David Platt and Pastoral Corruption

The Eternality of God and the Nicene Creed

Welcome, welcome, welcome. It is the American Churchman podcast. I'm your host John Harris and my co-host Matthew Pearson should be with us in a few minutes. We are starting a little bit late tonight.

So thank you for your patience. We have a lot to talk about today, but I want to let everyone know before we get into the podcast that American Churchman is brought to you by Truthscript .com and we are dedicated to inspiring Christian men to embrace their divine calling.

We explore a range of topics today. We're going to be talking about ministry, mostly, and corruption in ministry. There's several examples lately of that and it seems like there have always been examples of that.

But what a surprise, right? Because there were examples of that in Jesus's time too and the same in the time of the Apostles. So nothing is new under the sun and we're going to talk about that. We'll be taking your questions.

If you have any, we are on X, we are on Facebook, we are on YouTube. You can get your questions in, in the live chat, in any of those places. So before we get to the topic at hand, which is mostly going to surround David Platt and the documentary that was released last week and and then broadly speaking, pastoral corruption and that kind of thing, we are going through some of the attributes of God on this podcast.

And today our attribute is the eternality of God, the eternality of God. Let me give you a few Bible verses on this. Psalm 90, Psalm chapter 90, verse 2 says, Before the mountains were born, or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God.

Isaiah 40, 28 says, Do you not know? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, does not become weary or tired. His understanding is inscrutable. First Timothy 117 says, Now to the king eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.

Amen. Revelation 1, 8 says, I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. And then lastly, Psalm 102, 25 through 27 says, Of old you founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.

Even they will perish, but you endure, and all of them will wear out like a garment, like clothing. You will change them, and they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will not come to an end.

We see this idea of God being eternal also reflected in some of the creeds. For example, the Nicene Creed says that there is one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And this element of God, this attribute of God, is at the root connected to the fact that He is the Creator. He is the creator of the heavens and the earth, and like we just read, everything invisible.

That includes the spiritual realm. God created all of it. So He is outside of His creation in that sense. This is a concept that is very hard to wrap your mind around because we are finite beings. We cannot conceive of an object that does not have a beginning, because everything that we know in our physical lives does have a beginning.

We had a beginning. The things that we see, my daughter who was just born four months ago, she had a beginning, and God is different in that way. This is one of the attributes we call a non-communicable attribute of God.

There are attributes that are communicable, like God is loving. We can be loving. We should be loving. We should be like God in that way. We are supposed to be perfect, like God is perfect, right? You can emulate God in these ways, but this is an attribute of God that we cannot emulate.

And it looks like Matthew Pearson is actually popping in, so I'm gonna put him on the stage. Hey Matthew, how you doing?

I am great. How are you doing? My apologies for running late.

No worries. Someone asked, where's Matthew Pearson? So here he is. He's here. I'm right here.

I was assisting with a Facebook market deal, you know, and I had to help somebody out, and the person who's coming through with the market deal did not bring cash after they were being late, so they go to the ATM.

So a whole lot of stuff, but what matters is we've made it.

We're here, so I'm excited. Cool. Well, we were talking about eternality and how God's eternal. I read some Bible verses. I read a passage from the Nicene Creed and was kind of wrapping up my thoughts.

I don't know if you have anything to add to the discussion.

Well, I don't know everything you covered, but I do have quite a few notes, so I could go over some of those. You know, I'll just go over one section. Did you define eternality insofar as it's like an attribute, or how did you, because I joined and you're talking about how this is an incommunicable attribute, so what was like your definition, I guess?

Poor listeners. I just said that God exists outside of His creation, and so it's a hard concept for us to understand, given that everything we know has a beginning in the physical realm, but God does not.

So that's pretty much all I said. Okay. Yeah, well,.

Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of when we were discussing infinity last week. Something which I included in my notes, and which I mentioned last week when discussing infinity as a divine attribute, is that infinity, when spoken of in relation to God, not being bound by time, this coincides with eternity, and if you want, in order to kind of wrap this up, since you've already gone over some of it, I can talk about like the nature of time, and how eternity relates with that.

