Questions & Answers #29

Q: What does the Bible say about God's sovereignty over evil?

The Bible teaches that God is sovereign over evil, ordaining its existence to display His glory and righteousness. In addressing the problem of evil, Scripture presents a God who is sovereign over all creation, including the existence of evil. As expressed in Romans, God ordains evil not as the source of it, but as a means to demonstrate His glory, righteousness, and grace. This is evident throughout both the Old and New Testaments, where God uses scenarios, such as Pharaoh's hardening, to showcase His power and justice. Theodicy, or the justification of God's goodness amidst evil, ultimately points us back to the cross, emphasizing that the existence of evil serves to highlight the grace and mercy offered to humanity through Christ.

Q: How do we know God can be good if evil exists?

God's goodness is affirmed in Scripture as He ordains evil for His glory without being the source of it. The existence of evil does raise profound questions about the nature of God, particularly His goodness and sovereignty. Biblical theodicy asserts that while God is good and just, He ordains the existence of evil to display His attributes—from His justice to His mercy. As Paul outlines in his epistle to the Romans, God reveals His righteousness, love, and glory through the existence of sin and the subsequent redemption provided in Christ. Therefore, the church finds comfort in knowing that God's ultimate plan incorporates all things, including evil, to magnify His glory and power.

Q: Why is understanding God's sovereignty important for Christians?

Understanding God's sovereignty is crucial for Christians as it assures them that God's plans will ultimately prevail for their good. Recognizing God's sovereignty fosters confidence and security for believers. It provides a framework for understanding the trials and tribulations they face in life. The concept asserts that God is in control of all circumstances, working through them for the good of those who love Him, as expressed in Romans 8:28. Sovereignty also affects how Christians perceive the world around them, enabling them to endure suffering with the hope that God providentially directs events according to His divine will. Such understanding reinforces the conviction that nothing happens outside of God's purposes, which ultimately leads to His glory.

Q: What should Christians do about cultural issues like sexuality?

Christians must uphold biblical teachings on sexuality boldly and clearly to align with God's moral order. In a culture increasingly at odds with biblical morality, Christians are called to boldly proclaim the truth of Scripture, especially regarding sensitive issues like sexuality. The consistent message of the Bible regarding marriage and sexual conduct cannot be altered or compromised, even amid societal pressures. As pastors and church leaders, it is vital to educate congregations on God's design for sexuality, ensuring that members understand the implications of deviating from Scripture. By doing so, Christians can remain steadfast in their convictions while extending grace and truth to those influenced by a secular worldview.

