Christ the Logos Unifies All Reality in Himself

Christ the Logos unifies all Reality in Himself

The Day of the Lord will usher in the third cosmology known as the new heavens and the new earth (2 Pet 3:10-13).

“Knowing the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Cor 5:11). When God purges the universe by fire, this burning purification process will extend to the very nuclei of atoms (2 Pet 3:10-12). In terms of this cleansing of the cosmos, it could be said, “God will do Himself to the creation.” By that phrase is meant that God will ‘press down’ His moral majesty upon the entire creation in a cosmic-wide event that extends down to the smallest particle. He will reorder the cosmos to a pristine corruption-free state.

The event known as the Day of the Lord is a critical component in the role of Christ the Logos in biblical cosmology (Revelation chapters 5; 14; 19ff.). Sadly, a thorough going grasp of this central doctrine of cosmology is missing in much of Christian ministry today. And in response to checking the spread of new age paganism, my Georgia pastor friend said, “The cosmology bomb has to hit!” What he means is we will not break out of our limp-wristed anemic Christianity until we proclaim the ramifications of Christ the Logos, Lord of cosmology.

As the Creator of the universe and its order, Christ is central to the study of biblical cosmology (Col 1:16-17).

The Son of God is eternal and self-existent, the divinely acknowledged focal point of reality, preeminent over all existence. Christ the Logos is the origin and goal of all created things. Thus, rationality, logic, and meaning are inherent in the creation because it is the purposeful expression of our infinitely wise Creator.

At the incarnation, Logos, the eternal utterance of God entered His own creation as the God-man (Jn 1:14). He did so to obtain eternal redemption (Heb 9:12). The cosmos is thus, as ordered and explained by its Maker, the intellectual property of Christ, “for all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Him” (Col 2:3). He owns all things, directs all things, and will bring all things to a reconciled consummation according to His eternal will (Eph 1:9-10; 3:8-12; Col 1:20).

One of the dangers of neglecting cosmology is the church lapsing into retreat mode pondering the prospect of moral surrender in the face of the world’s relentless pressure. It seems that every year another Bible college raises the white flag, abandoning its scriptural stance on Genesis in favor of old earth theistic evolution. Evangelicalism has been substantially weakened by this subtle form of pseudo-science to which so much of the church has given safe harbor.

Consider that the secular humanist academy teaches its students that they are nothing more than a jumble of atoms. Public university students hear this worldview from their professors. If the student is of evangelical persuasion, he hears the opposite for 40 minutes on a Sunday. What a quandary, church-going students hear of God in one ear, and in the other

The Glory of Christ

that the creation is a meaningless coincidence. Philosophic naturalism gobbles up the truth claims of Scripture, relegating them to myth. Can a thirty-minute bouncy devotional homily on a Sunday morning effectively counter our culture’s dualism?

The Western world is undergoing an historically new phenomenon; burgeoning technological achievement coupled with appalling biblical illiteracy—resulting in an educated populace without fear of God. Important to the fear of the Lord is our commitment to biblical cosmology (Rev 14:6-7). For, the fixed order which God has put in place has at its core: male and female, marriage and family, and fatherly headship. Thus, it is no surprise that when the academy became apostate and atheistic, it declared war upon God’s creation structures of heterosexual marriage, family, and biological patriarchy. Consequently, the progressives have characterized God’s good institutions as ‘oppressive’.

A genuine fear of the Lord involves our continuous pressing in upon our created purpose—our telos, or created design for glory.

For a telos of glory is our creational identity, we exist for God’s glory. What’s more, all that our Creator has made has a particular telos. In other words, a goal or design in how it will glorify God. This all-pervasive truth extends to even simple forms of life. Fireflies flash to the glory of God, kangaroos hop to the glory of God, and good bacteria break down substances to the glory of God. And, if a humpback whale could talk, it would say, “I sport in the sea to the glory of God, that is my telos!” God’s fixed order in cosmology is a foundational and central piece of His glory story. But it is man who has departed from his telos.

‘Do you not fear Me?’ declares the Lord.
‘Do you not tremble in My presence?
For I have placed the sand as a boundary for the sea,
An eternal decree, so it cannot cross over it.
Though the waves toss, yet they cannot prevail;
Though they roar, yet they cannot cross over it.
‘But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
They have turned aside and departed.
‘They do not say in their heart,
“Let us now fear the Lord our God,
Who gives rain in its season,
Both the autumn rain and the spring rain,
Who keeps for us the appointed weeks of the harvest”
(Jer 5:22-24).

The prophet Jeremiah comments further on man’s departure: “Thus says the Lord, ‘Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you will find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it’” (Jer 6:16).

But praise be to God, He will not leave Adam’s entire race in self-imposed ruin. For, the five great ‘beats’ of redemptive history are: creation, fall, redemption, judgment, and restoration. That fifth beat, restoration involves the perfect recovery of created order. But a great assize or judgment is coming first (Heb 9:27). Romans chapter nine teaches that those who know Christ are vessels taken from the same lump of defiled clay as vessels of wrath and dishonor. But, in His matchless grace and electing love, God through Christ takes lumps of corrupt clay and makes them vessels of mercy and grace (Rom 9:22-24). What a cause this is to fear God; for on Judgment Day, He will ‘pour out’, and reveal the contents of each vessel. Will it be spiritual fruit exalting His unmerited mercy and grace, or will the contents be a lifetime of sin and selfish ambition? There will be no hiding in that Day, for God will reveal the secrets of men’s hearts (Rom 2:16).

God’s plot is an all-consuming metanarrative, a totalizing life view.

All history will be consummated in Christ when He sums up all things in heaven and in earth in Himself (Eph 1:9-10). In the purification of the cosmos, He will thoroughly shake everything which exists right down to the atomic level until the only thing remaining is the everlasting Kingdom of God. This event is associated with God described as ‘a consuming fire’—burning like a furnace, consuming all that is not like Him in holiness—indeed He will ‘do Himself to His creation’ (Heb 12:28-29).

Christ’s glorious second advent will be accompanied by cosmic disasters the scope of which our imaginations are incapable of conceiving (Rev 6:12-14). His shaking of creation will extend to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, beyond our telescopes (Hag 2:6; Heb 12:26-29). For the Son of God is the stone cut out without hands who will reduce all human structures and systems to powder carried away by the wind, in preparation for the new heavens and the new earth (Dan 2:35-45).

When we use the phrase, “God will do Himself to the creation” at the Day of the Lord, illustrations and analogies of that event elude us. But one inadequate one came to mind which falls infinitely short of Christ’s parable of the wicked husbandmen in Matthew 21:33-43. Imagine someone giving you a budget without limits for building your earthly dwelling. Your dream home would be designed according to your specifications, and you would choose everything about it including landscaping, functional features, décor, location etc. The design you would choose would say a great deal about you. But, say that your plans got into the hands of an evil and woefully incompetent architect, and after waiting for months, you looked at the blueprints and saw the following: the jacuzzi was in the garage, the garbage composting pit was in the dining room, the toilets were in the living room, and the dog run was in the kitchen. To make matters worse, the contractor had trucked to the building site hundreds of felons to live in your house and on your property!

You would be justly outraged at the chaotic disorder, and you would take the appropriate corrective action. Because to enjoy your dwelling and your property, you would make right everything that was wrong, right down to every square inch of what you own and what you have designed. Only then would it comply with your plans and wishes and reveal your purposes. This is but a feeble example to show how Almighty God will exercise His righteous indignation on that great day, the Day of the Lord. To make a new heavens and earth, Christ the last Adam must reverse the ruin caused by the first Adam. Christ’s sovereignty, incarnation, and all-sufficient redemptive work, including His resurrection is the warranty that a new cosmos is coming (Rom 4:23-25, NKJV).

When we teach these vital truths of biblical cosmology, it is important that we keep Christ at the center.

Attacks upon Christo-centric biblical cosmology come from this present evil world in which the powers of darkness have over the millennia, introduced lying philosophies to take men captive (Col 2:8). What we owe God by virtue of being created in His image, gets erased by Darwinism. Afterall, if human beings are but a species formed in the image of an animal then we owe God nothing, and holiness of life is not required (Rom 1:23-27). The damnable lies of paganism need the theory of evolution to obscure humanity’s core identity as the image and likeness of God.

Christ as the center is expressed in Scripture as Him being the ‘Light of the World’ (see John chapters 1, 8 and 12). The Son of God is this world’s appointed light. Light is the ultimate metaphor for truth. He is the source of absolute truth. Our Lord’s title, ‘Light of the world’ touches all of life, for how we know what we know with certainty is only found in Christ. He is God’s appointed illumination to mankind regarding certainty of knowledge (Jn 1:4-9). No wonder those outside of Christ so often say ‘we cannot know anything with certainty’. Well, for them, that is true! For apart from Christ, in their darkened condition, they do not know where they are going, no matter how many academic degrees they possess (Jn 12:35). Conversely, believers are assured that all the treasures of God’s wisdom and knowledge are found in Christ (Col 2:3). Our Lord has, by God the Father’s appointment, absolute epistemic authority—He is the only final source of certainty of knowledge. If you do not walk in His Son’s light, you will sentence yourself to skepticism, atomism, pessimism, and hopelessness.

When Christ, Lord of cosmology is missing from our teaching a host of spiritual ills may manifest themselves.

A number of these ills, or symptoms are described in the following list:

1. Without a foundation in Christo-centric biblical cosmology, a church goer experiences a weak grasp of the significance of his telos as the image and likeness of God, created for His glory in all aspects of life.
2. A second symptom is the breaking apart of the body soul binary—manifested as the devaluing of embodied life, which is accompanied by a discounting of our bodies as our chief spiritual resource. Pornography ‘feeds’ on this symptom.
3. A third symptom is the ripping from Christ’s hands His control over all existence, followed by crediting the control of the cosmos to the laws of science. An old earth view of Genesis implies that natural law is capable of imposing positive upward change. This can open a door to the lie of an autonomous universe that is self-sustaining, self-evolving, and self-interpreting.

4. Fourth, without instruction in God’s relation to the creation, there is a tendency toward the privatizing of Christian experience so that it becomes inward, self-focused, and pietistic.

5. Fifth, there is a palpable metaphysical lostness in which even a professing Christian cannot answer the question with biblical accuracy and authority, “What is prime reality?”
6. The sixth symptom is a reductionist trivialized approach to doctrine. For without the determined goal to instruct in the majesty of Christ the Logos, church goers will have little idea of the dignity and glory of the One who judged our sins in His own Person.
7. Where Logos doctrine is weak or absent, Christian experience tends to move toward a man-centered, manageable ‘pragmatic’ form of Christianity that is missing the foundations of God’s awe-inspiring transcendence.

8. Next, as Christianity is shoved into a subjective category, the church feels the pull to look to rationalism for ‘real knowledge’ rather than to divine revelation. Consequently, a devotional approach to the Christian life ‘eats up the life of the mind’. Lightweight devotional reading replaces transformational Scripture meditation. Comfortable preaching replaces masculine preaching and its attendant discipline of ‘theologizing’. Consequently, Christ is seen as Lord of spiritual things, and not necessarily of the cosmos itself. This leads to a divided life which pulls apart faith from practice, reason from revelation, and truth from life.

9. And finally, when Christ the Logos is not proclaimed, there tends to be an egregious neglect of Christ’s offices of Prophet, Priest, and King in the life of the church. Paradoxically, this gives the church tacit permission to settle into a business model of ecclesiology, “we’ll run things while Christ is away.” In that approach, the church exists to perpetuate itself, and as David Wells warned, ‘the church replaces God’. Hyper-structuralism is often joined to authoritarianism which stifles the organic nature of the church. Elder meetings become staff meetings, held to conduct the business of the church. Ministry and love feasts become events. Prayer meetings become flat and one dimensional, dominated by an inordinate attention to temporal needs rather than to bringing every member to maturity (Col 1:28-29).

Christ in unifying all reality, is also the focal point, goal, and purpose of all existence.

The fact that truth is a divine Person (Jn 14:6), and truth is only known by a relationship with this divine Person is a poignant commentary upon our utter dependence on Him as His creatures (Jn 18:37). Liberals like to say that Christianity is one of many religious options. May the Lord have mercy upon them, for Christ truly is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:13). Everything outside of Him is but confusion and soul-damning darkness—a runaway descending elevator with cables cut, plummeting into hell. In unifying all reality, Christ does what the greatest philosophers in history could not do. He unifies being and becoming; temporal and eternal; visible and invisible; material and immaterial; created and uncreated reality. These central truths baffle us, for how could the Creator take on creaturehood? How could the timeless One become subject to time for 33 years? No wonder Paul describes Christ as ‘God’s mystery’ (Col 2:2-3).

