LARSON: We enjoy these Q&A times so much, and
we have a lot of questions to move through, and feel free to jump into several here
as they come up. Some will be directed to a specific speaker. But the first one is,
just in simple terms, how do you reconcile some of your differing views theologically
regarding issues like baptism or eschatology since you are teaching at the same conferences and published by the same publishers? So how
would you explain to a layperson who is on the fence and confused about whether these are
issues that we need to be standing firm for? SPROUL: Well, in one sense, we don't need to
be involved with reconciliation because the one necessary prerequisite for reconciliation
is estrangement, and we don't have any of that. Now, how do we reconcile the different
views that we have, like on baptism? Well, so far, we haven't been able to do
that. The only way that can happen is if one or all of us change our position on
the thing. And so, I'm willing to wait, and so are my brothers over here. But,
you know, the issues that are before the church in the twenty-first century touch
the very heart of the gospel and the very essence of the Christian faith, and for me
to be able to find men who are as valiant and as clear and articulate and brave as these
guys are on the core issues of the Reformed faith, the areas where we disagree, though all
disagreements are significant and important, but the other matters so far outweigh these in my
opinion that I certainly don't have any problem standing side by side. These are the guys I
want in my foxhole when the shooting starts. Some of them may be little
more wet than I am, but we'll… MACARTHUR: I think we both dried out after that
experience. I think it's very important to say that as a pastor for all these years at Grace
Community Church, we've had a basic principle of membership in our church and it's this.
If the Lord will allow you into His kingdom, you can be in our church. That is the only
requirement that we would have. We don't set any requirement beyond conversion.
If the Lord accepts you, believe me, we accept you. We have a doctrinal
statement, but it's titled, "What We Teach." It isn't titled "What We Believe,"
because we don't all believe it. There are people in our church who don't
believe like I believe about everything. There are people in our church who believe in infant baptism. Every possible angle
on eschatology would be represented in our church, but we teach what we have always taught and what
is defined in our doctrinal statement with no illusions that everybody necessarily believes it.
That doesn't change my responsibility for them, my love for them. It doesn't alter my duty and joy to
shepherd them, to care for them, to nurture them, to work to sanctify them as a pastor. And so,
I have no different relationship with other men outside the congregation of our church than I
have with the people that are in the church. Wherever they are in their spiritual development
and growth and understanding of the Word of God, they are one with me in Christ, and I celebrate
that. It comes down to what I call the drivetrain of theology, the absolutely
non-negotiable necessities at the core of our faith on which we all stand. SPROUL: Steve, will you tell your wife to turn
that camera off that she's hitting me with that red dot every second? That's your wife, isn't it
sitting right there in the front row waving at me? LAWSON: Yes, I see her. You want me to tell her to turn off the
red dot? Is that what you're saying? SPROUL: Yes. LAWSON: What red dot? SPROUL: On that phone or camera,
whatever it is she is aiming at me. LARSON: We all have our issues. SPROUL: Wait a minute, wait a minute!
Let's compromise and take his picture. LAWSON: There's not a flash
going, is there? No, okay. SPROUL: That red thing that goes. LAWSON: Oh, I'm sorry. I'll speak to her. It's "the woman Thou hast given me." SPROUL: Which outside of your conversion was the
greatest blessing God ever gave to you, buddy. LAWSON: Oh, I know. I
married up. There's no doubt. SPROUL: Yes, you did. Way up. LAWSON: Yeah. We're almost
unequally yoked. She's so up there. SPROUL: I'm not sure it's just
"almost." It may be "altogether." LAWSON: Yeah. SPROUL: Go ahead, Chris. LARSON: I'm going to need to go and
arrange different transportation for Steve. How important is the historicity of Adam to
this conference theme of "standing firm?" Could you also comment on the idea that
Adam could have been the head of a tribe of people who were created at the same time as he? SPROUL: I have a book that deals with
that, at least the title, Not a Chance. I'll tell you what, and this issue
is really becoming hot in our day, and it's critical because it's critical
not only for the teachings of Genesis, but it's critical for the teachings of the Apostle
Paul and of the Lord Jesus Christ. You negotiate the headship of Adam of the human race and
try to mix it up with theistic evolution, you're on a roller coaster
without any breaks, I think. MACARTHUR: You know, I would say that the question
I always ask about that is what where in the Bible did you come to that conclusion? Where is
that in Scripture? That's not in Genesis, so the next question would be, do believe
the account of Genesis 1, 2, and 3 to be a divine account of creation? And if someone says,
