Inauguration Day Prayer #1: John Frame

posted by Dan Phillips

Series Introduction

I emailed this audacious request to several Biblically-faithful pastors whom I admire:

...I'm thinking ahead to Rick Warren's prayer at the inauguration — but that isn't the topic.

My request: would you send me, for publication, a draft of such a prayer you might pray, if Barack Obama had invited you to give the prayer at this particular inauguration?

Or if you would decline Obama's invitation, would you explain briefly why you would decline?

If you're too busy or don't find the idea appealing, that is of course absolutely fine.

So far, the first four respondents have answered separately. None of them has seen any of the others' submissions.

I plan to publish each response as a standalone between now and the morning of the inauguration.

The first to provide me with his response was the amazing John Frame. To most of you, Professor Frame needs no introduction (if needed, see here, here, or here). I've become a real admirer of Professor Frame's, and have benefited greatly from his lectures and writing.

My favorite Framian anecdote so far comes from Tom Chantry, whose father visited Tom when he was a student at Westminster in Escondido. One of Chantry's roommates asked his father, “Were you in the same class as John Frame?” The senior Chantry paused a moment and responded, “No one was in the same class as John Frame.”

Here is Professor Frame's gracious response to my request.

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Dear Dan,

I would accept the invitation only on the condition that I would pray in the name of Jesus Christ. If Mr. Obama accepted that condition, I would have to think long and prayerfully in preparation, which I cannot do now. But my current inclination would be to say something like this:

We pray to you our creator, the mighty king of kings and lord of lords, who governs all things that come to pass and rules over all the nations. You raise up rulers and cast them down at your own pleasure, in the pursuit of your just and merciful purposes. We thank you for the freedom we have to worship you, sought by the founders of this nation, freedom you have given to us through the righteous laws of this land. So we call on you to be with us again during this new era. Be with our new president and all the leaders of this country, that they may be willing to hear the wisdom of your word and thus may image your justice, mercy, and integrity in their public life. As the one who remains constant throughout history, and yet who ordains change from each moment to the next, move our leaders to know how to maintain the foundations of our nation, while changing to meet the demands of new situations. Be our rock, when so much is changing in our lives. We pray for those families whose loved ones have died in defense of our country, and we pray for the young men and women who continue to fight our battles, that they may be victorious, and that their efforts may bring about the fruit of peace. We pray for those who have experienced terrible losses through the changes in the economy, and we pray that the leaders of this nation may seek out the wisest ways of responding. Above all, pour out on this nation your Holy Spirit, that there will be revival in our land, that the hearts of many will be moved to seek you, and that they may find that new life you offer us of love, joy, and peace.

This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ,

AMEN

Dr. John Frame
Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy
Reformed Theological Seminary

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We're all grateful to Prof. Frame for taking the time to respond.

NOTE: Special Rule for all these posts: diss me as you see fit, but nobody disses my guests.

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Where is he right now?

Mystery quotation: the flesh

by Dan Phillips

It's been a good long while, so...how about another round of Mystery Quotation? This one goes well with our recent talk of sarkicophobia.

Remember, no tricks—

1. Use your memory (or guessing) alone
2. No electronic tools
3. No Googling
4. No murmuring about the "no tricks" rule
5. No murmuring about the "no murmuring" rule
   

And so, without further eloquence, here is your Mystery Quotation:

A young man, who had been "in fellowship with the brethren," wished to join the church at [omitted]. I knew that they would not grant him a transfer to us, so I wrote to ask if there was anything in his moral character which should prevent us from receiving him. The reply they sent was laconic, but not particularly lucid:—"The man _____ has too much of the flesh." When he called to hear the result of his application, I sent for a yard or two of string, and asked one of our friends to take my measure, and then to take his. As I found that I had much more ‘flesh’ than he had, and as his former associates had nothing else to allege against him, I proposed him for church-membership, and he was in due course accepted.

Have at it.

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Assurance to all

by Frank Turk

I want to relay a fictional conversation to you, between me at age 43 and me at age 21. I'll call the me of today "ME", and the me 20-odd years ago "HIM".

ME: 'sup dude? Long time no see.

HIM: Do I know you? You look familiar, but pretty fat.

