The Importance of the Bad News to Prepare for the Good News

"Against such as these [i. e., unbelievers], the doctrine of justification may be defended, but it is vain to attempt their satisfaction in it. Whilst men have no sense in their own hearts and consciences of the spiritual disorder of their souls, of the secret continual actings of sin with deceit and violence, obstructing all that is good, promoting all that is evil, defiling all that is done by them; who are not engaged in a constant watchful conflict against the first motions of sin, to whom they are not the greatest burden and sorrow, causing them to cry out for deliverance from them; they will reject what is proposed about justification through the righteousness of Christ imputed to us. Neither the consideration of the holiness or terror of the Lord, nor the severity of the law, nor the promise of the Gospel, nor the secret disquietude of their consciences can prevail with them, who have such slight conceptions of the state and guilt of sin, to fly for refuge unto the only hope set before them, or really and distinctly to comport with the only way of salvation." -John Owen, "The Doctrine of Justification by Faith Through the Imputation of the Righteousness of Christ"

In his well-known prolix manner, Owen is advising us of an important consideration: until the unbeliever is conscious of his sin and its consequences, he has no interest in hearing about what Jesus has done for His people. This is a message that too many American evangelicals need to hear, because they suffer from the Gospel of Joel Osteen, that "Jesus loves everybody and wants us to be happy." It is too negative, we suppose, to tell about the sin in men and God's hatred of it. Yet, that is why the evangelical church has turned into a circus of self-esteem, rather than the body of Christ confronting the fallen world.

Free Grace and the Creator-Creature Distinction

"Esteem not yourself the better for what you may carry with you. Think not to be accepted because of your present. It is not your money, Isaiah 55:1, John 7:37, nor your double money in your hand that will fetch you corn from above, though it may come from Egypt. Silver and gold, your own works and worthiness, are of no value at the mint of free grace. But there it is, and thence you must have whatever may hinder you welcome at the court of Heaven." -Puritan Elisha Coles, "A Practical Discourse of God's Sovereignty" 

People like to bargain. "If you do X, then I will do Y for you." That is part of our existence as creatures of a similar class. However, seeing our autonomy from our fellow creatures, we imagine that we have a comparable stand with our Creator, offering Him some good works, according to our own standards, in exchange for His forgiveness. 

However, our relationship with God is not of the same sort as that with our fellow creatures. We may be equal to them, and with the autonomous right to offer voluntary exchanges, but neither applies to our relationship as creature to our Creator. 

As our Maker, God retains an absolute right over His creatures. The Bible compares that relationship to that between the potter and his clay: "O House of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand, O House of Israel" (Jeremiah 18:6; see also Romans 9:21). And what does the lump of clay have that it can exchange with the potter to change its form? Nothing. 

That is why the justification of God's people can be only by His voluntary condescension. "What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For He says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.' So then, it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy... So then, He has mercy on whomever He wills, and He hardens whomever He wills" (Romans 9:14-18). 

An Ancient Prophetic Warning to Today's Mormons

"The prophets are prophesying lies in My name. I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds. Therefore, thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who prophesy in My name, although I did not send them, and who say, 'Sword and famine shall not come upon this land':  By sword and famine those prophets shall be consumed. And the people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out in the streets in Jerusalem, victims of famine and sword, with none to bury them - them, their wives, their sons, and their daughters - for I will pour out their evil upon them" (Jeremiah 14:14-16). 

This warning was expressed to Israel by a God-sent prophet, because they had been receiving the false prophecies and promises of fake prophets. Those prophets gained status and wealth by making promises to the people, promises which those people gobbled up greedily. Why? Because these prophecies exalted them, in contrast to Jeremiah, who preached warnings and judgments which were true, but not what they wanted to hear. 

In the same way, the modern members of the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or more-commonly the Mormons, have their own prophets, who preach to them pleasing words, promising godhood and rewards to them, while those same Mormons turn their backs on true Christians who try to point out the failed prophecies and false doctrines proclaimed by the Mormon prophets. 