Christ is the first ‘heavenly man’—the prototype of the glorified man; the ‘first fruits’ of the resurrection to come (1 Cor 15:23-28; 45-48). In Himself, in the hypostatic union He joins the human and divine. And by this union, we are brought as near to God as a creature could possibly be. In Himself, He unites all redemptive history—for every program of God is carried out and fulfilled in Him. His titles delineate His roles in redemptive history: Creator, Logos, Lawgiver, Light, Lamb, Lion, Judge, Alpha and Omega, Lord of the cosmos. No greater miracle can be imagined than God becoming one of His creatures. This was necessary for Him to be the perfect Mediator to bring His own from defiled dust to flawless glory.

In making all things new, the Son of God is the source of the coming ‘cosmic holiness’ in the new heavens and earth.

By cosmic holiness, we mean that in the new heavens and earth, every created thing will declare God’s praise in accordance with its created purpose (Rev 21:5). In unifying all reality in Himself, Christ is the solution to the dualisms that have afflicted the church since the beginning. For He presently rules His church by means of His three offices of Prophet, Priest, and King. And these three offices are dimensions of His mediatorial glory. In exercising these offices, He unifies redemptive history, He Himself being its goal. For all recorded time will be consummated and summarized in Him (Eph 1:9-10)—on that Great Day, history will prove to be the record of the honoring and the dishonoring of God and the results of each.

All things will dovetail into one unifying purpose, the revelation of the glorified Christ—seeing and beholding God in our nature. This is the purpose of the ages (Eph 3:9-11), to dwell with God in our nature—this explains the ultimate reason for human existence. The revelation and the communication of God to redeemed men is history’s destination. This is the glory for which we were created. The destiny of beholding this weight of glory is the highest possible happiness. This is why we are going through trials. We must be prepared by God to experience this communication of Himself (2 Cor 4:16-18).

How can the church experience a fresh discovery of Christ’s lordship over all creation?

Admittedly, the church has been beat up and fractured by a form of dualism which rips apart Christ’s sovereign dominion over creation from His Headship over redemption. How can the church return to the conviction that Christ unifies all reality? Answer: she must make it her highest goal to give to Christ the proper place His supremacy and preeminence deserve, for He is the eternal Logos. In the Christ-hymn in Colossians 1:15-20, Christ as Lord of cosmology is exalted in His role of absolute dominion. Colossians chapter one reveals that it is the Father’s purpose that Christ have first place in everything. For He possesses dominion and preeminence in creation, in redemption, and in judgment. By virtue of Christ having first place in everything, His vastness is explicated, exalted, and exhibited before our eyes of faith. The proclamation of Christ the Logos must be primary in our disciple-making. Since Christ is the Creator, Sustainer, and Goal of the church, His last command will be the church’s first priority (Mt 28:18-20). Thus, in the church’s prioritizing of the Great Commission, she will be an organic, flourishing, culture-making buttress of truth with all the spiritual vigor her Lord supplies as she abides in Him (Jn 15:1-10; I Tim 3:15). When Christ is preeminent in the church His bride’s preparation for glory will be central—for He is fulfilling her telos of glory that He might present her to Himself without spot or wrinkle (Eph 5:26-27; 2 Pet 3:14; Rev 19:7-8).

What is missing from most pulpits today is Christ’s cosmological power and authority as Creator, Designer, Owner, and Upholder. Few professing believers are conversant with His role as Logos—namely that all the laws and ordering principles which make our universe a beautifully ordered and rational cosmos, are upheld by Him every moment and exist for Him (Heb 1:3).

The sinner who believes as well as our aging cosmos both find their true telos in Christ.

Christ alone makes men new, and He will recreate a cosmos that’s new. ‘New’ in this context means telos realized—created purpose restored. The new heavens and new earth will be occupied by men and women made new—both the cosmos and the redeemed will together perfectly fulfill their telos. The harmony which Adam in innocence enjoyed with the earth in Paradise will be restored yet improved for Christ is the better Adam and His work infinitely superior. At the Day of the Lord, by Christ’s infinite power, everything except fallen angels and impenitent sinners will be restored to its proper telos—with no remnant of corruption. All things will ‘sing’ at their appointed frequency so that the whole creation will be a worshipping chorus making a joyful sound of praise to God (Ps 104:1-2; Is 55:12). How many professing Christians grasp this truth to such a degree as to be staggered by it?

Reality is unified and ‘consolidated’ in Christ, for the origin, sustenance, and definition of the cosmos belong to Him as Logos.

This restoration of the universe to function as a worshipping chorus is all owed to Christ ‘the Choir Director of creation’ who is carrying out every aspect of God’s plan. For all the Father does is through His Son. He creates, upholds, defines, reveals, saves, sanctifies, glorifies, judges, and restores—making all things new. The crowning reason the cosmos and its contents exist is that God might extend His glory by means of revealing and exhibiting His moral majesty. And His purpose of extending His glory is being carried out through His Son’s rule over redemptive history, and His Son’s entrance into redemptive history, and His Son’s fulfillment of redemptive history. “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him” (Eph 1:9-10).

Cosmology and Biblical Purity

Do we see all of life from the vantage point of biblical cosmology—from the perspective of God’s relationship to what He has made? It is essential that we do so if we are to be discerning and avoid the snares in our culture which are taking souls captive (Col 2:8). When we view our entire existence from the perspective of biblical cosmology it is intensely satisfying as well because cosmology shows us how all things are unified in God’s design for His creation. However, there is an added challenge before us: we live in an age in which modern science has taken God out of the realm of creation, order, and providence.

The result is that creation is no longer be seen as the theatre of God’s glory, but rather as a purposeless cosmic accident controlled by present laws and processes. The prevailing attitude today is, “We will let God be the subject of the Christian religion, but we will not bow to His claims to be Lord of history, Lord of the cosmos, and Lord of the individual.” How reminiscent this attitude is of Psalm two! “The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed” (Ps 2:2).

The Word of God corrects the willful ignorance of our age by constantly reminding us that created reality is a perfect comingling of physical and moral order (Ps 19; 96).

The knowledge of biblical cosmology has been lost in our Western civilization—namely the all-pervasive truth that God’s moral order is just as real as the physical created order. Cosmology begins with the fact that God made all things out of nothing (Heb 11:3). He is Creator, Upholder, and Definer of what He has made. This has profound ethical ramifications for our lives. For if we define something other than the way God does; or use something in a way God forbids, we are engaging in direct revolt against His Person. Biblical cosmology asserts that God is ultimate owner and Ruler over all, and we His creatures are stewards and co-rulers over His creation (Ps 8). Mankind was created to be a steward of both physical and moral order, thus we are not the ultimate owners.

We will give an account of our stewardship (Rom 14:11-12). Have we used what was entrusted to us for the purpose of serving and honoring God? To take the blessings of God for self without a view to stewardship is to be a usurper. Lucifer was the first usurper. In an act of theft and covetousness he sought to take what was not his, for selfish purposes (Is 14). All who are followers of Satan are engaged in the selfsame covetous acts of usurpation. Human usurpers refuse to pay the modest ‘rent’ of a lifestyle of thanksgiving unto God. Consequently, like their spiritual father the devil, they are engaged in the theft of God’s rightful glory. In speaking to the impenitent, Romans chapter two makes it abundantly clear that usurpers are living on borrowed time (Rom 2:5-9).

Biblical cosmology immediately impacts the issue of our battle for sexual purity.

Running the Race with Endurance

The hypnotic pull of illicit images is in part tied to an anatomical ideal for the human body. When yanked from the divinely ordained context, anatomical beauty is but an idol. Sexual idolatry, the worship of the creature instead of God involves tearing portions of God’s creation from their context or ‘habitat’ as creation structures, and selfishly using them for lust instead of for God’s glory. By way of example, pornography fragments one’s acting and thinking because it advances the deception that human anatomy can stand alone apart from the transcendentals or universals of truth, goodness, order, glory, morality, purpose, teleology, genuine beauty, and goodness. God forbids public nudity not only to prevent sexual lust, but also because male and female as the image of God is immensely weighty in significance. Our unclothed anatomy can never be a comprehensive statement of our creational identity as God’s own image and likeness. Mankind as a unity of body and soul cannot be depicted accurately as solely a biological or material creature.

The craving for sexual intimacy is a driving force in human experience.

But, taking those God-given desires to illicit sexual behavior and to erotic images instead of pursuing sexual oneness within marriage dishonors God and is ultimately unsatisfying and enslaving. Why does eroticism’s promise of satisfaction and fulfillment prove to be a mirage, leaving one empty, hollow, and distant from God? Why does porn produce the long-term fallout of guilt, shame, and self-recrimination? As biblical Christians we know the answers to these questions, and the solution. As Augustine observed, God made us to desire; He made us to love. “[But] when those desires are oriented away from God and toward our own selves, they result only in pain and destruction. [But] when those desires are [ultimately] aimed at God however, they bring about joy and pleasure.”ⁱ Stephen Nichols further states, “Edwards reminds us, that the nature of sin is enmity against God. Sin is hell-bent in opposition to God and to the design of God in the creation of the world, which was His own glory and the spiritual and eternal excellency and happiness of His creatures. If sin is opposition to divinity’s design, then the atonement is absolutely central and essential to overcoming that opposition and to accomplishing divinity’s design.”ⁱⁱ

Sexual oneness was created for just that, to consummate and build the covenant bond of marital oneness to the glory of God. Therefore, to use sexual stimulation NOT for the purpose of marital oneness but for self, represents a rejection of God’s design and a covetous abduction of God’s good gift—using it solely for self-oriented purposes. No wonder guilt, shame, and self-recrimination follow sexual impurity. For those who do not repent in obedience to the gospel, God’s judgment will hit like a sledgehammer someday warns Paul (Gal 6:7-8; 1 Thess 4:3-6, 7-8).

It is at this juncture that biblical cosmology can be a weapon in our arsenal against the bondage of habitual sexual lust.

Our culture offers us the lie of a divided life—namely that we can ‘successfully’ live with a set of beliefs which contradict our behavior. So pervasive is this lie that millions of professed believers have no clue that their lives belong in the very dangerous category of ‘hypocrite’. Hypocrisy was the constant target of the judgments uttered by Christ (Lu 12:56). Hypocrisy can be a short

step to apostasy (Phil 3:18-19). Biblical cosmology gives us a vantage point to see the soul-endangering absurdity of the divided life. Thus, biblical cosmology can assist us in reasoning through the issue of sensual temptation and our biblically required response of mortification of sin (Rom 8:12-13).

To provide a greater insight into the lie of the divided life, consider Satan’s own fall. In effect, Lucifer’s self-deceived reasoning was acted upon—the devil imagined that he ‘won’ his freedom and autonomy from God by rejecting his created purpose. His lie has now become his lifestyle—his imagined autonomy from God is founded on his rebellious act of attempting to transcend the created bounds and limitations of his creaturehood. But here is where cosmology gives us an indispensable lens—Satan’s rebellion did not create a new reality or new level of independent existence. What it did was put him in a death spiral—like a planet knocked from of its orbit Satan is careening toward a black purposeless eternity of wrath and crushing suffering.

Lucifer’s rebellion is the original source of self-exaltation. All acts of rebellion mirror Satan’s actions and his lie. Theologian A. H. Strong makes the following observation: Sin is a fundamental and positive choice or preference of self instead of God, as the object of affection and the supreme end of being. Instead of making God the center of his life, surrendering himself unconditionally to God and possessing himself only in subordination to God’s will, the sinner makes himself the center of his life, sets himself directly against God, and constitutes his own interest the supreme motive and his own will the supreme rule.

The use of pornography says, “I accept Satan’s cosmology; my yearnings for sexual oneness and beauty may be taken outside of their divine boundaries and context.”

Thus, porn serves as a fragmenting agent that cleaves in pieces God’s good and wise creation structures. For God’s creation structures constitute His glorious vision for relationships via His laws for social order. Porn deconstructs God’s created order and consequently jeopardizes one’s grasp of biblical theism. Why? Because the knowledge of God is only loved and retained when a unified life experience is flowing from reverencing and obeying God’s creation structures.

Culturally we are at a terrifying juncture. By casting away God’s design, or creation structures we are discarding the knowledge of our Maker. This delusion is destroying souls. It is a deception which says, “I can rip God’s good gifts out of their moral context and worship them—and at the same time I can know and worship the one true God.” Jesus says otherwise: no one can serve two masters. You will love one, and hate the other (Mt 6:24-26). Man cannot live a dichotomized lifestyle and retain the love of truth at the same time. God refuses to let us successfully approach Him when we allow our heart idols to remain precious to us, unmoved, and unmortified (Ezek 14:3-8ff.).