ME: heh. Yeah. Listen -- I have something to tell you which is the most important thing you'll ever hear, and I need you to take me seriously for about 15 minutes, and then you can go about your business.

HIM: I'll give you 5 minutes, old dude. Then I have to see a guy about a Long Island Iced tea.

ME: OK, then listen -- How would you know if you were living your life the right way?

HIM: I'd be rich?

ME: No seriously -- how do you know if you're a good person?

HIM: I am. I'm good -- everybody says so.

ME: What if we compare you to God's law?

HIM: Um, what?

ME: What if we open up the 10 Commandme ...

HIM: (interrupting) Hang on, bub. You mean the 10 Commandments that Moses got from God on that mountain?

ME: yes -- see, I knew you'd know what I ...

HIM: (interrupting again) No, listen: don't judge me by mythology, OK? In order for me to accept the stone tablets as a source of information, I have to accept all kinds of other stuff because the stone tablets are meaningless without that other stuff. Like the plagues in Egypt -- and that thing with the Red Sea.

I don't believe in those miracles, so don't bring that law out to me. It's a fiction just like the Flood is a fiction and all that other junk.

Before we go after this, this is not a slam of WOTM -- it is actually an argument that WOTM is way more effective than demanding the belief in all OT miracles. See -- if "Old Me" hadn't taken the bait of "young Me" to distract from the fact of God's judgment, "Old Me" would not have been immediately outmanned.

So what do we do here? If you run around the internet, you'll find dozens of people -- well-meaning, God-fearing people -- who will at this point begin the apologetics for the supernatural. Defending the historicity of the Red Sea parting or whatever.

And that's what I was on about last week: seeking to make people believe the whole Bible before they can believe the Gospel is a mistake. And while we had a good little run of kudos in the meta, eventually someone said (in words to this effect), "Cent: there is no Gospel without all the miracles of the OT. If someone doesn't believe in the Flood or something, they don't believe the Gospel."

Well, that's ridiculous -- and I promised one (and here let me say it clearly: only one) follow up to that post so my point can be crystal clear.

(1) There is a difference between accepting the whole Bible as inerrant and sufficient and believing and repenting. The latter may (and in my opinion, will) lead to the former. The former is not required in order to do the latter.

(2) There is a difference between accepting the authority of the Bible and knowing for certain that Jesus is both Lord and Christ. The latter is apparently (Acts 2) the right offer of the Gospel; the former is a logical consequence of the latter.

(3) Proving any particular miracle (save two) is historically substantiated doesn't save anybody, and getting derailed by evidentialist apologetics when you are really seeking to preach the Gospel is really taking the unbeliever's bait to talk about his religion rather than talk about your good news.

Look -- don't trust me. Trust Paul.

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: ...

Now, before we get to what Paul did in fact say, let's think on this: he's not talking to Jews here -- not to people who had the books of Moses and the Prophets pretty much ingrained into them culturally. He's talking to the philosophers of Athens -- the pagans who seek an agrument. And there he doesn't start with the Ark of Noah. he starts like this:

"Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you."

And if you miss it, this is his argument from Romans 1 sets forth positively as a message to them rather than as a message against them. That's not to say that Paul affirmed that they had a right view of God: it's to say that Paul is telling them that they have the good sense to know that they have missed something, and he's here to tell them what they have missed. And notice that he doesn't then go after the miracle of manna from heaven:

"The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man ..."

Now think on this: there's no question that Paul is here appealing to Genesis here, right? God made Adam -- and in a second he'll strike the drum of "in His own image" -- and that's all he says about that, not trying to force the Greeks to accept, by the right authority of Scripture, a 6-day creation. He simply appeals to the fact of creation, and that man is created as is everything else. Watch:

"And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him."

That underlined bit is rather clever of Paul because it looks back at his initial plea that they know something of God. But he underscores that God wants them to know something about Him.

"Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

'In him we live and move and have our being'

as even some of your own poets have said,

'For we are indeed his offspring.'"

See: made in His image. That is, God is knowable because He made us in order that we should know Him.

"Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man."

And I think this is especially good here -- because Paul closes the gap from his opening statement -- by arguing that if God made everything, we shouldn't think of him as a picture in our minds or merely a picture we have made out of metal or stone: we should think of Him as a God who has made us children.

