A Debtor To Mercy Alone

I find that Evangelical college students do not know old hymns. Thus they do not sing the praises of the church throughout the ages. Also as a consequence, they miss out on the theological depth and worshipful instruction that is found is many of these hymns.

"A Debtor To Mercy Alone" is one of my favorites.

A debtor to mercy alone, of covenant mercy I sing;
Nor fear, with Thy righteousness on, my person and off’ring to bring.
The terrors of law and of God with me can have nothing to do;
My Savior’s obedience and blood hide all my transgressions from view.

The work which His goodness began, the arm of His strength will complete;
His promise is Yea and Amen, and never was forfeited yet.
Things future, nor things that are now, nor all things below or above,
Can make Him His purpose forgo, or sever my soul from His love.

My name from the palms of His hands eternity will not erase;
Impressed on His heart it remains, in marks of indelible grace.
Yes, I to the end shall endure, as sure as the earnest is giv’n;
More happy, but not more secure, the glorified spirits in Heav’n.

The words are from Augustus Toplady (1740-1788). The Trinity Hymnal sets it to the tune Trewen, a fine Welsh melody by David Emlyn Evans (1843-1913).

The Audacity of Suing God

"The Parable of the Vineyard" (Matthew 21:33-46)

by John S. C. Abbott & Jacob Abbott, Illustrated New Testament (1878)

A Nebraska state senator is suing God, WORLD Magazine reports.

Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers, 38, has filed suit against God for causing "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants." He claims the litigation is meant to make a serious point about equal access to the court system. But the senator's past criticism of Christians and regular habit of skipping morning prayers during the legislative session suggest that other forces are at work.

The court has threatened to dismiss the lawsuit due to its inability to serve God with notice. But Chambers argues that courts routinely acknowledge God's omniscience and omnipresence while swearing in witnesses and therefore should recognize that God is already aware of the proceedings and will be present for all hearings. ("God on Trial," Aug. 23, 2008; p.14)

This is ironic in the extreme. Imagine a domestic servant who steals from the employer, breaks his stuff, curses him continually, abuses the other servants, acts like he owns the place, never does his job except by accident when it happens to coincide with the servant's own plans, and finally humiliates and even kills the employer's son--his only son, whom he loves. Then when the employer brings consequences to bear upon the servant, not so much in punishment (that is held over until later, if necessary) as in chastisement, the servant sues the employer for unsafe living conditions.

The completely self-serving servant refuses to recognize the food, clothing, shelter, protections and steady flow of comfortable amenities that the employer continues graciously to supply. Moreover, the employer even offers peace and amnesty by transferring the servant's debt of punishment to employer's own son.

And, of course, these chastisements are nothing compared to what the servant deserves: expulsion into the cruel outdoors.

In short, it is we who stand condemned before God--in all his goodness.

Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. (Romans 2:3-5 ESV)

But, in contrast to sinful human beings, there is mercy and grace before God's righteous seat of judgment...and it centers entirely in the person of Jesus Christ the Savior.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. (John 3:16-21 ESV)

That is news you won't find in the mainstream media.

Community and the Longing Soul

In a sermon at Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church on Long Island, New York, Pastor Benjamin Miller said,

We long for a bond of human community that nothing can break (no one moves away, grows cold toward us, dies), in which each is eagerly pursuing the good of everyone with an infinite and gracious love. But that is found only in God the Father through Jesus Christ.

This brings to mind Augustine's prayer from the Confessions, "Father, you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Aristotle's observation is true: we are "political animals." We were made for community. "No man is an island, sufficient unto himself," said Donne. But though made for community, we were not made for this world. What we long for in relationships, we cannot find in earthly, natural relationships.

The human bonds that sweeten our lives are blessings from God, but like all of his blessings they point beyond themselves to the One who alone truly satisfies. It is the failure to see this that in the modern world has led to utopian ideology and thence to monstrous tyranny. Mistaking the sign for the signified, seeking in this world what can be found fully only in the next, or in what transcends this world, is idolatry and leads necessarily to disappointment, misery and destruction.

