Radio Free Geneva: Showbread’s “Dear John Piper” and Leighton Flowers on 1 John 5:1

I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. I have a problem with them. They're following men instead of the word of God.

Be the one standing on top of my feet, standing on a stump and crying out, he died. Those who elected were selected.

Well, first of all, James, I'm very ignorant of the reformers. I think I probably know more about Calvinism than most of the people who call themselves Calvinists. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.

Ladies and gentlemen, James White is a hyper-Calvinist. Now, whatever we do in Baptist life, we don't need to be teaming up with hyper-Calvinists. I said the other day in class that I don't understand the difference between hyper-Calvinism and Calvinism.

It seems to me that Calvin was a hyper-Calvinist. Right, I don't think there is typically any difference between Calvinism and hyper-Calvinism. Read my book.

Showbread’s “Dear John Piper” and the Critique of Calvinism

And now, from our underground bunker deep beneath Bruton Parker College, where no one would think to look, safe from all those moderate Calvinists, Dave Hunt fans, and those who have read and re-read George Bryson's book, we are Radio Free Geneva!

Broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to say for his own eternal glory.

And welcome to Radio Free Geneva, The Dividing Line. Today, I had enough stuff that I thought, you know, if we're going to address a lot of this anti-Calvinism stuff, we might as well fire up the electric guitar and do a riff on Mighty Fortress for the fun of it.

Though I'm sure we'll get the regular complaints about that, too. But welcome to the program. I wanted to... Both of our primary topics today came from Twitter. And, in fact, I just got a link, I don't know, not more than half an hour ago, on Twitter that will...

I'm not sure how much it's going to add, but it will help, I suppose. A couple days ago, somebody on Twitter said, you should review this on The Dividing Line. I get that all the time. I get tons of stuff.

And sometimes I click on something and go, why? People think I should review everything. And I don't know why anybody thinks that I know about everything. Because I don't. You know, I mean, I've never made that claim.

There are people who accuse me of thinking that way. But I think fair folks, fair-minded folks go, nah, he avoids lots of subjects because he hasn't studied those things. And so his opinion wouldn't have any more worth than anybody else's, I suppose.

But anyway, I was sent this link. And at first, if I recall correctly, there was no... It said you should review this thing, but there was no link. And I'm like, what on earth is that? It was just the name of a song.

I didn't even know what it was. And so, for some reason, it sort of caught my attention, distracted me from what I was doing, which happens a lot these days. And so I think I googled it first. Yeah, I googled it first.

After going, what on earth is that? I went ahead and googled it, took the time to stop, look, and found this song. Well, it's supposed to be a song. I personally really... I'm starting to really understand how out of step I am with the modern generation.

And I'm happy about that, given the modern generation, what it's doing. But I don't consider this music because I can remember times when we would have a situation where the gym class, it was raining outside.

And so the coach told us to go into the band room. And before you got in there, some guy started banging on the drums and screaming. And I did not consider that to be music. But that's what this is. There's no difference.

I'm going to play just a little bit of it here for you. Don't worry. Don't panic. I found the lyrics. Because that's the only way you can understand this. That's the only way. It's not meant to communicate, in that sense.

You're not meant to actually understand what's being said. But you'll see why here. You don't really need video on this because it's a still frame. You can just play it.

That's true. I have to tell you, my first reaction when you played it for me was it was something akin to the static that you get.

When you go to a drive-thru speaker and you can't understand the word the person is saying. No, this just sounds like a really angry person screaming himself hoarse. This is what someone sounds like when they're on the losing team in the second half of a college basketball game.

Okay? They're yelling and screaming angrily at their players and they're just about to lose their voice. That's what it sounds like. With the drum added in. Let's just go for it here and you'll see what I'm saying.

This is called Dear John Piper Stillbirth in Space by Showbread is show dead. That's the album but the group's called Showbread. Here we go. Did you catch Prevenient Grace? Okay. Let me go a little bit later in this Beethoven-like symphony and it changes a little bit.

There's a female voice that isn't screaming and if it was balanced so you could hear her you could actually understand what she was saying but it's specifically balanced so that you can't hear her and if you couldn't Google the lyrics who would know?

