Duncan, Ferguson, MacArthur, and Sproul: Questions and Answers #2

so let's just get right into it I've got a bunch of questions and we've got one our ligand Duncan can you elaborate on the distinction between the visible and the invisible church the visible Church consists Presbyterians would say of all those who profess belief in Jesus Christ alone for salvation as he is offered in the gospel and their children our Baptist friends a Reformed Baptist friends would limit the visible Church to professing believers but the point of the distinction between the invisible and the visible church would be held by both Baptists and Presbyterians the invisible church is the church consisting of all true believers in Christ throughout all ages those who have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb under the Old Covenant and those who are alive today redeemed and those who will be redeemed in the future and so it entails both those who are alive on earth believing in the Lord Jesus Christ and those who are in heaven above having gone before and those who are yet to be born who will come to faith in Christ and the importance of the distinction between the visible in the invisible church is simply the recognition that first in the visible church today just because a person is a member of a local congregation you cannot simply assume that they are in vital saving union with Jesus Christ that's the significance of all those prophetic passages warning of the wrath of God against Israel in the Old Testament there was the visible body of the people of God and yet the prophets are warning them of wrath if they are not truly trusting in the promises of God many of the Israelites died in the desert now you were making the point last night though that the judgment of God falls upon the visible church but not the invisible church I have another question later on maybe we'll just roll that up and now now how is it in what sense do we speak or should we or should we not speak about God's judgment or wrath falling upon his people in a truth well because the wrath of God has fallen on Christ on behalf of his people it would be unjust for God's wrath to fall upon those who are resting and trusting in Christ because God's judicial punishment has been meted out against his son and so there is a sense in which the believer is never under the judicial or pin ative wrath of God though we may be under the Disciplinary wrath of God but that punitive or judicial that moral visitation of God's wrath in punishment for sin is not something that the believer United to Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit experiences so we want to distinguish between punitive wrath and just fatherly discipline right okay thank you let's go to a lot of questions dealing with this anybody who may be you are see I don't know why does God seek glory and a number of questions take sort of the line of isn't it's selfish of God and boastful of God to want to be glorified this particular question says how can God be an impartial judge when he's trying to be glorified can you handle that whole subject you and then after you anybody else you know I always tell my students you know that there's no such thing as a stupid question because and and I tell them I said if you ever get in the ministry and people ask questions that you've heard a thousand times you've got to pretend that it's the first time because there's maybe something deeply troubling the person that's asking the question and like I say there's the only stupid question someone you're afraid to ask but this one comes perilously close but I want to make clear that I'm just reading this but again when we were hearing this morning about how the tendency for us is to project our own attributes and our own viewpoints upon God you know we think well how what a selfish thing it is for God to seek his own glory now what a foolish thing it would be what an irrational thing it would be for the most perfect being who alone is worthy of glory to not seek his glory for God to seek his glory is perfectly consistent with his righteousness and his holiness for us to seek his glory is the essence of arrogance and of selfishness where we try to rob from God what properly belongs to him glory mean when God works for his glory it means he works to maintain his own perfection his own righteousness his own majesty his own holiness which is the greatest good there is the period you know so methank of that as something selfish in God is to drag God down from his level of being to ours and because we understand the pursuit of glory as something that is selfish and but God will share his glory with no man and I think that takes you back to the very very helpful distinction that you made RC between being and becoming the reason we feel selfish in seeking our glory is because comparatively we're like so many others and we are comparing ourselves with ourselves in God's case since there is no other being like him it is essential to his own nature his his divine glory and it can belong to no other that's why he said in the Old Testament my glory will I not give to another there is no other to take his glory therefore there is no sense of comparison he stands utterly alone in the universe as the all-glorious one for the chief and the chief end of God then is the same as a chief end of man that's right to glorify God and enjoy him forever I had another question that somewhere in this pile that says ok even if we get that straight ok we're gonna say God's glory is above all else is there a right sense in which the creature is glorified or partakes or shares in that glory where we made for glory can we use that kind of length yeah we're Bound for Glory the court the booktitle certain young man but the idea is that you know the Bible says there's a glory of the stars a glory of the Moon there's the glory of this and the glory for that that has to do there with a sense of Worth or dignity solemnity or value that is associated with certain things and there's also that privilege the unique privilege that we