The Bible says that Christ rose physically from the dead, that if you
had been there that day you would have seen Christ stand up and
walk away in a space-time, observable situation of true history.
The materialist says, “No, I don’t believe it. Christ was not raised
from the dead.” That is unbelief. Liberal theology is also unbelief
because it says either that Jesus was not raised from the dead in
history, or that maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t because who
knows what’s going to happen in this world in which you can’t be
sure of anything. The historic resurrection of Christ doesn’t really
matter, says this theology; what matters is that the church got a
big push from thinking he was raised in history. . . . Now I would
say that the old liberalism, the new liberalism, and materialism are
basically the same. To all of them finally the same word applies:
unbelief. – Francis Schaeffer

The historical evidences which prove the resurrection are obvious for
all to see. The reason that all men do not see them is the sinful blindness
of the human heart. Only the man of faith can see the facts of
history. . . . Faith is not a blind leap in the dark without any historical
evidences. Neither will historical evidences demand faith, for the man
of unbelief will always come up with different historical explanations.
However, faith is supported and reinforced by historical evidences.
- George Eldon Ladd

The Resurrection is doctrinally significant…

As a generalization . . . Christ’s resurrection has been relatively eclipsed.
In Eastern Orthodoxy . . . the accent has been on his incarnation. . . .
In Western Christianity (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) . . .
attention has been focused heavily and at times almost exclusively on
Christ’s death and its significance. The overriding concern, especially
since the Reformation, has been to keep clear that the Cross is not simply
an ennobling and challenging example but a real atonement. . . . In
short, the salvation accomplished by Christ and the atonement have
been virtually synonymous.

My point is not to challenge the validity or even the necessity of
this development, far less the conclusions reached. But in this dominating
preoccupation with the death of Christ, the doctrinal . . . significance
of his resurrection has been largely overlooked. Not that the
Resurrection has been deemed unimportant, but all too frequently it
has been considered exclusively as a stimulus and support for Christian
faith (which it undoubtedly is) and in terms of its apologetic value, as
the crowning evidence for Christ’s deity and the truth of Christianity
in general.  - Richard Gaffin

Fundamentalists and Liberals get it wrong…

Sadly, there are those who err in emphasizing either the crucifixion or
the resurrection of Jesus at the expense of the other. Some preach only
the cross and its result of forgiveness of sin and justification. Without
preaching the resurrection of Jesus as well, Christians are prone to
overlook the mission of Jesus and the new life he has for them on the
earth. They tend to see Christian life as little more than going to church
to soak in teaching until they get to heaven. This is the perennial error
of Christian fundamentalism.

Conversely, there are others who preach only the new kingdom life
that Jesus offers through his resurrection. These Christians excel at
helping the poor and handing out hugs and muffins, but fail at repenting
of personal sin and calling others to repent of personal sin so that
they might be forgiven and reconciled to God through Jesus. This is
the perennial error of Christian liberalism. – Mark Driscoll

Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane while the disciples sleep. -Matthew 26

Jesus suffers agony in the garden of Gethsemane. -Luke 22

Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss. -Mark 14

Peter denies that he is one of Jesus’ disciples. -John 18

Jesus is scourged. -John 19

A crown of thorns is placed on Jesus’ head and a purple robe placed on him. -John 19

The crowd mocks Jesus, saying “Hail to the King of the Jews!” -Matthew 27

Pontius Pilate presents Jesus to the people and asks if he should be crucified. -John 19

Jesus stumbles while carrying the cross. Simon the Cyrene is compelled to carry the cross. -Mark 15

Jesus arrives at Calvary with the soldiers. -Luke 23

Jesus is nailed to the cross. -John 19

Jesus is crucified. -Matthew 27

Jesus cries out “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” -Luke 23

A darkness falls over the earth from the sixth hour to the ninth hour. -Luke 23

Joseph of Arimathea brings brings Jesus down from the cross. -Mark 15

The women bind up and anoint Jesus’ body for burial. -John 19

Jesus is buried in the sepulcher. -John 19

There are various imitations of (humility) that fall short of this reality. Some put on an affected humility. Others have a natural low-spiritedness, and are wanting in manliness of character. …In others, there is a counterfeit kind of humility, wrought by the delusions of Satan: and all of these may be mistaken for true humility.

-Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits

Many years ago as a young Christian my attention was arrested by an article on ‘Authority’ by John Stott. Stott asked, “Why should people believe that the Bible is God’s Word written, inspired by his Spirit and authoritative over their lives?” This was a big question for me. I had decided that I believed in Jesus Christ, but I struggled with the idea that I had to believe everything in the Bible.  Stott answered that we do not believe it simply because we want to be dogmatic and certain about our own beliefs, nor because the church has consistently taught this (though it has), nor because we just ‘feel’ the Bible is true as we read it. “No. The overriding reason for accepting the divine inspiration and authority of Scripture is plain loyalty to Jesus…Our understanding of everything is conditioned by what Jesus taught. And that includes his teaching about the Bible. We have no liberty to exclude anything from Jesus’ teaching and say, ‘I believe what he taught about this but not what he taught about that.’ What possible right do we have to be selective?”…

Stott’s question—‘what possible right do we have to be selective?’—is like a hammer blow to our contemporary way of life. We feel strongly that we have the right, even the obligation to select what parts of Jesus teaching we can accept and what parts we cannot. But that makes no sense. Why should you trust in him as Savior if you are wiser and smarter then he is? Either he is who he said he is, and his views judge our views, or he was lying or deluded about being the Son of God. So Jesus’ authority and the absolute authority of the Bible stand or fall together. If we believe he was who he said he was, then we must accept the entire Bible as God’s word.

Read more here

“That is your bigotry,” says one. Call it so if you like, but it is the bigotry of the loving John who wrote “If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.” I would to God we had all more of such decision, for the lack of it is depriving our religious life of its backbone and substituting for honest manliness a mass of the tremulous jelly of mutual flattery. He who does not hate the false does not love the true; and he to whom it is all the same whether it be God’s word or man’s, is himself unrenewed at heart.

Oh, if some of you were like your fathers you would not have tolerated in this age the wagon loads of trash under which the gospel has been of late buried by ministers of your own choosing. You would have hurled out of your pulpits the men who are enemies to the fundamental doctrines of your churches, and yet are crafty enough to become your pastors and undermine the faith of a fickle and superficial generation. These men steal the pulpits of once orthodox churches, because otherwise they would have none at all. Their powerless theology cannot of itself arouse sufficient enthusiasm to enable them to build a mousetrap at the expense of their admirers, and therefore they profane the houses which your sires have built for the preaching of the gospel, and turn aside the organisations of once orthodox communities to help their infidelity: I call it by that name in plain English, for “modern thought” is not one whit better, and of the two evils I give infidelity the palm, for it is less deceptive.

I beg the Lord to give back to the churches such a love to his truth that they may discern the spirits, and cast out those which are not of God. I feel sometimes like John, of whom it is said that, though the most loving of all spirits, yet he was the most decided of all men for the truth; and when he went to the bath and found that the heretic, Cerinthus, was there, he hurried out of the building, and would not tarry in the same place with him. There are some with whom we should have no fellowship, nay, not so much as to eat bread; for though this conduct looks stern and hard, it is after the mind of Christ, for the apostle spake by inspiration when he said, “If we or an angel from heaven preach to you any other gospel than that ye have received, let him be accursed.”

According to modern efficiency he ought to have said, “Let him be kindly spoken with in private, but pray make no stir. No doubt the thought was original, and we must not question his liberty. Doubtless, he believes the same as we do, only there is some little difference as to terms.” This is treason to Christ, treachery to truth, and cruelty to souls. If we love our Lord we shall keep his words, and stand fast in the faith, coming out from among the false teachers; nor is this inconsistent with charity, for the truest love to those who err is not to fraternise with them in their error, but to be faithful to Jesus in all things.

- Charles Haddon Spurgeon, from “Under Constraint,” a sermon preached Sunday morning 28 April 1878 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London.

Preaching Pastor at Mars Hill Church

The thesis of the sermon is simple and large:

Christians should be happy.

Why should Christians be happy? The sermon answers this question in 3 points.

Point 1: Our bad things will turn out for good.

Point 2: Our good things can never be taken away from us.

Point 3: The best things are yet to come.

You can read the whole sermon [here].

Here’s an extended quote from point #2 that encouraged me this morning (paragraph breaks added):

The godly man is happy in whatever circumstances he is placed because of the spiritual privileges and advantages, joys and satisfactions, he actually enjoys while in this life. How great a happiness must needs [it] be to a man to have all his sins pardoned and to stand guilty of nothing in God’s presence: to be washed clean from all his pollutions; to have the great and eternal and almighty Jehovah, who rules and governs the whole universe, and doth whatsoever he pleases in the armies of heaven and amongst the inhabitants of the earth, reconciled to him and perfectly at peace with him.