With that in mind, the wisdom of the American system of government can be seen in its moderation. It secures for each citizen the freedom to pursue happiness, but does not guarantee that happiness. That is only God's to give.

Indeed, God has promised us that happiness. He has promised you that happiness. He gives you himself, and does so only in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of sinners and the Mediator of the New Covenant.

To Israel he said, "I will satisfy the weary soul, and every languishing soul I will replenish" (Jeremiah 31:25 ESV).

He fulfilled this promise in Jesus the Messiah, the hope of all nations: "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst" (John 6:35).

Vos on the Kingdom of God

Geerhardus Vos has a fine statement on the kingdom of God in his introduction to The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church (Presbyterian and Reformed, n.d.).

He first draws attention to Luke 4:43 where Jesus says, "I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose" (ESV). He adds that the importance of this concept of the kingdom of God "will best be felt by considering that the coming of the kingdom is the great event which Jesus connects with his appearance and activity...(p.9)."

Having made a brief case for the centrality of this idea in the Bible and in the teachings of our Lord, he then cautions the reader against interpretive excess.

While thus recognizing that the kingdom of God has an importance in our Lord's teaching second to that of no other subject, we should not go to the extreme into which some writers have fallen, in finding in it the only theme on which Jesus actually taught, which would imply that all other topics dealt with in his discourses were to his mind so many corollaries or subdivisions of this one great truth. The modern attempts to make the kingdom of God the organizing center of a theological system have here exerted a misleading influence upon the interpretation of Jesus' teaching. From the fact that the proximate object of his saving work was the realization of the kingdom, the wrong inference has been drawn, that this must have been also the highest category under which he viewed the truth. It is plain that the one does not follow from the other. Salvation with all it contains flows from the nature and subserves the glory of God, and we can clearly perceive that Jesus was accustomed consciously to refer it to this divine source and to subordinate it to this God-centered purpose, cf. John 17:4. He usually spoke not of "the kingdom" absolutely, but of "the kingdom of God" and "the kingdom of heaven," and these names themselves indicate that the place of God in the order of things which they describe is the all-important thing to his mind.

It is only with great artificiality that the various component elements of our Lord's teaching can be subsumed under the one head of the kingdom. If any deduction and systematizing are to be attempted, logic and the indications which we have of our Lord's habit of thought on this point alike require, that not his teaching on the kingdom but that on God shall be given the highest place. The relation observable in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel between the person of Christ and salvation, is also the relation which we may conceive to exist between God and the kingdom. Because god is what he is, the kingdom bears the character and embodies the principles which as a matter of fact belong to it. Even so, however, we should avoid the modern mistake of endeavoring to derive the idea of the kingdom from the conception of the divine fatherhood alone. This derivation expresses an important truth recognized by Jesus himself, when he calls the kingdom a fatherly gift to the disciples, Lk 12:32. But it represents only one side of the truth, for in the kingdom other attributes of God besides his fatherhood find expression. The doctrine of God in its entire fulness alone is capable of furnishing that broader basis on which the structure of his teaching on the kingdom can be built in agreement with Jesus' own mind.

It is worth noting that the Great Commission speaks of authority and obedience, but makes no explicit reference to the kingdom of God. Jesus' restatement of it before his ascension in Acts 1 is similarly silent. Vos is saying that not the kingdom but God himself is the comprehensive theme in the Bible and thus in Jesus' teaching, more specifically the glory that he is due and that sinful man, made in his image, has denied him, but which will be his in the end, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.

But the kingdom is the most prominent expression of that. When the angel announces the Messiah's birth to Mary, he uses kingdom terminology: "...the Lord will give him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end" (Lk 1:32-33 NKJV). As this gospel is heading for the ends of the earth, Luke tells us in the very last verse of the Book of Acts, "[Paul] lives two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance" (Acts 28:30-31 ESV). The Apostle Luke equates the kingdom of God with the gospel.

