Biblical Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson 125
Let’s begin by turning to
Matt. 12:34. I want to begin looking at
some of the problematic passages we’ve discussed in connection with the
impeccability of Christ. Just to review,
we’ve looked at the birth of the King and in connection with that we’ve talked
about the hypostatic union doctrine.
Remember that the birth of the King introduces into history the God-man. Because He is the God-man, because He is true
humanity, undiminished deity, in one person, that sets up everything else that
we study in connection with Jesus Christ.
We’ve studied His kenosis in
connection with His life. We said that the kenosis is His emptying. What was
His emptying? His emptying was
submission to the will of God including the independent use of His
attributes. So God the Son, when He
became incarnate, could have exercised, could
have exercised His omnipotence on different occasions. For example, when Satan tempted the Lord
Jesus Christ, turn those stones into bread, He could have done that. But He refrained from doing that because it
wasn’t His Father’s will, and He accepted that role. So kenosis reveals the attribute of humility,
and it shows that in the Christian worldview the key or cardinal virtue is the
virtue of humility toward God, a submission to His will. Everything else rolls from there; that has to
be in place. The process of moving from
pride to arrogance to humility is repentance.
That’s a definition of repentance.
So Jesus Christ always and forever demonstrated this attribute in
everything He did.
Having studied the doctrine
of kenosis we moved on to a second doctrine, the doctrine of impeccability,
i.e. Christ’s perfection, impeccable, nothing to be accused of. We started this section by saying, on page
62, we gave a series of Bible references, which we’re going to look at in the
introduction tonight, of those times and places where the Lord Jesus Christ
seemed to show behavior that would be criticized today. In Matt. 12:34 we read, after He got through
the Sermon on the Mount saying you shouldn’t call people fools, He says “You
brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth
speaks out of that which fills the heart.”
That’s a pretty tough saying.
How’d you like somebody to say that to you? “You snakes,” and a snake is a metaphor for
you know what, so this is what He’s basically calling people in the street when
He’s confronting them.
We show these passages to
show that it’s not quite so easy to talk about the Christ’s life when you’re
confronted with passages like this, because people tend, we all tend to do
this, we talk about Christ and we have this gooey image of who He was and how
He acted. We need to correct that with the
text of Scripture, because He wasn’t just all a pile of goo. He had confrontational aspects in His
personality. We can go further, one of
the most interesting ones is a passage in Matt. 15:7, He calls the people He is
addressing “You hypocrites,” He’s judging them pardon the expression. He is evaluating their character, He’s not
slandering them, He’s telling them what they are; they are hypocrites. So it’s a very truthful expression, “You
hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying,” and He applies the
Scripture to them. It’s true. But if you go down further in Matthew 15.
Verse 22, “And behold, a
Canaanite woman came out from that region, and began to cry out, saying” her
daughter was demon possessed. In verse
23, because she’s a Gentile you see the reaction of His Jewish followers. “But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came to Him and kept asking
Him,” they asked Him over and over, apparently she was a very persistent woman,
kept saying it over and over, so the disciples said let’s get her out of here,
“for she is shouting out after us.” Tell
this lady to go get lost, forget it. And
it wasn’t once or twice, apparently it was repetitive because in the Greek it’s
the imperfect tense which is a continual process; this went on for some time.
[24] “But He answered and
said, ‘I was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of
The New Testament opens up
sort of a can of worms here because the smooth continuous progress in history
seems to be broken at this point because the nation rejects the Messiah. Now what happens? Satan thought he had it
aced because he thought he had stopped the plan of God. He thought at last, he had tried over and
over and over, to thwart and destroy the Jew because Gen. 12:1-3 promises that
whoever curses
So what happened was that
God, being the master chess player, moves a piece, Satan jumps the piece,
thinking he’s got clearance, and he rolls into a trap and out of this so-called
catastrophe comes the salvation of the world, because accomplished with the aid
of Satan is the complete payment for the sins of the world through the cross of
Christ. It’s an amazing situation that
was set up, Satan being a participant in it, yet he meant it for evil but God
meant it for good.
At this point in the Gospels,
this is Matt. 15 so the rejection of the nation hasn’t come yet in its fullness. So in verse 24 Jesus correctly responds to
this woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of
Many people aren’t prepared
to see this side of Jesus, because they don’t read carefully the text of
Scripture and the portrait the Holy Spirit is painting here of the Savior. Of course He’s doing it to bring things out
of her. This could be a whole sermon in
itself because this is how He works with us often times. When you pray to Him, you don’t seem to get
an answer and you wonder and you seem to get the cold shoulder, what turns out
afterwards is that that was a little maneuver on His part to get you to do
something. This is one of those neat
little give and take situations that’s going on here. So he says to her, apparently impolitely and
rudely, [26] “And He answered and said, ‘It is not good to take the children’s
bread,” that is the Jews, the bread of the Jews is salvation, it’s the Messiah,
so it’s not good to take the spiritual blessings of the Jews “and throw it to
the dogs.’” That is, give it to the Gentiles.
Very Jewish… very Jewish here in these Gospels! This is a Jewishness of Jesus. Remember the
Gospels were written after the epistles.
So this shows you that from start to finish the Lord Jesus Christ was
the Jew of the Jews. The Church has lost
something when it loses that Judaic background.
[27] “But she said,” a very
quick-witted woman, not to be outwitted, she replies to Him, “Yes, Lord; but
even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their master’s table.’” This woman had her theology, she recognized,
somehow the Holy Spirit had worked in her heart so she recognized something
about Jesus, because notice the position she takes in that phrase, “but even
the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their master’s table.” This isn’t a case of the master bending down
and saying let’s give a treat to the little puppy. That’s not the picture. The picture she has is that the people aren’t
even paying attention to the dogs, they’re just eating on the table, and
somebody moves the tablecloth or something and some crumbs fall off, and the
dog comes in and licks them up. In other
words, she recognizes that there’s a blessing to be had almost as a peripheral
incidental to the plan of God for
So here she submits, she says
okay, I’m a dog, but even a dog can eat the crumbs from the master’s
table. Now look at the response; look at
this response on the Lord’s part, because He knew this was going to happen, He
was just trying to bring this out of her, like He does works with us. [28] “Then Jesus answered and said to her, ‘O
woman, your faith is great; be it done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter
was healed at once.” So He recognizes
that in the statement of verse 27 that she had perceived who He was, she’d
linked Him with salvation to the world, she realized that salvation to the
world comes through the Jewish nation, she respected that, she didn’t challenge
it, she didn’t put her Gentile-ness over against Jewish-ness and say well, I
believe in equal rights. There’s none of
that snotty kind of stuff, the chip-on-the-shoulder approach, well you owe me
one. No, He didn’t owe her or anybody
one. She submits completely to the
Lord’s prerogative. If that’s the way
God’s designed the plan of salvation I salute and say “Yes Sir”, and I go with
it. I don’t start dictating to God how
He’s going to save me, or what the right way to go about salvation is. I submit to it because I know and I recognize
the Creator/creature distinction. All
that’s wrapped up in that wonderful verse 27.