Either we love the truth of God and labor to conform our lives to that truth—or we live by our natural desires and consequently lose the truth by distorting it, neglecting it, devaluing it, and suppressing it, all to justify our illicit yearnings. Scripture examines our unfaithfulness and induces the repentance needed to reunite our lives (Ps 86:11). Thus, the Word of God has a rectifying role—it corrects our fragmentation borne of a divided life and emends our wrong interpretations of life. How we need constant course corrections by the Word of God. Sin and guilt throw mud in our spiritual eyes—and when we sow to sexual lust, it kills our ability to handle God’s truth objectively (Jas 1:21). To habitually retain one’s lusts, a person must distort the truth. For no one can live a radically dichotomized lifestyle for long—either his behavior must change, or the truth must be twisted or abandoned. Jesus described this truth-distorting activity as ‘hating the light’ (Jn 3:19-21).

God’s creation structures for male and female, marriage, and family are anchored in biblical cosmology. But by abandoning these creation structures our culture is nearing the precipice of destruction.

Discarding God’s creation structures is done in the name of freedom. Unhindered personal expression is the evil one’s definition of liberty. This is the old Edenic anarchy in the new garb of ‘human potential’. To love pleasure more than God is to be part of this revolt (2 Tim 3:4). Consider that all sin is a resentment of God’s moral majesty (Rom 8:6-8). Sin patterns involve a rejection of our ‘bounded-ness’—a defiance of the wise and good limitations and boundaries God has placed upon us. The flesh is magnetically attracted to the devil’s prevarication. For Satan’s lie about freedom says, “Liberty is freedom FROM divine design.” God says the opposite, freedom is UNTO divine design. In other words, God’s perfect plan declares that freedom is found in divine design.

Redemption restores the believer to God’s design in every created sphere. Heaven will be the perfect manifestation of God’s design for every sphere—social and physical. This is why heaven will be a place of indescribable beauty. By contrast, our culture continually parades false beauty. Gross sexual immorality, immodesty, and lewdness are being mainstreamed in the entertainment industry, numbing our understanding of God’s wise and perfect design expressed in cosmology. All the way back in 1947, Richard Weaver (Ideas have Consequences) lamented America’s departure from first principles. “There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot.” ⁱⁱⁱ

The cultural sexual assault is so prolific that moral shock value is being lost as corruption is normalized.

The ability to blush is nearly gone (Jer 6:15), for our culture’s mainstreaming of animal passions is removing any sense of why God requires purity, decency, modesty, self-control, and fidelity. Once this stage of normalizing immorality is reached, a society becomes ignorant of the truth that God as holy Creator has an absolute claim upon our lives as His image bearers. What we owe God in terms of moral perfection and worship completely slips from view.

Regarding God’s purpose, His in-breaking into human history can be viewed from the perspective of three mountains. 1) At Mt. Sinai God broke into human history by accompanying the giving of His Law with a terrifying spectacle of fire, quake, trumpet, and smoke which produced its intent of fear and dread (Heb 12:18-21). What a withering lesson; God must provide the way of approach, or the penitent will face death. 2) At Mt. Calvary God broke into human history by assuming the curse, guilt, and punishment of His covenant people in the death of Christ. The doors of mercy were flung open. 3) When Christ returns to establish the capitol of His Kingdom at Mt. Zion, the in-breaking will be in fire, wrath, destruction, and eternal judgment (2 Thess 1:7-9). The last days before Christ returns will be a time of apostasy (2 Tim 3:1-9). As with Israel in the days of the judges, everyone was doing what was right in his own eyes. This very attitude is now descriptive of our society—just as it was of Israel’s apostasy—it describes a people that once knew God (Judges 21:25).

Biblical cosmology defines the universe as a worshipping chorus of God—created to intone God’s excellence, perfections, power, wisdom, and majesty.

The creation or social structures which God designed to govern mankind constitute a ‘blueprint’ for humanity. Our loyalty to that blueprint is inseparable from our loyalty to God Himself. We do not love, serve, and glorify God unless we fully embrace His creation structures— acknowledging that His righteous laws are designed to order the social institutions He created. The foundational social structure is heterosexual, monogamous marriage. In the following statements, Al Mohler captures well the concept that marital sexual relations are in no way isolated from the overall significance of the marital bond in all its holistic dimensions:

[For] marriage is not merely the [lawful] arena of sexual activity, it is presented in Scripture as the divinely designed arena for the display of God’s glory on earth as a man and a wife come together in a one-flesh relationship within the marriage covenant. Rightly understood and rightly ordered, marriage is a picture of God’s covenant faithfulness. Marriage is to display God’s glory, reveal God’s good gifts to His creatures, and protect human beings from the inevitable disaster that follows when sexual passions are divorced from their rightful place.ⁱᵛ

“God’s gift of sexuality is designed to pull us out of ourselves” and our self-occupied concerns and desires and “toward our spouse” (Mohler). The man committed to sexual purity is living in a state of sexual integrity toward his wife. In order to pursue their mutual pleasure in the marriage bed, the husband “is careful to live, to talk, to lead, and to love in such a way that his wife finds her fulfillment in giving herself to him in love.” Their marital relations then become “the fulfillment of the entire relationship, and not an isolated physical act that is merely self-centered personal pleasure.” “[T]his man can be confident that he is fulfilling his responsibilities both as a male and as a man. . . His sexual desires are being directed toward the one-flesh relationship that is the perfect paradigm of God’s intention in creation.”

God has given the gift of sexual oneness in the moral context of the marriage covenant. Sexual purity, fidelity to one’s marriage partner, and self-control must govern our sexuality if we are to be obedient to the Lord (1 Thess 4:2-7). The Word of God, and not the flesh, is to set the standard for our behavior (Rom 8:5-9). Diligent control over our sexual desire is inseparable from marital commitment (Song of Songs 8:6-7; Prov 5:15-23). The USA is sexually sick, for cyberporn in combination with autoeroticism has enslaved millions of Americans.ᵛ William Struthers, Wired for Intimacy; How Pornography hijacks the Male Brain, said, “Pornography is the consumption of sexual poison that becomes part of the fabric of the mind.” He stated that repeated use carves out and erodes a neurological, emotional, and spiritual channel which eventually becomes an inescapable canyon.

The porn viewer uses his sex drive as a dynamo of lust—as he turns to pornography his desires are not turned toward a spouse but are turned inward.

Arousal through illicit images is tantamount to the seduction of the imagination and the corruption of his soul.ᵛⁱ This self-directed misuse of sexual desire becomes a ‘tutorial’ in selfishness. We are warned in 2 Peter 2:14 of a terrifying prospect—that by habitually sowing to lust it is possible to develop “a heart trained in greed.” Al Mohler again avers:

Pornography is a slander against the goodness of God’s creation and a corruption of this good gift God has given His creatures out of His own self-giving love. To abuse this gift is to weaken, not only the institution of marriage, but the fabric of civilization itself. To choose lust over love is to debase humanity and to worship the false god Priapus in the most brazen form of idolatry. The deliberate use of pornography is nothing less than the willful invitation of illicit lovers and objectified sex objects. . . The damage to a man’s heart is beyond measure, and the cost in human misery will only be made clear on the Day of Judgment.

“Internet porn plays a part in an increasing number of divorce cases.” Author and New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat has gleaned this fact from a survey of matrimonial lawyers. This has prompted Douthat to pose the question, “Is pornography use a form of adultery [for a married man]?” The author ‘“suggests that we should . . . regard infidelity as a continuum of betrayal.’” In other words, ‘“The internet era has ratcheted the experience of pornography much closer to adultery than I suspect most porn users would like to admit.’”ᵛⁱⁱ

The spiritual consequences of using hard-core pornography affect not only one’s fellowship with God and with other believers, but also, ultimately affect one’s grasp of biblical theism. Peter Jones notes that, “The masses are rendered insensate with a constant diet of sexual degradation, while at the same time, reassured by the spiritual and moral liberation that paganism offers.” Jones argues that liberty of self-expression in the area of sexuality has historically been an instrument for the “deconstruction of the biblical God and sexuality.”ᵛⁱⁱⁱ No wonder Satan is so passionately committed to the deconstruction of God’s design for our sexuality. One cannot live as a sexual libertine and expect to keep his or her biblical theism intact.

The biblical command to leave and cleave is central to growth in intimacy, trust, and commitment between the marriage partners (Gen 2:23-24).

‘Bonding’ or ‘companion-ing’ is a biblical value that is a prerequisite for building strong marriages (Deut 24:5; Eph 5:25). The biblical counselor is always to impress upon the pre-marital counselee that the Scriptures constantly call us to look to God in whom transformed relationships are possible. What God requires is beyond our natural capacities. The promise of the Word is that through the Holy Spirit’s power, we may become by grace those who enjoy God-glorifying marriages.ⁱˣ

God’s dominion mandate described in Psalm 8 extends not only to cultivating order in the physical creation, but also to the moral order which accompanies divinely ordained spiritual and

social laws. This means that mankind is accountable to God for his stewardship of the creation structures governed by the laws of God. This is intensely relevant to fathers and husbands. For the man is the priest of his family—he is to raise up a God-fearing community in the ‘miniature community’ of his family. This is only possible if the husband has high praise for the wisdom, love, and goodness of God manifested in divinely ordained creation structures set forth in biblical cosmology. The father and husband exercises dominion as he stewards God’s creation structures.

To look intently at this cosmological truth of the dominion mandate blasts us out of our privatized subjective view of religion.

Cosmology hits us with a revolutionary dose of reality by taking the issue of mortification of sin out of the truncated category of ‘my own private heart piety, and my own private struggle with lust’. Biblical cosmology places mortification of sin within God’s master plan and design for creation. For the husband and father is to exercise the dominion mandate in such a way that his marital fidelity becomes a culture-making act. For a Christian marriage not defiled by the infidelity of erotic images sets the climate for culture-making to take place. Fidelity to Christ, fidelity to the marriage covenant, and fidelity to biblical cosmological design are inseparable. How we need to be lifted out of our shrunken perspective of private erotic indulgence. We need God’s all-wise perspective—we need to stand atop the biblical vantage point of cosmology so that we might be staggered by the scope of God’s purpose and plan. The gloriousness of His design exposes the tawdriness of its counterfeit.

The ancient lie is intended to overturn and destroy God’s purpose for the creatures made in His image. As His creatures our creational calling is to reflect His perfections by aligning ourselves with His creation structures. God’s creation structures are at the heart of reality. The ancient lie sown in Eden was an offer to rise above our creaturehood by transcending the bounds and limits inherent in God’s design for us. Upon believing the lie, self would become the new integration point and the new reference point instead of Almighty God.

The evil one has never desisted from his efforts to deface the image of God by means of idolatry. The worship of created things is idolatry. This is how the devil further shatters the image of God—idolatry destroys our human unity as persons. By contrast the worship of God in Christ strengthens our humanness. Sexual idolatry is a dysfunction in worship (Col 3:5). Whatever we worship in place of God places us into bondage and servitude (Jn 8:34-36; Rom 6:16-22). The way out through Christ entails embracing a unified Christian experience—firmly anchored in biblical cosmology. Only when our lives are aligned with God’s prescriptions for our social relations will God be glorified in us through our relationships.

Idolatry is tied to false notions of beauty. Scripture imbues upon us that beauty has no existence independent of God.

True beauty is always joined to divinely ordained transcendentals of truth, purpose, moral context, design, covenant, goodness, wisdom, reality, and order. Biblically, beauty is to serve as a glory pointer to God. Beauty joined to the above transcendentals does just that. Beauty divorced from the divine context of transcendentals is idolatrous—it cannot serve as a glory pointer. For this reason, beauty is the most extensive battle ground for the eternal souls of men and women. “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man” (Fyodor Dostoevsky). The devil traps and enslaves through idolatry by removing beauty from divine transcendentals—the enemy offers beauty by itself, as if it can stand alone without serving as a glory pointer. Satan is the great compartmentalizer. In other words, he fragments our understanding of life—he fractures our understanding of God’s design for creation—and he does so to fragment the image of God by further fracturing human idolaters.

