The first question, the doctrines
of grace are a new concept for my church. What are some tips
for showing mercy and grace and introducing them without compromising
the Scriptures? I think you just preach the Bible
as it is. I mean, you pick a book in the
Bible, chapter 1, verse 1, preach your way through that book. God
sets the agenda. You come to those issues as they
arise in the text. You speak very clearly. You speak
the truth in love. You do need to have some sensitivity
as to where your church is, how hard you push down on the gas
pedal at those certain points. You may be turning a battleship
around instead of a rowboat, and it takes a little time. Dr.
MacArthur has said you preach with patience. And And then you
move on to the next literary unit as you preach through that
book in the Bible, and it has a wonderful balance that's already
built into the Scripture itself. It's like you cook one side of
the hamburger, and then you flip it over, and you cook the other
side. You don't just keep grilling one side. And so there's both
divine sovereignty and then human responsibility. Sometimes it's
within the same verse and within the same cluster, but I think
that's the best way, and people understand that you don't have
an agenda. You haven't gone out of your
way to introduce this. It's in the Bible right there.
Now, what's amazing in so many New Testament books is that it's
on the front doorstep of that book. Like we said with Ephesians
1, there are countless other New Testament books exactly like
that. it's there, but, you know, the
old saying, as Luther said, you don't defend a lion, you just
turn it loose. And that's what we do, but with
much patience and instruction, and I think a lot of pastoral
care and sensitivity and love goes a long way, and you know,
Rome wasn't built in a day, and you don't turn everything around
in a day. Semper Reformanda, always reforming. I mean, it's an ongoing process,
and you move from one truth that crystallizes to the next truth,
but you're putting bricks in a wall, and it's not just a one
brick wall. It's multiple texts and multiple In his dreams. He's always trying to do an impression
of me. So... So you were saying? Yes, what I was saying is... But it's over time. Well, you
know, one of my favorite theologians gave advice on that. It was John
Wayne. He said… He said, smile when
you say that, partner. Seriously, one of the best tactics
that I know of is when you want to deal with the hard sayings,
don't present them in the first person. Let Jesus teach. Go to
Jesus, because there will be a certain attention that people
will give to Christ that they won't give to me or to you or
anybody else, and let them know that this is what He taught.
Yeah. Yeah. And you could start with
John 15, you did not choose Me, I chose you. Not too confusing. I think another element, I think
another element, and that's the words of Jesus, another element
that is important is to present the sovereignty of God as the
most comforting doctrine in Scripture. And I think you come to comfort
your people. I remember a huge influx of people into our church,
and I actually met them in a private room. It all come from the largest
charismatic church in the area. And they were actually… they
were the children and grandchildren of staff members of that church,
and I was sitting talking to 25 or 30 of these people in a
room, and I said, what brought you here? And they said, we cannot
any longer live under the sovereignty of Satan. It was a crushing thing to believe
that Satan was sovereign. It reached the point where they
had a pastor. A prophet came. on a Wednesday night and put
his hands on their pastor and said, he's going to do miracles,
he's going to be a prophet to the world, he's going to carry
the message across the world, he's going to be God's prophet
for this time. That night he had a brain aneurysm and died.
The church I know very well, I went to the funeral of that
young man and I said, what happened to the prophecy? The answer I
heard was that the potential was so powerful Satan killed
him. Obviously, that's an extreme
situation, but I don't… I don't think there's anything more wonderful
than living under the sovereignty of God. That is the most comforting
of all doctrines. Yeah, John, just to add to that,
after the book signing I met a man who has driven a great
distance to be here at this conference and shared with me he had been
listening to the sermons, and his wife has passed away six
months ago. after suffering with Alzheimer's,
and he had tears coming down both cheeks. His son was next
to him, and I said, let me encourage you. That was the perfect day
for your wife to go to heaven because God had numbered all
of our days when as yet there was not one of them. and it was
the all-wise allotment of God to give that number of days. And you trust in the providence
and in the sovereignty of God, and that's the most comforting
truth that there is. And I told him, that's when I
learned that my father passed away. You know, on the cell phones,
put in your hand when you are preaching in a conference, and
you step off the platform, and your wife says, your father just
passed away. you just rest in, this was the
appointed time. This was the perfect time in
God's all-wise providence. And you can't just replay everything
in your mind, if I'd only done this, if I'd done that, I should
have been there, not been there. I mean, you rest in the sovereignty
of God. So just to affirm that, John, it's the most comforting
truth that He works all things after the counsel of His will.