Having adequately prepared the reader, Vos then states the unparalleled importance of this kingdom theme.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in many respects the idea of the kingdom acted in our Lord's thought and teachings as a crystallizing point around which several other elements of truth naturally gathered and grouped themselves in harmonious combination. That is the idea of the church, where it emerges in his teaching, is a direct outgrowth of the development of his doctrine of the kingdom, will appear in the sequel. But not only this, also the consummation of the world and the final state of glory were evidently viewed by him in no other light than as the crowning fulfilment of the kingdom-idea. Still further, what he taught about righteousness was most closely interlinked in his mind with the truth about the nature of the kingdom. The same may safely be affirmed with reference to the love and grace of God. The great categories of subjective religion, faith and repentance and regeneration, obviously had their place in his thought as answering to certain aspects of the kingdom. Even a subject apparently so remote from the kingdom-idea, in our usual understanding of it as that of miracles in reality derived for Jesus from the latter the larger part of its meaning. Finally, the kingdom stood in our Lord's mind for a very definite conception concerning the historical relation of his own work and the new order of things introduced by it to the Old testament. All this can here be stated in general only; our task in the sequel, will be to work it out in detail. But what has been said is sufficient to show that there is scarcely an important subject i9n the rich repertoire of our Lord's teaching with which our study of his disclosures concerning the kingdom of God will not bring us into contact.

You can find the book online here.

You can buy the Westminster Discount Books reprint of the book from the Westminster Seminary Bookstore here.

The Unity of Religions

Envir Hoxha (pronounced hoja) smashed the majority Muslim religion in Albania and reduced the faithful of all Illyria's religions to mere co-religionists. The result? Though Albania is 70% Muslim and almost all the rest are either Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic, it is all quite nominal. In a seminar on the value of religion for democracy, both a "Muslim" and a "Christian" gave an account of the essential unity of all religions, at least the monotheistic ones, and thus the basis on which we can all finally get along in this necessarily shared life. Secularists who remain sentimentally attached to their religious heritage are fond of viewing religion this way.

But is it possible that what is most important in religion--what is most profoundly significant--is not what they share in common but what distinguishes them, i.e. what is unique to each one? That, after all, is how the religious themselves view their own religions. It is only those who are more concerned about peace among men than about peace with God that view it otherwise.

And isn't it always the unique and distinguishing that is of greatest importance? What is common merely directs us to it. If we were to recognize only what is common to all human beings, friendship--that which sweetens life and affirms our humanity--would become impossible, and it is only in friendship--that attachment of one's own particular soul to another particular soul in all its particularity--that humanity is most profoundly understood and cherished. A tyrant has no friends.

Medicine, for example, is premised on an understanding of what is common to all human bodies--the circulation of blood, the respiratory system, the arrangement of organs--and yet without recognizing and taking seriously the distinguishing characteristics of particular bodies, the diagnosis and cure of illness are impossible.

So too with religion. If we recognize only what religions share in common and if we refuse to take seriously what distinguishes them, it is impossible to understand any particular religion or even religion itself.

God became man to remedy sin. But he became a particular man at a particular time to redeem particular men and particular women. If you suppress that distinguishing feature of Christianity, then the religion that you claim teaches essentially the same thing as Islam is not in fact Christianity.

The Innes Theological Blog

Frontispiece to Francis Bacon's Great Instauration

Why another Innes blog? Well, it is not because I just don't have enough to do. But from time to time I have a strictly theological post that I want to put out there.

My original blog, Principalities and Powers, is for Christian and theoretical reflection on political life. I have avoided posting anything that gets too far off the political and cultural path. This blog allows me that freedom to roam.

I call it Piety and Humanity after Francis Bacon's use of the phrase in New Atlantis, his literary envisioning of the scientific society for which he was laying the practical and theoretical foundation. "Besides, we are come here among a Christian people, full of piety and humanity." It was Bacon's intention to replace piety with the modern virtue of humanity, and retrofit the Christian faith for service to the new science and the brave new world for which it would provide a foundation and establish a horizon.

This blog is in part simple theological reflection, but in part--and unavoidably--a conversation with that world...our world.