Concerning “let go and let God” theology:
If the house catches on fire we must sit quietly in it and burn up: to walk out is to distrust God. If the boat sinks under us, we must not swim to shore, but fold our hands and sink – “let go and let God.” Here is a fully developed philosophy of irresponsibility. -B.B. Warfield, The Mystical Perfectionism of Thomas Upham
Chrysostom, Augustine, Jerome, Luther, Calvin, Beza, and J.C. Ryle all agree that John did not doubt, but rather, that he asked this question for the sake of his disciples. I see nothing to support that interpretation and much to indicate that John doubted. But why did John doubt?
While in prison John hears of Jesus deeds, and he doubts, doesn’t this seem strange?
“John, Jesus is restoring sight to the blind! (Matthew 9:27-31)”
“John, Jesus is healing the lame so that they walk! (Matthew 8:5-13)”
“John, Jesus is cleansing lepers! (Matthew 8:1-4)”
“John, Jesus is casting out demons! (Matthew 8:28-34)”
“John, Jesus is raising the dead to life! (Matthew 9:18-26)”
And John’s response to this news is… doubt? Notice John doesn’t doubt that Jesus does the deeds. He doesn’t doubt the deeds of Jesus but the identity of Jesus. Imagine, John hears the news of Jesus raising the dead, believes the report, but thinks, “Yea, I don’t know… is He the one?”
What condition can there be in our hearts and minds such that when we hear of Jesus’ authoritative words and deeds that call for a response of complete abandonment and surrender to His supremacy, we doubt instead of taking up our cross and following Jesus? Why does John doubt?
Let’s start at the surface. John hears of Jesus’ deeds while he is in prison. One very likely reason for John’s doubt is his imprisonment. While circumstances are not everything, that does not mean that they are nothing. Few of us doubt when times are happy. This isn’t necessarily because our faith is strong, but more often because our hearts are wrong. When doubts only flee when circumstances are optimal, this does not mean we are people of great faith, but people of great sin. When a change in circumstances deeply affects a change in heart, idols are being exposed. Thus, circumstances are only surface.
I believe at root John doubts because Jesus isn’t meeting John’s expectations. I don’t think John expected less from Jesus, but more. It is not that John is disappointed by the salvation Jesus is bringing, but He was expecting judgment as well (Matthew 3:11-12). John is the forerunner to God’s king, and he is in prison, so where is the King’s full salvation? You see John expected Jesus’ salvation to include judgment, as he should. Jesus’ reply to John alludes to many passages in Isaiah, many of which include predictions of salvific judgment upon the enemies of God, who are also the enemies of the people of God (Isaiah 35:4-6, 61:1-2). Jesus will preach both salvation, and judgment; a judgment He will bring, but right now He is bringing salvation.
So then, John’s doubts don’t arise because of unbiblical expectations of Jesus, but because of a misunderstanding of God’s timeline. The problem is not John’s theology, but His chronology. There are some sins that only a faithful Christ-follow can sin.
Why do you doubt? Ask yourself two questions:
Drop your expectations, they are small and sinful; if not in the thing desired than in the motive behind them. Instead, look at Jesus, not in the light of your sinful expectations, but in the light of Scripture’s holy promises and realize Jesus will always be more, not less than you could expect.
Critiquing Charles Finney’s revivialistic methods:
People were “prayed at” rather than “prayed for,” with the mind obviously set more on moving them than on moving God. – B.B. Warfield, Oberlin Perfectionism
Jesus is not afraid of being misunderstood. For instance, Jesus, the Prince of Peace, will say, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” He will say something shocking, something meant to make you think, something that we may think contradictory to something else He has said, and then leave you with it. He feels no necessity to qualify and explain away all of the difficulties. Gospel ministers should do the same. Their are times when we should try to explain the difficulties, more often this will be in regards to doctrinal truths. There are often other times when we should just let the tension be, and let sheep wrestle with the text.
Jesus says that if we acknowledge Him, He will acknowledge us. If we deny Him, He will deny us. I will ease tension as to how this does not contradict justification by faith, but I will not seek to ease tension for one who is apprehensive to share Jesus by assuring them that they must be saved despite that fact.