She had her theology together.
The point we’re seeing is
that the Lord Jesus Christ could be very abrupt, several times. Turn to Matt. 12:46, another situation to
look at. I do this so we don’t get some
false impression of Jesus personality.
Now it’s His own family, watch this one.
“While He was still speaking to the multitudes, behold His mother and
His brothers were standing outside, seeking to speak to Him.” Now with all due
respect to the Roman Catholic Church, the Lord Jesus Christ did have sisters
and brothers, these are not the disciples.
The disciples are with Him already and these are His physical brothers,
Mary did have other children; these are His physical brothers coming to see
Him. [47] “And someone said to Him,
‘Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are standing outside seeking to speak to
You. [48] But He answered to the one who was telling Him,” presumably one of
the apostles, “and said, ‘Who is My mother and who are My brothers?’ [49] And
stretching out His hand toward His disciples, He said, ‘Behold, My mother and
My brothers! [50] For whoever shall do the will of My Father who is in heaven,
He is My brother and sister and mother.”
One of the interesting facts
of history, when He said these statements, probably the only believer in His
family was His mother. His sisters and
His brothers, presumably in the Gospels from notes on their behavior, none of them
believed in Him. That’s actually a good
source of encouragement, because you may come in a family where you’ve been
faithful to witness for the Lord, and live the Christian life, and yet nothing
happens. The family just goes on its
merry way to hell, literally. You begin
to get a sense, and often Satan will do this to you, throw you the curve ball,
it’s your fault, you’re not living the life right, and it’s your fault that
they don’t become Christians, you screwed up.
If that’s so, how do you explain this one? The Lord Jesus Christ screwed up maybe,
didn’t live the Christ-like life in front of His brothers and sisters, that’s
why they didn’t believe. That can’t be.
See how silly that reasoning is.
This refutes that kind of reasoning. They didn’t become Christians, the
ones who did, until after the resurrection, presumably. We don’t have detailed notes but there’s not
any evidence of it in the Gospels other than His mother, Mary. He tends to be kind of surprisingly
non-Jewish in the way He handles His own family.
There are these startling
things about the way He acted and things He said that bothered people,
including who wrote the New Testament, because they’re recording these
events. Somewhere the Holy Spirit laid
it on Matthew’s heart (Matthew is writing) oh yeah, I remember that, I’m going
to write about this, I was there when that happened and I want the readers of
my gospel to see what I observed of the Lord Jesus Christ, and here’s one of
the things that happened one day, I’m going to tell you about it. So he puts it in the Gospel, and under the
power of the Holy Spirit that’s in the Gospel to show us the portrait of
Christ.
This all has to do with this
question of the impeccability of Christ, His perfection, His moral
perfection. The Lord Jesus Christ had
to, as a human being, be sanctified.
Look at this from the standpoint of what we’ve learned so far in the
hypostatic union. In the hypostatic
union Jesus Christ is God; Jesus Christ is man. As God, He doesn’t need more
holiness; as God He is complete in every way.
We go through the attributes of God; God is sovereign, God is love, God
is holy, God is omniscient, God’s holiness doesn’t have to be added to,
purified or perfected. God is unchanging; He is the same yesterday, today and forever,
another divine attribute. Since God is
immutable and holy, His holiness doesn’t need to change. There’s no growth process in God.
But as Jesus Christ was a man
who grew physically, He also grew in righteousness; we’ll call it God’s
absolute righteousness. +R, that’s God’s
righteousness. He grew in that. How did He grow in that? He grew in that by at various points in His
life He obeyed. Here was an issue, He
obeyed. Here was another thing, He
obeyed. Here was a trial, He trusted the
Lord. Here was something, He trusted the
Lord. Here He obeyed God’s will, so forth and so on. This went on and on and on
and on. He spent time with the Lord. In Isaiah 50 the Lord Jesus Christ was
awakened in the morning, says Isaiah.
The Father would call to Him, and teach Him in the morning, every
morning, morning by morning He would do this. So He was always looking at
Scripture, He was always discerning in His humanity the Father’s will. He knew the Bible like no one has ever
learned the Scriptures, a tremendous student of the Word of God. So He’s growing in righteousness.
The point is that Jesus had
to be sanctified, and there are passages in the Scripture that prove that. In the book of Hebrews you can see several
passages that speak of that process.
What we want to do is carefully remember, back when we studied the Old
Testament we went through the doctrine of sanctification, and we said there’s
the position, the Abrahamic Covenant promises, that’s not going to change,
that’s our position under God where we stand.
Jesus had a position under God in God’s plan. But Jesus Christ also had experience such as
the Sinaitic Covenant, we studied the Sinaitic Covenant and Israel was given
things to do, to respond to. Jesus was
given things to do and respond to. In
fact He knew the Sinaitic Law and He had to apply that in His life
perfectly.
We said the aim of
sanctification is to develop loyalty to God, and that’s true of the Lord Jesus
Christ, He had to develop loyalty to God.
He didn’t come with it all there; He built it with His faith and His
obedience. He [can’t understand word]
law and grace; grace is somewhat problematical to use that word in Jesus
Christ’s case because He really didn’t need grace as we define grace here,
grace is God’s initiative toward sinners, because He wasn’t a sinner. He had long term growth. He also had the
enemies of sanctification, so all that was true of the Lord Jesus as it is true
of us and it is precisely that analogy, because He is a man that means that the
Lord Jesus Christ can correctly be called the role model. He gives us a model of what righteousness
looks like for a person. Where His
sanctification and our sanctification are different concerns the issue of
sin.
Remember when we studied
David’s life, conviction of sin, we have to be convinced of a specific offense
toward God, then confess the sin, a repentance, turning from autonomy to
submission to the cross as the sole point of contact with God, and restoration,
eternal forgiveness of God through the cross.
Jesus never did that, Jesus never confessed sin; Jesus never had to
confess sin. So that part, that subset
of sanctification He never dealt with.
