Biblical
Framework
Charles
Clough
Lesson 95
[Message very hard to hear, transcription may be affected by words or
phrases that are nearly unintelligible] We’re going to kind of pull together
what we’ve done this year and in doing that go back three years to the other
part of the framework. The one event
that we haven’t dealt with that we had scheduled for this year was the return
from the exile, and that event, the restoration, which involves the doctrine of
canonicity and prayer we’ll have to pick up in the fall. We have four major events in the life of
Christ, His birth, His life, His death, His resurrection. We are going to
approach the life of Christ differently.
It’s not going to be, so to speak, biographical; we’ll follow the theme
mode that we’ve followed here, by concentrating on events and what those events
reveal, what doctrine, what truths they reveal about God. We’ll use a particular method of showing that
if you don’t master the Old Testament, and you do not come to Jesus through the
pages of the Old Testament, with the understanding of the Old Testament, your
view of Jesus gets skewed. That’s why
it’s important that we spent three years going through this framework in the
Old Testament because now you’ll see that it pays off when it comes to seeing
who Jesus Christ is.
I’ve passed out a little questionnaire, there’s some thought questions
it and I want to go through these questions because I think these are the ones
that will show you how, if you haven’t thought about it this way already, how
to apply a lot of this framework material.
The first thing I want to go back to, the first question is back when we
started with Genesis we started working with presuppositions and the problem
with that is that the average person, including us, never examines their
presuppositions. We just don’t do
that. We don’t reflect on the fact that
we carry basic presuppositions with us everywhere we go. Every time we respond to situations in life,
that response reveals a map, kind of an inner map that we have, or maps
(plural) of reality. Before we spoke in
terms of presuppositions, recently it’s been it’s come to my attention that we
can think of these things as maps that are sort of written into your soul, and
we’ve all written them, we all have them.
There’s no such thing as a person without a map. The question is whether your map fits what
the real world is or not.
The reason we want to look at that is because it goes back to a
principle that we examined two or three years ago; this chart shows you that
all human knowledge is limited. No
matter who you are, where you are, or who you’re talking to or anything else,
we all are limited. We all have out
thinking and our experience embedded inside this box. No matter how smart you are, no matter how
much experience you’ve had, you’re still trapped in the box. Being trapped in the box means that you can’t
ever get out of it to make an absolute statement; you never can get a universal
statement. So you have to come up with
some guesses, and there are various approaches to that, and we’ve said before
and we say again that there are only two views of reality.
We’ll review tonight just keeping this in mind that every person’s map
has to be built out of limited material. All of us build our maps that way; all
of us have our presuppositions in a limited fashion. The question is how do we proceed? We said that there are only two basic
pictures of the universe. You can say
there are 108 different authors out there and 55 religions, but when it gets
down to the basics there’s only two views.
We want to look at some of the features of this and remind ourselves,
we’ll just review some of them and then we’ll go to the questions.
On the left side, the Biblical position, the Biblical map of reality is
found, between the time of Noah and the time of Abraham it was found in the
ancient monotheistic faith of the tribes of the world. That ancient monotheism perpetuated when God
called Abraham out and we said what about the heathen who have never
heard. I mentioned Paul Richardson’s
book, Eternity in their Heart and
how he had gone into southeast Asia, he had ample evidence that far before the
missionary even got into southeast Asia, these people were singing hymns to
Yahweh, they knew about the fall in the Garden of Eden, they knew about the
first creation of the man and the woman, they knew about the flood. Where did they get that from, they didn’t get
it from missionaries. They got it from
generational passing down, transmission inside their own culture because they
ultimately descended from the family of Noah.
Ancient monotheism, ancient
So when we start thinking about our mental maps and where we’re coming
from, why we react the way we do, when we get into some of these questions,
let’s look at them from this point of view. This gives you the overall
perspective. Behind the opposite
position from Creator/creature distinction, there is no distinction between God
and nature really. God is viewed as sort
of a super man, just differing in degree but not in kind. So you have a continuum of the nature, the
gods, and man. Remember when we read
Genesis 1 I had you read Enuma Elish,
the Babylonian Genesis, and the goddess Tiamut, the universe was made out of
her body, showing that in their thinking that the god and nature were kind of
united, they were part and parcel of each other. That’s what we mean by
Continuity of Being and we’ll see that it has tremendous behavioral
implications. It’s not just theoretical
theology here; there are practical behavioral results of this.
Then we come to the bottom line as it were, when you take this position
behaviorally, here’s where it leads. It
will lead to the fact that every one of us faces a personal sovereign, that
ultimate furtherest back we have to deal with a personal sovereign God. That makes us responsible. That’s where
responsibility comes from. Frankly, only
in the Biblical position do you have responsibility this way. Watch the big picture; we’re just reviewing
quickly on the big picture. In this view
you start up here with the Creator/creature distinction, you wind up with real responsibility. Over here you wind up with blur, where everything
is kind of blurred together, and what you have is not a personal god in back of
it all, because the gods themselves are limited, so in back of them you have
this impersonal faith or chance, whatever the word is. In the ancient documents that we read the
word for fate was tablets of destiny.
But the bottom line in all of this theory, the bottom line is that it
renders us victims. We are not
responsible, we are part of a thing, we are part of the cosmos, we are the way
we are because that’s the way we are.
That’s just the way our genes fell out in the chance allocation of
history. So we are ultimately passive,
we are ultimately victims; we’re trapped in the Chain of Being. Where this comes out today is I am a product
of my genes, I am a product of my nurturing, I am a product of my
environment. Yes, all these things
affect us, obviously genes affect us, we have boy genes and we have girl genes,
so we know that the genes affect us, but the problem is do they control us
100%. That’s the issue.