The Character of God as Guarantee of the Saint's Perseverance

"It is impossible [that] we should lose the thing we were wrought for, because it is God that wrought it for us. It is not the designment of an idol; that is, of some ignorant, rash, fallible, or mutable agent, such a one as may possibly be surprised by unlooked-for accidents, circumvented by a sublimer understanding, overborne by a power above him, or recede from his purpose through levity and fickleness of his nature, etc. But it is God who is 'wise in heart and mighty in strength,' Job 9:4. It is He from whom all things that are have their being and are perfectly under His rule and obeisance. He had eternity before Him, to lay His design surely; and, accordingly, 'He declared the end from the beginning.' It is, therefore, as impossible for Him either to do or to neglect to do, or to suffer to be done, anything whereby His purpose might suffer disappointment, as it is impossible that God should lie. He would never have set up those ends as the sum and substance of His design, if He had not determined to see them made good." -Puritan Elisha Coles, "A Practical Discourse of God's Sovereignty 

Part of the Creator/creature distinction is that the Creator is omniscient, omnipotent, and eternal, while the creature has all but three of those attributes. A creaturely awareness is conscious of our inability to plan for all contingencies, at all times, as may disrupt our best-laid plans. For example, the farmer cannot know of the coming hurricane that wipes out his crop. In contrast, the triune God of the Bible has infinite awareness across all time, all space, and under all contingencies, such that His plans are infallibly achieved. As in the verse that Coles quotes, "I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish My purpose'" (Isaiah 46:10). It would be comical hubris for any human to make such an assertion. 

However, it is also unforgiveable hubris to assert such infallibility for any man's ability to keep himself in a state of grace. Yet that is what the Arminian does, when he claims that no man can keep himself saved, and, therefore, he should never be assured of his hold on eternal life. If the fundamental assumption of the Arminian, that it is the will of the man that should thus preserve him, then it would be true that no man could ever know an assurance of salvation in this life. 

But this is exactly what perseverance is not. It does not, has never, and never shall, depend on the will and power of the creature to maintain his state of grace. It is the work of God alone, He whose irrepeatable attributes of deity guarantee that any man, truly saved, can never fully and finally lose his salvation. Thus, his assurance is sound, not because of any ability of his own, but because of the infallible character of the God who saved him to begin with. 

David's Sense of God's Inspiration

In giving his final charge to Solomon regarding the building of the Temple, King David included this statement: "All this He made clear to me in writing from the hand of the Lord, all the work to be done according to the plan" (I Chronicles 28:19). 

There is a lot of substance in this one sentence. 

First, David is explicit about the source of his plans for the Temple, i. e., God. He says, "He made clear to me." The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews develops this statement in Hebrews 8:5: "They [the levitical priests] serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For, when Moses was about to raise the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, 'See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.'" That writer was referring to statements that are found in Exodus 25:9, 25:40, 26:30, and 27:8. What Moses was shown regarding the construction of the tabernacle, David also received when the tabernacle was replaced by the Temple. 

Second, David tells us that he received God's words  by the mediatorial hand of the Lord, i. e., Yahweh, the preincarnate Son. This, too, is a pattern we see elsewhere: "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His servants" (Revelation 1:1). What God would inspire to be recorded in the Scriptures had its origin in the triune God, and was then mediated through the Son to the human writer. This is probably what Peter meant when he mentioned that the prophets were taught by the Spirit of Christ when they predicted His "sufferings and subsequent glories" (I Peter 1:11). 

This refutes some neo-orthodox teachers who claim that the writers of the Bible had no concept of divine inspiration when they wrote (compare II Timothy 3:16). While some may not have had such a concept, some did, as we see in the words of David recorded here. 

