After Darkness, Light: John Calvin And Revelation

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It is really my pleasure to be with you. Spurgeon said, and I know
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I'm in good company, the thing you like about Spurgeon is he works for everybody. Everybody likes
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Spurgeon, right? And he also smoked too, so we could throw him into the mix. But anyway,
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Spurgeon once said, and this is in his preface to his book on commentaries that he was encouraging pastors to use commentaries, and he writes in there,
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I find it odd that someone who thinks so highly of what the Holy Spirit teaches them thinks so little of what the
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Holy Spirit teaches others also. And what Spurgeon is saying is the
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Holy Spirit is not an individual gift alone. He is a corporate gift to the body of Christ.
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And through others, the Holy Spirit teaches us. Not only is the
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Holy Spirit a corporate gift, the Holy Spirit is an historic gift to the church.
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And there is a significant hubris today that thinks that all of the resources we need for living the
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Christian life are on our present horizon without recognizing that there are centuries behind us in which the
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Holy Spirit has been at work leading the church into a deeper understanding of God's word and what discipleship looks like.
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And I know that I am in good company because I know you appreciate that the
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Holy Spirit is in fact an historic gift. It's nice to be among friends, even in the snowy climes of New England.
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And I also say that to say that I recognize where I am.
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We are spoiled in Lancaster. We're a bit of a Bible belt of the North in Lancaster County.
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We have about six or seven churches within Lancaster County that are over 1 ,000 members that are conservative theological
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Bible preaching, Bible believing, Christ -centered churches.
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We are spoiled in Lancaster County. I recognize that such is not the case here in Massachusetts, this beloved land of our
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Puritan forebearers. And I don't say that to be disrespectful of your state.
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I say that to encourage you to take comfort in the fact that while you may look around and see things that are discouraging, please remember that you are part of something that is much bigger than what you see.
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You're a part of something that reaches back in time and that runs around the globe and will continue to reach forward and is going precisely as God has planned it.
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And we will eventually culminate in the kingdom of God. So be encouraged that even though the appearances may be discouraging and even daunting, that you are in fact not alone, that you are in fact part of something that is much bigger than us.
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I wanna dip back a little bit further than Machen. I wanna dip back to the
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Reformers. We're gonna do this morning, is talk a little bit about Calvin in our first session together.
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And then in our second session, we're gonna talk about Martin Luther. And then in our third session, we'll sort of pull all that together and make it more of a sermon together as we try to contemplate what is the
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Reformers legacy to us. So a few lectures, hence I'm down here and I have what
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I love, a whiteboard. I used to appreciate chalkboards, but chalkboards have all but disappeared.
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But the thing I like about whiteboards is the markers tend to make me high, which is always a great way to spend
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Saturday morning. Come with me on a trip to Wittenberg.
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We can pop in on any Sunday to the castle church and hear
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Martin Luther preach a sermon. On this particular
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Sunday, he has chosen as his text a rather difficult passage from the
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Old Testament. The passage in which Abraham is commanded to take his son
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Isaac and slaughter him like a lamb. Luther was a powerful preacher, a vivid preacher, a storyteller preacher.
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He wasn't much for a long sermon. He believed the sermon should be no longer than 30 minutes.
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I won't say that on the tape. We'll cut that off for your sake, Pastor Mike. But my favorite line about Luther on preaching is, he says, when
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I have nothing more to say, I stop talking. Isn't that a great line? You've heard preachers before.
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Not this one, of course, not this one at all. But you've heard other preachers who've somehow missed that. They keep talking even though they really have nothing more to say.
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That's a great line. When I have nothing more to say, I stop talking. That's his real advice for a pastor. In this sermon, it's a sermon that weighs heavily on him.
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This is what he says. Abraham was told by God that he must sacrifice the son of his old age, the son that came to him by a miracle.
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And it was the son that is the seed through whom was to become the father of kings and the father of a great nation.
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Abraham turned pale. Not only would he lose his son, but now
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God appeared to him to be a liar. He had said, and Isaac shall be the seed.