He never had to. But the rest of
the sanctification He did and Jesus Christ, in His humanity, was sanctified.
On page 63 of the notes we
define the doctrine of impeccability, and we said theologians have done it two
ways, primarily because of the vocabulary.
[In the Q&A someone said] a way to visualize this is that Jesus
Christ was not able to sin in the sense of a Father who loved a child was not
able to hurt the child; that gets more of the substance and the meaning of
what’s going on here. But theologians
classically have used these Latin phrases, so that’s why I use the Latin
phrases. One of them is non posse peccari, not able to sin, and
the other one is posse non pecarri,
able not to sin. Not able to sin means
something different from able not to sin.
Able not to sin means that the Lord Jesus Christ, if He’s that, He is
like Adam, He is able not to sin, and there’s a possibility that He would
sin. So we come to this situation, fork
in the road, where we can go plus or minus.
Being able not to sin means He can go this route, this positive route,
He is able to go on that route. But not
able to sin is stronger in that it says that it will never go the negative
root.
The problem is, is He is not
able to go the negative root, has there been a temptation? That’s what theologians have struggled to
say. This is why on page 64 we said that
if you think of it in terms of human responsibility and divine sovereignty it
helps, because the first thing, able not to sin, is clearly and undeniably a
human situation, able not to sin. Not
able to sin has as its meaning the fact that in the plan of God it was certain
by God’s sovereign setup that the Lord Jesus Christ would never sin. That’s His sovereignty. What happens is if you combine God’s
sovereignty and human volition in the same person? You’ve got them united in
one person. So as God, Jesus Christ is
not able to sin; as man He is able not to sin; because they’re in one person,
however, both statements have to apply.
That’s where the theologians make that point about not able to sin. It’s not quite saying what it sounds like
it’s saying.
That’s why on page on page
64, where I’ve underlined first and second statements, “in the first
statement, ‘not able to sin’ refers to the uncreated…” uncreated, remember Creator/creature distinction, always think of
Creator/creature distinction. “Not able
to sin refers to the uncreated divine nature.
The verb ‘able,’” watch it now, “the verb ‘able’ here takes on meaning
from divine sovereignty. The second
statement, ‘able not to sin’ refers to 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.” This is what happens in a lot of discussions
and it’s going to happen, we’re going to be wound up around an axle in the
death of Christ. For whom did Christ
die? People like to make a big issue out
of this. I’ve often sensed that we’re
talking by one another when we talk this way.
I’ve always gotten that feeling and it comes about because of meanings
that we’re carrying into these words.
You’ve got to be careful about that.
What happens, if you look at
that sentence, the verb to be “able”… and this is a good illustration of pagan
logic versus Biblical logic or Aristotelian logic, people say what do you mean
by two different logics? Here’s an
example of what we’re talking about. If
you think of this verb as having a fixed meaning, ability, and you’re going to
apply it to the dog, to the cat, to a person and to God, and you say that the
verb “able” carries the same meaning when I use it for the cat, the dog, my
sister, my brother and God, you’re wrong.
That verb does not carry the same meaning because you’re using it as a
universal and underneath the universal both God, man, cats and dogs exist. Now do you see what happens? Continuity of
Being. You’ve slipped into paganism
unintentionally. We’ve talked about
that. That might have seemed abstract to
you before; we kept saying Continuity of Being.
Here’s an example, right here.
We’ve got this abstract verb, “able,” and we think it has this
impregnable, stable meaning wherever it’s used and in whatever context it’s used. Then we proceed to jam it on the cat, we jam
it on a person, and we jam it on God.
Then we say, ooh, we’ve got a contradiction here. We wound up with a contradiction, how can
Jesus be “able” and “not able?” See, the
Bible has contradictions in it.
What’s the answer to
this? The answer is that the verb “able”
takes on its color depending which side of the Creator/creature distinction
you’re talking about. The
Creator/creature distinction is primary and this verb has to submit to that
distinction, the Creator/creature distinction precedes universal meanings of
words. It submits to them. So when I use the word “able” for God I do
not mean the same thing when “able” is referring to men.
Let’s see a verse in the Old
Testament that points this out because it’s going to come up again and again
and again, we might as well clarify the air.
Turn to Isaiah 40, that’s a critical Old Testament chapter that deals
with the Creator/creature distinction.
In Isaiah 40:25, this is the warning against the pagan use of logic,
where we invent universal meanings of words and we apply them across the board
as though it always means the same thing in different context. And it’s not true. Isaiah 40:25 blows it out of the water. “To whom then will you liken Me that I should
be his equal?” That’s the challenge God
offers us. He says if you think that I
am like something in the identical way, that I possess qualities that are
identical to the creature, you’re mistaken.
If that were true, you could make idols, and He doesn’t permit us to
make idols. The second commandment,
which we don’t normally talk about, what is the second commandment? Making an
image of God, and it’s forbidden. God is
the Creator and everything else is created, and words do not mean and cannot be
applied the same way. There are
similarities. If there were no
similarities then we would know nothing about what God is like. His sovereignty is like our act of choosing,
that’s true, it’s like it, but it’s
not the same thing. Think about it for a
moment.
We walk along with our
chooser, and we walk in the midst of circumstances, we walk in the midst of a
body that runs by biological mechanisms.
We breathe air that’s full of molecular physics. We come into an environment and within that
environment we choose, but do we have total control over the environment like
God in His sovereignty does. Surely
not! So therefore isn’t it true that
choice means different when God chooses and when man chooses. Can you take that
word “choose” and say that that word means the same thing when God chooses and
when man chooses. No you can’t, not if
you have any respect of Scripture.
The problem we’re getting
into here is we have to be very careful in how we use words when we cross over
from God to man, man to God, God to man, man to God. Every time you do that you’d better
think. Because God is incomprehensible
and mysterious, we are totally dependent on the Scripture for guidance. We have no other source of what He’s really
like, except what He’s told us that He’s like.
We could sit here and endlessly speculate what God is like, but that’s
just us, we’re down here as creatures.
Therefore, that’s the
argument for why we have to go to Scripture as our only and total
authority. If the Scripture is not our
total, complete and final authority, then we’re left with speculation, which
gets into the next doctrine we’re going to look at. Hopefully that clears up some of the
problem. Granted, you don’t feel totally
comfortable with this, like you don’t feel totally comfortable with the
Trinity, how can God be three and one?
