Shining a Light before men

by Frank Turk

We get letters. I got a version of this one today, which I’d like to share with y’all because I think there’s some profit in it (there may also be some prophet in it, but I’ll leave that to the reader and the Holy Spirit to decide):

I'm a reader of your work over at TeamPyro (awesome stuff) and I'd like to ask for your help on an issue I'm currently facing.

It's about the book "Pagan Christianity" by Frank Viola and George Barna. It was recommended to me by a friend for discussion. We're specifically talking about the gospel (what it really means) but the conversation is spilling over to the church, about which he has some very passionate, but not altogether great opinions on.

Anyway, while looking for reviews of Mr. Viola's book, I stumbled across a comment you made in a Pyromaniacs comment feed saying that basically Frank Viola is a "kook" and has got his church history all wrong. I'm wondering if you could kindly:

1. elaborate a little more on why that is so and
2. lend me your take on this whole "I'm too cool for church/church should be like it was in the NT/we should abandon institutionalized and flawed churches" attitude that is sweeping many young people, especially those infatuated with emergent thinking.

your encouragement and solid thinking on this issue would be very much appreciated.

Well, as “kindly” as possible, here’s what I have to say about that:

This (meaning #2, above) is not a particularly “emergent” stream of thinking

Truth be told, this goes back even to Anabaptist conceptions of what it means to be a “church”, and maybe back even to monastic views of piety – so this is not hardly a new way to see things. The problem is that it is a view of what God has done without a lot of reference to what God says about what God has done.

I’ll cover that more in #3, below.

This is not a particularly mature stream of thinking

I can be honest: while people have to take responsibility for this kind of thinking in themselves, they didn’t invent it: they were taught it, either by example or explicitly. But if they were mature in their approach to this topic, and were taught by others who were mature, they’d not atomize the faith the way this approach atomizes faith to a primarily-personal experience.



This is not a particularly biblical stream of thinking

The way this approach to “church” works is to see what God has done for “me” as the starting point of Christian life and then maybe one tries to extend what God has done for “me” to include what God has done for “you” on a provisional basis. When I think God hasn’t done it for you anymore, I can therefore not care about you anymore – at least in the church sense.

The Bible, for those of you who have read it (and specifically for those who have not), goes about the matter in a completely different way. For certain, the place where the rubber hits the road is where “I” do something. But the way we are taught to reason by the Bible about our faith is that Christ has died for us, and that Christ sees his bride as an assembly, and that God has a whole people who are purchased as his own possession.

Does Christ save each one? Sure: certainly. But the formula that you might hear popularly that Christ would have died if the only one he was going to save was me is absolutely not found in the Bible.

The Biblical approach to what it means to have church starts with the fact that Christ died for the elect, which is not a statement of individualistic grace but a statement of a singular act of grace for the sake of all who would be saved.

When Paul riffs on this in Eph 5, he makes it clear that Christ died for the church and gave himself up for her. This has to make us consider that Christ’s work somehow is for all of us on purpose.

Candles on a birthday cake vs. a city on a hill

When Christ talks about who we are in him, he doesn’t say, “you are the light of the world, like little birthday cake candles which people will encounter here and there and I hope that’s enough to get the message across.”

Christ says instead this: “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.” You know: You-Plural. Y’all. The city on the hill and the light on the lamp stand is the church and not the individual believer. So our light shines before men when we are together being the people Jesus died to make us.

Institutionalism vs. community

So how do we carry that over into the real world 2000 years later? Should we then embrace whatever institution has risen up – should we not have had a reformation? Should we never-ever leave the local church?

The truth is that the Bible gives us a lot of liberty for the local church – with some guidelines. We should have elders who teach us the faith, reprove us when we are wrong, guard the word of God, love people, and train up new elders; we should follow them. We should bear one another’s burdens. We should stand against error but seek to reconcile brothers who are turning away from the faith. We should love one another. We should worship in spirit and in truth (and in good order).

After that, it’s sort of open as to how we administrate that.

But factually the church has to be a local body – full of real people. It has to be visible and distinct from Kiwanis, the Lion’s Club, and the temple of Athena. It should be calling people into Christ and therefore into itself.