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Now God said to him, kill him. Who would not hate a
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God so cruel and contradictory? How Abraham longed to talk it over with someone.
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There was no way he could tell Sarah. He well knew that if he mentioned it to anyone, they would dissuade him and they would prevent him from carrying out the behest.
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The spot designated for the sacrifice, Mount Moriah was some distance away. And Abraham rose up early in the morning.
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He saddled his donkey and he took two of his young men with him and Isaac, his son, and the wood for the burnt offering.
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Abraham didn't leave this to others. He took it upon himself. He himself loaded down the donkey, the wood for the offering.
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And all the while he was thinking, these logs would consume my son.
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The hope of God's promise. He continues, he gets there.
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My father, Isaac said to him, yes, my son. Abraham says back,
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Isaac says, father, here is the fire and here's the wood, but where's the lamb? He called him father and he was solicitous, lest he had overlooked something.
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And Abraham said to his son, God will provide a lamb. Then Abraham bound him and laid him upon the wood that he had gathered and the wood that he had piled up.
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The father raised the knife. The boy bared his throat.
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If God had slept an instant, the lad would have been dead.
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I could not have looked. I cannot even imagine what the moment was like.
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The boy was a sheep for the slaughter. Never in history was there such obedience, save in Jesus Christ.
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The father raised his knife. The boy did not wince. And at the last moment, the angel cried out,
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Abraham, Abraham, see how the divine majesty is at hand in the hour of death.
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We say in the midst of life, we die.
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God answers, nay, in the midst of death, we live.
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Now what Luther was doing there at the end of that sermon was actually quoting a medieval saying.
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And the medieval saying is, in the midst of life, there is death.
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In the midst of life, there is death. Media vita in morte sumus.
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In the midst of life, we die. But you see what
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Luther does? He switches that around. No, in the midst of death, there is life.
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Now, travel with me to another city. This is the city of Geneva. This is Calvin's city. Anywhere you go in Geneva, you see this
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Latin phrase. It's plastered everywhere. It's all over. In fact, the most interesting buildings in Geneva is the city council building.
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And there's an outer, not really a stairwell, a ramp that goes all the way up to the fifth floor.
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And it's a very wide ramp. And I found out that it was wide enough so that city council members could ride their horse right up the ramp to the fifth floor.
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Then they could leave their horse outside and go in and conduct city council business. Isn't that a great elevator?
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Just ride your horse right up to the door. And as you walk up that ramp, it snakes its way around the city council building.
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And you look up at the ceiling, there are these little rosettes. And it's all beautiful architecture and sculpted.
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And at each step, there's this particular rosette. And in there, there's this saying that is ubiquitous around the city of Geneva.
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It's a Latin saying. And if you've hung around R .C. Sproul, you know the saying. Post, tenebrous, looks.
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After, somebody explain to me how these markers work and it's taking me a while.
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The aroma is already sinking in. After darkness, light.
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After darkness, light. Now, it's probably not the best way to refer to the
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Middle Ages as the Dark Ages anymore. But there is a sense in which it is an accurate description.
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That there was a spiritual, if not an intellectual darkness. It was like a massive cloud hovering over life.
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And into that atmosphere, into that context, into that darkness comes the
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Reformation message. It comes light. To me, this is the way to best understand the
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Reformation. That in a time in which there was physical death, this was not a great time to be alive, the
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Middle Ages. Plagues and so forth. But far worse than the physical death is the spiritual death that so marked the world.
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And that had so marked the church that was supposed to be the antidote to that death.
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But how can you be the antidote when you yourself are dead?
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So it's this world of death and it's a world of darkness. And into that comes life and light.
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This life and light comes in a person, right? And that person is
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Christ. Luther actually turned this phrase, in the midst of death there is life, turns this phrase into a hymn.
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We sang one of Luther's hymns. This was another one of his hymns. It's called In the Very Midst of Life. Let me read to you a couple of the stanzas.
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In the very midst of life, snares of death surround us. Who shall help us in the strife, lest the foe confound us?
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Thou only, Lord, thou only. In the midst of death's dark veil, powers of hell overtake us.
