Category: Evangelism

Dear Brother Hillary,

Here is an article that has had a significant influence on my thinking in the area of covenant children. Maybe you will find it profitable as well.

http://www.faithtacoma.org/doctrine/covenant.aspx

I’ve also read Lewis Bevins Schenk’s book, The Presbyterian Doctrine of children in the covenant, which has had a profound impact on me.

I only mention these in order to let you know what has shaped my thinking on the post on “Parents & Children — Cause and Effect.”

In order to support the overall contention of Flavel I would appeal to Ex. 20 when it clearly states that

I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Both God’s condemnation and his salvation tend to run generationally … and yet not without exception. Praise God!

Now certainly Acts reminds us that this covenantal arrangement en-grafts those who had been strangers and aliens to the covenant when it teaches, “And the promise is for you and for your children, AND AS MANY AS ARE AFAR OFF THAT THE LORD OUR GOD SHALL CALL.” Praise God that in this age of grace many, like myself, who were afar off, the Lord our God called, calls and continues to call.

Also the NT teaches that the nations will come in and swell the Church. However, I honestly believe that the norm was to be that they would come in by nations and not so much that we would pick off people one by one in a kind of individualistic approach to Evangelism that is current today.

However, having gladly rejoiced in the certainty that God will save the nations, I wonder how long that will happen in our lifetimes as the church continues to lose her covenant seed at the rapid rate that is happening? Will God save the nations as He loses His own covenant seed? How long can faithful evangelism so that the Nations might be saved happen if the Church continues to redefine the Gospel in order to accommodate those unfaithful covenant families in their midst with a message of “peace peace, when judgment and discipline is swirling around us?”

I guess I find my optimistic theology in the hope that those few that God snatches will be obedient and be ones who will be fruitful and multiply to the point that greater are their numbers than the numbers of those, and their seed, who will make a covenant with death by turning aside from Christ. My hope lies in the reality that those who God does snatch will become a people who will raise up large families in the way of God’s covenant promises. My hope also lies in the realization that no pagan people can prosper long and avoid destruction who try to build personal lives and culture apart from Christ and the real reality that only Christianity reflects. After all, Babel still speaks. Babel will continue to fall with the result that Christianity will always flourish again.

Given your admonition I will write something soon that supports evangelism and great expectations of God’s harvesting those fields that remain white unto harvest. I do believe that God can send and has sent seasons of Reformation and Awakening, but, I think this must be a “both and” matter. We must have our families and Churches thinking covenantally again and we must continue to say to those outside the covenant, “Be ye Reconciled to God.” It strikes me if we fail at one we will fail at both. I don’t need to tell you that our families in our Churches are very spiritually sick. Is it possible to proclaim a covenantal gospel when there are so few covenantally minded Churches that remain so that we can fold those who come to Christ into a place where they will receive covenantal nurture?

With God all things are possible.

I’m sorry if I communicated despair. That wasn’t my intention, although I must admit there are times I wonder if we should be like Jeremiah and just proclaim the judgment that is upon the visible church in the West and is coming upon the visible church in the West with the reminder that once we pass through judgment (and discipline for the invisible Church) there will be times of refreshing ahead. The Church in the West seems so utterly past reclamation and the culture is in a state of trauma because of it. Yet I know that the Omnipotnent Lord Christ is greater than my sinful, and often repented of, despondency. Forgive me brother when by despondency shows more than my repentance. I do believe the Church’s best times are yet ahead of it! Just maybe not in my lifetime.

I know, that there have been periods in history where the Church was supernaturally shaken from her spiritual lethargy to be about obeying both the great commission and the cultural mandate. In light of that I pray daily that God will, in Wrath, remember mercy. I so love the Church in the West. Though never all that she might have been she has been mighty in the things of God over the centuries. My heart breaks at her loss of her first love.

Thank you for your admonition and your reminder that God has every intent of building up the fallen tent of David by bringing in the Nations so that the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

My love to you and your lovely bride,

Bret

“(The Apostle Paul) saw that it was paradoxically through the narrowing down of his redemptive acts to unique singularity of one single man — the Messiah, Jesus, that God opened the way to a universal offering of the grace of the gospel to all the nations.”

Christopher J. H. Wright
Knowing Jesus Through The Old Testament — pp. 52-53

Try to imagine the Gospel as dense matter getting smaller and smaller, and yet at the same time increasingly concentrated, with the passing of redemptive history. Jesus arrives on the scene and with the confluence of redemptive events that characterize his life completed, the dense matter Gospel explodes, and goes super nova, having a re-creating effect wherever the impact of the explosion is felt. This is the book of Acts chronicling the initial fulfillment of the OT prophet’s foretelling of the streaming in of the nations to serve the Lord (cmp. Acts 15:15-17).

