Biblical Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson 124
I want to finish up the area
that we’ve been studying on Christ’s kenosis.
In the birth of the King we’ve talked about the hypostatic union, we
said that the hypostatic union gives the basis for all the rest of the
Christology of the New Testament.
Failure to get a clear understanding of that hypostatic union is going
to lead to all kinds of confusion. Where
it starts in is where we get into the life of the King and we begin to look at
kenosis. To understand kenosis we have
to know the hypostatic union. In Phil.
2:5-8, a very central passage, the central section of the New Testament Paul
believed it was necessary, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to reveal this
truth about the person of Christ in order that He might be a model for us.
You’ll notice Phil. 2:1-4 is dealing with just practical church type
stuff. Yet when Paul goes to motivate
readers to do those things, he provides this big hairy, detailed, theological
statement about the person of Jesus Christ.
We commented before on this
and you’ll see it again and again in the pages of the New Testament. The New Testament does not present ethics as
ethics, because ethics by itself is just the law, it’s just legalism. It’s necessary, we have to have content to
what we believe is right and wrong, but knowing the content of what is right
and wrong doesn’t motivate. There needs
to be spiritual energy, spiritual empowerment, and that falls under what we
call the category of motivation. What is
the source of motivation? It appears
that the source of motivation is the theology and meditating upon these great
truths that Paul goes to great lengths telling us.
Again, if you’ll follow in
the text tonight just to root this in our minds, [Phil. 2:5] “Have this
attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, [6] who, although He
existed in the form of God,” an exact form of God actually, “did not regard
equality with God a thing to be grasped, [7] but He emptied Himself,” there’s
the word kenosis, “taking the form of a bondservant, and being made in the
likeness of men. [8] And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself
by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” The word
“humbled” shows that at the heart of Jesus’ model is humility toward God and
that in the Biblical worldview is the answer to the Greeks, it’s the answer to
Stoicism, it’s the answer to all the other ethics that are out there, that the
fundamental cardinal virtue in the Christian faith is humility before God.
That’s the result of
repentance if you think about it. Why is
repentance again and again in the New Testament? It’s necessary because the
natural flesh is arrogant. So how do you
go from arrogance to humility? You only
do that with repentance. Hopefully by
thinking of the Scriptures again, as we said over and over, in terms of
contrasting the Scripture with the world around us it helps clarify the truths
of Scripture.
We stated the doctrine of
kenosis, on the top of page 58 of the notes, and expanding on what Paul said,
the best definition is that kenosis does not refer to Christ giving up His
attributes. It does not refer to the
loss of His attributes. It does not
refer to the suspension of His attributes.
What it does refer to is the independent use of His divine
attributes. When it was okay with the
Father for the Son to utilize His attributes on earth, He did. There’s no reluctance, there’s no diminishing
of His attributes. Last time we went
through some of the illustrations of the kenosis, we showed His attribute of
omniscience, we took two attributes of Christ, on the divine side He had
omniscience, He had omnipotence. As a
human He had knowledge, and He had human energy. Sometimes He showed human knowledge, when He
asked for information from people He didn’t use His omniscience. He asked various questions to watch responses
to learn from that. Isaiah 50 said that
Jesus Christ had to be awakened each morning in His humanity to be taught the
Word of God.
Again and again He would show
human knowledge. But then there would be
those times when His omniscience would flash forth. So what do we make of this. Sometimes He
doesn’t appear to have omniscience, other times He does. And there are various theories that have
risen to account for that. We said that the true theology is that He was not
independently using His omniscience. He
only used it when it pleased His Father, that was it. We said the same thing with His omnipotence.
Beginning on page 58 we
started to go through the implications of kenosis. We want to be sure we understand those,
because tonight we go to a related doctrine, kenosis. We said there were three major applications
of kenosis. Just as all these truths
have many applications, many implications, kenosis leads to various
truths. One of them is the cardinal
virtue of humility. That is the model;
Christ is the model of that. It was the
greatest act of the cardinal virtue of humility ever seen in human history or
ever will be seen.
Please notice that humility
is not a characteristic of weakness.
This is omnipotent God the Son who is being humbled. We’ve got to get
out of our heads that humility before God means diminished strength. It doesn’t at all. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do completely with the will of God.
Arrogance is not powerful; it may think it is, because there’s a self-delusion,
a self-deception that accompanies arrogance that makes one think they’re powerful,
and makes one think of humility as weakness.
But you have to be careful about that, that’s the world impinging upon
us, that’s not Biblical, that’s not true, it’s a deception. We want to remember that in the Christian way
of looking at life humility is the cardinal virtue. Not humility before men, it’s humility before
God. There may be humility before men,
but that’s not the source of it, it’s humility before God.
Then we said, on page 60 that
the second implication of kenosis is that it reinforces the concept of divine
institutions, where you have authoritative relationships. Humility and authority go together. Humility recognizes authority, and authority,
in order to function, requires humility.
So these are related. In our
society, in our maturation, the cardinal virtue of humility is to be learned in
the home. This is why the Scripture
stresses honor your parents, honor your father and honor your mother. What’s involved in that? It’s the first lesson all of us learn about
authority and humility. In the Old
Testament, Deut. 21 and other passages, when a young man or a young woman
became a teenager in a Jewish home and had not learned humility, but instead
showed arrogance by abusing their parents, by doing their own thing, etc., it
was a capital offense. The parents, at
17 and 18 were to take that child down to the gates and if it proved true in a
trial before the elders, that child was killed.
God said that’s how you keep evil out of society. That might reduce the population a little bit
today, but nevertheless, that was the way God ran it. And we dare not criticize
those rules as being primitive. Those
rules are not primitive. After all, of all the sin that they had, they did not
have anybody shooting kids in schools in ancient
The third implication of
kenosis is found on page 61. It’s just an utterly incomprehensible thing that
Jesus Christ is the logos incarnate, and what we see as a result of His kenosis
is that it qualifies Him to be a sympathetic high priest. In John
But even in so-called
Biblical faiths of modern Judaism and Islam, they don’t have anything like John
What does this mean
practically? It means several
things. The first thing, turn to John
5:22, this is one of many verses, this is one of those passages that show that
Jesus Christ is a peer judge as well as an empathic priest. Because of His genuine humanity, because of
His kenosis, because of His successful execution of the Father’s plan in His
life, in John 5:22 it says “For not even the Father judges any one, but He has
given all judgment to the Son.” Now isn’t that interesting. We studied the
Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; there is a difference in the Trinity, and
which of the three persons of the Trinity judges the world. If you come out of a liturgical church I’m
sure you’ve had liturgy quoting one of the enthronement Psalms He comes, He comes,
to judge the quick and the dead, He comes to judge the world, etc. It’s not the Father, it’s not the Holy
Spirit, it’s the Son. This is the other
side of Jesus that the world doesn’t really like. What the world would love to have is some
weak Jewish carpenter boy.