enjoy as human beings there's being made in God's image that part of our task is to mirror and reflect his glory but that glory that we enjoy at that point is not intrinsic it's extrinsic it's real we have real dignity because God says so because God assigns it to us and gives us the capacity uniquely to reflect it and not only that that the end of the line of the plan of salvation the order of salvation is our glorification not our deification but our glorification where that image all of the Mars and blemishes from sin are removed and erased and we reach the clinical of our sanctification which is called glorification where we most perfectly reflect what we're supposed to reflect that belongs in errantly to God it's just a footnote I think the incident of Moses and the fading glory in Exodus and reiterated in 2nd Corinthians 3 where it clearly indicates that Moses covered his face so that people wouldn't see the fading glory there's the extrinsic in the intrinsic changing the subject a little bit dr. Ferguson let's get you into this very good how does does God's foreknowledge mean that all of life is predetermined if so does this mean that human free choice is merely illusionary well there is a difficult question I think the simplest answer to it is to recognize that what is what is for knowing by God and the deterministic sense is nevertheless contingent for ours I maybe if I can back up just a little bit in all of our thinking about the relationship between the divine and the human you've heard me say this might have our tendency is always to think in terms of a football field there is a there's a hundred percent event and if if two individuals two persons are involved in that event on the field then somehow or another we've got to divide the field up and we think we seem to think about that in relationship virtually to all of the attributes of God as they are expressed extrinsically in the world and in doing that it seems to me we do exactly the thing I was trying to warn against our on which is we try to see God simply by magnifying man and the fundamental thing for us to grasp is that God is related to all reality in a completely different way from the way in which we are related to all reality so there is never a situation in which in an event in which the divine and the human interact we begin to divide the field up and say this is fundamentally Sicilian Pelagian Arminian and all these bad word styles of thinking to say well maybe it's 1% me you know I must I must leave some room for my freedom the nature of God's relationship to the creature is that all room is life for the creatures freedom the Westminster Confession of faith affair carefully works its way through the principle that we are at liberty consistent with our own nature and being at every stage of our lives so there's no question about the issue although I would rather drop the term with Calvin freewill we all have free will but we don't have a will that is set free from our nature's and so our liberty and that census humans is always restricted perverted twisted by our own natures but the thing that I think we need to grasp is that God is related to all the actions of our lives in which we exercise human volition 100% working out his will even while we are 100% working out our will now I find actually it's somewhat easier for people to get into this along the lines of omnipresence here's here's Ligon and here's here am I now we both believe in the omnipresence of God but neither of us thinks that God is omnipresent except in the space he's taking up in the space I'm taking on we believe the fact that Ligon is taking up that space and I'm taking up this space both of which spaces are not insubstantial does not mean that God is present everywhere except where Ligon is present and except when I'm present so it's it seems to be easier for us to get our minds around the notion that we are not dividing up the space in relationship to the presence of God then it seems to be in relationship to the will of God I remember you in the classroom using the example of our Lord Jesus who's whose life was not merely predetermined it was pre-recorded and yet we wouldn't say that he was a puppet would we no I mean the fact he is I think as I said this morning and all these things if you bring if you're putting our doctrine back to Jesus and say does it work with Jesus if the answer is no then it doesn't work does it work with his teaching does it work with his reflection and none of us would doubt he was the freest man of all but simultaneously most clearly and evidently a thoroughly predetermined man did that minimize the agony of Gethsemane or the passion of Calvary not at all so you have a hundred percent of the Divine Will working its way out in an interconnected way with liberty and freedom of an individual let me ask the question throw it out generally how do you all feel about the expression freewill talking about me let me answer that yeah well you asked you asked me how I feel about it not what I think about it I see it matters a lot to you well it is it's an it's such an important concept because I I always say that all of us have had our minds played with by pagan ideas and we're taught from the time we're little kids that nature operates independent from the power of God and that there's an errant powers of nature like gravity and so on we also have been taught from childhood from infancy a pagan understanding of human volition and that pagan knowledge is that we have a free will that is capable of choosing whatever we want from a spirit or attitude of indifference with no prior bent inclination or disposition to the left or to the right to the good or to the bad now all reform people say that man has a free will in the sense that we have a Faculty of choosing that remains after the fall every person out there has the ability to choose what they want in you of all made choices to be here today because that's what you wanted to do more than not wanting to do and that's what gets us into so much trouble we sin because we choose to sin