Every once in a while in my discussions someone asks how I can believe in the Trinity. My answer is always the same. I would still be an agnostic if there was no Trinity, because there would be no answers. Without the high order of personal unity and diversity as given in the Trinity, there are no answers. —Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent
Author: Josh King
Theft Royal (Exodus 20:15)
God owns everything. It’s all His stuff. This is the basis for human ownership, the only basis. God entrusts man with dominion as a steward. Man is a small “k” king. God takes from Canaan and gives to Israel. The true test of ownership isn’t if you took, but if God gave. If dualism or polytheism is true, then the strongest wins, and so it shall be in creation: might makes right. If atheism is true then the chaos remains. No God, no ultimate ownership, no reference point. Winner take all. If you’re smarter, faster, sneakier, meaner, or tougher, it’s yours. It’s no coincidence that atheism and communism rhyme and travel together, married couples like poetry and gallivant, and these two are definitely wed and in love.
But if God is, then ownership can be. All is His, and He thus has the right to freely distribute and entrust as He will. God is no egalitarian. To some He gives much, to others He gives little, but to every son of Adam He gives lavishly. He makes His sun to rise on the just and the unjust. Hell on earth is short of the hell of hell we deserve.
This means that all theft is sin against God, and all sin against God is theft. All theft is against God because it’s all His stuff. Queen Elizabeth has given certain items to the British Museum on long term loan. Should a thief steal them, he’s not only stolen from the museum, he’s stolen from the Queen. But that is not as high as the crime goes, for a majesty greater than even the British Empire at its height could muster is involved. An infinite majesty is involved in the theft not only of earth’s sovereigns, but also of her peasants. Indeed, God may very well count the penny entrusted to the lowly serf the greater treasure, and thus robbery of that penny as the greater crime.
All sin against God is theft. God is due, and He is due all. Sin incurs a debt you cannot repay. You may be able to repay the human victim. You may even be able to pay the double, quadruple, or quintuple the law specifies, but you can’t repay the debt you owe back to God. Do you carry extra time in your back pocket? God is infinitely worthy of worship now. Should you worship him perfectly now and forever forward, you would only be rendering unto Him what is His due then. Can you reverse time? Do you have some infinity in the bank? Because that is how worthy He is.
Sin is a debt only man is obligated to pay, but only God can pay. Glory be to God, He did. “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross (Colossians 1:13–14 ESV).” Dead men can’t pay back debts, but, because Jesus paid our debts, we can be made alive.
The Apologist: Apologetics a Subset of Evangelism
Thus apologetics, as I see it, should not be separated in any way from evangelism. I wonder if “apologetics” which does not lead people to Christ as Savior, and then on to their living under the Lordship of Christ in the whole of life really is Christian apologetics. —Francis Schaffer, The God Who Is There
“How Far Is too Far?” Is too Far (Exodus 20:14)
It seems the Pharisees were like hormonal teenagers raised in a dead Christendom; they read the law wanting to know how far they could go (Matthew 5:27–30). You could lust, only you mustn’t commit adultery. When one asks the question, “How far is too far?” they’ve already crossed the line. The law makes hard lines, no doubt, but we shouldn’t treat the law like a cow does a barbed wire fence, straining our necks through the lines to get the green grass on the other side. “But my feet and body are still on the other side.”
Think of the law less like a line between and more like a line to: a line leading you unto godliness, a line to express love to God, a line that you want to climb higher up. The law is a line to pursue deeper intimacy. The point isn’t how close you can stay to sin, but how you can grow closer to the Holy one in holiness. The point isn’t to stay an inch away from sin, but to run miles away from sin towards God.
In Proverbs 5 Solomon calls for his sons to flee the forbidden woman. He doesn’t give his sons wisdom for how to knock on her door and stare only at her face. “Keep your way far from her, and do not go near the door of her house (Proverbs 5:8 ESV).” But that alone isn’t the full prescription: “Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets? Let them be for yourself alone, and not for strangers with you. Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress (Proverbs 5:15–20 ESV)?”