But in the New Testament it
is precisely the Son of God who becomes the judge. Why is that?
It’s because Jesus Christ is a peer.
The closest thing we’ve got is trial by jury, where the jury has to come
out of peers. In the military, the code
of military justice, if an officer is being charged the jury has to be
officers, and if an enlisted person is charged the jury has to be
enlisted. Theoretically that’s the way
the court system is supposed to be in our country, except after the lawyers get
through paring away the stupidest people they can find in the room is put on
the jury. But in the New Testament and
in the Old Testament, trial was trial by people who could understand.
So what does this tell us
about Jesus Christ and kenosis? How does
this relate to kenosis? It relates to
kenosis because while in the kenotic state He had to face life exactly the way
we face life. That means that Jesus
Christ can understand, it means that He has empathy with us, and He, therefore,
can be an accurate judge. There will be no court of appeals beyond Jesus
Christ. He is the final court of
appeal. You can’t go to the Father and
appeal the judgment of the Son. What
does John 5:22 say? It says the Father
is not going to judge anything. He’s not
involved in a final oversight court in case the Son makes a mistake, and then
it gets passed to the Father. That’s not what we read here. The judgment is finished, it’s final.
Stated another, more blunt
way, is that it’s Jesus Christ commits people to hell for eternity. That’s a thing about Jesus you don’t normally
hear. Jesus Christ sends people to hell,
that’s His job. He’s been delegated that job by God the Father. Why does He delegate that to the Son? Because the Son has the authority to do that
because the Son can pierce through all the smoking mirrors and get down to the
“no excuse, Sir” type stuff. And nobody
is going to pull the wool over His eyes, nobody is going to say you don’t
understand. Oh yes I do understand, is
going to be the answer. It’s pretty
frightening. There’s no escape from this
judge who perfectly understands, it isn’t going to take bologna talk, no slick
lawyer is going to end run this One.
This is the final judgment.
Conversely, what did we say in the Old Testament when we dealt with Exodus and
the Noahic flood. Remember the doctrine
we tied with that, judgment/salvation.
Here we see the same thing. We
see He is a judge and He is an empathic priest.
Turn to Heb. 4:14. This verse has
so much in it; we just can’t spend time on it because this is not exegetical
Bible teaching. “Since then we have a
great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let
us hold fast our confession. [15] For we do not have a high priest,” watch it
because here comes kenosis, here comes the application of kenosis, “For we do
not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who
has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. [16] Let us
therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, that we may receive
mercy and may find grace to help in time of need.”
In verse 15 how is it that
Christ can be a high priest? What does
it say? It specifically says, in two
clauses it describes the same idea of Phil. 2:5-8, because He “has been tested
in all things as we.” So since He has
shared completely in the human situation, that’s what makes Him a great high
priest. What makes Him a good judge is
what makes Him a good priest. In both
cases the Father is really not involved in this. This is God the Son, and you can begin to see
after you look at Christ’s position as judge and priest why those who deny
Jesus Christ have got a real problem, because it’s precisely the person of the
Trinity that’s being downplayed, denied and compromised that is the center of
the whole story here. That’s why the
writer of Hebrews, whoever he may be, in verse 16 says, practical conclusion, I
can come with confidence. Notice he’s
not coming with confidence to the throne of judgment, nobody has confidence
there. This is the throne of grace.
There are two thrones,
there’s the throne of judgment and there’s the throne of grace, and Christ sits
on both of them. What makes the
difference? What is the cardinal virtue? The virtue is humility. What is humility? Repentance. What is repentance? Conversion from arrogance
to submission to His authority. That’s
the act of “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” So what changes our meeting ground from the
throne of judgment to the throne of grace is belief on the Lord Jesus Christ,
that’s the gospel.
Another interesting thing in
verse 14, just a little tidbit thrown in that’s really peripheral to our point,
but if you observe carefully, there’s a phrase in there that’s quite remarkable. “Since then we have a great high priest who
has passed through the heavens,” plural, and it shows you that Jesus Christ had
a trajectory when He ascended from the mount of ascent east of Jerusalem, really
the Mount of Olives is the mount of ascension, when He ascended there it says
He not only passed through the atmosphere, the ionosphere, the stratosphere
with His resurrection body, but He passed through multiple heavens to get to
wherever this throne of grace is. The
interesting thing about verse 14 is it’s very geometrical. It’s stating that in His resurrection body
He’s not omnipresent. Jesus is
omnipresent as the Son, but as the resurrected priest He is not omnipresent,
He’s located at a particular point. When we dwell in eternity we will see
Him. We won’t see Him simultaneously at
every place, but we’ll see Him where He is, wherever that is. His resurrection body is located at a point.
So there’s some place, some place
where Jesus Christ is tonight in His resurrection body.
How that ties in
geometrically, I’m convinced it has very profound implications for geometry,
because skeptics always put you down as a Christian, ha-ha, you stupid
Christians, in the northern hemisphere they look up, in the southern hemisphere
they look up, so how can Jesus be at one point?
Well, the line of sight must be directing to the Throne, so talk about
curved space or anything else, I think it has very interesting geometrical
implications. A person of the southern
hemisphere can look up and a person of the northern hemisphere can look up, and
somehow the line of sight converges on this point. Otherwise He wouldn’t tell us to look
up. This is another little gem in the
Scripture, everybody laughs at and tee-hees and thinks it’s a big joke, and the
jokes on them, because the joke is that obviously this is not Euclidean
geometry. The obvious think is that God
has another kind of geometry going on here.
It doesn’t affect God just because we believe in Euclidean geometry, it
doesn’t mean He runs the universe by it, it just means we’re arrogantly
thinking He should do it because that’s what we understand, therefore He should
run it by Euclidean techniques. Sorry!