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Who will help when they assail? Who secure will make us?
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Thou only, Lord, thou only. In the midst of utter woe, when our sins oppress us, where shall we for refuge go?
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Where for grace to bless us? To thee, Lord Jesus only.
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Thy precious blood was shed to win full atonement for our sin.
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This life and light comes from, and that is essentially what the
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Reformation was about. The life and light that comes from Christ.
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Now, what I wanna do in our time this morning, and our first session, is focus in on this one by looking at Revelation.
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And by looking at Calvin and his city of Geneva, and this phrase, post -Tenebrous looks, and look at how
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Revelation has come to us. Now, like you, I, probably like you,
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I have become significantly dependent upon my GPS. I am sort of directionally challenged, and I have a right -left problem, but that's another story.
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But anyway, I love my GPS. I am addicted to my GPS, which is nice to have drivers.
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So far, all my drivers are named Dave, which I'm trying to figure out. And I think on Sunday I get another
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Dave. So I've got all Daves, you're all just Dave. So if I meet you and I call you Dave, please understand that I think that's actually your name.
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Well, you don't have drivers, it's nice to have a GPS. And I was traveling somewhere to speak, and usually when
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I get my little GPS, I plug in the destination and I have a little scrap of paper and I write down some of the major roads, especially if it's not too many turns.
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I'll write them down just in case so I know. I'm sort of made that way. But this particular place had a lot of turns.
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I mean, a lot of turns. You know, you keep scrolling down and down and down, and oh, there's no way
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I'm gonna remember this. I'm just gonna go, I'm not gonna write anything down. And I had my son with me, he was in the back seat.
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So I like to travel, especially when I drive places, I take one of the kids along. Usually I take the middle child, you know, to overcome that psychology thing where the middle child is supposed to grow up all messed up because nobody ever pays attention to them.
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So I try to especially take the middle kid along. And that's what we call a middle child to contribute to that sort of psychological thing he's gonna be.
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So I had middle child in the back and it was dark, yes, and it was in fact raining.
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And we pulled off of one of these highways onto another highway and it was just about to merge.
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And you know, when you're not sure where you are and there was some construction and you're merging and it was busy. And I was supposed to speak that night and I wasn't sure where I was going.
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And all of a sudden, my little screen just goes off. Black. Black.
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What I hadn't realized was that my cigarette lighter was the connection of the car itself.
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There was a wire loose in there. And so this whole time it was operating on battery. And when it finally had used up its battery life, it just went off, which was a very cruel thing to do to me.
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And no matter how much I jiggled it into the cigarette lighter, it did not come back on because the wire was behind in the dashboard itself that was the problem.
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And so I had just merged onto a four lane highway with construction, having no idea where I was supposed to get off.
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And it was raining and it was dark and middle child was in the back. And what do you do?
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You have no guide. Now, I have no problem asking directions.
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So I pulled off the first exit, got directions, got there, it was fine. They sang a few hymns and then I walked in.
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That's my other nightmare. And it worked just fine. And I had a great story to tell them and it worked great.
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But imagine going through life like that. That's what it is without revelation.
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It is going through life with a blank screen in front of you and there's darkness and it is raining and you're on a four lane highway and you have no idea where you are and you have no idea where you're supposed to go.
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That is life without revelation. What we have is a gift.
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It is a gift from God to tell us who we are, where we're going, why we're going there and what the trip is all about.
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That's a real gift that we have, this gift of revelation. Now, God has in fact given this gift to everyone.
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Theologians, when they talk about revelation, they divide revelation up into two categories. They divide revelation up into what they call general revelation or sometimes natural revelation.
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And then the other category is special revelation. General revelation is the revelation of God in the world, the cosmos, and in us, in the conscience, if you will, but in what
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Calvin liked to call the image of God. In fact,
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Calvin writes, well, if we can back up a little bit just to sort of set this in the context of Calvin's life.
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Calvin's born in France, Noyon, France. He has an interesting early life.
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His mother dies when he's four years old. I think we sometimes don't realize this about Calvin, the sort of dimension to his life of suffering and loss.