We have to face this. This is a big issue in our society. If you want to see where it’s popping up
today, look at the explanation for crime.
It’s due to nurture, it’s due to environment, change the environment
you’ll change the person. Is that
true? Not necessarily, but it would be
true if the model is right; if we are ultimately products of our environment,
that makes sense. But if on the other
hand the Bible is correct and we are actually choosers and we have responsibility,
then changing the environment will not necessarily change it. A good example of that is where was the
perfect environment?
Now let’s come to question 2 and these are some ways in which this
doctrinal truth shows up in experience.
“What is my most basic view of all reality?” In other words, it’s time to reflect and we
don’t normally do this, we’re too busy to do this most of the time, and the
result is we never do it. We don’t think
back, pause, and say to ourselves look, I can think of myself… you know
sometimes you dream and you can dream of seeing yourself in a position. Well, sometimes you can just daydream and
think of yourself and look at yourself and look at the way you’re
thinking. Back off, that’s one of the
things that we can do that animals can’t do.
Your cat and dog don’t sit there at their dish and think, you know there
are 52 other brands you could have picked up at the store; they may react to
the food that way, but the point is they’re not seriously thinking about
that. But we can reflect, and strangely
we can reflect in our own hearts. God
has given us that capability. Do you
know where you see it in the Bible? The book of Psalms. How many times in the book of Psalms do you
read that David talks to himself, he says O my soul, you are cast down. What is that?
That’s self-reflection, and it’s something that we don’t often do
because in the business of life we’re running from one thing to the next and we
don’t back off and just look at what’s going on with us. That’s what we’re asking in question 2.
If you take a back seat and look at yourself in the front seat, what do
you see as your map? What’s the view,
your basic programming in your soul that controls your behavior, that
automatically takes over in responses?
It’s got to be one of these two views.
So we go back to this. There may
be a variant in some way, shape or form, but it’s of these two. Most of us have pieces of both, that’s the
problem, we’re hybridized and we come out of the world background and we have
pieces of each of these.
Following question 2 on the sheet, “Is it a Creation” and if it is, we
really believe “that there are two absolutely different levels of reality.”
There’s God and we have no idea what’s on His mind other than what He’s told
us. He is infinite knowledge, we are
finite in our knowledge, we’ll never be infinite in our knowledge, we have to
take what He says on authority, but we have the assurance that somebody does
know. There is a plan in every detail
behind every molecule, behind every electron and proton, there is a plan, that
everything has rationality and purpose.
It is so vast, so amazing, so complicated, that we can’t penetrate. But we don’t have to penetrate it; we can
take it that He has a plan. That
relieves me of a lot. Right off the bat
that relieves me of the fact that I don’t have to make up the map of everything,
nor does the whole human race. The map
is already there in God’s mind. If we
believe that way then we believe in the Creator/creature distinction. If we believe the other way, then somehow
God, angels, man and animals all exist in relative complexity. Don’t think this is pagan. We tend to think that way sometimes, that God
is more good than we are, not absolutely good, good and holiness of a kind that
we can’t attain apart from whatever He gives us. That separation concept, when it’s blurry we’re
drifting, drifting over to the Continuity of Being idea. The implication is, following question 2
again, the next series of questions follow behaviorally from these views. “What is my ultimate authority—social
convention, family, peer or church approval, personal mystical experiences,
great literature of mankind, or those parts of the Creator’s mind that He has
shared in Scripture with us?”
What is your ultimate authority?
You have to keep asking that.
This is something you can’t ask once; you ask it thousands of times,
when you reflect upon how you personally are living your life and solving
problems. I think to myself, or I think
back to a situation, what was I thinking when I did that; what was I really doing
moment by moment as far as my ultimate authority; what mattered most in that
situation. Was it what people thought
about me or was it what God thought about me?
Remember how we defined sin, we went back to David’s Psalms and David
had murdered, committed adultery, really messed up, a lot of social
consequences, but remarkably in the text in Psalm 51 what does it say? Against who did he sin? Against Him alone; against God.
That sounds like he’s being callous toward the social
consequences. That’s not it; he knew
about the social consequences. The point was that sin can’t be defined in terms
of social consequences. If you start
defining sin in terms of social consequences you wind up with some sort of relativism
where you compare your social consequences of your sin with Joe Blow’s
consequences and of course you always come out on top because you picked your
area of strength vs. their weakness, and that always makes you feel good. That’s the problem and error of thinking of
sin primarily against its social consequences.
You can’t think of it that way and if you do, you’re drifting. If I think that way, I’m drifting away from
the authority of Scripture of the Creator/ creature distinction. I have to give an ultimate answer for my life
to Him; I don’t give an ultimate answer of my life to anybody else. I don’t give it to my parents, my pastor, the
police; I don’t give it to the military, the government, teachers. I give some accountability, yes but I don’t
give my ultimate confession of my life to anybody except the One who holds me
responsible. These are all wrapped up in
the map. Do I have a proper mapping of
reality in my head, in my soul; do I really understand the Creator/creature
distinction? Keep this in mind. This leads to the next question.