Let me just put a little twist on this, and I'd love for you,
Dr. Busenitz, to speak to this. Thinking in terms of bringing
these doctrines to the church and how a pastor with patience
and over time leads people into the Word and the riches of God's
Word. And that's a tremendous task that you have there at the
Master's Seminary. So if you just care to comment
in terms of not entering the church, but on the pastoral preparation
side to prepare them for leading congregations into these truths.
Yeah, absolutely. I had the incredible privilege
of growing up at Grace Community Church under the preaching ministry
of Dr. John MacArthur, and so he is
for me a model of how this works itself out in practical pastoral
ministry. And to emphasize and to preach
and teach from the Scriptures the doctrine of God's sovereignty
when times are good equips your people to cling to that doctrine
when times are hard. And I saw that modeled, I've
seen that modeled my entire life. And to see the practical outworking
of that, when the trials come, people remember the doctrine
that they've been taught. They see it in the Scriptures
and they have hope. Thank you. We've been talking
about the doctrine of election, and it came up the issue of foreknowledge
and forenation, so we have two questions in that field. Since
God foreordained everything that has happened and will happen,
and nothing happens without Him allowing it to happen, did He
foreordain Satan and the fall? The Westminster Confession, I
believe it's chapter 3, says that God, from all eternity,
immutably, doth ordain whatsoever comes to pass, semicolon. And after the semicolon, it says,
but not in such a way as to do away with secondary causes. or
violating the will of man and so on, and echoing what Augustine
said centuries before, is that God ordains everything that comes
to pass in a certain sense, and you have to use that qualifier
carefully in a certain sense. But if it's true that God ordains
everything that comes to pass, then it's true that God ordained
Satan's creation. He ordains even my sin that I
commit, because that's part of everything that comes to pass. Now, so that doesn't mean, however,
that God is the author of evil. but he is the author of everything
that comes to pass, again, in a secondary sense at least. And so I say to people, evil
is evil. Satan is Satan. And it's improper
to call good evil or evil good. But even though evil is evil
and Satan is Satan, it's good that there is evil, and it's
good that there is Satan, because as Luther says, it's God's devil
that has to deal with the devil. We're not an eternal dualism,
but rather God is sovereign over all of these things. And He brings
all of these things out of His eternal purposes to bring everything
together for good, for His ultimate purposes. So I don't think we
should shrink from acknowledging that if God is sovereign, then
it has to be that in a certain sense He ordains whatsoever come
to pass. A simple way to look at it is
this. God knows before I sin that I'm going to sin. We all
understand that. Now, God also has the power to
vaporize me before I commit that sin, right? And when you talk
about God's permitting it, you know, that's a weak answer really,
because He does more than permit it. But at least, at the very least,
God chooses to let me do it rather than not to let me do it. So
insofar as God, who is capable… of stopping me from doing something,
chooses not to stop me from doing it, in a certain sense, He ordains
that I do it. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able
to do it. That's simple, isn't it? Simple. Right? You get it? I think the other end of it is
that He doesn't stop us from doing it because it serves His
ultimate glory to allow us to do it. Otherwise, how could He
put on display all those attributes of His nature that are related
to how He deals with sinners? Justice, wrath, judgment, mercy,
grace, compassion, forgiveness. Without sin, none of that is
on display. God is fully glorified when He
fully displays all of His attributes, which necessitates the reality
of evil in the world so that that can also be put on display
for His own glory. So what if God, what if God allows
vessels of wrath. Are we going to question that?
Because therein He displays His glory. I would venture to say
that when you come to praise the Lord and you come to worship,
you might worship Him for His omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence.