But that's the song and so I'm like what? And so I brought up the lyrics because I Googled it and so one of the things was lyrics so here are the lyrics for Dear John Piper. John Piper wants to put me away because I believe in possibilities and that's not okay.

He tells me you've got to draw horns on your picture of God, deliciously capricious and vicious don't you spare them the rod and then the chorus I guess throughout this is this no fate but what we make corporately predestined and drawn by prevenient grace so you catch the two there?

Now I'll finish the other ones up here but it'll help you to understand better and helped me to understand better that a gentleman on Twitter not very long ago fell by the name of Hutch MDH underscore Junior on Twitter, it was actually 50 minutes ago now, 54 minutes ago dropped me a link to an interview with the lyricist of Dear John Piper it was on um Ecclesiam it's one of these blogs designers please why do you put text in light gray on white on a font of about 10 do you not want someone to read it?

It was one of those things, I had to select the text copy it into text edit and select black. What a thought to be able to read it anyways it is a interview from February of 2016 between Aaron Ross and the gentleman who wrote this particular song and it explained a lot because right toward the beginning uh and again now I'm having to read the blog and it's like uh he says then I kind of stumbled into reading and studying theology a couple of albums in just because someone handed me a copy of a book by Greg Boyd he as a thinker was really interesting to me.

The other way he polished out some of his ideas in turn made me jump from him to other authors that were influential folks in the Mennonite tradition John Howard Yoder and stuff like that. Alright so we've got Boyd the open theist inclusivist um who is a primary uh influence here which will become rather clear as we continue with the lyrics here.

But certainly you get there the corporately predestined and drawn by prevenient grace stuff God goes strolling through the nursery playing duck duck goose appointing babies for destruction and they just can't refuse poor baby sovereign.

All controlling God who pushed over man. You set the table for our failure. You put the fruit in our hands. It must be lonely when you sort it all out the sheep from goats. The listing boat of all these questions and doubts.

Someone must rise and swell and eclipse the moon like so many loathsome spiders skittering to their doom. And then our wonderful uh chorus. Wait a minute there was a chorus in there? No yeah. No fate.

But what we make corporately predestined and drawn by prevenient grace. No fate. But what we make. No divine hand that's behind genocide. No good behind rape hail. The sovereign lord who turns the world like a toy.

He chooses suffering for children. Their agony brings him joy. And then I can't figure it out from listening to it. But there's a parenthesis but only sort of parenthesis closed all powerful so I have a feeling that the but only sort of is actually modifying the all powerful not the other.

Not what came before but only sort of all powerful so strong he sends molesters to children. All that he does is true and is good and no one can resist him ever. All controlling who sends earthquakes and famine.

The author of suffering and death who can understand him. It's best to shut your mouth and hope for the best cause even when you catch the worst it's still kind of like the best. And then evidently this is the quote from David Bentley who is orthodox eastern orthodox that I guess the woman was reading in the song.

If indeed there were a god whose true nature whose justice or sovereignty were revealed in the death of a child or the dereliction of a soul or a predestined hell then it would be no great transgression to think of him as a kind of malevolent or contemptible demiurge and to hate him and to deny him worship and to seek a better god than he.

So there you go. As I've always said theology matters. And the first thought across my mind when I read this aside from the fact that here is where here is where you see the destructive influence of a Gregory Boyd of the emergent movement Brian Zond even classical arminians I I still have in my feed a certain arminian it just drives me nuts to read him because he's just liberal enough to be able to skitter by the real issues.

No one is ever going to have a no one is ever going to hold reform theology if you are not absolutely convinced that god has spoken. And we have shown over and over and over again how individuals who have left the reform movement have likewise abandoned a high view of scripture and which came first in their particular situation isn't necessarily the issue.

But it is quite obvious that many of these individuals these formerly reformed people are on a slide. There's no hand holds to stop them there are no scrub brushes to grab on the way over the cliff they're on a slide to where they must do what people like Brian Zond have done.

And that is to allegorize or in some other way find a means of abandoning the true and full inspiration and meaning of the Tanakh. Remember my discussion with Brian Zond and I kept talking about the Tanakh and finally he said what's the Tanakh?