all right so we know we have a Faculty of choosing and in the sense that we have wills then relational creatures then you could say we have a free will but at the same time when the Bible speaks about our will it speaks about that it doesn't like to use the term free because you have to say free from what if you want to say free from coercion yes we have a will that is free from coercion but if we if you mean free free from moral bondage and slavery which is what the pagan concept is that we're free to be righteous and to do the right thing and so on oh no no no the Bible says we're dead in sin and trespasses that this that the will is enslaved to this desires are the desires of our heart our only evil continuously that was the battle between it's between Agustin and Pelagius between Luther and Erasmus between Calvin and biggie is in between Edwards you know it's good and but we like Calvin said if you mean by free will the ability to choose the things of God unaided by regeneration then free will is far too grandiose a term to apply to us mortals right is there a term you would prefer to use a human responsibility full volition what do you say instead of freewill well I still say freewill but I then I have to qualify you know like Agustin did and what Sinclair was getting at earlier the distinction because some said you know before the fall we had libera amor bitchery I'm a free will and we also had Libertas Liberty meaning the power to do the right in the things of God after the fall we retained the libera more became the free will the Faculty of choosing what we lost was our Liberty and only the Holy Spirit can restore the Liberty that we have lost at the fall and the problem you have with semi-pelagianism influenced by paganism that it wants to retain that kind of a pre fall view of of the will or at least they recognize that there's a fall and the what fault the Wills been weakened by sin they don't really grasp the depths of that weakness you know man is sick in sin and trespasses rather than dead in sin and trespasses that's why I wrote the book willing to believe I just like your canvas the whole history of this debate over free will because for my desires not simply to support reformed theology biblical theology but to try to get people to to realize where these ideas come from they don't come from you don't see big treatises in the Bible about free will you do hear about our responsibility and all of that but you don't find a pagan notion of freedom in the scriptures all right how can we respond to those ev Angelica 'ls who believed in the annihilation of the soul I guess alig you want to take the lead on that one I explained the issue well the the doctrine of the annihilation of the soul has been around for a long time in sort of our world it's been around since the time of the Reformation when it was featured in the writings and teachings of the sicinius who were sort of the Liberals of the Reformation and the doctrine is that at some point the wicked after the day of judgment are uh Nile ated they cease to exist there is no eternal punishment and there are various reasons given for that argumentation again it's it's not exegesis that drives someone to make that assertion it's a concern over whether eternal punishment the visitation of God's eternal wrath upon the unrepentant wicked in Hell is is consistent with the love and the mercy and the goodness of God and so people begin to look for a justification for for changing the doctrine and the problem with the view is that with regard to the teaching of the New Testament many of our proofs of the eternality of the Blessed state of the believer are actually the corollary of Jesus is teaching about the eternal state of the wicked and so there is a paralleling in Jesus teaching and in Paul's teaching and in the book of revelation about the eternal state of those who are in Christ and the eternal state of those who have rejected Christ and are not in Christ and the one goes with the other and if you start monkeying with the passages that support an eternal conscious punishment of the wicked bottler then you also begin to undermine the doctrine of the eternal blessed state of those who are in Christ what do you think is behind I think it seems to me that the annihilation is view has gained some ground has gotten some traction why do you think people are attracted to that view how can you not be right I mean we heard the recitation of Edwards this morning sinners in the hands of an angry god and in lake was talking about last night how I believe is Leegin that that the doctrine of the wrath of God has been muted in our pulpits in our society and there are fleshy reasons for that because we don't like conflict we don't want to drive people away and all that sort of thing but there's also another aspect to it I like to say this Rick that if we think of the most sanctified believer that's ever walked the earth apart from Jesus maybe it's the Apostle Paul okay and put Paul next to Jesus no put Paul next to Adolf Hitler and then put Jesus up on the stage now to whom is Paul closer to Hitler or to Jesus there's no comparison the gap that exists between perfection the sinlessness of Jesus the holiness that John was talking about today and the greatest saint is so vast that Golf is almost what it is unpassable and the difference between me and Hitler is just one of degree it's not one of kind so in the sense that even in my IIST moment of sanctification I tend to have more sympathy and compassion for my own kind Hitler I can understand okay Jesus in his perfection I can't begin to fathom sinlessness and perfect moral perfection and holiness such as in Jesus and so as a human being to me it's I can't fathom one of us no matter how bad being punished forever by the Living God I have to grant intellectually it's perfectly just it is just I can't complain and say that's not fair because my sin against God is infinitely heinous and there's nothing unjust about his pun if he would punish me forever I could not say hey God that's not fair I know that but