But the discomfort that you feel is actually a testimony to your
finiteness and your creaturehood. That
discomfort means that finally in the last analysis I can’t get at the total
view, I can’t get in God’s chair and look out at everything the way He looks
out, and there’s that within me, because what does Eccl. 3:11 say? What has He put in our hearts? The sense of eternity, a sense of divinity,
He’s put in our hearts. But Eccl. 3:11
goes on to say “but we cannot find out the end from the beginning,” so that
tension that you feel, oh gee, I just want to get this explained somehow, and
we can never get it totally explained.
That’s good, because if could
get it totally explained it would mean we understand God as He understands
Himself, and that implies that we’re not omniscient. So we have to be careful. We have to be
accurate; I’m not arguing for sloppiness here, I’m just arguing for a sense of
humility about what our capacities are in our understanding. Remember the cardinal virtue of humility, and
I have to take my place as a creature, you have to take your place as a
creature, underneath God, and say I understand this about you God, straighten
out my thinking if it’s screwed up, but I will never totally understand
You. You know what? That means that in eternity, in heaven, it
will never be a dull and boring place.
There are an infinite number of lessons to learn about God, endlessly, a
well that will never run dry of mystery, of surprises, of things we never
dreamed of that He pulls off forever and ever, over and over again, a new drama
every day, a new act, an act that follows that act, and it just goes on and on
and on, never ending, because our God is an infinite source of drama.
That’s the impeccability
issue and the bottom line of impeccability; on the bottom of page 65 are the
implications. On page 66 I cover the
three implications. There are more but
this is just to show you the value of this doctrine, it’s not theory, it’s not
for the theologian in abstract ivory towers, this truth is revealed in
Scripture for a very important reason.
How you get these implications and a good way to study Scripture,
whenever you try to learn a doctrine, always learn it in the context of the
passage it appears in. Where’s
kenosis? The doctrine of kenosis appears
in Phil. 2:5-8. So if you want to see
the way the Holy Spirit intended the truth to apply, go back to the context of
Phil. 2:5-8 and see what was Paul talking about then; verse 4, all this truth. Paul was the kind of guy that I think if you
asked him how he brushed his teeth in the morning you would come up with some
big long dissertation about how Christ died on the cross and the Trinity,
because for him all truth was related, there was no such thing as mundane
trivial stuff.
Here are some of the
implications of Christ’ perfection.
“First, it reveals something about evil and human responsibility. Often well-intentioned Christians try to
answer the evil problem by claiming that it was a necessary corollary to having
genuine human choice in history. In
Jesus’ case, however, there was genuine human choice without evil.” Right? We
agree to that, human existence without evil.
“Was Jesus supposed to sin in order to prove” He wasn’t a robot. Surely not.
“Was Jesus supposed to sin in order to prove He had genuine choice? To
err is not a necessary quality of
being human,” did you ever hear that expression, to err is human; people use it
all the time. Next time you hear that,
say well, not necessarily, I know one exception. It’s a wonderful conversation opener to the
gospel because it allows you to stop somebody short and then they’re asking
you, you don’t have to shove it down their throat, they’re asking for it. So they open their mouth, you put it in, like
a baby.
“A second very practical
implication of impeccability follows from the first. If created humanity does not require evil,
and if Jesus was the ‘test case’ that proves this in history, then what happens
when we share His nature?” Got the question?
Jesus Christ’s nature is perfect.
If it’s really perfect and proven out to be perfect in history, what
happens when we share that nature? This
set ups certain passages in the New Testament, if you don’t go along with this
thing you’re going to have trouble with some New Testament passages, because
this bursts forth again in the New Testament epistles, and interpreters of the
Bible hit grease when you look at what some people say about some of these
passages.
Let’s turn to one of the
trouble passages, I John 3:5, because this talks about the nature of Christ in
the believer, and it says something that’s troubling. “And you know that He appeared in order to
take away sins; and in Him there is no sin.”
That’s talking about His impeccability, now we’ve got a vocabulary word
we can attach a doctrine to that passage.
So when we read it, now we’ve got some substance here, we can connect it
and link it. “… in Him there is no
sin.” Next verse, [6] “No one who abides
in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him.” That seems to lay an impossible burden upon
Christians. Actually, we have to get
into this when we get into the epistles, but this is a case where the solution
to the interpretation of that passage hinges on the impeccable nature of Jesus
Christ. When he says that “no one who
abides in Him sins,” he’s talking about when Christ’s nature manifests it never
sins… when it’s manifested. Of course we
can sin, because John tells us. John
isn’t teaching perfectionism here, because we know from the first chapter, he
says if we say we haven’t sinned we lie.
So it’s not perfectionism that is taught of us, but it is a
perfectionism of the nature of Jesus Christ that He manifests through us. The problem is we truncate it, we grieve the
Spirit, we get out of fellowship, we stop the filling of the Spirit, etc. so we
wall it up and limit it, but the life of Christ remains impeccable, just as it
was in the Gospels. That is
impeccability, and that’s the thing that John latched onto. And John says this more times in his writing,
probably because John was so impressed with Jesus, he was the closest apostle
to Him. Think of who John is here, he
saw an awful lot of the impeccability of Christ and he really had a firm grasp
of this, so when he talks about Christ’s nature, he’s got to continue that idea
of impeccability.
The third implication of
impeccability is that it demonstrates that you can get God’s qualities and
man’s qualities together. We say, well
gee, God’s sovereignty is incompatible with free choice. That’s because free choice is defined
wrong. For some reason human choice and
sovereignty worked fine with Jesus. Do
you see why Paul said in Col. 2:18 you’ve got to start your philosophy, your
serious thinking, and your categories with what? Not according to the elements,
the stoicheia, the basic categories
of the world, he said don’t start there, you’ll be deceived, start with Jesus
Christ. And by Jesus Christ he wasn’t
talking about some Jesus stories, He was talking the hypostatic union and all
the truths of Christology here. That’s where you start. Whatever you do philosophically you’d better
be sure that it fits the yardstick of the hypostatic union. So however you
define human choice and God’s sovereignty, your definitions have to fit the
person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He
wasn’t schitzo, these two things weren’t fighting each other, they came along
perfectly. How do we do that? We’d better fix our words up when we talk
about human responsibility and divine sovereignty so they work out. That’s
why the hypostatic union is so central to all of these truths and discussions.