Only God at the center of our lives integrates us whereas idols dis-integrate us. As biblical cosmology is marginalized, the devil’s playing field is enlarged. Through doctrines of demons and the lying philosophies of the world, Lucifer shrinks God’s domain in the world to a tiny upper story religious sphere so that he as the deceiver may use the whole of creation for his idolatrous purposes. This ‘de-sacralization’ of the creation has become one of the devil’s prime tools for deception. ˣ Pagan cosmology, the worship of the creation is always the default position when creation’s role as an ‘inerrant’ revealer of God is rejected (Rom 1:18-20, 23-25). How do we escape this idolatry? We must insist upon the truth—that every square inch of our experience belongs to God. The depth of what we love on earth we must love for Christ’s sake—for all things exist for Him—they exist for our enjoyment, but ultimately to point to His excellence and goodness.

The evil one seeks to shipwreck the faith of many professed believers by suggesting to them that their Christianity is safe in a partitioned off compartment in their lives.

This is a deadly lie because true faith is a constant whole-souled act. All the faculties of our being are called upon to live in genuine faith in Christ. And not the least of these faculties of our being is our affections. Jonathan Edwards stressed that the religious affections are the fruit of a new heart, and that these affections are what moves the Christian life like a watch spring.ˣⁱ The Holy Spirit takes up residence forever in the true child of God and confirms to His child that God’s glory and our happiness are bound up together. Satan cannot counterfeit this sentiment—no natural man sees God’s glory and the creature’s happiness woven together in Christ. The hypocrite, says Edwards, speculates about spiritual things whereas the soul of the truly converted feeds on spiritual truths, upon Christ’s perfect suitability to save.ˣⁱⁱ The true believer is always growing in his affection for divine holiness, and consequently his disgust for what is unholy grows.ˣⁱⁱⁱ Strong love for Christ expresses itself in fruitfulness, self-denial, and mortification of our lusts.ˣⁱᵛ

Edwards shows us why a compartmentalized Christian life is impossible for any extended length of time. True Christianity is bound up in the believer’s religious affections. Christ will not share our heart with idols. As we have been stating, God’s creation structures are just as real as our own solar system. Our problem is that we tend to view his moral laws, including his laws governing social structures as separated from cosmology. We tend to buy into postmodernity’s lie that God’s laws for social structures are but arbitrary impositions of the church upon society rather than what they really are: creation structures which are the very moral fabric of the universe—the very foundation of freedom and dignity, and the bedrock support of a just society and an ordered civilization.

At the end of creation week God pronounced His benediction upon every creational structure declaring them all to be exceedingly good (Gen 1:31).

God’s blessing of His creation structures includes all the relations which He has sanctioned including social relations. Our whole lives then become an answer to God’s call. We could say that the gospel writes a new ‘script’ for us. It does so by transferring us out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of God’s Son, and by making us adopted sons of God born from above (Gal 4:5-7). This new life lived out is the warranty, proof, and evidence of possessing saving grace. The gospel pours the new believer into its ‘mould’—giving precise shape to our new life direction in Christ—a direction that makes our lives a living affirmation of the beauty of God’s creation structures. The power of the gospel raises us to newness of life—first making us right with God through Christ, then enabling us to obey God from the heart. The gospel is intended to radically transform us by causing our affections to be wrapped around things above (Col 3:1-4). It is all about spiritual seeing—about the perception of true source and true treasure. The gospel puts us in God’s story—into His plot so that His glory and our good are bound up together in the Person of Christ.

Biblical cosmology gives us a vantage point to see that our lives constitute a kind of biography under construction. God will read each person’s ‘biography’ aloud on judgment day (Rom 2:16). How sobering that we are becoming today what we will be tomorrow. Each person’s life will ultimately prove to be an object lesson to the watching universe. God will bring history to its consummation in Christ, and then history will prove to be an exhaustive lesson—declaring to the rational universe the results of honoring God and the consequences of not honoring God (2 Pet 3:10-14). Would we live any differently if we were convinced of cosmology’s message that my life will prove to be an object lesson to the rational universe—either of eternal honor or eternal dishonor?

The Christian must find his or her place in the battle of the ages, for it is a battle for ‘all the marbles’—for the eternal souls of men and women. Central in this battle is the human body— and the very epicenter of the battle is the sexual body. One’s body, with its sexuality, is intended by God to be a prime spiritual resource. The body is not for immorality, but for the Lord (1 Cor 6:13). Our body with its desires is either presented to the Lord each day, or it is presented to unrighteousness. So crucial is the human body with its sexuality to the battle of the ages that Paul commands his readers not to go on presenting the members of their body as weapons of unrighteousness. Instead present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as weapons of righteousness to God (Rom 6:11-13).

Biblical cosmology asserts that God’s character and His glory purpose for the creation constitute prime reality. God’s great purpose is to extend and maximize His glory through creation, providence, redemption, and judgment. This is central to reality. Aiming for God’s glory so that Christ has first place in everything is therefore the source of unity between every intellectual discipline, every aspect of creation, every aspiration of man, and every human longing.ˣᵛ As my friend Pastor Hal Farnsworth has said, “It is time, it is way overdue in the church; the cosmology bomb has to hit.”

Endnotes:

i Stephen J. Nichols, “Proclaiming the Gospel and the Glory of God,” in For the Fame of God’s Name, p. 376
ii Ibid, pp. 383-384
iii Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences, p. 1.
iv Al Mohler, “The Seduction of Pornography”
v Hindson and Eyrich, Totally Sufficient, pp. 191-193
vi Mohler, p. 3
vii Ross Douthat in Roberto Rivera y Carlo, “Porn Adultery & Marriage” Boundless Webzine, 2005
viii Peter Jones, “Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal,” Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, p.6
ix Hindson and Eyrich, pp. 195-197
x Paul Helseth, Northwestern College, St. Paul Minneapolis, MN
xi Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections, pp. 28-31
xii Ibid, pp. 166-167, 172-173, 197-198, 200
xiii Ibid, p. 317
xiv Ibid, pp. 352-354, 371, 374-375
xv Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman, The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University
Education, pp. 10-13

A Personal Checklist for Abiding in Christ

What does it mean “to abide” in Christ?”

TO ABIDE (N.T. Grk. meno) is to remain, to continue, to stay on. It is to abide in the sphere of, to dwell, to tarry, to remain in one place with someone. Metaphorically—to hold fast and to remain steadfast. In the Gospel of John, ‘abide’ refers to the closest possible relationship. It alludes to the believer’s mystical union with Christ—that of inner unity and fellowship. Abide, in the context of union with Christ does not mean holding a position, instead the sense is “allowing oneself to be held.” This is pictured by the branch abiding in the vine (John 15:2ff.).

To abide in Christ is not merely a spiritual experience, but life itself. It is a statement of Christ’s ownership of the believer—ownership extending right down to the depths of his being.ⁱ Countless genuine believers admit that their daily abiding in Christ is a haphazard, hit and miss affair, without a biblical ‘metric’ or clearly marked target. Movement toward the remedy involves a careful study of the biblical imperatives and promises associated with abiding in Christ. In this current article, the biblical aspects of abiding in Christ are fleshed out so that the reader may have a very useful ‘personal checklist’ for communion with, and devotion to, the Savior:

1. Abiding involves a willing submission to the Father's pruning. “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit” (Jn 15:2). Dead wood is worse than unfruitfulness because it leads to disease, stagnation, and decay. By means of discipline, the Father prunes away the deadness in our lives. Deadness is what is produced by the flesh, even in ministry! Fruit that remains is produced by the Spirit of Christ (Gal 5:22-24). After the Father disciplines us, He then directs us into fruitful activity by renewed abiding in Christ (1 Pet 5:10).

2. Abiding brings a growing awareness of our utter dependence upon Christ. “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:4, 5). We must consent to be utterly dependent upon Christ for fruitfulness. The “right kind of fruit” (Mt 7:16-20) can only be produced by the believer’s vital connection with Christ who is our life source. When the life of Christ permeates a man or woman because of abiding, fruitfulness is the result. This is the only kind of fruit that is acceptable to God. Abiding is a moment to moment reckoning of Christ as our ‘Source Person’ rather than an idolatrous dependency upon created things (see Phil 3:18-19).

3) Abiding is maintained by a life of faith, obedience, and prayer.

“If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples” (Jn 15:7, 8). Abiding in Christ means that the words of Christ are taken in and heeded. The words of Christ become the controlling dynamic in one’s life—so much so that they dominate exceptionally. Notice it is not just

The Pursuit of Godliness

abide in My words, but My words abide in you.

The one who abides believes Christ’s words and acts in accordance with them—thus he as the promise of effective prayer (Jn 14:13; 16:23). Our commitment to have Christ's Word dominate exceptionally in our lives is inseparable from our submission to Him as Lord. Our prayer requests ought to reflect the will of Christ as revealed in His commandments. He is ready to grant what accomplishes His will for the Church. Our fruitfulness is for the glory of God and the good of the Body of Christ. The fruitful servant, by his fruit-bearing, manifests that he is a true disciple of Christ (see also Jn 8:31, 32). The secret in this endeavor is to keep the eyes of faith and reliance upon Christ, and not upon ourselves. Faith is a most self-renouncing and self-denying virtue—it continually looks away from self as a source of adequacy (Note the believer’s adequacy in the new covenant, 2 Corinthians 3:4-6).

4. Abiding involves the experience Christ’s love as we seek to please Him by obedience. “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full” (Jn 15:9-11) (See also 2 Cor 5:9 on pleasing Christ as our highest ambition). When our aim is to please Christ by obedience to Him, we will sense His love. Fruit-bearing and joy are the result of faith-based obedience. Fullness of joy flows from our union with the Lord of love. Our concern about success in ministry ought to be subordinated to our ambition to please Christ and abide in His love. When pleasing Him and abiding in His love is our priority, it ensures success.

5. Abiding issues forth in a sacrificial concern for the brethren. “This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:12, 13). In our zeal to be fruitful in ministry, there is the frequent temptation to place our personal goals above the needs of others. We must remember that the quality of our work among the saints depends upon our love of the brethren. At times, meeting a goal will tempt us to rivalry, suspicion, and self-assertion. We need to depend upon the Holy Spirit for the power to exhibit supernatural love. Only a supernatural love will be able to choose unity over rivalry, trust over suspicion, and obedience over self-assertion. “Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:1-3).

6. Abiding produces a response to Christ’s love of radical identification with His purposes. “You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you. This I command you, that you love one another” (Jn 15:14-17). Christ’s friendship with us presupposes our committed obedience to Him. As ‘Christ followers’ we are drawn into intimacy with Him as we identify whole-heartedly with His purposes in the world. In the text above, He calls us friends and not slaves. “A slave does not know what his master is doing” (Jn 15:15). In contrast to a slave, the abiding believer shares in the knowledge of his Master’s mission. The abiding believer voluntarily adopts his Master’s purposes as his own. This is the heart of consecration to Christ. Every true believer can say, “Christ’s cause and mission is my cause and mission.”

7. Abiding in Christ involves the expectation of persecution from the world for Christ’s sake. “ If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know the One who sent Me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause’” (Jn 15:18-25). The world hates Christ and His followers because the Lord and His people are not conformed to the world (v. 19). The world hates us because we have been called out of the world by Christ and are now radically identified with Him. The world hates Christ because it is ignorant of God, and consequently cannot properly evaluate God’s messengers (v. 21). The world hates Christ because it resents Christ’s claims and standards (1 Jn 4:1-6). The world’s hatred is aroused because Christ’s words disclose the corruption, hypocrisy, and rebellion of the sinner's heart (vv. 24, 25) (See also John 7:7).

8. Abiding equips the believer for a Spirit-empowered witness of Christ's Person and work. “When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me, and you will testify also, because you have been with Me from the beginning” (Jn 15:26, 27). Those who consistently abide in Christ are most qualified to bear witness of Him because they know Him by experience (Grk. epiginosko). The Holy Spirit is pleased to bless their testimony of Christ in a unique manner. For, we are not bearing witness to a salvation ‘scheme’ or plan, but to a divine Person who is the Redeemer of sinners. “Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

9. Abiding is essential in order to be ready for Christ’s return. “Now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming. If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him” (1 Jn 2:28-29). In addition to deepening our hope and confidence, abiding increasingly conforms us to Christ’s holy character. The life of abiding in Christ cultivates a “living hope” that is characterized by desire for Christ’s appearing, and confidence at the prospect of meeting Him (see Titus 2:11-13; 1 Pet 1:3-9). How you greet the King of kings at His return will be a powerful revealer of your relationship with Him. The abiding believer has made communing with Christ his lifestyle. Therefore, he will greet his King in confidence, as the very consummation of a life lived fellowshipping with his Savior. “By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 Jn 4:17).

In terms of an experience, what does this abiding look like?

