Quotes & Commentary

“Our Salvation Is In Christ”

We all have those memories of moments in life where we wish we could have a mulligan and so be able to go back and relive or re-do what we painfully remember having so gloriously botched. But, of course life is lived in the forward gear and there is no going back.

In light of this I found this quote from my reading yesterday to be of great comfort remembering times when my faith has been so weak;

“My father, dying just short of his 91st birthday after 75 years as a believer, deeply bemoaned the weakness of his faith at a crucial point of his life. I assured him that this was of no account, for our salvation resides in Christ, not in the strength of our faith. As he lapsed into unconsciousness, to die the next day, he repeatedly affirmed, “Our salvation is in Christ.” His last words were to repeat the Book of Common Prayer’s powerful expression “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.”

Robert Letham
Systematic Theology – p. 677

When we are convicted about our past failures of exercising our faith even then we must not lose hope since our hope lies in Christ’s faithfulness and not our own.

Thanks be to God for the imputation of Christ’s righteousness that covers my sin and for His infinite patience with us. If I had to live with my past without knowing that Christ is my righteousness and acceptability before the Father I could not function.

I hope when I am on my deathbed, I am reciting the same words that Letham witnessed his father reciting.

Postmodernism & Fact Checking?

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.”

Hannah Arendt

This morning I was watching an interview by a BBC reporter with Elon Musk The reporter was complaining to Musk about the misinformation that Musk allows on his social media platform X. Musk turned the tables and asked the interviewer about the misinformation that routinely occurs on the BBC. Suddenly, it hit me. The heavens opened. A sunbeam spotlighted me and angels sang.

We have all this massive carping about misinformation, misinformation and disinformation to the point where even Hillary Clinton worries that if we don’t do something about the social media platforms, “We are going to lose total control.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/10/06/hillary_clinton_if_social_media_platforms_dont_have_to_moderate_content_we_lose_total_control.html

Indeed, a whole cottage industry has sprung up of “fact checkers.”

However this is all one giant contradiction we have going on here because on the one hand we have these complaints about misinformation while on the other hand we live in a culture that touts the epistemological philosophy of postmodernism which teaches that there is no such thing as true truth. The current prevailing epistemology at the University level teaches that while sub-communities may have their little “t” truths, no macro “T” truth exists. Truth, for postmodernism is reduced to preferred narratives embraced by sundry different communities.

And yet despite that epistemology we are drowning in accusations of misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information. However if truth is reduced to merely preferred narratives that different social groups want to own then who is to say that something is misinformation? What might be true for the Lugenpresse might not be true for MAGA groupies and how dare anybody suggest otherwise.

In brief, were we rational, (and we most definitely are not) we would shut down the whole “fact checking” nonsense that is going on at every turn. What we see is that the elites want their cake and to eat it also. The elites don’t believe in true truth and yet they scream about “misinformation.”

Really, it is quite comical if you think about it.

However, what all this “fact checking” is all about is control as Hillary informed us above. Information is power and the ability to say what is and isn’t “fact” is power over people’s thinking, and so power over people. The elites don’t want anybody determining reality except for themselves. The elites want to keep selling us the false reality they have been feeding us for decades now. The access of counter information finds them trotting out the threat of misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information in order to shore up their power.

And this in spite of swearing allegiance to postmodernism at the same time.

Greg Bahnsen Answers J. Ligon Duncan From the Grave

“If you sincerely try to stand against the slide into the cesspool of wickedness in our state and our culture by looking for a consistent biblical position from which you might witness against the disgrace all around us as many of us have found you’ll lose your job within the seminary community, you’ll lose your standing in the church establishment you’ll virtually become unemployable even if you’re orthodox you’ll become ostracized you’ll be called dangerous. What’s wrong with us that theonomists are called dangerous when we have to lock our windows at night? It’s crazy isn’t it? How many times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn’t see?

Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fight homosexuality, not abortion, not crime and mayhem in our society, not subjectivism in theology, not dispensationalism, not cultural relativism, not licentiousness, not defection from the New Testament, not defection from the Westminster Confession of Faith all of which are out there and they could give their legitimate efforts to. Boy, the thing they had to write about was Theonomy. How many times can a man turn his head and pretend he just doesn’t see? We are living in the cesspool of relativism and the church doesn’t have an answer. So I praise God, not for my work, I think it’s the grace of god that allows me to have this ministry, but I praise God that the truth that the early church knew and that is found in the Bible is available to us and there are people like you who are willing to say we’ll pay the price, it’s worth it.”

