Category Archives: “free offer” of the gospel

Three questions demonstrating why Calvinists need to recognize the value of more than one perspective

Rather than explain what I mean, I’ll suggest the questions and trust that my meaning will be clear.

Question One: Did God lead the people of Israel out of Egypt in order for them to die in the wilderness?

Throughout the Exodus story the people grumbled against Moses and against God and accused one or both of intending exactly that: God took them into the desert to die there. Did God regard this as a true statement of his intentions? No. He claimed he was leading them through the wilderness in order to bring them into the Promised Land.

But because of their unbelief and increasing rebellion, God did eventually destroy that generation in the wilderness. So does that mean that we Calvinists must side with the grumblers? Do we agree that God brought them into the wilderness in order to kill them there? Did they speak the truth about God?

Yes or No?

Question Two: Was it God’s will for David to take Uriah’s wife?

God obviously worked all things together to bring about the birth of Solomon as the heir to the throne of David. So was David doing God’s will when he seduced Bathsheba? Or when he got Uriah murdered?

Yes or No?

Question Three: Were Jesus’ bones breakable?

I stole this one from John Calvin. But what is your answer? Isaiah prophesied that Jesus’ bones would never be broken. They never were. So were they unbreakable?

Breakable or unbreakable?

The point:

No Calvinist can operate without acknowledging different levels in how one speaks of God. They seem contradictory, but they are not dealing with the same level of reality. We can speak of God from the standpoint of his unconditional and certain decree, and we can speak from the perspective of his revealed character, his sincere offer, and the nature of things in themselves.

RePost: The best way to defend soteriological Calvinism?

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I had objections to the doctrine of predestination but, eventually, these were overcome. What happened is R. C. Sproul’s original (black hair, turtleneck, plaid pants) lectures on “The Holiness of God”powerfully reintroduced me to my own depravity and guilt. The new understanding of my depravity broke down my objections to facing the passages that talk of our need for God’s invincible grace. The new understanding of my guilt broke down my objections to facing the passages that spoke of God’s sovereign rights to have mercy on whom he chooses.

From that point on, I was sure that all objections to decreetal calvinism stemmed from an underestimation of our depravity and our guilt in comparison to God’s holiness.

But what if there are Arminians who are not concerned about such issues?

What if they simply want the cross of Jesus Christ and the offer of salvation in the Gospel to be as deeply revelatory of God’s nature as anything else in Scripture?

It was Athanasius, I think, who said we learned something more essential about God when we named him “Father” from the revelation of His Son, Jesus, than when we named him “Uncreate” from the revelation we find in creation. The point was that creation was God’s volition but that begetting the Son, and being begotten of the Father were eternal relations. God could have chosen not to create and would have been no less God, but he could never fail to beget the Son. Knowing the Son is the Son and the Father is the Father is a grasp of God’s essence much more than knowledge of God as Creator.

And here is the problem. Salvation is supposed to be a revelation of God. It can’t be given equal weight with the trinitarian relationships, of course; if God could choose whether or not to create then the cross could also be chosen or not. But, within creation and the revelation therein both special and general, when we compare the wrath of God to the love of God, wrath looks like it is more fundamental and more revelatory of God’s character.

Think about it. What do we know about God’s character? What must be true about God beyond any possible contingency? The answer is: God must inflict penal suffering on sin. What is fundamental about God is that he punishes. That he is loving and merciful is true, but it could just as easily not be in regard to sinful human beings.

From one angle, this all makes perfect sense. Mercy can’t be obligated, of course. But when it comes to understanding God’s fundamental nature, what it can sound like is that it would make no difference to who God is if he were to damn all creation. He would still be a holy and righteous God. (Come to think of it, inasmuch as Sproul’s lectures were intended to make the listener open to TULIP, the entire project was theological: to relativize love and make it subordinate to holiness. God can decide to be forgiving but fundamentally he must establish separation, control, perfectionism, and punishment.)

Every time a Calvinist tries to get an Arminian to see things differently, he might well be saying something that sounds quite different to the Arminian than what he intends. I have assured and do assure people every time the issue comes up that we should not be amazed that sinners are reprobate but instead should be amazed and thankful that any sinners will ever be saved. Soteriologically and legally this is fine. Theologically it sounds like we have no real revelation of God’s character in his salvation of sinners. The fundamental reality is wrath and the contingency is sometimes that wrath gets put on Jesus instead of the sinner. And this rhetorical gap only widens as we talk about who amazing it is that God saves, how suprising and how strange. Are the doctrines of grace a revelation of or an exception to God’s essence?