So in regard to the relation of eternity with time, I will mainly, I mean, this guy, as we're doing this series going over the attributes of God, I've actually found that, you know, Bhavik is good on some things, other things I'm a little hesitant to use him on, but, you know, on the attributes of God, Bhavik is just, he's wonderful.

So I consulted him a bit. So everything you're about to hear me spiel is very Bhavikian, so I may just have direct phrases and quotes that are basically plagiarized. So this is not Matthew Pearson speaking, this is Matthew Pearson summarizing.

But in regard to, like, time in relation to eternity, time is not a substance. Instead, it is a mode of existing. So there's not like this, this thing which we call time. Time is simply the mode in which you exist.

So it's a temporal thing. So there's past, present, future. And the concept of eternity, in contrast to this, it bears three marks. It excludes a beginning, it excludes an end, and it contains in it a succession of moments.

So I do this, then I do this, then I do this. There's a succession of events happening. That's kind of how we, that's how we define time, and eternity, it excludes those things. So in order to affirm the eternity of God, we would affirm that God does not exist by mode of time, by virtue of his distinct nature, which has these attributes, one of which being eternality, which, as you said, is incommunicable.

So, despite the fact that God, in a sense, God is a creator of time, he transcends time, despite this, his eternity does not just transcend time, but it also is present and imminent in every moment of time.

In sustaining and upholding all things, God, who is the cause of time, he still pervades time with his eternity. And that's why we can still call God, as the Apostle Paul does, the King of the Ages, because God, in being eternal, has dominion over time, being the cause of all time.

And there's a lot more we could get into with time, or not with time, with eternity, but that obviously has implications for time. But one important thing to think of is the modes of relation in the Godhead, how the Father begets the Son, the Son is begotten of the Father, the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

The idea of begetting something is, whenever we think of that, we think of a process which happened in the past, and then it culminates in a birth or something like that. So when we talk about the Father begetting the Son, because this is done in eternity, this is a logical ordering rather than a temporal ordering of things.

So it's not like, okay, here's God the Father, and then one day he decided to beget the Son. No, because in eternity, it's simply eternal present. And so Augustine, in expositing Psalm chapter 2, he talks about how when he says, the Lord said to me, you are my Son, today I have begotten me, that the today there is not actually a reference to like a moment in time.

It's simply an eternal presence. And when we say eternal presence, that's obviously analogous language because you can't really capture it. But yep, that's my spiel about eternality.

That's why we say he's outside of time, not before time. Some songs will say that poetically, but this is one of the things that I think, for apologetics purposes, atheists they have a, I don't want to say they have a hard time, because they have, every religion or view of the world has to have an uncaused cause at some point.

So yes, either there's a God who is outside of time, or there's some kind of impersonal spiritual force, like some of the Eastern religions. Now, the Eastern religions actually, they're interesting because I think they are more similar to an atheist understanding, where they might infuse it with this spiritual presence, but they also, like if you believe in reincarnation and karma and those kinds of things, you believe that matter is eternal.

It might be infused with something spiritual, but it's also eternal. But the atheist thinks that the material world is eternal, and there was a Big Bang, but before that they don't really have any answers.

They don't know, but all the stuff that was there for the Big Bang was there, and then some of them even think there was this, there's a sequence. It's cyclical. You just keep having Big Bangs, and then heat death, and then more Big Bangs, and so you have to, at some point though, find like the uncaused cause, and for us, that is God, and that's God's, part of his attribute by definition, and I think the difference with atheism or materialism is that material things don't have that quality to them.

That's why we call it, I said non-communicable. What did you say? Incommunicable. It's one of the attributes.

Yeah.

God has it, and nothing else does. We know material things do have causes. They do have periods in which they start to exist. So, anyway, I think Christianity is on a more solid footing than atheism in that sense.

Yeah, certainly. Yeah, and the Eastern religions, too, so I've always been intrigued. I asked a Hindu this once, and I couldn't really get him to engage with it, because I don't know if he understood the question, or maybe he was pretending he didn't, but I always have been intrigued by the fact that you have bad karma.

