Tolle Lege: The Sinfulness of Sin

1Readability (1-3):  2

Length:  284 pgs

Author:  Ralph Venning

This is not a book for everyone, but for those who have grown to love the depth and warmth of the Puritans I highly recommend it.  It’s not that the book is highly technical, nor is the language completely alien to ours (I think the Puritan Paperback version has been gently edited).  This book can require discipline simply because like most of the Puritans the extent of the treatment is so thorough that you may get lost in the subtle arguments.  However, if you are up to the challenge, this book is deeply soul nourishing.  I am always thankful for an author who can help me see the bane of my soul more clearly and inversely appreciate my Savior more truly.

…as God is holy, all holy, only holy, altogether holy, and always holy, so sin is sinful, all sinful, only sinful, altogether sinful, and always sinful (Genesis 6.5). In my flesh, there dwelleth no good thing (Romans 7.18). As in God there is no evil, so in sin there is no good. God is the chiefest of goods and sin is the chiefest of evils. As no good can be compared with God for goodness, so no evil can be compared with sin for evil.

In short, sin is the dare of God’s justice, the rape of his mercy, the jeer of his patience, the slight of his power, the contempt of his love…

To comment on this briefly, it is as if sinners should say to God in the day of judgment, Lord have mercy upon us! Have mercy upon you! says God. No, I will have no mercy on you. There was a time when you might have had mercy without judgment, but now you will have judgment without mercy. Depart! Depart! If they should then beg and say, Lord, if we must depart, let it be from thy throne of judgment but not from thee. No, says the Lord, depart from me; depart from my presence in which is joy. Depart and go to Hell. Lord, they say, seeing we must be gone, bless us before we go so that thy blessing may be upon us. Oh no, says God, go with a curse; depart, ye cursed. Oh Lord, if we must go from thee, let us not go into the place of torment, but appoint some place, if not of pleasure, then of ease. No, depart into fire, burning and tormenting flames. Oh Lord, if into fire, let it be only for a little while; let the fire soon be out or us soon out of it, for who can dwell in everlasting burnings? No, neither you nor the fire shall know an end; be gone into everlasting fire. Lord, then let it be long before we go there. No, depart immediately; the sentence shall be immediately put in execution. Ah! Lord! let us at least have good company who will pity us though they cannot help us. No, you shall have none but tormenting devils; those whom you obeyed when they were tempters you shall be with as tormentors. What misery sin has brought on man! to bring him to hear this dreadful doom!

By this we see that no wicked man cares for sin’s wages. Surely that work cannot be good for which the wages are so bad that no man cares to receive them…

Sin promises like a God but pays like a devil.

To be merciful to sin is to be cruel to yourself…

The Doctor: Amazing Book-Keeping

The first step is that our sin is reckoned to Him.  The second step is that His righteousness is reckoned to us.  What an amazing piece of book-keeping!  What a tremendous manipulation of the accounts, if I may so put it.  We had no righteousness at all.  He has a perfect righteousness.  – D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Romans Vol. 3, p. 177

Hebrews 12:18-29 & …Huh?

You reach for the porcelain collectible for the third time, sure you’ve been warned, but you have called her bluff up to this point.  She is speaking, telling you not to, but you know she hasn’t quite reached that tone yet.  You know that tone that says a beating is imminent.

Have we grown up any?  Do we respond to the gospel with a “…huh?”  Not an inquisitive huh, but a non-interested huh.

In our text we are told that we must listen, because God will speak.  The speaking that God is doing now is different from the speaking that He will do then.  If you are privileged to hear the gospel of Jesus, the revelation of the Son, by the Son (Hebrews 1:1-3), God is speaking to you.  It is the greatest good news in the world; He is speaking to you kindly.  His speaking then, when all is shaken will be different. 

Do not listen to the repeated offers of the gospel, in which God as it were lays the key to His heavenly city before you, do not listen to them in the same way you listen to your mother’s threats.  To respond casually or flippantly to this gospel, is to call more than Mt. Sinai down upon your head.  Every time the gospel is preached you are either softened or hardened.  As the Puritans said, “the same sun that melts the ice hardens the clay.”  Perhaps God’s judgment upon you for a habitual pattern of shirking the gospel is to expose you to more of it, such that your quilt is increased.  Ease and comfort in sin is the scariest state to find oneself in.  We see this kind of terrifying judgment in Romans 1:18-32.