Now we come to a new truth,
and we’re going to look a little bit at the third doctrine. We talked about the
doctrine of kenosis, the doctrine of impeccability, Christ’s perfection. Now flowing out of that is the doctrine of
infallibility. Did Jesus, even though He
was morally…, here’s the argument, because evangelicals are slipping on this
all over the board so pay attention to what’s happening. The argument is, yeah, yeah, I’ll agree that
Jesus was morally and ethically correct, no mistake, no problem there, but you
know, Jesus, He lived in the first century, I mean, He had a first century
view, and in the first century people believed strange things about the
universe. So Jesus didn’t intend to do
this, I mean, He couldn’t help it, He was just a human being walking around the
first century and He just articulated first century views that we now know are
wrong. In other words, Jesus committed
what they’ve called “technical errors.”
The argument of evangelicals
that have bought into this errancy…, we used to laugh at seminary, one of the
guys made books about this in the 60’s and 70’s, a guy by the name of Dewey
Beegle, he wrote in Southern Baptist circles trying to get the Southern
Baptists to believe in an errant Bible, not an inerrant Bible, an errant
Bible. You’ve got to come of age
Baptists, you guys got to get along and get with the program, the Methodists
have gone this way, the liberal Presbyterians have gone this way, so I don’t
know why you Baptists can’t also agree with the whole thing and go along with
the same trend. You guys better
recognize that Jesus made mistakes, Jesus made technical errors. So we used to say of Dewey Beegle that he
believes the Bible errors and all.
Infallibility deals with this
issue. Did Jesus make technical
errors? If He made technical errors,
does that violate impeccability? They claim
no, they claim He could be innocently ignorant.
Do you see the thrust; I’m just trying to show you the siren song of
this position. Jesus can make technical
errors, He didn’t intend to do that, but that didn’t bother His impeccability.
Let’s look at this. We noted, bottom of page 66, when we studied
revelation, remember what the event was in the Old Testament where we linked
that doctrine to? The giving of the Law
at Mount Sinai—revelation. Revelation
has certain characteristics. We said its
verbal; thoughts are transferred in revelation, not just feelings. It’s personal, I’m not listening to the
printout of a computer, I’m listening to the words of a person. It’s historical, it’s not abstract, it’s not
theoretical, God speaks in the planet in human languages. If you had a tape recording you would have
heard God speaking in the Hebrew language.
It’s comprehensive; remember the Mosaic Law dealt with every aspect of
society. [blank spot]
Did it deal with
clothing? Yes. Why did it deal with all those other
issues? Why didn’t He just talk about
worship? Because truth is
interrelated. The diet and the clothing
and all the rest went along with worship because where do we worship? We walk around every day in the practical
world with all these things. The world
is one in the sense of the truthfulness of it, if God is Creator. So if I’m dealing with the physics of this
microphone, and the electronics of this cable, I’m just as much dealing with
the handiwork of God and the laws by which He made this, as I am when I’m
sitting here praying, because He’s the Creator of all. So when He talks about something as the
Creator, He means to include everything.
And it’s prophetic, the other characteristic we learned, that is, it
looks into the future and tells us things that are beyond the human
horizon.
We want to spend time on this
section, page 67-68, Jesus’ historical and scientific claims, I won’t go to the
verses because we’ve gone over those verses before and I think it will be
obvious. “Since revelation is
necessarily comprehensive, it should be no surprise that Jesus spoke about many
things open to historical and scientific investigation. Did He err in doing so? Was He right in affirming that Genesis 1 and
2 both form a coherent account of creation?”
Turn to Matt. 19:4-6, let’s
look at that passage in light of what our kids get in college. Every year
somebody in Fellowship Chapel, either the person going to college or the
parents, the person paying the tuition, comes to me and says, can you imagine
what they’re teaching, they’re teaching that there’s conflicts in the
Bible. No kidding! They’ve been doing that for about 240
years. Wake up, that’s the world system.
Satan is not going to allow this Book to stand unopposed. And He’s going to use every trick that He can
think of to undermine the text. When
your kids go to school, and they can go to Christian schools and get the same
kind of crap that they get from the secular schools, the only difference is in
a Christian school you pay more for it.
It’s disgusting, some local Christian schools teach the same stuff that
you could get at Princeton, Harvard; it’s ridiculous, and these people are
living off the contributions of God-fearing families who have saved money so
that their kids could get a Christian education and they go to a Christian
campus and they hear well, we don’t really believe that Genesis 1 and 2 really
go together. Now we’re not really saying
that Jesus made a mistake here, but we know now things that Jesus didn’t
know. Oh really! We’re going to learn in the 21st
century that there’s no such thing as sin, maybe it’s a psychological
disturbance of the seventh gene, Jesus didn’t know that so He went and died for
it.
Let’s look at Matt. 19; He’s
dealing with a divorce issue, verse 4-6.
“And He answered and said, ‘Have you not read, that He who created them
from the beginning made them male and female.” What chapter of Genesis is that
quoted from? Genesis 1. Next verse, [5] “For this cause a man shall
leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the two shall
become one flesh?” What chapter of
Genesis is that quoted from? Genesis
2. Ooh, how can He do that if they’re
two separate accounts? The Lord Jesus
Christ clearly said, He’s building a doctrine here, He’s in the middle of the
discussion of defining what marriage and divorce is, and He’s building a
doctrine on the assumption that Genesis 1 and 2 are logically
incompatible? Poor Jesus, He didn’t have
his PhD or else He would have known New Testament criticism better than
that. Now Jesus is articulating clearly
the orthodox conservative belief in Genesis.
In the notes I give you three
or four more instances. “Was He right in
believing in a literal Abel, the son of a literal Adam (Matt. 23:35)?” He did, it’s all there in the open text, and
it’s not hiding. “Did Jesus speak the
truth about a literal flood with a literal Noah (Matt. 24:37-39)? Did He
correctly insist on the Mosaic authorship of the Law (Luke 27:24)?” No Old Testament professor today, outside of
the godly men who are teaching in the few good Christian schools, nobody today
in scholarship circles in Old Testament believes that Moses wrote the Law. Nobody!
It’s just a remnant, the faithful few, not because they’re super
intelligent but because they’ve bought into an entire world view. Your children going to college, 90%
probable, they’ll take a course in religion or something like this and they
will have it shredded, the Mosaic Law authorship of the Law, it’s not believed
at all. Jesus did.
Watch what happens, we’ve got
a little tension setting up because when you get Christians, see what happens
is we all have arrogance built into us because of the fall of man, but what
happens when you get in academia is there’s a certain kind of arrogance that
can easily creep into your soul. Your
promotions in academia come from what?