Enjoying the aged and refined scotch in your cupboard curbs the appeal of the illicit and deadly moonshine. Delighting in the truth that God has given you the best grass is the way not to succumb to Satan’s lie that the grass is greener on the other side. The Puritan Thomas Watson commented, “It is not having a wife, but loving a wife, that makes a man live chastely. He who love his wife, whom Solomon calls his fountain, will not go abroad to drink of muddy, poisoned waters. Pure conjugal love is a gift of God, and comes from heaven; but, like the vestal fire, it must be cherished, that it go not out. He who love not his wife, is the likeliest person to embrace the bosom of a stranger.”
This is a glorious way to fight sexual sin, but it is yet a lesser way. It is a lesser way in that marriage is lesser thing than that which it is a copy of, Christ’s love for His bride. The way to avoid violating the command to not commit adultery, in all that it entails, is for the bride to delight in Her Bridegroom. He is without peer. He is altogether lovely. He is without fault. When we truly see Him, we have eyes for no other. Be intoxicated in the unequalled jealous love of your Savior, and may this overflow into your marriage, and may it keep you from adultery of every sort.
The Apologist: Why the Easiest is the Hardest
We must realize that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world, because it is the only religion in which God the Father and Christ and the Holy Spirit do everything. God is the Creator; we have nothing to do with our existence, or existence of other things. We can shape other things, but we cannot change the fact of existence. We do nothing for our salvation because Christ did it all. We do not have to do anything. In every other religion we have to do something—everything from burning a joss stick to sacrificing our firstborn child to dropping a coin in the collection plate—the whole spectrum. But with Christianity we do not do anything; God has done it all: He has created us and He has sent His Son; His Son died and because the Son is infinite, therefore He bears our total guilt. We do not need to bear our guilt, nor do we even have to merit the merit of Christ. He does it all. So in one way it is the easiest religion in the world.
But now we can turn that over because it is the hardest religion in the world for the same reason. The heart of the rebellion of Satan and man was the desire to be autonomous; and accepting the Christian faith robs us not of our existence, not of our worth (it gives us our worth), but it robs us completely of being autonomous. We did not make ourselves, we are not a product of chance, we are none of these things; we stand there before a Creator plus nothing, we stand before the Savior plus nothing—it is a complete denial of being autonomous. Whether it is conscious or unconscious (and in the most brilliant people it is occasionally conscious), when they see the sufficiency of the answers on their own level, they suddenly are up against their innermost humanness—not humanness as they were created to be human, but human in the bad sense since the Fall. That is the reason that people do not accept the sufficient answers and why they are counted by God as disobedient and guilty when they do not bow. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There
The Blood on our Hands has been Sprinkled on Our Hearts (Exodus 20:13)
Murder isn’t far from any of us. We’ve got blood on our hands.
“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire (Matthew 5:21–22 ESV).”
“Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him (1 John 3:15 ESV).”
When Peter preached to the crowds on Pentecost He spoke of “Jesus whom you crucified (Acts 2:26 ESV).” It is highly unlikely that this is the exact crowd that cried out “Crucify Him!” but that cry expressed every rebel sinner’s heart. Later the church would pray, “truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel (Acts 4:27 ESV).” The cross isn’t about ethnic hatred for God’s Messiah, but human hatred.
The first murder was committed by the first son of Adam. As weeds and thorns now find ready root in cursed soil, so anger finds fertile ground in fallen man’s heart to bud in the fruit of murder. Cain slew his brother Abel. God told Abel “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground (Genesis 4:10 ESV).” The blood of the murdered cried out against the murderer.
The cross expresses every son of Adam’s heart towards One more innocent than Abel. But the blood of Christ instead of calling out for our condemnation, speaks for our justification. Hebrews tells us that we have come “to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel (Hebrews 12:24 ESV).” With Jesus, the blood of the murdered cries out for the murderers. We are given life by His death; pardon in His bearing our condemnation. O what horrid sin, O what unfathomable grace: the blood on our hands has been sprinkled on our hearts.