"Well, you know, it's an allegory. It's a poem," whatever, there's plenty of evidence that that's
not true. One of our professors at The Master's College did a quantifiable study on a computer
system comparing Hebrew poetry with Genesis 1, 2, and 3, and there was no relationship between
that literature in Hebrew and any form of Hebrew poetry, so it's not some kind of epic poem
that can be interpreted someway allegorically. But the bigger question is this: When do
you start believing the Bible? Do you sort of kick in in Genesis 4? I mean is that when you
start? Or maybe you wait till Exodus? Who knows? And if you don't believe Genesis 1 and
2, do you believe Matthew 1 and 2? Or just exactly how much liberty you're going to take
with this? One thing to say about that, I wrote a book called The Battle for the Beginning, and one
of the things that I said in that book is that whatever you observe in the world today,
whatever science observes, has nothing to do with origins. It only has to do with what you
observe, which doesn't say anything about origins because you couldn't observe it. There was only
one witness, one eyewitness to the origin of everything, and that eyewitness has given us a
divinely accurate account in Genesis 1 and 2. This is a huge issue. You either believe
the Bible at that point or you don't. And if you don't believe it there, then you
literally are susceptible to not believing at all kinds of other places that might be
uncomfortable or that some philosopher or some pseudoscientist decides isn't accurate. And
that is a slippery slope of epic proportions. SPROUL: And he's speaking about
epic not in a poetic sense. MACARTHUR: No. I see. LARSON: Dr. Sproul, John MacArthur quoted you
in defense of his position that natural Israel, that the nation of Israel, would
turn to Christ at some future time, i.e., that God's promise that all
Israel would be saved applies to ethnic Israel. Is that truly what your
statement was intended to convey? SPROUL: Do I believe that…, you know,
I take, as John indicated yesterday, a classic premillennial view of Romans 11
following Edwards and Calvin and Hodge, and all the rest. And it talks about a future
conversion of ethnic Israel, and I believe that. LARSON: Next. MACARTHUR: Again, if you believe in a
literal Adam, you would have to believe in the salvation of an ethnic Israel.
Same book, same literal reality. LARSON: My family is still Roman Catholic and
they still pray to Mary and the saints. Will this cause them to be kept out of heaven even though
they claim to trust Christ for their salvation? SPROUL: Maybe. I mean, it's a gross act of
idolatry to be praying to Mary and to the saints. That's a very serious matter. And I think that
there are thousands, perhaps millions of people within the Roman Catholic Church who really
are trusting in Christ and Christ alone for their salvation, not trusting the way of salvation
that their own church teaches, just like there are multitudes of people in Presbyterian churches that
don't believe in the Reformed doctrines. So that's the happy inconsistency of our friends who
are in Rome. But they have to understand as I'll be talking about this afternoon
that Rome has categorically, consistently, and clearly denied the gospel. And no
matter all other good things that they do, opposing abortion and affirming the Trinity and
all of that, the anathematizing of the gospel at the succession of the Council of
Trent, which has never been rescinded and reaffirmed as recently as the Catholic catechism,
disqualifies Rome in my opinion as a valid church. And I think it's an apostate body, and so with
that in mind, I believe that every true Christian who really is trusting in Christ has a moral
obligation to leave that communion and to identify themselves with a church, not that it's a perfect
church, but a church that is a valid church, a church that doesn't deny an essential truth of
the Christian faith. And as long as the gospel is an essential truth of the Christian faith, you
don't want to be in a communion that denies it and get into this kind of stuff where "I believe
in Jesus, but I'm praying to His mother," or "I'm praying to these saints. I'm
attributing to His mother and to the saints the powers of intercession that belong
only to the Mediator, to Christ Himself." And now, I think that you can be a Christian
and have all kinds of error in your theology, just like John talked about in his congregation.
We have the same approach at Saint Andrew's. You don't have to affirm the Westminster
Confession of Faith to be a member of Saint Andrew's. You do to be an officer, but not to
be a member of the church. And so, all of us have error mixed in with truth in our faith,
but some of this error is extremely dangerous. And, you know, for example, again most people who
go to churches, whatever communion they're in, are not all that deeply informed about the theology
of that particular communion or what's going on even in the worship service. I, for example,
being a student of Roman Catholic theology, could not possibly participate in a Mass
because I know what the doctrine of the Mass is, that the church teaches that you have
a real sacrifice of Christ in the Mass, unbloody to be sure, but it's still
a sacrifice. And again, at Trent, it is defined in terms of sacrifice.