How great a pleasure and satisfaction must it be to him to think of it, and not only that God is reconciled to him or has nothing against [him], inasmuch as all is pardoned; but also that this same almighty being who created him, who keeps him in being and who disposes of him and all other things every moment, loves him, and that with a great and transcendent love; and that He has adopted him and taken him to be His child, and given Himself to him to be his father and his portion, and that takes care of him as one that is very dear to Him, continually guides and directs him, and will lead him to the fountain of living waters.

And how joyful and gladsome must the thoughts of Jesus Christ be to him, to think with how great a love Christ has loved him, even to lay down His life and suffer the most bitter torments for his sake, Who also now continually intercedes for him at the throne of grace; to consider that so great a person as the eternal Son of God, who also made the worlds, is his lord and master, and is not ashamed to call us brethren, Who will come in and sup with him, and He with him, and to see His arms expanded to embrace him and offering Himself to be embraced by him. And beside, what a satisfaction and pleasure must it give to his mind to think that he is now sanctified and made holy, adorned and beautified with those lovely graces that make him lovely in the sight of God and excellent in the sight of saints and angels; to reflect on himself and consider that he acts rationally and doth that which the best of beings has commanded, that he in some measure acts worthy of the nature of a man, in some measure answers the end of his coming into the world in glorifying God and doing good to his fellow creatures, and that he has not lived altogether in vain: not as it is with many; they live in the world and burthen the same, and had better be dead than alive for all the good they do in it, or any they do towards manifesting the glory of him that made them.

The reflection on these things affords such a peace and pleasantness to the mind, as far exceeds and is immensely above all outward delights. What there is no wicked man doth know, neither; neither hath it entered into their hearts to conceive how great are the comforts and pleasures of the godly, and how great [the] things God hath prepared for all those that love [him], even in this life; their pleasures are of vastly a more refined, higher and more noble kind than those of the wicked, besides the many other advantages that this has above that, but especially that taken notice of in the Doctrine: that no worldly afflictions in the world are able to deprive them of them, but they, as rightly improved, do only serve to give them a quicker and more lively sense of spiritual enjoyments.

HT: Justin Buzzard

In correlation to my personal study of the doctrine election/predestination in Romans 8 and 9, I recently sat down to listen to a talk by Matt Chandler on the issue of God’s will.

Here’s his message: Does God have two wills? AUDIO, NOTES

Here’s an article by John Piper: LINK

Here are some articles from my boy Sam Storms: LINK, LINK

and a message from him I listened to a few months ago:

“Enjoying Election: Finding Delight in God’s Decree“: AUDIO

6   Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7 For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.

10 For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.”

Most Christians would wonder, “Why in the world would you want to start every morning with that?!” That’s a frightening set of verses. You see this all throughout the Psalms. The whole spectrum of God’s character, his love for his people and his hatred for his enemies, set right next to each other. The wrath of God is an attribute of God as much a part of God as any other attribute, an attribute without which God would be less than God.

Many Christians have a hard time reconciling the reality that God’s is both loving and wrathful. We struggle to believe that God would hate anyone. But the Bible is replete with the reality of God’s judgement, and the reality of Hell. This is a hard truth to swallow. A. W. Pink observes:

It is sad to find so many professing Christians who appear to regard the wrath of God as something for which they need to make an apology, or at least they wish there were no such thing. While some would not go so far as to openly admit that they consider it a blemish on the Divine character, yet they are far from regarding it with delight; they like not to think about it, and they rarely hear it mentioned without a secret resentment rising up in their hearts against it. Even with those who are more sober in their judgment, not a few seem to imagine that there is a severity about the Divine wrath which is too terrifying to form a theme for profitable contemplation. Others harbor the delusion that God’s wrath is not consistent with His goodness, and so seek to banish it from their thoughts.

Yes, many there are who turn away from a vision of God’s wrath as though they were called to look upon some blotch in the Divine character, or some blot upon the Divine government. But what saith the Scriptures? As we turn to them we find that God has made no attempt to conceal the fact of His wrath. He is not ashamed to make it known that vengeance and fury belong unto Him.