You might worship Him for His immutability. You might worship
Him for His creative power But my guess is that that which elicits
the most profound worship out of your heart are all those attributes
of God put on display in your salvation, which is a result
of your sin. And that's what we're going to
be doing all forever in heaven. As we look at Revelation chapter
5, we hear everyone saying, worthy is the Lamb that was slain, that
that will be the ringing worship of heaven surrounding the salvation
of God, which was brought into being because God didn't stop
sinners from sinning. With regards to Romans 8, 29,
why is foreknew presented with predestination? Are we predestined
because He foreknew? Who would accept Him? I almost
said a bad word. In fact, I'm still tempted. I
don't want to just say no. I want to say heck no. I think
we understand. We got it. I mean, this is the
most common view against the biblical view of predestination,
the idea of the prescient view of predestination, namely that
God looks down through the corridor of time. He knows in advance
who's going to say yes to the gospel and who is going to say
no to the gospel. and those whom He knows from
all eternity will say yes to the gospel, He then predestines,
so that His predestination is based on His foreknowledge. That's not an explanation of
predestination. It's the denial of predestination. There's no possible way that
God can predestinate anyone or anything which He did not foreknow. Obviously, those whom He predestines
He knows who it is whom He predestines, and so there's a reason why in
the golden chain foreknowledge starts the chain before predestination. Thank you. We also appreciate
your two-word answer. Yeah, and I… well, we talked
about it with John 10 today, I know my own and my own know
me, that verb genosko, to know in a loving relationship. He put for in front of it. It's
those whom he previously loved with a distinguishing love. John
Murray in his commentary on Romans has a special appendix on just
the word prognosco, for knowledge. And that Romans 8.29 does not
say what he foresaw. It says whom he foreknew. It's not referring to events
or circumstances in the future that he foresaw. It's referring
to individuals whom he previously loved, and he helps clarify that
in the next chapter in Romans 9.13, Jacob I loved and Esau
I hated. So it's far more than just knowing
about. but intimately loving beforehand,
before the foundation of the world. if you come to the called, those
whom He foreknew that He also predestined, those whom He predestined
that He also called, and it's all… the elliptical sense of
that passage is all whom He foreknew that He predestined, all whom
He predestined that He called, all whom He called that He justified.
You have to understand what it means to be called of God in
that context, because it's not just the outward call. because
not everybody who's called outwardly responds to that call. But all
who are called in this case respond and are justified. And so, all
whom He foreknew that He predestined, all who are predestined are the
called, and all who are called are justified. All who are justified
are glorified. So it can't mean, linguistically,
that the prescient view is in view here, if it's talking about
an eternal effectual calling. Does that make sense? You had to say that. We have another question here
on the doctrine of salvation. Are we saved by Jesus' life or
death or both? And the short answer is both.
Anyone like to elaborate? Well, I think maybe that's what
I was conveying last night, that we're saved by God. We're saved
by God imputing to us a righteousness that is alien to us, that is
the very righteousness that He possesses, manifest and lived
out in His Son whose life is placed as a substitute for ours.
And we're also… that is, you could say, the active righteousness
of Christ, as theologians have talked about it. But we also
have been saved by the passive righteousness of Christ who became
a sacrifice for sin, bore our sins. So I think you have to
take the whole thing. I think this is correct, and
even though people have tried to argue against that, I think
the active righteousness of Christ in living that life of 33 years
and a holy, harmless, undefiled life in all points tempted like
as we are yet without sin, there is therefore a life, a life that
can be credited to our account. just as there is a death that
can be credited to our account. Both of those are essential elements
of understanding the fullness of how that imputation works,
and that's essentially what's being said in 2 Corinthians 5.21. Our sins imputed to Him, His
righteousness imputed to us, and that was the point last night.