yet at the same time I just I hate the thought of it that you know when I was in college I read a psychology textbook that used that sermon we heard from Edwards as an example of sadism that's just how people don't understand Jonathan Edwards the thing of difference between Edwards and modern preachers is Edwards believed in Hell he really believed it and if I'm a sadist then I believe that there is a hell I'm going to persuade my people that there's no such place and have a gleeful delight in thinking that they're going to go there but Edwards loved his and he believed in Hell and and even though it drove him you know to this great anguish of soul and himself I mean he was trying to awaken people from where they were you know inevitably headed since so I think it's so hard for us to handle that even the most you know hard-hearted theologian it has to has to struggle with this but again like I think was leaking said if this were not a Dominical doctrine that is that they were not taught by Jesus himself we just couldn't handle it but the reality is Jesus taught more about Hell than he did about having it and you can't as you just said by what he says about heaven and reject what he says about Hell but let me just say this I had a teacher that said in seminary in a seminar we had somebody asked this question isn't doctor G what if I get to heaven and I find out that my mother is in hell how can I be happy and he answered the question this way he said when you get to heaven you'll be so glorified you'll no longer think through the prism of your own human sinfulness you'll be able to look into the pit of hell and see your mother there and rejoice that God is glorified by your mother in hell when he said that I burst out laughing but I don't know what other reaction to have I can't believe he said that but he did and he was serious but he but that's true but right now I don't have that perspective Rick right now I look at the punishment of fellow human beings or family members through the lens of somebody who is a sinner like they are and that's why we have to believe not what we wish was true right not what we think ought to be true but what the Word of God planning teaches is that before the thinkin got Evers I read Martyn lloyd-jones just this week I was reading him and he said we preach not to fill our churches but to save sinners from Hell and the two are not the same what do you mean by the unpredictability of God I don't dress that to anyone in particular but I think it's come out a couple of times that God does not often do what we thought he would do or what makes sense to us is it right to say that God is unpredictable and what would we mean by that Ligon no but I'm asking you the same lines it's the same wyan thing it really is that was my that was gone free who never got free he said they would you guys want to take that up is is God predictable well I I think it is nature he's consistent but from my viewpoint he may not be predictable but I'm operating with very minimal information so from the human viewpoint things may happen that I wouldn't have expected I mean there are certain people who are alive that I think should be dead and there are definitely people dead that I think we need to be alive that's not predictable I wouldn't have done it that way so from the human viewpoint God is not predictable to me but from the divine side he's absolutely consistent with his eternal purpose and he's predictable with his promises yes promises are reliable yes isn't there an illustration of that again and Christ Rick you know now that we read the Old Testament we see that it was in one sense predictable God was true to himself and true to his promises but there was nobody that guessed it would be this way and is the same I mean I think we learn as we go along that the the faithfulness of God to his promises in which we believe is not the same thing as access to the ways in which he's going to fulfill his promises and he is some very strange way to hours of fulfilling his promises and we need to know that when we're obedient to him take the disciples getting into the board because Jesus says were going over to the other side he was faithful to his warrant but I'm sure when they got to the psyche of thinking we never thought it would be like this I think there's a lot to learn about living the Christian life on that I think I've heard absolutely reliable about the what would Jesus do of course we all want to prove the whole idea of trying to follow Jesus exemplary example but often Jesus would do things that we could not do like raise the dead person or he would make a whip out of cords and drive the moneylenders out we we need I think we need to be suspicious of anybody who thinks he knows moment by moment how God is keeping his purposes that gives me the heebie-jeebies did you learn that in Dallas you didn't use this ad BG's London Dallas's that gives me the heebie-jeebies y'all Oh y'all are you all bull y'all know we've talked about the acidity of God and the omniscience of God I had a number of questions dealing with the open theism controversy and could you explain what open theists are saying and why it's wrong who'd like to take that open theists are saying that God does not have a complete exhaustive and infallible foreknowledge of the future that there are some future events and contingencies that are not known even to God the reason that open theists are saying this is they have understood that whereas historical our minions have affirmed the foreknowledge of God and denied the predestination of God and said that the predestination of God was based upon his foreseeing of the choices of humans have not been able to escape the philosophical problem for the Arminian view that is entailed in that assertion and that is that if God infallibly for knows the future than it is as fixed as if he had predestined it predestinated at which they deny and so the open theist says well then we're just going to have to get rid of foreknowledge - and the open theist can do this in one of two ways he can either