First, it is not merely a dutiful discipline, it is true communion with Christ. Arthur Pink notes in his wonderful article, “Experimental Union,” it seems too good to be true: that this union with Christ is for you. You were called into fellowship with the Son of God—yet we tend to be fixated on our ineligibility and disqualification and often deeply disillusioned about our spiritual progress. ‘Experimental union’ means that personal practical dealings with Him produce joy and confidence. How it would change us if we truly believed He was given for us!ⁱⁱ Are you groaning, feeling sin-harassed, are you poor in spirit? To these low points the gospel brings the news of Christ’s perfect suitability, His availability, His virtue, and efficacy—meeting you at the point where you are smitten with your wretchedness. You can’t trust in His blood too much. He is your sympathetic High Priest for sin-harassed souls. He mediates unending installments of grace and mercy (Heb 7:26). Bring Him to your troubled souls amidst disputes of conscience and He will give ample grace and mercy to help in time of need (Heb 4:16; 9:14).

The ability to abide in Christ is a God-given gift of grace. God took the initiative in our salvation. Now as “new creatures” alive in Christ, He has given us the ability to abide. As new creations in Him, we have been reconstructed around the Person of Christ (Col 2:10; 3:4). The consciousness of that deep mystery of mutuality, of Christ in you and you in Him is produced by the Holy Spirit “Christ in you the hope of glory” (Col 1:27). We abide by the power of the indwelling Spirit—but it is our responsibility to abide.

Abiding means reckoning and living out union with Christ (Jn 15:1-11).

God’s act of placing the sinner into union with Christ brings us into all the benefits of His representative death and resurrection (Rom 6:6). Calvin said in his Institutes, “The flesh of Christ is like a rich, inexhaustible fountain that pours into us life springing forth from the Godhead.” ⁱⁱⁱ

The legal imputation of Christ’s righteousness produces in every believer a total sense of indebtedness in the very depths of their being. Union sets us apart as His possession. We dwell on Christ from the perspective and vantage point of union with Him. The vine and branch organically joined depicts the shared life concept. As you receive security and satisfaction in Him—you are having fellowship in Him. This makes us ‘strong in grace’ and thereby equips us for ministry (2 Tim 2:1). The discipleship mandate flows out of shared life in Christ that is realized through abiding.

When we abide in Christ, we “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” as our ‘sphere of life’ (Rom 13:14a, Gal 3:27). The believer has already clothed himself with Christ. Being clothed with Christ is the indicative or accomplished fact of Galatians 3:27. The imperative in Romans 13:14, ‘put on’ is a command to keep putting on Christ. To do so is “to reach and hold [Christ] again and again, in faith and confidence, in grateful loyalty and obedience, [holding] Him to whom we already belong.”ⁱᵛ Thus, to put on Christ is to live in Christ as our sphere of existence. When you ‘put on’ Christ—you are reckoning Him as your covering as your standing before God, and your completeness in God’s sight.

The priority of abiding is addressed to our will or volition.

Abiding involves a daily decision to depend upon Christ as the condition of fruitfulness. Abiding maintains our connection by faith to Christ who is the source of life and fruitfulness (Jn 14:15, 21) (See also John 15:10). When we live to please the Lord by obedience, we continue in the possession and enjoyment of Christ’s love to us. When Christ takes up residence in a believer, He brings His love with Him—your responsibility is to continue in His love (Jude 21). Jesus set the pattern; He kept His Father’s commandments. The believer able to influence another spiritually is a person in whom the Word of God is active transforming, controlling, giving discernment in all things, and producing the ability to abide in Christ. Thus, the believer’s potential for fruit-bearing is by the strength of Another, the strength of Christ.

To abide in Christ means choosing Him as our soul’s prosperity—consciously going to Him as our heart’s greatest desire. It is to love Christ; to live for Christ; to love the things of God.

When we abide in Christ, we are kept from returning to the world as a source of security, significance, peace, prosperity, comfort, ease, and freedom from suffering. When we put on Christ, we draw near, finding our identity, our purpose, and our direction in Him. We won’t ‘go back to Egypt’—in other words we won’t return to the world as ultimate source. Christ and His imputed righteousness is ‘deeded’ to the believer in the new covenant. Therefore, as believers we have the perfect covering for our naked, shivering, sinful souls (Is 61:10). There is nothing more precious than union with Christ. When your life ends, there is only one thing you will take with you to glory, your relationship with the Lord. The Christian life involves the day by day living out of your union with Christ by means of abiding in Him—this is how God makes us happy and useful (2 Pet 1:8).

The experience of Christ’s love and joy is promised to those who abide in Christ (Jn 15:9-11). The Father’s love for the Son is a pattern of Christ’s love for us. Jesus’ earthly life was characterized by His abiding in His Father’s love—the Father’s will was His meat and drink—His secret “food” (Jn 4:32-34). We should exert ourselves to abide in His love (Jude 21). We must allow ourselves to be drawn closer and closer to the Savior. Our love to Christ is a reflexive response of His love to us first (1 Jn 4:19)—we love, because He loved us first. His love is ever active in our love. His love precedes, accompanies, follows, and creates our love. When we consent to it, abiding in it, we exercise it in return, and we feel drawn ever closer to Him; and we are fitted for ministry. And our faith takes ahold of Christ’s total ‘fitness’ for our sin-weakened, fallen condition.

This glorious truth of Christ’s fitness for us is to constantly animate our walk with God. Christ’s propitiatory sacrifice is so perfectly sufficient that we now “walk in the light as He is in the light and the blood of His Son continually cleanses us from all sin” (1 Jn 1:7). We keep going back to the gospel to feed on the truth that Christ gave His life so that we might have an uninterrupted love relationship with the Godhead. So perfect is this propitiation that Christ has wrought, it removes every obstacle to an unimpeded flow of love to the believer. Thus, the gospel clears away disputes in our conscience and allows us to drink in God’s love without our conscience ‘disqualifying us’ from such blessed treatment by our holy God.

Abiding means consciously living upon Another.

He saved us by trading places with us (2 Cor 5:21); but that guilt exchange was just the beginning of the exchanged life. This exchange is now to characterize our whole Christian life. The Word of God defines the believer as the new man complete in Christ. This new creation is complete in Him, clothed with Him, full in Him—but never apart from Him. Christ is the Architect, Contractor, and Blueprint of the new man (Col 3:10). Thus, the new man is patterned after Him. These gospel realities are revolutionary, and they are appropriated by faith. They will change and revolutionize your walk, AND they are perceived and appropriated by abiding in Christ. Now the secret here in appropriating is abiding—for in abiding we are reckoning the sufficiency of Christ’s work on Calvary. This enables us to be an unhindered channel of divine love back to God and to the brethren. This is God’s will that we function in this way—that our love is a reflex response to His love for us. “We love because He first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19). God’s love flowing through us unhindered is how His love is perfected in us (1 Jn 4:17). This is inseparable from abiding in Christ and His love.

Thus, by abiding in Him, the new man who is created in Christ Jesus for good works begins to assert himself—manifesting the personality and virtue of Christ. This is the answer to a crisis in leadership in the church today; a crisis in fostering male spiritual leadership. The gospel, in enjoining us to abide, calls for a rational abandonment of ourselves to Christ’s glory—that is the ‘good, acceptable, and perfect’ spoken of in Romans 12:2, and it is realized through a life surrendered and ordered as ‘a living sacrifice’.

When completeness in Christ reckoned, capacity in Christ realized.

Out of pursuing Christ through abiding in Him comes the power and desire to pursue the brethren in the ministry of discipleship. This issue of pursuing our brethren for the sake of doing spiritual good to them is commonly the weak link in the chain of church ministry. Discipleship can only be perpetuated when the cycle of multiplication is the aim of ministry (2 Tim 2:2). But out of self-protection and unsureness, we hesitate to be the pursuer who takes ministry risks and makes the diligent efforts to nurture relationships for the purpose of discipleship. Abiding in Christ is the “x” factor that answers that reticence to be a pursuer. For, abiding puts us in touch with Christ as ‘Source Person’. He is our sonship, our status, favor, righteousness, wisdom, inheritance, adoption, sealing, access, completeness, etc. Not one of these blessings functions as an independent spiritual commodity which can exist apart from union with Him. Each is a benefit that is ours ONLY by virtue of being united to Christ. Paul traces his fruitful ministry to Christ living through him (Gal 2:20).

Abiding lets you see this—that these blessings are a function of our union with Christ. This is so closely tied to our ability and ‘want to’—to being a blessing to others and a pursuer of others. Essentially, we can only pass on what we are receiving in our spirit from the Lord. The gospel keeps giving us permission to go to Christ for all we need: love, grace, mercy, forgiveness, courage, righteousness, power over temptation (2 Pet 1:3). You cannot consistently receive these blessings from Christ without yearning to see Christ formed in your brethren, and thus making the sacrifices necessary to move them to maturity (Gal 4:19). That is what it means to be fitted for ministry through abiding in Christ. This is why abiding is the “x” factor of ministry. As we consent to be filled by Christ’s fullness, ministry to others is the ‘overflow’. “Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water’” (Jn 7:37-38).

CONCLUSION: We have seen that the power to bear fruit means you cannot focus on ‘self’ as the primary spiritual resource. That of course is the central message of John chapter 15. Fruitfulness is predicated on abiding. Fearless confidence in your ministry efforts is directly proportional to seeking your security and satisfaction in Christ. Abiding is to draw near—we would add “dare to draw near”—because drawing close to Christ means having His cross applied to your self-life. That is a profound thing—for it means in finding your all and all in Christ, you will have to experience a degree of disillusionment with self. Your self-reliance will be slain. As Paul said, that is how God’s power [is] perfected through my weakness (2 Cor 12:9ff.). Your affinity for self-reliance will have to receive sustained death blows from the cross. This is one of the reasons why the gospel is so radically humbling. It tells us that Christ died—not only for our sins—but also for our moral efforts and aspirations. Thus, the only human strength recognized and approved of by God comes through Christ. Paul shocked his Corinthian readers by stating that Christ was crucified because of weakness, and we as believers are ‘weak in Him’ (2 Cor 13:4). In other words, in this gospel age we are to be radically identified with Christ and His cross and His humiliation which includes His ‘reproach’—see Hebrews 13:13. The Corinthian believers had to learn that the heavenly man, glorified and strong must wait until Christ’s return (1 Cor 1:18-25; 15:45-49).

The evil one knows that he can hamper our ministry efforts by tempting us to be preoccupied with measuring our performance. Like the predators in the animal kingdom that go for the neck of their prey, the powers of darkness don’t want you communing with Christ your Head and ‘Source Person’. When we contemplate ourselves without Christ in view, we tend to come to conclusions which can neutralize our ministry zeal. This counterproductive mentality reasons, “Who am I to propose to tell another brother how to live?” In a word, we ‘bench’ ourselves—voluntarily taking ourselves out of the game. The answer is to abide. For abiding in Christ is a soul-edifying privilege which persuades our hearts and minds that Christ is not only the source of our salvation, He is the source of the Christian life.

End Notes:

i Colin Brown, Dictionary of N.T. Theology, pp. 223-226.
ii Arthur W. Pink, “Experimental Union,” Chapel Library, Pensacola, FL.
iii John Calvin, Calvin’s Institutes, Inst. IV, 17.9.
iv C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans, a Shorter Commentary, 335.

It is time to stop apologizing for the doctrine

of eternal damnation (Part One).

It’s a tragedy that pastors are ‘protecting people’ from God’s holiness.

In an attempt to be relevant to the prevailing winds of culture, countless churches have adopted an ‘attraction model’ of ministry (Paul Washer). Accompanying that trend is a growing embarrassment over an expression of God’s holy character—namely that He has an eternal hell. R. C. Sproul offers the following assessment: the doctrine of God’s holiness is being systematically concealed from His people. This doctrine of endless punishment, if faithfully preached, cannot be marketed. It is just too devastating. And what is the evidence that the truth about hell is a source of embarrassment to the church? Answer: church leaders only refer to it in hushed tones, or preferably not at all. When encountering that doctrine in the biblical text, the tendency is to apologize for it, lest its exposition frighten children, and disturb the ‘respectable’.

