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Post by Admin on Jun 13, 2024 20:01:25 GMT -5
Article Archive
TheologyLast ThingsHeaven and Hell
Thinking of Home
R.C. Sproul
6 Min Read
What is heaven like? Is there anyone who hasn’t raised that question at one time or another? We could first ask, “Is there really such a thing as heaven?” Christianity has been loudly criticized for being a so-called pie-in-the-sky religion. Karl Marx popularized the idea that religion is the opiate of the people. His thesis was that religion had been invented and used by the ruling classes to exploit and oppress the poor people of the world. Religion, Marx claimed, would keep them from revolting by promising them great rewards if they would obey their masters, accept low wages, and so on—but their rewards would be deferred into eternity. In the meantime, these ruthless exploiters of the poor would amass fortunes for themselves here on earth. Marx took the cynical view that religion, with its hope of heaven, has been used as a club to keep unthinking people in line. Versions of this view have become so prevalent that now people are considered unsophisticated if they think at all about a future life, unless they’re at a funeral home or at a graveside. One cannot take Christianity seriously without seeing the central importance of the concept of heaven. There really is a “pie in the sky” idea that is integral to the Bible. I’m afraid we’ve lost our appetite for, or our taste sensitivity toward, those delights that God has stored up for His people in the future.
Christians are sometimes asked to name their favorite chapter in the New Testament. The top two results are 1 Corinthians 13, the great love chapter, and John 14. John 14 is where we’ll begin our brief study of heaven.
In this chapter, Jesus is speaking to His disciples in His last great discourse with them in the upper room on the night of the Last Supper. This is the night on which He was betrayed, the night before His execution. He tells them: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:1–2). Jesus begins with an admonition to His disciples not to allow their hearts to be distressed or disturbed. This is a call to trust and to faith. These words are so comforting to us that we can sometimes gloss over the cogency of the argument contained in this brief exercise in reason.
Jesus says, “Let not your hearts be troubled,” and then He urges them, “Believe in God; believe also in me.” Belief in God and belief in Christ are inextricably tied together, for this reason: according to the testimony of the New Testament, it is God who certifies and verifies the identity of Jesus. By endowing Christ with miraculous power and by raising Him from the dead, God proves and certifies that Christ is His beloved Son. Three times the New Testament records that God spoke audibly from heaven, and on all three occasions the announcement that came audibly from heaven was substantially the same thing: “This is my beloved Son.” In one case, the voice says “with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). Another time it says, “Listen to him” (Matt. 17:5). In John 14, Jesus is saying that God the Father sent Him into the world, and God the Father bears witness to His identity in the world.
It’s in this context that Jesus makes His statements about heaven. Before He makes His announcement about heaven, He speaks of faith in God and faith in Himself. Why does He begin by saying, “Believe in God”? In a real sense, one’s relation to God is the controlling idea for one’s whole understanding of life, of the world, of death, and of heaven. If there is no God, then there is no reason to have any significant hope for the continuity of personal existence that we call life. And yet if God exists, what would be more ridiculous than to assume that He creates creatures in His own image that are ultimately destined for annihilation—to fall into the abyss of nonexistence, to live as grass for a season, only to perish with all our memories, hopes, and labor ending in meaninglessness?
In Macbeth, Shakespeare writes about the poor player who “struts his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” And what’s the assessment? “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” What an image. Here’s a person who was in the limelight for a brief interlude of his life, and then suddenly there is only silence. The idea is that if this is the final conclusion to human existence, then the story of life is the idiot’s tale. An idiot is someone who is irrational. An idiot is someone who doesn’t make sense. He is on the rim of madness, and the tales he tells are not credible stories. They may be filled with sound and fury, noise and passion, but they signify nothing. I think this is the great existential question that every human being faces when he or she faces death.
The ultimate hope of my soul is to see the resurrected Christ in His Father’s house, and He promised that this will happen.
I’ll never forget the day my son arrived. When you see a newborn human who has come into your life, your life changes automatically. All relationships will now be different forever. I remember that occasion vividly because I left the hospital and picked up my mother to take her to see her grandson that evening. When she saw him, she was ecstatic. Later that evening as we walked into her living room, she said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” Then we said goodnight.