And at the time he was writing a commentary on an Old Testament book for some publishing house Torah, Nevi 'im, Ketevim Tanakh, the law prophets, the writings standard terminology used of what Christians normally call the Old Testament but what is probably even better called the Tanakh because not everything in the Old Testament is specifically about the Old Covenant or something like that it's more often described in the New Testament by the law or the prophets or things like that.

And when you listen to Zond when you listen to Zond in his debate with Michael Brown on pedo-substitutionary atonement when you listen to him in his debate on Calvinism remember on Radio Free Geneva we played that stuff we played his sections and reviewed his comments in the debate.

It was absolutely crystal clear that the only way that he could attack reformed theology was to fundamentally attack the consistency and inspiration of the scripture itself. And once you do that once you no longer have an inspired body then you get to pick and choose what you're going to put together according to your predilections according to what you like.

And that's why the god of the emergent movement and those who in our day are just trying to produce something that will keep the millennials happy that god ends up looking shockingly like us instead of being the sovereign of the Old Testament.

Not only have I been preaching through the holiness code I'm now in Deuteronomy dealing with tough stuff dealing with very difficult material but we're also reading through pretty much the same section.

We're now in Joshua in the evening service. Reformed Baptists have a tradition where most of us anyways read a chapter of the New Testament in the morning a chapter of the Old Testament in the evening in our morning and evening services in the Lord's day.

And so we're in somewhere in Joshua right now in the evenings. And man there's tough stuff in there judges is coming up the toughest stuff except for a couple sections in Ezekiel right there. And most of us know that stuff's there.

I mean most serious Christians have read the Bible. If you haven't yet I would highly suggest having the discipline to do that. It's not all that long actually. But we know it's there and a lot of people just simply want to try to avoid it.

They don't want to deal with the destruction of the Amorites. Just last Sunday night I read the section about the destruction of the King of Jerusalem and a couple of other of the city states around Jerusalem and Joshua goes in and wiped out every living creature in those cities in just a matter of days.

And modern people look at that. And because we have never seen plague at least in western culture most of us now have never lived through war here in the United States we've never really experienced war on our own soil in our lifetimes.

Obviously people in the 1860s fully understood that. But because we've not seen these things then we are extremely sensitive to the very idea of God having anything to do with any of that. And for most people if you don't understand the holiness of God if you don't understand his kingly freedom if you do not if you've been brought to the faith with this Namby Pamby milk toast God is your girlfriend type of presentation you have no foundation upon which to even begin to understand God's role in history let alone your own relationship to God.

And so for many of these people they have no problem whatsoever putting God in the dock putting God on the witness stand or making him the defendant actually and demanding that he justify his actions in this world.

And of course the result is they end up with a God that from their perspective really doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in this world anyway has nothing to do with it. And so despite the clarity of Daniel chapter 4 and the reality that a pagan king can come to understand that God does whatever God chooses to do.

And no one can stay his hand despite the repeated statements of God hardening this king's heart to destroy this people and keeping this person from sinning against him but judging this person the freedom with which God can grant his mercy and grace because all are guilty before him all are under his wrath.

The expression of his wrath against sinful mankind not only in the destruction of the peoples in Canaan for their sin by Israel but supernatural things plagues and hail and so on and so forth. Despite Psalm 135 6 God does whatever he pleases in the heavens and the earth.

Despite all of that those things are all allegorized and pushed off to the side. And people end up with this neutered God whose holiness is a mere abstract concept easily dismissed easily dismissed. And is it any wonder then why these same groups end up.

You can track it denying penal substitutionary atonement the plain teaching of scripture in regards to the purpose that Jesus himself the angel said why would his name be called Jesus. Because he will save his people from their sins.

Well how is he going to do that. It's necessary that I go to Jerusalem. It's necessary for the son of man to be betrayed in the hands of sinners and be beaten and killed and buried rise again the third day it's all right there.

You have to chop up the Bible and get rid of its unity and get rid of its harmony. But it's not shocking then that once you've come up with a different God because you're uncomfortable with the Old Testament that then what that God does in his greatest revelation of himself in the gospel in the purse of Jesus Christ that becomes changed too.

We can't have propitiation because propitiation speaks of wrath. We don't want to have a wrathful God anymore. And so it all ends up just being flattened out and turned into this simplistic humanistic milk toast fluffy gospel which is what we have all around us.