"The times of ignorance ...

That is, the times past when we were stupid enough to think of Him as merely in a temple, merely as a statue, merely as some thing and not our creator and father.

"The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed;"

Compare that fully to, for example, the Way of the Master. The reason Paul's message matters is that men are under condemnation.

"and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."

Can you really not see it here? The only miracle Paul makes necessary to receive the Gospel is the miracle of the resurrection. The only assurance we can have that God's judgment is coming is that Jesus was raised from the dead.

And, of course, the Greeks laughed at him for this -- for a host of reasons. But Paul didn't then break out with the evidentialist posturing. The necessary miracle of the faith Paul was evangelizing to was this resurrection from the dead by a man named Jesus.

See: the Greeks demand an argument, but Paul didn't give them their idolatrous worship at an intellectual altar. He gave them the only miracle necessary to be saved from the coming judgment.

You should be at least that wise to do the same.

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Happy day, and the aftermath

by Dan Phillips

Honestly, my brain has pretty much been all about my dear and only daughter's wedding. Rachael was stunningly beautiful, Kermit was very handsome, my wife was beautiful and radiant, my boys were dashing and terrific. Kermit and Rachael witnessed to their faith in Christ, I love them both dearly, and it was a very happy day.


Kermit and Rachael gave both their sets of parents many sweet and dear memories we'll treasure forever, which is a great good thing. Good for them (Ephesians 6:2-3), good for us (Proverbs 23:24-25). Squared away with the Lord, His church, their parents, they're starting out on a firm foundation, and we pray and hope great good things for them.

Me? Tired today, and happy for and about the lovely couple. Feet and ankles very sore. Don't want to offend Baptist readers by explaining why that is, though conceivably the answer could be on Youtube one day, and I keep humming Chicago's Mongonucleosis to myself.

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We're Living Proof that Depravity is Total

by Phil Johnson

ere's the closing zinger from an article in this weekend's New York Times Magazine:

[The] New Calvinism underscores a curious fact: the doctrine of total human depravity has always had a funny way of emboldening, rather than humbling, its adherents.

Reading that sentence made me feel a little like David must have felt when he was on the receiving end of Shimei's angry tirade in
2 Samuel 16:5-13. While I don't think it's a fair evaluation of Calvinism per se, there's enough truth in the remark to warrant a humble acceptance of the rebuke.

We can quibble about the "always." We can also argue that Mark Driscoll (he's who the article is about) is atypical in just about every way. We can point out that "Calvinism" is by no means the root of the Mars-Hill-Seattle idiosyncrasies the NYT writer was criticizing. We can also plead that in a postmodern world where doubt has been canonized as a virtue, any sort of strong conviction is going to be dismissed as "arrogant."

Still, that remark about Calvinistic arrogance has too much truth in it to be dismissed completely.

What do you think? Talk amongst yourselves.

(And let's not make this thread about Driscoll, OK?)

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Don't Pamper Your Doubts

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 "Unbelief Upbraided," a sermon preached on Thursday Evening, June 8th, 1876, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. Spurgeon's text was Mark 16:14: "He . . . upbraided them with their unbelief."

SHALL not dwell so much upon this particular instance of the disciples' unbelief as upon the fact that the Lord Jesus upbraided them because of it. This action of his shows us the way in which unbelief is to be treated by us.

As our loving Saviour felt it to be right rather to upbraid than to console, he taught us that on some occasions, unbelief should be treated with severity rather than with condolence.

Beloved friends, let us never look upon our own unbelief as an excusable infirmity, but let us always regard it as a sin, and as a great sin, too. Whatever excuse you may at any time make for others,—and I pray you to make excuses for them whenever you can rightly do so,—never make any for yourself. In that case, be swift to condemn.

I am not at all afraid that, as a general rule, we shall err on the side of harshness to ourselves. No; we are far too ready to palliate our own wrong-doing, to cover up our own faults and to belittle our own offenses. I very specially urge every believer in Jesus to deal most sternly with himself in this matter of unbelief. If he turns the back of the judicial knife towards others, let him always turn the keen edge of it towards himself. In that direction use your sharpest eye and your most severely critical judgment. If you see any fault in yourself, you may depend upon it that the fault is far greater than it appears to be; therefore, deal more sternly with it.