What it forms is a community which is (without going all eschatological on you) an expression of the coming kingdom under Jesus Christ, the King of kings. If we keep our eye on that objective, we avoid it becoming the kingdom which the brilliance of our pastor’s preaching, our elder’s leadership, and our own wonderful community outreach (which will create an institution) has formed. God forbid that our churches are “the church which we made for Jesus” rather than “the church which Jesus made us for”.

Anyone who would tell you otherwise is selling a book or a research project – and there’s no one saved by that.

Hope that helps.

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Apocalypse Then

Remembering the Y2K Hysteria
by Phil Johnson

xactly ten years ago this week I preached in our church's morning service. I can't remember if John MacArthur was ill or suddenly called out of town for some reason, but I remember being asked very late to fill in. I had about 24 hours to prepare.

It being the first Sunday of 1999, I decided to preach an appropriately forward-looking message on Matthew 6:34 and its context: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."

In those days, the evangelical world was at the peak of the Y2K insanity, so I made reference to that issue in my message. At the time, Gary North was operating a heavily-trafficked website that included this:

We've got a problem. It may be the biggest problem that the modern world has ever faced. I think it is. At 12 midnight on January 1, 2000 (a Saturday morning), most of the world's mainframe computers will either shut down or begin spewing out bad data. Most of the world's desktop computers will also start spewing out bad data. Tens of millions—possibly hundreds of millions—of pre-programmed computer chips will begin to shut down the systems they automatically control. This will create a nightmare for every area of life, in every region of the industrialized world.

North's Web site had links to more than 3,000 places where you could read similar doom-and-gloom predictions about the Y2K crisis. He grimly told visitors to his Web site that they had better heed these doomsday warnings, or they would certainly regret it.

Today, he admits, "I did not understand the Y2K thing in any sort of detail. I took someone elses [sic] word for it. . . ."

At the time, he was saying:

It took me from early 1992 until late 1996 to come to grips emotionally with the Year 2000 Problem. You had better be a lot faster on the uptake than I was. We're running out of time. I don't mean that society is running out of time to fix this problem. Society has already run out of time for that. There are not enough programmers to fix it. The technical problems cannot be fixed on a system-wide basis. The Millennium Bug will hit in 2000, no matter what those in authority decide to do now. As a system, the world economy is now beyond the point of no return. So, when I say "we," I mean you and I as individuals. We are running out of time as individuals to evade the falling dominoes . . .. We are facing a breakdown of civilization if the power grid goes down.

(It frankly amused me that a postmillennialist like North, who had frequently derided premillennialists by referring to them as "pessimillennialists" would himself make a career of fear-mongering. But that is just what he has done. So much for the vaunted "optimism" of theonomic postmillennialism.)

In my message that morning a decade ago, I pointed out that the spirit of that kind of panic-mongering was 180 degrees at odds with a whole string of Jesus' commands in Matthew 6:25-33. I mostly just explained the biblical text.

I admit I wasn't prepared for the reaction I got that morning. There was a smallish group of people in the church who were fully into the Y2K hysteria, and they approached me in a phalanx as soon as the service was over. The guy who would have been their spokesman (if his wife hadn't kept interrupting him) was so angry he was red in the face and spitting when he talked. He said he was going to meet with the elders and demand equal time to tell the people of Grace Church they needed to start stockpiling food and preparing for the looming crisis. He likened me to me a holocaust denier.

I stood there and listened to them for ten minutes or so until they began to calm down a bit. I let them talk and did not interrupt, except to ask how they thought Matthew 6:25-34 applied to our society in 1999.

As the spokesdude began to lose some of his steam, he said, "Look: all I know is that if you're wrong, you are guilty of placing the people of our church in mortal jeopardy by not encouraging them to stockpile food and prepare Y2K bunkers. But if I'm wrong, the worst that will happen is that I will have to come back and apologize to you for losing my temper."

"Will you do that?" I asked.

"Of course I would—if it turns out I am wrong," he avowed. "But I am not wrong."

"I will look for you on the first Sunday of the year 2000," I promised.



He moved to a remote part of Idaho that fall because he wanted to be as far as possible from any urban area when all the computers started spewing bad data. One of the hard-core Y2K aficionados in the group actually left his wife when it came to light that she did not share his fear of the coming apocalypse. He likewise moved out of state.

Ten years after the fact, not one of that group of Y2K cadets has ever come back and formally acknowledged that they were wrong, much less apologized for the scene they made that morning.