say that God does not know the future exhaustively or infallibly because the future does not exist yet that's what Greg Boyd says because we create the future and God therefore can't know what does not exist yet and others argue that God and this would be more like Clarke Pennock self limits himself so that he is not able to know certain aspects of the future in order to protect human free will Greg Boyd especially will appeal to a range of scripture passages wrongly I think to attempt to support that view he has been able rebutted by a number of good reformed scholars in the last few years they've been a number of good books coming from consistent evangelical reformed perspective responding not not the least of which are Bruce wears books which have responded to Greg Boyd and to Clarke Pennock in some measure now Greg Boyd will say see we need to be able to hold that doctrine otherwise we tell some poor wife who's had a tragedy I think he uses the example of a woman who married a man she was certain it was God's will in her life he ended up betraying her she had misery and he says are you you Calvinists are gonna tell her that was God's will now how would we as Calvinists help how would we passionately respond to a woman or anyone who's been through a great tragedy with regard to God's foreknowledge and omniscience first of all if God wasn't sovereign over that situation that woman would be utterly hopeless our great comfort in this world is that even our tragedies are underneath the sovereignty of God and therefore for the Christian ultimately there is no such thing as this tragedy and you can say that and say it flippantly but it's the biblical truth if we really believe in the character of God as he says one of the things though Rick that I'm that that's refreshing to me about open theism particularly from Clark clinic who was it's early as champion is that when Pennock developed this concept he right up front did something that heretics never do all heresy in the history of the church is it's brought forward when the heretic claims to be teaching orthodoxy I'll use wertha Doc's language we'll try to peel the Bible and do all that stuff of the historic reads whereas refreshingly Pennock said we need to reconstruct what he called free will theism somewhere between the finite god of processed theology and orthodox theism so he knew at the front that his open theism view was a conscious departure from Christian orthodoxy now open theism itself you could debate whether that's an oxymoron but open Christian theism is an oxymoron I don't think that this position is simply an error within the Christian family where there's errors abounding and we tolerate each other I believe this is sub Christian and anti-christian because it uh Turley destroys the biblical God and I hope our people are not open to open theism you know in some sense this is sort of the last frontier the effort has been made to undo the last member of the Trinity we all grow up when they were assaulting Christ and redefining Christ then we lived through the mystical Chara's mania in which they did in the Holy Spirit and have attributed to him things he would never do redefining the Holy Spirit in unbiblical terms and the only place left is to assault the throne of God and this is just another in the long line I think of demonic doctrines that are espoused to destroy the Christian faith at its most foundational point the very nature of God Rick I've read a fair amount through not just the open theism but the whole history of of these areas and it's just always struck me that the thing that gives rise to middle knowledge to everything between middle knowledge and open theism and and and and it was present in the Middle Ages present in the post Reformation period is how do we make God so that we are free really meaning how can we make God so that we are God and I I think this has come in the case of Clark panic it's the tail end of a long process in which in a variety of different ways he's been saying man man man man ever more loudly and you know at the end of the day you need to say if we're talking about freedom when are we going to start talking about God's freedom to be God and you know I think that's why the point that John is making is really so critical yeah the act God's freedom to be God the axiom you hear all the time is that God's sovereignty is limited by human freedom I mean just think about that for five seconds if that's true then who's sovereign but rather we believe that man has true freedom but our freedom is always and everywhere limited by God's freedom because he's sovereign not us I think I think at one point I think it's in one of Boyd's books and he says that when you embrace open theism it's exciting because our prayers control the future now what do you think about that thought that our prayers actually change God the Greeks used to say whom the gods would destroy they answer their prayers so the thought that my prayers were controlling the future of the world should be a scary thought for you and for me please knock about like take it easy here brick because I still have another message to give on the immutability of God and you've just stolen the half of it I got a charge on the dr. MacArthur here yeah since since I don't know what to pray for as I ought I'm out of the game what is so it's it's not a thrilling idea to you all okay I'll just leave it at that here's a easier issue I think if we have an infallible Bible then why do we not agree on everything why do we have different denominations and differences between Bible believing Christians maybe dr. MacArthur you'll handle that I think this conference here is a great illustration year after year of how minor an issue this is when it comes to the great matters of our faith because we come from all different backgrounds and denominations and the core of great biblical theology has passed down through the ages under the providential care God and we are united around these great and glorious truths the the reason we disagree on some matters tradition is one