I have known of professing Christians who struggle with assurance for no apparant reason. I’m beginning to wonder if this is not a sort of existential or metaphysical angst. Yes there is grace and salvation but the bedrock character of God is punitive justice. Wrath is the fundamental metaphysic. And I think we see other problems cropping up in the Christian life, though if someone wishes to simply deny this, I have no argument to make. Recall Jack Miller’s query as to whether believers who affirm that God loves them are willing to concede that God likes them? Is our presentation of God’s love for sinners something like Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice? Does God confess that he loves us in spite of his better judgment and even against his character? Do we give that impression? Would it be good news if we did? Yet it is hard to know how we can affirm slavation as a gratuitous gift without risking sounding like this. Obviously God wasn’t obligated to forgive anyone. Nevertheless, there is tension present in affirming this. It sounds like we don’t know God and this may be the reason why the particularism of Calvinism is resisted.

Is it possible much promotion of calvinism is designed to distract listeners/readers from this problem? Of course, the distraction involves truths about God’s holiness, our sin, and God ability to save. No one is trying to be distracting. But when we find people resisting, maybe it is not because they want to believe they are less depraved than they really are or that God is less capable of salvation. Maybe they want to believe that God is love–that the giving up of his Son is just as revelatory of God’s character as anything else.

So what to do?

First off, I think we should beat Arminians to the punch in bringing up this objection. Let’s admit to it and face it.

Secondly, let’s say that, as powerful as such considerations are, exegesis still trumps our feelings. Of course, by that I don’t mean that our feelings are wrong. On the contrary, it is obvious from reading the Bible that God wants us to have those feelings. Rather, the point is that those feelings must somehow be compatible to what the Bible teaches about predestination and salvation. Even if everything doesn’t fit together as neatly in our minds, it still remains true that the Bible teaches God’s ultimate plan for all things, total depravity, unconditional election (nothing foreseen is the basis for it), limited atonement (God’s motive for sending Jesus was personal), invincible grace, and the preseverence of the eternally elect.

Thirdly, lets emphasize The Free Offer of the Gospel and Common Grace. Here John MacArthur’s excellent comments are a helpful corrective to a lot of hypercalvinism is a great help. But there is a lot of great stuff out there including John Piper, Robert Dabney, and, of course, John Calvin. A couple of things are important here:

Creational Grace The difference between monotheism and everything else–atheism, pantheism, deism, or polytheism–is that the latter means that one can and should have ultimate grattitude and ultimate trust. Reality is not the product of chance, whether impersonal forces or competing personal agents, but a gift of grace. The awful truth of sin and reprobation is found in the fact that people have refused to given thanks and refused to trust (Romans 1.18ff). The background and presupposition of depravity is God’s initiating love.

We believe that man was created pure and perfect in the image of God, and that by his own guilt he fell from the grace which he received, and is thus alienated from God, the fountain of justice and of all good, so that his nature is totally corrupt. And being blinded in mind, and depraved in heart, he has lost all integrity, and there is no good in him (Gallican Confession, Article IX).

Everytime we tell of sin we have a chance to tell people of the goodness and love of God that we have and continually deny and distrust. This doesn’t answer every possible question one might have but it does reinforce the metaphysical reality that God is the giving God (James 1.5)
The offer of mercy and grace is sincerely given to all who here it. Even in affirming that the resistance to God’s kindness will lead to perdition Paul does not hesitate to affirm that God’s kindness is intended to bring us to repentance (Romans 2.4, 5). We need to teach God’s decree but not allow it to be used to portray God as either insincere or stingy.

This won’t solve every issue, but it will help us all remember that an ontology of love is something that wrath must somehow fit into rather than love being an inexplicable raft on a sea of fire.