Verses 14-16 emphasize this
same theme of the kenosis. On the bottom
of page 61, we’re summarizing the doctrine of kenosis. “Christ is the perfect model of
sanctification. He modeled the cardinal
virtue of humility toward God.” You might
put in the margin because I didn’t put it in the notes, but this is why the
Bible has four Gospels in it. We evangelicals
sometimes don’t do justice to those four Gospels. We’re in such a hurry to get to the epistles
all the time. 90% of evangelical sermons
are out of the epistles. 67% of
evangelical sermons ought to be out of the Old Testament, and about 15-20% more
ought to be in the Gospels, and then the epistles if we’re going to balance our
teaching and preaching the way God the Holy Spirit wrote the text.
“Christ is the perfect model
of sanctification. He modeled the
cardinal virtue of humility toward God.
He showed us what true submission to authority is. And because He had to utilize the filling of
the Holy Spirit in His faith walk, He has become an empathetic Intercessor for
us with the Father.” By the way, that’s
another point that I skipped when we were in Heb. 4. What does a priest do? A pries goes to God on behalf of the
people. A priest makes intercession for
the people. A priest carries on a
conversation rationally with God. So
here’s a priest who is talking to God, in this case the Son talking to the
Father and He’s arguing our case and presenting our case. You begin to see a connection here with
kenosis. What do you suppose Jesus
Christ does when He prays for us, one of the things? He’s explaining to the Father our problem,
because as one who is God and man, He knows by personal experience what we’re
like. Do you think that makes Him an
effective intercessor? Yes, because He
understands us.
“He has become an empathetic
Intercessor for us with His Father. Like
a test pilot puts a new airplane through its paces, beyond the envelop of
normal flight, Jesus Christ demonstrated
the Christian life perfectly in every area beyond levels we are likely to
experience.”
Now we move to the doctrine
of impeccability. This is another doctrine
that presumes we know hypostatic union, because if we don’t know the hypostatic
union we’re lost again. Let’s look at
the vocabulary word first. What does
“impeccable” mean? It means without sin. Impeccability is Christ’s perfection, and
there’s a problem with this. So follow
me in the notes, we won’t look up all these verses but if you’ve been in the
Bible any length of time you’re well aware of the content of these. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid them; it’s
just in the interest of time we need to go pretty fast.
“That Christ was morally
perfect is central to the Christian faith and one repeatedly mentioned in the
New Testament. The following verses are just a few that confirm the point. Luke
1:35; John 8:46; Rom. 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:21; Heb. 4:14; 7:26; 1 Pet. 1:19; 1 John
3:5.” Since we’ve just been in Heb 4:14, “Since then we have a great high
priest who has passed through the heavens,” we have “a great high priest,” so
the point is a priest had to be what in order to appear in the Old Testament? Think how a Jew would have thought. He had to be cleansed; he had to be morally
perfect to survive the righteousness of God, to dare to walk into God’s
presence.
“Nevertheless, many other
verses seem to show Christ behaving in a fashion considered today as rude,
impolite, and even eccentric. The Gospel
of Matthew particularly notes this behavior.” By the way, I think that’s
because again, what was Matthew’s background?
Who was the guy that knew all the political [can’t understand
word.] It was Matthew. “Jesus calls His opponents ‘snakes,’
‘hypocrites,’ ‘adulterers,’ ‘children of hell,’ and ‘whitewashed gravestones’
(Matt. 12:34; 15:7; 16:4; 23:15, 27).”
Not exactly what you would find in How
to Win Friends and Influence People.
“In spite of His own teaching not to call people fools in Matt. 5:22,
Jesus calls His enemies fools in Matt. 23:17, 19. In Mark 11:13-14 Jesus curses a defenseless
fig tree. In Matt. 15:26 He calls a
seeking Gentile woman ‘a dog.’ At least
twice He appears abrupt with His own mother (Matt. 12:48; John 2:4). In Matt. 8:21 Jesus is harsh toward
traditional Jewish family loyalties, and in John 2:15 He assaults businessmen,
damages their wares, and blocks public access.”
Is this a person with a
perfect life? He’s not going to be
considered a person with a perfect life today; not by today’s standards, Jesus
is not living a perfect life, and says the kind of things He says, physically
assaults people, and really almost at that point blocks public access. Think of the abortion clinic issue now. How do we reconcile this? Let’s think about this a minute, because we
as Christians have got to learn that this kind of stuff, and I’m putting it in
here with all its bluntness because it’s the kind of stuff that somebody is
going to nail you with someday, if you haven’t already had it dumped on
you. Somebody who is slick enough to
have read the New Testament is going to challenge you. It may be in the store, it may be at work, it
may be in your own family, so what do you do when somebody trots this stuff
out? Go into shock, faint, or do
what? We’ve got to think back through
something here.
First of all, is this
inaccurate? No, this is accurate data
from the Bible. So if it’s accurate data from the Bible, then since God is
rationally consistent, there must be some sort of solution to this. Now we personally may not be aware of it yet,
but there’s a solution out there. Think
about this for a minute, a person who objects to this sort of thing, who would
object to the behavior of Jesus Christ doing these things and saying these
kinds of things. You can understand how
people would object to this. You can
think of some nice, very ethical, gentle, well-cultured people that are among
your personal acquaintances or your family circle that would just, if they
could see… thankfully they don’t read the Bible so they’re not aware of this,
but if they did read the Bible, or if there was an honest Hollywood producer
who produced the Lord Jesus Christ saying these things and doing these things,
I think a lot of people would be genuinely shocked. They would certainly say to themselves, if
not to us in our hearing, they would certainly be saying to themselves in their
own heart, wow, I’m not so sure that I think so much of Jesus now, not after
seeing this.
What do we do now? What’s happening here is judgments are being
passed as to what? A standard of
behavior. Think about this. If Jesus is the standard and this is what
He’s doing, and we’re condemning Him by another standard, what does this tell
us? Let’s take this logically one step
at a time. It tells us that our
standards by which we are judging don’t look too good. It ought to start wheels turning in our minds
about the standards that we use to judge everyday behavior, are they
right? Maybe they aren’t right. If those standards turn out to fault Jesus,
and He is the standard, then our standards must be wrong.
I work with instrumentation
all the time and we have such a thing called calibration, and when you’re
calibrating a thermometer, or a barometer or any kind of sensor, one of the
rules is that you always have to calibrate it with an instrument at least ten
times more accurate than the one you’re working with, on all the way back to the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, the NIST standard. So if I have a thermometer and I think it’s
right, I’ve used this thermometer, I’m very comfortable with it, and I start
saying let me just check it against a standard, and I find it’s .8 degrees
Celsius off, now what am I going to say, well gee, I’m comfortable with this,
throw out the standard, the standard must be wrong. I don’t do that, we wouldn’t do that.