“Who am I?” A basic
question. Am I “a responsible finite
analogue of the Creator,” remember when we went through this. Just to review again, this is just so basic,
and when we get into the Lord Jesus Christ who is both God and man in one person,
this gets really complicated. But we
said you could take some of God’s attributes, you could take God and His
sovereignty, you could take man with his choice, and there’s an analogy between
God’s sovereignty and my choice. But
they’re not identical. This clearly is
categorically different than this. This
is that of the infinite Creator; this is a finite version of it. This saves us, because today all kinds of
debates arise about this, obviously one that is very prevalent and all over the
place, and basically has taken our society by storm is that people of
homosexual orientation can’t help themselves, it’s genetic, it’s determinative
and we are victims, and this is not something to be judged or evaluated. We’re not talking about judging people now;
we’re talking about particular behavior.
So we can love the people and disagree with their behavior. We’re not talking about hating people
here. We’re talking about this issue,
and the issue is: are we responsible or are we not. The answer that is being given nationally,
from coast to coast, in all the universities and all the think tanks, the
answer is no, I am not responsible. And
if you’re going to hold me responsible, you’re wrong and you hate me and you’re
out of line, you don’t respect my rights. Your rights? Your rights to what? Well, because I’m determined, I can’t help
this, I was born this way, so you have to respect me because I was born this
way. This debate ends right here.
This is where the whole thing is decided, right here, and it’s decided
on the basis of a basic map. In fact,
whenever you see homosexuality attain popularity, obviously homosexuality has
always been with us, but when it becomes socially acceptable in any society or
country or nation, it’s a signal, because Romans 1 picks that out, of all sins,
as a flagship sin of paganism. What does
it mean? It means that whenever you have
a society which acknowledges and openly agrees with this position, then what
you have is enough people in that social unit that are operating off of this
map, this wrong map, that society is disintegrating. You haven’t got enough people in society at
large that have correct maps of human responsibility. So the people with correct maps of human
responsibility become a very small minority and that creates a problem.
We’re not talking theory here, we’re talking about a basic idea of who
am I? Do I have choices? When I face temptation, when I face sin, when
I face a choice, or when I face an opportunity, am I looking upon that as gee, I
can do that or I can do this, I just can’t
choose, I want to but I know I can’t.
Who says that? God says that I am
responsible and He can’t hold me responsible if I don’t have choice. So choice is the axiom of being held
responsible and accountable.
The opposite in point 3 is that I’m “a life form wholly determined by
genetics, upbringing and environment.”
The key word in that sentence is “wholly.” We’re not denying genetics, upbringing and
environment have a role, obviously they do. What we’re arguing is that they
don’t wholly determine it. Ten years ago they had the famous experiment
at Johns Hopkins that was paraded across the newspapers of the world, they had
operated on the cadavers of what they thought must have been homosexual men and
they found the brain was different than those of heterosexuals. It turns out now they’re arguing about how
they define what behavior pattern these guys were doing.
So the experiment isn’t
considered to be too valid. But the idea
was that hey, there’s structural differences in the brain, see, we told you all
along these people are different. If we
hold to this, then something is wrong with the logic. What do you suppose is wrong with the
logic. Maybe what we observed in the
cadavers was the result of the behavior, not the cause. Think about it. If our bodies did not respond to behavior,
how would an athlete train? How would a man who runs, race? How would a
football player, a boxer, a weight lifter train if the body didn’t respond to
exercise, it didn’t respond to behavior.
Our bodies do respond to behavior. They alter themselves
phenomenally. People learn to think,
they think fast, there can be mental drills, there can be physical drills; our
neuron patterns in our brains can establish networks for doing all kinds of
math, if people want to specialize in doing quick calculations in their heads
that is possible. Why? Because our
bodies are built to do our calling. The
bad thing is that the same rule holds when we sin. When we do things out of line with God our
bodies begin to accommodate that; our bodies begin to change to that. Now what do we do? Now we’ve built in flesh patterns. Now the neurons up here are programmed to
operate that way, it becomes more and more easy to do that.
The idea then is that if I am a life form wholly determined by the
genetics [can’t understand word], or am I one that has a choice. This is fundamental to the great debates
going on around us today. It all hinges
back to this, what is man, what are we? We said we’re finite analogues, we have
a picture of God’s sovereignty in our choice, God is holy, He is righteous and
He is just, and what’s the human analogue of God’s attribute of
righteousness? We have a conscience; it
still operates this side of the fall. What is that little thing called
conscience, that voice that you can’t suppress?
It’s a residue, it’s an analogue of His holiness; it’s a reminder, it’s
like the electric plug, it’s waiting to be plugged in. It’s a reminder that we’re built for Him. We
have a human thing called love. Animals don’t have that, God does. This is a finite analogue to this. There are structural differences. This love is a perfect love because it’s
never threatened, never on the defense.
This love is vulnerable and exercises only to the point where it’s
secure enough to act. A person can’t
really love unless they feel safe. That’s why in 1 John the opposite of love is
not hate. What is it love casts out? Fear.
Love and fear are opposites. We
have security and love on one hand; insecurity and fear on the other one. So you have that analogue.
Then you have God in His omniscience, He knows perfectly. We have human knowledge, and all year we have
emphasized contracts and covenants and all this. Just look at the contracts and covenants
we’ve talked about, the Abrahamic Covenant, the Sinaitic Covenant, the New
Covenant, the Palestinian Covenant, what’s this? God’s omniscience. In His omniscience He has a perfect plan for
history. He has all kinds of details in
His omniscience. He chooses to take
little pieces of that and he reveals those pieces to us. The problem is that He doesn’t give us the
whole picture. For example, the book of
Job; Job sits there in the middle of a suffering situation and wants to know
why did this happen to me? And it’s a
piece that God didn’t reveal to Job, and after 42 chapters God still doesn’t
reveal it to Job.