Publications, your acceptability with your peers. Who are your peers? People on the faculty. How do you get stature in academia? By
publishing papers; before the papers can be published, what has to happen? Editors look at them and if they see and
smell something not quite right, you don’t get published because there are
fifteen other papers competing for that position of publication. You don’t make it. Now what happens to your resume when you want
to teach at a college? How many papers have you published recently? None.
We’ll put someone else in that position.
It’s a system that feeds on
itself. And it’s very, very difficult
for godly men and women on faculties; we have some of the great unsung heroes
of our time are on faculties in this country.
They engage every single day of their life for their career; their
career hangs on this, for their defense of the faith. That’s what’s going on here. So when you get Christians who want academic
respectability they’ve got to finally make a decision because there’s going to
come a time when they’re going to have to decide, do I want my academic
credentials more than I want my loyalty to Jesus Christ. The pressure is on, I’m not making light of
that. I’m not saying I would do better,
I’m simply observing, I’ve seen it, I’ve watched it for thirty or forty
years.
Here comes an example of it,
right here. G. C. Berkouwer, he’s a
Reformed theologian in Holland. Holland
was the only country in Europe to be ruled by a man who was a godly theologian
at the turn of the century. Holland was
ruled by a man who wrote the standard text on the Holy Spirit. There’ was a whole series of godly Christians
in Holland and they had a very strong influence historically on Holland. And along came World War I and World War II
and now there are more prostitutes in Holland, I guess, according to military
friends of mine, than there are all over Europe together. It’s just a country that’s gone downhill, and
now if you notice in the newspaper Holland has authorized doctors to poison
people to death, that is a normal act of the medical profession, they help you
live, they help you die, whatever switch you want turned they turn it. Mercy killing is legal in Holland today. That’s a country that had more light than any
other country in Europe for the last 200 years.
And that’s what they’ve done to it.
We see the same thing going on, creeping into our own country.
Berkouwer was over there, he
was this Reformed theologian and he wanted a lot of respectability among his
peers, some of the stuff he wrote was great, but you know what they say about
snake venom? It’s 90% protein; it’s the
4-5% of venom that bothers you. Berkouwer
“argued that one must distinguish,” notice what’s happening here, “distinguish
sin which involves willful turning from the truth, from technical error which
involves ignorance and misinformation.”
See the door he’s created? He
thinks by making that distinction he can side with the higher critics of the
Bible against Jesus and yet also somehow call himself a Christian by believing
in Jesus’ impeccability and His sinlessness.
“Jesus might have been
impeccable and the perfectly righteous One, according to this view, but He was
not necessarily free in His humanity from ignorance and misinformation. Jesus’ belief in a literal Adam, Berkouwer
thinks, is an instance of a technical error.
The purpose of the Bible and Jesus, Berkouwer writes,” now watch this
one, this is a key phrase, Dewey Beegle says it in his book, all the
evangelicals that push this view say the same thing when you challenge it. What’s the purpose of the Bible? They’ve got to define the purpose of the
Bible such that I can disbelieve Genesis without impinging on the purpose of
the Bible. So what has to happen,
they’ve got to define the purpose of the Bible so they can also have errors in
the Bible without violating the purpose of the Bible.
Here’s how they do it. “Berkouwer writes,” the purpose of the Bible
“‘is not at all to provide scientific gnosis [knowledge] in order to convey and
increase human knowledge and wisdom, but to witness of the salvation of God
unto faith.’” You’ll have to think about
that for a while, this is something you have to think about, but there’s some
greasy words being used in there. It’s
true, isn’t it, we’re saying the purpose of the Bible is not to make everyone
fatheaded. That’s not the purpose of
Scripture, but somehow he says it’s “to witness of the salvation of God unto
faith. Occurrence of technical errors,
he supposes, does not hinder the purpose of” the Bible if that sentence
describes the purpose of the Bible.
“According to such critics,
Jesus’ righteousness coexists with ignorance that causes technical errors. Can this be true? It certainly is true of ourselves. The limitations of human knowledge jeopardize
every thought and statement we make. Is
it true, however, of Jesus? If Jesus functions
as a prophet of revelation, as one who carries out God’s prosecution against
those breaking His covenant, can technical errors be tolerated?” What did we learn in the Old Testament? I said in the Old Testament, pay attention to
the definition of prophets, because we’re going to pick it up later. Well now we’re picking it up. What was the definition of a prophet? What was the function of those prophets? They weren’t just ethical commentators. We said they were involved in something else. What was the standard the prophets used? The Mosaic Law Code. What was that Code? That was a contract
between Yahweh and Israel. What were the prophets doing? Prosecuting
attorneys. Under God the Holy Spirit
they prosecuted violations by Israel of that contract. That was their function; we showed how Isaiah
would harp back to Deut. 32, he had that same format, he’s carrying out the
same kind of things, O heavens, O earth, hear, now I’m going to present my
case.
The prophets speaking for God
prosecuted the nation for its sin. In
order to carry out the prosecution, think of a courtroom. In a courtroom how does the prosecuting
attorney, or any lawyer, defense attorney too for that matter, involved in a
courtroom situation, what do they want to do to the witness? I was called up in a murder trial and I was a
witness because some kids gang raped a girl, threw her out in the backyard, and
the poor girl died of hypothermia. The
question was whether the weather was cold enough to cause hypothermia. So here I was on the witness stand, and the
county attorney was saying Mr. Clough do you want to… blah, blah, blah, what
was the temperature, etc. Then the
defense attorney came up, and he did his best to try to undercut my temperature
data for that night. Now I stopped him
cold with the fact that I happened to calibrate all my instruments at National
Institute of Standards and Technology, and if you want you want to argue with
them, go ahead.
The point is, what does a
lawyer try to do? If you’re testifying
to something, he tries to take this apart by attacking over here, or over here,
or over here. The idea is to so doubt in
the minds of the jury the credibility of the witness. He might not be able to so doubt directly on
what you observe about the crime, but if he can show that you can’t even
observe what color Mrs. Jimmie Jean wore Tuesday, he’s saying you’re sloppy,
now if you’re sloppy over here and you’re sloppy over here, and you can’t get
this straight, are we to believe you when you say that Joe killed Jim. Maybe you were seeing things, you regularly
do that maybe. The idea is to destroy
the testimony.
We’ll conclude by turning to
John 3 because you’ll see the difficulty immediately with this false view of
Scripture. In John 3:12 Jesus
recognizes this, and what does He say?
“If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how shall you
believe if I tell you heavenly things?”