It is a very easy thing for us to get into a desponding state of heart, and to mistrust the promises and faithfulness of God, and yet, all the while, to look upon ourselves as the subjects of a disease which we cannot help, and even to claim pity at the hands of our fellow-men, and to think that they should condole with us, and try to cheer us.

Perhaps they should; but, at any rate, we must not think that they should. It will be far wiser for each one of us to feel, "This unbelief of mine is a great wrong in the sight of God. He has never given me any occasion for it, and I am doing him a cruel injustice by thus doubting him. I must not idly sit down, and say, This has come upon me like a fever, or a paralysis, which I cannot help; but I must rather say, 'This is a great sin, in which I must no longer indulge; but I must confess my unbelief, with shame and self-abasement, to think that there should be in me this evil heart of unbelief.'"

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Danish Humor

posted by Phil Johnson

ou'll get most of the following video just fine, even if you don't know Danish. It's an excerpt from Victor Borge's 80th birthday concert at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen in 1989. This was one of his most famous concerts, coming near the end of his performing career and about a decade before Borge died.

Here's an excerpt from Borge's obituary mentioning this concert:

Borge became an American citizen in 1948, but thought of himself as Danish. It was obvious from the numerous affectionate tributes and standing ovations at his 80th birthday concert in Copenhagen in 1989 that Danes felt the same way. In the concert at Copenhagen's Tivoli gardens, Borge played variations on the theme of "Happy Birthday to You" in the styles of Mozart, Brahms, Wagner and Beethoven—all executed with such wit that the orchestra was convulsed with laughter that a woman performing a piccolo solo was unable to draw breath to play. "Playing music and making jokes are as natural to me as breathing," Borge told Reuters in an interview after that concert.

The "woman performing a piccolo solo" is actually playing a recorder (not a piccolo). She is Michala Petri, famed Danish recorder virtuoso. She makes stunning recordings with her husband, Danish lutenist and guitar player Lars Hannibal. She's been performing to critical acclaim since she was a teenager.

I love the spontaneity of her performance with Borge, and the brave way she perseveres, even when he starts playing in a different key. The video is not subtitled, so I've included below the video a quasi-translation and keyed it to the time code for you:



To the concertmaster:
0:04: How does it begin?
0:08: Oh, you have to use the bow?
0:13: Please do that again.
0:17: You are very nervous; your hand is shaking!
0:22: One more time, please. You may shake, that is all right!
0:36: Yes, that was right!

To Michala Petri:
0:45: Does this key suit you?
0:48: What a great shame; I cannot stand that key.
2:26: Does this mean I have to play it all again?
3:56: You chose it yourself.
4:06: It sounds great. I am very happy about this. You spoil my birthday completely!
4:26: We try one more time; if it does not work I may take the flute from you.
4:38: Did you never consider playing the cello?
7:42: Is there a doctor here?
8:03: Would you like a glass of water?
8:20: I do that every morning.

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Two unrelateds: a sarkicophobia afterthought; and a TIWIARN

by Dan Phillips

Firstly

Following up on some of the thoughts in Tuesday's sarkicophobia post and meta, I find Spurgeon's meditation for this morning startlingly timely. To wit:

...The iniquities of our public worship, its hypocrisy, formality, lukewarmness, irreverence, wandering of heart and forgetfulness of God, what a full measure have we there! Our work for the Lord, its emulation, selfishness, carelessness, slackness, unbelief, what a mass of defilement is there! Our private devotions, their laxity, coldness, neglect, sleepiness, and vanity, what a mountain of dead earth is there! If we looked more carefully we should find this iniquity to be far greater than appears at first sight. Dr. Payson, writing to his brother, says, “My parish, as well as my heart, very much resembles the garden of the sluggard; and what is worse, I find that very many of my desires for the melioration of both, proceed either from pride or vanity or indolence. I look at the weeds which overspread my garden, and breathe out an earnest wish that they were eradicated. But why? What prompts the wish? It may be that I may walk out and say to myself, ‘In what fine order is my garden kept!’ This is pride. Or, it may be that my neighbours may look over the wall and say, ‘How finely your garden flourishes!’ This is vanity. Or I may wish for the destruction of the weeds, because I am weary of pulling them up. This is indolence.” So that even our desires after holiness may be polluted by ill motives. Under the greenest sods worms hide themselves; we need not look long to discover them. How cheering is the thought, that when the High Priest bore the iniquity of the holy things he wore upon his brow the words, “Holiness to the Lord:” and even so while Jesus bears our sin, he presents before his Father’s face not our unholiness, but his own holiness. O for grace to view our great High Priest by the eye of faith!