What do we do every time we
see stuff like this in the Scripture?
Inwardly there’s a tendency to chuck it.
Inwardly there’s a tendency to impose a standard that we carry around
with us that we’ve socially learned, we’ve become culturally conditioned to it,
and we’re using that as a standard to evaluate Jesus. I say the problem is exactly the
opposite. If our standard condemns
Jesus, then our standard is wrong. Now
let me extend the logic a little further.
Watch the next paragraph.
“Before someone naïvely talks
about being ‘Christlike,’ he ought to explain this apparent discrepancy between
Jesus’ claim to sinlessness and His reported behavior. Modern observers, so
heavily conditioned by present-day psychological models of ‘ideal’ personality,
are upset by this discrepancy. Psychologist
Paul Vitz” who by the way is a great Christian guy, he became a Christian later
in life, he taught psychology for many years at New York University, a lot of
nuts around New York so he had to go out of business. “Psychologist Paul Vitz is right when he
notes ‘Certainly Jesus Christ never lived nor advocated a life that would
qualify by today’s standards as ‘self-actualized.’ The problem, however, doesn’t lie with Jesus;
it lies with present-day personality theories.
Vitz’ notes in his book the anti-biblical assumptions between these
modern (and mostly existentialist) theories.”
“Describing Jesus’ sinless
but disturbing personality, Karl Adam writes: ‘From a purely psychological
point of view, this humanity is characterized by an enormously powerful
will.” Jesus was humble toward God, but
in His life, His will was anything but weak.
It was precisely because He submitted to the Father and was certain
therefore of what the Father wanted Him to do and He did it, that comes off not
weak, that comes off as strength. “… an
enormously powerful will. Jesus knew
what he wanted. He knew it as no one
else did. In this entire public
ministry… we cannot point to a single moment when he pauses to consider, or
where he reflects, or where he takes back any word or deed.’” Please notice
that, underline it and circle it because there’s another little tidbit about
the person of Jesus and these obnoxious unbelievers who always like to talk
about the good and gentle Jesus. Well,
where did the good and gentle Jesus ever admit He made a mistake? Where’s the good and gentle Jesus ever taking
back anything, ever apologizing for anything?
See, Jesus is somebody special; you can’t categorize Him with all the
rest of the good, nice people. He either
is who He claimed to be, or He’s a liar and a lunatic. He doesn’t let you be in that comfort zone,
He pulls you out. “‘From the beginning
he appears as a finished, mature man.’”
The next paragraph has
important implications today in our institutions. “Jesus’ personality is disturbing because it
is perfectly holy and in active contact with the sinful, unholy world. Being ‘Christlike’ is not necessarily,
therefore, being conformed to what modern psychological theory regards as the
ideal or healthiest personality. For
this reason Christian psychologists ought to develop new standards for the
model personality, based not upon man’s speculations or statistical
distributions, but upon the objective revelation of Christ. Would Christ, for example, be hired by a
modern corporation which filtered job applicants on the basis of what modern
theories consider mentally healthy personality?”
Institutions and corporations
do this, they have filtering exams. I
know one of them, a very famous national exam, that used to be given 20 years
ago by a lot of corporations. And if you
were an evangelical Christian and you really let your beliefs hang out while
you were answering these questions, you got downgraded. If I remember, you lost 13 points just if you
believed that prayer was answered. This
is what idiot corporations use. That’s because they’re run by unbelievers,
institutional fools. What they do is the
enscripturate their foolishness into every company policy. And this is a good example of it. Jesus would flunk some of these personality
profiles. He really would. What’s the
problem? It gets back to how we started
this series. Light has come into the
world, and why is it that men don’t admit to Jesus Christ? Because of the darkness of the world, because
men love darkness rather than light and neither come to the light lest their
deeds be reproved. Why don’t the
psychologists come to Jesus and submit, and say He is the model
personality? Because men love darkness
rather than light, lest their deeds be reproved. Are we saying necessarily killing people, bad
deeds? Not necessarily, it could be good
deeds done out of self-righteousness, the self-actualized personality.
When you think about it, that
is a very arrogant statement, self-actualized personality, I do it my way. That’s an institutionalization of the virtue
of arrogance and independence of the Creator.
It’s the exact opposite of humility before the Creator. No wonder many of these personality profiles,
I’m not saying all of them, but many of them are really weird and far out, even
though they can be done and composed by PhD’s by the ton. Many of these profiles that I’m talking about
weren’t made by stupid people. A lot of
work went into them, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
research. The problem is what was the
research? The research was statistical,
looking at a group of 1000 people and saying who were the people that
excelled? What do you mean by
excelled? Oh, well, now what’s happening
to the guy that designed the questionnaire for the statistical study? He’s got his definition of excel. Where did he get that definition at? His worldview. Now the worldview gets embedded into the
definitions of the questionnaire so now what about the physical results of the
questionnaire? They simply are numbers
that reflect.
Who are you sampling in any
questionnaire? Did you sample Adam
before the fall? Was he part of the
statistical sample? No. Are we sampling
Jesus? No. Now it seems to me we’ve excluded the two
guys, one was originally created perfect, the other guy was the God-man Savior,
perfectly righteous and you’ve excluded them from the statistical study, so now
what do we have left to put in to make statistic about? So now what does the norm mean in the center
of the bell-shaped curve? It means the
average of fallen statistical sinners.
That’s the average sinner. Then
we turn around and build a profile off the bell-shaped curve that really is
measuring the statistical medium of sin, and say Jesus doesn’t fit the
profile. Well, no kidding, guess
why? This is an example of how subtle
this is, and people can lose their jobs by this, you can lose your promotions
by this sort of stuff, and it has nothing to do with you personally. It has to do with the foolishness of the
institution that you work for.
Let’s state the doctrine of
impeccability. “To state the doctrine of
impeccability, one has to examine these two expressions.” The theologians expressed these back in the
days when Latin was used as the language of precision, so we’re going to look
at a little Latin here. “(1) ‘not able
to sin,’” and you see the Latin word “(non
posse peccare),” Latin infinitive.
And “(2) ‘able not to sin’ (posse
non peccare).”
Let’s stop and look at these
two. Let’s look at the language very
carefully. “Not able to sin,” and “able
not to sin.” What’s the difference
between these two phrases? A strong
difference exists. The first one is
perfection that can never fall, “not able to sin.” The second on leaves you uncertain, a person
“able not to sin” but maybe they might.