A Definition and Defense of Postmillennialism

Postmillennialism— AKA “A victorious eschatology” 

1 - History is intricately governed by God, and all that God intends to accomplish, He will, in fact, accomplish. (Genesis 3:15; Job 42:2; Psalm 115:3; Proverbs 16:33; Isaiah 45:7-9; Jeremiah 32:17; Lamentations 3:37-39; Matthew 10:29-31; Acts 4:27-28; Romans 8:28; Ephesians 1:4, 11; Colossians 1:16-17) 

2 - Jesus was who He said He was, and brought what He said He brought; namely, He is the Messiah who brought the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10; 16:16; Mark 1:15) 

3 - Jesus did not obfuscate or equivocate when He told His followers to disciple all nations & peoples, assuming its success and utter completion. (Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 13:10; Romans 10:16-18; 16:25-26; Colossians 1:5-6, 23; Revelation 7:9) 

4 - Jesus ascended to the throne of heaven as David’s Son and David’s Lord in order for God the Father to make Christ’s enemies a footstool for His feet. (2 Samuel 7; 1 Chronicles 17; Psalm 2; 72:8; 110:1; Daniel 7:13-14; Luke 1:33; 24:50-53; Acts 1:6-11) 

5 - Jesus will not cease reigning until all enemies are defeated in history, the last enemy—death—will be supplanted at the final resurrection and final judgment. (1 Corinthians 15:24-28; Revelation 11:15, 17; 22:5)

Jonah and God's Righteousness Among the Heathen

"Now, the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it - the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because, in His divine forbearance, He had passed over former sins." --Romans 3:21-25 

In this passage, I want to focus especially on the last clause: "In His forbearance, He had passed over former sins." By itself, it strikes us as strange, because it seems to suggest that God was unconcerned about sins that occurred before the coming of Jesus. In fact, some people claim that it means that the heathen, who had not known God's written law, unlike Israel, were not held accountable for what would have been sins, because those acts were done in ignorance. 

That view is an egregious act of eisegesis, inserting the assumptions of dispensationalism into a text which says no such thing. 

First, consider the wording of the clause itself. The dispensationalist claims that God overlooked actions which would have been sins, but weren't. Yet Paul says just the opposite. He doesn't say that God overlooked actions; he explicitly states that God overlooked sins. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (verse 23). So, there must be a standard by which those heathen were judged, and Paul tells us what that standard was: "The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, though the Law and Prophets bear witness to it" (verse 21). Paul makes a distinction between "law," marked here with a small "p," and the Law, marked by a capital "P." Thus, there has always been a moral code, reflecting the righteous nature of God, which, at a particular point in time, was written down through Moses. Therefore, the dispensationalist is wrong. The law did not begin with Moses; it was merely recorded by Moses. It is the same as the theory of relativity. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared did not suddenly come into existence when Albert Einstein put it in writing! It had been true ever since the first day of creation. 

Second, do we see God's not holding heathens accountable for their sins? 

"'Arise, go to  Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come before Me... Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.' So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city, three days' journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, 'yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!' And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them" (Jonah 1:2, 3:2-5). God sent His prophet to these heathens to warn them of their coming judgment. Judgment according to what? The dispensationalist has no answer, because he holds to his presupposition that the law was only for Israel. We could also consider the case of Sodom and Gomorrah. While God relented of His wrath against Nineveh, He did not against the Sodomites (Genesis, chapters 18 and 19).

Thus, we must conclude logically that the doctrine of the dispensationalist was not what Paul intended. Rather, consider the context: he isn't giving us a contrast between sinfulness and sinlessness; he is contrasting the coming of Jesus, against the previous age without Him. While the Law and the Prophets directed Israel to the coming Redeemer, such as seen explicitly in Job 19:25, the heathen received no such succor. The faithful in Israel had an object for saving faith, but the heathen had none, except for a few individuals, such as Ruth. That is the sense in which God overlooked their sins: He refrained from revealing to them a basis for forgiveness and restoration. Thank God that He has now done so!