R.C. Sproul, Jr. All Jesus did was die for our
sins and be punished for our guilt. that would simply restore
us to the situation Adam was in before the fall. It would
make us innocent but give us no positive righteousness. That's
why we need the life of Christ as well as the death of Christ
to have salvation. We've heard a lot of Spurgeon
quotes, and somebody worked a Spurgeon quote into the question. Charles
Spurgeon said, I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel
who does not preach the law. How would you explain the use
of the law as we share the gospel with individuals today? Well, the law is the divine standard
by which we are measured, and Spurgeon said that in the conversion
of the sinner that there are ten mules that must pull ten
plows that break up the soil so that then the seed of the
gospel can be sown into that plowed-up soil. that if all we
do is just scatter the seed without plowing up the ground, it just
remains on the surface. And so there is much use in preaching
the law because it exposes our sin and reveals us to have fallen
short of the glory of God. And it is the law that reveals
to us our need for Christ. and really to go back to what
was just said, too, and then to realize that there is One
who in my place kept all the requirements of this law, and
His active righteousness can be credited to me. As you study the four Gospels,
Jesus did not have a pat way to do evangelism. He met the
woman at the well, Nicodemus, the rich young ruler, a lawyer,
various different people with different bridges, in essence,
that He crossed over. And with the rich young ruler,
he certainly used the law to expose his heart to him. We don't have the full account
of everything that he said to everyone else, but nevertheless,
and the law is written on the heart also. R.C. Sproul, Jr. I think that's a key thing is
the only ally you have in the sinner, the only ally you have
in the sinner is the law. If he is a sinner who knows the
Word of God, then you have the law of God written. If he is
a sinner who does not know the law of God, you have the law
of God in the heart, Romans 2. And the law of God in the heart
is activated by the conscience which either accuses or excuses.
That is the only ally we have in the heart of the sinner is
the law of God, and we cannot abandon that. That is all we've
got. If that law which that sinner
knows, the written law, or doesn't know the written law like the
Jews but like the Gentiles, has the law of God written in his
heart, and that conscience is given by God to make that law
bite at him when he sins, just even an ignorant sinner then
that is all we've got. You hear today trends, well,
we've got to get away from the Law because people don't want
authority. We've got to talk about idols of the heart because
people can identify with that. You are… If you do anything other
than that, go at the Law of God written, and the Law of God written
in the heart, which is part of being human, you have literally
walked away from the only ally you have in the fallen heart,
and that is the Law of God. And you go at that law, and you
expose that law and the violations of that law, and you come to
the sinner with the hope of forgiveness and restoration and reconciliation.
Sproul, Jr. And it also shows how prescient
and prophetic Spurgeon was, looking to the future. My friend Steve
Lawson, who's one of the ten mules. Dr. Sproul, you might be pleased
to know that most of the people here, this is their first time
at a Ligonier conference and their first time in St. Andrew's
Chapel. Now, they've not had the experience of entering St.
Andrew's Chapel on a Sunday because the narthex is rearranged for
our conference. But ordinarily on a Sunday, they
would have a different experience if they were to come through
that entrance and come into St. Andrews. Would you like to explain
that a little bit in terms of the law and the gospel, in terms
of how you've designed and what you've put out there in the narthex?
SPROUL JR. Well, part of it is architectural manifestation of
the law and the gospel itself. You walk into the North Ex on
Sunday morning, it's dark, and you make a transition from the
secular to the sacred as you walk through the door. But you're
confronted immediately by the law, and out there, there is
a three- or four-hundred-year-old copy of a scroll of the Torah,
open to Genesis… I'm sorry, Exodus 20. I knew it was in there somewhere.
And so the first thing they confront is the law before they enter
into the sanctuary and into the nave. And in the ancient world,
the Gothic design was to shape the church in the form of a cruciform
or the crucifix, where you have the vertical and then the two
wings of the shape of the cross. The vertical symbolizes what
we call propitiation, where God is satisfied in His wrath and
judgment by the gospel, and on the cross section of expiation,
where we see our sins have been carried away from us through
the work of Christ. And you also come out of the
darkness and into the light and into the center part of the church,
which is called the nave. out of which the Navy was named,
and it had to do with going all the way back to the Cyprianic
formula, you know, I can't even remember what, out of the… apart
from… Apart from the church, there is no salvation. Yeah,
extra-ecclesiam nomosalus. Apart from the church, there
is no salvation. And the idea being that the nave is like the
ark where people flee for safety, for resent for salvation from
the coming wrath. And so there's all that symbolism
that's involved in the… Is that what you…? That was. So everyone
should come back Sunday to hear you preach and experience entering
from the law to the gospel. Right. Thank you. Another question
regarding doctrine of salvation, regarding profession versus possession
of faith and the showing of evidence. Is there a minimum level of evidence
that should be seen in the life of the believer to know if you
are saved? If so, what is that evidence? Well, 1 John gives a series of
nine tests, depending upon how you divide up the book of 1 John,
where regeneration is the root, and there is sanctification as
the fruit, and there is the necessary evidence of a changed and regenerated
life. And so we have the Scripture
itself. Now, there is not… it's not given as a spectrum from
1 to 100, and so where are you on this? The Spirit of God would
have to either convict or assure a heart. of what I see taking
place in my life. And it's not a multiple choice.