The Bahnsen Institute
Taken from “Law and Disgrace”

Fewer and fewer Christians are willing to pay the price.

Will you?

Francis Roberts Arguing that the Noahic Covenant is a Gracious Covenant

While this (taking the Noahic covenant as a common grace covenant) is a common construction among many today (think R2K) (17th century Puritan) Francis Roberts rather understands the Noahic covenant as an ‘expressure’ of the Covenant of Grace. Roberts will write of a double covenant made with Noah, one before the flood, in which God covenanted to save him and his household, and one after the flood ‘superadded’ to the former covenant. In this second instance of covenanting, several things are noticed that indicate not common, but special saving grace. The first is the occasion of it, that God ‘smelled the sweet savor’ of Noah’s sacrifice, as the outward moving cause of it, which indicates an appointment to Christ and His sacrifice, the inward ‘moving cause’ being God’s ‘mere grace and commiserating mercies’ to Noah. Second, the parties covenanting are the appeased God on the one hand, smelling that ‘savor of rest’ and second, Noah and his sons, and their ‘seed.’ Third, the matters covenanted consist on God’s part that He will not again destroy all flesh. For Noah and his sons, on their part, and especially in reference to the ‘seed,’ to believe God’s gracious dealing in this promise, but more to believe in Christ, the true sacrifice as the one who appeases God’s wrath and restores rest to the perishing and cursed creature, preserving God’s gracious design. Fourth, the token of the covenant, the rainbow in the cloud, concerning which Roberts declares, ‘So then the rainbow which physically and naturally denotes rain theologically, supernaturally and by institution signifies fair weather and security from rain and flood.’ ”

God’s Covenants: The Mystery & Marrow of the Bible Vol 1 — p. 36
Rev. Dr. Todd Ruddell — Preface

Dabney & Calvin On God’s Approval Regarding Slavery

Most clergy read out Dabney from being highly estimated because of his views on slavery as seen with this quote;

“Moses legalized domestic slavery for God’s chosen people, in the very act of setting them aside to holiness.

Christ, the great Reformer, lived and moved amidst it, teaching, healing, applauding slaveholders; and while He assailed every abuse, uttered no word against this lawful relation.

His apostles admit slaveholders to the church, exacting no repentance nor renunciation. They leave, by inspiration, general precepts for the manner in which the duties of the relation are to be maintained. They command Christian slaves to obey and honor Christian masters. They remand the runaway to his injured owner, and recognize his property in his labor as a right which they had no power to infringe.

If slavery is in itself a sinful thing, then the Bible is a sinful book.”

R L Dabney
Life of Lt Gen Thomas J Jackson

But if we are going to toss Dabney on the bonfire of our cultural vanities we need to be willing to throw Calvin there as well;

“Here a question arises, Is perpetual servitude so displeasing to God, that it ought not to be deemed lawful? To this the answer is easy — Abraham and other fathers had servants or slaves according to the common and prevailing custom, and it was not deemed wrong in them.”

“That since God permitted the fathers to retain servants and maids, it is a thing lawful; and further, as God permitted the Jews also, under the Law, to bear rule over aliens, and to keep them perpetually as servants, it follows that this cannot be disapproved.”

“And still a clearer evidence may be adduced; for since the Gentiles have been called to the hope of salvation, no change has in this respect been made. For the Apostles did not constrain masters to liberate their servants, but only exhorted them to use kindness towards them, and to treat them humanely as their fellow-servants.”

“If, then, servitude were unlawful, the Apostles would have never tolerated it; but they would have boldly denounced such a profane practice had it been so.”

“We hence see that the thing in itself is not unlawful.”

Interestingly enough, in SwordSearcher Bible software, these six paragraphs are missing from John Calvin’s commentary on Jeremiah 34:8-9. It is fairly obvious that the reason why they are missing is that Calvin, like Dabney after him, would not have supported Jacobinism or abolitionism in the form that it took.

It is criminal for publishing houses to just delete whole sections of author’s works because they don’t find them tasteful to their zeitgeist palates.