That's like the main problem we have to escape is bad karma, and that's why we're in this world. That's why we're suffering. That's why we have all these bad things happen. But my question has always been, where did it come from, though?

Because if you have these sequence that go back to eternity, and you were always something. You always existed. You're always part of the universe. Where did the bad stuff come in? At what point, if you started out good, if everything was good karma, where did the bad stuff enter?

There's no explanation for any of this, but anyway, I'm getting into different territory now. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you, Matthew, for that. We have a article that we're going to talk about today.

Did you get a chance to look over this article, Matthew? Was this the David Platt article? The Pastoral Corruption, yeah.

Mm-hmm. I was able to look over a majority of it.

David Platt, Radical, and the Documentary on McLean Bible Church

Yeah, I read it by Pastor Seth Brickley. He's actually on the board for TruthScript, and I just want to let people know, before we even get into this, that the David Platt documentary, part one and two, they're out there.

A lot of people, in fact, hundreds of thousands of people, I think, at this point have actually watched those documentaries. We'll take some questions, but tomorrow morning on my other podcast, Conversations That Matter, I am going to have some of the ex-members from the church answering questions about their experience at McLean with David Platt.

So, for those who are just completely in the dark and don't know, there were some documentaries released about McLean Bible Church and David Platt, who is the pastor there, and the experience that they had with Platt trying to essentially take over the church, replace leadership, gut the ministries, put new ones in.

The.

Numbers went way down. I mean, it's been a disaster for that church. They keep trying to make it out like this is such a great thing and everything's fine, but it's not, and there's some connections to the SBC and so forth.

But with that said, the more specific things we'll talk about tomorrow, but for now on the American Churchman podcast, we want to have more of a thousand-foot view and talk about this issue of pastoral corruption more specifically.

So,.

Pastor Seth Brickley starts off by referencing Jerry Bridges' book on Respectable Sins, and the premise is that there are certain sins that are respectable in the church in different eras, and you can think of, like, a good example of this today might be gluttony.

That's not a sin that is condemned very widely, especially in churches. How many pastors probably have a problem with gluttony? But it's not, it's a respectable sin, right? And there's a lot of other sins that we could talk about there.

But he talks about Steve Lawson, and I thought this was interesting to bring up Steve Lawson in the first paragraph, because Steve Lawson lost everything. I mean, he has no chance of ever making a comeback.

You know, even Mark Driscoll could make a comeback in a sense. He lost his temper, and there was this whole podcast about the rise and fall of Mars Hill that was at Christianity Today, I think, put out.

So there were issues that were focused on, but at the end of the day, that wasn't enough to hold him back from re-engaging in ministry. But for Steve Lawson, there's just no way. He had a relationship with a girl that was younger than him that he shouldn't have had, that was, as the church calls it, inappropriate, but was really highly suggestive and adulterous.

That's the biblical word for it, and there's no coming back from that. And this was this was a sin that was when Steve Lawson did this just, well, when it was found out, I should say, just a month ago or so.

This was widely condemned. I mean, all this stuff was pulled immediately. It's a shameful thing. These ministries connected to him don't even want to talk about the specifics. And yet, with David Platt, there's something different going on.

And so, Seth Brickley says that there is a certain level of corruption that seems to be acceptable in Christianity, broadly speaking, or at least in evangelicalism. He says, this cancer found in churches all over America is corrupt pastors.

America is flooded with such pastors, but they are in no danger of losing their positions. They are trained to look like real pastors. They know the Christian lingo. Many of them know the intricate ins and outs of theology.

Many of them are good public speakers and do expository preaching. These men are great at sounding credible and humble. They are professionals. They are career men and know how to perform the job. Unfortunately, many congregants are not discerning enough to understand their pastor's corruption.

And he talks about seeing Platt first at the Desiring God conference in 2011 and not suspecting any of these things. Matthew, did you ever see David Platt at a Christian conference or have you met him before?

I never have. I grew up seeing like clips of him, but I never got too much into him. Growing up at a very large SBC megachurch. I mean, he was popular. His books would be put out there.

Did you read Radical? I did not.