It's not that you get to pick three out of these nine evidences
of the necessary fruit of the new birth. It's all a work of
grace, and it evidences itself in the One who is born from above.
So, it's presented as it's there or it's not there. SPROUL JR.:
: One of the great and ghastly errors, not just error, but heresies
that permeates the evangelical world today is the doctrine of
the carnal Christian. The doctrine of the carnal Christian
was first set forth in a theological framework that taught this. that at regeneration the Holy
Spirit can come in and save a person without changing the person at
all. There had to be a second stage
where there was lordship introduced on the throne of the soul where…
for a person to be Spirit-filled and so on and not be carnal.
But the idea was that you could be a believer and be altogether
carnal. Now, the Bible says we are carnal,
we're sold unto sin, and as long as we're in this life, we still
have a certain fleshiness that accompanies our walk as Christians. But if you're 100% flesh, 100%
carnal, you're 100% unconverted. But this is an excuse for people
to say, well, I answered the call, I raised my hand, I signed
the card, made the pledge, therefore I'm saved. even though there
is no evidence of it whatsoever, you can still be in a state of
utter carnality and be a saved person. John MacArthur wrote
the definitive work against that. Thank goodness for that, John,
that you stood up into that battle field, which was so vital, because
otherwise you have multitudes of people Going back to 1969,
we're saying, Lord, Lord, who… and Jesus is going to say, please
leave. I don't know who you are, you workers of lawlessness or
iniquity, because am I going too fast? There's no such thing
as a totally carnal converted person. Of course, the book is the gospel
according to Jesus. The author is right here. Would
you like to add to that question or answer? I'm going to be speaking in a
little bit on the perseverance of the saints. This speaks to
that doctrine because eternal life perseveres manifestly in
every life in which it has been granted by God. We talked about that a little
earlier in the other Q&A. I absolutely agree with that.
There's no such thing as a carnal Christian in the sense that there's
no changed life, but that was the idea. In fact, there were
books being produced at the time I wrote the gospel according
to Jesus that said as a statement of fact, if you ever believed
in the Lord Jesus Christ, You can now be an unbelieving believer,
deny Christ, and have no evidence of any salvation in your life,
and you're on your way to heaven. You'll get there, one book called
The Hungry Inherit said, you'll get there, but you won't inherit. You'd be like… you'd be like…
there'll be like a ghetto in heaven for non-Lordship people. We call that ghetto hell. Huh? We call that ghetto hell. You
call that ghetto hell. I know. You managed to get that word
in there. I'm very proud of you. There you go reading my mind
again, Stu. We have some more theological questions, but let's
drop back for a little bit and maybe ask a bit more of a question
in your own formation. Could each of you identify a
figure or two from church history who impacted your ministry or
your own theological formation? Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I have the privilege of teaching
historical theology at the Master's Seminary, and there's many different
individuals who immediately come into my mind. I recently worked
on a project tracing the doctrine of justification by faith prior
to the Reformation, and so some of the individuals who come to
my mind are those who I studied for that project. And one of
them is Clement of Rome, who… The Roman Catholic Church considers
to be the fourth pope, and yet he has one of the clearest statements
of justification by faith alone in all of patristic literature
in the 32nd chapter of 1 Clement. I love to tell Roman Catholics
that I meet that their fourth pope was actually a Protestant.