The next morning, my daughter’s yelling awakened me. She came into my room and said, “Grandma won’t wake up.” As soon as I walked into my mother’s room, I realized that she had died in her sleep. When I touched her, her body was cold. It was one of those uncanny moments of human experience. I stood there by her bed, and it seemed to me that just moments before, I had heard my mother say, “This is the happiest day of my life.” She had been a living, breathing, caring, passionate, human being, and now she was lifeless. The previous morning, I had seen the newness of life with the birth of my son, and virtually on the same day that my son was born, my mother died. I experienced this conflict between life and death. I stood there and said: “This doesn’t make sense. Death doesn’t make sense.” And every fiber in my being said to me, “This cannot be the final conclusion for human experience.”
Now, all of that could be explained by an emotional need in my soul to believe that life is meaningful, but I was thinking in these terms: if God exists, then this cannot be the end. That’s what Jesus is telling His disciples when He says, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” When I stood beside my mother in that room, my heart was deeply troubled, but Jesus urges: “Don’t allow that. Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in Me.”
Immediately upon making this connection between faith in the Father and faith in Christ, He states: “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:2). Do you hear what Jesus is saying to His disciples? As He approaches the moment of His death, He declares to them: “Trust Me. Trust the Father. There is plenty of room in My Father’s house, and I am going ahead of you to prepare a place for you.” Keep in mind that if Jesus Christ is God incarnate, He’s the greatest theologian who ever walked the planet. He doesn’t make theological mistakes or approve of theological error. He was not going to allow His disciples to go through the rest of their lives holding to a false belief.
He continues, “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3). Jesus says: “I’m going home. I’m going to My Father’s house. I’m going to receive My final inheritance, but I’m not going to be alone in heaven. I am going there to prepare a place for you and then I’m coming back, so that where I am, you may be also.”
Every single person, Christian or not, longs to be reunited with loved ones who have died, but the Christian longs to be with Christ. I can’t wait to see my father, my mother, and my friends in heaven, but beyond that, the ultimate hope of my soul is to see the resurrected Christ in His Father’s house, and He promised that this will happen.
Sometimes we shrink in terror and doubt when we contemplate something as wonderful as heaven purports to be. We are sometimes assaulted by the idea that it’s just too good to be true, so we’re better off living for the here and now. Many people then cling to life in this world desperately, fearful that what lies beyond is worse, but for those who are going to heaven, the bliss that God has stored up for us is unworthy to be compared with any joy or delight we cling to in this life.
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Post by Admin on Jul 1, 2024 15:25:26 GMT -5
JUL 1, 2024
Christian LivingLife IssuesGrief and Death
Fear and Uncertainty
R.C. Sproul
3 Min Read
Death is the greatest problem human beings encounter. We may try to tuck thoughts of it away in the far corners of our minds, but we cannot completely erase our awareness of our mortality. We know that the specter of death awaits us.
The Apostle Paul writes:
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses. (Rom. 5:12–14)
We see that there was sin even before the law was given through Moses, and this is proven by the fact that death occurred before the law was given. The fact of death proves the presence of sin, and the fact of sin proves the presence of law, which has been revealed inwardly to human beings from the beginning. Death came into the world as a direct result of sin.
The secular world views death as part of the natural order, whereas the Christian sees death as part of the fallen order; it was not the original state of man. Death came as God’s judgment for sin. From the beginning, all sin was a capital offense. God said to Adam and Eve, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16–17). The death God warned about was not only spiritual but also physical death. Adam and Eve did not die physically the day they sinned; God granted them grace to live for some time longer before exacting the penalty. Nevertheless, they eventually perished from the earth.
The secular world views death as part of the natural order, whereas the Christian sees death as part of the fallen order; it was not the original state of man.
Every human being is a sinner and therefore has been sentenced to death. We are all waiting for the sentence to be carried out. The question then is what happens after death. For Christians, the penalty has been paid by Christ. This has implications for how we approach death. Paul was in prison when he wrote:
I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. (Phil. 1:19–24)
Many of us are staggered by Paul’s words in this text. Although we rejoice in Christ’s victory over the grave, we nevertheless fear death. Christians are not guaranteed exemption from a painful death. Nevertheless, the thought of death often brings fear for Christians and non-Christians alike. That fear is bound up with the question of what happens after death.
For the Christian, there is a promise from God, a promise that allowed Paul to say, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” We are promised that we will enter the presence of God. But there are questions, even with this promise. What does heaven look like? Will we enjoy it? What will we do there? What will we be like?
For all the difficulties of this life, it is all we know. After all, even Paul did not denigrate this life. He said: “I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account” (Phil. 1:23). Paul desired to continue his life on earth and especially his ministry, but he acknowledged that “to depart and be with Christ” is “far better.”