This is what I love so much about Spurgeon. He never writes as a Doctor of the Theory of Applied Christianity, much less as having flawlessly mastered that subject. Spurgeon ever writes as a redeemed sinner who has been in the trenches and knows them well. I can listen to him without feeling obliged to prefix each statement with "Theoretically...."

Spurgeon takes a clear-eyed and unromantic view of the complex mish-mash of motivations that plague every thought-process that pushes through our consciousness, including the holiest. The flesh really is a problem. We have not yet been delivered from the body of this death (Romans 7:14-25), there still is an internal battle (Galatians 5:17), and I very much doubt that we perform any conscious action without an admixture of motivations. ("Very much doubt that we do" is a humble-sounding way of saying "have no doubt whatsoever that we don't.")

So notice that Spurgeon's solution isn't to collapse into self-absorbed inaction until we achieve purity. It is — well, it's what Spurgeon's solution always is about everything, isn't it? It is to look to Jesus.

Every good and godly and holy thing we aren't, He is — and He is that on our behalf, before God. We'll never get to be like Him by looking to ourselves until we "arrive." Instead, we grow as "we all, with unveiled face, [behold] the glory of the Lord, [and] are ...transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

So get over yourself, get into Jesus, and get moving.

Secondly

This is a quick post, and I doubt I will do much at my own blog for the next couple of days, because... my dear and only daughter is to be wed this Sunday! (A bit more about that here, item two.)

We all are joyfully looking forward to this happy experience for the Phillips family, as Rachael honors the family who loved and raised her, and honors God in the launching of a new family created in the fear of God and respect for His name and word.

Until then, we'll be doing whatever we need to, to get things ready. After that, a rehearsal, a dinner, and ultimately I get to walk my dear Rachael down the aisle, as my dear wife beams on proudly and happily, and as my Josiah and Jonathan lead the usherings and bear the One Ring (er, Two Rings), respectively — and as I witness Rachael exchange vows with Kermit, honorably in the sight of God and the assembled witnesses.

I'll be armed with a tux... and an initially-dry handkerchief or two.

Join me in praying for Rachael and Kermit, and that the name of Jesus Christ be lifted up.

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The wrong miracles

by Frank Turk

Yeah -- wow. So I look down this morning and I see the image you see at the right there, and I realize I should have had a TeamPyro post today ready for you people because it's Wednesday.

How can it be Wednesday? What happened to Tuesday? Is this what it's like to get old -- to have days vanish?

As I deal with my existential crisis, Let me comment briefly (heh) on something that came up in the last couple of days which is bound to draw ire from a lot of people for a lot of reasons. I want to talk a minute about the apologetic value of defending OT miracles.

Now, read this closely so you don't say something you ought to apologize for after you read (or have someone tell you about) what I will have written here: without any reservation, I affirm creation in 7 days, every single miracle and supernatural event of both the OT and the NT, and I affirm that God can do as He pleases in and above Creation because He's the creator and sustainer. So as you read this, don't hear me say that I discount the miraculous.

But here's the thing: I believe that God can do all those things -- a global flood, preserving all the animals in a boat, parting the Red Sea, speak through dreams, etc. -- because I have faith in God. The Bible's authority speaks to me because my faith makes me ready to hear what the Bible says and receive it and believe it. When I didn't have faith in God, it all looked like gibberish to me.

That doesn't mean the Bible didn't have the authority to speak to me on these issues: its authority is above and before my willingness or ability to listen. And in the end, because the Bible has the authority is has, people are going to be judged by that standard in the end.