You know, I don't know how it was, but I always managed to avoid a lot of these really scandalous guys somehow. I never got too attached to any of them, but you know, who knows what's in store for me.

But I did hear a lot about him. I remember my high school pastor liked him a lot and my middle school pastor did as well.

I was thinking about this podcast and you, and I was like, you know, David Platt was huge back in, like, I remember whenever, I don't remember when his book came out, 2009, 2010, 2011, somewhere in there.

But 2011 at the Shepherds conference, I remember one of the distributors there, one of the vendors said that this was their top selling book. And Shepherds conference is known to be more, I would say, reformed-ish and just like, they're not your TGC type.

They're more on the conservative end of the reformed movement. And it was a big, hot item there. But I remember thinking 2011, how old would Matthew Pearson have been?

I would have been 10 years old.

Yeah, you wouldn't have, you probably missed a lot of the hype because you just wouldn't have been interested at that age. But for me, that was like, this was right when I was becoming an adult, that this was popular.

And so I think for guys just a little bit older than me, this was the book that defined the reformed-ish T4G, TGC movement. I would suspect, I haven't looked it up, but I would suspect this sold more than any of the other books.

Maybe with the exception of, if you want to count it, Desiring God, which was maybe a little before this movement, but helped jumpstart it. Francis Chan's Crazy Love is another book that might be, it came out around the same time, might be somewhat competitive.

But this was big. And I was actually required to read this book when I went to Southeastern for my admissions class. So in 2014, we're reading this as part of our seminary level, which is embarrassing because it's like on a seventh grade level.

But we were required to read this for our seminary level class. So you haven't had to read this at all. You probably won't at this point.

No, no, I can't see them assigning me. I mean, the only thing which I think was probably very popular back then that I get assigned to read is like Tim Keller books on like The City or whatever. Which is kind of, you know, if you go to a reformed university or not university, like seminary, then I guess that's kind of expected.

I don't know, unless you go to Greenville, you're probably not going to be reading a lot of Keller at Greenville.

Right. Yeah, it's just Southern Baptist more. And I've talked about Platt quite a bit on the podcast. And without going into everything, he he had a very influential ministry for a long time and he was known as kind of like the missions guy.

And that propelled him to the position he had at the International Mission Board for the Southern Baptist, which is the highest level you can get in missions. He left that. I want to say what, twenty seventeen or so.

He left that position and said that he was essentially full of corruption. And what he said, it's just so funny because what he said at that point about how he didn't like people jostling for career advantages and everything was image.

And he just couldn't take it. It describes it has come to describe the way he operates, according to the documentary at McLean Bible Church. It's like he's writing about himself and he I mean, he would have learned that's what he would have learned, I suppose, for his leadership style.

But anyway, the article goes on and let's see. Seth Brickley says he talks about the documentary a bit. I'll let people go watch that themselves. We won't go over all that. But he quotes John 10. He says he who is a hired hand and not a shepherd who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.

He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. And Jesus is setting contrast to that in the very next two verses, I am the good shepherd. I know my own my own know me just as the father knows me.

And I know the father and I lay down my life for the sheep. So before we get into Platt, the false teacher here, I want to talk a little bit about Jesus's teaching on this, because I was just reading in Mark chapter 11 this morning and family devotions about how it was at 11.

No, it was sorry. 12. I was reading Mark 12 about the vine growers, the parable of the vine growers and how in Israel's history, God keeps sending them prophets. He eventually sends them his son. They will hurt them or kill them.

And the son they kill in the story. And of course, Jesus is about to go through this. But you continue through the chapter and he talks at the end about the widow's might, which is interesting because he says the chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets.

This is what they love, the spiritual leaders. He said they devour widows houses and for appearances sake offer long prayers. These will receive a greater condemnation. And then he gives the story of the widow's might, how she gave what she had to live on, all she had.

And this was, I think, in context, this is an indictment. This is telling the spiritual leaders you're asking her to give what she doesn't have. You're preying on widows houses. You're devouring widows.

That's what you're doing here. And it's evil, but you're able to put on a good face. And it's the same thing we have today. We have this in the prosperity gospel movement, but we also have it in this poverty gospel stuff, which David Platt is, I think, most known for.