Remember the observation we made in the text; what do you notice, after
all the suffering, heartache and loss that Job has, God comes in like a train,
a big bulldozer and wallops the guy. You
say that’s being very unsensitive, gee, you’d think God would have some counsel
here to listen to Job. God didn’t act like
a traditional counselor but there was a reason God didn’t. He came in heavy on Job, I believe, to shock
him, because when we’re suffering, when we’re wandering we are in shock and the
result is we don’t see, we don’t respond correctly, and God has to get our
attention. So God comes and watch how He
gets Job’s attention, with about 75 questions, boom, boom, boom, where were you
when I created the world, did you do this, can you count the sand of the sea,
can you do this, can you do that….
What’s He doing? He’s not telling
Job why Job suffered but He’s doing something else. What is this “something else” that’s going on
here? He’s making Job aware of who he is
and who God is. What’s that? The Creator/creature distinction.
Apparently it’s more important that we perceive this difference than it
is the details. Once we get that in our
head, then we understand, okay, I don’t know what the puzzle is, He hasn’t
revealed all the pieces to me but I know enough to know that there is a reason
for it. This is not nonsense, this is
not irrationality, God hasn’t forgotten me, I’m not in a jam because He made a
mistake, the phone calls got switched, the wrong file got read in the computer;
it’s nothing like that. It’s the fact
that He has done it His way and He did not say why. He is forcing me, by not telling me, He’s
forcing me to bow before Him. What else am I going to do? Sit and argue with Him through eternity? He’s got me aced. I can’t do anything, and that’s exactly where
God had Job at. So it gets back to
basics.
Let’s go to question 5 before we go to 4, because one of the things we
want to do as we look at the early part of the first year of the series, we
dealt with those events, creation, the fall, the flood and the covenant. The two biggies that you always want to
remember, no matter what happens, even before salvation, even before the
gospel, you’ve got to remember the Creator/creature distinction, and you’ve got
to remember the fall. If you don’t
anchor yourself to these events, then the rest of it, I’m sorry but the gospel
is going to come across to you as trivial, you’re going to misinterpret it,
you’re going to think it’s psychological, you’re going to think it’s a little
religious exercise or game, or something.
But you can’t get a real view of the gospel if you don’t have a real
view of these basic events.
When we come to evil, evil and suffering start here. That means that we
go back to the diagram of good and evil.
We’ve gone through this a number of times but let’s go through it
again. It doesn’t hurt to review. What
it does, it just rewrites our maps better.
Repetition builds a map and makes it more solid. Christians are often on the defense about
this. Satan, the evil one, will make you
on the defense. If you have a shocking
thing happen to you or a loved one the first thought that comes to your mind is
to blame God for it. It’s always
interesting; I’ve heard atheists who claim that God doesn’t exist curse God by
his name. Isn’t that a strange thing? If God doesn’t exist, what are you cursing
His name for? I’ll tell you why he’s
cursing His name. Because at bottom,
like Paul says in Romans 1, at bottom you’re not an atheist, at bottom you know
very well He exists and you know who to blame.
You know who allowed that to happen, of course you do, don’t try to tell
me you don’t believe God exists, it leaks our of your mouth every time you get
a problem. God exists and He is in
control. What happens is the pagans
always like to make it look like we’re the ones that have the problem. oh
Christianity has a problem with evil. So
let’s look at the pagan position. When you’re being exposed to viruses, you get
inoculated. That’s what we’re
doing. In this framework we’re exposing
ourselves deliberately to the world under a controlled situation, we get
inoculated, get vaccinated, we get little doses of the toxin just to see what
it looks like, and that’s how we learn.
In the non-Christian position good and evil coexist. Death, sin, sorrow, suffering, sickness,
adversity, everybody knows this. Here’s
the deal. In the non-Christian position
has it always existed? Yes it has. In the non-Christian position will it also
continue to exist forever? Yes it will because it’s part and parcel of
reality. There never was a time without
it, there’s no fall, there’s no transition point, there’s no time ever when it
wasn’t there. So it’s always going to be
here, no escape from it. As we’ve said,
this is the reason why we have Americans (Asian’s don’t do this, only stupid
Americans) that believe in happy reincarnation, the New Agers, going around
thinking it’s cool to believe in reincarnation.
The Asiatics have had centuries to think about this and they hate
reincarnation. They believe in it but
they hate it. How do you get off the
reincarnation wheel? Who wants to
reincarnate and go through this mess again, or for the thousandth time; I want
to get off of this thing. So what do
they do? They commit spiritual suicide
and go into nirvana. It’s a very eloquent
answer to this problem because it’s an admission that it doesn’t go away. This is the position if you don’t believe the
Bible.
The Bible says that God is good and always has been good and God has
never been contaminated by evil. This
will come out later in the doctrine of the impeccability of Jesus Christ, and
how He was tempted and yet He couldn’t be tempted. How do you get those two truths together,
because as God He is good, He never was contaminated with evil and could never
be contaminated with evil, therefore how could Jesus Christ be tempted? That’s a big discussion. But He was
tempted.
Down here we have creation and we have a time that’s between the
creation and the fall when there was no evil, so we know that evil cannot
always exist. Then we have the judgment when God separates permanently good
from evil. Our problem is that we have a
temporary problem of good and evil in between the fall and judgment. But it’s bracketed, it’s controlled. It’s not going to go on forever, it hasn’t
been forever. So it’s limited. It’s actually the Christian position that has
the limitation on good and evil. It’s not the non-Christian that has the big
problem; he just doesn’t understand that he’s got the problem.