Welcome to the 2007 Shepherds
Conference, General Session number 8, Keynote Panel, Questions and
Answers. I want to invite our speakers
to come up at this time, Mark and Al and Lig and Steve, and
maybe collectively we could thank them for their ministry to us
this week. We want to leave a little of
the reward for eternity if we can. Thank you so much. What an outpouring
of love, and I know they feel the same way. In fact, I think
it was Al who said yesterday he's never been in a place where
he's seen so many wagging tails. And I think that's a southern
expression for happy puppies, I think. Is that what it is?
So we're grateful that you are...I feel like I'm blocking someone,
but that's all right. This is the best side of me. I'm at the wrong end of life
to be going on television, you understand that? And every week my son-in-law
says, did you bring your makeup? And that is a new experience
for me, so I'm having a hard time dealing with it. We want
to do what we can to... get to know the speakers. This
is really not, I think, a time when we can answer every query
and every question that has arisen in your minds. If we have done
a little to inform you and enrich you with an understanding of
the Word of God and then to provoke all kinds of questions that you
yourself can pursue, then we've really done what we believe the
Lord would have us to do. We can, however, share a few
things that are on our hearts. I would just commend you to the
best books, the best resources for your own study to answer
many of the questions. So many questions have come in
that they stack very highly, and what I would like to do in
coming months is use those questions as basically the direction and
the course for us to follow in Pulpit Magazine to begin to carefully
deal with those kinds of things that are on your heart that you're
asking, some of which we provoked this week, some of which have
been there for a long time. But that helped give us what
essentially is a mandate from from you to speak to these kinds
of issues, and we definitely will do that in the future as
rapidly as we can. Pulpit magazine, online magazine,
we move as fast as we can through that material to provide it for
you. So stay with us. Don't miss too many opportunities
to hit on it so that you get the answers that you're looking
for as soon as we're able to put them up there for you. And
book reviews are really important. Mark said on Nine Marks they
do legitimate book reviews, not book reviews paid for by the
publisher. And you get a lot of help there. And, of course,
Al's blog is very, very helpful. I don't know, Leg, where we can
access your material? LEG Well, www.fpcjackson.org
or at reformation21.org. I hope you got that, reformation.org. It might be as simple as just
remember one. And you can get to the minds
of these guys. And Steve, you don't have a website,
do you? Steve Lawson I do. Yes, sir.
What is it? Christfellowship.cc and newreformation.org. Okay, good. I don't have a website. What can I say? Just some general questions,
and you guys have covered so much of this in what you've said,
but it just hangs out there that our guys are wanting to be strategic,
they're wanting to think strategic. As I have been saying in a number
of conversations this week, issues come and go with warp speed.
Something happens and within a week everything that could
be said about it has been said about it on the web and it's
gone. Some of us lived in an era when
issues came up and we had to write a book to deal with an
issue and it took a year to get a book together and another six
to nine months to get it out. And by then there was still some
interest. If you try to keep up with issues writing books,
you're wasting your time. So they can't wait. This is why
these strategic websites and other places that you can access
are so important to these guys. But just not prognosticating,
but looking in the near future. They're interested in knowing
what you think is coming that's going to be critical for the
life of the church. What do we need to be aware of
that's coming? We know the issues that are immediately
on the horizon, but you guys are a little ahead of us on the
cutting edge. What are the things that threaten the church as we
look forward in the immediate future? I think if there's any one issue
where pastors are likely to face the most immediate kind of problem
in their church, perhaps even legal problems, is over issues
related to marriage and sexuality. And holding to a biblical position
on the sinfulness of homosexuality and preaching that openly and
consistently and practicing church discipline in the congregation
and teaching this to families is a part of the overarching
picture of the glory of God. presented through the expository
preaching ministry can get you into trouble. And we have no
eyes to see exactly what will happen, but we do see the trends.
And I can tell you the trends in the society are particularly
pernicious. on this issue. And the younger
you go in the demographic, the more problematic it becomes.
I think you would probably be shocked to know how many 15 to
24-year-olds in your church just consider this kind of thing to
be off-limits because they are already showing the culture-forming
influences that have been around them that have really led them
to believe that this is no one's business, and certainly not God's
business and not the church's business and not the pastor's
business. Just to take a very specific example, if homosexual
marriage is legalized, as it already is in Massachusetts and
elsewhere, what happens when you won't recognize that? When,
you know, it's one thing, and it may not be the local church,
first of all, it may be your theological seminary or your daycare center,
which I hope you don't have, but you may have, or, you know,
whatever, you know, may be going on in your church where you have
a ministry, your youth ministry. Or it could arise as a specific
issue where you don't recognize what the state says marriage
is. For the first time in the history of Western civilization,
the Christian church basing its authority on Scripture could
find itself holding a definition of marriage that almost no one
else in the society holds. We're going to have to hold to
it because we are assigned a definition of marriage in Scripture. But
we may find ourselves, you know, very much out of step. We were
talking at lunch about Daniel Scott, the Australian pastor. He's been on my program. He was
arrested for just preaching about Islam. And that was defined as
hate speech. Well, how long is it before that
logic takes hold here? It's already embedded in legislation
that has been attempted but did not pass. And if it's about religion,
legally defined, you know, how long before that's about sexual
orientation? So when you say, what do we fear? I don't fear
so much persecution from the world, as Mark said so eloquently
this morning, we should expect that. I fear we will have cave-ins
in the church. And I'll tell you this, if you're
not preaching these things consistently, thoroughly, boldly and clearly
now, don't be surprised when you find yourself out on the
end of the diving board when your congregation wonders what
you're talking about when you find a time of crunch and crisis. And along that line, in the state
of California this year, they tried to get legislation to make
it a crime to spank your child. It didn't materialize, but that's
the strategy. It will. There's a series of
steps that they inevitably take, and they just keep coming back
and coming back and coming back, and they know that. So it's very
reasonable to assume in a few years in California it can become
a crime to spank your child. That too is a biblical mandate.
That really isn't a biblical option for us. We must spank
children, obviously, with sensibilities. But that's another very clear
indication of how the society is croaching on Christianity.
The emerging church is happy to acquiesce to all of this.
They're happy to be confused about homosexuality, to be confused
about marriage, to be confused about sexual behavior, to be
confused about anything. It accommodates their ability
to reach into that generation that you're talking about and
attract that generation without that generation having to make
any changes in their life or their world view. It's really
the first time...of course I have this on my mind from the book
The Truth War...it's the first time in my experience that the church
is happy to be worldly. I just don't think...I just don't
think that's the true church, but it's an attractive environment
for a lot of sociological reasons. to people and that's going to
create more confusion because they're going to define themselves
as the church. They probably will define themselves as evangelicals
and then we're going to be there saying, no, no, we're the real
evangelicals and we're going to be painted not only by the
world but by the church as the bad guys who are holding the
hard line on this and we're going to get shot by our, you know,
friendly fire as well as by the enemy. So this is not a time
for weak men. This is not a time for weak ministries
and as Al said, you better start preaching this now or if it comes
up and you have to confront it, people are going to wonder why
you brought it up in the heat of that battle with nothing prior. So now is the time to take your
stand and it's going to come...it's going to come quickly. John,
can I add an amen to that and say, especially in light of the
text that you preached last night, that not just in the crazy left-wing
emerging movement, but within more historically sound evangelical
churches, you're hearing pastors say, in light of precisely this
issue, which I do believe is the major cultural wedge issue
right now impacting the church and will be for the foreseeable
future, You see people using the text, preach Christ and Him
crucified, as if Paul is calling you to theological reductionism,
where you never, ever speak to any ethical issues. And I'd just
like to remind our friends what book that occurs in. First Corinthians,
okay, where the Apostle Paul was happy to speak to ethical
issues in the life of the Corinthian congregation. So Christ in him
crucified does not mean that he's not going to address the
issue of marriage and sexuality, he does so explicitly. And the
appeal to all things to all men is also heard in our circles
to argue that we do not need to...we got into discussion on
this through the Together for the Gospel statement and blog.
And people are saying, we don't want to put these teachings out
front because they are culturally offensive. And so there's this
idea that the way we reach the culture is we keep these… WEBBER