Ministers who intentionally pass over this doctrine often DO know that the truth about hell is withering to their hearers’ self-focused sense of goodness, security, and importance. “It can be tempting for pastors and elders, who serve gathered congregations of saints, to be misled into thinking that we no longer need to reflect on the excruciating sorrows of the damned. Such weakening resolution can be diminished even further by comments from the pews (or indeed other pulpits) that the people need more grace—more of the sugar, none of the vinegar”ⁱ (Pastor Andrew Kerr). 19ᵗʰ Century theologian William G. T. Shedd warned that due to opposition to the doctrine of endless punishment, the following repercussions were increasingly being manifested in society: breaches of trust (especially in business), corruption in mercantile and political life, the deadening of moral life, a propensity for luxury, a hunger for power, waning of the fear of God, shameless vice and sensuality. As the doctrines of the immortality of the soul and future endless punishment disappear from pulpits and lecterns, the same wickedness which swallowed up Babylon and Rome will infallibly engulf the West. Luxurious ages and luxurious men rail against the doctrine of eternal hell. The above was written by W. Shedd in the second half of the 1880’s.ⁱⁱ Why do impenitent sinners deserve unending hell, and why is this doctrine avoided by so many church leaders? The place to begin is the two major prongs of God’s character: His justice and His mercy. The lesson so often repeated in Old Testament through the types and shadows of Levitical worship is this: there is no divine mercy without the satisfaction of God’s justice (Lev 17:11). Frequent reminders are needed because God’s justice is opposed by the natural heart. The comprehensiveness, deservedness, rigor, severity, and finality of His justice is disquieting to say the least. That is a significant reason why unsaved people do not exalt God’s justice.ⁱⁱⁱ Thus, is it any wonder that they cannot imagine how God can be glorified in the eternal destruction of the impenitent?

The Holiness and Justice of God

The scarlet thread of redemption running through Scripture reiterates a central theme: the reconciliation of God’s justice and mercy can only come by means of the life blood of the divinely appointed substitute being poured out in place of the sinner. This truth, communicated by 1500 plus years of Levitical worship is summarized in Hebrews 9:22, “Without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sin.” Divine mercy is only poured out richly through the bloody death of the substitute. The sacrifice of that substitute demonstrates God’s justice against sin. We must be reminded that not a drop of that mercy can be shown without the satisfaction of God’s righteous demands.ⁱᵛ

Bare, general benevolence has never saved a single person, and yet millions of people have placed a false hope in God’s charitability.

A ‘Christ-less’ false hope dominates today—namely the attitude that God is genuinely kind and will not judge those who are sincere and who acknowledge His existence.ᵛ This present author recently met a Jewish doctor at a restaurant. This man does not attend a church or synagogue, and he doesn’t believe the gospel, but he stated that he is putting his hope in God’s general benevolence. And since he believes in a divine being, he has concluded that due to his acknowledgement of the existence of the divine, God is obligated to release him from judgment. There are many places in Holy Scripture wherein God calls believers to exercise mercy, even to love their enemies (Mt 5:43-48). That is a call to imitate our Lord Jesus Christ who is the epitome of mercy, love, and meekness. But God’s common grace is temporary, it precedes the final condemnation of the impenitent (Rom 2:1-9). When Christ’s followers exercise love and mercy toward their enemies, it is not a forecast that our Lord will abandon His justice on the last day. No, according to Second Thessalonians chapter one, Christ will return in flaming fire dealing out wrath and retribution to those who do not obey the gospel and to those who do not know God (2 Thess 1:6-10).

In this age of gospel grace, reconciled sinners are sent out as ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18-21). We are to plead with our fellow sinners to avail themselves of the gospel; to accept peace with God on the gracious terms God has set. For the doors of his mercy are soon to close—swift, comprehensive justice is coming. A searching, exposing, devastating justice will soon descend, and it will examine souls to the point of identifying every idle word, as our Lord states in Matthew 12:36. It will be an omniscient justice that will reveal publicly the secrets of men’s hearts (Rom 2:16). It will be a justice so invasive that it will bring to light thoughts and motives and intents of the heart (Heb 4:12-13). All will be laid bare before God’s uncompromising justice (Rom 2:16). And then, when God’s wrath is poured out, there will be severity, the undiluted strictness of His uncompromising justice (Rom 11:22).

Eternal punishment can never be harmonized with humanist thinking.

There will be no mercy for the impenitent on that day. Now with the many commands in Scripture requiring mercy of us toward others, we shudder at the thought that passages such as

Ezekiel 7:9, Deuteronomy 17:2-6, 13:8, and 19:21 refer to the fact that, under judgment, God will be severe only. In fact, when carrying out the execution of an Israelite who had committed presumptuous sin worthy of death, his punishment was to be carried out without the show of pity. In referring to those penal commands under Moses, Hebrews 10:28 reads, “The person who sets aside the law of Moses was to die without mercy.” This is shocking to us that the same God that sent His beloved Son in love to bear our sins addresses situations in which he commands no mercy and no pity.

This execution of the guilty ‘without pity’ foreshadows the day when God’s enemies, having rejected all opportunities to repent and receive mercy, will receive no mercy (Rev 14:9-11). This does not square with our modern way of thinking—it doesn’t comport with our idolatrous concept of God. We cannot conceive of a God who is love, but also has instances under Moses in which He commands the exercise of no mercy or pity (Deut 7:16; 13:8; 25:11-12). We are baffled by this because we have projected our own nature upon God. Instead of viewing Him as transcendent in holiness and altogether other, the unsaved religionist has formed a god in his own image and likeness.

The unregenerate has fashioned a benign god who easily dismisses sin, who may excuse it, or even show continual leniency toward it. The natural man has manufactured a god whose glory and honor have no association with the divine justice and holiness vindicated in the torments of those who will face eternal damnation. The doctrine of eternal hell is scandalous because it is ‘only reasonable to us’ that sin’s penalty should be limited by time. But, as creatures made in God’s image and likeness, human beings will never go out of existence. God’s image does not evaporate over time, though that image will be nearly unrecognizable in hell, it will never be annihilated.

The doctrine of eternal punishment is gradually being lost today; for the reality of unending punishment of the damned does not comply with natural reason nor with a spirit of licentiousness. The words of Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs disturb our consciences. For Burroughs has said, “God has made His own holiness His great end and goal.”ᵛⁱ And, in the thought of Edwards, God created the universe to put His holiness on display. His moral majesty is the great cause of God. He is extending the glory of His transcendent holiness by means of redemptive history. But because we are blind to the purpose the cosmos exists, it is rare to contemplate the enormity of what it means to sin against God. Consequently, we cannot fathom why sin justly deserves eternal misery. Again, the words of Jeremiah Burroughs stagger us and mortify us, even terrify us and scandalize us, for Burroughs said of hell, “God has determined that you shall have as much suffering as He had dishonor by your sinning.”ᵛⁱⁱ The impenitent sinner shall experience as much suffering as God had dishonor by his sinning—this only begins to make sense if one understands something of the dignity of the One against whom we have sinned. The doctrine of an eternal hell must be preached and taught in the context of God’s infinite majesty and dignity.

Sinners think lightly of their sin because they think lightly of the character of the One against whom they have sinned.

God will forever display His holy justice against rebels. You may find yourself raging against this truth. You may accuse God of engaging in a tyrannical, petulant tantrum. You may cast aspersion on Him as dispensing unkindness and horrific cruelty. You may even refer to hell as an atrocity, as ‘unworthy of your god’. But, not for a millisecond will you be able to hold God hostage by your false caricature of Him. I have heard lost men say, “Eternal hell?” “I would not wish such a punishment on my worst enemy.” The inference is not difficult to miss; for the unbeliever, in denying the reality of hell is postulating that he himself is more merciful than the Almighty! But God in His infinite rectitude knows Himself, and knows Himself to be holy and completely just, even as He knows exhaustively the mind and heart of every sinner. You are deceived if you think He will spare you from hell to avoid being blasphemed by you.

Today’s preaching, in avoiding God’s eternal wrath, has emptied the cross of its foundational message of propitiation (Wm. G. T. Shedd).

We do not hear much today about God’s justice and wrath against our sin. Consequently, we don’t hear much about divine wrath in conjunction with the cross of Christ. In fact, we seldom hear of that association between divine wrath and the atonement.ᵛⁱⁱⁱ In the fluff and bounciness of modern evangelicalism what easily slips from view is that the justice of God is a scandalous thing to the unregenerate mind and heart. And in ‘guarding’ the hearer’s conscience from that scandal, pulpiteers have adapted themselves to the way people think. They frequently offer a message of the cross that is weak on propitiation. It is so weak and impotent that the cross becomes merely a symbol of spiritual therapy, or worse, a divine apology for human suffering! Brace yourself for the blasphemy contained in this quote from a United Methodist author of ‘God’s Apology’:

For millennia I felt guilty about what I had allowed to happen to Job. It made me rethink this whole business of divinity. Being supernatural was over-rated. I created the universe in the first place because I wanted a loving relationship with somebody. Love requires vulnerability. Job was vulnerable. I was not. Being supernatural got in my way. So, I decided to become a human being – a mortal. In Jesus, I experienced everything that Job enjoyed and suffered. It was wonderful and it was awful. After the torture on the cross, after the tomb, there was no going back. I gave up omnipotence and omniscience and settled for omnipresence. Three days later, I emerged from the tomb… reduced to nothing more – and nothing less – than pure unconditional love. Love is all that is left of me. I can’t fix things. I can’t force things. I can’t control things. All I can do is invite, attract, and welcome. All I can do is exude kindness and compassion, and hope that all beings will be drawn to me. And as they take me into their hearts and treat each other with love, humbly releasing puffed-up pride, I experience overwhelming joy in our companionship. My cosmic loneliness is gone. Just as people must do, I had to give myself up to find the love I was so desperate to have. For eons I suffered loneliness and frustration, and in turn caused humans to suffer from unrealistic expectations of what I could do for them. I really wasn’t very good at being a supernatural divinity because I was so preoccupied with my own jealous rage. I’m sincerely sorry about all that, dear humans. Getting down to your level gives me infinite empathy for all you go through. I don’t want religion to make life any harder for you than it already is. So from now on, know me as love - so that I can know you, and you can know me, fully.ⁱˣ

In our evangelical churches, the cross appears to be less and less associated with the demonstration of God’s righteousness—in the placarding of His settled anger against sin— which is the expression of the vindication of His immutable justice (Rom 3:25-26). Tragically, the cross is becoming a synonym for God’s general benevolence—as if the sinner can come to his senses, avail himself of the opportunity God offers, and then never have to concern himself about his sin again.ˣ Perhaps, without meaning to do so, much of the evangelical church today has emptied the cross of its message of propitiation and left us with something in its place that is more akin to sentimentality. My friends, the cross is designed by God to vindicate His holiness, and to destroy our sin and guilt, and our sinning tendenciesˣⁱ (Titus 2:14, 2 Cor 5:14-15; 1 Jn 3:8). The cross applied to the quickened sinner plants in a man the knowledge of our holy God and the deliverance from the rule and reign of sin (Rom 6:11-13; 1 Jn 3:8).ˣⁱⁱ When the sinner hears the piercing truths of God’s just wrath along the lines of Jeremiah Burroughs’ preaching, perhaps through a faithful minister, it is arresting, foreign, and intrusive. This is jarring to those who have never considered the following: outside of Christ, the dishonor to God that our sinning has caused will be reaped in the suffering of eternal hell. The contemporary churchgoer who is a false Christian has no category for this. It scandalizes his thinking, namely that God will vindicate His own majesty, honor, and glory by means of the miseries and punishments of the sinner in eternal hell. The impenitent man is stopped in his tracks. This withering reality of the immensity of God, and a man’s ill desert begs the question, “How much dishonor did God experience on account of my sin, I need to know!” “For if there is an equivalency between the dishonor my sin caused, and my future suffering, it behooves me to find out how much dishonor my sin has caused God!” “If the shame and aspersion my sin has cast upon God is to be the magnitude of my eternal misery, I must look into this matter of the weightiness of my sin!” It is only an awakened sinner who thinks in this way, most settle back into spiritual apathy. Conversely, the ‘natural conviction of sin’—the sense of falling short of a moral standard does not lead to conversion. For genuine salvation is preceded by the work of the Spirit when He brings crushing conviction over one’s sin against God.ˣⁱⁱⁱ Unregenerate sinners, even church-going religionists are, in their spiritual deadness and depravity, asleep in ‘nature’s night’. They do not reason about their sin in the devastating manner described above. But, in a moment of alarm, a sinner might say to himself in response to a truly biblically preached doctrine of hell, “You have my attention, tell me more.” “Even though I don’t believe this monstrous doctrine, I’m willing, out of curiosity to hear more.” “But, as I listen, I want you to know that I regard this doctrine to be a monastic layover from an age of ignorance, fear, and superstition.” “Wasn’t perdition held over people’s heads to scare them into obedience?” “Though I am a skeptic about hell, there is something in my conscience that bids me listen, especially if there is an infinitesimal chance this horrific doctrine might be true.”

