“Yielding ALL obedience & submission to Him with the WHOLE man” – Fail!

In our Lord’s Day worship service, we read a summary of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20) and the Great Commandment (Mt. 22).  I then highlight one of the commandments in a brief homily, to show us our sin and drive us to Christ – to prepare us for the confession of sin and assurance of the Gospel.  As we do so, the sovereign Spirit, I’m sure, also instructs us in the third use of the Law.  In fact, the pattern of the Christian faith is well reflected in the structure of the Heidelberg Catechism – guilt (Law as mirror), grace (Gospel!), and gratitude (with the Law of God as the guide and the Gospel as the compelling power of new obedience).  And the pattern of our Christian lives conforms to that, as we are called to repent in light of our guilt, believe the Gospel of God’s grace to us in Christ, and to gratefully live in accord with that repentant faith.

So the Law exposes and mortifies our sin.  The Gospel unites us to Christ, who died for our sins and rose from the dead.  And so we rise with Him, to walk in newness of life.  The God-given repentant-faith which turns from sin and receives His grace in Christ then works through love.  Repent, believe, and love accordingly – over and over again, ad infinitum, till Christ joins us to the spirits of righteous men made perfect at death, and finally raises our bodies from the grave, that we would be fully conformed to Him the Last Day.  And so Christian worship is derived from this three-fold structure of the Christian faith (guilt-grace-gratitude), which in turn shapes this three-fold pattern of our Christian lives in this world (repent-believe-love accordingly).  All by the power of God’s Spirit working through His Word of Law and Gospel.

Recently, I’ve started to use the Westminster Larger Catechism’s exposition of the Ten Commandments as the basis for the homily before our corporate confession of sin.  I plan to spend four Sundays on each commandment.  And beginning with this post, I plan to share these homilies in my upcoming blogs, starting now:

If ever you think you’re doing pretty well in the Christian life.  If you’re not feeling much like a sinner, but pretty darn holy.  It’s time to sit yourself down and carefully read the Westminster Larger Catechism on the Ten Commandments.  It’s a thorough, biblical exposition of each commandment – what duties each one requires, and what sins each one forbids.  In fact, it’s so thorough, that we will only be able to sample it.  But as we do, it will be more than sufficient to show us our sin and drive us to our Savior.

So let’s hear what duties the Scripture teaches us regarding the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods before Me”:

Westminster Larger Catechism 104:  “The duties required in the first commandment are, the knowing and acknowledging of God to be the only true God, and our God; and to worship and glorify him accordingly, [and here’s how!] by thinking, meditating, remembering, highly esteeming, honoring, adoring, choosing, loving, desiring, fearing of him; believing him; trusting, hoping, delighting, rejoicing in him; being zealous for him; calling upon him, giving all praise and thanks, and yielding all obedience and submission to him with the whole man; being careful in all things to please him, and sorrowful when in anything he is offended; and walking humbly with him.”

And you are to do these things every moment of every day.  You are to seek His glory, to meditate on Him, to be zealous for Him – with every ounce of your being, all the time.  You are to love the Lord your God in this way – with ALL your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Because God deserves such total love!  Has God been first in your thoughts since you first woke up this morning?  Has God been your “all in all” – even since you arrived for worship this morning?  Even right now?  Have you yielded all obedience and submission to Him with your whole person – even for one moment in your life?

Jesus alone fulfilled every phrase in this glorious exposition of the First Commandment.  And He did so for you.  And He died for your miserable failure to keep God first in your heart for even one moment – never mind every moment of every day.  And that’s what makes the First Commandment SWEET to us – even after it SLAYS us.  We see it fulfilled in Christ – for us.  And we see Jesus die the death we deserve, for our sinful rebellion against the one true God.  And we know the Spirit is working even now to conform us to this commandment.  And one Day, one fine Day, we will rise in the perfect righteousness of our Redeemer.  We will finally love and glorify our God and Redeemer as we ought, with every fiber of our being, in perfect holiness, forever.  In the meantime, let us repent.  Let us receive His Word of forgiveness.  And let us be renewed in our love for the one true God, who has given His Son for us – even while we were still God-hating sinners.

Federal Vision, Baptismal Efficacy, and what HE said

Peter Leithart’s views on baptismal efficacy do not accord with the Westminster Standards.  There.  I said it.  I do pray that we in the PCA find our confessional back bone to say so, as well.  We will have the opportunity to say so this summer in Greenville – or to be guilty of confessional double-speak.

