain faithful in a land that is under God's judgment. And conviction of sin, a healthy, growing church, those are all blessings upon a land. So if the Lord decides to bring judgment upon this particular land, this particular point, maybe he'll raise up China as the next great light.

Who knows?

I don't know. But if this is where we are, and this is where we're called to be, then we have to be faithful even in the midst of all of that, even when it comes to the gospel.

The Sovereignty of God in Suffering and Evil

So you're a Calvinist, right? I'm not sure.

I'm not sure, you couldn't tell?

Okay. So how, okay, I'm gonna talk for a moment about practically how this impacts us as Christians. When we approach the issue of the sovereignty of God, and we're talking about issues of, like we're talking about right now, a plane crashing, 150 some odd passengers being murdered by a man.

We talk about all the awful things that happen all around us. Why is it so important for us to get this issue of the sovereignty of God over every element of the world and every molecule in the universe?

Why is it so important? I mean, you were a chaplain, a hospital chaplain for a long time. I've been a hospital chaplain, and so we've been face to face with brokenness. A lot of people don't have to sit with that every day.

They don't have to sit face to face with that, and so they sort of ignore the issue. They treat the issue of the sovereignty of God and evil in the world as, it's just an issue that's sort of like a head issue, right?

It's a theological gymnastics you pull, but in reality, when you're face to face with darkness, you've gotta have a consistent, meaningful answer. So talk to us about, practically speaking, why is it important to get this right?

Well, you know, the families of the people on those planes, you know, if that had been one of the flights I was taking, you know, because I'll be teaching in Zurich pretty soon, and it could have been, you know, who knows.

Right.

Those families, eventually, as you know, in a hospital chaplain situation, five minutes after the event is probably not the time to be having a deep theological discussion because the mind isn't functioning overly well at that particular point anyways.

They're in a state of shock. But eventually, if there is a desire on the part of those families to really give consideration to the meaning of life and the meaning of the life of that loved one that was lost, secularism, and unfortunately, a large portion of evangelical Christianity doesn't really have anything to offer to them.

The secularist doesn't have anything to offer to them because it was just a bunch of biological bags of chemicals that stopped fizzing. That's literally all there is to it. But the evangelical, non-reformed answer is that, well, God will do the best he can from now on, as if he didn't know that this was happening.

There was nothing he could do about it. He's really bummed about it. And of course, it just, you read all of the Bible, especially the Old Testament and God's absolute sovereignty over human affairs and all the things God says about himself, and you just go, where on earth does that come from?

And then you talk about the loving heavenly father who knows every sparrow that falls. You telling me that he had some of his children on that plane and he didn't care? He didn't, that the plan, I guess there is no plan for God from that perspective because what if one of the greatest missionaries in the future was one of those young kids on that plane?

Now he's got to start all over again because he didn't know what was coming. I mean, I don't even go into the heresy of open theism at this point. There just isn't any coherent way of responding to the serious questions down the road.

If, and this is what I learned in the hospital chaplaincy, I'm sure you learned the same thing. Most of the books that I read on being a chaplain when I first became a chaplain said to sort of insulate God from it.

God didn't have anything to do with this. He has a wonderful plan for your life. It just is from now on. It's a motivational speech. Yeah, a motivational speech type thing. And I came to the real conviction that I could not tell somebody that God had a wonderful plan for their life in the future if God hadn't had a wonderful plan in the past for the one who died because I'd be lying to them.

I mean, I'd just be giving them absolutely empty words. And so believe me, we were, both you and I have been put in situations where there are people who wanted us to proclaim their loved one who was dying or about to die or just had died to just give them, grant them instant access directly into heaven.

They wanted us to say that. And that's one of the toughest things to deal with as a chaplain. But the reality is that the fundamental answers that will give meaning are those that take the biblical teaching seriously, that the final answer is Ephesians 1 .6.

It's all to the praise of his glorious grace. Now, will it take, and I don't even know how we measure time in eternity, but will it take a long time into eternity before we even begin to fully start seeing the glory of that?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Eye has not seen, ear has not heard. I think it's scary when we start trying to limit heaven to what we can imagine it to be and things like that. But the fundamental final answer God has already given to us and that is almost found in the children's prayer.

God is great, God is good. Let us thank him for our food. God is great and God is good. And in the final analysis, we're going to see that the judge of all the earth did right and he is going to be justified in all of his actions.

And that means there's no purposeless evil. That man's actions were fully under the control of God. And those families, if they trust God, if they have experienced his love in their life, can trust that God had a purpose in taking that loved one.

If they have not experienced that, that's not exactly the kind of God they're going to be looking for, unfortunately. They may be looking for a God who can make them feel better now, but really can't give them a reason for understanding what the future is.

So it's an important issue.

So we talk about the issue of, so the reformed person, Calvinist, the person that says, okay, God is solving over every detail and there's no purposeless event in history, can say that God had a purpose in this, not that he'll just make it better.