Every time God’s word is preached the gospel should be preached.  Therefore every time God’s word is preached there should be a serious and solemn examination of our hearts.  Are we listening?  Remember the Pharisees heard and taught the Scriptures every Sabbath, yet they were completely ignorant of Jesus.

Jesus did not mute the holiness and righteousness of God that speaks in wrath against our sin.  No rather God’s testimony against sin was amplified as Jesus hung on the cross in our stead.  If you stand outside of Christ this wrath burns against you still.  If you spurn the blood of Jesus, it burns against you more (Hebrews 2:1-4; 10:28-29)

As wise old Uncle Ben said to Peter, “with great power comes great responsibility”.  The gospel is the power of God unto salvation.  With greater revelation, greater glory, greater power comes greater responsibility on our part.

“Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”

“For our God is a consuming fire.”

Hebrews 12:3-17 & A Prayer

Father,

            Holy and loving,

 

Grant us in our consideration of your courageous Son,

            Sustaining grace to realize that the hostile hand of sinners,

            Is also Your helpful hand of discipline.

 

May we not seek the false remedy of alleviating our suffering by attenuating Your sovereignty.

            May we agonize, struggle, and bleed to keep this faith.

            May Your words come to our minds and hearts as light in dark times.

                        Grant us a sanctified memory, so that we may not forget Your words.

 

Teach us to esteem, value, even treasure Your discipline as it cries out to us that we are:

            Loved,

            Received,

            Delighted in,

            Not a bastard.

 

May we know that Your discipline does not come to us as a penalty, but for our purity.

            We are corrected,

            We are prevented,

            And we are educated,

            But the wrath and penalty due for our sins has been born, for hell hung on the cross in our stead.

 

May we be infected with a childlike awe to look just like our Daddy,

            And may that desire make the bitter medicine of discipline sweet to our souls,

            The unpleasant bud of pain, tolerated in hopes of the beautiful bloom of:

                        Your holiness,

                        And the peaceful fruit of righteousness

 

May the truth of Your loving, fatherly, perfect discipline propel us to run, strive, and encourage one another.

            We move in hope, only because we know You are moving.

 

Father,

            Holy and loving,

 

We plead this with earnest tears, for:

            The consequences are so severe if we respond with bitterness to your loving discipline.

            Our ecstasy is the vision of You, in all Your glory.

            Without holiness we will not see this, it is the stamp of our sonship.

            God put this stamp on our souls.

 

May we not like Esau count corn flakes more than the Christ of the Cross and all He purchased for us.

 

In the name of Your perfect Son, Jesus, 

            I, Your lesser son, adopted and unworthy, pray, amen.

The Doctor: Divorcing Faith

[W]e must never think of faith as something in and of itself.  Faith is never something isolated or alone.  You must never divorce faith from its object.  Faith is always linked to an object.  The object is the Lord Jesus Christ and His perfect work and His perfect righteousness; and as long as you always remember that, you can never go wrong.  So we must not boast of our faith; it is not faith as such that saves us.  Faith is merely that channel, that instrument, that link that connects us with the righteousness of Christ which saves us.  His is the righteousness that saves, and faith simply brings it to us.  It is His righteousness that saves us by faith, through faith.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 3, p. 120

Hebrews 12:1-3 & From Moons to The Eternal-Supernova

We orbit the illuminated moons of Hebrews 11:4-40 (for five weeks we have orbited!) only to be thrust toward The Eternal-Supernova Son.

Tolle Lege: The Atonement

Readability :  3

Length:  206 pp

Author:  Leon Morris

How does the Bible speak of the atonement?  What words and images does it use?  Leon Morris does an excellent service to us in this work.  Although primarily a word study Morris is always sure that his theology is Biblical as well, that is, he always lets the context and Biblical storyline determine the ultimate meaning of the word.  Many word studies are attempts to violate the clear meaning of the storyline, this is not one.  Although The Atonement is the laymen’s version of his previous work, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, it is still a very scholarly work.  While it is readable, understand what it is, it is not simply reflections, sermons, or exhortations concerning the cross, but a deep study of the meaning of the cross.  Morris deals with images such as covenant, sacrifice, redemption, and reconciliation among others.  If ever we need push ourselves to read deep hard books, it is concerning books of this ilk, books on God’s masterpiece of atonement.