Having said so, though, I also say that there are others in the PCA whose views on baptism’s inefficacy do not accord with Westminster, either.  Baptism is not a wet baby dedication.  According to Scripture and our standards derived therefrom, baptism is a means of grace, efficacious for the elect, as applied in the sovereign Spirit’s appointed time, the benefits of which must be received by faith.  I have blogged about the pastoral implications of this here.

And William Evans has said it better than I have here.

Exposing Ehrman’s whoppers, and affirming the reliability of the New Testament

Michael Horton and New Testament Scholar Daniel Wallace discuss Bart Ehrman (and provide tremendous resources to correct his erroneous ramblings) in this edition of the White Horse Inn:

http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2013/05/12/whi-1153-has-jesus-been-misquoted/

It has seemed to me that of all the many attacks that Christianity faces in our modern culture, the most egregious and harmful come in the form of the sensationalisms that Bart Ehrman has espoused. Ehrman, who is someone who ought to know that the sensationalisms he espouses are simply not what he publicly says they are, and yet he has “caught the popular imagination”.

Playing clips from Wallace/Ehrman debates (so we hear Ehrman’s whoppers in his own words), Horton and Wallace provide a popular-level response to some of the more egregious misconceptions that Ehrman has spread in his work “Misquoting Jesus” and others.

For example, when Ehrman says “we don’t have the original manuscripts” – he treats the issue as if we are playing the ‘telephone game’ in which errors become multiplied. But Wallace points out that when you compare the copying of the New Testament to the ‘telephone game’, first, the copies were done by hand, not orally, and second, it was not just a single line of transmission.

One of the things he doesn’t say is that we don’t have our earliest copies because they must have worn out. But he doesn’t say how they wore out. They would have worn out from people copying them.

Wallace relates that, off of the first generation of manuscripts, there may have been many multiple copyists making copies of that original manuscript. And the manuscript evidence is that we have a proliferation of imperfect first-generation copies, not a single lineage of them, enabling us to make comparisons of those manuscripts. And by comparing the manuscripts that we have, we can see scribal errors, categorize them, know what they are. Wallace provides this example:

Imagine we came across an early manuscript copy of the Constitution of the United States, and the preamble said, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect onion …” If we were to see that line, we would know that “union” was the original word, not “onion”.

Those are the kinds of mistakes we have find in the early manuscripts. They get corrected early on, leaving us with a far higher degree of reliability than in “the telephone game” or as Horton says, “the bigger fish game”.

As texts and copies proliferated, there is “an enormous amount of agreement among all these texts”. Also, when there are early copies with scribal errors, there is a constant re-correction early on.

The fact is, the more copies of manuscripts we have, the better, because the more we compare them, the more we are able to get back to the original texts.

As well, some manuscripts were in use for 100 or more years. Some of the original manuscripts may have actually lasted to the end of the second century. So it’s possible or even likely that some of the papyri we have may have been first or second generation copies of the original manuscripts.

Ehrman also makes the claim that 94% of the manuscripts we have are from the 9th century or later. In fact, more than 15% of the manuscripts we have are from prior to that time, and he ignores that from the 4th century on, we have complete manuscripts of the New Testament. So by the 9th century, we have six hundred or seven hundred manuscripts or more, and even by that time, we are already on very sound footing.

Ehrman also points out that there are more than 400,000 variants in these manuscripts. Wallace notes, however, that the reason why we have so many variants is because we have so many different manuscripts. In addition to the 5,500 Greek manuscripts, there are more than 10,000 Latin manuscripts, some from the second century, plus Coptic, Syriac, and other Asian and European languages from which to compare. And more manuscripts give you greater certainty as to what the original manuscripts said. Wallace estimates that there are perhaps more than 22,000 manuscripts in existence.

The nature of the differences, the vast majority (70% or more) are spelling variations, in which the wording is not in question. Definite articles, “more perfect onions”. A huge number of variations simply involve the use of the definite article in Greek. The word “the”, for example, there are 16 different ways in Greek to say “Jesus loves Paul” – but all of them get translated in exactly the same way.

Less than 1% of “textual variants”, in fact, are what Wallace calls “meaningful”, that is, it affects the meaning of the text in some way, and “viable”, which means that it can be traced back to the original wording. About ¼ of 1%. In about 1000 places there are variations that are meaningful or viable.

But in fact, not one doctrine is affected by these “meaningful” or “viable” variants.

A couple of Ehrman’s “whipping boys” involve such things as Mark 1:41, in which different variations say “Jesus was moved with anger” or “Jesus was moved with compassion” to heal the leper. It’s not out of the ordinary to think that Jesus was “moved with anger” about a disease.

