Well, thank you for being here. I'm amazed you're here, and thank you for
coming to this session. Just to relieve any of you who may have suspicious
minds, when we do these sessions on things that we have written or recorded, it's only
because we're told to do it. And for some of us who are not blessed with
the American perspective on existence but have a Celtic melancholy running through our
disposition and know that our mother would've beat the living daylights out of us if we'd
ever talked in public about anything that we ourselves have done, you realize that there
is a certain discomfort level in talking to you this evening about The Whole Christ. So let me set this in an autobiographical
context, and then I'll set in an historical context. There is a book here published by Crossway
called The Whole Christ. There's a DVD series here called The Whole
Christ. There's even a workbook here called The Whole
Christ. And there are questions in here that I just
glanced at, I'm not sure I know the right answers to them all, but you know a little
like these naïve people who wrote textbooks when some of us were younger and the answers
where all at the back of the book, the answers are all at the back of the book. So you do not need to fear that Ligonier is
giving you the third degree. Well, how does this book emerge in my own
life? In, 19… I think I came to visit the United States
for the very first time in 1980. To be honest, I never thought I would see
the United States again. But then I was invited back to speak at a
ministers' conference in Indianapolis, which I knew, I knew my American geography because
of the places where Arnold Palmer had played in golf tournaments. So I even knew where Greensboro, North Carolina
was, and the only thing I knew about Indianapolis was that's where the Indianapolis 500 was. And so I came to this ministers' conference
and I was invited to give three addresses on this subject: "Pastoral Lessons from the
Marrow Controversy," pastoral lessons from the Marrow controversy. To be absolutely honest, I accepted the invitation,
so obviously a younger man than I am now, because it seemed such honor to have the privilege
of speaking to other ministers. And I have a vivid recollection one day of
my wife Dorothy bringing a cup of coffee into my study when I was preparing for the conference
the week before the conference, and I remember looking up at her and saying, "I don't know
why I'm doing this because there cannot be anybody in the United States of America who
has even heard of the Marrow controversy." But I came, and then one of those amazing
providences in life. I gave the addresses, they were recorded on
cassettes. And when I came to the United States thereafter,
I hardly ever went anywhere without somebody coming up to me and saying, "I've listened
to your cassettes on the Marrow controversy." It was, it was kind of like amazing that this
should be so. And I think in the next few minutes I'll be
able to explain to you why I think that was but thereafter, people said, "You know, you
should publish that," and I thought, "Yeah, I should publish that." But it's one thing, as those of you who speak
know, it's one thing to prepare for the immediacy of a service or a conference, which will be
gone in a flash. It's a different thing to, actually it's a
different thing to do the hard work of writing something. And so, the years passed and people said,
"You should do that, you should that," and then I was retried or retired, or whatever
it is. I thought, you know, maybe I should try and
do that. And that was the, that's why there is a book,
and one thing led to another. So, one might say there was like this screenplay
of the Marrow controversy in 1980, and then there was the book of the screenplay, and
then they made it into a movie, and then it became a course at the Reformed Bible College,
and it appears in all these different versions. They are not all the same. The book and the DVD series cover the same
themes, but the DVD series is not just a ventriloquist telling you what's in the book. So that's the relationship between these things. But what on earth, you might say was the Marrow
controversy? Well, in the early 1700s in Scotland there
were all kinds of controversies, but one of them arose because of a question the candidates
for the ministry were being asked in a particular presbytery in Scotland, in the Presbytery
of Auchterarder, and those of you who are rich and famous and have stayed in the Gleneagles
Hotel will know that area of the country. It's in the Presbytery of Auchterarder. And the question that students who were seeking
to be licensed and ordained were always asked was whether it was orthodox doctrine to teach
that we must forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ. Is it right and orthodox doctrine to teach
that we must forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ? And in a way, it was really a trick question. It was really meant to unearth whether people
thought that there were certain qualifying marks you could attain in your life in order
to prepare yourself for the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Those of you who are familiar with the Westminster
Confession of Faith will remember how it emphasizes that it's not possible for an individual to
do anything to prepare himself to come to Christ. And so, it was probing these young men who
were candidates for the ministry. And one of them gave his answer, and then
the next month he decided that his answer had not really been an answer of conviction. And the Presbytery was willing to set him
apart for the ministry when he came back, they rescinded their decision. Their decision was appealed to the Synod,
the Synod decision was appealed to the General Assembly, and it became a controversy in the
whole Church of Scotland. Sitting in the assembly where the issue was
decided, and the young man whose name was William Craig was in fact exonerated at the
assembly, sitting in the assembly, there was a minister from down in the border regions
of Scotland in a very out-of-the-way place. His name was Thomas Boston, and he turned
at the end of the meeting to the man, the other minister who was sitting beside him
(don't think they really knew each other), and he said, "Do you know on this whole issue
of how the grace of God works in people's lives, and especially how do we preach the