And… R.C. Sproul, Jr. So, it's our first
one. So for those of you that didn't
hear, he said, so was their first one. Beyond Clement of Rome, someone
else? Yes, certainly on the theological level, Augustine, and then on
the exegetical or expository level, his counterpart in the
East, Chrysostom, the father really of expository preaching.
So to trace some of those individuals prior to the Reformation is just
so encouraging to recognize that the evangelical convictions that
we hold dear that are summarized in the five solas They were held
by generations of believers in the first 1,500 years of church
history as well. And the faith that we hold, dear,
it's not just 500 years old, it's 2,000 years old, and we
rejoice with all of those generations of believers throughout all of
church history with whom we resonate at that level. And this is a
question for all of you, so… SPROUL JR.: : My guy is your
guy, a little fellow from Southampton, or Northampton, not Southampton,
Northampton, Massachusetts. NICHOLSON COOPERMAN. We're talking
about Jonathan Edwards. SPROUL JR.: : Yes. LAWSON. Yeah, God uses different
people in our lives as we're at different stages. We read
different books, and so it doesn't necessarily mean that this is
the towering theologian like Jonathan Edwards, but it's who
God used in my life almost like a key to unlock a far more Reformed
understanding of salvation and providence and the Godhead and
all of that, and it was reading Thomas Watson's book, A Body
of Divinity, as he preached through the Westminster Confession. And
I'd never read anything like this. There was more of God in
the table of contents than there was in other books that were
being written. The first half was the attributes
of God, and the second half, the table of contents, was everything
flowing out of God. And I was profoundly impressed,
and he writes in such a simple way. It's almost like eating
candy. It's just easy, pithy sentences that are easily digestible,
and that's what I needed at that time because I was chewing on
this and trying to understand. this, and I remember coming to
a solidified understanding of the doctrine of election and
the effectual call of God, and it was really almost like I was
saved all over again. It was just It so stunned me that I literally
for the next three months almost didn't say anything. I felt like
Job at the end of Job. I just needed to be quiet because
I've been wrong for so long. And then I read the chapter on
providence and realized God is sovereign, and it's beyond just
salvation. It's everything, and that thought
had never even entered my mind. And so reading as simple of a
Puritan pastor suffering under the great ejection as Thomas
Watson, God used that book in a wonderful way. And then I remember
wrestling with, so what do I do with this sovereignty? Because
if everyone's going to be saved who's going to be saved, then
why am I living in a garage apartment in an alley in Dallas? Why don't
I just go back to the bank and have a nice job? And I remember just standing
in the bookstore and reading Spurgeon sermons. and how on
fire he was for God and the gospel and Christ, and he would preach
the sovereignty of God and then plead for sinners to be saved. And like Dr. MacArthur quoted
last night, we urge you on behalf of God be reconciled. So then
to follow up with Spurgeon to see that that we who believe
in the sovereignty of God ought to be the most powerful preachers
of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So those two men in church history
for me were game changers. You can throw Whitefield in as
well. I don't know that we've ever
had that conversation, but the first two Puritan books I ever
read, one of them was The Body of Divinity. And you talked about
the simplicity, the terseness, the short sentences, and I remember
the analogies, all kinds of natural analogies, flowers, gardens,
grass, animals, sun, stars, rain, and I needed those. Those were openers for me. And
then the second book that just completely, to use your phrase,
rocked my world was Stephen Charnock's Existence and Attributes of God.
I couldn't even imagine that anyone could have that many things
to say about God. And it's a book for your life.