This has behavioral consequences.
Now let’s look at question 5, How am I responding to evil and suffering
in my life or in the lives of others.
Again, back off and reflect how you respond to these kinds of
situations. Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal your map. When you respond, is your response when you
really look at how you respond, does that show one or the other positions. I’ve written this in kind of a funny language
in question 5, so let’s go through it.
I’ve always tried in both these alternatives to put the Biblical
position first and the non-Christian position second.
In a Biblical position, first of all, when I see a child die, a
tragedy, and you say what brought this into existence. What brought it into
existence? Seems like the Bible tells us
the story, Adam and Eve brought it into existence by a choice. Who brought death into the world? So what does that make me? Oh well, if I was in the garden I wouldn’t
have sinned. No-no, we all would have
because we participated, Adam and Eve are our representation. That’s why we’re sharing. We’re sharing the
results of Adam and Eve’s decision because in God’s mind they represented a
each one of us; you and I were represented by what they did, they are not
different from us, they are before God our representatives. You say that’s unfair. Do you know what I say in return? Then it’s unfair for Jesus Christ to
represent us in heaven, because He’s the Son of Man, the second Adam. You can’t have it both ways.
That’s why in question 5 the first part is “As a participant in its
historic origin,” so every time you see suffering in the world, you see
starvation, you see cancer, you see death, you see violence, before you get too
prideful and start well, gee kind of thing, you know, God needs advice from us
on how to run His universe, just think, we are participants in the historic
origin of that, whatever it is that’s shocking you at the moment. We are participants in the historic origin of
that. You are also a receiver of the
promise of its final end. Remember the
Apocalyptic literature we just got through studying. So we’ve already been told about this, we’ve
been told that He one day will do this; the separation one day will be
absolute, final and irrevocable between good and evil. By the way, that’s what makes sanctification
so painful, because it’s tearing us; pieces of us have to be jettisoned to make
us acceptable for eternal life with God.
Then other parts have to be redeemed. That’s the pain, that’s what’s
sorrowful about sanctification, it’s part of this process, getting ready for
the end. So do I respond this way, do I
participate in here, point F, I have the assurance of [can’t understand word],
therefore I’ve already cut this thing down to size, it’s not out of control as
in the non-Christian position.
If I don’t take that and I look at how I respond to suffering and evil
in my life, I could be responding…, and I have to detect this in my little
inner map, am I responding as a hopeless observer and a victim. If you consider yourself in the face of evil
to be a hopeless observer and a victim, you’ve got the wrong piece of the map
going. You’ve got to get the map
straightened out. How are you going to
get the map straightened out? You get
the map straightened out by constantly going back to these Biblical truths:
creation, the fall, the flood and the covenant, and reading the stories and
getting the imaginative food out of the text.
Now we go backwards one and come to question 4. As we go into that, remember the last event,
creation, fall, flood, covenant, remember I gave you a frame of reference for
that. The covenant, the fourth event, is
the picture, the Noahic family going out into the earth. We said there was excruciating detail, these
guys left maps, they mapped all of Antarctica before the ice cap, they set up
pyramidal architecture in the western hemisphere and the eastern
hemisphere. All of that was done before
Abraham; all that was done by the great-great-grandsons of Noah. That’s how genius these guys were. They navigated. In fact, they drew a map, we said the only
way you can measure longitude is the clock, you can’t measure it with a [not
sure of word], so if they made maps of Antarctica it must mean that these guys
had clocks. Where did they get the clocks from?
A sign of the geniuses of the sons of Noah.
We come out of that, and what we are, how do we relate to other people,
it’s a major issue in our society today.
It’s not theory, these are major issues.
How do I relate to other people?
Think about the covenant, think about creation. In both of those things God ordained certain
relationships. He structured them,
marriage, responsible labor, family, civil government, church. These are all
structures. We did not invent those.
They are not human sociological good ideas. They’re structures that God made. So then
when we ask the question, how do I relate to other people, that question is
usually answered far too rapidly for serious thought. When you ask that other
person, how should I relate to other people, they think uh, I should be good, I
should do this, I should do this, I should do that, it’s all me against them as
individuals. Once you start to try to
answer the question that way it’s wrong, you’ve missed something. You’ve missed structure. First, how are we all related to one another,
independently of our rights, skin color or anything. We are all related through
Adam, we all share the common DNA; we are all related. We don’t have to relate,
we are related, by position in Adam.
Moreover, most of us are related, even a closer bond physically, because
of our racial identity with the sons of David, probably. Most of us probably come from the sons of
David. So we’re related that way. We don’t have to try to relate, we do
relate.
Those are the structures. As a fellow member of God-designed
structures, the human race out of Adam and Noah, marriage, God made marriage,
it wasn’t a vote, it’s not a new idea that was created in 2000 BC, someone says
this is a cool idea, marriage is something that was ordained originally in the
Garden of Eden, period, that’s it; family, civil government and church. What happens today, here’s the “or” in that
sentence in point 4. [“How should I primarily relate to other people? As a
fellow-member of God-designed structures (human race out of Adam & Noah,
marriage, family, civil government, church) or as a fellow ethnic or as an
independent being?] Look at the “or.”
What’s happening today in discussion after discussion on talk shows,
television, books, newspapers and magazines, people want to relate as a fellow
ethnic, meaning part of my tribe, and when everything else breaks down, what do
people gravitate to? Their tribe. Want
some good illustrations? What’s going on
in Europe today, the last eight years?