Gary North is now selling doomsday advice for a monthly fee—"approximately the cost of one movie ticket, a large box of popcorn, and a large soft drink per month."

My advice: the popcorn is much healthier for you.

Even if you load it with butter.

Seriously.

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Avoiding Spiritual Dry Rot

Let's Keep the Gospel at the Center

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from chapter 5 of An All Round Ministry, a chapter titled "A New Departure." I love this section, where Spurgeon takes to task all who have departed from the gospel—ranging from the End-Times-Obsessed dispensationalists to the Modernist precursors of today's Emergent postmodernism. His warning still applies—to both sides. (His chronicle of early candidates for the Antichrist is especially intriguing. I have a small collection of books from the first half of the twentieth century, each of which speculates on the identity of Antichrist—all of them guessing differently, and each of them—of course—getting it wrong. They follow the same kind of pattern Spurgeon noticed in his time. They began with Kaiser Wilhelm, then moved on to Hitler, Mussolini, Winston Churchill, etc. Some things never change.)

here is an evil under the sun which is as terrible as an open catastrophe,—indeed, it works greater ill to the church in the long run,—and that is, when a man's ministry is eaten through and through with spiritual dry rot.

I heard an old Indian describe the way in which furniture may be devoured by the white ants. The ants will come into the house, and eat up everything; and yet, to all appearance, nothing is touched. The bookcases stand just where they did, and the trunks and everything else remain exactly as they were; at least, it is so to the eye; but directly they are touched, they all crumble to pieces, for the ants have eaten the substance out of them.

In the same way, some men still remain in the ministry, and yet the soul of their ministry has gone. They have a name to live, yet they are dead: what can be worse than this condition? One might almost sooner have an explosion, and have done with it, than see men continuing to maintain the form of religion after vital godliness has gone, scattering death all around them, and yet maintaining what is called a respectable position. God save us from this last as much as from that first! If I am a rotten bough, let me be cut off; but to hang upon the tree, all verdant with parasitical lichen and moss, is deplorable. A respectable ministry, devoid of spiritual life, is little better than respectable damnation, from which may God deliver us!

When men drift into this condition, they generally adopt some expedient to hide it. Conscience suggests that there is something or other wrong, and the deceitful heart labours to conceal or palliate this fact. Some do this by amusing themselves with hobbies instead of preaching the gospel. They cannot do the Lord's work, so they try to do their own. They have not honesty enough to confess that they have lost gospel power, so they ride a hobby; and it is a very mild form of evil when they raise some side issue, which has no other fault about it than that it diverts them from the main point. Many are these playthings; I have no time to mention more than one.

I have known certain brethren give themselves solely to expound prophecy. Now, a man full of the life of God may expound prophecy as much as he likes; but there are some who, having lost their love of the gospel, try to win back what little popularity they once had by taking up with guesses at the future. They may be quite, sure that, if they cannot profit men by bringing them to the manger and the cross, they will make a complete failure of it if they handle the seals and the vials.

Did you ever notice, in Calvin's Commentaries, that there is no exposition of the Book of Revelation? Why not? He said, "I have not expounded that Book because I do not understand it." When I hear a man say, "I have found much in Matthew which does not belong to the Church, I have outgrown much of the Romans and Galatians, and I cannot enjoy the Psalms, for they do not rise to the perfection of my experience; I want something more elevated and spiritual, more abstruse and wonderful;" I conclude that this brother is spinning his last hank, and spending his last pennyworth of sense.

I have been amused by observing the manner in which speculators have been taken in when they have left the old ship of the gospel to become prophets. The beast of the Revelation was reported to be Napoleon I, and then the creature suddenly reappeared in his nephew, Napoleon III By-and-by, the deadly wound was healed, and the Prince Imperial wore the dreadful honours of the prophetic book; but the prince is now dead, and it will be needful for the seers to invent a new theory. There is no fear but what they will do it before long; and, meanwhile, "our Israelitish origin" will do to fill up the time.

In the story of Sindbad the Sailor, it is said that, as they sailed along, they saw an island, and at the sight thereof they greatly rejoiced. The crew left the ship, and feasted on the island, and were going to take possession of it in the name of the king, when suddenly it began to quiver and to plunge, and finally it went down altogether, for it was a whale's back, and not an island at all! I have known brethren disport themselves upon the back of some novel speculation, when suddenly the facts of history have gone against them, and the whole thing has gone down very like a whale.