You have people who who read his book who are convinced after reading it that and I've I've seen I've read things from people who have done this and actually people have reached out to me who have followed this.

They'll sell all they have or just about, you know, they'll go to the mission field, move the inner city. They'll they'll try to follow it. And they think this is part of living the gospel. That's what Platt calls it in the book, which I think you don't find that language in scripture.

There's a lot of conflation of law and gospel in the book. And and what happens is their lives oftentimes are essentially ruined. They they realize this doesn't work. They've delayed their life. If normal things that would happen with getting married and having kids and that kind of thing, at least in the stories I've heard, they they eventually come to find out that this was not what they should have done.

But they were convinced that this was the Christian duty for them. And it's kind of like the widow who gives her last might. It's not a positive example. So with that being said, I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about Platt's theology on this point and whether like what's expected of Christians as far as.

When you see someone come into your church who is asking you to give to dig deep into your pockets to give to the church, not say we should give we should be God loves a cheerful giver, but there this is one of the red flags you see in scripture.

This is one of the things that you see with Platt. You saw it in the documentary where he's talking about, you know, if we would just give more, they can just do so much more. And it's all going to the Great Commission.

We find out now, oh, no, it's going to all these other things that David Platt cares about. He's actually living in the suburbs in this really nice house. There's exorbitant speakers fees, apparently, that he's receiving for some of these or at least radical as organizations receiving for some of these services and so forth.

And so what do you do when you see that sign? That's one sign that Jesus talks about and David Platt demonstrated. And I think for me, at least that a red flag goes off in my mind. We give to the Lord.

We give to his mission. But when you see people that are so focused on that and you see people who want you to give not just sacrificially, but to the point of impoverishment and they value that and they say and they merge that, especially with like the Christian message of the gospel.

I I say run. Something's wrong with that. That's you're getting close to actually the prosperity preacher type mindset, which Platt condemns, which is funny, but he still has some of that because he's not saying you're going to get a new car, right?

He's not he's the reward is a spiritual reward, but he's still saying you need to dig deep. And and so, you know, I don't know. What do you do with stories? I'll pitch it to you, Matthew, since you haven't talked in a while and I'm just going on here.

But, you know, what do you do with the stories of like the rich young ruler? Because Platt uses that in his book quite a bit. The rich young ruler comes to Jesus. Jesus says, hey, go sell all you have.

Give to the poor. That's Jesus instruction. And Platt universalizes that and says, hey, that's all Christians, basically. How do you take that?

Well, something that came to my mind when you're going through this kind of theology is it's really interesting because you actually see quite a bit of this in the early church, like after the apostolic era, with the rise of with the rise of Christian monasticism, you'll see people who become bishops.

So I think of someone like Ambrose, who has a very large estate. But once he becomes a bishop, something really funny about him becoming a bishop within the span of eight days, he was baptized, ordained a priest and then ordained a bishop.

So that's kind of something funny to know. But he sells everything that he owns, like all his estate. And but the thing is, is the context in which that's occurring. What you have to realize is it's not all about monetary wealth.

That's not really why he's getting it up. It's because when you become a bishop in this context and you're overseeing all these churches and you have an estate where what do you have on an estate, you have large amounts of property, you have a lot of slaves, you have a lot of people to look over.

It's sort of like there's this idea that you can't really take care of everyone. So you have to focus on that, which is your duty. And if you're a bishop and you have to oversee a diocese of various congregants and be a pastor, not only to the people there, but also to the priests, then that's it makes sense in that context to do that and to give things up for that.

And I mean, even the Reformation saw the abuses of monasticism that came about. And so that's something that is important for evangelicals to realize, is that you come from a tradition which emerged out of a recognition of monastic abuse.

And so to kind of return to that is not good. But even when you look at the early church and you see how they did monasticism and the selling of goods, a bishop who did that, it makes sense why he had to do that.

And it was more so it had to do with oversight than just things like wealth. And something also to consider behind this idea, in principle, there's nothing wrong with if you have a lot of wealth and you want to give it up to serve the church.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that in principle. The thing you have to consider, though, when you look at the early church when this happened, is they always had a large support network. They always had means of staying afloat.