Clearly Adam was statement (2) at the point of his creation. Statement (2) unquestionably applies to
Adam. Does statement (2) also apply to
Jesus in so far as it says the truth?
Yes. Was Jesus “able not to
sin?” Sure He was. But here’s the question. Does statement (1) apply to Jesus, and if
statement (1) applies to Jesus what does that do to the reality of
temptation? So this has created a big
debate in Christian circles.
We want to proceed carefully
here, because I said you can’t understand kenosis and impeccability if you
don’t understand the hypostatic union first.
Let’s not be sucked into a blind path.
However we deal with this we’ve got to remember who it is we’re dealing
with, the hypostatic union; Jesus is God as well as man. Does statement (1) apply to God? You bet.
Then which of the two most clearly expresses the God-man? Do you see the problem? That’s why theologians have a problem with
this. If Jesus Christ is tempted and He
wasn’t able to sin, how could He be tempted?
And yet we have to adhere that statement one somehow does apply to Jesus
because He is God. So as God statement
(1) applies to Him, as man statement (2) applies to Him. How do we work these two together?
Page 63, “Good Reformed
theologians have taken both sides of this question. Charles Hodge, for example, thought that
statement (2) must apply to Christ” and not statement (1) “because he held that
it must be possible for one to fall or sin in order to insure that any
temptation would be real.” Why do you suppose they’re concerned about the
temptations of Jesus being real? Because
of kenosis. How could He not be
genuinely tempted and come out as our sympathetic high priest. “He was tempted in all points as we
are.” This is how doctrine is related,
it’s like a sweater, you get rid of one of these little pieces of yarn and the
thing starts unraveling, so you’ve got to be careful. One doctrine protects another doctrine. You don’t ever take a doctrine by
itself. Ultimately when you deal with
one doctrine you’re going to deal with all doctrines. [blank spot]
“William Shedd, however, held
that statement (1) applies to Christ because he observed it was impossible for
Christ as God-man to sin without fracturing the hypostatic union and the
sovereign plan of God.” So the Hodge-Shedd
discussion is critical to think this thing through. Let’s work through this a minute, and
hopefully we’ll come out tonight with some sort of resolution to this.
“Hodge was obviously trying
to protect human responsibility” Was he not?
The reality of temptation, yes.
“Shedd focused on divine sovereignty.
The problem of resolving these two truths arises again and again in
Biblical thought. (In the next chapter
we encounter the dilemma in connection with the death of Christ—for whom did
Christ die?)” Did Christ die for every
man or did Christ die for the elect only.
If Christ saves and His death doesn’t apply to the non-Christian, then
did He really die for the non-Christian?
To get involved in all of that we’re going to have to come right back to
the same problem here. All these problems come right back to this, human
responsibility and divine sovereignty.
“To clarify matters we must dig a little deeper into the language and
logic being used to discuss the question, using our knowledge of the
Creator/creature distinction and the Trinity.”
Always check how a question is asked before you try to answer it.
“The Biblical question,” this
is a clarification of the language first, before we get to the logic. Be careful about alien ideas that we bring
into our conversation because the vocabulary we are using we have learned out
there in the world system, we bring it into a discussion and all of a sudden we
realize, oops, we brought in through our language alien thoughts to Scripture. So let’s be careful.
“The Biblical question
doesn’t involve abstract categories such as ‘free will’ and
‘determinism’.” Free will being you can
do what you want to, determinism is that you’re biologically determined, that
sort of thing. “To phrase the question
as though free will and determinism are locked in mortal combat implies that
both categories are universal and apply to all existence, including the Creator
and the creature, in the same way.
Saying that, however, puts the speaker solidly in the pagan camp
believing in the Continuity of Being.”
You can’t have a category that’s identical to God and man, to say that
you have violated the Creator/creature distinction. “The question rather is: how do the analogous
qualities of the Creator’s choice,” that is His sovereignty, “and the
creature’s choice” human responsibility, how do those two “coexist? One expresses the incomprehensible nature of
God,” divine sovereignty, and “the other describes human design,” human
responsibility.
“To avoid drifting into the
logical contradiction of free will versus determinism, it is better to use the
terms ‘divine sovereignty’ and ‘human responsibility.’ The adjectives ‘divine’ and ‘human’ remind us
of the fundamental Creator/creature distinction that underlies all our
experience.” Watch this flow now. “As undiminished deity,” we know that from
the hypostatic union, “Jesus possessed divine sovereignty,” so He possessed
divine sovereignty but He was also true humanity, “as true humanity He
possessed human responsibility. In the
first statement above,” let’s look at this statement, if these two did apply to
Jesus, for the sake of argument we’re going to say they do. “Not able to sin” reflects God’s unchanging
holiness that God is not able to sin.
He’s not able to lie, He’s not able to sin, and Jesus Christ was
God. So if statement one applies to
Jesus Christ in His divine sovereignty, what happens to this little vocabulary
word [able], and is this little vocabulary word in statement (1) meaning the
same thing as the vocabulary word in statement (2). This is where you can get really screwed up
because you don’t notice things happening and we don’t consciously bring into
our vocabulary and our logic and our discussions the Creator/creature
distinction. So watch what we’re saying.
“In the first statement
above, ‘not able to sin’ refers to the uncreated divine nature. The verb ‘able’ here takes on meaning from
the divine sovereignty.” God is not
able. “The second statement ‘able not to
sin’ refers to the created human nature.
In this statement the verb ‘able’ takes on meaning from human
experience. Because of the hypostatic
union, both must apply to Jesus Christ. The verb ‘able’, therefore, has different
meanings in the two statements. No
logical contradiction exists. Other
Scripture supports this truth that Jesus was constrained (John 5:19)” says I
can only do what I see My Father doing, “and free (John 8:35-36) at the same
time.” In John 8 He says I make you free
and if you are free you are free indeed.
[John 5:19, “Jesus therefore answered and was saying to them, ‘Truly,
truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something
He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son
also does in like manner.’” John
8:35-36, “And the slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does
remain forever, [36] If therefore the Son shall make you free, you shall be
free indeed.”]
Jesus is at once constrained
and free. So why there appears to be a
contradiction is because we’ve loaded those two verbs with identical
meaning. We’re using Aristotelian
categories in our thinking, and we said “able” means the same thing in
statement (1) as it means in statement (2).