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In fact, one way we could frame this, how would you like this life for yourself? Your mother dies when you're four. You become essentially an exile in your early 20s.
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You have your first pastorate that you really don't want to take. And a couple of weeks into your first pastorate, you get a toothache that turns into a gum infection that knocks you out for 10 days.
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And according to the letter Calvin wrote, it was not until he took a triple dose of physic.
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Now, I'm not sure what was in that thing, but he took three of them that he finally got relief.
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And this church that he was reluctant to go into the first place, didn't pay him for the first 10 months that he was there.
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And then after two years on the job that he really didn't want in the first place, he was rather unceremoniously kicked out and literally given 48 hours to get out of the city with his belongings.
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And then he marries and they have an infant, child, and the child dies in infancy.
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And of the nine years that he's married, half of that time, his wife is ill and then she dies.
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And he writes to a friend, I do what I can to keep myself from being overwhelmed with grief.
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And then as you're turning 50s, you suffer from intestinal parasites, pretty much everybody did in the 1500s who lived into their 50s had intestinal parasites.
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You have gout that is so painful that you have to be carried up to the pulpit to preach.
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And the last few weeks of your life, you're bedridden and then you die at age 56.
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From one perspective, that is the life of John Calvin. Would anyone sign up for that life?
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Hey, yeah, that's a great one, I'll take that one. If I were Calvin, I'd be having a conversation like this with God.
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What's behind door number two? Let's try that one. What was the life marked out for Calvin?
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Early on, Calvin, young, smart, goes to the University of Paris as a 12 -year -old.
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12 -year -old, he's at the University of Paris. Don't think he's that great because Paris then ended up having a rule that you had to be at least 10 to attend the
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University of Paris. So there were a couple that were smarter than he was, actually. He goes, the idea was that he'd study, go back to Noyon and be a pastor.
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In fact, he was funded by the church at Noyon to be a student at Paris on the plan that he would go back and pastor.
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But while he's there, he wants to be a humanist scholar. Gets bit by the academic bug.
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Has no intention of going into the ministry. Does his undergraduate work, does his master's work.
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Then he gets appointed to the new Royal College of Lecturers. This was the king, he was mad at the
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University of Paris. They weren't quite doing what he wanted to do. So he set up a new college called the Royal College of Lecturers.
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And he went around and he handpicked the youngest, brightest minds he could find and put them into his college.
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And Calvin was one of them. And he publishes his first book, Commentary on Seneca, a
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Roman political philosopher. And it doesn't sell, at all.
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But that's what Calvin's interested in. But he has a roommate. And this roommate gets converted after reading
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Luther. And then eventually, Calvin gets converted.
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And now he turns this brilliant mind of his to becoming a theologian. And one year after he becomes a
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Christian, and as he is 24 going on 25, he publishes a systematic theology textbook.
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Now, what were you doing when you were 24? What were you doing your first year of your
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Christian life? Publishes Institutes of the
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Christian Religion, first edition, as a 24 -year -old.
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The first edition, okay, he's 24, it's only a couple hundred pages, so don't be too intimidated by it.
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And as he goes through his life, he continually revises and expands it, all the way up into 1559, a few years shy of his death.
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And by the time he's dead, the thing is now 1 ,200 pages. And I'm so glad he died.
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Because I had to read the thing at Westminster, and 1 ,200 was enough. If he had lived longer, how much longer would that have been?
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So in God's providence, he took him. But in that book,
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Calvin says, the fundamental question that we have to ask is the question of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.
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Now, why is he raising that as the fundamental question? Because we are in the era of the
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Renaissance, and we are coming, Renaissance and Reformation, and we are coming off of the era of the medieval church.
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And the medieval church was, the Roman Catholic church, was the authority. Any question related to knowledge, who am
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I, where am I going, what is the meaning of life, what's above us, what is the meaning of all this, you know what the answer to all those questions was?
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The church, the church, the church, the church, the church. If you travel now among cities, how do you know you see a city off the horizon, right?
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You see skyrises, you see the big buildings that we built, you know there's a city.