I had a friend who was in the Roman Catholic communion and was leaving it, and we had
a discussion about that. He went to his priest and complained about this business of the sacrifice,
and the priest told him, he said, "Well, your friend doesn't know the Latin of what
we really teach." And he came with that to me and so I showed him Trent. And I said, "You ask
your priest what the Latin term sacrificio means in English?" And that was the end of it. It's a
real sacrifice. There are priests out there who don't believe it's a real sacrifice, even
an unbloody one. But that's the official teaching of the church. How can you believe in the
once-for-all atonement of Christ and participate in a celebration of His being sacrificed again,
as unbloody as that may be? That's ghastly. LAWSON: May it never be. SPROUL: Other than that, I don't have opinion. MACARTHUR: I just would add a footnote to that,
and of course I believe that, and probably over fifty percent of the people in our church
through the years who have come to Christ have come out of Roman Catholicism because we have a
large Hispanic and Asian population in Los Angeles with Catholic backgrounds so we're very used
to seeing people liberated from that. But one of the other things that is tragic about that
view of praying to the saints and to Mary is that it strikes a blow against the
gracious character of God and Christ. The idea of all of that is that God
is very tough and He's wrathful and somewhat transcendent rather than imminent. And
you don't really want to go directly to God which, of course, flies in the face of what Scripture
says, that God is compassionate and marked by loving-kindness and shows mercy to thousands and
is tender-hearted and weeps through the eyes of Jeremiah, and the same would be true of Christ,
but the idea is you don't want to go directly to God because you know He's preoccupied and
He's somewhat indifferent and transcendent. And you don't really want to go to Jesus
because He can be pretty tough as well, but Jesus can't resist His mother and God
can't resist Jesus, so that's the chain. You go to Mary because, you know, Mary can soften
up Jesus and then Jesus can take it to the Father. The assault that that is on the saving
nature of God, God who is by nature a Savior and full of compassion and mercy toward sinners,
can be pled with directly, this whole layering of that assumes that God's less than gracious,
merciful, kind and compassionate and sympathetic to the sinner is a blow against His
nature and the nature of Christ as well. LARSON: Dr. Lawson, what is the gospel? LAWSON: Well, the gospel is that Christ died
for our sins, according to the Scripture, that He was buried and that He was raised
from the dead. It is 1 Corinthians 15:3 and 4. So, the heart of the gospel is Jesus Christ
Himself, the person and work of Christ, the sin-bearing work of Christ, as
well as the perfection of His life that is imputed to those who believe. I think
out of the Reformation came the great solas and the three in the middle, sola fide, sola
gratia, solus Christus really is the heart of the gospel, that salvation is by grace alone, through
faith alone, in Christ alone. That really is the synopsis in its most succinct form of what the
gospel is. The word "gospel," euangelion, means "good news." And so, it presupposes that there is
bad news. There is no good news unless you first know the bad news. And that's where Romans starts
in Romans 1:18. And so, the gospel does include a message about sin, and sin is, you know,
any want of conformity to the law of God. It is a transgression, but the wages of sin is
death. "The soul that sins, it shall surely die." And so there must be the
understanding in the gospel that I am under divine judgment, I am under
wrath, that my sins have offended a holy God, I am separated from God, and there is nothing that
I can do in and of myself to remove the pollution and the condemnation of that sin, and that
my only hope is found in Jesus Christ, who died upon the cross for my sins. And so,
that really is the heart of the saving message of the gospel. I mean, we can extend out
and add other, you know, aspects, you know, the virgin birth of Christ, His sinless life, His
substitutionary death, His bodily resurrection, His present intercession in heaven and
soon return, all of that is interwoven as to which Christ we call upon and believe. In
Galatians 1, it talks about "If any man preach another gospel," so there is "another gospel" that
is a gospel that is corrupted by the addition of human works to my salvation, everything that
R.C. and John just said about the Roman Catholic Church, that is another gospel. It is a damnable
gospel. It is a bridge that doesn't get you to the other side. It is to lay hold of a log that
will not save you as you're drowning. And so, there is only one true saving gospel, and it is
by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. And Rome would say "Grace and…" They
would say "Faith and…" And they would say "Christ and..." And the Reformers, true to Scripture,
took out the word "and" and added the word "alone" sola. And so, that really frames or puts a picture
or frame around the essence of the gospel of Christ. And so, any addition of human works, human
merit, human goodness, religiosity is a corruption of the gospel. Salvation is not a reward for
the righteous; it's a gift for the guilty. And the clarity of the Christ whom we preach is
critically important. Dr. MacArthur yesterday preached Isaiah 53, and that was one of the
clearest presentations that we would ever hear of the substitutionary death of Christ. That's
at the very heart of the gospel of Christ. So, I would say that in summary form is the gospel.
And then I think the five doctrines of grace really help bring more clearly into focus
the saving work of God in the gospel. LARSON: Some adherents of the Emergent
Church Movement are advocating for mystical prayer as a means of coming together and
finding common ground with other religions such as Muslim, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
Could this lead to the one world religion? SPROUL: Well, you know, how
did it work out on Mount Carmel when Elijah had his ecumenical
service with the priests of Baal? I mean, I hear all the time people saying, "Well,
at the heart and at the basic soul, that all these religions are basically the same." When
people say that to me, it tells me immediately they don't know anything about the world
religions, and they know even less about the Christian faith. Because if you spend five
minutes studying the central tenets of Islam or Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism,
whatever, and Christian faith, you will see that the truth claims of Christianity, the
assertions and affirmations of the Christian faith are utterly and infinitely incompatible with these
other religions. But we want to all get along and want to reduce religion to its bare minimum
and reconcile all this so that we all believe the same thing. But again, if you read through
the Scriptures, you will see that the greatest threat to Israel in the Old Testament was not the
armies of the Philistines but the false prophets who were teaching another way. And the reason
why most of the New Testament is written is to protect the truth of
Christ from other false teaching. And you can't believe that there's one Mediator
and that there's only one way to God as our Lord taught, and at the same time out of the other
side of your mouth say, "There are many roads that get to the top of the mountain, some get
there by a more circuitous route than others, but we all get there in the same place."