That can’t be. Why can’t it
be? If this refers to Jesus’ deity, it
means that God’s nature and character can never sin. We know this from statements repeatedly in
Scripture. But “able” in this case is a
description of what? The essence of God,
the essence of the Creator, it labels His incomprehensible being. But this verb, when it’s talking about Christ
in His humanity is talking about the creature capacity, capacity for choice,
capacity for response. So since the word
“able” does not have the same meaning in statement (1) and (2) you can’t show
that there’s a contradiction between them.
You cannot understand how they’re tied together but if we understood
how they’re tied together then statement (1) would not be
incomprehensible. And if statement (1)
were comprehensible, then it would say that we in our finite mind have totally
enveloped our God. That is a denial of
the faith.
So if this leaves you on the
prongs of a dilemma and you feel well, gee, it isn’t totally resolved, do you
know what you’re feeling? You’re feeling
the incomprehensibility of God right at that point. And this is where things like disasters in
life, why the problem of evil will always come up like this, and it leaves you
feeling like you’ve got two feet, and they’re both on different platforms and
it’s a little uncomfortable, but it’s not logically incoherent. The unbeliever loves to say this is a logical
contradiction. That’s not true. That is not a correct statement. That is not
a logical statement. That is an
irrational label, because in order to show a contradiction between these you’ve
got to show the identity of the language.
You haven’t done that and you’re not able to do it. So you can’t demonstrate there’s a
contradiction but on the other hand we can’t get the two statements together to
fully understand how they interplay. So
let’s go on.
“Genuine temptation,
therefore, does not require the ‘possibility of failure’,” here’s where I tried
to get into the meaning of these words a little bit, so follow with me word by
word, it’s my attempt to try to state something here. “Genuine temptation, therefore, does not
require the possibility of failure if by ‘possibility of failure’ we mean that
history is indeterminate, that its final outcome is ultimately the result of
creature choices, atomic motions, and a plethora of other ‘clauses.’ If instead we mean by ‘possibililty of
failure’ an unknown piece of the overall
plan of the Creator, then temptation is adequately pictured.” In other words, you can walk into a
situation, let’s take Jesus in Gethsemane for a clear picture of this. He goes
into Gethsemane, He knows what’s going to happen, the cross is right
there. Jesus has a choice; right up to
the last minute of the cross He has a choice, doesn’t He. And you know that it’s a choice, because what
is He praying about? The disciples are
all sacked out, but what is He praying about?
“Let this cup pass from me.” Do
you get the impression it bothers Jesus?
Yeah! Is He thrilled about
this? I wouldn’t say so. He’s bringing
it to prayer, as a human being in His humanity He’s able not to sin; He’s able
to choose to go to be with the Father.
He’s able to choose the will of God for Him.
You’re an outside observer
and you’re watching Jesus praying in the garden, and you’re saying is He going
to make it or not? But let’s suppose
there are two of you. One of you is a
Biblical observer and the other one is a non-biblical observer, pagan
thinker. The pagan thinker looks at
Jesus and says, gee, history is really uncertain, it’s a throw of the dice,
nobody, not even Zeus know what’s finally going to come about because after
all, the gods fight among themselves on Mount Olympus, they can’t get together,
so I know that the gods don’t know for sure, they know more than I do, I have
an IQ of 90 and Zeus might have an IQ of 900, but the problem still is that he
can flunk. So the pagan sits there all
this time thinking of history as a roll of the dice. So what can he do? He can only estimate, based on Jesus’ past
character how it’s going to come out, but not really sure how it’s going to
come out. He’s furthermore saying no one
else knows how it comes out, including Jesus.
See the hidden implication, there is no total knowledge here, it’s just
a roll of the dice. He thinks that’s how
he’s guaranteeing freedom of choice. He
thinks the only way to guarantee freedom of choice is to have total uncertainty
in history. So he sits there wondering
which way are the dice going to go. Gee,
I wonder if Zeus and everybody else gathers on the Mount of Olives to find out,
all the gods and goddesses come to see, because none of them, whether they have
a 900 IQ or a 90 IQ can tell what’s going to happen, because nobody knows
what’s going to happen. That’s
indeterminate history.
Over here we have a Biblical
observer. He looks at this, and he doesn’t
have any more information than the pagan.
He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but what’s the difference? The
difference is he knows the One who does know what’s going to happen. He knows that his god is not a Zeus on Mount
Olympus with a 900 IQ. My God is the
Creator of the universe, who’s planned this from all eternity. And while I don’t know what it’s going to be
like, I know that He knows. I know
there’s a perfect plan here, and as a Biblical observer becomes more and more
informed, he realizes this is the Son of God and the Son of Man, there’s going
to be no failure here. So he knows the
outcome is guaranteed. It’s not a roll
of the dice.
So you see you can come to
the same thing, it gets back to presuppositions again. Both these observers are looking at exactly
the same data, and they’re coming to wildly different, exaggeratedly different
conclusions. That’s why, when we discuss
the temptation issue and the reality of temptation, the doctrine of
impeccability, we’ve got to discipline ourselves to approach this thing out of
a Biblical perspective in every area. We’ve got to watch out for slippery
Aristotelian logic that leeks into our thinking, that we’re so used to using
day after day. And all of a sudden it’s
failing us here. We want to be careful,
this is heavy stuff.
What we’re saying is that “in
the case of Jesus Christ, however, we must further ask about whether temptation
under the ‘not able to sin’ condition (i.e. it wasn’t in the plan of God for
Him to sin) is somehow less of a problem than temptation is for fallen beings
like ourselves. Did Jesus, in other
words, not really enter into the struggles we face? B. F. Westcott, who lived in the nineteenth
century along with Hodge and Shedd, gives us insight into what it means for a
sinless being to be tempted. His classic
commentary on the epistle to the Hebrews puts the matter well: ‘Sympathy with the sinner in this trial does
not depend on the experience of sin but on the experience of the strength of
the temptation to sin which only the sinless can know in its full intensity.’”
“Following Westcott, one can
imagine a ‘temptation pressure’, pictured in Figure Four, which rises with
resistance to the temptation. The
pressure is relieved when one gives in and sins (line B). A sinless creature such as Jesus never gives
in and, under the sovereign plan of God, might continue to experience the
temptation and experience an intensity never encountered by a creature who sins
(line B)”
“The doctrine of
impeccability, therefore, states that Jesus Christ, though genuinely tempted
beyond anything any other creature ever experienced, could not sin. As the One
having true humanity and undiminished deity coexisting in one Person forever,
Christ would always be victorious, even though kenotic during His life on
earth.”