Fourth, lets remember the danger of relying on the printed word to persuade people of the truths of predestinaton and monergistic salvation. When people hear new doctrines (new to them) they have nothing but their imaginations to guess how these new principles would alter their lives. It is much better to introduce people to new communities where people can see that these truths are embodied in love. Otherwise, many may reject the doctrines of grace thinking that, in order to be in the image of God, they must be selective in their love. And worse, some who do embrace these teachings may miscalculate and become the charicatures we all want to avoid. (Think of John MacArthur’s words in the article linked above: “I am troubled by the tendency of some-often young people newly infatuated with Reformed doctrine-who insist that God cannot possibly love those who never repent and believe. I encounter that view, it seems, with increasing frequency.”)

Fifth and finally, when one sees photographs of people who lived their lives in the American frontier wilderness, one often sees people hardened by the elements. And, in our literature and moveies we often see those who survive scoffing at the “tenderfoots” and “soft” Easterners who pass by on trains. Let us not grow hard because we have mistakenly been thinking of reality as hostile, and if we have grown hard, lets not rationalize this by mocking Christians who seem more concerned about portraying a God who is generous than one who is the ultimate cause of all things. One shouldn’t have to choose between those options but if one does, it is not at all clear that one is superior to the other.

Sunday P.M. Post: Robert Dabney on God’s Feelings for Jacob and Esau

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Is not compassion for the miseries of his own lost creature as natural to a God of infinite benevolence as moral indignation against all sin is to a God of infinite righteousness? And when two guilty creatures are suffering similar miseries, equally deserved in both cases, can the divine immutability, consistency, and goodness be reconciled with the belief that the compassion which exists in the one case has not even the slightest existence in the other case? If this particular position be assumed, then the charge of unaccountable partiality, which the Arminian unjustly casts against predestination, will have some fair application. Not that either sufferer has a personal right to either compassion or succor as against God. But the anomaly will be this: how comes it that an essential principle of God’s nature should act normally towards one object, and refuse the similar exercise towards the precisely parallel object? This is God’s absolute sovereignty, answers the supralapsarian. But a sound theology answers again, no; while God is perfectly free in every exercise of his essential principles, yet he freely does some things necessarily, and other things optionally; and God’s optional liberty is not whether he shall have the propensions of his essential principles, but whether he shall execute them by his volitions. The counterpart truth, then, must be asserted of Jacob and Esau. As God had the natural and appropriate affection of disapprobation against Jacob’s ill desert (and still elected him) which he had against Esau’s; so, doubtless, he had the same affection, appropriate to his infinite goodness, of compassion for Esau’s misery (and yet rejected him) which he had for Jacob’s deserved misery. If any compassion for Esau existed in the sovereign mind, why did it not effectuate itself in his salvation? We answer with a parallel question: Why did not the righteous reprehension against Jacob’s ill desert, if any of it existed in the sovereign mind, effectuate itself in his damnation? All of us have agreed to the answer to this latter question; we dare not say that God could distinctly foresee all Jacob’s supplanting falsehood, and feel no disapprobation whatever; it would come near to blasphemy. We must reply: Because this disapprobation, while existing in the holy mind, was counterpoised by a wise, gracious, and sovereign motive unrevealed to us. Well, let the parallel answer be given to the parallel question: The divine compassion existing towards Esau’s misery was counterpoised by some holy, wise, and sovereign motive unrevealed to us; so that righteous disapprobation for his sin remained the prevalent motive of righteous preterition.

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RePost: John 3.16–Whom Does God Love?

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Us calvinists occasionally get in debates about John 3.16. “Does God love everyone in the world?” some ask. And we get painful explanations about how “world” (kosmos) means world of the elect.

Well, I as strange as it may sound, I don’t think John 3.16 really refers to the whole world.

I think it refers to reprobate Israelites.

First of all, when the Gospel of John uses the term “world” we know it, at least sometimes, does not mean the whole world.

My most obvious example: John 15.18-16.4a:

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: “A servant is not greater than his master.” If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my Father also.

If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: “They hated me without a cause.”

But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.

I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you.

So “the world,” here, are those who have witnessed Jesus’ miracles and witness, who have the Law of the Old Testament, who will cast the disciples out of synagogues, and who persecute in the name of God, not of Caesar or Diana of the Ephesians.

The world is the establishment of First-Century Judaism.

What about John 3.16? In context, is there any reason to think that Jesus is still speaking to Nicodemus? Despite the red-letters in many passages, we know John starts commenting without warning. This reads to me like one of those instances.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.