presuppositions is another carnality is another ignorance is another lack of study is another I mean you could list all of those things but I think those things are reflective of the human condition but I think the thing that you have to look at is how God has protected his saving truth the core the drivetrain of biblical truth about which we all agree and we stand with those who have passed long off the scene and how he has protected and preserved that and I don't think there's this much disagreement as you might think even though there are some what I should say unique or maybe sometimes quirky things that separate us denominationally at the core we stand with the same great historic faith let me then follow up this way and I look good to everybody unless you'd like to take it how do we discern between those core saving truths that are essential and matters in which we may safely disagree well I think you start with those doctrines necessary to salvation and you would start with God being who he is we have to start there Hebrews makes very very clear he that comes to God must believe that he is that he is who he is he is not the God of the Muslims Allah is not another name for God it's another name for Satan so you start with a true and living God the God who is a Trinity not a unity I've been meeting that off and on with the gatekeepers for Mormon theology the head of the religion department of BYU and sitting hours talking to them for some reason they've included a couple of my books in the curriculum which is deeply distressing to me I'm not sure why that happened but I I think something that's been left out I don't know what but you know after about three or four hours of talking to these people one of them writes most of the books on their theology I said you know as much as you talk about loving Jesus and loving God and wanting to live a holy life and and being saved by grace alone isn't it gracious of God to let us work our way to heaven that kind of grace at the end of the day you have a God who is not a Trinity you have a Christ who is not deity and you have a salvation by works that obviously puts you outside the pail of saving truth so I think you go right through Christ and his sinless life his substitutionary death his resurrection those are the core truths that that are related to the reality of salvation anybody else want to deal with the whole issue of our denominations themselves a problem and then how do we deal with those in a constructive way and on a much todrick except this that I think you you know at the points at which we divide from one another where we differ with one another without necessarily dividing from one another those are the very points that just because they are points of difference immediately escalate in significance and it's it's important for us as we function with one another which is I think what we try to do as friends to recognize that the points of which we made different from one another our points of which communally we seek further light from God's Word rather than raise them as barriers between us so that when so that we get to the terrible position where immediately we think about each other we think about the way the brother has gone wrong with respect to this aspect of Christian doctrine or another and that's a great I think as John said that is a great battle with our flesh and the flesh of our mind and the struggle that all of us have with with our tradition because none of us wants to say we begin the Christian Church and every generation and forget about the last 20 centuries and I don't think there are any inherent problems in denominationalism that don't exist in Independence I can say as a pastor of an independent church that whole independent movement frightens me there is such an utter lack of accountability any Yahoo on the street who wants to open up a church and invent a theology and you know sort of appoint himself as a preacher and teacher can carry off his people in whatever direction they want and there is absolutely no one to whom he answers I mean this doesn't seem to me to have independence while it has merit in certain environments doesn't seem to have protected the church from anything now some of these people no doubt have learned things this weekend I would hope they would and it may be different from what their pastor teaches or they may have people in their home Bible study who are going to disagree with them would you all have any counsel for them for how to handle that in a productive way if they go back to their church's Bible studies and whatnot to try and interact with people who are not going to agree with things they've learned here you have to search the Scriptures again the first question was if you have an infallible Bible how scammy of all these denominations we have infallible people interpreting I mean you have fallible people interpreting the infallible Bible even if you get an infallible Pope or an infallible Church you still have to have infallible people interpreting the infallibility infallible teachings of the church so sooner or later it gets down to us that's fallible people so when we disagree first thing is were called to be patient and long-suffering and this and and agree at the same time to go to the mat the thing you don't want to do is buy into relativism to keep the peace as I've always said about my friend John over here I said if if John and I disagree on the point the one thing I know about John MacArthur absolutely certain that if he and I differ on something if I can show him from the scripture that I'm right and he's wrong he'll change this position in a heartbeat because he's driven to be faithful to the Word of God and I hope he believes the same thing about me but so we sew it and one of the things too is what we have to know what issues really are the issues that you have to stand for and the hills you need to die on you don't negotiate justification by faith you know they're not go she ate the Trinity you don't negotiate the atonement and so on but to get all bent out of shape