There are pronounced reasons the unsaved cannot conceive of why God’s honor is vindicated by unending human misery in hell:

1. The first reason you do not think hell is just, is because your concept of God is merely that of a large category. You’ve made Him into a pantheistic god, as if He were part of His own creation—a sizeable category belonging to reality, but nonetheless, just a category. He sits alongside other categories which are also large such as galaxies and constellations, time, and space, but my friend, large categories do not command holiness, and large categories are not omnipotent and are not able to justly deal with men and angels. In your unbelief you cannot conceive of a God existing independent of the universe. You’ve made Him a parallel concept to the universe, or relative to the cosmos, a mere ‘force’. In fact, your perception of an autonomous universe fits well with your own imagined autonomy. But the one true God upholds all things by the Word of His power (Col 1:16-17; Heb 1:3). He is the One upon whom all things rely for their existence (Job 34:10-15).

In your opposition to His transcendence, you cannot conceive of the fact that in a moment in time He spoke into existence over 200 billion galaxies each with millions of stars (Ps 33:6-9). That is just too staggering, you’d rather attribute the cosmos and its contents to internal natural causes—forces operating in deep time. But consider this: what God has made, He owns, and what He has made and owns, He upholds. And what He upholds and owns, He defines. And as Creator, Owner, Upholder and Definer, He designates the purpose of everything He has made from a toadstool to a nebula. He is Lord of cosmology. Thus, you cannot conceive of hell being a just penalty because you deny the omnipotence of your Creator. You have underestimated His majesty, not by a factor of trillions—but by a magnitude that is infinite.

2. The second reason you cannot conceive of a God who requires endless retribution is because you are willfully ignorant of why God put you on earth. Your creational identity is the image and likeness of God—that is what you will be for all eternity, thus what you owe God is inseparable from who and what you are as His image. But as an unbeliever, you don’t know who you are as His creature, nor why He created you in His image and likeness (Gen 1:27). The great purpose for your existence is to know your Creator— to glorify Him by reflecting Him, worshipping Him, enjoying Him, and imaging His moral majesty in all your relationships (Is 43:21).ˣⁱᵛ That is the very heart of the Ten Commandments; to love God and neighbor (Deut 6:4-5). Thus, to go your own way as a rebel is to willfully violate your created purpose as a creature owned, upheld, designed, and defined by God—a creature uniquely fashioned and formed to know God in a covenant relationship in order to reflect His holy character.

You exist to know your Creator and to advance His glory. This truth is invasive to your sense of self, it is deplorable to you because your illusory worldview has ‘granted you autonomy’. Therefore, you regard His own glory and your own good to be at odds, thus your response is enmity. But, know this, God regards those who despise His glory to be His adversaries (Rom 5:10; Col 1:21). The fact you exist for God, to know and to reflect Him, your heart regards as despicable, and thus contemptable to your assumptions about personal freedom. Therefore, in your mind, you construct an idolatrous version of God which is tantamount to a denial of the Creator-creature distinction (Rom 5:10; Col 1:21). Yet, as a creature of dust formed by Him and for Him, you owe Him your love and devotion and service, and conformity to His moral law.ˣᵛ But, because you deny this, you cannot envision the justness of eternal perdition, for you do not see yourself as you are, lawless in God’s sight (1 Jn 3:4). You cannot conceive of why hell is eternal because you have believed the lie that nothing outside of you has the absolute right to own, define, possess, and direct you.

3. There is a third reason why you don’t believe that eternal hell is just. It is because you reject the truth that sinning against others and against your own body is regarded by God as sinning against Him (Ps 41:4; 51:4).

Please consider this, if your Maker put you here to reflect, honor, serve, know, love, glorify, enjoy, and represent Him, then your sinning is not only the defiance of God’s moral government, it is also the refusal to reflect Him. Since your creational identity is the very image and likeness of God, then your creational calling is to live as the image of God. Thus, your sinning is a form of cosmic treason. It constitutes open defiance against His transcendent holiness which He has purposed to glorify through His creation. Your sin is against God Himself because your sin opposes who God is, and it is hostile to His rightful authority as your moral Governor.ˣᵛⁱ What a weighty thing it is for the creature to carry in his own being the very image of God, for you can never shed that creational identity! Thus, in possessing the creational identity of a reflector of God, your sinful behavior infers, “This is what God is like; if I lie or lust or steal or curse, I am saying by my covetousness, dishonesty, and impurity that these deeds describe my Creator.” This is why God is so offended by sin. God is holy and righteous. He is sovereign Moral Governor of the cosmos. Your sin is not merely an error in judgment, it is living with your back to God in a sin-ward orientation rather than a God-ward orientation. It is akin to the devil’s rebellion. Therefore, it is high-handed treason and revolt. For every unbeliever says by his life, “My impulses, pride, appetites, and self-will shall define reality instead of God defining reality.” My friend, this is why your lying, lusting, dishonesty, and cursing is so serious. Your wickedness casts disgrace upon your Creator’s very character and reputation (Rev 21:8). Therefore, in your spiritual blindness you are unable to see that divine righteousness and justice necessitate the endless condemnation of the impenitent wicked (Ps 36:9).

4. There’s a fourth reason why you do not accept that your sin deserves eternal judgment. It is because you are willfully ignorant of God’s creation structures—that God has ordered creation in accordance with a particular design, goal, or blueprint.

Theologians refer to this blueprint as ‘cosmology’, a cosmological design by which everything God has made from a polliwog to a star has an intent and purpose. That means that mankind has a telos or a particular goal or design. It is a telos of glory. We are created to behold His glory, to pant after it, and to reflect His glory. By way of example, in our solar system, our own moon follows a course around our earth. And our moon has a reflected glory. It does not generate its own light, but reflects a supremely greater source of light, the glory of the sun. The moon’s created telos, or glory is a reflected glory. And, in terms of its created function, in addition to illuminating the night for man and creatures, the moon produces our tides and flushes out our estuaries and bays. The moon also is the calendar for months and years, and for the reproductive cycle of countless creatures. The moon also stabilizes our own earth’s orbit and makes life on earth possible. And, according to Scripture, the moon is for times and seasons and for warnings and signs (Gen 1:14).

But, like fallen man, suppose the moon rejected its telos, its created design and glory? What if it defied its created purpose and wandered off from our solar system into the black vacuum of space? It would have no purpose, no relationships, no glory, no orbit, and no gravitational order. In a small way, that illustrates how depraved and rebellious man has defied his God-ordained purpose. Man’s God-ordained glory and telos has been rejected, for man has set aside his God-ordained ‘orbit’ (Jer 5:22-24; 6:16). Remember that the satanic lie in Eden is firmly fixed upon every unregenerate sinner’s heart the moment he is born into the world (Eph 2:1-2). Regarding this present evil age, the lovers of darkness have pushed the light of Scripture to the periphery, for the ancient lie in Eden has a modern permutation which dominates the world—namely, ‘sin is freedom’ and ‘light is hated, and darkness is loved’ (Jn 3:19-21). How ironic, the message of the Bible which is the ‘soul’ of the civilized Western world, and which birthed its freedoms is now considered dangerous to our freedoms.ˣᵛⁱⁱ When the Enlightenment began to dominate Western philosophy in the 17ᵗʰ century, human reason was elevated, and divine revelation was discounted. The enthronement of human reason was accompanied by antagonism against the supernatural and the claims of God. Rushing into that metaphysical vacuum, or absence of meaning was a man-centered worldview. Secular humanism made man the owner and definer of life, he would be his own measure. He would determine reality for himself. He boasted that by means of empiricism he would be able to answer every unanswered question. Like the parable of the moon wandering off, this constituted a radical retrograde orbit in which man rejected his creaturehood and treated himself as if he were divine, his own focal point, “you will be like God” (Gen 3:5).

Rather than glorifying God through the sciences, modern man was determined to hypothesize about reality without reference to God. And, further, amidst the social chaos produced by man’s sin, the blindness of ancient Babel is evident as man promises his fellow creatures a political, ecological, and sexual utopia. Eternal damnation is the just destination for those who hate their Creator and who prefer a lifestyle of self-love, self-indulgence, and self-worship. No wonder perilous times are here, as Scripture says, when men become lovers of self rather than lovers of God, the times will be highly dangerous (2 Tim 3:1-5).

The defiance of God’s created order originally set forth in biblical cosmology is an attempt to overturn God’s blueprint. It is no less of a revolt than if the moon said, “I am leaving earth’s orbit.” “I’m not going to serve this planet anymore.” “I’m going off to find my own function, which I will define, I am taking charge of my own potential.” “I’m sorry, but this solar system is abusive and restrictive.” “I’m going to go off on my own.” My friends, that would make the moon an adversary of God and His purposes for it. This is what sinners are doing by their insistence upon self-determination. By rebelling against their created purpose, they declare a functional loyalty to the evil one. This is what it means to imitate and follow Lucifer, for it was through his pride of imagined self-determination that he fell (Is 14:4-20; Ezek 28:11-19). Those who insist upon following Lucifer’s course demonstrate that they have no interest in being reconciled to God. But the God who holds the stars in His hands, and who feeds and cares for puny man will not be mocked (Gal 6:7), He will have His day of reckoning (Is 2:12; Dan 4:37; Rev 22:10-13). For He who makes the galaxies and constellations, and even says to the oceans, “Here are your boundaries go no further” (Jer 5:22), declares of His coming judgment, “He who sits in the heavens laughs, the Lord scoffs at them. Then He will speak to them in His anger and terrify them in His fury” (Ps 2:4-5a).

This is the God who has established the boundaries for us humans. But consider how tiny we are, we are but dust and wind and ashes. Scripture compares us to the grass or wildflowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our Lord endures forever (1 Pet 1:24-25). Our present, mortal existence is but a vapor (Jas 4:14) it is ephemeral, evanescent. We are like a miniscule puff of steam, Scripture says, but the Word of God is eternal. Shall a vapor challenge Him who is the eternal Word (Prov 21:30)? This immense exercise in arrogance and hubris is a clear reason why God is going to decisively judge His adversaries. For the assumptions of humanism make the creature the final reference point and ultimate authority. Thus, to be willingly taken captive by this philosophy (Col 2:8) blinds a man to his created purpose as the image of God. Redemption alone can slay the satanic delusion of the sovereign self.

5. The fifth reason why the sinner does not understand why he deserves eternal damnation. It is because his innate hatred and hostility toward God is so strong. He chooses to curse God rather than bless God. In his pride, he may out of civility restrict his tongue from outbursts of blasphemy, but in his heart, he hates God’s throne. He hates God’s just rule and ownership. The effects of sin on him are so extensive that his entire perspective flows from his imagined autonomy. Sometimes we refer to this deception as the concept of ‘the sovereign self’. For self, so to speak, is enthroned in the kingdom of self. For the natural man self is the ‘sacred holy of holies’ so to speak—nothing may enter that chamber of self without permission from the ‘palace guards’, not even the Creator! Man’s self-love, his unquestioned loyalty to himself pits him against his Maker. Because of his self-love, he cannot love God. The natural man views God’s omniscience as an intrusive and invasive act of trespassing on his inner man. “Stay out!” Shouts the soul of the natural man. In wishing to be his own god, fallen man makes his heart like the heart of God it says in Ezekiel 28:2. But a day is coming in which God will settle the controversy He has with the nations (Jer 25:31). He will publicly ‘hang on the gallows’ of his wrath the wicked and their wickedness. The reprobate mind will be exposed in all its disgusting wretchedness and folly. Like a snail under a gardener’s boot, they will be effortlessly crushed. The Lord will make them into his footstool, and their judgment will be to the exaltation of God’s eternal justice (1 Cor 15:27; Heb 10:13). In summarizing reason five, eternal hell is regarded as unfair by an impenitent because he does not consider his innate hatred toward God and the infinite distance between the Creator and the creature.

6. There is a sixth reason why sinners do not understand that damnation will be meted out as a just penalty. It is because of the unbeliever’s willful ignorance that the cosmos is a massive stage or theater for God’s glory.