John is summarizing what happened, looking back on the outcome after the years have passed. Jesus came to bring salvation to Israel and Israel chose judgment.

John 3.16, then, would be pretty much the same message as Jeremiah 13.11:

For as the loincloth clings to the waist of a man, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory, but they would not listen.

The whole point of John 3.16 is the tragedy of rejecting the Son. It isn’t dealing with the secret decrees of God but of His sincere offer, motivated by a love that sent His Son.

On the day of judgment, God’s not going to accept the claim from the reprobate, “You never loved me, anyway.” And I don’t want to hear any of them add, “At least that’s what I learned from internet calvinists.”

For Further Reading:

Postscript: Is there a verse that says God so love the world (as we know it)?

Yes! Of course there is. It is found in Genesis 12.3:

Now YHWH said to Abram,

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
And I will make of you a great nation,
and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse,
and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Abraham wasn’t chosen at the expense of the world but for the sake of the world! The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, identifies God’s message to Abraham as the Gospel itself:

Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.

Thus, postmillennialism is extremely important to the Gospel!

RePost: God won’t share his people (his glory) with another

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In Isaiah 48 we read:

Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
for how should my name be profaned?
My glory I will not give to another.

In the context of a prophecy that God will deliver his people from Babylon and the nations, Someone recently pointed out to me the text of Jeremiah 13.11:

For as the loincloth clings to the waist of a man, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory, but they would not listen.

This chapter in Jeremiah is full of severe judgment. But here in the midst of it, God himself tells his people that their sin strips him. His loins are uncovered and his glory has been taken away.

I commented awhile back on how astounding it is that God tells us that we are his inheritance, and shows us in Scripture the saints praying to God to remember his inheritance and protect his people–as if God were some pauper hoping to come into a fortune. As if we corrupt sinners were his fortune. Jeremiah 13.11 is of the same sort. The all-glorious God considers himself naked without us–we who are by nature sinful and ashamed and prone to trade God for fig leaves.

Repost: Covenant of Grace conditional and unconditional

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I mentioned here what I think is an implausible way to relate grace and conditions or the lack thereof. It occurred to me that getting back to the Reformation earlier than the Westminster Standards might be helpful:

And indeed one may easily get in trouble here unless one proceeds on the royal highway. For those people who consider only the conditions of the covenant and in fact disregard the grace and promise of God exclude infants from the covenant. It is true that children not only do not observe the terms of the covenant but also do not even understand these terms. But those who view only the sacrament, ceremony, or sign of the covenant count some in the covenant who are really excluded. But if you consider each one separately, one at a time, not only according to the conditions of the covenant but also in terms of the promise or the mercy of God, and the age and reason of a person, then you will realize that all those who believe from among the Jews and the Gentiles are the descendants of Abraham with whom the Lord made the covenant. In the meantime, however, their offspring, that is, their children, have by no means been excluded from the covenant. They are excluded, however, if having reached the age of reason they neglect the conditions of the covenant.

In the same way, we consider children of parents to be children and indeed heirs even though they, in their early years, do not know that they are either children or heirs of their parents. They are, however, disowned if, after they have reached the age of reason, they neglect the commands of their parents. In that case, the parent no longer calls them children and heirs but worthless profligates. They are mistaken who boast about their prerogatives as sons of the family by virtue of birth. For he who violates the laws of piety toward parents is no different from a slave; indeed, he is lower than a slave, because even by the law of nature itself he owes more to his parents. Truly this debate about the seed of Abraham has been settled for us by the prophets and the apostles, specifically that not everyone who is born of Abraham is the seed of Abraham, but only he who is a son of the promise, that is, who is faithful, whether Jew or Gentile. For the Jews have already neglected the basic conditions of the covenant, while at the same time they glorified themselves as the people of God, relying on circumcision and the fact that they were born from the parent Abraham. Indeed, this error is denied and attacked not only by Christ along with the apostles but also by the entire body of the prophets (boldface added).

Thus wrote Heinrich Bullinger in The One and Eternal Testament or Covenant with God, which I found translated in Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenantal Tradition, Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker [Louisville, KY: W/JKP, 1991], 106). Notice that Bullinger doesn’t say that Jews are guilty in boasting in their obedience to the Law, but only in their membership in the Abrahamic family through circumcision. In my opinion, pursuing this as you study Romans would be very helpful to understanding what Paul is saying.