And we got into this discussion with other conservative evangelical
leaders. So it wasn't like liberals who
were assaultings about this. It was guys that we would agree
with theologically and everything. WEBBER That's right. And so the
idea is that you keep those behind your back. You don't lead with
them out front. You don't deny them, but you just don't address
them. And you connect with all things to all men and Christ
in him crucified and you keep all of those things behind the
back. The problem is that's a Hezekiah strategy. That's, phew, thank
heavens the Babylonians aren't coming in my day. Because what
you save them by, you save them too. And if you have taken a
strategy of filling the church by ignoring those issues, then
it will come back to bite you. It may not be your pastor, but
it will be the next one. It's a bait and switch thing.
It's bait and switch. I can tell you the most frustrating
aspect of that is when someone comes up to me and says, what
is your defense of a biblical position on homosexuality? And
I lay it out. And then they say, there you
go again, bringing up the subject. That happens over and over and
over again. That's no exaggeration. That's
what happens. You know, people say, well here's an issue, what
should we think about it? Okay, well just don't bring it up. There
you go again. None of us is leading with the
gospel being God has a wonderful plan for your sex life. But the gospel does get to your
sex life. You know, the biggest issue is
the cross. what God did in accomplishing
our salvation from sin. But it has consequences. The
gospel matters to our financial life, our family life, who we
are as husbands, as citizens, and no, none of us would lead
with the issue. We do not believe in a gospel
that begins with sex, or marriage for that matter, but it amazingly
in the New Testament gets there pretty quickly. John, just four
resources to mention to pastors that they can look to, albertmohler.com. Raise your hand if you've been
there before. Raise your hand if you've never been there. Don't
be embarrassed. Come on, stand up for your ignorance. Yes, okay. That's
fine. All right, seriously guys, you
who haven't been there, Al has written on most everything. Well, and he's done it having
written or having read everything. So it's save yourself the time,
don't read modern books, just read Al. So that's one, albertmohler.com. Two, kirosjournal.org, k-a-i-r-o-s-journal.org. They mean it for pastors. I think
you may have to get a password to get on it, but if you just
email them telling them that you're a pastor, they'll send
you a password. There are some dear Christians behind that putting
a lot of resources into making sure that there are contemporary
issues being addressed with some historical and biblical reflection.
That's kairosjournal.org. Third resource, Ken Sandy's Peacemaker
Ministries. Ken has done a great job in helping
churches prepare in some ways for legal persecution. There's
a lot of wisdom. Ken's a PCA elder and a lawyer.
Peacemaker Ministries, many of you will know of it. Spell his
last name so people know. S-A-N-D-E. S-A-N-D-E. And fourth, have a church covenant.
Back in the 16th and 17th centuries, churches that were not established,
what you call gathered congregations, found that a statement that tried
to summarize what they thought the Bible taught in matters of
behavior was very helpful on a number of levels. One, you're
getting upfront agreement from people about what they're agreeing
to. So it's a pedagogical tool. It
helps them to understand what they're agreeing to and for you
to state it publicly. But then two, in our situation, should
anyone come along and say, hey, why are you doing this? You can
say, actually, we've been saying this since 1878 unmolested. And it helps to make them aware
that you haven't changed what you're doing. And I'm told by
lawyers it's very helpful if you can show consistent practice,
and a church covenant instructs up front. We actually have our
members sign it when they join. All our lawyers say it's of absolutely
no legal worth, but I still like the fact they signed it. And
one final thought on that issue. For instance, the Southern Baptist
Convention revised its confession of faith in 2000. that was the
first time with that revision that our denomination mentioned
marriage and homosexuality in our Confession of Faith. And
immediately we got calls from the secular media, you know,
why did you just change your position on these things? WEBB.
SBC, NBC, CBS, PCA. WEBB. Yes, exactly. Well, no. ASPCA. The fact is that the Christian
church didn't have to put this in confessional documents until
lately. In other words, there's a general
principle. I mean, the Christian church
had not codified the Nicene Creed until the heresy of Arius presented
the necessity of formally stating what the church believed about
the natures of Christ. By the same token, you know,
the church has held to the sinfulness of homosexuality since the apostles,
since Jesus, and since the inheritance of that sexual morality from
the Old Testament. But we are having to mention
some things more explicitly now than in times past just to make
clear. But it's not like we're coming up with a new position.
I love the way you put this when you say Christian fathers 50 years
ago used to say, now, son, marry a Christian girl. Now they start
off with, son, it's very important that you marry a woman. That's
right. They're actually having to start out with, son, this
is a girl. These guys know each other too
well. Along that line of being sensitive
to what's going on around us in terms of potential litigation,
Grace Community Church makes sure that our entire discipline
approach is spelled out and outlined clearly in the church. The legal
document, the Constitution of the church, it's there, it's
in all of the details as to the procedure. And we're told that
legally that's a very important component for us to have so that
we don't appear to be doing something arbitrary. And particularly for
us as an independent church because we can't lean on a denominational
or historic confession as such. We've been around long enough
now and it's been there long enough that anything you can do like
that to To put that in a position to be mandatory in the life of
your church and to make sure that when people join your church,
they are exposed to that, we actually have the people who
join our church every month line up across the front of this church.
I take them through a commitment which they verbally affirm out
loud before the entire congregation of the church in response the
congregation affirms their care and love and embracing of those
new people. So it is a public affirmation
of their submission to the things that are precious to this church.
Anything that you do like that, and I know that's not a popular
thing to do today because we've got all the church hoppers going
on all over the place. That's one of the other questions
and that would be a good transition to that. What is your advice
concerning responding to Christians who church hop? How can we instill
a sense of loyalty and commitment to one local congregation? Steve,
you haven't said anything. We need to get something out
of you. I know the wheels are cranking there. I think it begins with us as
pastors doing a better job of preaching the Word of God and
giving people reason to stay under our ministries. I think
a lot of people are migrating and moving because for some they
are not receiving what they're looking for. And I've had a number
of men come up to me this week and discuss this very thing,
longing, even men in leadership, not the pastor but come up to
me this week, longing for their pastor to be this kind of a man
and seeing people drifting. You know, in the front door and
then out the back door. And I think it begins with the
pulpit. I think everything begins with the pulpit. And when you
anchor the pulpit, you anchor a congregation for the most part.
So I think it begins there and then I think there is a follow-up
and throughout the week of enfolding them into the life of the church. And it's unhealthy just to come
to church, hear a sermon, and that's all the connection that
there is. And so whether that's small group
discipleship or Sunday school or whatever the enfolding process
is, I think everyone needs to be in a big group and a small
group and you pretty much contain them within the life of the church.
And so, excellence in the pulpit on Sunday morning is the key
for the big group and then everyone needs to be plugged into a place
where they're known and they make themselves known. And if
both of those heads and tails of the same coin are in place,
then I think you've done a good job of closing the back door
of the church. MACARTHUR And I agree wholeheartedly
with that. I would throw in one other component after many, many
years of watching it here at Grace Church. The level of desperation
in a family is tremendously intensified when Christians have children.
And there is a...there is a grave concern on the part of parents
as to what this culture is doing to their children. And you've
got to wake up in your church and provide genuinely spiritual,
life-transforming ministry for kids. Starting at the earliest
age, people are aware. That's why we wrote our curriculum,
Generations of Grace. We couldn't find anything that
had any real spiritual wallop. that we could pour into the lives
of kids, real spiritual content. And it took us years and years
to write that curriculum to provide serious biblical teaching from
the very beginning with children so that the Spirit of God really
was working in transforming ways in their lives. You cannot invest
too much in that, nor can you invest too much in the junior
high ministry. That is another critical area,
to put the best, most capable, faithful, careful handlers of
the Word of God who have the skill to capture the interest
of kids in the junior high and high school cause those two areas
in particular when they're just moving out from under their parents
and the exposure level is massive in their school environment and
in their peer pressure, They've got to have sanctifying influences
from the Word of God pouring into their lives. You've got
to get serious about junior high ministry, serious about high
school ministry. And I'm talking about face-to-face,
one-on-one, pouring yourself into the lives of young people
at a crucial point. And I'll promise you this, if
parents see their kids walking with Christ, they'll never leave
that church. That to me is a critical, critical ministry. Two things to add. I think that
we want to raise the importance of membership in our own congregations,