I have mentioned one of the more harmless hobbies, but some have taken to fancies which have bred greater mischief. Speculation is an index of the spiritual poverty of the man who surrenders himself to it. His flour has all been used, so he tries plaster of Paris; he has no more gold or silver, so he coins the baser metals. He cannot prophesy after the measure of faith, so he exercises his immeasurable imagination. His own experience does not serve him with topics for his ministry, and therefore he takes airy flights into regions of which he knows nothing.

Far worse is it when a man so runs down in heart and spirit that he has no principles left, and believes nothing at all. He is a Baptist, but he would very cheerfully minister to a Paedo-baptist church. He is a Calvinist, but he is not narrow, and will promise to offend no one. He holds certain views, but "a view to the pastorate" is the chief of them, and in that view the salary is the charm. He boasts of possessing large-heartedness, and receptivity of spirit, and all that sort of thing. He has dry rot in his soul! That is the truth of the case, and he tries to cover it up with this nonsense!

Such persons remind me of an advertisement of a school in France; its concluding paragraph was to this effect: "The pupils will be taught any religion which may be selected by their parents." It is abominable when ministers as good as say that any religion will be taught which may be selected by the deacons. "Pray inform me whether the church likes a high-toned Calvinism, or prefers Arminianism." It is with such as it was with the showman who exhibited the battle of Waterloo, and in answer to the question, "Which is Wellington, and which is Napoleon?" replied, "Whichever you please, my little dears; you pays your money, and you takes your choice." These broad-churchmen are prepared to supply any article for which there is a demand. This is a terrible condition of things, but men do not generally rest there; in the lowest depth, there is still a lower deep.

When the heart has got out of order, and the spiritual life has run down, men soon fall into actual doctrinal error, not so much because their head is wrong, for many of them have not erred very much there, but because their heart is in an ill condition. We should never have known that some men had brains at all if they had not addled them.

Such departers from the faith usually fall by little and little. They begin by saying very little concerning grace. They serve out homoeopathic doses of gospel: it is marvellous what a very small globule of the gospel will save a soul, and it is a great mercy that it is so, or few would be saved. These snatches of gospel, and the preacher who gives them, remind us of the famous dog of the Nile, of whom the ancients said that he was so afraid of the crocodiles that he drank of the river in a great hurry, and was away from it directly. These intellectual gentry are so afraid of the critical crocodiles that the moment they touch the living water of the gospel they are away again. Their doubts are stronger than their beliefs.

The worst of it is that they not only give us very little gospel, but they give us much that is not the gospel. In this they are like mosquitoes, of whom I have often said that I do not mind their taking a little of my blood, but it is the poison which they put into me which is my great cause of quarrel with them. That a man should rob me of the gospel, is bad enough; but that he should impregnate me with his poisonous doctrine, is intolerable.

When men lose all love to the gospel, they try to make up for the loss of its attractions by sparkling inventions of their own. They imitate life by the artificial flash of culture, reminding me of the saline crystals which cover the salt deserts. There is a lifeless plain, in the heart of Persia, so sterile and accursed that even saline plants do not thrive; "but the salt itself, as if in bitter mockery, fashions its crystals in the form of stems and stalks, and covers the steppe with a carpet of unique vegetation, glittering and glistening like an enchanted prairie in the dazzling light of the Eastern sun." Woe be unto the poor congregations who behold this substitute for life, this saline efflorescence of dainty errors and fascinating inventions!

Alas, whatever a man may now propound, he will find learned personages to support him in it! Fontenelle used to say that, if he could only get six philosophers to write in its favour, people could be made to believe that the sun is not the source of light and heat; and I think there is a great deal of truth in the remark. We are told, "Well, he is a very learned man, he is a Fellow of Brazenface College, and he has written a book in which he upsets the old dogmas." If a learned man writes any nonsense, of course it will have a run; and there is no opinion so insane but, if it has the patronage of so-called scientific men, it will be believed in certain quarters.