In that respect, the Way of the Master approach to evangelism is a wholly-valuable approach, presuppositionally, to telling people the truth about their real problem before God. It doesn't seek to get them to first, for example, accept a 6-day creation before showing them that the Law says they are sinful people under condemnation. They know in their hearts what the law says (Rom 1-2)(Rexella - thx van Impe groupies everywhere), and WOTM is an appeal to that -- which, I think, is a good thing.

But think about that in terms of the apologetic value of defending OT miracles -- or even NT miracles (excluding 2, which I will get to in a minute) -- to unbelievers. There's no sense in doing that at all -- because they could believe all the miracles and still miss the point of the Old Testament. Look at this from John 6:

So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum, seeking Jesus.

When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal."

Then they said to him, "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?"

Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."

So they said to him, "Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'"

Jesus then said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst."

You know: these are Jews who believe that Moses made miracles in the desert, and that they can trust the Torah to tell them the truth about the history of that time. But here they are, with Jesus standing in front of them, frankly missing the point. They believed the OT miracles -- and missed the Messiah!

So before you break out the apologetic argument to substantiate any or all of the miracles in the Old Testament, keep something in mind: those miracles, in the best case, are merely parables about Jesus -- however historically-accurate they may be. Believing in those miracles doesn't give you faith in the one who is just and also the justifier of the ungodly.

On the other hand, what if we were wiling to say something like this: "Listen [unbeliever's name goes here]: I'd be willing to stipulate your unbelief in the miracles God made in Israel if you'd be willing to talk to me about one of two non-negotiable miracle of the Christian faith. Paul, who was the first global evangelist for my faith, said that if the resurrection was not true, then he was himself a liar and all his followers were the most-pathetic of all men. Let's talk about the miracle of the ressurection."

In that miracle, we also get a front-door to the other non-negotiable miracle of our faith -- which is forgiveness of sin. You know something? If we spent as much energy on appealing to people to repent because God -- who ought to rightly judge them -- has provided a solution to the problem of His wrath -- a miraculous solution, because there's no logical or natural solution to His wrath except our punishment -- think of all the really-worthless arguing we'd have to give up.

Don't waste your time on the wrong miracles. The flood of Noah is not good news: finding out that the tomb is empty, and Jesus Christ is risen -- a sign of His power and His authority, and of the worthiness of His sacrifice -- is actually Good News.

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TSK weighs in

een awhile since we've said much about the Emergenting situation. Here Tall Skinny Kiwi has reviewed my review of Emerging diversity. He's very kind.

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Stunned, stymied and sidelined by sarkicophobia

by Dan Phillips

New year — new word! Sarkicophobia.

Sar´-kĭ-kə-fō´-bē-ə

Derivation: In the NT, the term σαρκικός (sarkikos) is commonly translated "fleshly" or "carnal." It is an adjective derived from sarx, "flesh," and means belonging to the flesh, pertaining to the flesh. It occurs in Romans 15:27; 1 Corinthians 3:3 [twice]; 9:11; 2 Corinthians 1:12; 10:4; and 1 Peter 2:11. Sometimes it is used simply of material things (Romans 15:27; 1 Corinthians 9:11), and sometimes of attitudes or thinking that is dominated by the flesh (i.e. unredeemed, un-Christian thinking or attitudes; 1 Corinthians 3:3; 2 Corinthians 1:12).

Formation: Unlike nomicophobia, there actually is an existing (if little-used) English word to use: sarkic. The rest is easy.

Meaning: I would use this of folks who so fear obeying God "in the power of the flesh" that they'd rather do nothing, than do something carnal. Whatever their theory, their practice can be summed up in this motto: better to disobey God outright, than obey Him in the flesh! Or, Better do nothing for God's glory, than do something fleshly for God's glory!

The result is not only paralysis, but a particularly repulsively and repugnantly pious form of paralysis. You dursn't confront these folks for their sin in disobeying God. Do that, and you mark yourself as shallow and — well, carnal! Because clearly, you don't understand: when they disobey God, it's really because they love God so much! It's because they just want Jesus to be all, and God to be all, and themselves to be nothing, like little lead soldiers melted down into the big molten vat of Godness.