and we want to recognize the importance of membership in other
congregations. So as far as raising it in your own, find a way to
involve your congregation in taking out all the members of
your church who don't regularly attend but could. I don't mean
people overseas or admissions or in college or in the military,
but I mean the people who are just sitting, you know, two miles
over to the west, staying at home that morning, and they've
been doing that for months or years. get your congregation involved,
somehow take those people out of membership so you recover
a meaningfulness to your membership. And second, be aware of the distinction
between your church and the kingdom of God. I don't mean this in
the technical George Alden Ladd sense, I mean this in the sense
of just, you know, you're not the whole show. Praise God. you
know, not any of us are. So sometimes I think in our assumption
of the goodness of our own ministry, we way too quickly take in people
from other local churches and the membership in our churches.
And I think one of the ways you show in a striking way to other
people The importance of church membership is by not taking that
casually. Now, it's not that we never take in members from
other local churches. There's circumstances in which we do.
But a story I've shared before that I think is useful in illustrating
this, a guy comes up to me a few years ago at the end of one of
the services, was flattering me about my preaching. He doesn't
know that's absolutely revolting me inside. You know, he thinks
he's really getting in good with me. Really, I'm going, ugh. So
after about a minute of this, I got people back up and said,
let's go sit and talk in the office. We go sit and talk in the office.
He starts bad-mouthing another local church and their pastor.
Well, I happen to know that pastor and think pretty highly of him.
And so he's saying he wants to join our church. And I finally
just interrupted him after about a minute or two minutes, maybe,
when he was bad-mouthing this other guy. And I said, look,
it's clear to me you need a better pastor than Rob is. And I know
Rob. I'm not as good a pastor as Rob
is. So I think you need to go back to Rob's church. Now, if
you have a theological reason at some point why you need to
come to us, we can talk about that. But first, you need to
go back there and get things sorted out. So you be very careful
before taking in members from another local evangelical Bible
preaching church. Did you want to add something
to that? Yeah, just one thing. I think many of the problems
we face can be traced to weak men, in many cases weak pastors,
preachers, but also weak fathers. And I'll tell you one of the
things that has most alarmed me of late is where I have parents
tell me, well, we're involved in this church, but our teenage
children are involved somewhere else. You know, where is the
father as the head of the household, as the spiritual leader and the
spiritual teacher of his own children? And, you know, I wholeheartedly
agree with Dr. MacArthur. If you've got the
children and the parents together in one place, and the father
is deeply involved in the church, everything else is basically
going to work out. But if he's not, it's not going to happen.
If it's an effeminized church, if it's a church which is not
a place where men are called out as men, then I think you're
going to have church hopping, especially among men. And especially
in the chaos that's left when men do not lead their families.
But I've been shocked by how many people have said, you know,
I'm here but my kids are over here, my college-age son goes
to this church. There's just no sense of responsibility to
the congregation as men heading our families. You know, in California,
you guys are very much aware of this, we have no Christian
heritage at all here, nothing. And, of course, we're so culturally
diverse now that everything is pouring in here, which is absolutely
marvelous. The mission field has come to
us. And I praise God that our church looks like L.A. because
it should. It's the Lord's church, not ours. heritage at all. And there is
a certain freewheeling mix in this culture and people don't
know what they're supposed to belong to and what they're not
supposed to belong to. If we don't educate them that this
is something that's very different than going to a restaurant or
a movie theater or associating down at the poker palace or the
bingo hall or whatever else you do. meeting with your ethnic
group in some social event, this is a completely different thing.
If we don't train people to understand that, they're not going to understand
it. We're not always helped. For example, the biggest church
growth movement in Southern California in the last 25 years has been
Calvary Chapel. There are probably 500 Calvary Chapels. They have
no church membership, no doctrinal statement and no eldership. This has been laid out there
as a completely distinct model of the church. You just go and
then, you know, it's like reading the movie page or, you know,
looking at the restaurant list. You pick this one and that one
and who's playing here and what's going on over there. So we come
into that situation, we have a membership pattern, a membership
process, an interview in the prayer room on a personal level,
a fully written out testimony in documentation, an appointment
with a deacon or an elder in the church to go over that personally,
and then a meeting with the elders. And we're talking about 75 to
80 people a month. that come into the church, and then standing
here making a public affirmation before the entire church. And
then with the proviso and the understanding that we follow
Matthew 18, that if someone is approached over a sinful issue
and doesn't repent, then two or three go, and if two or three
can't draw that person to repentance, then we tell the church. This
coming Sunday morning I have a list on my desk now of at least
three people that I will have to tell the church have resisted
any call to true repentance and have brought dishonor upon Christ
and shame. And the church needs to go pursue them, and I'll give
their name and the category of their sin. We don't go beyond that.
Everybody knows that at Grace Church. Everybody has always known that
here. If somebody just fades and disappears, we actually have
our congregation, we encourage our congregation to fill out
cards every week they're here. That may seem very intrusive.
But we have a count to give to God for the shepherding that
we do, and we want people to understand that we care about
that accounting. How can I apply the significance
of the heart of the Apostle Paul, who is sort of my spiritual hero,
who never saw a weak Christian without feeling the pain, right? Second Corinthians 11, he never
saw a weak Christian without feeling the pain. AUDIENCE MEMBER
So John, how does the card thing work practically? Seriously,
how do you do that? JOHN I just stick cards in the pews and tell them to sign
them and drop them in the offering plate. And everybody does that. We don't
know. But I mean, basically... JOHN HATHAWAY Essentially they
do it enough that we know the flow. There's sort of a wave.
And we've done it for years and years and years and years and
years because I didn't know any other way to shepherd the sheep
than that. We don't go and bang on your door. You know, this
isn't like some heavy-handed kind of ministry. We just want
to know if we're shepherding you faithfully and a phone call
if somebody's not here for three or four weeks, can we help you?
Is everything okay? And if the men are all taking
copies of that card right now, is that okay for Sunday or is
that a bad thing? JOHN, Yeah, take all the cards...well I don't
know, all of them, just grab one if you want. Now what happens
if somebody doesn't show up in a while? We do everything we
can to pursue that person and we actually try to find that
person. We have a whole process we go through, we have a whole
office and folks that track and we contact, we call them, we
write them. And eventually it comes all the way down to...actually
I've got a list of these people who have been in that process,
this person moved to Texas, this person went to Washington, this
person moved to Arizona, these people have moved to the other
side of Los Angeles. We want to know where they went and what
church they're attending. And we want them to tell us that
and we try to track them to that point because we feel that we
are...we I don't want to go through the whole New Testament pattern.
I think they kept numbers clearly in the New Testament. They were
counting heads. They knew how many people and they were adding
them up and there was accountability and they were sending letters
from church to church and city to city to follow the people that
were moving around so the church would know. So we try our very
best and, you know, as I look at the people, people love that.
people want that, they are shepherded, they belong, they're cared for.
It's just like we say about our children, give them fences. They
feel secure. They feel cared for. They feel
loved in that environment. And you've got to care for them
with love and with tenderness and with compassion. But I think
that's really important. We still have people on the growing
edge who are coming here and checking this and checking that.
Eventually, as Steve said, though, we're so much what we are. That we are so what we are that
we aren't anything but what we are, right? And if this is what
you want, then this is what we are. And we aren't a lot of things.
So we always say, when people come here and leave, we know
why they left. We always know why they left. They didn't want
consistent teaching of Scripture all the time. That's why they
left. Right? What else would they leave? They can say we didn't like the
music, but that's not it. They can say, you know, the parking
was a problem, but that's not it cause we have people who drive
a hundred miles on a Sunday to be here. So when the church is
what the church needs to be and the pulpit is what it needs to
be and it flows down through the life of the church and we are
who we are and it's all laid out, when you want this and you
know it's going to embrace you and you're going to embrace it,
this is where you want to be. But if you don't want elders caring
for you, you don't want people shepherding you, you don't want
the incessant proclamation of the Word of God, this isn't the
place you're going to land. Now obviously there's some exceptions
to those kinds of things and there's some debates going on
in families about, you know, one might want one thing and
one another. But I do think it is critical for us to do all