The Apologist: The Glory of the Christian System: The Personal-Infinite God
The Christian system is consistent as no other system that has ever been. It is beautiful beyond words, because it has that quality that no other system completely has—you begin at the beginning, and you can go to the end. It is as simple as that. And every part and portion of the system can be related back to the beginning. Whatever you discuss, to understand it properly, you just go back to the beginning and the whole thing is in its place. The beginning is simply that God exists and that He is the personal-infinite God. Our generation longs for the reality of personality, but it cannot understand it. But Christianity says personality is valid because personality has not just appeared in the universe, but rather is rooted in the personal God who has always been.
All too often, when we are talking to the lost world, we do not begin at the beginning and therefore the world stops listening. Without this emphasis on personality we cannot expect people really to listen, because without this the concept of salvation is suspended in a vacuum.
If we understand this, we understand the meaning of life. The meaning of life does not end with justication, but is seen in the reality that when we accept Christ as our Savior in the true biblical sense, our personal relationship with the personal God is restored. Every place we turn in Christianity we find that we are brought face to face with the wonder of personality—the very opposite of the dilemma and the sorrow of modern man who finds no meaning in personality. Consider the words of Paul, ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all.’ It is the personal to which we are brought. First of all there is the personal relationship with God Himself—this is the most wonderful, and is not just in Heaven but is substantially real in practice now. When we understand our calling, it is not only true but beautiful—and it should be exciting. It is hard to understand how an orthodox, evangelical, Bible-believing Christian can fall to be excited. The answers in the realm of the intellect should make us overwhelmingly excited. But more than this, we are returned to a personal relationship with the God who is there. If we are unexcited Christians, we should go back and see what is wrong. We are surrounded by a generation that can find ‘no one home’ in the universe. If anything marks our generation, it is this. In contrast to this, as a Christian I know who I am; and I know the personal God who is there. I speak, and He hears. I am not surrounded by mere mass, nor only energy particles, but He is there. And if I have accepted Christ as my Savior, then though it will not be perfect in this life, yet moment by moment, on the basis of the finished work of Christ, this person to person relationship with the God who is there can have reality to me. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There
Bad Future Stock because of Poor Present Investments (Exodus 20:12)
This commandment, as Paul says, is the first with promise (Ephesians 6:2). Why is this one, of God’s ten words singled out to receive a promise? First, let’s ask another question, who is this promise for? Those who honor the father and mother, of course, right? Yes, but perhaps like me you’ve always thought of this promise in a personal and individualistic way. Two passages now convince me otherwise.
Therefore you shall keep his statutes and his commandments, which I command you today, that it may go well with you and with your children after you, and that you may prolong your days in the land that the LORD your God is giving you for all time (Deuteronomy 4:40 ESV).
You shall be careful therefore to do as the LORD your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. You shall walk in all the way that the LORD your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you shall possess (Deuteronomy 5:32–32 ESV).
Same promise, but here we clearly understand the promise to refer to the nation as a whole remaining in the promised land. So it is here with the fifth commandment. In Deuteronomy this promise is attached to the whole of God’s law, but first, the fifth command is singled out, and this promise is specifically attached to it, why? Because if children do not obey this command of Yahweh, they won’t obey any, and thus they will be thrust from the land. If children do not learn Yahweh’s commands in the home, they won’t learn them, and thus they, they nation, will be thrust from the land.
The family is foundational for covenant faithfulness. Failure here means covenant failure altogether. Charles Hodge, once president of Princeton Seminary when she was a bulwark of orthodoxy, wrote, “The character of the Church and of the state depends on the character of the family. If religion dies out in the family, it cannot be elsewhere maintained.” The Puritan with mad pastoral skills, Richard Baxter, asserted,
We must have a special eye upon families, to see that they are well ordered, and the duties of each relation performed. The life of religion, and the welfare and glory of both the Church and the State, depend much on family government and duty. If we suffer the neglect of this, we shall undo all. What are we like to do ourselves to the reforming of a congregation, if all the work be cast on us alone; and masters of families neglect that necessary duty of their own, by which they are bound to help us? If any good be begun by the ministry in any soul, a careless, prayerless, worldly family is like to stifle it, or very much hinder it; whereas, if you could but get the rulers of families to do their duty, to take up the work where you left it, and help it on, what abundance of good might be done! I beseech you, therefore, if you desire the reformation and welfare of your people, do all you can to promote family religion.