The Church, for the Glory of God, impelled by the Spirit, preaching up Christ crucified, is still to be God’s supernova re-creating institution. The Church should still have the expectation that God will use it as the agency whereby the nations and their cultures know and experience redemption. The church is not waiting for some cataclysmic end for the cataclysmic end, with its promise of a new heavens and a new earth, has already come in the death, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost of Christ. The old Judaic order has passed and God’s new Kingdom order has come. In order for that present new Kingdom to progressively come as a reflection of its definitive arrival we must be adorning the Gospel w/ beautiful community life, proclaiming the crown rights of King Jesus, and commanding all men everywhere to repent. Because of the Supernova Gospel we have been given a Kingdom that can not be shaken. This Kingdom is destined to make the places of this current world that are arid and hostile deserts (The lands of the Son’s of Allah, The land of the Jews, The lands of the humanist) which are the last outposts of the falls resistance into beautiful and flourishing gardens of the Lord.

However before any of this happens the church has to awaken to what it is as members of the age to come, and what the seed of the serpent is as it holds membership in this present wicked age. Until we understand this eschatological antithesis we will forever be putting up garden wallpaper on the desert spots and deluding ourselves that it has been changed by the supernova Gospel.

“Israel existed at all only because of God’s desire to redeem people from every nation. But in his sovereign freedom he chose to do so by this particular and historical means. The tension between the universal goal and the particular means is found throughout the Bible and cannot be reduced to either pole alone….Now when we consider Jesus in light of this, the vitally important fact is that the NT presents him to us as the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. And the Messiah ‘was’ Israel. That is, the Messiah was Israel representatively and personified. The Messiah was the completion of all that Israel had been put in the world for — i.e. God’s self-revelation and his work of human redemption. For this reason, Jesus shares the uniqueness of Israel. What God had been doing through no other nation he now completed through no other person than the Messiah Jesus. The paradox is that precisely through the narrowing down of his redemptive work to the unique particularity of the single man, Jesus, God opened the way to the universalizing of his redemptive grace to all nations. Israel was unique because God had a universal goal though them. Jesus embodied that uniqueness and achieved that universal goal. As the Messiah of Israel he could be the savior of the world. Or as Paul reflected, going further back, Jesus became a second Adam, the head of a new humanity (Rmns. 4-5, Gl. 3)”

Christopher J. H. Wright
Knowing Jesus Through The Old Testament

Put a hour glass on its side. From the left broad end to the middle point where the sand pours though you have the Old Testament with it particularizing motion serving the universal end of making God’s glory known to the nations. As OT redemptive history unfolds the motion becomes, like the hourglass increasingly particular. At the broad end we find the Nation of Israel but eventually that is narrowed down to the tribe of Judah and eventually that is narrowed down to the household of David and that is finally narrowed down to the Messiah Jesus. In Jesus we find the culmination of what it was supposed to mean for Israel to be a Kingdom of Priests unto God.

With the Death of Jesus, the particularizing motion of Scripture ceases and we start reading the NT accounts moving from the narrow to the broad end of the right side of the hour glass. Jesus has accomplished OT Israel’s task and now the nations become to come in. On the day of Pentecost the Spirit falls on representatives of all the household nations. In the book of Acts the broadening of the Gospel is seen in the march of the Gospel from Judea to Samaria to the uttermost ends of the earth. In the book of Acts we see the Spirit fall on the Jews, the God-fearers, and the Gentile Ephesians. What is being communicated here is that now the Church is to be to the nations, under the power of the Spirit, and w/ the commission of Jesus what the Jews were to be the nations in the OT.

The goal in all of this was and is the re-creation work of God whereby, by the power of the Gospel the World repents much the same way that the Assyrians repented under the Gospel ministry of Jonah. If Christ is a faithful recapitulation of what faithless Israel was supposed to be, then following the head and body metaphor, the Church is to likewise be a faithful recapitulation of what faithless Israel was to be. The Church is now the Kingdom of Priests representing the nations to God and her task is to reveal God’s work of re-creation in her midst in a world that still suffers and pursues the Fall’s attempt at de-creation. Just as the first Adam, in submission to his dominion mandate, was to push the garden boundaries so that the garden of the Lord covered all the earth, so the Church has been commissioned again with a dominion mandate (Mt. 28) to bring God’s re-creative Gospel news with the expectation that the glory of the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the ocean.

One of the first acts of God’s post fall grace was His placing enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman (Gen. 2:15). If not for this act of grace “the seed of the woman” — those who belonged to God — would forever have been joining league with the seed of woman in rebellion against God to the point where the righteous seed would completely disappear. Even with the enmity placed between these two competing seeds we see the constant inclination of the seed of the woman to cast off their allegiance to God. From the “sons of God” (“seed of he serpent”) taking for themselves the daughters of men (“seed of the woman”) for wives to the flood to Babel we constantly read of the tendency of the “seed of the woman” to negotiate away the gracious enmity that God placed between themselves and the “seed of the serpent.”