we can to make sure that our church is biblically defined
and careful as to how we care for the people God gives us from
the pulpit all the way down to the shepherding process. And
that will assure us that the people that should be here, the
people that God is sending to us, are in a place where they're
going to stay. Okay. John on resources, by the way,
ninemarks.org with great material on church membership, The Deliberate
Church. We'll address this to a certain extent. And Josh Harris'
book, Stop Dating the Church. It's a great little book to give
out to sort of young Christians or new church members, people
who are visiting your church but have been visiting for months,
Stop Dating the Church. Great little hint from the pastor.
Okay, Steve, three favorite books. Not including any of mine. I'm
just saying that just to get you off the hook. LAWSON Well,
your book...I will say the gospel according to Jesus was a defining
book for me. But having said that, I would
say my favorite books that have most shaped me are Thomas Watson's
A Body of Divinity. just the reading of the table
of contents where all the attributes of God are laid out and that's
almost half of the book. It's just a God-centered book. That had an enormous effect on
me, preaching through the Westminster Confession. Forgotten Spurgeon
by Ian Murray showed me what it looked like for a man who
held to the sovereignty of God in salvation. to be a powerful
preacher of the Word of God. And an evangelist. And an evangelist
and how that came together. And then Arnold Dallimore's two-volume
on George Whitefield just has challenged and thrilled and romanced
my own heart. You know, if I could do anything,
I'd be on a horse like Whitefield riding and preaching the Word
of God. And I think that's in the heart of every God-called
preacher in one way or another. And that book on George Whitefield,
I think, pulls the best out of us in that regard. AUSTIN WESTMORELAND
Yeah, you're talking about heroes. You're talking about models.
We just desperately need those kind of guys who just make us
look small, make us look insignificant. There's a proper motivation and
a proper inspiration that pulls us up higher to want to reach
out for more, to want to be more relentless in what we do and
to push ourselves more and those examples from church history,
it makes you want to be in that flow of history. Absolutely.
This may be the hardest question you've ever been asked in your
life, Al, three books. It really is. It's one of his favorite speed
books he read yesterday. A large, large choice. It's difficult
at different levels, honestly, because there are some books...
And that's the way I'm going to have to answer it because
I'm not going to say these are the three books I'd most recommend
you go right out and buy. They're not going to be what
I say were the three books that at the end of my life may prove
to have been the most significant. But I can tell you that my biography
is kind of defined by three books as I know them. The first was
when I was a teenager. very anguished over certain questions
that I didn't know anyone was dignifying or answering. And
then the pastor put in my hands, He is there and He is not silent,
by Francis Schaeffer. And it's not the greatest work
in theology ever done. It's an enormously important
apologetic work, especially timed in the 1970s for young people
asking, some very basic questions. And from Francis Schaeffer, I
got the absolute necessity of the fact that the only God that
would matter is one who is self-existent and self-revealing. and it just
so happens that that is the God of the Bible. And it's a magnificent
resource given those questions at that time. When I was in college,
I think the book that affected me the most was Knowing God by
J.I. Packer because I read that book and realized I am a Christian,
but I'm not the kind of Christian that knows God the way I ought
to. And it wasn't so much the chastening
of the book as it was the joy of the book that drew me into
it. This self-existent, self-revealing God who atoned for our sins through
Jesus the Christ is the God who wants to be known, and out of
an act of His own self-giving, even as His grace is His gift
and His revelation is His grace, so also is the gift of knowing
Him. And then I would say theologically the book that has probably meant
more to me than any other, the book that becomes kind of the
touchstone to me for theology is the Institutes of John Calvin,
which a lot of people talk about but few people have actually
read, or at least far fewer than talk about it. The first book
is entirely, almost entirely about the glory of God, the knowledge
of God. And it's a theology that begins
with the first principle. being the glory of the God who
can be known and the two-part knowledge that is our responsibility,
the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. And, you know,
I can remember reading that first book of Calvin thinking, you
know, most human problems come from trying to know the self
without first knowing God, the Creator. And so, you know, before
you even get to the part you think of as Calvinism, you have
Calvin's glorious, systematic, relentlessly biblical attempt
to understand the glory of God in His self-revelation. It's
a life-changing experience. So, at different points in my
life there would be those three books. If I mentioned, you know,
some I would just say every preacher ought to read, I'd write with
you on all the ones you mentioned, and Dallimore on Whitefield. And I just want to end by saying
I specifically did not mention a biography, though I know my
life has been probably impacted as much by reading the biographies
of godly men as any other form of literature. So let me commend
the entire genre to you. Good stuff in the bookstore.
I'm curious, and I'm sure they probably are, Al, how many books
do you read a week? ALBERT MOHLER It depends on the
week, but I mean, I try to read between seven and ten a week.
Okay, it's apparent. It's apparent, and we're grateful
that you do and that you distill it down and put it on the web
so we can all be helped by it. Ligon, how about you? Ligon Duncan,
Jr.: : Yeah, I love the books that these brothers have mentioned,
and especially Knowing God and the Institutes are very significant
and formative in my own life. If I can squeeze in four for
the price of three, because two of them came together in their
small books. In seminary, I was introduced to John Murray's Redemption
Accomplished and Applied alongside of B.B. Warfield's The Plan of
Salvation, both of which are relatively small little books.
Murray actually taught that in a Sunday school class in Philadelphia. Most seminarians have to read
it with a dictionary open next to it. But it helped me get...those
two books helped me get the doctrines of grace, theologically and experientially,
in a way that I had not gotten them before. Even though I had
grown up on the shorter catechism and faithful biblical preaching,
they just were penetrating in terms of conveying the doctrines
of grace with rigorous biblical reason and application. So those two books, very significant.
J.I. Packer's A Quest for Godliness,
which is simply a collection of essays that Packer has written
on Puritanism in various places that distills his encyclopedic
knowledge of Puritanism, not only in a wonderful volume that
gives you the fruit of his academic research, but his pastoral outlook
on life. And that book has been very ministry-shaping
for me. And then David Well's No Place
for Truth. with regard to looking at where we are situated in this
present, in North America, in Western Europe, in the English-speaking
world, trying to minister. Three...those would be my four
that are three. JOHN MACARTHUR, JR.: : Really
helpful. And I just want you to know, I found a quote from
John Murray in which he said, Romans 11 does suggest that there
is a future for ethnic Israel. That's right. That is Murray's
position. That's one for us. I'm glad to see that nodding
head. Yes, all right. Yes, Mark. Well, so, John, just
on this future of Israel thing. Stick with the questions, Mark. You're going to like this one.
You're going to like this one. Richard Sibbes, a good Anglican Puritan,
believed very much there was a future for ethnic Israel. Richard
Sibbes. You got another one. You studied
Richard Sibbes. I did. I did. Do you know MLJ, Martin
Lloyd Jones, at the end of his life said the same thing? I didn't
know that. Yes, he did. Yes, he did. I'm just trying to talk about
non-dispensationalist. Well, I don't think any of my
books are dispensational. My favorite one would definitely
be Spurgeon's Autobiography. I mean, that's just, if you can
get the old full thing, it's even better than the, Banner's
two-volume is great, but the old full, I'm interested in everything.
Give me his childhood stories, I'll take everything. He wrote
in such an amazing way, and God acted in his life so singularly,
I'm just encouraged reading it. I don't feel bad that my life
hasn't been like that, I'm just glad somebody's was. That's just
great. Praise God he loved a sinner
like this. It's just wonderful. Very encouraged by it. At the end of his life. No, no. I'm not going there. At the end
of his life, all those years of blessing and hearing and listening
and his heart was absolutely broken by resentment, persecution,
hostility, even from his own brother. He didn't escape what you were
talking about this morning. The other three books I've mentioned,
unlike Al, I'm not going to do biographically so much, because
we were all brought up at the same time, and all the same books
influenced us. I mean, everybody was reading
Knowing God in 73, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, so it's just... I mean,
you all were too, if you were around then, that's what... I
think everybody was reading that. So I'll just tell you... It's
too good of me to mention it. No, I'm just saying I'm going to
mention something else. So three books that I would recommend
you to buy. That's good. John Wynnum's Christ and the
Bible. I never hear people talking about that. I think it's one
of the best arguments you can give on why, as Christians, we
follow the Bible. I very much believe in the inerrancy of the
Bible. I've even done up a kind of annotated bibliography on
the Nine Marks website about the history of that discussion,
which, you know, you can go and find references to a couple hundred
books. But Wynnum's is a very different way to go about it.
And basically, his whole argument is, look, Jesus treated scripture
as truth. So I'm a follower of Jesus. I
will, too. So John Wyndham, Christ in the Bible. The other two would
be more on the atonement. Leon Morris, the atonement. A