The [not sure of word: sounds like Bulcans], what’s happening there, I’m
a Serb, I’m a Bosnia, I’m a Croatian.
When the whole society falls apart there’s no law, there’s no business,
there’s no banking, there’s no communication, there’s no police, there’s no law
and order, everything’s gone to pot.
[blank spot]
When you find on your map that you feel closer to somebody who’s
racially akin to you, closer to them in times of crisis than you do to a
believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you’ve got the wrong map. That’s the wrong map, you’ve got to correct
that, you’ve got to get more doctrinal truth down into that map and change
it. For some people it’s me, never mind
my fellow ethnic, it’s just me, I’m a super man, I’m Rambo, I’m the big
boy. That lasts till you meet somebody
bigger than you.
Question 6, involved in this as we came forward in time we came to the
fact that God redeemed us and He’s going to separate good and evil, so we have
the time of the disruption. We’ve
entitled that period of history from Abraham on down to David, the rise in the
kingdom of God in Israel, as The Disruptive Kingdom. Why did we call it The Disruptive
Kingdom? Because it disrupts the
paganization of society, it disrupts the good and evil pattern as normal. It’s an intrusion, it’s an interruption, God
doesn’t allow us to go on in history in evil. He reaches down and He interrupts
and He disrupts. So that’s His disruption, and that’s the history of the Old
Testament. He’s disrupting, interfering
with our culture. Why does He do
that? Because He’s going to separate
good and evil, He is going to solve the evil problem. Everybody wants God to solve the evil
problem. If God was good, if God was
powerful, surely He doesn’t love us, and if He loves us, then He’s impotent to
do anything about it; classic argument.
What is so ironic, what do you think He’s doing here? Aren’t these the preliminary steps in history
that He’s taking already to get it away, to deal with the evil problem? That’s the whole story here, you’ve missed
the point.
So question 6, “What do I view as the final evaluation of my life as a
human being?” Where am I going? We’ve talked so far this evening about our
maps, where we’ve come from; question 6 is where are we going to? What do I view as the final evaluation of my
life? What matters? Again, the
alternative. “Having my life completely
evaluated before my Creator and Judge,” like David, “or having my life
evaluated by its effects on fellow human beings or by my feelings at
death?” How I feel on my death bed? Yeah, I feel good today, I’m dying, so my
life is good. People are this way. If we believe that God has a plan and He’s
working His plan, He’s standing at the end of this program. This year we saw the fact that when we
examined how He ruled in Israel He has a disciplinary process; we learned that
this whole period of history. We watched
God interfering, messing around, judging these people, blessing these people,
cursing those people, it’s all part of the King’s discipline. This is how our God is, and he’s trying to
show us what His kingdom is going to require, what shape we have to be in to
come into fellowship with Him for all eternity.
We have to get in shape.
So what’s the view, the evaluation?
Is it more important to think in your map, your view, think about your
life, what’s more important? Does it
matter more what fellow human beings, this is not to say just go screw up here,
this is just saying whence comes the ultimate issue, where do I finally look to
decide issues of value for me. Am I
looking, even at my fellow believers?
They can be mirrors to point me to the truth, but they’re not the truth,
they point me to the Word of God, then I go to the Word of God. Why do we emphasize this, why do I make such
a point. Because “whatsoever is not of
faith is sin.” And if I’m responding to
what people think about me and allow their value system to teach me, where’s
the faith. Where did it go? It’s just pressure that’s going on here,
that’s all it is, it’s just peer pressure.
God wants more than peer pressure.
He wants us to personally know that He expects this, this, this and
this, then I walk by faith because now I’m trusting Him, now I’m God-oriented,
not human oriented.
All during this time period this year and last year we had two events
that played a key role in picturing salvation.
One earlier was the Exodus, judgment/salvation; before that we had the
flood. We emphasized that in
judgment/salvation it’s a public thing, it’s not just private, it’s historical
it’s not just our imaginations, it’s objective, not just subjective.
So now we come to question 7, “How do I view salvation? As the only
escape from evil or as a pleasurable optional ‘add on’ to life’s
experiences?” If you listen to some
gospel preaching today, the success gospel or something, if you make a thousand
dollars you can make two thousand more with Jesus. That’s an “add on.” It doesn’t challenge you, it gets back to the
same illustration I used a couple years ago when I said you can visualize this,
you move into this house, you want it redecorated it, you call up the
redecorator that comes and changes the curtains, the carpets, etc. and he shows
up on the front lawn with a bulldozer, he’s going to take the whole house down;
I didn’t ask for that, a renovation, I didn’t have that in mind. But that’s what Jesus does with the
gospel. He shows up as the
bulldozer. He takes the whole thing out,
starts all over.
“How I view salvation, “as the only escape from evil,” do we really
think that, that it is the only
escape for evil, or do we think there’s an option. Do I think of salvation as a replacement,
watch this one now, we studied this in justification by faith, “as a
replacement of my best works or as a means of helping me do better works?” Let’s read that one again: “as a replacement
of my best works or as a means of helping me do better works?” Does salvation
result in means to do better works? Yes
it does, but is that the basis of our being saved? What is the basis of our being saved? Our righteousness our Christ’s
righteousness? Christ’s righteousness,
and again, look at your map at times, review at times, and if you start
catching yourself thinking this way, say oh-oh, got a map problem here,
something’s not right. This doesn’t
happen all the time, but from time to time really seriously reflect on this to
see if these pieces that we’ve talked about, these framework doctrines are
really working and taking hold, or are they just entertainment on Thursday
evenings.