Sunday P.M Post: John Murray on The Free Offer of the Gospel

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But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

The disciples are to love their enemies in order that they may be the sons of their Father; they must imitate their Father. Clearly implied is the thought that God, the Father, loves his enemies and that it is because he loves his enemies that he makes his sun rise upon them and sends them rain. This is just saying that the kindness bestowed in sunshine and rain is the expression of divine love, that back of the bestowal there is an attitude on the part of God, called love, which constrains him to bestow these tokens of his lovingkindness. This informs us that the gifts bestowed by God are not simply gifts which have the effect of good and blessing to those who are the recipients but that they are also a manifestation or expression of lovingkindness and goodness in the heart or will of God with reference to those who are the recipients. The enjoyment on the part of the recipients has its ground as well as its source in this lovingkindness of which the gifts enjoyed are the expression. In other words, these are gifts and are enjoyed because there is in a true and high sense benevolence in the heart of God.

These conclusions are reinforced by verse 48. There can be no question regarding the immediate relevance of verse 48 to the exhortation of verses 44-47, even though it may have a more comprehensive reference. And verse 48 means that what has been adduced by way of divine example in the preceding verses is set forth as epitomizing the divine perfection and as providing the great exemplar by which the believer’s attitude and conduct are to be governed and the goal to which thought and life are to be oriented. The love and beneficence of God to the evil and unjust epitomize the norm of human perfection. It is obvious that this love and beneficence on the part of God are regarded by our Lord himself as not something incidental in God but as that which constitutes an element in the sum of divine perfection. This is made very specific in the parallel passage in Luke 6 :35,36 where we read, “And ye shall be sons of the Most High, because he is kind towards the unthankful and evil. Ye shall be merciful, as your Father is merciful.” This word translated “merciful” is redolent of the pity and compassion in the heart of God that overflow in the bestowments of kindness.

via The Free Offer of the Gospel.

RePost: AntiFV and Hypercalvinism Again

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In my series on The “free” (i.e. genuine) offer of the Gospel, I pointed out in this post Berkhof’s reply to a hypercalvinist that Berkhof believes that the justified, can, in this life, also be in some sense under God’s wrath. I wrote,

it is well worth asking how we are to interpret the destructive forces of nature, but such a question cannot reduce the plain meaning of Jesus’ words to absurdity, unless God can be guilty of absurdity, which is blasphemous to contemplate. Perhaps we need to ask if we have not created more trouble than necessary by absolutizing the distinction between God’s “Fatherly displeasure” and His “wrath,” between “discipline” and “chastisement” on the one hand, and “punishment” on the other. As Louis Berkhof asks rhetorically: “Are the elect in this life the objects of God’s love only, and never in any sense the objects of His wrath? Is Moses thinking of the reprobate when he says: ‘For we are consumed in thine anger, and in thy wrath we are troubled’? Psa 90.7.”[Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1941), p. 445.] It is a profound truth and great comfort that all things, including sufferings, work ultimately to our good as Christians. The question is whether that fact necessitates that all things are alike and in the same way to be considered “good” simply because of the future result in glory.

In context, Berkhof can only be talking about the elect after they are converted. So, in reply to Hoeksema, Berkhof thought it was possible to look at the Bible and see that these justified people were also, in some sense, under God’s wrath. Perhaps we should always use scare-quotes for “wrath,” in this case, like the actor I saw who re-enacted the Gospel of Luke (which was actually a pastiche that included John) and made quotation marks with his fingers while he played Jesus saying that his flesh was true “bread.”

But there are no scare quotes in Psalm 90.7. And if it is possible for God to be angry and wrathful with the justified in some way, it seems equally plausible to say that unregenerate professing believers are, until they manifest their hard hearts in rebellion, in some sense relatively right with God compared to those who refuse to respond to the Gospel.