as to whether you use grape juice or wine in the in the Lord's Supper that's that's immature you can talk about it and discuss it but that's that's not something that you want to be combative about it seemed to me I have to tell you what at the conference last week I was telling about Russia and I was with 1600 leading pastors in the Evangelical Church in Russia it's basically one large church called a Baptist / evangelical Union and they they're precious precious Saints and in the middle of this we had 1,600 their leading pastors together and a little group of them decided that they wanted to present a paper in protest against Calvinism and one very astute and wise leader put the kibosh on it but I heard about it so I said you know I because you don't understand John Calvin you think you rolled out of bed one day he came up with these five little deals and stuck them up on a board somewhere and this is Calvinism and because you don't understand what's behind it and where it came from you don't understand his life I'm gonna talk to you about John Calvin so I I gave the history of the man the suffering that he went through you know from the death of his children to the death of his wife to having to take all those kids into his house to his hemorrhoids is his other problems one meal a day and on and on and how he went through and did a commentary on every book of the Bible except revelation how he tested everything he ever believed against the Word of God I mean relentlessly against the Word of God from 1536 to 1564 he's exposing one passage after another takes a three-year break comes back picks up the same verse after he was in exile and I said you've this battle went on and on and on and afterwards this group of men came and said we want to repent we want to repent of our attitude I told that to RC and RC said John MacArthur came back from Russia and 3500 Russian pastors accepted John Calvin into their hearts that wasn't quite the thing it's a great story well I think it's not only the wisdom issue of what what is a significant issue and what is not that we need to have heavenly wisdom for I think also the attitude which we display a paul tells us that the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a sincere in a clean conscience and a sincere faith and so we want to adorn the doctrines of grace with a demeanor of grace in the way we discuss it especially with those who disagree because we live in an any intellectual age and because that any intellectualism pervades the evangelical church oftentimes anybody who knows anything immediately comes across as hard-edged to someone who doesn't know very much about the faith and so we will have to bend over backwards to be gracious in engaging with people who don't know some of the things that the Lord in His mercy has shown to us in the word and so we want to adorn the way we talk with people should show in our attitude our love and concern for them because our concern is ultimately the truth of God just to add to that perspicuity is an important reality to consider the perspicuity of Scripture of the clarity of Scripture and I think this question poses something that we're all going to have to face in a postmodern world where truth and the clarity of truth is not a concern but it's where everybody sort of has the right to their own opinion and that's going to be exalted to the detriment of the truth I had a question here I think it came partly out of the pre-conference I think ligand you'd mentioned that people were going to Eastern Orthodoxy can someone I have a question he actually had two or three questions asking can someone quickly summarize what are the chief errors one of the features of Eastern Orthodox theology that we think are erroneous well I to go along the lines of the way John took our last question the first thing would be in the doctrine of salvation you have a system of salvation which is essentially similar to Roman Catholicism in terms of the function of the sacraments basically there are only two systems of salvation in Christian history there's either a sacerdotal system which depends upon the dispensation of the sacraments by the church and there's an evangelical system which acknowledges the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer or in the life of the center drawing that Center to Christ uniting him to Christ by faith and the evangelical and the sacerdotal systems are the are the two great alternatives within the stream of historic Christianity and and Eastern Orthodoxy clearly fits in the category of sacerdotal ISM salvation through the sacramental system there are other odd beliefs in orthodoxy some branches of Orthodoxy today still stress the idea of theosis or deification which is a bizarre but RC made an allusion to it earlier on it's a bizarre warping of the Bible's teaching on sanctification and glorification which is very central to the Eastern Orthodox theology it has been since the Hesse ACCA's movement in the 14th century where they went back and they misread basically some 5th to 8th century Eastern Orthodox theologians the maybe the best evangelical scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy today is Gerald Bray and is an outstanding in his critique of the Eastern system but if you wanted to get a quick taste of what Eastern Orthodoxy believes you could pick up Timothy ware who is a an Eastern Orthodox Bishop from Oxford England and look at his book the Orthodox Church and just read the doctrinal section and you'd get a quick overview of Eastern Orthodoxy it's very very different from a Protestant evangelical view of salvation now when we talk about Roman Catholics we'll often stress that in an official way the Roman Catholic Church anathematized the gospel has something like that happened in Eastern Orthodoxy it's not that all the same yeast an orthodoxy doesn't have their Council of Trent in which they've anathematized justification by faith alone but there's a sense they remain somewhat Olympian and Allu from the issues of the Protestant Reformation but I've never seen a