Many are those who have appealed to “common grace” as a doctrine which allows us to negotiate away God’s gracious enmity. However, as I understand the Kuyperian development of the doctrine of common grace this doctrine was developed so as to account for how believers and unbelievers could work together to advance a common culture on the terms of a preexisting Christian worldview. However what we are finding increasingly today is the doctrine of common grace used as a means to explain how Christians and pagans can work together to build a common culture on the terms of a preexisting pagan modernist worldview. The doctrine of common grace is one thing when it is invoked in order to explain how Christians can work with non-Christians in order to advance a common culture on the terms of a preexisting Christian worldview. The doctrine of common grace is quite another thing when it is invoked in order to allow Christians to negotiate away God’s gracious enmity in order that modernists and Christians might build a common culture on the terms of a preexisting non-Christian worldview.

That contemporary Christians are negotiating away God’s graciously placed enmity are everywhere to be seen. In the denomination that I am affiliated with it can be seen in the push in some quarters to normalize homosexuality, in the recent acceptance of the Belhar confession, and in the attempt to water down the form of subscription. In the larger culture we see the attempt on the part of Christians to negotiate away God’s graciously placed enmity in the reality that contemporary Christians are so relaxed about how the current State is seeking to currently ascend to the most high in order to seize the scepter of God and His Christ. A Christian people who were fully invested with the gracious enmity of God against the “seed of the serpent” would be in visible and constant tension with the current State since it is constantly revealing itself as being occupied and controlled by the “seed of the serpent.”

What shall we say of this negotiating away of God’s gracious enmity that we find in the Church today? Whether we find this enmity negotiated away through pelagian or gnostic theologies that have crept into our fellowships or whether we find this enmity negotiated away through the homosexualization and feminization of our fellowships what shall we say of this negotiating away of God’s gracious enmity?

I believe what we must say is that God has, for some time, entered into judgment against the Church and as that judgment has fallen upon the Church it has rippled across our culture and people. God’s judgment has been to turn us over to our own negotiating away of enmity between ourselves and our enemies. The only cure for this is repentance.

However the repentance that is called for is a repentance that will firmly reestablish the enmity that has been negotiated away. Such a repentance has to be characterized by a repentance in our thinking for a repentance that will reestablish God’s gracious enmity is a repentance that must find the intellectual reasons why the enmity that we have negotiated away must be reestablished. So, the repentance that we stand in need of is not the kind of repentance that is going to be found in your typical Arminian – Pentecostal revival setting as it is the case that repentance found in those settings are most commonly associated with an affectation of the emotions absent a radical change in thinking.

God’s graciously placed enmity between God’s enemies and God’s people. God’s people have historically negotiated that enmity away. Common grace is a doctrine that is often used to justify negotiating away God’s enmity. Signs are abundant that the contemporary Church continues today to negotiate away God’s enmity, especially as seen in its refusal to be at enmity with the current serpent state. Ultimately, all of this is indicative of God’s judgment against the Church — a judgment that ripples across the culture as a whole. The cure for this is a repentance characterized not primarily by the affectation of the emotions but rather characterized by the affectation of the intellect. Historically such repentance has been found especially among Reformed Churches.

“Failure to distinguish between the gospel and all the effects of the gospel tends, on the long haul, to replace the good news as to what God has done with a moralism that is finally without the power and the glory of Christ crucified, resurrected, ascended, and reigning.”

D. A. Carson
Thelimos

I couldn’t agree with this quote more. However, as D. Marty Lloyd Jones used to teach one can fall off the razor’s edge of truth on both the left side and the right side. Dr. Carson has given us a proper warning regarding falling off one particular side of the razor’s edge of truth. The reality that Dr. Carson would have us to be aware of is, is the danger of failing to distinguish between the gospel and all the effects of the Gospel. However, there is another warning that needs to be raised against another danger and that is the danger in failing to articulate the reality that the Gospel does have effects and consequences.

If we were to frame it in similar ways to Dr. Carson we might say something like this,

“Failure to articulate to the Church that the Gospel has effects tends, on the long haul, to replace the truth that because we have been raised with Christ we are to walk in newness of life, with an anti-nomianism that is finally without the power and the glory of Christ crucified, resurrected, ascended, and reigning.”

I am more than willing to admit the danger of which Dr. Carson speaks. There is a great danger in the Church today to exchange the Gospel for moralism. However, I wonder if those who are so excited to raise their voices in warning against moralism will also raise their voices in warning against anti-nomianism.

We must remember Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd Jones warning that one can fall off the razor’s edge of truth in two different directions.