Do I think of salvation “as part of a universe-wide program or as a
private psychological experience?” What
do I mean by that? I mean that what
happens in my soul and your soul is related to what’s going on out beyond the
galaxies in the angelic realm. I’m
saying that what is going on in our hearts here in 1998 is vitally related to
what went on in the Roman Coliseum in 250.
There’s a connection, and the program of the Holy Spirit’s work in our
life is all through the cosmos, because Christ shall reign and EVERY knee shall
bow, in things in heaven and things on earth.
So there’s a universe-wide program going on, it is not a mere private
psychological experience. You hear this
sometimes in testimonies, well I accepted Jesus and here’s what He did for
me. That’s true, but if it’s left in
that language you know what happens; what does any greasy non-Christian do you
the moment he starts talking to you, well, that worked for you, I’m glad to
hear that, that’s great for you. There
goes the whole idea of the universal claim of the gospel, it’s just gets
swallowed up in the [can’t understand word.]
Do I think of salvation “as something initiated by God” or do I think
of it as a fact that it resulted because I searched for it. Is this to say that I searched? Yeah, but who was stimulating the
search? So in the end, how were you
saved? Was it because God did something
and He initiated the call to you, in some way, through circumstances, other
people in the family, other people in the work place, somehow? How did you become a Christian? What led you to that? Maybe pain in your life, pleasure, something,
emptiness, but it was God initiating it.
Finally, do we view salvation, and this is a little tricky, I had a
hard time wording this one, “as assuaging God’s wrath or as God’s arbitrary
forgiveness? By arbitrary forgiveness I
mean He just said oh, you’re a nice boy or a nice girl, we’ll forgive you. If that’s really what salvation is, why do we
have a bloody cross? What’s that
for. It’s quite clearly because there
had to be an assuaging of guilt here, there had to be a judgment going on, it’s
a bloody mess that was involved, it’s hell that was involved, it wasn’t just
because God felt sorry for us, and yeah, I forgive you. God couldn’t just forgive. Why couldn’t He? Think of His attributes, He’s righteous, He’s
holy, remember that’s what Paul said, the wonder of the gospel is that God
could remain holy and justify the sinner, Romans 3.
These are just some questions we’ve thrown out tonight for your
thinking and just going through getting the cream of the crop here out of these
basic events. There are fundamental issues; they impact our society all around
us, every day of our lives we’re operating on maps with these issues on them.
So they are areas we need to think about.
And in the last few minutes does anybody have questions on anything
we’ve said tonight or in the series.
Question asked: Clough replies:
God is a holy God, He has standards, standards are violated by sin. When you have a violation of a standard, how
do you fix it? Just in normal human
justice we know we have penalties that we pay.
But those penalties we pay in human justice are just an analogy of
God. Think about in the Old Testament,
before Jesus, people would confess their sin, but before they expected to hear
God forgave them, they had to do something.
What they had to do was bring a lamb and the priest had to slit the
lamb’s throat, a bloody mess all over the place, and that was the atonement for
the sin. The person couldn’t atone for
the sin; we have to be careful, nothing we do is sufficient to deal with that
violated standard. Nothing, absolutely
nothing! That’s the problem. Half the religions in the world would have
you believe that if you did 2082 good works that’ll balance the 152 bad works,
so it’s a scale problem. That has
nothing to do with the gospel of Christ. In the gospel of Christ Jesus Christ died on
the cross and in that dying He paid the price, not me; not because I wouldn’t
want to, it’s just I can’t, I don’t have the assets, because I’m a sinner, a
sinner can’t pay his own price. So Jesus
Christ as the innocent one had to come and He had to be condemned. That’s the tragedy of the cross, that’s why
for three hours He was in darkness on the cross and then finally after three
hours ended He said tetelestai, (tetelestai), “It is finished,” it’s
done with, it’s over.
So now we have to trust in Him, because God isn’t going to
automatically apply the results of that atonement, we have to trust Him for
that atonement. But apart from this, if
you don’t go along with the gospel of Christ and this atonement issue, here’s
what happens. You come over to another
position where God arbitrarily forgives; now you’ve got God Himself
compromising His own standard. In Romans
3 that’s why Paul says the wonder of the gospel is that God can be “just and
the justifier” of him who believes in Christ.
Paul knew his Old Testament, and he knew that the holy, righteous God of
the Old Testament could never, ever forgive sin without some sort of either
compromising His own holiness, or He had to somehow provide it. The Old Testament saints really never knew
how He was going to provide it, they just knew that, in fact, He would, and
they trusted the Lord that way. In the
New Testament we have a benefit the Old Testament guys didn’t have. We know how He provided it. So for us, we can directly trust in His work
of Christ on the cross. But it’s very
vital that we see this because you wind up diluting the holiness of God and you
turn His love into an emotional gooey sentimentality, God’s a good guy kind of
thing. He’s a loving God, but He’s not a
“good guy,” He’s holy.
Question asked: Clough replies:
The gravitation to a tribe, tribal allegiance, is probably the result of
the fact that God separated the nations right after, you know…, categories of
seventy out there, and we tend to identify with that. That’s true, but in the New Testament a real
issue is made against ethnicity. Do you
know what epistle it is? It’s the
epistle written to the city that lay between the Gentiles and the Jews. Rome.