doctrinal statement from Neath Orthodox person that didn't deny justification by faith alone it just is totally against the grain of the Sasser totalism which Ligon was speaking here a moment ago one of the other things though - you'll find among particularly contemporary many Eastern Orthodox folks you mentioned the the bishop who wrote his book in this doctoral statement usually not a very big book customer Eastern Orthodoxy characteristically is not all that focused on and interested in doctrine it's more of the liturgy and that's what makes them attractive to so many people because we've had we've had such a stripping of the aesthetic dimension of worship from evangelicalism that beauty has been vanquished from our churches and from our worship and a lot of people hunger and thirst for the richness of an aesthetic approach to the majesty of God which they find in Eastern Orthodox churches and then whenever angelical churches lose their doctrine and then have no beauty well you might as well have beauty I just happened to attend an ether estern Orthodox service in Moscow I don't think they would use any books there wasn't a book table there wasn't a tract table there wasn't a document in the place there wasn't a sermon nobody preached there was chanting and more chanting and more chanting and walking in circles through little doors in the back screen and going around and coming through and wandering I know because I was standing there next to some little old ladies and I have kept having to move it was like waves you moved when the flow came behind you and they endless lighting of candles at expense of the people you know and they would come around in noticing and extinguish them when there were only half burnt so they have to go buy another one it went on for for an hour no one said anything no teaching no preaching which supports the idea that there's we know theology this is this is Sasser totalism plus nothing RC how do you respond to someone who says the self-existent eternal being is the universe since matter cannot be created or destroyed that's scientific approach yeah well it's yet to be shutting that matter can't be created and they're destroyed once they find the Living God they'll know that that's not the true principle but very quickly I mean this is a common thing most ant most opposite views to Christian theism and creationism are based on some kind of doctrine of self creation creation out of nothing the opposite is the pure materialist who says matter and matter or matter and energy have already existed so we don't need to appeal to some transcendent being outside the realm of the material universe to account for the universe as we know it now if you look at each individual individuated date a bit of that material universe such as this microphone you know that it manifests the attribute of mutation mutability contingency and so they no one is going to argue that the microphone is the eternal self-existent being but usually what they'll say is that there's some some core some pulsating core as yet undiscovered within the universe that is self existent in the eternal and from which all other material reality derives and what I say at that point it to the materialist is that you've just affirmed the existence of a transcendent self existent eternal being they say no we don't believe he's transcendent he's part of the universe it's this unknown pulsating core within the universe and I said let me understand something when we're talking about transcend being we're not talking geography we're not talking about where God lives we're talking ontology if there is something with quote you say within the universe that is ontologically different from everything else in the universe and that it alone is eternal and self-existing okay then you're doing a very nice job of describing what I've been pleading for all along a self existent eternal being and that's where you start you have to have a self existent eternal being and if you if there's one part of the universe that suffix isn't an eternal and another part between that from which that this microphone is derived that is not eternal and not self existent is contingent then you have to make a distinction ontological e between the source and this and that's what we mean by God alright let's just wrap it up right now let me just do one more brief question then we'll finish dr. MacArthur has to run I became a Christian then strayed badly I now desire to repent and follow Jesus but I'm haunted by Hebrews six that says it is impossible to repent if I have known the Lord and fallen away how can I know that I am able to be received again and forgiven who wants to take that and that'll be our last question we may have three different views of that sitting up there but without extra cheating Hebrews 6 in detail because there are different views but how can I know that if I profess faith in Christ I fell away badly but now I I want to be forgiven I want to turn to Christ how can I can't will he receive me now this is one of those consistent promises that we were talking about God that if you confess your sin God is faithful and just to forgive you sin and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness and if you've had a temporary falling away okay maybe you weren't ever really truly converted in the first place or maybe you were converted and you went into a very serious and radical fall but not a fool you haven't committed the unforgivable sin if you repent and you're concerned about it you get on your face before God we have God's guarantee that he will forgive you that simple the promise of God's Word yes amen well that concludes this question and answer we'll have one tomorrow as well

Channel: Ligonier Ministries

Views: 114,257

Rating: 4.7675753 out of 5

Keywords: God, glory, foreknowledge, predestination, determinism, hell, Open Theism, infallibility of scripture, doctrinal disputes, Eastern Orthodoxy, pantheism, repentance, orl04

Id: ibTMWUxPr8E

Length: 60min 10sec (3610 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2013