And the importance of that is hard to even describe in one sitting. Especially when you're sitting in front of a person who was maybe raped or taken hostage and raped for four days by crack addicts, these sorts of things.

These are the things that are sitting in front of me. To be able to say to a person, God had a purpose in this, it was not meaningless, he's not an absentee landlord, that's important. So what do you take somebody to when you want to display that God had a purpose in a horrendous, awful act?

Well, you know, I was speaking at one of the reformed seminaries back in 2011, and a seminary student and his wife came up to me and they had a baby stroller. And as I looked down, I could tell there was something wrong with the baby.

And the young man began to tell me, he said, you know, years ago, your book, The Potter's Freedom, introduced me to reformed theology. And he said, I can tell you that in light of the fact that our baby has a congenital disease and will not see two years of age, that if I did not know that God had a purpose in this situation, our marriage wouldn't survive, we couldn't survive, we could not handle this situation.

That was, man, that was extremely sobering to even consider that situation and how a book could have had that kind of an impact.

Theology matters.

Yeah, it does, it really does.

Who says that?

I don't know. Al Mohler, he's stolen it, and I've given up. He's a lot bigger than I am, so I give up. But it is that type of, honestly, I think for most Christians, the only place to really go there is to go to Acts chapter four.

I mean, you know, we've been there so many times, but so many things in Christian theology devolve back to the cross and to listen to the early church under persecution, a small little minority group being viewed as a cult, literally, by their own people, by the Jewish people, and to recognize that those that early church was able to pray and say, whatever happened, whatever's going on, it happened because God's hand ordained that it happen.

So here you have the death of the son of God, the working out of our redemption, the very highest thing that God does to glorify himself, and yet, when you think about the cross, it's gory, it's horrific, it's hard to even begin to describe.

And so here you have Christ showing his love for us, the father's showing his love for us, the spirit is likewise there, showing his love for us in the restraint, in the restraint of divine power in not wiping out these evil human beings.

You know, Jesus himself said, 12 legions of angels, it only took one angel to wipe out the Assyrians, 12 legions takes out the whole planet, okay? That's the Death Star on steroids type situation. And yet you have that restraint of God's power at this very point where the very forces of hell are allowed to, it appears to them, prevail over the very son of God, but it's actually in that very action of weakness that you have the greatest power of God demonstrated.

And so I can't think of any place where God's sovereignty in evil, over evil, bringing about ultimate good is displayed with any more clarity than in the prayer of the early church at that point.

Ministry to the LDS and the Easter Pageant

Well, if I can offer some encouragement, this is encouraging to us, I think it'd be encouraging to you, obviously our ministry to the LDS is fruit of your ministry, you know, pouring into Jeff and then I came on board.

So right now, you know, Easter pageant started this week and what you probably missed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I show up out there and the King James only guys find out about it, they'll be back with their banners.

Before anything.

Well, this is the first time that we've not been there and I don't know how many years, yeah. So, and just to encourage you, we had what, 15 people?

Oh good.

There, so I just wanted to.

This week, we're not there, without us there.

So we're like freaking out, we're super excited.

It's getting warm out there right now, I was noticing it's up in the 90s. There'll be more, but there's almost no place for them to go anymore to get drinks and stuff.

I know, the Arby's is gone and.

Is Dairy Queen still now?

Dairy Queen is still.

Oh, okay.

I think they're only open for a week a year.

Yeah, it's true. Do you think that Arby's just sort of said, yeah, you can have it, because the Mormon church said we need parking, so.

Yeah, well, I imagine the Mormon church said, oh, okay, yes sir, yes sir, Bishop, you bet.

Were you there the one year where, remember when the park across the street had no lights? Remember, it was just dark? They cleaned the park up like a bunch. So you've got the visitor's center and directly across is that big park.

Oh, sure, yeah.

So you used to be a lot of drug addicts and all the things going on over there, dark. Were you there the one year that we're in the middle of the patches going on and the helicopters flew over and the guys were running?

Yeah, I was trying to tell Luke about that. That was an interesting experience.

Oh yeah.

Do you remember the time you made him change his pants?

No.

No, it was, I don't know, I must have been 19 and you made fun of my pants.

What, did you have balloon pants or something?

So parachute pants?

Parachute pants.

I don't know what I had on, I had pants that were like.

You said they were like plaid or something.

They were like plaid, striped things and you just looked, you just kept like looking down at them, looked back at me, looked down at my pants and I was like, I gotta have to go change now. I feel guilty about what I'm wearing.

I am so subtle, aren't I? Not really, not really, no, I don't remember that. That's amazing.

Well, as a result, I've developed sort of a complex.

I could tell by the pants you were wearing yesterday.

So tomorrow I'm actually.

Yeah, I'm gonna be speaking in. How do you like the rips in my pants,.

So yeah, that's great. I don't think I had rips, but I have a complex now, so now tomorrow I'm wearing a suit to breach in tomorrow.

So yeah.

There you go.

Yeah.

There you go.

Thanks Dr. White for the interview.

Yes, thanks.

Enjoyable, enjoyable.