It’s very interesting that if you read the text in the book of Romans, I
recently have been trying to get my [can’t understand word] back in Greek and
one of the things in reading Romans in the Greek that you see, in the English
Bible it says “to the Jew first and to the Greeks,” it’s not just a conjunction
of kai
(kai) that’s in there between the Jew kai (kai) and the Greeks, it’s got a little Greek
particle, te; (te); te kai, (te kai) and that little particle tells
us that it should really be translated as a couplet. So the way we would translate it would be
“both the Jew and the Greek together,” that would probably be a better
translation.
See, Paul had a problem because the Roman church had the ethnicity in
it, and they had this pride. The Jews
really got ticked off at the Gentile Christians. They got ticked off because the Gentile
Christians weren’t circumcised, they didn’t have any Mosaic Law and they
probably had rough backgrounds, and they’d come into the communion, to the
culture, and they’d bring all this garbage in with them. The Jews had maintained their ethnicity,
which is to separate and that was God-given too. But God called them to have fellowship and
God said there’s an absolute standard going on between us, and you guys had
better recognize that.
What I’m getting at there, in the ethnicity of our time it isn’t so
much that we don’t…I fully acknowledge we bond more with our own racial
identity, what bothers me about the ethnicity we see now in society, it’s
getting to be that the ethnicity controls values. The value question, the absolute standards,
are getting to be relativized, we
have our standards—well we have our
standards. Think about it, if you extend
that. Did Germany of the 1930 and 40’s
have their standards? Did everybody go
along with their standards in Germany?
What happened at Nuremberg? The
Allies came into Germany after WWII. Why
did we have the Nuremberg trials? They
were trying the Nazi war criminals. What
law did the Nazi law criminals violate? They didn’t violate any German law, did
they? They were just carrying out German orders. So how you could you convict a Nazi war
criminal on the basis of German law? You couldn’t. That’s why Supreme Justice
Jackson who was one of the judges at Nuremberg said the only way we can convict
at Nuremberg is to convict on the basis of a law that is above the provincial
and above the transient. At that point
in human history, it’s amazing, here are all these non-Christians running
around, they don’t believe in absolutes, but they wind up going back in the
trunk and digging up for the occasion an absolute, such that the Nazis, the
Americans and the Brits and the French, and the Austrians were all under the
same standard. And all of us now have
become “absolute-ers,” it’s convenient for us to do that. That’s an example of what we’re saying. What the tragedy is in ethnicity, the
ethnicity exceeds common standards of truth, falsehood and values, and even
language. Obviously everybody has their
own language; I’m not talking about different languages in the sense of Spanish
and English. I’m talking about the fact
that you have an utter non-communication going on, where not because of a
language problem but because of a perceptive problem, them vs. us, they’re
subhuman.
All I can say is the answer to that is get a friend of another race or
another culture; just get one and all of a sudden you discover that they’re
human. They have same problem I have,
and gee, the gospel means the same thing to them it does to me. If you don’t have that experience…, it’s a
cherished thing, you should really try someday, some time, to make a friend,
take an oriental person for example and get to know them as a Christian, find a
good Christian, and just learn… what you’ll sense is you’ll sense the Spirit of
Christ in that person and the Spirit of Christ in you, you have a bond. And it’s not a cultural bond. You don’t become oriental, he doesn’t become
occidental, those racial distinctions stay, but somehow there’s a bonding that
goes on, you recognize each other as a person.
And of course, [can’t understand words] That’s the point there. Yes, you’re right, there’s a tendency to do
that.
Question asked: Clough replies:
The exact description we wouldn’t have, we have pieces of the
description that are given in the pages of the New Testament, and when you look
at those passages that talk about us as children in Christ, and Christ in us
and we in Christ, it’s talking about the character of the Lord Jesus Christ in
His humanity. Keep in mind the Lord
Jesus Christ walked around the earth as a human being, and He was perfectly
righteous, the only human being that ever did that, perfectly righteous, He
dies, He resurrects, and He is ascended to heaven. He sends the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit
takes the qualities that He generated in His earthly life and begins to imbue
them in our hearts, begins, little by little, to make us aware of the Father,
make us aware of our sin, make us aware of God’s grace, and then at the same
time to empower us to live to the standards that Christ does. Now we’re not going to because we’re
sinners. But the impetus, the impulse
has been placed in the heart of the person who is a spiritual child of God. I’m not saying that… because their salvation
doesn’t depend upon this growth process, their salvation depends on the
righteous atonement of Christ.
It’s sort of like if I have a baby two years old, that baby is not an
adult, far from it, it has lots of growing to do, but can I say that the baby
is alive? Yes I can. But saying the baby is alive doesn’t make it
an adult. That’s the same way with us as believers. We are born again in Christ, we’re like the
baby, but we’ve got an awful lot of growing to do. And the fact that we’re not yet grown doesn’t
mean we’re dead, it just means that we’re not fully grown. So if you can think more in terms of just
physical life, make an analysis from physical life to spiritual life, it’s
remarkably similar. So we are born again
just like we’re originally born, we have life that was given to us at that
point, at the point of conception, and that life gradually expands and grows,
but the growth can’t be identified with the life. The life was there before the growth; the
life causes the growth, the growth doesn’t cause the life. That’s what’s so hard to grasp about when we
say we’re spiritual children of God, it makes it sound like we either are
goody-two-shoes or have been around, or sometimes it connote the wrong image to
people, that I am a child of God because I’ve done all these good things and
I’m accepted as a child in His kingdom. That’s not true. You can take a four year old child and he may
do good things, but he doesn’t become any less your baby because of those good
things; he was born into the family, so since he was born into the family, the
family status doesn’t change, whether he wets his pants or whether he says
goo-goo at the right time, the point still is he’s your child.
We’ll have to cut it here.