What we have all around us. And so here you've got some punk rock death metal. I don't even know this sounds like death metal to me whatever you call it and you get past the noise and you listen to the lyrics and it all makes sense.

Now I did take the time to read the response from the author and I don't get any of it. It's it you know he says I'm a seminary student right now and if I'm in my class and I start to talk the way I talk and the lyrics in Dear John Piper will all like you say be easily dismissed, it will be taken as a character an ad hominem, ad hominem is completely misspelled a red herring and all that would be completely valid.

But if you're writing a punk rock song you can do certain things with satire and you can do certain things that are seemingly vitriolic and kind of blur the line between what is ostensibly theological and what are theological statements, even doctrinal statements and what you're just over with.

I feel like that is kind of fun. Well and then the end of the paragraph and so I thought it would be funny to have this song that was so deliberate and so over the top that would begin one way and launch into this sort of ironic Calvinistic hymn.

That's that was what I wrote as in the beginning, a Calvinistic hymn and then I added John Piper on top. It's just funny that there is a punk rock song with John Piper's name in the title. I can't make heads or tails out of it.

It seems obvious to me that we have a millennial punk rocker studying theology and here's the problem. He's studying it using the worldview of the millennial generation. Christian theology was not formed in that worldview and that worldview is so decrepit so self-centered and so shallow that he thinks this is funny.

Wow wow now some of you are going oh you're so mean to millennials. Well uh given that in my country it seems the majority of them are now professing socialists um who show absolutely no concern about their own history or those who handed them this liberty and freedom which they are now using to re-enslave themselves with.

Um yeah I do have some issues there um but there are some that understand what's going on thankfully and I wanted to it's interesting. I uh let me see if I can bring this up here. It's throwing me a curve here there we go.

Um come on there we go. Well that's not it either it's really throwing me a curve here let's go back to. I'm not sure how that came up. That's interesting. There it is. We'll find the right one there we go.

Um I had never heard this song. I had never heard this song this morning while I was preparing for the program my daughter tweeted or facebooked or something that my granddaughter wanted to have this song on repeat just over and over again.

And so I thought well I don't recognize this song. And once I brought it up on YouTube lo and behold guess who was quoted in it. John Piper. And guess what he's talking about exactly what he was mocked for by this.

I think playing with theology is fun. Millennial now I don't know what the ages of the performers are and John Piper ain't no millennial um but there are still folks who take theology seriously and it just so happens.

This song really refutes rather fully everything that was said um by showbred in it's satire of John Piper. And so I thought you know what. Let's just play this. Especially because this is real music.

This actually takes skill to play instruments and to control your voice and harmony and all that old fashioned stuff. This is real music. Um here is a song called though you slay me.

The earth is all.

Your affliction momentary. Not only is all your affliction light in comparison to eternity and the glory there but all of it is totally meaningful. Every millisecond of your pain from the fallen nature or fallen man every millisecond of your misery in the path of obedience is producing a peculiar glory you will get because of that.

I don't care if it was cancer or criticism. I don't care if it was slander or sickness. It wasn't meaningless. It's doing something. It's not meaningless of course. You can't see what it's doing. Don't look to what you see when your mom dies when your kid dies when you got cancer at 40 when a car careens into the sidewalk and takes her out.

Don't say it's meaningless. It's not. It's working for you an eternal weight of glory. Therefore do not lose heart but take these truths and day by day focus on them. Preach them to yourself every morning.

Get alone with God and preach his word into your mind until your heart sings with confidence that you are new.

You'd say your name though. You sing a song to the one who's all. To the one who's all.

Well certainly in my experience um the message there is defensible biblically on the basis of the highest view of scripture. The message in the previous song requires you to abandon the highest view of scripture.

That's just all there is to it. And so we will continue on with a second subject on the program today that I now only have a shorter period of time to cover but I don't want to rush too much through this and we're not under any specific time limitations.

And that is I want to um bring up accordance here for you. And if you I will confess if you are listening if you're one of those folks that's listening to you know while running riding biking whatever um you might want to watch the video on this one because we're going to be looking at some texts in scripture and we're going to be looking at some um some Greek and we're going to be responding to some comments by professor Layton Flowers regarding the subject of the Ordo Salutis and Regeneration and hopefully this will be useful.