gospel to people, how if we are Calvinists who believe in sovereign predestination and
election, how can we freely preach the gospel to all sinners?" And Boston said, "You know I have found great
help for myself in a book called The Marrow of Modern Divinity." And this man got so interested in the book,
he got a copy and some of the ministers made arrangements for this book to be republished. It was a book written in the seventeenth century
by a man called Edward Fisher, and it's in the form of a -- those of you who know Plato's
dialogues, you know that different positions are represented by different individuals,
a bit like Pilgrim's Progress -- and The Marrow of Modern Divinity is a dialogue among four
people. There is a new convert, there is a legalist,
there is an antinomian, and then there is a wise pastor. And during the course of two volumes of The
Marrow of Modern Divinity, there's a series of really significant theological and pastoral
points discussed. One is the free offer of the gospel. How do people who believe in divine election
and discriminating grace, how do they offer the gospel to the people to whom they preach? A second was the question of legalism, the
great tendency that the Auchterarder Presbytery was trying to resolve, what's the relationship
between our works and God's grace? The third question was the issue of antinomianism,
the kind of question that Paul raises in end of Romans 5, beginning of Romans 6. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. Isn't the logic of that that if there is grace
to cover all our sin, then it doesn't really matter whether we slip or fall. There will always be grace to forgive us. And so, there is a laxity in relationship
to obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. And in the middle of that there was a question
that was always important in the Reformed theological tradition, which was "Do all Christians
enjoy the assurance of salvation?" Do all Christians enjoy the assurance of salvation? And Thomas Boston had found this book very
helpful to him. It wasn't that he agreed with every jot and
tittle in it, but he found it so helpful in wrestling through these issues in a way that
made a difference to his preaching. And in his autobiography and his memoirs,
he expresses that at one point in a very interesting way. He says that people told him they noticed
the difference between his preaching and the preaching of most other ministers. The way he puts it is that there was a tincture,
a tincture, a tincture of grace about his preaching, a tincture of Christ centeredness,
a tincture of Christ's absolute sufficiency to save all those who came to Him in faith. And the book, of course, became public knowledge. People started attacking the book. It was especially attacked because it gave
rise to the free offer of the gospel. It was attacked because people thought it
was antinomian. It was attacked because people thought it
said every Christian enjoys the assurance of salvation. And it led to a great controversy in the church
that was named after the title of that book that Thomas Boston had actually found it on
the window ledge of a parishioner's house when he was visiting him, and he'd taken it
home. He'd borrowed it, he liked it so much that
he had bought it. And this controversy arose in the Church of
Scotland over The Marrow of Modern Divinity, and eventually the denomination banned the
book. So, ministers were forbidden to recommend
that book in any way to their parishioners. And actually, as far as I know, that ban has
never been lifted. It's been ignored often enough, but it's never
been lifted. Boston himself produced an edition of it with
marginal references and notes. There is a great work of theology on it, and
so one of the well-known ministers of the next century, once said to his theological
students, "Because of the ban I cannot recommend to you that you read The Marrow of Modern
Divinity, but I urge you to read Thomas Boston's notes on The Marrow of Modern Divinity," which
shows that it's not only Jesuits who can be subtle, that Presbyterians can be subtle as
well. Now, let me try and bring together my own
experience, and I think what happened there in the 1700s in Scotland and the controversy
over The Marrow of Modern Divinity. I said earlier on that I found wherever I
went people would come up to me and say, "I was helped." And I pondered the reason, and as I spoke
to people I think I discovered this, that so many Christians, serious Christians, struggle
with the issue of the fullness of Jesus Christ as their Savior. If I can put it this way, Kevin DeYoung said
this in his message last night, many people were listening to the preaching about Christ
and so they had their Christology clear, they had their soteriology clear, but they didn't
really know Jesus Christ Himself in all His fullness. You have probably met people who every Sunday
perhaps in your church, I've known people like this, will stand up and happily recite
the Apostles' Creed, believe every word of it. I remember a lady saying to me once, an elderly
lady that most of the people she thought in the congregation believed she'd been a Christian
since childhood, but she'd only recently become a believer. And I thought this has happened to you. You never doubted a word of the Creed or the
Christian confession, but you didn't realize it was all about a Person. It was not a description of a system. It was a description of a Person, and now
you've come to know the Person. And because you've come to know the Person,
you've come to an assurance of your salvation. And this is what Boston discovered. And one of the things that I think all those
years ago impressed itself on me was this, and it emerged in the addresses I gave, essentially
from something I had noticed in the opening chapters of the Bible. That was what happened in the Garden of Eden. In the way in which the serpent tested and
tempted Adam and Eve, and particularly Eve, and you remember how the narrative goes. So often I had read what happens in the Garden
of Eden is that the serpent attacks the authority and the inerrancy of God's Word, that's what
happens. Now that's true, but it dawned on me that
while that is true, it's actually secondary to something else. And this fact very much goes along with the
idea of preaching about Christ and preaching Christ. What happens in the Garden of Eden is not