The only same place that we'll all get to with that kind of theology is not the top
of the mountain but underneath the mountain. LAWSON: Amen. MACARTHUR: That's the subject I'll
be dealing with this afternoon. SPROUL: I'm changing my subject because Steve
already gave my message on justification. LAWSON: Yeah, sorry. SPROUL: That's alright. I can take a nap. LARSON: Dr. Sproul? SPROUL: Yes sir. LARSON: All this talk about the Trinity.
There are obviously false religions out there, heresies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons. Let's
just say hypothetically would you be able to vote for a presidential candidate that does
not believe in the triune God? Why or why not? SPROUL: Could I vote for a presidential
candidate who's not a Christian? LARSON: Who does not believe in the triune God. SPROUL: Oh yeah, well, if I require real belief in the triune God for the
president of a secular state, you know, I really would be disenfranchised. I wouldn't be able
to vote. Period. Because it's very rare to have an authentic Christian up for election for this
secular state. And I think that there are times in the past where I've seen believing Christians
running against pagans for the highest office in the land where the pagan's policies were more
in keeping with biblical policies of government than the Christian's were. And so, I look
at whether the policies of the candidate are compatible essentially with the fundamental
precepts of government as God ordained it. I believe in the distinction between separation
and state, but that concept of separation in church and state has come to mean in the
secular world the separation of the state from God where the government, particularly the
federal government, has declared its independence from God. Not just from the church, but from
God. And at that point, it's a revolution against heaven because it's God who ordains
government. God institutes not only the church, but He also institutes civil government,
whose principal task under God is to protect, maintain, and sustain the sanctity of
human life, which our government does not. And so, if I have any issue that determines
my vote, it's not the Trinity; it's abortion. Because any candidate who supports abortion by
law has completely abrogated his responsibility as a governor by failing to protect and
maintain the sanctity of human life. So, I will not ever vote for a candidate in any office
including dog catcher who is pro-abortion, okay? MACARTHUR: In a somewhat humble illustration,
if you asked me the question, "Would you allow a physician to do brain surgery on you
if he didn't believe in the Trinity?" I really don't care if he believes in the Trinity.
I just want to know he's been in somebody else's brain, and he knows where to look. If you asked me
that question about the state, then its competence and consistency with a biblical view of
government, exactly as R.C has stated it. And I think inherent in the biblical view is the
protection of life and is capital punishment. Jesus said, "Peter, put your sword away. If
you live by that, you're going to die by that." I think that's another component
that is largely missing, an unwillingness to punish the evil,
Romans 13, and reward the good. Everything is turned on its head. No protection
for the family. A president who affirms gay marriage, is so violently opposed to the
sanctity of life, which is the building block of human society. To say nothing about how you deal
with the government, how do you deal with family? That is devastating stuff on a civil level, and
we have to go the opposite direction from that. SPROUL: There are lots of people who believe
that the church should never say anything, and Christians should never say
anything about what government does. But that ignores the whole history of
redemption, all the way up to John the Baptist where that was a distinction in the Old
Testament between the priests and the kings and all of that. But the church historically
has always been given the responsibility of what we call "prophetic criticism." Not
that we want the state to be the church, but we do want the state to be the state.
And when the state rebels against its God-ordained responsibility, the church not
only may, but it must speak out against it. LAWSON: I'll just add a verse, Proverbs
14:34, "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people." And
so, it's fundamentally not about the economy. Stupid. It is righteousness that exalts a
nation, and what Dr. Sproul and Dr. MacArthur have just asserted are righteous issues,
and it's righteousness that exalts a nation. It's interesting, you remember, back in the
nineteenth century when Alexis de Tocqueville left France, came to America to discover the greatness
of America, "What makes this nation so great that we have sent the Statue of Liberty to?" And he
says he went into the commodious harbors to look for the greatness of America. He did not find it.