It's the "thinking" that underlies the ever-popular (and never-Biblical) mantra for daily living: Let Go and Let God.

Illustration: reading Andrew Murray and the "higher life" sorts will freeze you up like this. Murray will so terrify you of the thought of acting in the flesh, that you'll collapse into goo. You will want to be a glove on Jesus' hand, moving only when He moves, dissolving into nothing that He may be all in all.

Among these folks, it's all clothed with (masked in?) gloriously spiritual and mystical language, and sounds absolutely wonderful. I mean — who wouldn't want that? What Christian wouldn't like to quit striving and struggling and battling and sweating and groaning... and failing? What Christian wouldn't like to be so mastered by Jesus that he lives and breathes and emanates Jesus, so that Jesus lives through Him in the sense of replacing his will and responsibility?

Again, this is seen in the phrase: "Stop trying to live the Christian life, and let Jesus live it through you!"

Aside: do you see, though, that this only moves the goal, the marker? It doesn't remove it? The idea is that I stop getting my grubby hands all over everything, and let Jesus control everything. Stop trying to do things right — in fact, that's the problem: I keep trying to do things right. And that's wrong. I have to stop trying, and let Jesus do it.

Okay, so then... why isn't He? Who's stopping Him? Well, I am. Because I haven't let Him right. I haven't yielded right. I haven't adopted the right resting, yielding attitude.

So you see, it's still me, me, me. It's just that we've moved the focus from my obeying right, in faith and by grace (which is an explicitly Biblical focus), to my yielding right (which is not). And I still fail, because I have to strike the right mystical attitude to shift into "J" for Jesus-life. If I'm not there, there's something more for me to do.

So even apart from being un-Biblical, it's nonsensical. It collapses on itself.

Anecdote: I was infected with this very early in my Christian life. It seemed natural enough to me because of its similarity to the cultic teaching from which I'd been saved. Then we believed that God was all and in all, and we just needed to "manifest" the God-life. This teaching is very similar, only it focuses more on Jesus rather than the mysticized redefinitions of Religious Science.

So, like J. I. Packer and many Americans as well, I tried and tried. That is, I tried not to try. I tried to melt... er, that is, to let myself be melted. (But wait, if I'm doing the not-doing... if it takes me to not take me to... whoa, like I said, this gets really confusing....) And, like J. I. Packer, it made me pretty miserable.

But my circle of Christian friends was also infected, and we all had the same fear: acting "in the flesh." We were afraid of going to church in the flesh, witnessing of Christ in the flesh, praying in the flesh, studying the Word in the flesh, obeying the Word in the flesh. So, for fear of doing any of those things in the flesh, we'd stop doing them altogether. Some of us could be pretty smug about it, too, and could look down on others who were very energetically involved in church, witnessing, and holy living — but we were pretty sure that it was, you know, in the flesh.

It came to a head for me in my first course of pastoral training. It's quite a long story in itself, but the bottom line is that I'd gone from being a lazy, undisciplined student before my conversion, to being very committed to immersing myself in Greek so as to master the New Testament.

But many of my fellow-students wouldn't. They wouldn't study too hard, get into it too deeply. Why? Whyever not?

You've already guessed: all that studying was in the flesh.

The effect of sarkicophobia on me was that I was ever taking my spiritual pulse, ever checking within, freezing up, paralyzed, spiraling down into deeper and deeper morbid introspection. In the name of "looking to Jesus" (revealed in His Word) I was constantly looking to myself, within myself.

And so what should I do? Should I leave off the hard, sweaty, grueling work of study and "let God," for fear of studying in the flesh?

In short: God set me free. Somewhere around that time I began to realize how comparatively simple, straightforward, and in-broad-daylight New Testament Christianity was. Never ever did you see an apostle or Christian on the side of the road, locked in a whirlpool of introspection over serving God by Spirit-enabled, faith-motivated, grace-empowered obedience to Gospel commands in the flesh. Nor did we ever read of an apostle issuing a series of commands in Christ's name, then immediately cautioning his readers against obeying them in the flesh.