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In the medieval world, what dotted the horizon? The cathedral spire. And that was a metaphor, that spire dominating the landscape becomes a metaphor for how the church dominated life in medieval times.
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But with the unraveling of the church through the Reformation and the Renaissance, now we have what historians call a crisis of knowledge.
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What are we going to base our knowledge on? And culture answers that with two questions, or two answers rather.
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The reformers say, scripture, and this is the sola scriptura principle.
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This crisis of knowledge, how are we going to know now that we have shaken, and well, we haven't shaken, we've seen that those foundations had cracks all along in the church, and now they finally gave way and the thing has collapsed in on itself.
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And so you know what we're gonna build our foundation on? We're gonna build on the foundation of the word of God.
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That's the reformers answer to the crisis of knowledge. What's the Renaissance answer?
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The old Greek statement, man is the measure of all things.
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And so we have the birth of humanism, of rationalism, of the answers locked within our own head.
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And eventually that's going to give rise to modern philosophy, and eventually that's going to give rise to modern science, and eventually that's going to give rise to the modernity, the modernism that we were talking about last night.
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What we call the autonomy of human rationality.
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That's the Renaissance answer, in the making in the 1500s. Still living off of borrowed capital of a religious culture, but by the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, in the
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European world, continue to shed that religious culture until we just careen into a full -blown secularism and naturalism.
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And same in American culture. But here we are back at a crisis of knowledge, and so that's why
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Calvin begins his institutes with the question, how do we know?
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And his answer is, we know because of God's revelation. Now it's very fascinating what
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Calvin does in the institutes. He actually divides the institutes into four books.
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Now the four books follow the structure of the Apostles' Creed. So book one is about God.
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Book two is about Christ. Book three is about the
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Holy Spirit. And book four is about the church.
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What's interesting, though, is how this reflects this question of revelation and knowledge that Calvin is fundamentally interested in.
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So he raises the question. How do we know God? How do we know ourselves? And then he says, where do we start?
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And it looks like he starts with God, but what he actually does is he starts with both. And he sets up a sort of,
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I guess the best deal, it's like a pinball machine. Right? So you pull the ball and it goes up and it just bounces back and forth and back and forth.
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So we start with God. And when we start with God, we see that he is creator.
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And if God is creator, what does that say about us?
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Created, you are so sharp on a Saturday morning. I am very impressed. You have a wonderful congregation,
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Pastor. We are created. And we are created what, according to Calvin?
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In the image of God. The imago
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Dei, or the imago Dei, the image of God. In the image of God, then, we have within us what
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Calvin will go on to say, use a Latin expression, the sensus divinitatis, or the sense of the divine.
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We all have an awareness of the existence and presence of God through the testimony that he has left of himself in the cosmos and in ourselves.
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Augustine will call it a God -shaped vacuum. And Augustine, in his
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Confessions, in book one, will say, you have made us for yourself.
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The literal is, you have made us to live towards you.
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You have made us Godward. And we are restless, is how it usually gets translated.
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The word is inquietum. Think of quiet and calm and rest and peace.
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Shalom. But not in God, we are unsettled.
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As Shakespeare's Hamlet says, there is a stench in Denmark. There's something not quite right with this picture.
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And we are restless until we find our rest.
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The Latin word is requiem, at peace, at rest in God.
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This is the image of God. Calvin says that you created us.
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You have left a testimony to us. Take a look at this in Romans chapter one. I know you know this.
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And I shudder to think if Pastor Mike ever starts a series in Romans, if you would ever get out of that.
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In my Bible, it comes before, but that's okay. Chapter one, verse 18.
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For the wrath of God. Now, we talked a little bit about this last night, didn't we? Isn't that interesting?
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That's what's put up front. The wrath of God, right? Remember Niebuhr, a God without wrath.
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That's not God, right? For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.
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This is verse 18 of Romans one. Against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
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That is the key verb. It is not as if God is out there somewhere and we have to go discover him.
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It is not as if this knowledge is there to be uncovered. We know it. Our problem is ethical.