Another is 1 John 5:7, the Trinitarian formula, was not in Erasmus’s original manuscripts.

He also compares the NT manuscript evidence with the number of Greek and Latin “classics”. For example, we have more copies of Homer – with a 900-year head start, we have 2200 copies of Odyssey and Iliad, only 10% as many manuscripts as what we have for the New Testament.

In fact, for other Greek writers like Aristotle or Plato, the number of manuscripts is far, far smaller. And yet we don’t contest whether we’re really reading those individuals. The earliest MSS of the New Testament come within decades.

This caught my ear because my 14-year-old daughter was asking me about “the telephone game” with respect to New Testament manuscripts. I highly recommend that you give this a listen, and even spread the word among popular circles like Twitter and Facebook (see the links immediately below this article).

This is an area where a discussion like this one can really help to correct some popular misconceptions and restore confidence in the textual transmission of the New Testament that Ehrman and others have undermined.

The Death of Roman Catholic Tradition

Reblogged from anactofmind:

It is certainly no secret that that Catholic Church has taken it on the chin from Obamacare and the Health and Human Services Administration (HHS).  The HHS has mandated that Roman Catholic employers must provide insurance which pays for abortifacient drugs for the people they employ.  But the Roman Catholic Church is opposed to abortion, at least the modern Roman Catholic Church is.

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Reformation Starts With Those Idiots Over There (Or, In My Image I Re-created Them)

It seems perfectly obvious to me that in this culture the Church stands in as great a need of reformation now as it ever did. That is, the Church as an institution, needs to be reformed. We need our false gospels, and false gods taken from us and repentance granted. But I am concerned here and now to talk about the reformation that must happen on an individual level for Christians. This is an aspect of reform that I don’t see dealt with as much, at least not in those terms; and institutions are only as reformed as the people who are within them.

The presence of false worship always means that reform is needed. Our greatest idol, no matter who we are, is ourselves. And one of the ways in which this is seen is the ever popular comment thread on social media. I have been involved in quite few of these and I am sure that anyone reading this has been as well.

It is an almost inevitable fact of life in the social networking age that any comment thread dealing with religion or politics will turn ugly, and almost any comment thread can turn to religion or politics at any time. So what am I babbling about?

Well here it is: When these comment threads devolve into flame wars (as they so often do) and even when they don’t, but rather become long, monotonous ya huh, nu uh battles, there is a palpable worship of self going on. And there is a palpable desire to remake man in our image. This is not invariably true, of course, but it is more common than not. At least, that is my strong anecdotal suspicion. Why can’t these morons just see that I am the fount of all wisdom and adjust to my obviously superior view of the world? Isn’t that often what our attitude really amounts to when we get engaged in these things?

I certainly am not saying that engaging in an argument is wrong. There is a time and a place and very often on the internet, that bastion of ignorance and half informed opinions, truth does need to be proclaimed in no uncertain terms. But our self-worship soon takes over and we begin to attempt to re-create those with whom we are arguing in our image. The proof of this is seen as the thread continues and the comments get more snarky, more sarcastic, and more personal as it continues.

Brothers and sisters this ought not be so. We know, as Christians, that the world needs the truth of the gospel. “There is one name under heaven, given among men, whereby you must be saved”. Alas, the Holy Spirit, although He is a user of means, very often opts not to use the means of a seventy-five hundred word, sardonically written Facebook comment in the conversion of a soul to Christ. I have been guilty of this myself at times. Kyrie Eleison!

So we want reform in the Church? Great. It starts with those who are the Church believing that the law is true “You shall have no other gods before me” and that the gospel is true “All who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved”. May God grant us repentance and faith as we interact with those around us. Repentance from our tendency to worship ourselves to the point that we become angry when others wont be just like us, and faith to believe that we are forgiven for our rather boorish idolatry through the bitter suffering and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

New Pope may end priestly celibacy

Reblogged from anactofmind:

A good friend of mine gave me a print copy of this article whose authors think the new pope may end priestly celibacy.  Apparently, Pope Francis was supportive of a woman who was romantically involved with a bishop and was eventually married to him.

That possibility will certainly cause the far-right Catholic epologists some considerable heartburn.

Soli Deo Gloria

A Further Example for my friend, Joseph Richardson

Reblogged from anactofmind:

In my ongoing interaction with my friend, Joseph, it is very clear that Joseph doesn’t want to believe what I say that the Catholic Church actually teaches with regard to the use of Holy Scripture. Fair enough. So I thought I would provide some further historical evidence to help us in our discussion.

It is well to remember Joseph’s recent question to me in order to understand his concern:

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