1 John 2:23 is illuminating to our text, “No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.” Notice it does not say that if you confess you will have the father, but if you confess you have the Father. If you possess the Father you profess the Son. If you do not profess Jesus, you do not possess the Father. This confession is not meritorious towards salvation, but resultant from salvation.
This does not alleviate tension for the apprehensive soul timid to share Jesus. Explaining the doctrine rightly increases conviction rightly.
A hard soul might instantly object, “But Peter denied him!” Indeed Peter did, but ultimately and most often Peter boldly professed Him.
And when they had brought them, they set them before the council. And the high priest questioned them, saying, ‘We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.’ But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.’ -Acts 5:27-32
Don’t quickly comfort yourself by looking at Peter’s failures, challenge yourself by looking at his courage. I leave you with the exclamatory, Christ-like, tension-creating question of Thomas Brooks:
Ah, souls, you can easily sin as the saints, but can you repent with the saints! Many can sin with David and Peter, that cannot repent with David and Peter, and so must perish for ever.
Many upcoming quotes from Warfield come from his writings against perfectionism – the idea that we can be free from sin. Pelagianism, referenced below, is that view that the will is totally free to do good such that grace is bestowed on those who merit it.
Pelagianism unfortunately does not have to wait to be imported from New Haven, and does not require inculcating – it is the instinctive thought of the natural man. -B.B. Warfield, Oberlin Perfectionism
Hundreds of miles wide in its swath of destruction you have no hopes of outrunning or outmaneuvering it. It’s as though Jupiter’s red spot were condensed, concentrated, amplified and transported to earth. The rain falls fat and thick; so thick the atmosphere seems an ocean. Breathing is imagined to be an impossible labor in the midst of this storm. That’s assuming you would even be allowed time enough to take a breath. Hail stones the size of boulders fall with such force they are splintering redwoods. Deep purple and wickedly splintering lightning bolts strike repeatedly within mere feet of one another. Families of F5 tornadoes populate the storm liberally, like hordes of Okies fleeing in the midst of the Dust Bowl.
Yet in your blind terror you find an enchanted cave, or rather it is almost as if it found you. There is as it were an invisible barrier that the storm cannot pass. This does not cause you to belittle or mock the storm. You still fear it. It is your dread. But now your fear is mixed with delight. The cave both allows you to reverence the storm more, for now you more fully can observe its glory, and to delight in it more for you can observe all of this in complete safety. Fear has not been eradicated but transformed into that holy love called reverence. One deep mark of this reverence is a rejoicing and delighting in the cave.
This cleft is Christ, and the storm is the glory of God’s holiness. But Jesus has promised that as we identify with Him we will be persecuted. In this cave there is a serpent. He is a wounded serpent. He is a dying serpent. But He is a dangerous serpent, and he has minions. The whole world is under his sway. But you dare not flee the snake to take your chances with the storm, for you know this; the snake could never defeat the the storm, but the storm has already mostly done in the snake, and is sure to finish the job.
If you love the cleft of Jesus, and reverence the storm of God’s holiness you will not be afraid of the serpent’s threats.
[Adapted from an illustration in The Pleasures of God by John Piper]
The inestimable value of the peace of God is apparent next from the reasonableness and surety of this peace. There may be a peace which is not reasonable; a peace which is not assured. The worldly man’s peace on which he strives to stay himself is of this kind; the peace of a drunkard in a house on fire, the peace of a lunatic who fancies himself a king, the peace of a fool who cries Peace! Peace! when there is no peace. Such a peace can be maintained only by shutting our eyes to what we are and where we are and the relations that actually exist about us and between us and God. Any accident that calls us to ourselves destroys it. Any ray of true light arising in our conscience extinguishes it. And when evil and death come, where is it then? But God’s peace is a rational peace, and a stable peace. It arises not from shutting our eyes to our real state, but from opening them to it, and the more our eyes are open and the more we realize our real condition, understanding what Christ is, what we are, and what He has done for us, the more peace flows into our hearts. The more searching the light we turn on the scene, the more glorious the prospect. Light turns a false peace into torment. Light awakes in the countenance of the true peace, happy smiles. -B.B. Warfield, Peace with God
When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.