brother who recently went home to be with the Lord. He was a
wonderful scholar and in the 50s he did some very important
protection work of the gospel in the academy over at C.H. Dodd
and others. And he distilled this toward
the end of his life, at the end of his sort of conscious working
life, in a book, InterVarsity Press, I think, still has it
in print, called The Atonement. And it's a wonderful, very simple,
I mean, a Sunday school could go over this. Look at all the
material in the Old Testament on the Atonement and how it all
fits together. It's a great book. And the fourth
one, the last one I would say, would be the Synod of Dort, the
canons of the Synod of Dort. It is the clearest presentation
of the Gospel I have ever read. If you want to know why you are
not going to be in hell when you die, read the canons of the
Synod of Dort, and praise God for His salvation. One of the things we need to
be able to say is, I want to recommend a book to you by an
author, but I'm not recommending the author to you in totality.
John Lennon's an annihilationist, or at least, you know, when it
comes to hell. But that is a certain strain, a very unfortunate strain
of Anglican theology in the twentieth century. But on Christ and the
Bible, he's very much right. By the same token, John Stott's
book, The Cross of Christ, is another one I know we would both
recommend. Although I'm bothered by how he denies immutability
in it. I'm sorry, not he does not, impassibility. I think that's a bad assumption.
But it's a defense of substitution in a day in which substitutionary
atonement is very much on the line, especially from the emergent
kind of people that we were mentioning earlier. As you know, with Steve
Chalk and others in Great Britain, there's an effort to actually
suggest that any substitutionary notion of the atonement is a
form of divine child abuse. Well, honestly, the reason I
didn't mention several Packer books that I regularly use in
private with people is because I'm concerned with some of the
things Jim is saying these days. It's hard to anchor those Anglicans.
Right. Well, by definition. Well, Sibbes
believed in a future for an ethnic Israel. Seriously. He did. That's very encouraging to me.
Just say it. But I'd like to get some of the
living ones over on our side at the same time. This is a completely
different question. You have just exposed us to your
eager, hungry minds and to the devotion you give to reading
because everything you're talking about is to one degree or another
a tome of sorts. On the other end of the spectrum,
the questions come up a couple of times, what do you do to relax? to unwind. What kind of recreation
or is that a sin? What do you do in the break of
your life? What do you do in the days that
you're free? What do you do in a vacation?
What appeals to you to do? What interests you? I talk to
Ligonel. I talk to Ligonel. On your day
off you talk to Ligonel? Yeah, I just call him up. You
just call him up. It is a fair question because
these guys, you know, there's a lot of guilt about what we
should do, your wife, you've got the wife, the kids, I know
we all are drawn to the wives that God has given us, but what
do you do? Who wants to jump in? JOHN, Well, I can tell you
what I don't do. This is an accountability factor
here. I don't play golf. I don't have
anything to do with anything that's round and you hit or catch. And in all seriousness, I always
worried about that until I found out I couldn't see the ball when
I was a kid. That's why I wasn't any good at it. But part of it
is just everyone has different interests. And I, by the way,
when you ask what I do to relax and don't laugh, but I read.
Because that's one of those relaxing things I do. And I find reading
rarely work, actually. I sometimes have to read for
the work, obviously, in preparation, preaching, and speaking, and
all the rest, but I love to read. So, I don't count that as time
that's not for relaxation. But, you know, we have a place
at the lake, a boat, and you add that to a 14-year-old son,
and you've got a lot of fun. And, you know, I mean, we just...I
have a beagle. And, you know, he just...he needs
to walk and he needs someone to walk with him. That's a good
thing to do. And that's relaxing. I have great conversations with
him because he agrees with everything I say. R.C. Sproul, Jr.: : Al,
now tell them, you write your blog every day. What time of
the day do you write that blog? For some stupid reason, it posts
it on there. I work very late at night, because
that's when I get the time when my day is taken up. As soon as
the radio's over, I go home, and that's family time. And then
only after family time with my kids and with Mary, I work. I don't need a whole lot of sleep,
honestly. I'm not a good sleeper. And I just work very, very late,
often well into the hours of the morning, because no one calls
me then, including the morning people. Because I discovered
that if people find out you're a morning person and they're
morning people, they'll assume you want to be called then. But no one calls
me late at night, and that's just kind of when I work best.
So you could be writing your blog at 3 in the morning? Very
easily. And you would go to sleep maybe at 4? Something like that
sometimes. SPROUL JR.: : Yeah, and then
you would get up at… AUSTIN BROWN, JR.: : Well, it depends on what the day's
like, but I can get by on five hours sleep, four hours sleep,
you know, a lot of times. But I'm not commending that.
That's not…I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV. You know,
I mean, for a lot of people that will be disastrous, but I just…that's
just what I do. Help me, brothers, say something.
What about you, Ligon? I know you're a musician. Ligon
is an outstanding musician from a family of musicians and could
carry the day as a soloist with a beautiful voice. And sometime
we've got to get that out of you, you know. You and I ought
to do a duet sometime. Right now, we can do it right
now. They're looking at you and Steve
and me and they're saying, Leg, you work out as much as Steve
and John do. No, they're not looking at me
and saying that. No, I like athletic stuff but
I don't have time for it right now. child and a 10-year-old
child and so my time off is either relaxing reading or playing with
my kids right now. I'm trying to figure out how
to work more regular just exercise into the routine right now because
I need it. badly. But I would love to go watch
college football games on Saturday afternoons and do all sorts of
other things like that. I just don't have the time for
it. So with kids right now and with a schedule of church life,
I feel my obligation outside of my devotion to the Lord's
work in the church is to my family. When the kids are older, I think
I'll have a little more time to do the kind of recreational
things that I like because I like to watch a college basketball
game or a college football game or to go out myself and shoot
baskets or play tennis or do something like that, but I don't
have time for it right now. So I don't want the kids to grow
up thinking, gee, I never saw dad. And so I take them to school
every morning and try and spend the time, just like Al, when
I come home from work, that time all the way up until the time
they go to bed is their time for me to focus on them, and
I don't think they feel like we don't ever see our dad. I
think they feel like, hey, we're a normal family, and dad takes us to school,
and they're a blast. Seven-year-old and 10-year-old,
that's a sweet age. I know teenage is coming, so
I'm enjoying it now. And we have a yellow lab. So, Al, your children are teenagers. ALAN MENKENS 17 and just about
turned 15. And it's great, by the way. You're
going to love it. It is. And Mark, what do you
do recreationally? I don't know that I even know
the answer to that question. I don't know if I do. I guess I watch
documentaries on World War II and read architecture books and
take walks with my wife. Well, I don't want to say what
is the definition of a nerd, but... True, I do. Okay, John, I'll
make it worse. I really like Antiques Roadshow. Our whole family will watch it
together. Wow. You play video games with Nathan. Actually, I was waiting to see
if this was coming. You know, you play with Nathan
in video games. Yeah, we did. He's kind of grown
out of that, so I'm left out there by myself. Although I've got pictures of
Ian Murray playing it with us. And Al Mohler. And I think Lick
Duncan. You could finance Nathan's college
education that way. Frankly, I don't know that any
of this is helpful. I'm not sure it translates into what they
would like to hear about, you know, taking a little exercise
now and then. So we'll come to see. Well, I
think at a deeper level, you know, frankly we're all just so different.
Recreation and relaxation takes a very different form. That's
right. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Well, and I found it very useful. I
do the elliptical machine down in our basement every morning
and watch a documentary for 30 minutes while I'm doing it. That's good.
Combines... Now Steve, I know, is a golfer. Yeah. Yeah, our
family is a non-nerd family. I don't even know what PBS is. In DC it's all you can get. No, we love athletics in our
family, three boys, Andrew, James and John, and we're a big golfing
family. I have twin boys that play golf
for the Master's College. And just growing up, all of our
vacations rotated around golf trips and my day off or a Saturday
afternoon is playing golf with my boys, so if I had one day
to live, I'd play golf with my boys, I'd have my foursome, I'd
preach a sermon, kiss my wife and die, you know, if I had my...
That's good. I don't know what order, but... Well, whatever the initial order,
the die part is at the end. Steve and I have enjoyed a little
recreation on the golf course and it's a great walk in the
park. It's a great way to smell the
grass and enjoy the blue sky and talk about the things of
the Lord and enjoy His creation and not do any bodily harm to
yourself. Like contact sports, we all grew up...we both grew
up playing football in college and have the wounds to prove
it. But I find when I can do that,
from my standpoint, that's a real refreshing experience for me
just to get away. It's contemplative, it's meditative,
it's time to think and process things and to reel back from...I
said to somebody today, my life is like a fast break that never
ends. going down the court constantly, you know, turning...handing the
ball off to somebody and you never get to the hoop. So the
total unwind for me, the total unravel, the total backing up
and isolating myself from the normal influx of events and people