For non-Christians, the news is much less good. There is again a promise from God, but this time it is a promise of punishment, that God’s wrath against sin will be satisfied in those who do not trust in Christ. That punishment will happen in a place called hell, but again, there is uncertainty. What is hell like? What does the punishment involve? Is there any chance of escape from it? Is it just, or would it be more just for the wicked to simply be destroyed?
These are important questions, for we will all face death one day. Being consistent Christians means affirming the unflinching supernaturalism of the Bible, a supernaturalism that is anathema to the world today. We must have our worldview shaped by the Bible rather than by the unbelieving culture. As we do so, we will find hope—hope in the God who made us and who promises to bring us to heaven by the work of His Son and to spare us the pains of hell.
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2024 19:35:32 GMT -5
The God Who Sees
R.C. Sproul
3 Min Read
The doctrine of providence is one of the most fascinating, important, and difficult doctrines in the Christian faith. It deals with difficult questions, such as: “How does God’s causal power and authority interact with ours?” “How does God’s sovereign rule relate to our free choices?” “How is God’s government related to the evil and suffering in this world?” and “Does prayer have any influence over God’s providential decisions?” In other words, how are we to live our lives in light of God’s invisible hand?
Let us begin with a simple definition. The word providence has a prefix, pro-, which means “before” or “in front of.” The root comes from the Latin verb videre, which means “to see”; it is from this word that we get our English word video. So, the word providence literally means “to see beforehand.” The providence of God refers to His seeing something beforehand with respect to time.
Providence is not the same thing as God’s foreknowledge or prescience. Foreknowledge is His ability to look down the corridors of time and know the outcome of an activity before it even begins. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to use the word providence with reference to God’s active governance of the universe, because He is indeed a God who sees. He sees everything that takes place in the universe. It is in full view of His eyes.
This can be one of the most terrifying thoughts a human being can have—that there is someone who is, as Jean-Paul Sartre lamented, an ultimate cosmic voyeur who looks through the celestial keyhole and observes every action of every human being. If there is anything about the character of God that repels people from Him more than His holiness, it is His omniscience. Every one of us has a keen desire for a sense of privacy that no one can invade so as to pry into the secret things of our lives.
At the time of the first transgression, when sin entered the world, Adam and Eve immediately experienced a sense of nakedness and shame (Gen. 3:7). They reacted by attempting to hide from God (v. 8). They experienced the gaze of the God of providence. Like the mountain climber in my earlier anecdote, we want God to look at us when we need help. Most of the time, however, we want Him to overlook us, because we want privacy.
There is a God of providence who is aware not only of every one of my transgressions but of every one of my tears, every one of my aches, and every one of my fears.
On one memorable occasion during the ministry of our Lord, the scribes and Pharisees dragged a woman they had caught in adultery into Jesus’ presence. They reminded Him that the law of God required that she be stoned, but they wanted to know what He would do. But as they spoke, He bent down and wrote something on the ground. This is the only recorded instance of Jesus writing, and we do not know what He wrote. But we are told that He stood up and said, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). Then He began to write on the ground again. At that, the scribes and Pharisees began to go away, one by one.
I am speculating here, but I wonder whether Jesus wrote out some of the secret sins those men were zealous to keep locked away. Perhaps He wrote “adultery,” and one of the men who was unfaithful to his wife read it and crept away. Perhaps he wrote “tax evasion,” and one of the Pharisees who had failed to render unto Caesar decided to head for home. Jesus, in His divine nature, had the ability to see in a penetrating way behind the masks people wore, into the hiding places where they were most vulnerable. That is part of the concept of divine providence. It means that God knows everything about us.
As I noted above, we often find this divine sight disquieting, but the concept of God’s vision, of God seeing us, should be comforting to us. Jesus said: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Matt. 10:29). That teaching inspired the popular song “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Do you remember the lyrics? “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.” I believe the writer of that song understood what Jesus was saying—that God knows every time any tiny bird falls to the ground. God does not overlook even the slightest detail in the universe. Rather, He governs the universe in total awareness of everything that is happening within it.
Yes, this kind of intimate knowledge can be frightening. But because we know that God is benevolent and caring, His comprehensive knowledge is a comfort. He knows what we need before we ask Him. And when our needs arise, He is both able and willing to help us. To me, there is nothing more comforting than knowing that there is a God of providence who is aware not only of every one of my transgressions but of every one of my tears, every one of my aches, and every one of my fears.