He looked for its greatness in its industry, and in its grain fields. He did not find it. He said,
"It was not until I went into the church houses and I heard her pulpits ablaze with righteousness
did I discover the greatness of America." And then he said, "America is great because
America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great." And really, I
would lay the blame not even so much at the White House but at the church house where we need to be
ablaze with righteousness and proclaiming the Word of God and for there to be a strong remnant in our
country that would uphold righteous standards and out of that for there to be salt
and light influence in our country. LARSON: What would you do about teachers who stand firm
on the topics covered at this conference but who add and or claim to receive special
revelation, direct revelation from God regarding their ministry? Are
they considered apostates, heretics? Should you support their ministries
and promote their Bible studies? SPROUL: Yes, to the first
two. No, to the second two. MACARTHUR: I think anyone who says he is getting
revelation from God poses a massive threat to the integrity of Scripture, to the faith once for all
delivered to the saints. Revelation 22:18 and 19 "If you add anything to these words, it shall be
added to you the plagues that are written in it." This whole issue of continuing revelation,
which marks the charismatic movement, has created a haven for every imaginable
aberration. Once you get outside the pages of Scripture, and you start saying you have
divine revelation, then the question comes, "Is it equal to Scripture?" And if you
tell me it's not equal to Scripture, then you've told me that God doesn't always tell the
truth. What do you mean? If God is revealing Himself, then this is God revealing Himself and
He speaks the truth. Then how would you prove that this was God and how would you prove that it was
the truth? The record just will not sustain that. Furthermore, if God were going
to give continuing revelation, it would seem to me that He would give it
to the people who were most trustworthy and who had the soundest theology, not
to the people who are least trustworthy, making money off of it and had the worst theology.
Why would God be talking to those people? Furthermore, why would He be giving miracle power
to them and not to R.C to validate the truth? So, the whole thing is warped. I
just did a thirteen-week series on the abuse of the Holy Spirit, and
the premise of that series is that in Matthew 12, Jesus accused the Pharisees of
attributing the works of the Holy Spirit to Satan. And in this series, I said reluctantly,
but I said it, that today the charismatics are attributing the works of Satan to
the Holy Spirit. They've flipped that. These supposed revelations and spiritual
insights and these religious experiences and so-called miraculous events and along with the
prosperity gospel and all the rest of it that is attributed to the Holy Spirit is really the work
of Satan. It's a corruption of Christianity. It's an addition to the Bible. It's all that's
bad. And I say this, and I think you'll see the reality of it. The evangelical church, when
God the Father, when our God is under assault, we rise to that occasion. I flipped through your
book this morning on Romans, and I noticed that you were speaking there in Chapter 11 about
the openness of God and what threat that is to the church. And when God is dishonored, we all
feel the pain, don't we? As the psalmist said, "The zeal for Your house has eaten me up. The
reproaches that fall on You have fallen on me." And we rise to defend our God, and we rise to
argue, and books come out and articles are written and sermons are preached. And when there's any
assault on Christ, on His deity, we rise to that battle and we go after the clarity of the gospel
and we create organizations, the Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel. R.C and I were
in a seven-hour meeting down in Florida with the ECT document defending the gospel, and
all the guns come out blazing to defend Christ and His death and the gospel, but the Holy Spirit has
been massively blasphemed and abused for decades. And where is the outrage? Where is the outrage for
that equal member in every sense to the Trinity to be so abused, so misrepresented, so blasphemed
for so long? And in the name of tolerance and in the name of unity, nobody will say
anything. So, I did this series, and I said I need to do a book on this, and so I'm going to do
a book, and I'm trying to find a good title, and the best one I've come up with so far is "Plucking
the Dove." I don't know whether the publisher… SPROUL: Luther talked about those in his day
who swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all. MACARTHUR: Well, this is of grave
concern to me. This is not a small thing; people running around saying they're getting
revelation from God. I dealt with that years ago in a book Charismatics, dealt with
it again in a book, Charismatic Chaos, and it never seems to go away. It's just escalated
and escalated, because there's so much money to be made. There's so much power and so much influence
and so much cash that can be garnered from that kind of thing. At all the levels, it is a
tragic thing and it's a blight on the church. LARSON: A pastoral question from a lady
who's here. She had a miscarriage this past week. It would have been her fourth child.
Many have told her to take comfort that her child is in heaven. What is the biblical
view on this? What Scriptures support this? LAWSON: Well, John has written a
great book, Safe in the Arms of God, and he does a masterful job of walking through
all of the Scripture and I think presents the best biblical case and even goes into the
book of Job, for example, and extracts texts that would show what David said that, you know,
"The child will not come to me, but I will go to the child," after his baby died. And so, I do
believe that God includes in His saving grace and applies the blood to a miscarriage. We do
believe that life begins at conception. "In sin did my mother conceive me," the psalmist says
and referring to the giving of the sin nature, the transmission of it at the time of conception,
and so that child begins at that point in the womb, which is why we so oppose abortion and
consider it to be murder, intentional premeditated murder of a human life in the womb. And so, when
there is a miscarriage then where does that child go? I think that we should have the comfort
of knowing that God in His mercy and grace built upon multiple passages, and Dr. MacArthur
can pull many of those together for us here, that that one is numbered among the elect
and is in the Lord's presence, so gentlemen? MACARTHUR: Yeah, I would just encourage that
lady to get the book Safe in the Arms of God. It's a big issue. It is such a big issue
that in ways that you would never assume that that little book has found its place in the world.