I have myself watched the labours of novelists in theology, and have tried to get what I could out of their books, but I have been struck with the remarkably poor results of their lucubrations. I have stood by the shore at Mentone, and seen fishermen with miles of line, and a vast net buoyed up by great tubs, visible far out at sea. A dozen men are hauling at one rope, and as many more are pulling in another, drawing this great net to land. Pull away! Ahoy! Pull away at the ropes, and bring the fish to land. I believe that, on one occasion, I did see them produce a fish not so long as my little finger, but that was a rather successful occasion! Our German friends have diligently made vast nets with which they have enclosed the sea of thought: and upon drawing them out, what a noise there has been, and what a sensation, and what at trembling and a fainting among the old ladies of Christendom; but when we have seen their mighty catch, it has not been the tenth part of a sardine!

The next philosopher who came along, has fitted on his spectacles, with due gravity, after wiping them most solemnly, and then he has put his critical fork into this small fish, and, holding it up to be admired of all, he. has discoursed upon its species, till another philosopher equally wise has declared that it was rotten, and pitched it back into the deeps.

This kind of game is continually going on, and many young ministers have been fools enough to give up the apostolic fishery to join in this stupid waste of mental effort. What have they ever done, these doubters, since the world began? What will they do? What can they do? All that they can do now is to wriggle into our churches, and hiss from pulpits which were once filled by the orthodox. They cannot build places of worship of their own,—they could not build a mousetrap; as a rule, there is not power enough in their teaching to gather a congregation, or to keep one when it is gathered. All the vitality, force, and energy they possess are spent, cuckoo-like, in laying their eggs in the nests which we take the trouble to fashion, for they cannot build their own.

God forbid that we should ever try to cover our decline of heart by the invention of our self-conceit! I hope that, when our ministry begins to lose power, we shall be driven to our knees, and to our God, that He may quicken us again by His good Spirit.

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The Value of Setting Your Affections on Heaven

by Phil Johnson

n Psalm 17:14, David describes his enemies as men whose vision is totally earth-bound—who cannot see beyond the earthly value of this life's material blessings. They are "men of the world, which have their portion in this life, and whose belly thou fillest with thy hid treasure: they are full of children, and leave the rest of their substance to their babes."

In other words, they are already planning how to divide the family estate among their children. That is as far into the future as they can see. They have looked no further ahead than that, and they have no higher thoughts than that. All their hopes and expectations are tied to this life and this temporal world. They are utter worldlings, with no hope of heaven, no desire for heavenly things, and no concern about eternity. In that myopic vision lies the seed of all their wickedness. They are infatuated with this world, and therefore they are enemies of God.

David's world-view was totally different. And he sums it up in verse 15—one of my favorite verses in all Scripture: "As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness."

In stark contrast to his enemies, David's hope lay beyond the present and beyond this world. What he was looking for was something that will not come in this life. He would ultimately be satisfied, but not until he awakened in his Savior's likeness.

So the center of David's greatest hope and longing was something that can be realized only in eternity. It is not something that pertains to this life. And therefore it is not something that can be shaken by the troubles of this life.

Here is an anchor for any believer who is downcast: Keep your center of focus in eternity. Don't be distracted by the anguish and the hardship of this life. A time is coming when all of that will be done away, and we will be perfectly and eternally satisfied. Cling to that hope and press toward that goal.

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Drawing to an end

by Dan Phillips

The year 2007 draws to an end. And what else?

None of us knows what the next moment holds. "Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring" (Proverbs 27:1). Whatever the next day brings, all the preceding days bring their mounting weight to bear on us.

Consider now the final words of Benazir Bhutto:

"Long live Bhutto," Benazir Bhutto shouted, waving to the crowd surging around her car. They were her last words before three gunshots rang out and she slumped back on to her seat.

"She did not say anything more," said Safdar Abbassi, her chief political adviser, who was sitting behind her.

"Long live Bhutto" — bang! — dead.

And then? Then Benazir Bhutto found herself facing her Judge (Hebrews 9:27). Was she prepared?

At the moment, I'm less concerned about her than about you and me. The only difference between Bhutto and us is a tick, a moment, a flash. We all stand before the Judge just as surely as she. We don't know the time on the summons, but we do know that we won't miss our court appearance date by so much as a second.

And what do we bring? In the best movie version of A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge hears Marley's lament about the many and heavy chains he wears, and murmurs "You have my sympathy." Marley's response:

"Ahh — you do not know the weight and length of strong chain you bear yourself. It was full as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas eves ago and you have labored on it since. Ah! it is a ponderous chain!"