--------------------------------
If that didn’t strain a few
brains, I don’t know what will. I’m sure
there are some questions.
Question asked: Clough
replies: He’s wrestling, like I’m sure
everybody else is, you understand the implications if Jesus did sin, shattering
the plan of God and rupturing the hypostatic union and everything else. The
question gets back to what had God sovereignly planned here. Is it absolutely necessary, we’ll see this as
an implication of impeccability…let me go out on another area that might help
us think this through. In answer to the
question of evil, Christians often given the answer that God had to allow sin
in order to demonstrate the existence of free will, that somehow free will, in
order to be seen has to be seen as being exercised over to the negative side as
well as the positive side. I do not
believe that’s a complete answer, in fact I don’t even think it’s a Biblical
answer. I don’t believe that God had to
allow the fall in order to demonstrate free will or human responsibility.
An example of this is once we
have the period of history called the probationary period, the period of grace,
between the fall and the judgment, free will isn’t done away with in
heaven. Free will is not done away with
today among the angels that serve God that are loyal. You can’t say that God said, oh well, I let them
choose for or against Me and now I’ve reprogrammed their computers so now they
are robotically set never to fall. Yet
it is in the plan of God that none will.
It is in the plan of God that eternity is absolutely secure and free
from all fall. How does He accomplish
this? How is this pulled off, so that sin is guaranteed forever and ever never
ever to be a threat, without at the same time somehow tampering with the
volition of the people who dwell in the Kingdom of God for all eternity?
Somehow it happens, which
gets back to a deeper question, that viewed from God’s plan, and this is the
way you have to think about it, viewed from God’s plan it was not possible for
Jesus Christ in His humanity to fall.
God, from all eternity planned the cross, planned the salvation act of
the cross, always as part and parcel of this plan of Jesus, because after all,
what was the righteousness that we share?
The righteousness that He generated in His life as the God-man. That means that all the time He was facing these
temptations they were genuine temptations.
Certainly Matt. 4 when He’s talking to Satan, they were genuine
temptations but what we’re saying is the existence of the temptation does not
require as its corollary a threat inside the plan of God, that once God decrees
history to move in a certain direction there’s a certainty to the decree
because He’s decreed it.
That’s why I’m saying what
we’re dealing with here is hard because it’s the same thing that we run into
all across the board. It’s just tonight
when you get into the person of Christ because He’s God and man together, it
comes out more clearly. But it’s not any
different than, for example, why is it some people believe and some people
don’t? Why is it that Satan fell? The answer goes back to the fact, because God
established history under His decree that way, period. Because the only alternative you have to that
view is what I said, it’s the pagan view, that history is a set of marbles,
there is absolutely no plan whatsoever to history. You can’t have half a plan. You either have marbles or you have a
plan. You either have sovereignty or you
don’t.
Question asked: Clough starts
to reply, is interrupted, someone else makes a statement: She is pointing out that the language in
here… see, you can’t use words without automatically importing meaning that
comes in with the words. There’s no such
thing as a neutral word. That’s what’s
going on in this discussion. What I tried to show there was that Jesus Christ
can’t be divided half and half. Remember
statement (1) and statement (2). The
problem is both of them have to apply to the one person. What does the
hypostatic union say? It says
undiminished deity is united in one person without confusion forever. One or the other statements has to apply here
as the ultimate statement, as the ultimate statement about what’s going
on. All that Shedd is saying is that if
you negate one, what you have done is that you have slighted the deity of
Christ, because the One person is God and is man. What you’re dealing with here, going back to
what she is saying, is that this “able” (this one right here) probably carries
with it so much baggage the way we use it in our everyday language that it’s
distorting our thinking about what that statement (1) is saying.
Debbie gave the illustration
of a father who is perfectly capable of physically assaulting his child, and
yet he loves the child and certainly will not do it. That’s the sort of thing that’s meant by this
right here, because God has His character He’s not able to sin, never wants to sin. But because Jesus Christ is one person, not
two, He shares both the divine nature and the human nature and under the plan
of God, as He is sanctified, He loves the Father with all His heart, there’s
not any sin Him, and He loves the Father with all His heart and that is a
finite reflection in His humanity of His infinite holiness. It’s inconceivable that in His infinite
holiness He would ever sin. The problem
is, you’ve got this linkage in one person forever. That’s what the theologians are dealing with
on the Shedd side of the controversy. What they’re trying to do is to show the
impossibility of the destruction of the sovereign plan of God, which is rooted
not in arbitrary sovereignty, like some hyper-Calvinists think, it’s rooted in
the very character and being of God.
Wade pointed out that he
feels right now, and I’m sure all of us have this sense, that he wants to break
rationality and make an existential decision.
That’s very much the kind of atmosphere we have lived in, our society,
for the past hundred years. That would
never have occurred to any of us if we had lived in America in 1780 or 1690,
that’s a statement that’s a very 20th century statement. I feel like I’ve got to break out of
rationality and just choose. Why we feel
that way isn’t because of some inherent view of how we think, it’s because of a
particular way we have been taught to think.
It gets back to the fact that when we can’t demonstrate that sentence A
and sentence B fit together, we can demonstrate they don’t conflict, but we
can’t demonstrate they go together.
Let me give you a neutral
illustration of the same kind of thing so it’s not theological. For years and years, for centuries men in
western history were brought up on Euclid, and remember from high school,
Euclid has his postulates, had his axioms, at the beginning of the book in
plain geometry. One of those axioms was
the parallel line axiom. What was the
parallel line axiom? If I have a line
and a point outside the line, then I can draw one and only one parallel line
through that point. Euclid said that’s
the axiom, and that along with the other axioms, we built theorems and
corollaries and you built up geometry, everything was rational, everything was
logically consistent. However, what then
happened was that somebody, very perceptively, in the 19th century
noted that that’s not axiomatic, that one and only one parallel line can be
drawn through a point outside of a line.
And if you want a good example of it in 3-D, it’s a sphere. You can draw different lines through that
point in a sphere. So that’s when
non-Euclidean geometry started, in the 19th century.
But they were logically
consistent, so then the mathematicians were sitting here, going like this, like
we are tonight, saying that I’ve got Euclidean geometry, they’re all perfectly…
I mean guys sweat doing thesis to make sure that theorems followed from that,
everything was rational over here in the Euclidean camp. But everything is rational over here in the
non-Euclidean camp. So now which one
fits the real scene? Do you know—we don’t
know today. Nobody knows.