There were…a few years ago there was a city in Russia called Beslan, and some terrorists came
in with machine guns and slaughtered all kinds of children. I don't know if you remember
that in Russia. And the one issue in that town was this whole issue of grief was so
massive and the compelling question always was "Where is my child?" This is communist, former
communist Russia, still communist by ideology. And there was a little Baptist church in that
town that rushed to take the Safe in the Arms of God book and translate it into Russian
and distribute it throughout that entire town to give them hope that even as non-believing,
non-Christian parents that their little ones were with the Lord. And it opened up doors for
parents to come to the church, and the church began an evangelistic ministry to the parents
of the children. The nurses' associations in hospitals across the country have ordered that to
stock it because they don't know what to say to people whose babies die in the pediatric wards and
neonatal wards, and I think there is a tremendous need to comfort people. And I think the Bible
does give answers and I've tried to lay them out in that little book, and you can read it and
judge for yourself whether the case is made. LARSON: When everyone is talking about the
love of God and "God loves me just as I am," how would you respond? SPROUL: The kingdom of God is
not Mr. Roger's neighborhood. I think there are few things more dangerous than
preachers out there preaching that God loves everybody unconditionally because the message
that is heard by the people who hear that is, "There are no conditions. I can continue to live
just as I'm living in full rebellion against God, and I have nothing to worry about because there
aren't any conditions that I have to meet. God loves me unconditionally. I don’t have to repent.
I don't have to come to Jesus. I don't have to leave my life of sin. No conditions. No strings
attached. God loves me just the way I am. He's glad that I turned out so nicely," and so on.
But there is a sense. I've written a book on the love of God, where I talk about the three
ways in which theologians speak about the love of God. God's love of benevolence, where
God has a good will towards everybody, believers and non-believers. Beneficent love
of God: God gives benefits to people whether they're believers or not believers. "The rain
falls on the just as well as on the unjust." But the most important consideration is the
love of complacency, not the love of smugness. But what is meant by the love of complacency is
the filial love that God has for the redeemed, and that love is directed first to Christ and then
to all who are in Christ, our elder Brother. And that salvific love is not something that God has
for everybody unconditionally. And sometimes we close our eyes to what the Bible says frequently
about God's posture towards the impenitent. "God," the Bible tells us "abhors the wicked." That's
strong language. God abhors, detests, the wicked who are impenitent. And then people say, "Well,
God loves the sinner; He just hates the sin." But He doesn't send the sin to hell; He sends
the sinner there. And so, this is very dangerous stuff when we tell people, "God loves you
unconditionally," you know, so we have to do it from a biblical perspective rather than trying
to change the biblical character of God. God is angry every day against the wicked and justly
so. And every impenitent sinner is exposed every second to the rage, the fury of God's wrath,
as Paul tells us in Romans 1:18 and following. But again, like you said earlier, there's no
understanding of the good news apart from the bad news. Christ came into the world that was already
under the universal indictment for rejecting God the Father, for living in a sense where the clear
revelation of God, as you pointed out Steve, was so made manifest to every human being. But
our nature is so fallen that we don't want God in our thinking, we don't want God in our minds,
and we want so much to win people to Christ that we'll do everything we can to hide from them
the reality of the wrath of God. We don't tell them that every moment that they refuse to repent
that they are heaping up wrath, Steve, against the day of wrath. But people
aren't afraid of the wrath of God, and it's because we're out there telling
them, "You don't have to be afraid of God because God is so nice and, you
know, it's Mr. Roger' neighborhood." MACARTHUR: It takes the terror out of it. "Knowing
the terror of the Lord," Paul says, "we persuade men." "It's a fearful thing," a terrifying thing,
"to fall into the hands of the living God." The preaching that God loves
you unconditionally is the wrong message. The sinner needs to be
terrified about his condition. He doesn't need to feel comfortable in the fact
that he's turned out so well, as R.C put it. SPROUL: Now, just in the last
year, John, I've had two guys come into membership in our church as
adults, baptized as adults, by the way, who in their testimony…their
testimony is that what drove them to the gospel was they realized
that they were on their way to hell, and that scared them, literally scared
them…the hell out of them, right? LAWSON: Yeah, and rightly so.
SPROUL: Yeah. MACARTHUR: Now, that's part of what
Steve was saying, excuse me Chris. That's part of what Steve was saying. If we're
going to ever call a nation to righteousness, the preaching has to dramatically
change. It has to dramatically change. LARSON: Reformed theology and Calvinism most
certainly are considered a minority viewpoint. Why are so many Christians against
and actively against these concepts? LAWSON: They don't know the Bible. It's
not because they know too much of the Bible that they have come to this position; it's
because they know too little of the Bible that they have come to this conclusion,
and it's really their lack of knowledge of the full counsel of God as taught in the
Scripture. It allows them to continue to rebel against the truth that is presented in the
doctrines of grace, that there are no truths that glorify God more than what are succinctly
stated in the doctrines of grace. And so, it's not a secondary issue. It's not a minor
point in the Bible. It's literally in the heart of God. As John just said, He is a saving God.