This will be a little bit of a bible study type element but very much a part of Radio Free Geneva. And the subject of Reformed Theology when when I seek to defend Reformed Theology I frequently make the argument that we must be very careful in examining the hermeneutical methodology that we utilize and make sure that we are watching for tradition flags and tradition flags.

That's when you honestly discover that the method of interpretation that you use to defend the Trinity and the deity of Christ and the resurrection and the cross and monotheism and things like that that respectful contextual original language sensitive method of interpretation all of a sudden shifts and changes only when you start getting around to stuff that's a part of your tradition and that this is a sign that you are at this point following a tradition rather than scripture.

You have been given a belief and you didn't derive that belief from scripture. You instead have had that belief placed upon scripture. And look we all have our traditions. This is a lifelong process in constantly semper reformanda always going to the word of God.

By the way semper reformanda does not mean that there are not settled truths. Sometimes it's misrepresented. What semper reformanda means is that I must always be listening to scripture with the highest level of respect for it as God's word.

What does that mean. Well that means that I must be handling it aright. I must be putting out the effort avoiding the apathy that so often invades our handling the word of God. I heard a whole sermon on that text once I got it all figured out that assumes that the meaning and value of scripture is significantly less significantly more shallow than it in reality is.

And sadly in many theological schools today that's pretty much how scripture is presented. I mean if I went to a lot of liberal seminaries today I don't know how I could ever do ministry. Because once you graduate you pretty much figure you're pretty much smarter than all the biblical writers anyways.

So the point is that we need to look at our method of hermeneutics and be consistent with it. Now when we talk about the issue of what's called the ordo salutis ordo salutis the order of salvation it's a logical order not a temporal order.

It is those actions of God that and their relationship to one another. For example we know that God forgives. We know that God justifies. We know that God sanctifies. We know that God adopts. How are those related to one another.

Some of them are concurrent. They happen at the same time. Some of them have a beginning and then a working out. Some are complete at one point in time. Some have a future aspect a present aspect even a past aspect.

And one of the problems for a lot of people is that when they think of salvation they think of it. They confuse the sub parts of salvation with the whole. And so very often when we reform folks will emphasize.

Well let me give you an example before I get to the reform thing. In the reformation the intimate connection and yet distinction between justification and sanctification was emphasized of necessity because in Roman Catholic theology justification and sanctification had become confused and yet biblically they are distinguished from one another.

And biblically you can see them being used in different ways in different parts of scripture. Once the Roman tradition became encrusted over scripture and its exegesis those nuances that are there for us they are there for our benefit.

They are there for our insight. They are there for our joy became lost with the rediscovery and the reassertion of the primacy of scripture. And the fact that scripture stands in judgment over tradition not that scripture is just a part of a larger tradition we are able to see these things.

Well reform folks emphasize the reality of the fact that regeneration has a specific meaning in scripture and that there is this thing about spiritual life in key texts from Jesus all the way through the epistles to the end concepts of spiritual death, spiritual life.

The difference between a person who is able to do spiritual things who is spiritually minded versus the fleshly minded person. What the person who is not in union with Christ cannot do is not able to do.

The mind set in the flesh cannot please God. Paul says in Romans chapter 8 over against what the new nature can should and must do. These are all things that have to be taken into consideration. These are all things that we must recognize, we must understand.

And so in the reformed Ordo Salutis, one of the great controversies is in Arminianism in any synergistic system. And there are people today trying to avoid I'm not an Arminian, I'm a Biblicist. It's absolutely empty.

It means nothing. It means nothing that communicates nothing. You're wasting oxygen to make such a statement to be perfectly honest with you in synergistic systems and especially in conservative synergistic systems the normal approach is see from our perspective temporally in time a person believes repents and as a result they are born again and they become a new creature in Christ.

And the assumption then is is that the unregenerate person, the person who has not had their heart renewed is capable as an unregenerate person of the actions of faith and repentance. And this is necessary if you're going to especially defend the central the central idol of the synergistic systems human autonomy human free will.

Now there is a reformed use of the term free will but that's not what they're talking about. Synergists believe that man, the creature must have an autonomous will and that God the creator though they will they will affirm that he too has an autonomous will will.

Then in the very next breath say that he has abandoned his autonomous will and he has granted to man absolute autonomy. And so one of the dividing lines between these two systems is do you believe that God has free will.