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Previously published in Does God Control Everything? by R.C. Sproul.
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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2024 12:16:23 GMT -5
MAR 21, 2024
TheologyTheological ControversiesInclusivism
Jesus: The Only Savior
R.C. Sproul
3 Min Read
I cannot imagine an affirmation that would meet with more resistance from contemporary Westerners than the one Paul makes in 1 Timothy 2:5: “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”This declaration is narrow and downright un-American. We have been inundated with the viewpoint that there are many roads that lead to heaven, and that God is not so narrow that He requires a strict allegiance to one way of salvation. If anything strikes at the root of the tree of pluralism and relativism, it is a claim of exclusivity to any one religion. A statement such as Paul makes in his first letter to Timothy is seen as bigoted and hateful.
Paul, of course, is not expressing bigotry or hatefulness at all. He is simply expressing the truth of God, the same truth Jesus taught when He said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Paul is affirming the uniqueness of Christ, specifically in His role as Mediator. A mediator is a go-between, someone who stands between two parties that are estranged or involved in some kind of dispute. Paul declares that Christ is the only Mediator between two parties at odds with one another—God and men.
We encounter mediators throughout the Bible. Moses, for example, was the mediator of the old covenant. He represented the people of Israel in his discussions with God, and he was God’s spokesman to the people. The prophets in the Old Testament had a mediatorial function, serving as the spokesmen for God to the people. Also, the high priest of Israel functioned as a mediator; he spoke to God on behalf of the people. Even the king of Israel was a kind of mediator; he was seen as God’s representative to the people, so God held him accountable to rule in righteousness according to the law of the Old Testament.
As we celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, it is good for us to remember the uniqueness of Christ.
Why, then, does Paul say there is only one mediator between God and man? I believe we have to understand the uniqueness of Christ’s mediation in terms of the uniqueness of His person. He is the God-man, that is, God incarnate. In order to bring about reconciliation between God and humanity, the second person of the Trinity united to Himself a human nature. Thus, Jesus has the qualifications to bring about reconciliation—He represents both sides perfectly.
People ask me, “Why is God so narrow that He provided only one Savior?” I do not think that is the question we ought to ask. Instead, we should ask, “Why did God give us any way at all to be saved?” In other words, why did He not just condemn us all? Why did God, in His grace, give to us a Mediator to stand in our place, to receive the judgment we deserve, and to give to us the righteousness we desperately need? The astonishing thing is not that He did not do it in multiple ways, but that He did it in even one way.
Notice that Paul, in declaring the uniqueness of Christ, also affirms the uniqueness of God: “There is one God.” This divine uniqueness was declared throughout the Old Testament; the very first commandment was a commandment of exclusivity: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3).
So Paul brings all these strands together. There is only one God, and God has only one Son, and the Son is the sole Mediator between God and mankind. As I said above, that is very difficult for people who have been immersed in pluralism to accept, but they have to quarrel with Christ and His Apostles on this point. The Bible offers no hope that sincere worshipers of other religions will be saved without personal faith in Jesus Christ. As Paul said in Athens, “The times of ignorance God has overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). There is a universal requirement for people to profess faith in Christ.
Perhaps you are concerned to hear me talk in such narrow terms of the exclusivity of Christ and of the Christian faith. If so, let me ask you to think through the ramifications of putting leaders of other religions on the same level as Christ. In one sense, there is no greater insult to Christ than to mention Him in the same breath as Muhammad, for example. If Christ is who He claims to be, no one else can be a way to God. Furthermore, if it is true that there are many ways to God, Christ is not one of them, because there is no reason one of many ways to God would declare to the world that He is the only way to God.
As we celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ, it is good for us to remember the uniqueness of Christ. May we never suggest that God has not done enough for us, considering what He has done for us in Christ Jesus.
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Post by Admin on Aug 16, 2024 17:59:28 GMT -5
The Role of Art in the Christian Life
R.C. Sproul
2 Min Read
When we look at the role of art in the Christian life and community, we find that there are simple, foundational principles about the nature of beauty. If you were to look up every reference to “beauty” or “the beautiful” in the Bible, you would see that the word “beauty” in one form or another occurs frequently in the pages of sacred Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament. To set a framework for our investigation, let’s begin by looking at a psalm written by David, which we find in 1 Chronicles:
Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples,
ascribe to the Lord glory and strength!