Whatever the theological shortcomings of Christmas Carol (and they are many and serious), I appreciate this: Scrooge is vividly shown to be utterly unaware that he is judged, as he stands; that his life has already borne fruit, and that fruit is bitter, woeful, deadly.

This is the state of men today. We read, "whoever does not believe is condemned already" (John 3:18). Worse, and more ominously, John reveals that "whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him" (John 3:36) — now, at this moment, as he draws this fleeting breath which, for all he knows, may be his last. What Daniel said to Belshazzar, he might well say to us: "the God in whose hand is your breath, and whose are all your ways, you have not honored" (Daniel 5:23).

"Long live me!" — poof! — gone. Gone to judgment.

Someone has just read those words, and they are for you. Your condition is just so. Whatever your pursuits and distractions over the past year, the reality is that you are a step away from a judgment that is absolute, final, inescapable, irrevocable, and incapable of appeal. Were you to die now, the ax would fall, and that would be that. Forever. You need to come to know God, now.

But lest my Christian readers (and self) feel too safe, consider that the same principle applies to us equally, and perhaps even more so. Never forget:

"Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more" (Luke 12:48)

Perhaps you read this blog daily, and other writings of men far better than the current one. Good, and God be praised. But never forget: as you and I read, our responsibility-index goes up. It is happening now, right now, to you, and to me.

The words of Hebrews 9:27 ("it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment") do not bring a message to unbelievers alone, but to us as well. "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil" (2 Corinthians 5:10). And how does this consideration affect the apostle who wrote it? Does Paul go on to say, "But never mind that, the blood covers all, I'm eternally secure, so I'm going for what I see to be my best life right now"?

Not so much. Paul's very next words are, "Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:11). The apostle of free forensic justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone found the reality of God's judgment both sobering and motivating.

So I call us all, as the year draws to a close, to consider the judgment of God, and to consider our lives in that context. The statistics are pretty good that not all who read these words now will be here to read any similar post next year's end. Nor may I be here to write one. Benazir Bhutto's last words were a futile wish for earthly longevity, words that were instantly given the lie.

John Piper's idea is better. Piper uses New Year's Eve as a dress-rehearsal for his own death, considering his year in the light of God's judgment, and eternity.

Do that, or use another idea. But do something.

Tick tick tick.....

"For man does not know his time.
Like fish that are taken in an evil net,
and like birds that are caught in a snare,
so the children of man are snared at an evil time,
when it suddenly falls upon them"
(Ecclesiastes 9:12)

POSTSCRIPT: some of last year's closing thoughts can be found here and here; and a previous year from my blog here.

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This life, in brief

by Dan Phillips

Proverbic distillation:

For the Christian, all misery is temporary.
For the non-Christian, all pleasure is temporary.

More poetically:

The sorrows of the godly are fleeting,
As are the pleasures of the wicked.

Scriptures:

Line A:
Psalm 16:11; 23:6; 73:23-26; Isaiah 25:1-9; Matthew 5:3-12; Luke 6:20-23; Romans 8:18, 28-39; 16:20; 2 Corinthians 4:16 — 5:10; James 1:2-3, 12; 1 Peter 1:5-6; 5:10; 1 John 2:17; Revelation 21:4; 22

Line B:
Psalm 1:4-6; 17:14a; 37:10; 73:16-20; Proverbs 10:28; 11:7; Matthew 16:26; Luke 6:24-26; 12:16-21; 16:19-31; Romans 2:5, 9; Colossians 3:5-6; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; Hebrews 11:25b; James 5:1-6; 1 John 2:17; Revelation 20:10, 15; 21:8

Conclusion: Take heart, or fear — as appropriate.

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See, here's the thing:

by Phil Johnson

ince the opening day of my original blog, I have steadfastly declined to make John MacArthur the focus of controversy here. I am not suggesting—nor would he—that he should be exempt from anyone's criticism or contradictions. John himself is well known as someone who doesn't back away from controversy—especially when some vital point of truth is at stake. And he does make careful distinctions between fundamental and secondary doctrines—the fundamental ones being those cardinal truths that are of the very essence of the gospel.