In our day and age, that is not always the case. If you are a person with a family and you decide to give everything up and you don't have any means to take care of them, that is not selling everything for the kingdom of God.

That's endangering your family. And according to the Apostle Paul, that makes you worse than an infidel. So think of this. You may want to use the early Christian monastics as your example. Well, guess what?

First off, number one, many of those guys that became monastics were single. They didn't have a family to look over. That's not what they had. Number two, even those who were married were still able to support their family through funding from the church.

And I just don't think those support networks are there. And again, I go back to the whole Protestant point. I think that a lot of evangelicals need to look at their roots behind why it is they rejected many of these monastic forms, realizing that that wealth is not inherently wrong.

That if you steward your money well, you can see it as a gift of God, as a blessing. So I think that's important. And again, like you were mentioning with the rich young ruler story, I don't know if there's a basis to universalize that story.

I think that if you use that to contradict what the Apostle Paul says about providing for your family, then that is not good. But yeah, and I think a lot of this can also I remember the article that mentioned how Platt didn't really it seems like Platt didn't really know his congregants very well.

He was mainly just a teacher. And something something about these pastors and sorry, I'm super focused on the early church because there's so many parallels here between what's going on, because I can I imagine that a lot of these evangelicals that took like one patristics class before like, oh, don't you know about monasticism?

So I figured like they touch on that. But when you look at the early church, the people that were in charge knew their congregations very well. Did they have like some like celebrity preachers? Yeah, sure.

John Chrysostom was a celebrity preacher in some sense. Augustine was too. That's just how it worked. But nevertheless, they had congregants that they deeply cared for. And I think that sometimes putting these burdens on people such as many claim that Platt put on has a connection most likely to not knowing your congregants well enough, not knowing their particular circumstances and situations.

And I think that when looking at this information, that's something that's important that we have to evaluate.

Rich Young Ruler, Wealth, and Christian Stewardship

Yeah, it's irresponsible. And people are posting some verses. I actually pulled up a few. Proverbs 13, 22 says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. But the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous.

There are these wisdom principles that include storing up your wealth and making sure that those who you have responsibility toward are able to access it for their own betterment. And of course, it's all a gift from God.

But this is would that contradict, you know, go sell all you have. You have First Timothy 6, 17 instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy.

So the admonition there from Paul isn't, hey, go sell all you have, rich people. It's don't put your trust in the riches. And that's something that Jesus does talk about. It's hard for a rich man to go to enter the kingdom of heaven because of that trust he has in himself, that pride.

And if you look at the story of the rich young ruler in Mark 10, I just pulled it up. He says this teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth and many of them are the Ten Commandments, adultery, stealing, all these kinds of things.

And Jesus said, one thing you, meaning the rich young ruler, not everyone, but you lack, go and sell all you possess and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven and come follow me. But he was deeply dismayed by these words.

And why was he dismayed? It says he owned much property. This was something that Jesus was saying to this specific person. That was his specific problem was he had all this wealth and it was an idol to him.

And so Jesus, it's a, uh, it's a sniper. It's not a shotgun. He's focused on this one guy and his problem. And many of the disciples who follow Jesus were in this same kind of boat where they had been fishermen or engaged in some trade and they left it all behind, follow Jesus.

And then they were dependent on what was Judas. He was the one who kept the money for the poor. Why did he have money for the poor? Because people were giving contributions to Jesus to fund the work that he was doing with the disciples.

So, um, so he would have been living with Jesus. There were, there was this net there. There was a safety net there. And there's, there's a safety net in our lives too, when we follow Jesus, when he wants us to give up things.

And sometimes he does want us to give up, uh, lots of money, but you can't universalize this, which is my problem with the book radical. One of the problems I would say, uh, with the book radical, um, there's, there's a lot of comments.

Let's we're going to leave the comments that we're only about half an hour in. So, um, keep, keep, you know, asking questions. We'll come to them hopefully in about 15 minutes or so. Uh, let's keep going through the article though, because, uh, Seth makes some pretty good points here.