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;
bring an offering and come before him!
Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness;
tremble before him, all the earth;
yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. (1 Chron. 16:28–30)
Two words in this psalm stand out. One is “glory.” The idea of the glory of God is pervasive throughout Scripture. It refers to His majesty, His heaviness, His weightiness, His worth, His significance. Closely connected with His glory is the concept of “holiness.” The psalm enjoins the people of God to worship God in the “splendor of holiness”; the holiness of God and the glory of God are conjoined here with respect to this idea of splendor or beauty. We are called to come into the presence of God and to worship that which is beautiful about God.
All things beautiful find their source and foundation in the character of God. Ultimately, God is the norm of the good, the norm of the true, and the norm of the beautiful.
Psalm 27 and Psalm 29 also tell us about this idea of the beauty of God. Psalm 27:4 states:
One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire in his temple.
In Psalm 29, David reiterates what he said in his psalm in 1 Chronicles: we are to worship the Lord in the “splendor of holiness.”
I’m afraid that the idea of the beauty of God has been all but eclipsed in our contemporary culture, both in the secular community and in the church. The Scriptures are concerned about three dimensions of the Christian life: the good, the true, and the beautiful. But we have cut off the third from the other two. In fact, sometimes Christians reduce their concern of the things of God purely to the ethical realm, to a discussion of righteousness or goodness. Others are so concerned about purity of doctrine that they’re preoccupied with truth at the expense of behavior or of the holy. But in fact, the biblical concern is for all three. Scripture tells us that God is the ground or fountain of all goodness. All goodness finds its definition in His being and in His character. What God is determines what goodness is. The Scriptures speak about God as the author, the source, and the foundation of all truth. They say that God Himself is true. In the same way and in the same dimension, the Scriptures speak about the beauty of God; all things beautiful find their source and foundation in the character of God. Ultimately, God is the norm of the good, the norm of the true, and the norm of the beautiful.
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Post by Admin on Sept 6, 2024 11:26:39 GMT -5
Christian LivingChurch and MinistryThe Sacraments
What Is a Sacrament?
R.C. Sproul
8 Min Read
Throughout church history, there have been perhaps few issues that have led to as many disputes as the sacraments. We’ve seen debates over how many sacraments there are, how these sacraments operate, how they are to be performed, who is to receive them, and so on. There has been much confusion and conflict. Although we can’t go into minute detail here about all the technical theological points involved with the sacraments, we can look at some of the basic principles.
We understand that the life and worship of the church involve what we call Word and sacrament. Our churches—Protestant churches, particularly—have emphasized the preaching of the Word, whereas churches in the Middle Ages tended to feature the celebration of the Lord’s Supper; this is why the centerpiece of church architecture was the altar. Many Protestant churches instead made the pulpit the point of focus, emphasizing preaching rather than sacraments. Sometimes we tend to overreact in one direction or the other. But from the days of the Old Testament all the way through the New Testament, God has been concerned not only to speak to His people through His Word but also to communicate in other ways, including through the sacraments.
The English word sacrament comes from the Latin sacramentum, which is a translation of the Greek word mystērion. Our English Bibles translate the Greek as “mystery.” Historically, the church saw that something mysterious was involved in the liturgy of the church and in the giving of sacraments. So right from the start, we find a bit of difficulty as we try to define what a sacrament is. But in its most rudimentary form, the idea of the sacrament involves an experience of something that is sacred—something that we regard as extraordinary or uncommon, something with a special meaning or significance attached to it.
Theologians sometimes use the word sacrament in a narrow sense and sometimes in a broad sense. In the narrow sense, the term means the specific rites or ordinances that are observed in the church, which we call sacraments. In the broader sense, it refers to the many ways that God communicates to His people through object lessons, signs, or ordinary symbols that take on extraordinary meaning.
For example, early in the Old Testament, we have the record of the great deluge, the flood of Noah that destroyed the world. We know that after Noah and his family survived, God promised them that He would never again destroy the world by a flood. We are told that as a sign or symbol of God’s abiding promise to that end, God set His rainbow in the sky. He used the common, natural phenomenon of the rainbow as a sign of an uncommon, special, divine promise of His persevering and preserving providence. So every time we see a rainbow, we are involved in the sacramental life of the faith—not in the narrow, technical sense of sacraments but rather in the broader sense of external objects that are used to enhance and support the communication of the verbal promises of God.