It’s that sort of dilemma
that’s come up with the human thinking. Let me follow this through. What has happened is that people are
retreating from the use of reason and leaping in the dark making all kinds of
decisions. They’re fatigued, they’re
depressed. This is an intellectual form of depression, don’t bother me, I just
want to choose, I’ve got to live, come on, I haven’t got time for all this
stuff. That’s the climate that’s happened
in the last one or two hundred years.
The reason we feel that is because is back when all this existential
stuff was going on, what we were doing in our culture is we were doing exactly
what the pagans had done prior to bouncing off the Bible in the days of the
Roman Empire when the gospel first went out into what we call Western
Europe. What has happened is that
everybody has forgotten the fact that there is rationality, hyper rationality,
in God. So He certainly knows, Euclidean
and non-Euclidean, He knows which one fits.
The problem is I’m finite and I don’t have enough data to decide. But because I don’t have enough data to
decide doesn’t mean I break out of rationality and go irrational, IF I have what? In other words, if I’m sitting here I’ve got
a dilemma, I can say I’ll stay and I’ll try to work it out rationally, or I go
over here and I throw away… I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know what the
answer is, I just choose. That’s
existentialism.
This is genuine by the way,
this Euclidean and non-Euclidean thing limits the rationality, that’s very
real, that can be shown to be proved. So
faced with the destruction over here, I start walking in this direction. But the difference between walking in this
direction as a pagan and I get out here and I just choose, what I do Biblically,
and we all do this if we think about it, if we are born again and we have a
heart for God, we are automatically doing this, we’re just not thinking about
it, when we’re prompted by the Spirit we’re doing this, and that is, when you
face an evil situation and you don’t have an explanation for it, and your heart
cries out for an explanation for it, what do you do as a Christian? Do you just say well, I don’t know what it
is, so, must not have a reason, there’s no reason to this, no reason for my
sickness.
None of us act that way. What do we do? We fall back on the fact that He knows. What are we doing rationally at that point
and why is that decision not a violation of reason? That is not an existential decision. Modern theologians are wrong, that is not an
existential decision, that’s completely different from what’s going on over
here. In this case there is no reason in
me or anywhere, that’s existentialism, that rationality I see doesn’t exist in
me, I see it doesn’t exist in you, I see it doesn’t exist in the human race,
and therefore I extrapolate and say that there’s no reason anywhere! No purpose anywhere! Do you see what I’ve done? I’ve universalized out of my finite
experience I’ve made a universal. What
is the universal? That there’s no
reason, no purpose, nowhere anything.
Why? Because I can’t find it in
here.
What are we doing as Biblical
Christians? We’re saying yes, we agree
with you Mr. Pagan, we’ve come to the end of our rationality also. We can’t find meaning and purpose in here
either. But we know where to go to find
it. We’re not universalizing our frustration and throwing a philosophic
tantrum, and throwing rationality out the back door. What we’re doing is realizing that what we
call reason is part of His image in me.
And if want to embed and put a foundation under this imagery under this
imagery that I have, this finite version, I go to the infinite version, which
is the foundation of it. What is
that? God’s omniscience, the fact that I
know He has a plan, and it is, frankly, inaccessible to me.
A good example: Job, he deals
with this thing, you get at the back of the book of Job and does God ever tell
Job why? He never does. But does Job break out of reason and go existential. Some people think he does, but he
doesn’t. What does he rationally
conclude in chapter 40? I have spoken words without knowledge, that’s a
rational statement, it’s describing something, I have spoken words without
knowledge, and I put my hand on my mouth and I trust you, O Lord. Are those meaningless statements or are they
full of content intellectually?
That’s the same thing we’re
doing here. We can’t explain what’s
going on here, but we know one thing, there’s not a conflict between those
two. When we feel tension between
statement (1) and statement (2) the problem is that we’re loading them with
identity. And when we load them with
identity we’re crisscrossing the Creator/creature boundary. We’re doing exactly what Aristotle did, and
we can’t do that; logic breaks down when we do that, you do get conflict, you
really do. That’s the same kind of
thinking that says the Trinity can’t exist, because how can you have one and
three? God can’t be three and be one,
come on! What do we say as Christians? He’s not three and one in the same way, I
don’t know the different ways, sorry.
That’s Trinitarian logic. It’s
not irrationality, it’s not existentialism.
What we’re trying to do here
in His impeccability is simply to describe the fact that in God’s sovereign
plan, it wasn’t part of the plan for Jesus to fail, and God’s sovereign plan is
perfect, and it was never going to be compromised, it was never going to be
twisted, turned, or any other thing. Yet
there was a reality that was conceivable, because what does Jesus Christ say,
Do you not know that I could pray and there would be thousands of angels
here. You could say that’s kind of an
option, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a
conceivable option. We’re not denying
that He faced the temptation to do that.
What we’re denying is that He ever would do that. There’s a difference.
I’ll tell you why this is not
just theology. In the New Testament
there’s a passage which is in the notes, that will blow you away, and everybody
slips on it and does everything, there are several passages in the New
Testament that when Christ’s life is imparted to the believer, there’s
statements that go like this: He cannot
sin because God’s seed abides in him.
Oh-oh, now what are we going to do?
Now we’ve got the same problem.
We didn’t solve it when we started talking about Jesus, so now we’re in
the New Testament epistles and here we go, bang, we get hit with it in 1 John
3, now what do we do with it there?
That’s why I say you have to work through this thing, and it’s not easy,
and it doesn’t come overnight. What we
talked about tonight would take a whole semester in theology. And then the guys at the final exam are still
going like this… so don’t feel bad
What I’m saying is, I’m
presenting you with a discussion. This
is what real people have debated down through church history. I told you my conclusion to it. Nobody’s going to get excommunicated if they
don’t agree with me, I’m just saying that I believe that if you don’t hold to
that position, you may think you’ve solved the problem and it resurfaces and
bites you later on. We’ll see that,
particularly when we deal with this nasty thing, we’re always talking about the
limited atonement, the unlimited atonement, it turns out both sides have a
point here. They really do, so you want
to thread your way carefully through these things before you leap to one side
or the other. Usually when good
Christians that are Biblical students debate this kind of a question, there is
usually a logistic and a linguistic problem that’s going on. Sometimes the language we use to state things
is really misleading us because of the baggage we have with those words.
This will give you something
to chew on.