It's the very nature of God to be a saving God. And the doctrines of grace, I believe, bring into
clearest focus, in most vivid detail, the purity of sovereign saving grace. And so, those who
resist…I grew up in an Arminian church. I know this personally and experientially. No one
ever hit the brick wall of Calvinism harder than I hit it and bounced off that wall and got up
and ran at it again and just kept bouncing off. And once you begin to see the pure unvarnished
truth of the sovereign saving grace of God, once you begin to see it in certain texts, Ephesians 1,
Romans 9, John 10, John 6, John 17, pretty soon… SPROUL: Genesis 1, Genesis
2, Genesis 3, Genesis... LAWSON: Right. Yeah, exactly. The point that I was
going to make is you see it everywhere. I mean, these verses begin to multiply everywhere
before your eyes, and it's almost like every day as you're in this discovery period, you
wake up to new wonders in the Word of God, and you wonder, "How did I ever miss this? How did
I swim over this treasure that was lying beneath the surface as I was just speed reading over
these texts?" And then, once your eye sees it, it's like you're breathing heaven's air, and you
come to a greater realization and understanding of what God has done for us in Christ
and how special His particular grace is. And so, to answer the question, "Why do so many
resist?" it's a lack of knowledge of Scripture and it's also pride and arrogance, and these
truths are the great pride crushers that leave all of us on our knees before the throne
of grace in saying, "Why me, Lord?" And so, I know because my pride needed to be crushed and
my arrogance needed to be crushed. And I thought I was doing God a wild favor by leaving the bank and
going to seminary as though I were doing something that God needed and that I was doing God a
favor, and when I got to school and these truths overwhelmed me, I realized it was the total other
way around. I was not doing God any favors; God had showed sovereign, unconditional, unmerited,
eternal favor and mercy and grace towards me. So, I feel very deeply about this, and really,
I even go through Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 in Foundations of Grace and begin at the
beginning of the Bible and go all the way through, and it's everywhere. Every author of
Scripture virtually weighs in on this and magnify this sovereign saving grace of God. So,
you find yourself really being on the other end of the rope from all of the biblical authors
and really in need of spiritual enlightenment and illumination and being taught the height
and the depth and the breadth and the length of the love of God and so in Christ. So, I mean,
that is my response and that really is true. SPROUL: I think that there are two things that
we need. I agree with everything Steve just said. It is a lack of understanding of the
Bible and it's everywhere in the Bible. I don't know how the Apostle Paul could
have possibly made sovereign election more clear than he does in Romans 9. But in any
case, there are two fundamental things I think that people find it very hard to leave
semi-Pelagianism and embrace Augustinianism. The first is that they sense in the doctrines
of grace that that theology of Calvinism teaches a corrupt view of God, a God who is not
good, a God who may be sovereign, but He is not fair because the idea that people have is that He
arbitrarily chooses to save some but not others. And that puts a shadow on the integrity of
God, and people really struggle with that. And it takes a board over the head and the Bible
to get you to see that your view of God is not high enough. You haven't really, really understood
how righteous He is, how holy He is. I've had I don't know how many people say to me that of the
books I've written, the two that they've read were The Holiness of God and Chosen by God. And they
say, "I loved The Holiness of God; I hated Chosen by God." And I'm saying, "Well, that tells me
you either didn't understand The Holiness of God or you didn't understand Chosen by God. And I
think the one they didn't understand was The Holiness of God because if you really understand
the holiness of God, then you understand…if you understand who God is and you understand who
you are, you know your only hope under heaven is the sovereign grace of God the Savior. But the
second problem with people have is they believe that Reformed theology extinguishes free will, and
not only hurts our view of God, but hurts the view that we have of humanity. And the big problem
I see there is that the vast majority of people have an understanding of free will that is pagan
and humanistic, not biblical. The Bible teaches that we have free will in the sense that
we have the ability to choose what we want, but it's very clear that there's a problem with
our want to, that the desires and inclination of the hearts are only wicked continually and that
we are not free in our sin, we're dead in our sin, we're in bondage to sin, and this free will
that we celebrate is one that is imprisoned by sin. It's not anything like what
the secular world is teaching people from the day they go into kindergarten, and
so people have been, in a word, brainwashed with a humanistic view of humanity
rather than a biblical view of humanity, and consequently a humanistic and pagan
view of God. And so we have to…it takes really getting immersed in the Scripture
to grow in our understanding of who we are and our understanding of who God is. If we learn
those two things, then Reformed theology is easy. MACARTHUR: But in the big picture, and I agree
with all that, and I'll even talk a little bit about that later, in the big sense of things, I
go back to when I was a seminary student. I met a Calvinist. I met him actually, a living Calvinist
who was part of a group of thirty people that sat around every week in a tiny little church in