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We suppress it. You know, in the summers, well, I don't know. Does it ever get warm enough up here for you people to swim?
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I remember we, indoors. We were in Maine a number of years ago and it was like July and we were at one of the beaches and I think the water temperature was about 52 degrees.
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What is going on with these people? Can't you ever swim? But anyway, if you're in the pool, you got the beach ball and you try to sit on it.
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You've done this, you know? And then if you're really skillful, you try to stand on it. But what happens?
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Your weight shifts a little bit and it pops up. That's what humanity is doing to the knowledge of God.
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They're trying to suppress it. But you know what happens? It pops up. It pops up when there's beauty and somebody can't explain it.
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And now all of a sudden, a naturalistic worldview doesn't work because it has no category for beauty.
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It pops up when there's suffering. And the ugliness of life. And there's no category to explain it.
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The classic example is September 11th. You remember when September 11th happened? Tom Brokaw never went off the air, it seemed like.
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We didn't have a television at the time. We had to travel to my wife's folks and we were glued to the television set watching it.
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And at the end of a very long day, of a very confusing day of trying to make sense of what was happening, finally
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NBC was gonna conclude its broadcast and Tom Brokaw ends on September 11th with saying, all we can do is pray.
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Now, a couple of things. If he had said that on September 10th, people would have gone ballistic.
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But people would not have understood because there's no reason to pray on September 10th.
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But all of a sudden, on September 11th, no longer able to hold the beach ball under the water.
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And now if something's happening that we don't have a category for, and when Tom Brokaw says, let's pray, that is actually a very true impulse because it shows that there is in fact a transcendent reality.
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God has created this world and the only way to understand it is as a
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God -given world and all other worldviews are false. And eventually they will break down.
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Eventually the truth will pop up. So they suppress the truth.
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For what can be known about God, this is the key, is plain to them because God has shown it to them for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world and the things that have been made.
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So they are without excuse. So there's where we start.
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We start with the knowledge of God as creator, which is plain, which is apparent. But what happened?
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Well, we read on. Verse 21, for although they knew
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God, again, they don't have to go out. If God's not out there, we have to discover. The problem is not epistemological.
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Our problem is ethical. They knew God. They did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.
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So in the image of God, we were to do two things. The blue's not coming through too clear, is it?
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We'll go back to the black. In the image of God, we were to revere
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God. We were to honor him, show him reverence, acknowledge that he is creator and we are created.
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And it's all
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God wanted from us was gratitude. This is a lost art.
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And it's a lost art because we are an independent people. And independent people don't like to say thank you because that shows dependence.
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And self -made people don't like to say thank you. And self -absorbed people don't like to say thank you.
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It was the theologian, Bart, not Karl Bart, the American theologian, Bart Simpson.
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There's a particular episode. I didn't watch this, but your pastor watched this and he told me this story this morning.
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There's this particular episode where they were about to eat dinner and Bart's mother,
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Marge, says, Bart, why don't you pray for us? And Bart says, dear
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God, since we paid for all this ourselves, thanks for nothing.
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Now, you have to understand that Simpsons is a critique of culture. And that's a critique of American culture, of the ingratitude that runs deeply culturally.
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God made us for himself. And all he wanted us to do was be grateful.
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Read the Old Testament and you will find that the two big sins are idolatry and ingratitude.
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I've done everything for my people. I've redeemed them, I brought them into the land, and they are an ungrateful people.
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So that leads Calvin then to see us not just as the image of God, but also to see us as totally depraved.
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God created us to acknowledge him, to give gratitude to him.
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We did neither of those things. And so we exchanged the glory of the immortal
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God for images. We stopped worshiping the creator and we worshiped the creation.
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And so Paul launches into verse 24, verse 26, verse 28, God gave them up.
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And we enter into an utterly despicable downward spiral of behaviors and activities that if we read this text, it almost makes us blush of what's happening here.
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As Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, this world is not a fallen world. It is a fallen dash falling world.
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It is not a static fallen world. It is a fallen falling world, ever populated by fallen people.
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This is where Calvin starts us. And now we have a rather interesting mix, don't we?