It's a book for your entire life to try to continue to read and
read and read. Not even just the material in
the book, but the idea that a man could apply himself to the Scripture
to come to all of that vast grasp of the divine nature showed me
a depth of commitment to Scripture that I had never ever imagined. Since God is love, and love does
not seek its own. How do we reconcile that with
God doing everything for His own pleasure? So since God is
love and love does not seek its own, how do we reconcile that
with God doing everything for His own pleasure? I love questions like that. The
first thing is that… well, two things. The love of man that is defined
for us in 1 Corinthians 13 is a true and authentic example
of what love is, but it doesn't begin to compare with the vastness
of the love of God. Secondly, we stumble over statements
like that because we have a tendency to pour into words like pleasure
our general concept of pleasure, that which feels good and has
a lot of nice, cool ideas associated with it. But biblically, the
concept of God's pleasure is that that is pleasing to Him. And the only thing that is ultimately
pleasing to God is that which is perfectly good. And if we
understand the relationship between the love of God and the goodness
of God, then we see the connection with the pleasure of God. It's God's good pleasure, that
which really… You know, when I say… walk on in fear of blasphemy
when I sometimes wonder about the economy of the inspiration
of God the Holy Spirit when the Spirit inspires statements like
God's good pleasure. I think such a redundancy has
never been written by any mortal being, because what other kind
of pleasure does God have except a good pleasure? There's no such
thing as a bad pleasure in the nature of God, but because of
our weakness, and even God stoops to our weaknesses by amplifying
that word pleasure by the prefix good. But I think we have to
distinguish the pleasure of God, what is pleasing to God, and
what is sometimes pleasing to us that is not pleasing to God.
I also think it's a short-sighted question because God so loved
that He gave His only begotten Son. Love in the case of God did not
merely seek His own But in satisfying His own desire, He redeemed humanity
and brought them to glory. And the testimony of Jesus is
to say greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down
his life for his friends. So, I think that's a short-sighted
question. In the process of God seeking
His own pleasure, He has embraced a complete redeemed humanity
of unworthy sinners as an expression of His love. It is His love that
sought us to bring us to Him, not for His own pleasure alone,
but He found pleasure in our eternal pleasure in Him. I'll direct this next question
to you, Dr. Busenitz. This regards the world
in which we find ourselves, and so the question is, given the
nature of the issues that we're facing today, how should the
church be preparing pastors to minister to this next generation?
Yeah, I think the answer to that question is the same answer that
has always been, and that is that we preach Christ. And in
fact, at the Master's Seminary, we tell our men that we preach
Christ. And what we mean by that is what
Paul meant by that in 1 Corinthians 1, 23, when in the midst of a
counter-cultural, anti-gospel, antagonistic society, Paul said,
we preach Christ crucified. It's foolishness to the Greeks. It's a stumbling block to the
Jews. But the Lord Jesus Christ is and always will be the solution
for society's ills and problems. It's the heart of the gospel,
as even was said earlier in the Q&A. So we preach Christ, and
we recognize that the Scriptures are the Word of Christ, as it
says in Colossians 3.16, and that the Scriptures are empowered
by the Spirit of Christ, and we do this then for the glory
of Christ. So we preach Christ to a world that hates Christ
but needs Christ. We preach the Word of Christ.
We preach the Word of Christ empowered by the Spirit of Christ,
and we do it for the glory of Christ. And as long as we seek
to do that, then we have what the world needs, and it is the
knowledge of God that has been revealed in the Scriptures is
all that is needed for life and godliness. We have what the world
needs, and if we're faithful to do what God has called us
to do, then we trust that He will bless His Word and His kingdom
will advance. SPROUL JR.: : You hear things
all the time that say that as culture changes with cell phones
and Internet and all of that sort of thing, generations change
from time to time, and so you have to make a different approach
to generation X or Y or Z or whatever it is in our day and
age. And I hear all the time, well,
logic is no longer relative to people. So we can't address people
through the mind in order to get to the heart. We have to
bypass the mind and speak directly to the heart. Well, here's something
that's very important theologically. The constituent nature of human
beings remains the same. Generations change, culture changes,
and all the rest, but the human constituent nature does not change,
and the way to the heart and to the soul is through the mind,
through the Word of God, and so these truths don't change.