and calls and responsibilities is enjoyable and my boys, both
sons and sons-in-law are the same. They enjoy athletics. We all grew up with athletics.
My dad was an athlete, so that's kind of where I find my recreation.
I do...I do enjoy days with Patricia now that the kids are gone. And
a lot of times the grandchildren are over and that's sometimes
more complicated than the kids. There are only four of them,
they're fourteen grandchildren. But we love that. That's a tremendously
rich part of our life. Grandchildren are an absolute
joy to us that there's no way to count the...to count the the
value of God's grace on our children, their salvation, their spouses,
and now through the ranks of the grandchildren. So they're
a big, huge part of our life. But even just the two of us being
together, we have found at this end of our life, we love each
other a lot and it's a wonderful benediction when you come to
this point in your life and you really want to be together, you
really love to be together. So that's a wonderful benediction
at this point in our life as well. We haven't really talked
about a lot of hard theological questions. One question that
came up a couple of times, and this may be a little bit of a commercial,
was the issue of theodicy comes from the two Greek words theos
and dike, meaning the righteousness of God or the justice of God,
and asked the question, how can we explain evil if God is so
good? Why is the world so bad? That is an issue that comes up
when people are talking about Calvinism, when they're talking
about the Reform doctrine. You ultimately end up with the
fact that God is absolutely sovereign, and so somewhere in that discussion
you come to the problem of evil. Without wrangling through all
of that, last Sunday night I gave a message on that very issue
here at Grace Church, and if you would like, you can get a
hold of that CD. It pretty much covered the philosophical
options of the kinds of theodicies that there are. There are metaphysical
theodicies. There are theodicies of autonomy. That would be free will theodicies.
There are theodicies of the greater good. And then there is what
I think is the true and right theodicy, and that is the theodicy
of the glory of God. To put it in a nutshell, evil
exists. Unless you're a Christian scientist,
you understand that. It's only the Christian science
movement that says evil doesn't exist and neither does death.
And, of course, they're like grape nuts. They're neither grapes
nor nuts. They're neither Christian nor scientific. You can readily dismiss them.
You then have a whole lot of other metaphysical kinds of theodicies,
the yin-yang idea, if there's good, there has to be bad, the
absolute necessity of an opposite. You have theodicies of greater
good in which I think Augustine sort of launched that kind of
thing. Aquinas was into that, that God
allowed evil some way for the sake of making us more able to
worship Him, enhancing our own experience of heavenly bliss
because of what we've been rescued out of. You have theodicies of
autonomy which are the typical Pelagian, semi-Pelagian, Arminian
theodicies that says that the greatest good in the whole world
is freedom. and that God then has to bow
to His desire to make everyone autonomous and therefore divest
him. So that would be openness theology,
process theology in every form of Arminianism, Pelagianism and
all that. But what the Bible teaches about this is that evil
exists. God exists, and that is the God
of the Bible exists, the God who is God exists and no other
God exists, and He is clearly defined for us in Scripture so
that it is true, He is good, He is loving, He is holy, He
is all-knowing, He is all-wise, and evil exists. Therefore, the
third point is, God ordained evil. God is not the cause of
evil, He's not the source of evil, does not proceed from God.
He is clear to make that distinction. But He ordains His existence.
Then the question remains why. And the answer, I think, comes
in the book of Romans in a series of uses of a cluster of Greek
verbs that are basically synonyms that appear
starting in chapter 3 and run all the way through chapter 9.
And in chapter 3 he says that it's in the form of a question
in Paul's argument there that we know by the means of unrighteousness
the righteousness of God. That is to say, God demonstrates
His righteousness by comparison with unrighteousness. And the
word demonstrates is in the NAS there. You see that word a number
of times, by the way. They come to chapter 5, God demonstrates
His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us. They come to chapter 9, God demonstrates His wrath
by patiently enduring vessels of mercy fitted passive verb
for destruction in which God distances Himself from the very
cause of that evil. So you have a demonstration of
righteousness that wouldn't be known unless there was unrighteousness
to manifest. You have a demonstration of love that wouldn't be known
unless there was a cross to deal with sin. You have a demonstration
of wrath that couldn't be known unless there was sin to punish.
And then he wraps it up with God demonstrates His glory, the
glory determined beforehand on vessels of mercy. He demonstrates
His glory. grace in that. So I'm convinced
that the reason God ordains evil without causing it, without being
the source of evil, is in order that He could demonstrate His
full glory, which means His righteousness, His love, His wrath and His grace,
none of which would be made manifest unless there is sin to deal with.
So it is really wrapped up in the eleventh chapter of Romans
in the Great Benediction in which all things are for God, and that
includes even His ordaining of evil. And there's no other way
to go at it. You cannot make God a victim
in any sense. He is sovereign and He is sovereign
in that realm as well. And I think Paul lays that argument
out. If you just take the English Bible and follow the word demonstrate,
I know in the NAS I didn't check it in all the other ones, but
it's a little...it's a little cluster of verbs, sunistimi,
endicnumai, phanerao, and he even gives an illustration of
Pharaoh in Romans 9 in which he says that God ordained that
whole scenario to demonstrate His wrath on Pharaoh, His grace
on Israel. That's the model that He gives
in Romans 9. So when I hear people, and I
use a little illustration, I said, you know, for evangelicals we
feel that when people ask us the question about theodicy,
it's fourth and forty on our ten-yard line. And all we think
we can do is punt Deuteronomy 29...29 as far into the enemy
territory as it will go. You know, the secret things belong
to the Lord. But I don't think we need to punt Deuteronomy 29...29
on the issue of theodicy because I think there is an answer and
I think it is clear, crystal clear answer that this is ordained
by God for the manifestation of elements of His nature to
His own eternal glory that would never be revealed if it weren't
for the sin. Okay, that's the short answer. John, can I add
to that and just say that I often hear people raise the question
of theodicy as if it's a gotcha for Christians. You don't have
an answer. Your best theologians have worked
on this for 2,000 years, don't have a satisfying answer to it.
As if the skeptical critics of Christianity have a satisfying
and compelling alternative answer, they do not. And I think that's
a point actually to play up because what is more problematic is not
the Christian expressing how the sovereign goodness of God
can coexist with evil. What the biggest problem in the
world is somebody who has to justify evil apart from Christian
revelation. And in this world, people may
instinctively and intuitively know that there's such a thing
as evil, but once you deny Christian revelation and Christian theology,
you have no way of being able to uphold the idea of something
being absolutely evil. And when you look a parent in
the eye whose two-year-old child has just died, and you look at
that outside of the Christian revelation, there is no way that
you can say that that was a bad thing. Apart from Christianity,
I can explain why that's a bad thing in this fallen world, but
it's because of my theology. It's Christian theology that
allows me to do that. The pagan cannot do that. The pagan has
no way of demonstrating why the death of the two-year-old child
is any better than a child growing up into adulthood and leading
a profitable, useful life, giving you grandchildren, etc. There
is absolutely no metaphysical ground that he has to make that
distinction. It is utterly arbitrary. That
is a much bigger problem. for the skeptic than it is for
the Christian. The second thing I would say is it's so important
that we address this question to people that are wrestling
with it so they understand that they can't get outside of this
question. They cannot get distance from this question. They are
right smack dab inside it. And so this is not something
that they can sit back coolly and objectively and detachedly
and have a philosophical discussion about as if they're not involved
in it. They are right in the middle of it. Al knows that this
is where...this is Larry King's big thing. It's constant with
Larry, how can you make me believe your God is a good God, He's
a loving God, He's this perfect holy God and all these disasters
happen. This is from 9-11 on. All our
conversations eventually go back, this is the bone in his throat,
but he never does have an answer. He doesn't want our answer, but
he never has any answer. The problem of theodicy is actually
the warp and woof of our theology. I mean, in the sense of the larger
picture, that's what the entire Bible is about, is about the
demonstration of the righteousness and the glory of God in the midst
of a fallen world. You know, we have the fact of
the world we see. And the person we know when we
look in the mirror and we have great difficulty reconciling
that with any existent God, much less the God of the Bible. The
second thing is that we have to challenge people on their
basic assumption. For instance, when most people
ask a theodicy question, this includes Mr. King, when he asks
a theodicy question, he has in his mind an independent understanding
of goodness. And then he looks at God and
says that God does not come up to that standard of goodness.
We can't play that game. We can't even enter in that equation.
Our worldview is exactly the opposite. The only reason we
have any conception of goodness is because the self-existent,
self-revealing God has shown us in a way that's perfectly
consistent with His good character what goodness is. Any other picture
of goodness, criterion of goodness we have is a corrupted picture.