Nor was the concept of flesh introduced by Paul to make Christian living more complicated. True, he depicted the fact that the flesh complicates Christian living (Romans 7:14-25); but he never compounds the issue by horror-stories of grace-saved, born-again, Spirit-baptized Christians living for God's glory in the flesh — as if it were some sort of indefinable mystical state of being, more powerful than the Holy Spirit and the new nature.

True, the apostles warned against pride, arrogance, lust, covetousness, divisiveness, bitterness and such things; and, true, these are works of the flesh (Galatians 5:19-21). But Paul says those works are "obvious, apparent, plainly evident" (Galatians 5:19). Never would Paul have interrupted an aglow, on-fire, Christ-loving Christian from telling the Gospel, and told him to go to his closet and stop witnessing until he was sure he wasn't doing it in the flesh.

And so I decided — about Greek and a great many other things. I'd give it everything God gave me to give, out of love for Christ, and to be of use to His church. And if it made me arrogant, I'd take the arrogance to the Cross, and deal with it. And get on with keeping His commands.

Because that's what love for God is (1 John 5:3), and that's what people who love Jesus do (John 15:14)..

I wasn't going to use sarkicophobia as an excuse to avoid all-out living for God's glory, through grace, by the Spirit's power, in obedience to the commands of God.

In sum: sarkicophobia creates people locked in perpetual self-absorption in the name of Christ, ever taking their spiritual pulse, immune to direct appeals from Scripture to believing obedience. The last thing it produces is Christ-centered, God-glorifying, robust, hearty, daring, fruitful, pioneering, world-rejecting Devil-defying Christians.

And that's a bad thing.

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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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Human Philosophy and Scientific Hypotheses Cannot Deliver "Truth"

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 "The Greatest Fight in the World," Spurgeon's final manifesto.

he history of that human ignorance which calls itself "philosophy" is absolutely identical with the history of fools, except where it diverges into madness. If another Erasmus were to arise and write the history of folly, he would have to give several chapters to philosophy and science, and those chapters would be more telling than any others.

I should not myself dare to say that philosophers and scientists are generally fools; but I would give them liberty to speak of one another, and at the close I would say, "Gentlemen, you are less complimentary to each other than I should have been." I would let the wise of each generation speak of the generation that went before it, or nowadays each half of a generation might deal with the previous half generation; for there is little of theory in science to-day which will survive twenty years, and only a little more which will see the first day of the twentieth century.

We travel now at so rapid a rate that we rush by sets of scientific hypotheses as quickly as we pass telegraph posts when riding in an express train. All that we are certain of to-day is this, that what the learned were sure of a few years ago is now thrown into the limbo of discarded errors.

I believe in science, but not in what is called "science." No proven fact in nature is opposed to revelation. The pretty speculations of the pretentious we cannot reconcile with the Bible, and would not if we could. I feel like the man who said, "I can understand in some degree how these great men have found out the weight of the stars, and their distances from one another, and even how, by the spectroscope, they have discovered the materials of which they are composed; but", said he, "I cannot guess how they found out their names."

Just so. The fanciful part of science, so dear to many, is what we do not accept. That is the important part of science to many—that part which is a mere guess, for which the guessers fight tooth and nail. The mythology of science is as false as the mythology of the heathen; but this is the thing which is made a god of. I say again, as far as its facts are concerned, science is never in conflict with the truths of Holy Scripture, but the hurried deductions drawn from those facts, and the inventions classed as facts, are opposed to Scripture, and necessarily so, because falsehood agrees not with truth.

Two sorts of people have wrought great mischief, and yet they are neither of them worth being considered as judges in the matter: they are both of them disqualified. It is essential than an umpire should know both sides of a question, and neither of these is thus instructed. The first is the irreligious scientist. What does he know about religion? What can he know? He is out of court when the question is—Does science agree with religion? Obviously he who would answer this query must know both of the two things in the question.

The second is a better man, but capable of still more mischief. I mean the unscientific Christian, who will trouble his head about reconciling the Bible with science. He had better leave it alone, and not begin his tinkering trade. The mistake made by such men has been that in trying to solve a difficulty, they have either twisted the Bible, or contorted science. The solution has soon been seen to be erroneous, and then we hear the cry that Scripture has been defeated. Not at all; not at all. It is only a vain gloss upon it which has been removed.

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