And so I'm just seconding the motion of what we heard over
here. Thank you. Another theological question
regarding the immutability of God. How should we take passages
that seemingly show God having changing emotions, for example,
delight or displeasure? So how do we reconcile the doctrine
of the immutability of God with these passages that seemingly
show God changing emotions? Well, whenever we develop doctrine,
and you're talking about theological dogmas and so on, we're dealing
with principles drawn from the Scripture. And so we articulate
the doctrines in a certain language that we use. When we come to
the Scriptures themselves, we see that the Bible speaks in
different ways, metaphors and so on, and we talk about anthropological
language. And when we see God being described
as repenting and changing His mind and all of that, well, in
a literal sense, you can't square immutability with changing God's
mind, okay? Well, obviously, when the Bible
speaks about God changing His mind, it's speaking anthropologically,
describing God to us in human terms. And by the way, the only
way God can speak to us is through human language, because that's
the only language we have. And even when we abstract it,
we're still using human abstractions and moving away from metaphor. When the Bible says that He owns
a cattle on a thousand hills, it's not that we're to say, oh,
well, God is like a rancher in the sky that every now and then
comes down to earth, gets in a shootout at the O.K. Corral
with the devil or something like that. No, it's human forms. That's what we mean by anthropomorphic
language. It's speaking in the forms of
human conversation. And that's why you distinguish
between narrative language, for example, and language that's
found in the didactic expressions of Scripture. If you only build
your theology on the basis of narratives, you have to say,
well, God didn't know in advance whether Abraham would be obedient
to His call to sacrifice Isaac, and then suddenly there was an
epiphany where God realized that Abraham was going to follow through,
and so He stopped him and all that. Now, come on. We know better
than that because in the didactic portions, we are told that He
doesn't change, and He can't die, and He doesn't lie, and
all of that, even though these metaphorical expressions and
figurative forms of speech are used throughout Scripture. It's just like… Let me just say
one more thing. I hear the question all the time. When we pray, Can
we change God's mind? And I always tell my students,
you know, there's no such thing as a stupid question, but that's
a stupid question, because if you think about it for ten seconds,
You know, what would it be? What would cause God to change
His mind? God has decided He's going to
do something. Has He overlooked my counsel? And so that when
I inform Him of a better way, then that causes Him to change
His mind. Or did He skip over some detail, and He failed to
understand in His omniscience? Come on. Who has been God's guidance
counselor? Prayer changes me. It doesn't
ever change God's mind, because God is ultimately immutable. This will be your last question.
This is for each of you on the panel. When you depart from this
earth, what is the one statement you would leave on your tombstone? I told you I was sick. He said I told you I was sick
I I remember being in a Q&A with
John Piper a few years ago, and a similar question was asked,
what do you want people to say about you when you're dead? That
kind of thought never enters my mind. I think my mind immediately
goes to Paul's statement that It is required of stewards that
a man be found faithful, and I would want to be remembered
as having been faithful to proclaim the Word of God and live the
Word of God That really is the beginning
and end of my life. That is what I live and breathe
for, is to be a channel through which the Word of God can flow
in every way possible, and to just be able to finish by the
grace of God well enough that faithful to the Word of God would
be sufficient for me. Well, this is going to sound
like I'm copying, but my mind immediately went to Matthew 25
and to the words of the Lord Jesus there in that parallel,
that parable, well done my good and faithful servant. And we
recognize that that's only possible by God's grace, so maybe I would
choose the word grace. I thought also of the words of
Richard Baxter, who in The Saints' Everlasting Rest said, on the
door of heaven write the free gift, but on the floors of hell
write deserved. Because that is what we deserve,
and our entrance into eternal glory to worship around the throne
of the Lamb is only possible by His grace. Yeah, I think I would just want
it to simply say, Jesus Christ is Lord, and in a sense be testifying
to the gospel through what is on the tombstone, whatever that
would be, and just pointing people upward to Christ. Have you ever been to Spurgeon's
grave? I found it a year ago in the
rain. It's really hard to find. It is hard to find. Do you remember
what was written on it? Um, wow. I cannot, John. No, because it was so nondescript,
so obscure, so hard to find, but it really doesn't matter.
It's not what's on His tombstone that matters. It's what lives
from His teaching and His life. But that was a… that was a sad
day for me emotionally to try to find that place. Way on the
backside of Northwood. But in the end, his legacy far,
extends far beyond any tombstone. So will yours. Would you join with me in thanking
our panelists?