In the Old Testament, God ordained several rites as sureties of His promise. For instance, He gave Israel the sign of circumcision, which had symbolic meaning to the people (see Gen. 17). He made a covenant with Abraham in which, in a dream, God Himself appeared in a theophany (a visible manifestation of God) as a torch moving between the torn pieces of animals that God had instructed Abraham to cut in half (see Gen. 15). God was essentially saying, “I’m demonstrating the certainty of the promise of My word.” God’s verbal promise was upheld by the non-verbal visible sign that accompanies it. The Old Testament prophets frequently used object lessons, dramatizing the word of God with a visual apparatus or sign, such as a plumb line (Amos 7) or a broken jar (Jer. 19). The idea here is taking something that is common and ordinary and using it for extraordinary, uncommon ways of giving testimony to the truth of God.
Anthropologists have studied the religious behavior of people around the world, not only in Christian environments but also in other environments such as Jewish, Hindu, Shinto, Confucian, and Muslim. They have found that all people groups that engage in religious practices, no matter what religion they’re committed to, have some concept of sacrament, or at least some concept of what we call sacred space or sacred time. Again, we find examples in the pages of the Old Testament. When Noah landed safely after the flood, what did he do? He marked the spot; he built an altar (see Gen. 8). After Jacob had his midnight dream at Bethel, he took the rock on which he had rested during the night, anointed it with oil, and named that place the House of God, because there God had appeared to him (see Gen. 28). We think, for example, of Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush in the Midianite wilderness. God commanded Moses: “Moses, Moses! . . . Take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Ex. 3:4–5). Holy ground is ground that is now uncommon, extraordinary, filled with meaning and significance, because there an intersection took place between the divine and the human, between the Creator and the creature. God met with Moses on that spot, and so that spot became holy ground. That’s what we mean by sacred space.
My wife and I and our children and their spouses once took a trip to England, where we visited Stonehenge. To this day, nobody knows for sure how those big rocks got there and what their use was. Was it a religious thing? An astronomical thing? Experts still debate it, but the consensus is that Stonehenge was associated with religion and that it became a sacred site, a sacred place. Some of us have visited Jerusalem, a city that we call the Holy City. We sing a song, “I walked today where Jesus walked.” There is something uncanny, almost eerie about visiting those places in this world where there was the meeting between heaven and earth. We have a sense of awe as we walk over the stones of the road to Emmaus or on the Via Dolorosa where Jesus walked to His crucifixion.
Now, the Bible doesn’t authorize any sacralization of those stones or those streets. But that’s part of our common response as human beings. When you were a child and you were distressed for some reason or another, perhaps you had a favorite place that you went for solace or for comfort, a place you sought when you wanted to be alone—in a tree house or in a closet or in your bedroom—someplace that had special significance to you. Part of our human experience is taking that which is ordinary and imbuing it with special significance because of its association with something transcendent, something supremely important.
Every time we see a rainbow, we are involved in the sacramental life of the faith—not in the narrow, technical sense of sacraments but rather in the broader sense of external objects that are used to enhance and support the communication of the verbal promises of God.
We see that human practice developing throughout the pages of Scripture. For instance, there is the Old Testament celebration of the Passover. The Passover was a key redemptive-historical event in the life of Israel, when God, in liberating His people from slavery in Egypt, caused His judgment to fall on Pharaoh and the Egyptians, so that God slew the firstborn son of every Egyptian family, including the son of Pharaoh. God had instructed His people to mark the doorposts of their houses with the blood of a lamb, the Passover lamb, so that when the angel of death came to the land and saw that a house was marked with the blood of the lamb, the angel of death passed over and the children of Israel were spared. Immediately after this event, they were liberated by the exodus.
In the history of Israel, the exodus stands as an event of paramount importance. So God instituted an annual celebration—the Passover feast for His people. He gave explicit instructions on how the Passover was to be observed—the specific food and wine that were to be used at this meal and the discussion that was to take place. It was not simply an empty celebration; the sacrament was also wedded to the Word. God essentially said: “Every year unto all generations at this time, you are to gather and celebrate this event. When your children ask you, ‘Why are we doing this?’ you will tell them how I rescued you from bondage and how I spared you from judgment in the Passover” (see Ex. 12:24–27). This became deeply rooted in the religion of Israel. It became so important to Israel that shortly before the death of Christ Jesus, as He entered into His passion and began to feel the initial pangs of His torment, He said that He earnestly desired to celebrate the Passover one more time with His disciples before He left this world (Luke 22:15). That meal celebrates not just a place but a sacred time.