His point was if I tell you, and I talk about things that you on earth
can observe and check out, and you don’t believe me there, when I tell you your
sins are forgiven, what are you going do, go to heaven on a rocket and check
your accounting books? How are you going
to do that? You can’t observe that? You have to take My word for it. Now if you have shown that I can’t get My
history straight, and you’ve shown that I’ve made technical errors all over the
board, how can you trust Me when I offer you salvation for all eternity? See, it doesn’t go together.
We’ll come back to that, but
you can see the line of logic that we’re pursuing here, that because of the
contextual purpose of Jesus Christ and the prophets, they can’t be allowed to
make technical areas because in the area of the technical errors where the
history is. If Isaiah can’t get his
history right how can he get the circumstances right to prosecute the nation? Because we said this is why you open up the
Old Testament sometimes and you wonder what is all this. What are these
boundary markers? What’s all this land
business going on, it sounds like a real estate deal going on. Yes, it is. What was one of the promises of
the Abrahamic Covenant? You’ll inherit
the land; tribes had to be in certain lands. What’s the proof of it? Land records.
Oh, that’s why those Scriptures are in here, I always thought they were
in there so you could sleep while the pastor was reading the Bible and then
when he got to a good spot you’d wake up.
No. Those land records are in
there so that it’s a testimony, factually, to God’s faithfulness.
------------------------
Question asked: Clough
replies: You perceived, correctly so,
that in the classic doctrine of impeccability… that’s not my definition, that’s
where we get into these definitions that have been passed down over the
years. In the definition of kenosis, why
do we say Christ gave up the “independent use” of His attributes, when you
couldn’t imagine Him independently anyway.
What’s the deal? Unfortunately
with that word “independent” we’re at the same place we were with the word
“able.” It’s how that word is used when it’s used on the Creator side of the
equation. When you get into this you
have to appreciate the battle that was being fought when that statement was
made, because they’re always imbalanced somewhat they were fighting a war at
the time and they had to suppress them.
This is why there’s a reaction against Reformed thought and some of it
is justified in that the Reformation tried so hard to crush humanism that it
played heavy on the sovereignty of God.
That was the thing that chopped off all this chance business, and
unfortunately then what happened…, well, that was kind of a good idea that went
to seed; it destroyed evangelism, missions, and it just had to get balanced up
again.
That’s the trouble with all
these statements; they can all be pushed to illegitimate things. The point that was at stake here in kenosis
is they’re trying to say that Jesus didn’t in any way cease to be God. He emptied Himself of something, but whatever
He emptied Himself, it couldn’t be His attributes. But what’s happened in church history? That’s how some theologians define kenosis
when they start thinking about this, that He must have given up His
omnipotence, He must have given up His omniscience. They say He clearly didn’t use it; He didn’t
use some of these attributes, He must not have had them. Then they see, like Hebrews 1, when it’s
talking about the ascent of Christ into heaven and He was given power to reign,
and they see that power to reign in that sort of passage, when He sits at His
father’s right hand He was given back His omnipotence. That’s simply not correct. Jesus Christ manifested His omnipotence and
His omniscience. We gave some
illustrations of that. When He was
allowing police to arrest Him in the Garden of Gethsemane in the middle of that
action, for a split second He let go with omnipotence. When He said “I AM” the police force fell
backwards on the ground. Then He went right on and it was like omnipotence
turned off.
What I guess they’re trying
to say there is that the Lord Jesus Christ had to, in His humanity…, let’s take
a concrete specific, let’s picture the time that He was tempted and He was very
hungry. And here Satan comes and Satan
says you’re hungry right now, and He was, there’s no question that He was
hungry, forty days without food I’d be hungry, so He was very hungry, to the
point of starvation, and Satan says it’s easy for you, all you have to do is
say the word, the stone turns to bread.
The appeal was made to something that He could have done in the sense
that He had the power to do it in His omnipotence. But He refused to exercise that power due to
the fact that the Father had outlined this plan for Him, and it wasn’t the
Father’s will for Him to meet Satan in the power of His deity. It was God’s will to meet Satan in the power
of the Holy Spirit through His humanity, so He’d be a model for us. So He had to, then, not utilize His omnipotence
in that state when you could say that He had a legitimate right to oppose
Satan.
You could come back and say
well yes, but it’s still the Father’s plan that’s going on there. Could you imagine the Trinity splitting
apart in a committee of three that can’t agree?
No we can’t. We have to hold to
the unity of the Trinity. But whatever happened in those trials, that’s what
they’re talking about, that He chose to meet the trials in His humanity rather
than face off Satan with full divine powers.
What happened? We don’t really know what happened.
To answer the question, it’s
hedging, trying to avoid going off the road; that’s what a lot of these
statement are, they’re hedges, we don’t want to do that and we don’t want to do
this, so we’ll kind of get in here and stay with the Scripture as much as we
can. That’s all that is. You’re right, the word “independent” has a
nasty ring to it, and it’s the same when that non posse peccare and posse
non peccare, the “able” has a nasty ring to it to it too because if you say
He is not able to sin the way we normally think of the word “able” there, it
makes it look like there wasn’t even a contest going on. We grant you that;
it’s just be aware that these words are difficult to use because we’re talking
across the Creature/creature boundary line, and it’s very difficult to phrase
it right.
Question asked: Clough replies: That’s right.
The final bottom line is that what we want to do with our minds is we
want to encompass the problem, and that desire to understand itself isn’t
wrong. Where it gets wrong is when we
insist that we’re not going to believe and we’re not going to obey, and we’re
not going to do anything until we get it in our heads what’s going on here; we’re
going to postpone everything until we
figure it out. Then we’ve transgressed
something right there. That’s arrogance,
that’s intellectual arrogance. Humility
is Lord, this is pretty neat and heavy stuff, and You are a wonderful God and
I’m amazed at You, You’re majestic. That’s the worship of God, that’s what
worshiping is.
Question asked: Clough
replies: She brought up Romans 11 where
He quotes, but you know what quote is? It’s not Paul, it’s Isaiah 40, just
above the passage we went to, that’s where Paul got that from. He’s using Isaiah. But you’re right because in Romans 11 at the
end what does Paul do? He has struggled,
all through Romans 9, 10 and 11, and he deals with all this heavy stuff and
hardening Pharaoh’s heart, he works through that, and after three chapters of
this stuff what does He conclude with?