But as he demonstrated so graphically last week, he also has firm opinions on certain key doctrines he himself acknowledges are matters of secondary importance—not principal tests of orthodoxy or inviolable requirements for Christian fellowship (see John MacArthur, The Second Coming [Wheaton: Crossway, 1999], 19). He doesn't necessarily mind taking a controversial, public stand on such matters.

Fine. I'm still not going to sponsor a debate about it in the little corner of the Web I manage. I have profited immeasurably from his teaching for exactly 30 years; he has been a good friend to me for some 27 years; and he has been my pastor and employer for the past 24 years. None of that is a secret to anyone who reads this blog. My respect for him is well known, and it's not something I would ever try to disguise. So I'm certainly not going to change my longstanding rule at this juncture and suddenly sponsor a forum for controversy about my pastor's beliefs so that people who are already angry about something he said can use my blog to vent. That's not a policy that has been imposed on me; it's my blog; it's my own decision, and it's final.

It's not a new policy, either. One thing that became clear quite literally on the day I first launched my blog is that certain people, if permitted, would love to hijack the comment-threads here to air all their petty (and in some cases, contrived) complaints about John MacArthur. A few noisy hoodlums were already waiting in the wings the day I made my first post, itching to use the meta of Phil Johnson's blog for that very purpose. They kept at it relentlessly for several days. In many cases, the garbage they posted was not even remotely germane to the subject matter of my blogposts. After trying to be polite and dealing with their escalating mischief as gracefully as possible, within a few days of my bloglaunch, I posted this:

BTW: for future reference: Deliberate personal disparagement of my pastor, my church, my wife, my dog, my children, or the ministry I work for will be deemed outside the parameters of Christian civility and therefore a violation of Rule 2. Say whatever you like about me (as long as you keep your language clean), and I'll let you post it. Take a cheap shot at someone with whom I have a personal relationship of love and respect—whether it be John MacArthur, my dog Wrigley, or anyone in between—and I'll delete it.

Since then, I have done exactly what I said I would do: I have deleted nasty remarks or comments from disgruntled people who want to target my pastor, my place of employment, my church, etc.

So that's a well-established, long-term policy. To keep it fair, I have also generally tried to avoid constantly waving John MacArthur in the face of my blogreaders. In two years' time I've posted approximately three or four guest blogposts from him, and his name naturally comes up from time to time—but ordinarily only in relatively non-controversial contexts. I do assiduously try to avoid citing his name as a way of wielding artificial clout. I use Spurgeon instead for that purpose.

I have another personal rule of thumb that heretofore has been inviolable: I don't get involved in ugly arguments over eschatology with people whom I agree with on practically every other vital point of gospel truth.

Today, however, I'm going to bend both rules in a way that some readers might deem grossly unfair. I'm going to make one extended remark about the current brouhaha, and then I'm going to disallow all readers' comments on the matter. This is, I think, the first time I have ever made a post and closed the comments, but I'm sticking by that decision. Comment elsewhere if you like. I have neither the time nor the desire to monitor this thread today to keep the vandals at bay. If you really, really are bursting to say something, both Dan and Frank have posts on this issue where you can leave comments. They'll appreciate the traffic, I am sure.

Now, here's my comment:

John MacArthur's premillennialism is not an opinion he developed recently or kept secret until this year's Shepherds' Conference.

John has always been a premillennialist, holding to a pretribulational rapture. It's not a view he recently adopted in secret and suddenly unveiled. It's what he has always taught, and those self-styled experts in the realm of eschatology who seem most shocked and outraged today surely ought to have been aware of where he stood. He has written several books and a couple of commentaries outlining his perspective on eschatology.

Various eschatalogical hobbyists, cranks, and fanatics representing practically every other conceivable point of view have tried from time to time to persuade John MacArthur that their view is the correct one. Evangelists for diverse points of view have ranged from the relatively new "pre-wrath" position of Marv Rosenthal to Gary North's doomsday-flavored postmillennialism to Harold Camping's unique date-setting, escapist brand of amillennialism to the most fanatical hyper-preterists. But John's opinion on this matter hasn't really wavered at all since the start of his ministry.

Moreover, in all the years I have known John MacArthur, he has never pretended to be "Reformed" in the technical sense of the word. He does say that his perspective on soteriology is essentially Reformed and Calvinistic, because that's a fact. He might even say he thinks many who call themselves capital-R "Reformed" aren't (small-r) reformed enough in some of their opinions.