We have moments in our lives that we say were formative in the shaping of our lives. We celebrate birthdays every year. We celebrate Good Friday, Easter, Christmas—observances not commanded in the Scriptures. The Bible doesn’t say that we’re supposed to celebrate Easter or Christmas, and some Christians protest the celebration of those events for one reason or another. The reason, however, that the church celebrates those specific occasions is that they mark, in our memory, sacred time. Good Friday was the day on which our Savior died, on which the atonement was made—the most important day in human history. Then we mark the day of resurrection. We mark the day of Christ’s birth, the day of His ascension, and the day of Pentecost. These are not sacraments in the narrow, technical sense, but they are sacramental in the broad and general sense in which I’m speaking because they involve an observation of sacred space and sacred time. In one single word, these places and times are regarded as holy. The term holy chiefly refers to that which is other or different, that which is uncommon, that which rises above the normal and the mundane. I believe we miss something in the life of the church and in the life of the Christian if we fail to understand the deep significance of these historic moments, places, and signs.
For example, consider the Lord’s Supper. On the night on which He was betrayed, Jesus took the Old Testament sacrament of Passover and filled it with new meaning and new content, saying, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). He attached a new significance to an ancient rite. At this point, the bread no longer represented the unleavened bread that was eaten in haste as the people were preparing to leave Egypt and go to the promised land; instead, it symbolized the body of Christ. “This is my body, which is given for you,” He declared in the midst of that feast (Luke 22:19).
Let us remember that Jesus instituted this sacrament, and that He did so in the middle of participating in the old sacrament. He did it for much the same reason that the ancient nation of Israel did. He said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Jesus knew His people. He knew that sometimes our faithfulness is only as strong as our recollection of our most recent blessing at the hands of God. But we come down from those mountaintop experiences, and we tend to forget what God has done for us in the past. We tend to want to live from blessing to blessing, always needing to be replenished with the assurance that God is with us. I think that the disciples could have forgotten many things that they learned from Jesus—His teachings, His example. It is as though Jesus said: “Whatever else you might forget, don’t forget what’s going to happen tomorrow. Don’t ever forget My death. I want to seal this into your memories forever, so that as often as you eat of this food and drink of this cup, you show forth My death until I come.” So from that point on, the Lord instituted a special ceremony, a special event, to commemorate the most sacred time that God had wrought in human history.
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Post by Admin on Sept 17, 2024 10:11:32 GMT -5
The Question of Conscience
R.C. Sproul
6 Min Read
It is vitally important for Christians to consider the issue of conscience. In the classical view, the conscience thought to be something that God implanted within our minds. Some people even went so far as to describe the conscience as the voice of God within us. The idea was that God created us in such a way that there was a link between the sensitivities of the mind and the conscience with its built-in responsibility to God’s eternal laws. For example, consider the law of nature that the Apostle Paul says is written on our hearts. There was a sensitivity of conscience long before Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of stone.
The famous philosopher Immanuel Kant was agnostic with respect to man’s ability to reason from this world to the transcendence of God. Even so, he offered what he called a moral argument for the existence of God that was based on what he called a universal sense of oughtness implanted in the heart of every human being. Kant believed that everyone carried with them a genuine sense of what one ought to do in a given situation. He called this the categorical imperative. He believed there are two things that fill the soul with an ever-new and growing wonder and reverence: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. This is important to note because even in the realm of secular philosophy, there has historically been an awareness of conscience.
Historically and classically, the conscience was seen to be our link to the transcendent ethic that resides in God. But with the moral revolution of our culture, a different approach to conscience has emerged, and this is what is called the relativistic view. This is indeed the age of relativism, where values and principles are considered to be mere expressions of the desires and interests of a given group of people at a given time in history. We repeatedly hear that there are no absolutes in our world today.
Yet if there are no absolute, transcendent principles, how do we explain this mechanism that we call the conscience? Within a relativistic framework, we see the conscience being defined in evolutionary terms: people’s subjective inner personalities are reacting to evolutionary advantageous taboos imposed upon them by their society or by their environment. Having reached a period in our development when these taboos no longer serve to advance our evolution, they can be discarded with nary a thought of the consequences.