Funny, this doesn’t look very gracious

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Every once in a while I see someone post a historic writing about justification by faith alone and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness that makes me feel like I am being commanded to crawl up a long stone flight of stairs on my knees to kiss a relic when I have reached the top. What is the point of glorying in justification by faith when faith is then defined as requiring extraordinary piety and assurance of salvation is made doubtful? I’m reminded of a conference I attended where a speaker criticized this tendency:

But what kind of faith is sola fide faith? There is a certain quality to this saving faith, and there is the spurious faith and there is the pretentious faith. Then the pulpits want us to begin examining our faith. Then we have to “bring up” our faith. Before you know it, everybody thinks that he or she is not saved. “How can I really and truly be saved?” To find out, come back next week and the preacher will make you feel guilty, by golly. Week after week the people are berated, bullied, and tortured in their consciences on the presupposition that God is as niggardly as the preacher believes Him to be. God only saves with the greatest possible reluctance. When somebody manages to squeak into the kingdom, He snaps His fingers and says, “Shucks! Another one made it. I was hoping that he would be deceived into thinking that he had saving faith when he really didn’t have it.” The whole notion of God is distorted, as if Paul preached a Gospel so full of qualifiers that faith becomes a new work–and outdoes what the most wicked, abominable, self-righteous Pharisee (as our own Reformed fathers viewed the Pharisees) ever taught about works that had to be performed to enter the kingdom of God.

Another speaker:

When you read some books, even some reformed books about assurance, they will say something like this, that anyone can have assurance provided he continues in godliness for a certain space of time. How long? Five minutes good? Does it have to be ten? Does it have to be a year or two of godliness before you can have any assurance? And I began to wonder what do you do with somebody who has struggled against sin, who falls into sin, terrible sin, wants to flee from them, finds himself terribly attracted to them, can a person like that have assurance of salvation or does that wait until much later on after he has already conquered his terrible sins that he is struggling against? But then how do you conquer sin when you have no assurance? How do you battle against sin when you are not sure that God loves you? When you are not really sure that Christ died for you? And when you’re not really sure that you are one of his people, how could you ever fight against sin? What power would you have to fight with if you are not really sure that he has given you his Holy Spirit?

And again:

I’ve be in situations where many times I’ve had occasion to speak to Christian young people, covenant young people who have grown up in evangelical homes, good church kids, well established, well taught and there are a hand full of topics that can get a room full of young kids to go deathly quiet, deathly quiet. And one of them, one of the two, is assurance of salvation. Becau (se we have 350 years of our tradition requiring people to twist in the wind for an appropriate period to time before they can go through a crisis, convulsive experience and say, “I’m saved.” This model has been developed. We take a snippet from the Bible: The Apostle Paul was converted that way. He has a convulsive, Damascus road experience and it is wonderful when that happens. But we have made the Damascus road, convulsive, conversion experience the norm. And all over America you will have somebody come in to a special Sunday evening service, the former Hell’s Angel who has $300 a day crack cocaine, killed three people, scrambled his brains with a little egg whisk, he was on death row and the governor pardoned him and then led him to the Lord and now he is traveling around the country telling people about Jesus. And he is a mess. All right? He is a forgiven mess but he [is a mess]. And all these covenant kids are thinking “Ah man why can’t I have that?”Because your parents were obedient! Your parents brought you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Your testimony is supposed to be boring. It is! Glory to God for boring testimonies.

In short, if you are a believer, you are supposed to be confident God loves you and to follow him as trustworthy (which includes: faithful to continue to forgive all your sins all the rest of your life until you are perfected in the next one). You are not supposed to be told that you might have the imputed righteousness of Christ if you study enough or flagellate yourself enough or do any other works (!).

I get so far away from this I forget that it really happens. But then I see a quote from a Puritan or Pietist (not that there weren’t good Puritans and Pietists who did better than this) and legalism as grace has been a real problem in the Church.

It can even distort an Evangelist’s message.

Justification by faith alone or with faith added on?

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However, we do not mean, properly speaking, that it is faith itself that justifies us—for faith is only the instrument by which we embrace Christ, our righteousness. But Jesus Christ is our righteousness in making available to us all his merits and all the holy works he has done for us and in our place. And faith is the instrument that keeps us in communion with him and with all his benefits. When those benefits are made ours they are more than enough to absolve us of our sins.

via Mark Horne » Blog Archive » Why hypercalvinism is back of the “FV controversy.”.

So states the Belgic Confession. But I wonder… If I preach that one is maintained in a justified state by faith would that be considered orthodox by the watchbloggers?

FOR FURTHER READING: Union with Christ allows us to keep both forensic justification and justification by faith alone.