But, despite the persistent caricature frequently batted around the dark side of the blogosphere, neither he nor I have any wish to coopt the capital-R label "Reformed" in the sense of "Truly Reformed." Nor have we ever claimed that we own the legitimate copyright to the R-label. In fact, to whatever degree the epithet "Reformed" reflects the attitudes and opinions of certain overzealous sacramentalists and puerile "Reformed Catholics," we have every wish to repudiate it as forcefully and explicitly as possible.

So for the record, when you hear some of the same people who profess to hate the "Truly Reformed" mentality now breathlessly intoning the verdict that John MacArthur is not "Truly Reformed"—as if they have finally exposed a dark, secret heresy worthy of a major headline at all the "TR watchblogs"—just bear in mind that I have been insisting I'm not "TR" ever since I was first tagged with that moniker. And it should be no surprise to anyone who is moderately sober that the pastor of the church I attend isn't "TR" either.

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Why Calvinism Necessitates Premillennialism

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote space at the beginning of each week to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. This excerpt is from a sermon titled "The Man with the Measuring Line," preached Sunday morning, 11 December 1864. Spurgeon's words resonate wonderfully with John MacArthur's much-discussed opening message from last week's Shepherds' Conference.

am not given to prophesying, and I fear that the fixing of dates and periods has been exceedingly injurious to the whole system of premillennial teaching; but I think I clearly see in Scripture that the Lord Jesus Christ will come—so far I go, and take my stand—that he will come personally to reign upon this earth.

At his coming it appears clear to me that he will gather together the Jewish people, that Jerusalem shall become the metropolis of the new empire which shall then extend from pole to pole, from the river even to the ends of the earth. If this be a correct interpretation of prophecy, you may read the whole of Zechariah 2 through and understand it; you have the key to every sentence: without such a belief; I see not how to interpret the prophet’s meaning.

Dear friends, we may sometimes refresh our minds with a prospect of the kingdom which is soon to cover all lands, and make the sun and moon ashamed by its superior glory. We are not to indulge in prophesyings as some do, making them our spiritual food, our meat and drink; but still we may take them as choice morsels, and special delicacies set upon the table; they are condiments which may often give a sweeter taste, or, if you will, a greater pungency and savor to other doctrines; prophetic views light up the crown of Jesus with a superior splendor; they make his manhood appear illustrious as we see him still in connection with the earth: to have a kingdom here as well as there; to sit upon a throne here as well as in yonder skies; to subdue his adversaries even upon this Aceldama, as in the realm of spirits; to make even this poor earth upon which the trail of the serpent is so manifest, a place where the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

If our view of prophecy be the correct one, it seems to be in perfect harmony with all the doctrines of the gospel. God certainly did elect his people the Jews; he made a covenant with his servant Abraham, and albeit you will remind us that this was only a temporal covenant, I would remind you that it was the type of the spiritual one, and it would be an unhappy reflection for us if the typical covenant should prove to be only temporary as well as temporal; if that came to an end, and if God cast away, in any sense, the people whom he did foreknow, it might augur to us the ill foreboding that mayhap he might cast away his spiritual seed also, and that those who were chosen as the spiritual seed of Abraham, might yet be cut off from the olive into which they had been grafted. If the natural branches are cast away for ever, why not the grafted branches too?

But here is our joy, the God who sware unto his servant Abraham that to him and to his seed would he give the land for ever, hath not gone back from his word; they shall possess the land; their feet shall joyously tread its fruitful acres yet again; they shall sit every man under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and none shall make them afraid; and so the spiritual seed to whom the spiritual heritage is given as by a covenant of salt, they also shall possess their heritage for ever, and of their rightful portion no robber shall despoil them.

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Note: Debates over eschatological charts and end-times fine points are virtually always off-topic here at PyroManiacs. For the comment-thread under this post, however, we'll make a brief exception to our usual rule, especially since this subject has already been batted around so enthusiastically for several days by our friends and our adversaries alike. Feel free to post your personal observations or arguments about the above remarks by Spurgeon.

If you're looking for a discussion of John MacArthur's opening Shepherds' Conference message, that's not actually the point of this post or the discussion thread below. If that's what you want to talk about—especially if you mainly want to fulminate, please head over to Challies or to the Pulpit Live blog, where that discussion is already taking place.

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