As a professor some years ago, I counseled a college girl who was overtaken with a sense of profound guilt because she had indulged in sexual activities with her fiancé. She explained to me that she had spoken of her guilt to a local pastor. He counseled her that the way to get over her guilt was to recognize the source of it. He reasoned that she had done nothing wrong; rather, her feelings of guilt were a result of her having been a victim of living in a society ruled by a puritan ethic. He explained that she had been conditioned by certain sexual taboos that made her feel guilty when she shouldn’t and that what she had done was a mature, responsible expression of her own emerging adulthood.
Yet she came to me weeping and exclaimed that she still felt guilty. I told her it is possible for a person to feel guilty because they have an uneasy, disquieted conscience about something that is actually not a violation of God’s law, but that in this case she had broken the law of God, and she should rejoice that she felt guilty, because pain, as uncomfortable as it is to us, is an important for our health. In the physical realm, the feeling of pain signals that there is something wrong with the body. Spiritually speaking, the pain of guilt, can signal to us that something is wrong with our souls. There is a remedy for that and it’s the same one that the church has always offered, namely, forgiveness. Real guilt requires real forgiveness.
This woman’s problem illustrates the conflict between the traditional understanding of sin and conscience and the new concept of conscience. This new concept sees it merely as an evolutionary, societal-conditioning process that is a result of imposed taboos. How does the Christian sort all of this out? Is there a biblical view of conscience?
Whereas God’s principles don’t change, our consciences vacillate and develop. These changes can be positive or negative.
The Hebrew term translated into the English as “conscience” occurs in the Old Testament, but very sparsely. However in the New Testament, there seems to be a fuller awareness of the importance of the function of conscience in the Christian life. The Greek word for conscience appears in the New Testament thirty-one times, and it seems to have a two-fold dimension, as the medieval scholars argued. It involves the idea of accusing as well as the idea of excusing. When we sin, the conscience is troubled. It accuses us. The conscience is the tool that God the Holy Spirit uses to convict us, bring us to repentance, and to receive the healing of forgiveness that flows from the gospel.
But there is also the sense in which this moral voice in our minds and hearts also tells us what is right. Remember that the Christian is always a target for criticisms that may or may not be valid. Even within the Christian community, there are wide differences of opinion regarding which behaviors are pleasing to God and which aren’t. One man approves dancing; another disapproves of it. How do we know who is correct?
We see in the New Testament that the conscience is not the final ethical authority for human conduct because the conscience is capable of change. Whereas God’s principles don’t change, our consciences vacillate and develop. These changes can be positive or negative. For example, the prophets in the Old Testament thundered God’s judgment upon the people of Israel who had grown accustomed to sin. One of the great indictments that came upon Israel in the days of King Ahab was that they had grown so numb and accustomed to evil that the people tolerated King Ahab’s wickedness. Hardness of the heart had set in. The consciences of the Israelites were seared and calloused. Think about this reality in your life, about the ideals that you had as a child. Consider the pangs of conscience that may have intruded into your life when you first experimented with certain things that you knew were wrong. You were overwhelmed and shaken. Perhaps you even became physically ill. But the power of sin can erode the conscience to the point where it becomes a faint voice in the deepest recesses of your soul. By this, our consciences become hardened and callous, condemning what is right and excusing what is wrong.
It’s interesting that we can always find someone who will give an articulate and persuasive defense for the ethical legitimacy of some of the activities that God has judged to be an outrage to Him. As humans, our ability to defend ourselves from moral culpability is quite developed and nuanced. We become a culture in trouble when we begin to call evil good and good evil. To do that, we must distort the conscience, and, in essence, make man the final authority in life. All one has to do is to adjust his conscience to suit his ethic. Then we can live life with peace of mind, thinking that we are living in a state of righteousness.
The conscience can be sensitized in a distorted way. Remember, the relativistic and evolutionary view of conscience is built on the principle that it is a subjective response to taboos imposed upon it by society. Though I don’t believe that such a view is finally compelling, I have to acknowledge that there is an element of truth in that view. We recognize that people can have highly sensitized consciences, not because they are being informed by the Word of God but because they have been informed by man-made rules and regulations. In some Christian communities, the test of one’s faith, is whether or not a person dances. If one grows up in this environment and decides to dance in the future, what happens? Usually, the person is overcome with guilt for having danced. How should you respond to that? Would you tell the person that dancing isn’t a sin, that his conscience has been misinformed? That might be a normal approach, but such a response may be problematic for this reason: the conscience can excuse when it ought to be accusing, and it also can accuse when it should be excusing.
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