just that the serpent attacks the authority and inerrancy of God's Word. What the serpent does is to attack the character
of God Himself. Why do I say that? Because what the serpent says is not just
an effort to deny the truth of God's Word, but to insinuate something about the character
of God. And you know how that emerges, "Did God set
you in this magnificent garden," which has just been described in the previous chapters. "Did He set you in this garden and did He
say to you, 'You are not to eat of the fruit of any of the trees in this garden'?" It is so significant, as exegetes of Genesis
3, that we notice that question, "All of these trees, all of this fruit? Has God said to you, you're not to eat of
the fruit of any of these trees"? I think the way I put it way back there because
I knew about Macy's, I'm not sure whether Macy's is still in existence. But what was going on here was that the serpent
was describing God in these terms like a father taking his child at Christmas time into a
department store like Macy's and into the children's department and all the toys and
showing him around all the toys and then taking his hand and saying to him with a serpentine-like
voice, "None of these is for you, son. None of these is for you," and this is the
thrust of what happens. So what is the purpose? The purpose is to persuade Eve that God is
not fully, finally, truly, an infinitely good, kind, gracious, and generous Father. Now, why is that important when it comes to
the law? Let me slide in something else here. Some of you will know the name of the great
Dutch-American biblical scholar, Geerhardus Vos. Geerhardus Vos says that the essence of legalism,
listen to this, the essence of legalism … what would you say the essence of legalism was? Listen to Vos, "The essence of legalism is
to dislocate the law of God from the person of God." That's what was happening in the Garden of
Eden. And if you trace that narrative through, you'll
notice two very interesting things. That first of all the serpent seeks to turn
Adam and Eve into legalists. So if God is not lavishing all this upon you,
the implication is there is something you need to do in order to get into His better
books. And eventually it works, except instead of
at first turning them into legalists, it turns them into antinomians. And as I read that and wrestled with this
a little like Thomas Boston, it dawned on me that contrary to what we tend to think
legalism and antinomianism are actually symptoms of one and the same disease, and that disease
is at root cause, a suspicion of God, a mistrust of His character, an inability to take in
and to act upon the reality of His grace. And at that point, it dawned on me that that
was the description of so many Christians I had met, who deep down had some kind of
grasp that Jesus loved them but were not so sure about the Heavenly Father. That that there had been a dislocation, therefore,
in their lives between the Father and the Son and therefore, there had also been a dislocation
in their lives between the Father and His law. And so there were many Christians who were
inherently suspicious of and irritated by that law, because they had dislocated it from
a knowledge of God as the heavenly Father. And it went hand-in-hand, as I noticed, with
the way in which I had often heard the gospel preached which was this, "God loves you,"
notice the fist, "God loves you," meaning the Father, "because Christ died for you." That's the gospel. And the truth of the matter is that's almost
a reversal of the gospel, isn't it? But you see what it insinuates into our minds. If the reason the Father loves us is because
the Son died for us, then without the Son dying for us the Father would never have loved
us. And therefore, somehow how another the Son
by what He did persuaded the Father to love us. And it's incredible, but it's true, that the
verse that says the very reverse of that is what? John 3:16. God, in John 3:16, is a reference to the Father
because the antecedent of Son in John 3:16, is the Father. "The Father so loved the world that He gave
His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,"
and that, therefore, was the key to dissolving in the hearts of believers both legalism and
antinomianism. And that therefore the remedies that had often
been used in the evangelical church, an antinomian you know, sprinkle in some legalism, and they'll
be fine. Or a legalist, sprinkle in a little antinomianism,
don't take the law so seriously, would never produce spiritual health. But the knowledge of the grace of God and
the Lord Jesus Christ would provide the pharmaceutical that would dissolve both legalism and antinomianism
and lead to a happy bondage to the love of the heavenly Father demonstrated, as Paul
says in Romans 5, in the death of his Son and sealed in our hearts by the gift of the
Holy Spirit. And that when this was grasped therefore,
the believer would live in a happy communion and fellowship with God, and that if that
legalism or antinomianism were in the heart of the preacher, it would very soon be in
the minds and hearts of his hearers. And that what people noticed about Thomas
Boston's preaching, therefore, that brought them so much spiritual deliverance, was that
he had grasped this secret, and his preaching of Christ, and the fact that Christ demonstrated,
He didn't wrestle from the Father, His love. He demonstrated in His atoning death how profoundly
the Father loves us. And this was the heart of the gospel, and
so many Christians, don't you experience, believe that the evidence that God loves them
is that things are going really well in their lives? And so what happens when things are not going
well? The gospel, the gospel does not say that God
has demonstrated His love towards you in that while you're a sinner, things are going well
for you. But the Father demonstrated His love for you,
the Father demonstrated His love for you … get behind me, Satan! The Father demonstrated His love for you,
Romans chapter 5, and that while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you. And that this was therefore the root of the
free offer of the gospel. It was the pharmaceutical that would bring
healing for legalism and antinomianism in the heart, and as a result of both bring the
assurance of salvation. So that's all somewhere tucked away in these
many manifestations, these three manifestations of The Whole Christ. Thank you for listening.