When God gave them commandments in the wilderness, the writer says, the Israelites complained.  But God replied that they were his slaves: ‘For this reason have I redeemed you, that you might give decrees and you should keep them.’  Here the thought is plainly expressed that Israel was not redeemed for the people’s own personal convenience but in order that they might be the servants of God.  The redemption from Egypt was the redemption of a community which was to be in a unique sense bound to God as the people of God.

That peace has a very different content in the Bible from that which we normally give the term is clear from some words towards the end of Romans.  The writer assured his readers that ‘The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (Rom. 16:20).  God is characterized as ‘the God of peace’ by the very fact that he performs a warlike action!  This is strange language to us, but the overthrow of Satan was a necessary ingredient in peace as the men of the New Testament understood it.  So it is quite natural for one of them to speak in this way of God as the God of peace as he crushes the evil one.  What could more vividly show what ‘peace’ means?

Peace means the defeat of evil.  Peace means the breaking down the barrier between man and God.  Peace means the presence of God’s rich and abundant blessing.  Peace means positiveness; it is not the absence of anything – the barrier that separated us from God or anything else.  Peace is presence, the presence of God.  Christ ‘is our peace’.

The Necessity of Gospel Glory

I was skimming back through Jeremiah Burroughs Gospel Reconciliation the other day looking at places that I marked with a red asterisk (* = very important / powerful / good) and came across this gem.

God expects that we should have mighty high thoughts of this work [the wisdom and goodness of God in reconciling the world to Himself in Christ]; and if our thoughts are not high of this work, and are not lifted up above all creatures, we do but take the name of God in vain.  God does not care for any other glory we give Him unless we give Him the glory of this work.  It is true, when we see the works of God in the earth and on the seas, we should glorify God’s power and wisdom.  But unless your heart is taken with this masterpiece (as I may so term it), with this great work of God of reconciling Himself to the world in Christ, God will reject all your other glorifying of Him.  I mean He will so reject them as He will not accept them in comparison.

There is no other name by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12) because no other name glorifies how only God can give us God.  God gives His Son, and the Son He gives, gives us His Father.  Thus God is glorified as both the means and end of the gospel.  This is the marvelous masterpiece of reconciliation.  Revel in it, and know your heavenly Father smiles.

Tolle Lege: Knowing Scripture

Readability :  1

Length:  125 pp

Author:  R.C. Sproul

R.C.  Sproul’s little book is a great, clear, and simple explanation as to both why and how you should study the Bible.  What I always love about Dr. Sproul’s teaching is that by simple I do not mean watered down.  Although concise and easily readable, Sproul tackles big ideas and communicates them as a master teacher.  This is one of those books every child of God ought to have read because I think they will profit by reading it.  Never ignore a book that is rightly used to generate a love for the Book of books.

The preponderance of boredom that people experience with the Bible came home to me several years ago when I was hired to teach the Scriptures in required Bible courses at a Christian college.  The president of the institution phoned me and said, ‘We need someone young and exciting, someone with a dynamic method who will be able to make the Bible come alive.’  I had to force myself to swallow my words.  I wanted to say, ‘You want me to make the Bible come alive?  I didn’t know that it had died.  In fact, I never even heard that it was ill.  Who was the attending physician at the Bible’s demise?’  No, I can’t make the Bible come alive for anyone.  The Bible is already alive.  It makes me come alive.

No Christian can avoid theology.  Every Christian is a theologian.  Perhaps not a theologian in the technical sense, but a theologian nevertheless.  The issue for Christians is not whether we are going to be theologians but whether we are going to be good theologians of bad ones.  A good theologian is one who is instructed by God.

The Doctor: Is There a “But Now”?

On Romans 3:21 – [C]an there be two words which are more blessed and more wonderful to us than just these two words, ‘But now’?  To me they provide a very subtle and thorough-going test of our whole position as Christians.  Would you like to know for certain at this moment whether you are a Christian or not?  I suggest that this is one of the best tests.  As I repeat these words, ‘But now,” is there something within you that makes you say, ‘Thank God!’  Is there a ‘But now’ in your experience?  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 3, p. 26