Many blame the church today for the absences of children and young adults, and there is fault, but indirectly. The church has put extraordinary resources, time, and effort into children and youth, but statistically something like ninety percent leave the church and the faith during college. Why is this? I believe there are a handful of reasons, but one of the leading ones is that the church is putting their time and resources into the wrong place. It wasn’t the failure of Israel’s temple program for tots that spelled disaster for the nation, but the failure of the family. The church should aim at parents, and in particular it should aim at fathers. The church’s failure to children is that she has failed to disciple men.
The flip-side of this command is spelled out in Colossians and Ephesians.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged (Colossians 3:20–21 ESV).
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’ (this is the first commandment with a promise), ‘that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.’ Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.(Ephesians 6:1–4 ESV).
Children are to honor. Parents are to be honorable. Father’s are responsible. The discipline and instruction a child is should be under is God’s. Parent such that your child is relating directly with God. Labor to ensure that the honor rendered to you, is honor rendered to God.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6:4–7).
The Apologist: The Only Answer to the Mystery of Love
Nevertheless, he [modern man] faces a very real problem as to the meaning of love. Though modern man tries to hang everything on the word love, love can easily degenerate into something very much less because he really does not understand it. He has no adequate universal for love.
On the other hand. the Christian does have the adequate universal he needs in order to be able to discuss the meaning of love. Among the things we know about the Trinity is that the Trinity was before the creation of everything else and that love existed between the persons of the Trinity before the foundation of the world. This being so, the existence of love as we know it in our makeup does not have an origin in chance, but from that which has always been. —Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There
Enjoying the Sabbath (Exodus 20:8–11)
Altogether three reasons were given to Israel for remembering the Sabbath. The first, given here, is rooted in creation.
For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20:11 ESV).
When Moses calls the next generation to covenant renewal and restates this command, much remains the same, but the grounds are significantly different.
You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day (Deuteronomy 5:15 ESV).
Ultimately, I believe, that these two reasons have one unifying reason, and a hint as to how this can be is found in a yet third basis given for Sabbath remembrance.
You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you (Exodus 31:13 ESV).’
Like circumcision and the Passover, the Sabbath is a perpetual sign throughout their generations, of His covenant. Jesus comes as the fulfillment of the law. Because of Him circumcision gives way to baptism (Colossians 2:11–13), the Passover blooms into the Lord’s Supper (Luke 22:14–18ff), and the Sabbath, well, what becomes of the Sabbath? We’re clearly commanded to baptize and to remember the Supper, but no command is given concerning the Sabbath, nor the Lord’s day. Rather, we’re told:
One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord (Romans 14:5–6 ESV).
Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ (Colossians 2:16–17 ESV).
What happens to the Sabbath? Jesus declares Himself Lord of the Sabbath in Matthew 12. Just prior to this Matthew records these words, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28–30 ESV).” Hebrews 4 speaks of entering God’s rest by faith, the rest of God that He had once He had finished from His works.
Because of Jesus, our work is finished, competed perfectly for us, and now we rest. What happens to the Sabbath? We haven’t abandoned it. We’ve entered more fully into it—in Jesus. Because of His redemption, a new day has dawned, a resurrection day, a day of new creation, a day of rest.
In short the physical rest of the Old Testament Sabbath has become the salvation rest of the true Sabbath. Believers In Christ can now live in God’s Sabbath that has already dawned. Jesus’ working to accomplish this superseded the Old Testament Sabbath (John 5:17) and so does the doing of God’s work that He now requires of people—believing in the one God has sent (John 6:28, 29). In fact the Sabbath keeping now demanded is the cessation from reliance on one’s own works (Heb. 4:9, 10). —A.T. Lincoln
No Other Boast 