That God continues. Not that God had it theoretically in the past but that right now God continues to function with autonomy. If you're a synergist you're going to have to say no. He's given that up and he's basically given it to his creature.

The creature man now has autonomous free will and the the monergist believes that God has free will. And as R .C. Sproul has put it God has free will. I have free will. When my will runs into God's will I lose.

And what that means is I have creaturely will but my will is enslaved and my will is a slave to my fallen nature. This goes to anthropology. This goes to your doctrine of God. That's why you have to start.

You have to start with the doctrine of God first then your doctrine of man before you talk about anything else. Because if you try to jump in here somewhere else in the process without the foundations you're never going to get anywhere.

Never get anywhere. When we look at what the new testament says about the subject of regeneration we discover that the bible says that man is incapable of doing that which is pleasing to God including repentance and faith.

The dead unregenerate human being though very active in his rebellion against God is not capable in and of himself of doing what is pleasing to God. Is it pleasing to God for a person to believe in the one true God.

Well of course it is. Is it pleasing to God for an individual to repent of their sins and flee to Christ. Of course it is. But the bible says if you're according to the flesh you can not do these things.

You can not do what is pleasing to God. And so we see perfect harmony between Romans 8 John 6. No one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him and I'll raise him up in the last day. There is a specific group there that inability is a universal thing.

It comes from the fallen nature of man. Romans chapter 5. We've walked through that before those in Adam, those in Christ. And so we believe not that a person not that our human observation of what happens in time determines what the biblical teaching is.

We allow the biblical teaching to interpret for us what we ourselves have seen. We do this with everything else. We do this with sanctification. We do this with justification. We do this with adoption.

But this is one area where the sinner just say no. We can't let the bible determine these things for us. We need to sort of turn things upside down. But the fact of the matter is the bible describes faith as the gift of God.

It describes repentance as the gift of God. These are spiritual activities. And if we don't recognize this if we don't recognize that faith is the gift of God and that it is a part of the work of the spirit of God in his elect.

Then we end up going down that road where we're constantly having to deal with. What if someone has faith for a while and then they lose their faith. And you can't have any level of assurance. You end up over in the mess of non lordship salvation that just rips the heart out of God's entire purpose of sanctification and union with Christ and everything else to where you end up with this.

Well you just tip your hat toward God. Just have faith for a moment and you never have to repent. And you've got your ticket punched and you're on your way to heaven. That false gospel which has sent so many millions on the road to hell with a bible under their arm and a hymn, whistling a hymn is what you get when you start at the wrong place.

That imbalance that is the anti lordship position. Now in the discussion of faith as a gift we go to Ephesians chapter 2. I don't have time to go through these right now. But we go to Ephesians chapter 2 where in a text we all know and recognize the word that neuter is drawing together everything that's come before it.

So grace, salvation and faith are subsumed under that neuter term that we have Philippians 1 .29. It has been granted to us not only to believe in him but also to suffer for his name. It has been granted to us to believe in him.

What do you mean. It's been granted to us. If it's an autonomous act why would it need to be granted to me. And we've got the discussion in 2 Peter where faith has been given to us as a gift and things like that.

So we have those texts. But one of the other texts that comes in here is found in 1 John. And I want to look at this text. We should be able to bring accordance up. Yes I want to look. I want to start at 1 John chapter 2 verse 29.

If you know that he is righteous you know that also everyone pas ha poyon ten dekaya sunayn ex autu gegenetai everyone ha poyon now ha poyon. Right here I'll outline it for us here. The one doing poyo means to do this is a present active participle.

The one doing righteousness from him has been born now this is the term gegenetai. Notice there are two news right here gegenetai that means it's from genato which means to beget not genos which means kind or tight.

Because that only has one new there in the middle of the word. The perfect is seen in the epsilon reduplication beforehand. And in the Greek language when you have a participle now participles participles are incredibly rich.

I don't know why everybody is different. I've confessed this before infinitives. I'm very weak in infinitives have never just popped out to me. I love participles. And for most people that makes me very weird.

Most Greek students participles are just not a whole lot of fun. For me they are. They are the color in the palette that the artist can use in painting the text in coloring and texturing the text they really are.