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We have a complex view of human nature because we are both in the image of God and totally depraved.
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And so now we are thrown back to God, aren't we? Now being totally depraved throws us back.
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And now we see God not just as creator, but now
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God is redeemer. And so God as creator has revealed himself in the world.
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How does God reveal himself as redeemer? In the word. And at the center of that word, at the apex of the word, the climax of that revelation is the word, the logos,
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Christ. As the author of Hebrews so well puts it in the first couple of verses.
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Hebrews chapter one, verse one, long ago at many times in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.
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But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
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He is the radiance of the glory of God in the exact imprint. The word there is tupos, like the type that is on a page, right?
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So you've got the type itself and it makes its mark on the page and it leaves an exact replica of itself there on the page.
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He's the exact imprint of his nature and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.
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And after making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to the angels as his name is inherited, is more excellent than theirs.
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This ultimate revelation of God in Jesus Christ, right?
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So Jesus, the prologue back in John, says that here comes
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Jesus. And as John ends that prologue, he says that he's this revealer of grace and truth.
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And then he says that Jesus is literally exegeting the father.
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The translation we use is that Jesus has made him known. And the
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Greek word there is exegete. And I know you know what exegete means. When you exegete the text, which is what your pastor does faithfully for you each week and feeding you the word of God, you are literally leading the meaning out of the text and that's what
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Jesus is. He is the exegesis of the father, the demonstration of the father, the revelation of himself.
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And so we go from the creator to God as redeemer and then book two is all about Christ.
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And if Christ is redeemer and we know God as the redeemer, the triune God is redeemer, what does that say about us?
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See, we are not only created, we are redeemed. And how are we redeemed, right?
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How are we brought into this? We are brought into this, now we're thrown back to God again through the applier of redemption, the
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Holy Spirit. And so we have God as creator, God as redeemer. It's a dumb word, but I'll throw it up here.
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God as the applier. The Holy Spirit applying the work of Christ to us, sealing us, causing us to be born again as Jesus says, born from the spirit, regenerated, that unique work of the spirit.
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And as applier and redeemed, we are brought into the redeemed community and the redeemed community is the church.
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And so Calvin in this pinball machine starts us with this question of knowledge.
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How do we know? And the answer he consistently gives to us is revelation, revelation, revelation.
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Without it, there is darkness and without it, there is death.
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And in the revelation of Christ, there is light and there is life.
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This is a great era in the life of the church, this era of the reformation.
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I think what we see in it is not just the idea of a church that got it right theologically, but that because it got it right theologically, everything else is like all the other pistons were firing.
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But the basis of that is this belief in revelation as our only hope.
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Early on in the institutes, Calvin says this and I just want to leave you with this. He says, what help is it in short to know a
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God with whom we have nothing to do? Rather, our knowledge should teach us fear and reverence.
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Secondly, with it, right? Our knowledge of God as he has revealed it to us both through his world and his word and in Christ.
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Secondly, with this knowledge as our guide and teacher, we should learn to seek every good from him and having received it, to credit it to his account.
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Gratitude and obedience. That's what keeps our knowledge from being a mere abstraction.
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That's what keeps our reading of this word from being a mere exercise.
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That's what keeps us from slipping into apostasy by recognizing that we must always respond to God's word with fear and reverence and gratitude and obedience.
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We're not driving around with blank screens on our GPS wondering where in the world we are and how in the world we're gonna get there.
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That's what we're sort of surrounded by. Our GPS is on, right?
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The wires to our cigarette lighter are intact and the connections are made and our screen is bright and what that needs to instill in us is an attitude of reverence, fear and reverence and gratitude and obedience.
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It's very easy to think, especially in the culture in which we live, that this ancient word no longer works, that we can listen to other voices or trust in other voices when we are called to simple obedience to the word of God over us.
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Prior to the Reformation, it was an era of death and darkness and into that comes life and light and God used these human instruments of the
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Reformers to drive it home. Well, we've been camping out in Geneva.
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Next time, we're gonna go back to Wittenberg and spend a little bit of time with Luther, so thank you.