If you are not zealous for the glory of Christ, but only concerned for your own skin, this promise does not relieve anxiety, it causes it. Only someone burning with the prayer, “hallowed be Thy name,” derives any peace from this promise.
This is not an exhortation to preach extemporaneously as some have made it. There is nothing wrong with extemporaneous preaching per se, as long as it is expository preaching, but that is not what this text is about. Nor is this a promise that we will be given clever words to weasel our way out of pain, but rather that we will be given bold words despite threat of pain. This is a promise for anointed preaching when persecuted.
Preaching in the power of the Spirit is always the goal of all Christians when they herald Christ, and of course Christ promises to be with His church as they go forward faithful to the great commission (Matthew 28:20), but to those who go zealous for His glory to the hard places of the earth He gives this special promise of anointed preaching. Do you want the Spirit to anoint your preaching? Go to the hard places of the earth in zeal for His name and compassion for souls and you are promised it! We see several instance of this in the book of Acts, here are just a couple:
Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called), and of the Cyrenians, and of the Alexandrians, and of those from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and disputed with Stephen. But they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking. -Acts 6:9-10
On the next day their rulers and elders and scribes gathered together in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family. And when they had set them in the midst, they inquired, ‘By what power or by what name did you do this?’ Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’ – Acts 4:5-12
This promise relieves anxiety only if you treasure Jesus more than life. It gives peace only if your greatest fear is belittling, disowning, or maligning the name of Jesus. This promise is precious to you if Jesus is precious to you.
If worship is not our goal, we will not be martyr-minded Christians faithful to the great commission, and if we are not martyr-minded Christians, we are not worshippers of God, but of our own lives.
His is not a figurative fatherhood;He is not addressed as Father because we find some things in Him which remind us of the tenderness and love of our parents and so apply to Him, as in a figure, the name we have learned to love in them. On the contrary, His is the normal fatherhood; His is not derived by figure from theirs, but theirs is the poor and broken shadow of His. He is the Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: the gloss, though a gloss, is a correct interpretation, and the closeness and intimacy and love of that relation is the norm from which every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named. What we know of fatherhood—dear as the name has become to us through our earthly relations—is but a faint shadow of what He, the true Father, first of Christ and then of us in Christ, is to His children. -B.B. Warfield, The Fullness of God
A Christian seeking significance, meaning, or purpose is a contradiction. It would make more sense for Winston Churchill in the midst of the Second World War to think, “I really wish I had a task, a mission, something to do.” As Christians we don’t get to live where we want, we don’t get to proclaim what we want or how we want, and we don’t get to determine the response to our message or how we should respond to those responses. We get something infinitely better, cosmically bigger, and eternally glorious. We don’t need to find our own mission, Jesus has folded us into His.This mission isn’t elective Christianity for God’s nerdy children, but essential Christianity for all His children.
Contrary to any impressions you may have gained on your high-school mission trip, Jesus does not send us as an affluent and indulgent father might send his bohemian child to venture the world aimlessly in an attempt to discover himself. Jesus doesn’t just send, He instructs. He tells us where to go, what to do, and how to do it. We don’t make or discover our own mission, He gives us one.
His mission is not ours, but our mission is His. We don’t saunter up to Jesus and co-opt His mission, saying, “I’m here to help, and here’s what I’m going to do.” We are not co-redeemers. Jesus’ mission was not just to proclaim the gospel, but to be the gospel. Our mission is not to be the gospel, but to proclaim the gospel Jesus is. We don’t saunter up to Jesus; He comes after us, calls us out of darkness, and makes us messengers of light. He makes us ambassadors such that when we herald the gospel, the glory of Christ is set before souls calling for a response of submission or rebellion. We herald something so glorious that an opportunity for great salvation or great sin is set before them (2 Corinthians 2:14-16). When we proclaim the good news, we must also share the bad news – that they abide under the wrath of God, and that should they reject this message, the wrath they will have to endure will be even greater (Matthew 10:15). This is so because as ambassadors sent by the King they are not responding to us, rather, God is making His appeal through us (2 Corinthians 5:20).
Jesus’ mission is over, under, and through ours. He is over our mission calling and sending us. He is under our mission sustaining and empowering us. And He advances His kingdom not because of us, but through us.
His mission is not ours, but our mission is His. He is over, under, and working through our mission.
No Other Boast 