Southern California and contemplated their Reformed navel. They were just this tiny…that
was the only Calvinist guy I ever knew. I didn't know any. When I went to seminary,
nobody taught me Reformed theology. The best of my professors were proud to say they
were three and a half point Calvinists, and I wasn't sure what all that meant. You
know, I was basically a football player who ended up in seminary trying to figure out
another way to approach life. And look at now, three thousand people here, conferences like this
all over the place, people consuming volumes of books on Reformed theology, both now current
books and all the way back in history. There is a massive, massive movement that has occurred
in the last twenty years as people dig into the Word of God. You know, you can look at the history
of this as people began to study the Bible, you had more books being published, more publishers
coming online. You had more Bible translations, Bibles being produced, study Bibles. That throws
people into the Word of God and the result along with some very key people that God has used like
R. C. Sproul in monumental ways. And even going back to a little book by J. I. Packer that nobody
really knew called Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God that popped up in college students' hands,
and then he wrote a book on the nature of God, and it started something that I don't think we've
seen the ends of this yet. So, you're living in a real revival of Reformed theology. And we were
talking about this the other day. The preachers who didn't get on board are fading fast. They
really are. In this young generation you have Together for The Gospel recently. Well, how many
did they have at that conference? Eight thousand young men, who were there to hear Reformed guys
preach. That was absolutely amazing when compared with when I was a student. It didn't exist for
all intents and purposes. It didn't exist. So, you're living the reality of this great, great
revival, and you want to make sure you understand it, you can articulate it, you can defend
it, you can pass it onto the next generation. SPROUL: The first great revival after the New
Testament of Reformed theology was the Reformation and the original Lutherans and the Reformed in
Switzerland and in Scotland, John Knox and Calvin, and even the original Baptists, all their
confessions and creeds were Reformed in their soteriology and in their approach to these things
and historic Protestantism and evangelicalism, Reformed thinking was not in the
minority. It was the overwhelming majority until guys like what's-his-name in
the nineteenth century, Charles… LAWSON: Finney. SPROUL: …Finney came along. You know, guys like that were attacking the very
roots of even justification by faith alone. LAWSON: Right. MACARTHUR: Yeah, you can even go
back into the original documents of the Southern Baptist convention, and
it's just Calvinistic. It's Reformed. LAWSON: Yeah, the professors went to
Princeton and sat under Warfield and Hodge and they were trained in Reformed
truth and out of that gave birth to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
to the Southern Baptist Convention. For the first fifty years, the presidents
of the Southern Baptist Convention held to the doctrines of grace, and it wasn't
until the start of the twentieth century that they turned into pragmatism and what works will
drive the train of ministry, not what is true. And so, there is a new resurgence and not just
among Southern Baptists, but among independents. And I think even among Presbyterian churches,
as funny as it sounds. But when I graduated from seminary, I believed more Presbyterian
doctrine than the Presbyterians believed… SPROUL: Absolutely.
LAWSON: …Presbyterian doctrine. SPROUL: You still do. LAWSON: Yeah, I still do. Yeah, and I have been
told that on a fairly regular basis, but again that's only because we're biblical. I mean, we're
rooted and grounded in the soil of Scripture. SPROUL: Mr. Spurgeon says that Reformed theology is just a nickname for biblical
Christianity, and I believe that. LAWSON: Absolutely, he did. Absolutely. Yeah. He said the old truth that Paul preached,
that Augustine wrote, and that Knox proclaimed must thunder through England again. And we must go
back to old paths, and if it's new it's not true. And we must go back to these old truths
and that's what must happen today as well. LARSON: Last question. What method or
strategy would you employ in order to stir the men up in your church to serve the Lord? LAWSON: A high view of God, the glory of God,
the greatness of God. I don't think they need a, you know, a male chest-bumping club, you
know, that meets on Friday morning and we have a group hug and "I'll throw up on you and
you throw up on me and we'll just be transparent and open our kimono with one another." And I
just wish you would close your kimono really. So, I mean that didn't really help me. I
don't think it helps you. I mean, there is only one thing that helps me, and it's God
and God pouring through your life into my life. And so, we just need a high view of the
Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and be overwhelmed with the glory of God. And once
that is in place in a man's life, it does wonders for his being a husband. It does wonders for him
being a father. It does wonders for him going to work. It does wonders for him serving the Lord
in the church because men are on fire for God. And so, that's what has to be recovered. I mean,
they don't need a series of sermons on how to have a happy vacation and just little pragmatic
tips on how to love your wife and this and that; they need to be red hot for God and
that puts everything in right place. SPROUL: How do you really feel about this? LARSON: Thank you so much gentlemen. Let's
thank our speakers with us this weekend.