“Oh the depth of the riches of both of the wisdom and knowledge of
God! How unsearchable are His judgments
and unfathomable His ways!” [Rom. 11:33] Unsearchable and unfathomable His
ways, exclamation point. Here’s one of
the greatest geniuses in the human race, because I really believe Paul was one
of the greatest geniuses in the human race who probably had the deepest and
most profound understanding of doctrine of any person you could imagine outside
of Jesus Himself. And then he quotes
from Isaiah, [Rom. 11:34] “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became
His counselor? [35] Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to
Him again?” And then he concludes, [36] “For from Him and through Him and to
Him are all things. To Him be the glory
forever.”
It’s that recognition of the
depths and the riches of the incomprehensibility of our God, and you just walk
away in awe, and that’s what He wants of us, not that He doesn’t want us to
probe Him for those things because every time we dig we find treasure. But the problem is you never get to the end
of the treasure. That’s the problem. We
want to get to the end of the tunnel so we can kind of get it together. But then what would happen. Let’s imagine that we did that. Let’s just do a thought experiment here. Let’s image that we… ah, I got it, I’ve got
it, it clicks, now I’m done. Now what do
I do for the rest of eternity? So you
never arrive, that’s the problem, you never arrive. And that’s why we have
those mysterious… remember when we went through Job and we got into that
suffering passage, and Job is dealing with the problem of good and evil, he’s
hurting, he’s sick, he’s lost everything and talk about a guy… every church
congregation has a Job family in it, one time or another, I’ve just watched
this, a family just gets clobbered with one thing after another. I’ve often thought, we ought to really give
out an annual Job award because it just seems that people just get
clobbered. It doesn’t come one a month;
it has to come five in one day. That’s
what happened in Job’s case.
But when God comes to Job,
He’s like a freight train; this is not quite the nice counseling session, oh
what’s your name, have you had a good day today, let’s get to know one another,
the touchy feeling kind of thing, then we’ll talk about your problems. He comes in and He says all right, who is
this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Answer Me, gird up your
loins like a man, I’ll ask you and you instruct Me. Ooh! Where
were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Bam, Bam, Bam, I think I counted up
thirty-seven questions and all of them are really questions that have no
answer. So why does God do that? Why
does He come in apparently so cruel, so rough?
I suggested that I think one
reason He does that is because when we’re hurting, when we’re depressed, and
when we’re so stressed out, we are so emotionally wrapped up with our pain,
with our sorrow, our resentments, our frustrations, our depression, we’re a basket
case, we’re immobilized. And I think
what He’s doing here is when you ask someone a question, what does that force
them to do. It’s like serving a ball
across the net. The question is the ball; He knocks it into our court, what
does He want us to do? Hit it back. What do you have to do to hit it back? You have to think. Now you have to draw on
the reservoirs of the Word of God in your heart and you have to dig down and
pull it out, and finally after all this the Word of God…, it’s like blood, it
begins to flow, get the circulation going, and the emotions, the pain and the
sorrow kind of shed, lower down.
Ironically it’s almost
opposite to what modern counseling theory argues for. When people came into Columbine out in
Colorado, I guess it was Chuck Colson was saying how professional grief
counselors came in, ordered into the schools, and the kids were pushed and
shoved, you’ve got to go see the counselors, got to get this grieving process
going, and they found out the kids weren’t going to the counselors. How come the kids aren’t going to the
counselors? Because they’d been going to
their youth groups, to their churches, to their pastors. Oh, we didn’t think about that. What can the grief counselors do? On a secular basis? One of the techniques they use, if you’re
grieving over the loss of someone the technique is to get you to emotionally
cut your bonds with that person. That’s
their way of dealing with grief. Come
on! If you’ve lost a loved one is the solution to the pain and sorrow just to
forget you ever knew them? I don’t think
so; I think you’re fooling yourself. You
can’t let that person go that way. So
what do you do? It gets back to the
envelopment idea.
You take the problem, like
God does with Job, and you can’t tear the problem up and throw it away, you
can’t push it out the door and get rid of it because it keeps coming back, so
God encompasses the problem. It’s like a
cyst; He encysts it with truth or Scripture. Then finally you begin to relax,
and the more you can relax and calm down, the more you can see, okay, I believe
that He has a purpose for me for this, and I really do mean that. It’s not that somebody quoted a verse and yes
I believe that (no I really don’t) but I believe that (no I really don’t). It’s not that give and take. It’s really a depth trust. But see, you don’t get there in one step; it
takes a process to get settled. The way
God comes in like gangbusters there is His method of doing it. You see Jesus do that same thing. He always starts out with questions. And I’ve been impressed with that. Every time
God maneuvers… what did He do in Adam’s case?
After the fall, what did He do, what was the first sentence out of God’s
mouth? Why are you, hey, you whoo; what
did that do? That was the tennis ball;
it was put over into his area. Now it’s
yours, go ahead, hit it back to Me.
That’s what Jesus was doing with that woman, He said something, you’re
being coy about it, I’ll put the ball in your court, now you bang it back to
Me. When God does that you have to reach down with a paddle, pick the thing up
and bang it over, even though you don’t feel like doing it. But He puts you in that position, and then
once you do that, oh, I can do that, oh yea.
Job, in the end, after all
these questions, still doesn’t get his questions answered. God never answers His questions, but Job is
able to relax. That gets back to what
we’ve been talking about tonight, we have these questions, we don’t quite know
how impeccability fits in, and the hypostatic union, but by concentrating on
who He is as our Creator, we can come to rest.
It’s not that we believe there’s contradictions, the unbeliever’s idea
of what we’re doing here is that well, you’ve given up all hope of figuring it
out; you’re given up all hope of rationality. That’s his position. That’s not what we’re saying. We believe in
rationality. Surely God is rational. We
believe in reason, that’s precisely why those kids went to their pastors in
Denver. They went there because they were answered why did this happen, there
has to be a reason behind this massacre.
Did any of the pastors have
an answer? Not directly, like Job 1, we
don’t know what the councils of heaven were, why those two kids were allowed to
go shoot everybody. God didn’t share
that. But what happened when these kids went and started pouring out their
heart to the Lord in prayer and getting back.
It was because finally in the last analysis, you become persuaded, yes,
there is a reason for this. Do I know
it? No.
But I know the One who knows it, and there you rest your case. But see, you can’t do it quickly and you
can’t do it while you’re emotions are tearing you up, you can’t do it while
you’re all upset, there’s a certain heart-settling process that has to happen
and that’s why God comes on like that.
We’re going to encounter this
again when we get into the death of Christ, and we’re going to continue working
infallibility, this technical error thing.
Jesus did not make technical errors; we’re going to show that. Fortunately, infallibility is going to be a
lot easier to handle than kenosis and impeccability.
We’ve run out of time.