And that's why, you know, you have some people say, well, a
good parent wouldn't spank a child. No, a good parent does spank
a child. But, you know, that's counterintuitive to people who
have a picture of good that just doesn't fit. But the next thing
is, and I love this, this is great, this is great for us today,
because when Lig said you can't get out of it, I just want to
come back and say this is one of our great opportunities as
Christians, but also as Reformed theologians. This is one of our
great opportunities, because you can't get out of it, and
the Arminian can't get out of it with God. He can get out of
it with something less than God, but he can't get out of it with
God. I mean, let's just assume for a minute we don't believe
in...I know, just stretch your imagination. We don't believe in particular
redemption. We don't believe in what Reformed theology calls
limited atonement. Let's be Arminians for a moment,
which I guess would mean we'd be amillennialists as well. No,
that's not true. Just had to do it to my friends.
We'll be Arminians for a moment. Arminians believe that the only
reason anyone goes to hell is because they somehow were never
reached with the gospel or they obstinately refused the claims
of the gospel. It was their will that is the
determining factor. But that doesn't solve the theodicy
issue, not if God is sovereign at the beginning and the end.
And the Arminians don't… the classical Arminians, like Arminius,
he believed that God was absolutely sovereign in the beginning, and
he believed that God was absolutely sovereign in the end. All he
was trying to correct was what he saw was a classical Reformed
deformity of what was in the middle. But you can't get past
the fact that before God created the world, you know, this is
where their distinction between foreknowledge and predestination
just falls apart. If God, before the creation of
the world, knew who... Listen, again, remember we're
being Arminians for a minute. That He knew in His perfect foreknowledge
who would exercise their individual wills in such a way as to respond
savingly to the gospel, and that the others then would not, and
He created that world, then guess what? He's still responsible
for the fact that there are people in hell. because He did that
with foreknowledge. That's why openness theology
becomes the new theodicy. Then you have to step back and
say, no, if we're going to let God off the hook, then we're
going to have to say He doesn't have foreknowledge about the
one thing He can't foreknow, which is the free decisions of
human creatures. So you see, you can't get out
of this with God. The only way out of it with God
is exactly the kind of theodicy that John was talking about here,
a theodicy that says we don't know some of the inscrutable
will of God, that's why it's the inscrutable will of God.
But we do know this, whatever God does is right. And God has
chosen to ordain evil and to ordain the fall. in order that
His victory over sin and death would display His glory in eternity
to a greater degree than we would ever have known it had those
things never happened. That's the only theodicy we've got.
It's a theodicy that points to a cross. And that's the only
theodicy that matters. Liberal theology is all about
theodicy. Don't...you know, don't misunderstand
this. Liberal theologians are not trying to sabotage the great
ship Christianity. They think they're trying to
patch it up to keep it afloat. All liberal theology is an attempt
at rescuing Christianity from God, the God of the Bible. And so we'll try to redefine
doctrine so that we can keep this ship afloat. And again,
theodicy is our business. That's where we are, and the
gospel is the answer to the question of theodicy. You could even press
the openness theologian as well if…the typical Arminian approach
is that God only knows what's going to happen. Well if He knew
what was going to happen and He created us, then He's responsible.
The openness guy says, well He didn't know what was going to
happen. Well if He knew He didn't know what was going to happen
and He was willing to run a high-risk operation, then He's responsible
for the high-risk operation that He decided to let loose. But
He has good intentions. This is where B.B. Warfield says,
you can't get God off the hook by denying sovereignty and you
can't even get Him off the hook by denying foreknowledge. You
have to deny creation because what you create you are responsible
for. So that's true. Let me say that
the real delight of this though is half of our pastoral care
issues with Christians are many theodicy issues. And it is such
a joy because we are inside this to be able to point them back
to the goodness of God displayed in the cross. And one of the
most brilliant young women that I have ever had the privilege
of serving, I was a youth pastor in St. Louis, she had come to
faith in Christ in her, you know, 16, 17 years old. God had just done a glorious,
she was brilliant. God had done a glorious work in her life and
she was just devouring the scriptures and asking all sorts of questions.
And a year or so into her Christian profession, it dawned on her,
God had gloriously saved her, but that her father was unregenerate
and that her father was headed to hell. And it was one particular
night and I was teaching on the doctrine of hell in a Wednesday
night youth fellowship. And she came up to me with tears
afterwards and she said, does this mean that everyone who does
not trust in Christ is going to hell? Yes. Does that mean my dad is going
to hell? Yes, if he does not trust in
Christ." She was crushed by this thought. She said, how could
God do that? And it was one of those times
where the Lord was kind to me and gave me an angle of coming
back and said, Nancy, let me ask you a question. God did a
glorious work of giving you new birth a year ago. Has he ever
done anything wrong to you? No. The way I live, the way I
thought, what I loved, I deserve to be judged by that. He gloriously
saved me. He's so good to me in the places
that he's put me in and the gifts that he's given me in Providence.
Okay. So do you sin and make mistakes and still rebel against
his will? Of course I do. So let me get
this straight. God's never done anything wrong
to you? But you sin against him all the time and you're concerned
that he might do something wrong with regard to your father. Yeah,
I guess that's what I'm saying. So you, a sinner, are concerned
that the good and sovereign God who saved you from certain and
deserved destruction might do something wrong. And she suddenly
realized that she was placing her own independent moral standards
above God. And it's...that's what enables
Job to say, though He slay me, yet will I praise Him. He knows
that God is good. TODD PURDUM Yeah, and that's rich and I really
believe that being able to cope with hell for a believer is a
grace gift. I think the only way that I can
deal with that is that the Spirit of God overwhelms me with comfort
that God does what is right. There's almost a sense of guilt.
Why am I saved and these people around me not? And I can't rationally
deal with that. I can't rationally do it at all.
But I find a joy, a fulfillment in my salvation, a wonder, an
awe that transports me. And I don't mean I'm not thinking
about those realities, but there's an overarching comfort that sweeps
over my soul that settles that. wrestling in my own heart that
I don't think unbelievers have, a ministry of the Spirit. WEBB. They will. Here's an amazing
thing, and I can almost place in geography where I was when
this happened. It was a conversation with the
man I mentioned last night, James Montgomery Boyce. And we were
discussing evangelical preaching and he made the statement to
me, he said, we don't preach enough about God's judgment. And he's
absolutely true, but he meant that in a way that became more
and more clear in the conversation. He said, we tend to leave God's
judgment as the right-minded people coming to the right conclusion
that God was right in the end. He said, God's justice is so
perfect and His final judgment will be so perfect that the damned
will agree with the rightness of their damnation. And so theodicy
finally ends when God displays His glory comprehensively. When
God displays His glory comprehensively, not only will those who are united
with Christ know the grace of God in a whole new way against
the backdrop of their sin in a way that we never would see
if we did not have to come face to face with that. Those who
are without Christ will see that God's justice is so righteous,
literally so just, that they themselves will agree that it
is right that they should be punished as they will be punished.
And I realized I don't think I've ever heard any preacher
dare to say that in all my years of life. I don't think I've ever
heard anyone talk about that. But the more I thought about
it, I thought, you know, you're exactly right. Theodicy doesn't end with
our theological investigation reaching the end of the book
where we just, you know, write the afterword and send out the
footnotes. Theodicy is going to be with us until such time
as God cosmically, universally, with every knee bowed And with
every tongue confessing Jesus Christ as Lord, that doesn't
mean savingly. It comes to understand that He is right and He is just
and whatever He does is good because He alone is the one who
knows what good is. I think that's an amen. And I
think that's a great place to stop. Thank you. Rich, huh? Good. Our Father, we thank You for
this wonderful time today. We thank You for Your Word. We
have nowhere else to go, but therein lies all that we need
to know. We thank You for these precious
servants of Yours who have gathered together. With hungry minds and
eager hearts and a desire to serve You more faithfully, more
capably, see Your power and Your grace released in their lives
for the benefit and the blessing of multitudes of people. May
these days accomplish that end as we walk faithfully in Your
will. Thank You in Christ's name. Amen.

Questions & Answers #29

Key Quotes

What does the Bible say about God's sovereignty over evil?

How do we know God can be good if evil exists?

Why is understanding God's sovereignty important for Christians?

What should Christians do about cultural issues like sexuality?

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Questions & Answers #29

Key Quotes

What does the Bible say about God's sovereignty over evil?

How do we know God can be good if evil exists?

Why is understanding God's sovereignty important for Christians?

What should Christians do about cultural issues like sexuality?

Sermon Transcript

Comments

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