Therefore, our Maker has filled it with ‘glory pointers’. And the apex of all of God’s glory pointers is the human being. In the new heavens and new earth, when the curse is removed and the last impenitent sinner is rounded up and incarcerated, and entropy and decay and corruption are gone, what a day that will be! Perfect order will fill the creation. It will be a pristine consummation of cosmology—of unspoiled creation renewed and remade as the new heavens and new earth (2 Pet 3:13). Then every created thing will glorify God at its designated ‘frequency’. Everything will sing (Ps 98:8; Is 55:12), so to speak, in perfect harmony whether a star, a quasar, a planet, or even a creature or a tree. “. . .let the rivers clap their hands” (Ps 98:7-9). Angels, nebula, stars, flowers, fish, everything that God has made will harmonize and ‘sing’ unto God’s glory at their proper appointed frequencies. Everything in creation, like the members of a choir, will function in perfect joyful compliance in accord with its created purpose. But what about glorified human beings, the very crown of God’s creation? Yes, the saints will be perfectly tuned, perfectly rectified, perfectly harmonized and adjusted to their created purpose. For we will be made like Christ, our Great Head (Rom 8:29; Eph 1:4). Human beings are the most God-like creature the Lord has ever made; therefore, they are designed by God even above angels to be the chief glory pointer to God. This means that redeemed mankind will have been made like Christ in holiness. For Christ was the most ‘normal’ and human person who ever existed. The redeemed will have been conformed to His image as a new race, a new humanity actually functioning in accordance with their original telos of glory and the restoration of the perfect image of God.ˣᵛⁱⁱⁱ But, those who have despised their Creator by opposing His intent to extend His own glory, and by their heaping dishonor upon His Name by their sin, they shall find that their end shall be eternal punishment.

On that Day it will be realized that the whole cosmos truly is a theater and stage and worshipping chorus for the glory of God—a stage for His moral majesty, existing for the display of His transcendent, glorious holiness. How stunned we will be. How much we will marvel at this fact, that in seeking to behold God’s transcendent glorious holiness, we only could touch the outermost fringes while we were mortals. We only had an inkling of it. But to see that glory face to face (1 Cor 13:12), will stagger us (Is 25:6-9). We will marvel when we see Him (2 Thess 1:10) We will be ravished by the dimensionless of His love (Eph 3:18-19). We will feed upon this, be amazed by it, when we understand that we were created to take in this glory (2 Cor 3:18). And then, the God of infinite power and wisdom and sovereignty and righteousness and love will fill our hearts with adoration and wonder. We will marvel at God’s holiness and glory—that in His mysterious plan we should share His holiness (Heb 12:10). We will be captivated and enthralled by the sight of our Savior; and by the infinite wisdom of God’s design to extend His glory by means of the salvation of sinners.

God’s holiness is coterminous with His power, His might, His infinite wisdom, and sovereignty. We cannot imagine what beholding infinite holiness would be like, and yet, that will be our experience as the redeemed. The uninterrupted communication of His glory to the creature will be the bliss of heaven. That’s only possible if we are made like Christ in holiness. Yes, the sinner wishes he would not have to go to hell, but there is absolutely nothing for him to do in heaven, for he has no passion for the glory of God’s holiness, nor for the demonstration of God’s righteousness in the gospel.ˣⁱˣ For since he is not made like Christ, God’s holiness will repel him as it says in Revelation 6:15-17. The sight of God and Christ will be unbearable to the lost person—to a defiled creature confronted with infinite holiness, it will be unbearable. To stand as a defiled creature before the self-existent God who in His own person is the ground, and source, and support of your very being is a horrifying experience. The sinner will wish to escape and flee. He will want to go anywhere other than heaven or hell. He will seek annihilation. For the sinful, polluted creature cannot bear the sight of his holy Creator.

End Notes:

i Andrew Kerr, “A Very Important Reason to Keep Preaching Hell to Mature Believers.”
ii William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, Vol. IIB, (Minneapolis, MN: Klock & Klock Christian Publishers,
1979) 745
iii Gardner Spring, The Attraction of the Cross, (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1983) 37, 131-132
iv Craig Biehl, The Infinite Merit of Christ
v W. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, Vol. IIB, 748, 749
vi Jeremiah Burroughs, The Saint’s Treasury, (Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1991) 17-20
vii Ibid, p. 55
viii G. Spring, pp. 28, 48
ix Jim Buklo, “God’s Apology,” United Methodist Insight, Perspectives, June 22, 2021
x W. Shedd, Vol IIB, 741, Vol III, 483
xi Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, (Lafayette, IN: Sovereign Grace Publishers, 2001) 19, 20
xii G. Spring, pp. 180-182
xiii Matthew Mead, The Almost Christian Discovered, (Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1991) 70-73, 82-84, 140-148
xiv Joel R. Beeke, Mark Jones, A Puritan Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012) 120,
121
xv H. C. Fish, Primitive Piety Revived, (Harrisonburg, PA: Gano Books, Sprinkle Publications, 1987) 62-63
xvi John Arndt, True Christianity, (New Ipswich, NH: Pietan Publications, 2000) 31, 76
xvii Vishal Mangalwadi, “Must the Sun set on the West?”
xviii J. Arndt, pp. 7-10
xix J. C. Ryle, Old Paths

Six Catalysts of the Great Falling away from the Faith

A ‘catalyst’ is an agent which speeds up or produces a reaction. The six catalysts referred to in our title are pressure points which militate against the truth of God as it is revealed in Christ. Collectively these catalysts constitute a perfect storm so to speak in terms of giving rise to the coming apostasy from the faith.

In the first century church, amidst the affliction and deprivation borne of persecution, the Thessalonian believers were fearful about missing the Day of the Lord and about the resurrection of their deceased loved ones. This is why in the Thessalonian correspondence the apostle Paul spelled out the sequence of events which would occur at the end of the age. He desired to protect the Thessalonian believers from the instability, panic, and fear that can arise from rumors, counterfeit letters, satanic temptation, and severe persecution. In several places in the Thessalonian epistles Paul sets forth a clear eschatology to protect his converts from rash conclusions (see 1 Thess 3:3; 4:13-18; 5:1-10; 2 Thess 1:5-12; 2:1-12).

Even faithful, Bible-believing Christians can be subject to fears during uncertain times of national and global crises. During chaos and instability true believers tend to become increasingly alert to the importance of doctrine and are eager to treat theology with the importance and practicality it deserves in all seasons (2 Tim 4:2). There is value in exploring the ‘big picture’ themes in eschatology. The apostles and our Lord have expounded these themes to stabilize and prepare the saints for the consummation of the age. God desires that His people grasp the ‘why’ behind the events which lead up to the Day of the Lord. For redemptive history’s consummation is about the King and His kingdom of light dramatically overcoming the worldwide thrall of the kingdom of darkness.

Regarding the ‘great and terrible Day of the Lord’ (Mal 4:5), puzzling questions arise in connection with the coming ‘mystery of lawlessness’.

For a global acceleration in lawlessness will surround the career of the man of lawlessness described in 2 Thessalonians 2:7ff. The book of Revelation states that God put it in the hearts of national leaders to relinquish their countries’ sovereignty and give it to the beast—an action which helps propel forward the beast’s global agenda! See Revelation 17:17. God’s decision to temporarily grant a ‘long leash’ to the Antichrist bears similarities to God allowing Pharaoh to resist Moses after each of the ten plagues. “For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My Name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth’” (Rom 9:17). God’s sovereignty over evil is truly a humbling doctrine. For God alone is good; He sees no moral good in the creature (Rom 3:12). Apart from His distinguishing grace, we each would have continued in our self-destructive paths.

Christians rightly regard the tribulation period to be a time of unimaginable carnage and suffering (Mt 24:21; Rev 9:15). But what professed believers contemplate to a lesser degree is that the tribulation period will be a time of unparalleled ‘spiritual holocaust’. In other words, global apostasy will reach its fever pitch when the Beast demands worship from the whole world. “He

Living in View of the Kingdom

exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence. And he makes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose fatal wound was healed” (Rev 13:12).

A great falling away from the faith will precede the Day of the Lord.

The march toward this global spiritual holocaust is taking place through a long sequence of apostate actions and philosophies. In the last half millennium of history countless unbelieving thinkers, teachers, and leaders have each contributed deadly errors to the cumulative flow of apostate beliefs. They have mixed their lies into a toxic cocktail of plausibility structures and damnable heresies that have been eagerly embraced by the West. The Bible describes this promulgation of lies and rejection of the truth as follows: “But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron” (1 Tim 4:1-2). Global apostasy will not be a falling away into a vacuum of dogma or absence of belief, but rather to a deluding influence (2 Thess 2:11).

But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power. . .” (2 Tim 3:1-5).

The coming great apostasy from the faith will immediately precede the Beast’s rise to power. The mass acceptance of this poisonous blend of religious philosophic stew will prove to be the precise preparation needed to ‘roll out the red carpet’ for the Antichrist. And as Dr. Peter Jones has said, the lie will serve him (the Antichrist), the allegiance of the world on a silver platter.

Scripture tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter two and in the book of Revelation that the magnitude of this spiritual holocaust will be global in scope. In terms of the extent of the deception, the term ‘whole world’ or ‘world’ is used in Revelation 12:9; 13:3, 8, 12, 14, etc. God permits the powers of darkness to work through wicked political leaders to install a totalitarian world order. We are told in 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12 that because men have not received the love of the truth, the gospel, so as to be saved, God will send upon them a strong delusion so that they might be believe what is false and consequently be judged.

“There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth dismay among nations, in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken” (Lu 21:25-26). In the face of these disturbances genuine believers naturally long to be with their Lord and pray that the horrors which accompany the Day of the Lord will not be something they have to experience. But a respite may only be temporary, for the Lord tells us precisely how the end of this age will reach a climax of indescribable planetary destruction. Note the descriptions of unprecedented devastation in Revelation 6:12-17; 8:7-13; 9:15-21; 16:17-21.

What must not escape our focus is that God intends to publicly demonstrate the wickedness of the religion of man as it is inspired by the devil. For, the revolt in Genesis known as the Tower of Babel will be repeated in the campaign of the beast that is to come (Rev 18). Man will again set up his own religion of self-worship. This idolatrous worship of the creature and the creation (Rom 1:25) will be accompanied by calamitous consequences. Note the plagues described in Revelation chapters 6; 8; 9; 16; etc. You and I live in an apostate culture which God is going to judge—His holiness and justice require that retribution. Scripture is clear, God has a controversy with the nations, His fury will be poured out on the nations (Zeph 1:18; 3:8).

The term, the Day of the Lord refers to decisive judgment from God that is concentrated in a series of destructive climactic events. Because fallen man is in league with the devil, there must be a very public crushing of the kingdom of darkness before God’s everlasting kingdom is installed (Zech 14:1-21). God is justly filled with vengeance at the pride, idolatry, wickedness, and arrogance of the nations (Jer 25:31). The Lord is going to avenge His trampled honor. The destruction of ‘political-economic’ and ‘religious’ Babylon described in Revelation is a very visible event which will affect the whole world (see the judgment of Babylon in Revelation chapter 18).

The apostle Paul addressed the uncertainty of the Thessalonians regarding the coming Day of the Lord by affirming the order of prophetic events—namely that a great apostasy must come first before the Day of the Lord.

Now we request you, brethren, with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, that you not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one in any way deceive you, for it will not come unless the apostasy comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction. . . (2 Thess 2:1-5).

In the above text, the word apostasy (v. 3) comes from the N.T. Greek word apostasia, which means to fall away, to depart from the faith. The sheer momentum behind the reception of the lie will defy natural reason—and therefore Scripture describes its unfathomable exponential growth as ‘the mystery of lawlessness’ (2 Thess 2:7). As John MacArthur has warned, you and I live in the most spiritually dangerous period in all of history. Therefore, it behooves us to prepare ourselves to recognize and resist a coming massive acceptance of religious deception.

Regarding the compelling nature of the lie, our Savior tells us something truly breathtaking, “For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Mt 24:24). Don’t imagine that the deluding influence arrives as the jackbooted despotism and cruelty of a Hitler or Stalin. No, it comes in the garb of global harmony and human flourishing. Those not established in the gospel will fall away. To fall away from the faith does not mean that true believers will abandon the gospel. What it does mean is that millions who have made an outward profession of Christ but have remained unregenerate will turn to a form of religion which is a departure from the biblical gospel (1 Jn 2:18-19). The abandonment of the faith once for all delivered to the saints will gain momentum, not unlike a thunderous avalanche. It is ‘catalyzed’ by a set of simultaneous circumstances. The following six catalysts of the coming

apostasy are, at least in their initial form, already presently at work:

I. Scripture prophesies that a great falling away from the faith will occur in the last days (Mt 24:10; 2 Thess 2:1-4; 1 Tim 4:1-3).

And that this departure from the faith will be accelerated by the abundance of false teachers (2 Tim 4:3-4; 2 Pet 2:1-3; 3:17). The message of the false teachers ‘tickling their hearers’ desires’ will match the sentiment of the hearers and the ungodly times in which they live.

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths (2 Timothy 4:1-4).

II. The spirit of the age in the West has moved from post-Christian to anti- Christian.

The satanic notion that “sin is freedom” is embraced and propagated by the academy, by corporations, by the media, and by government. “Why are the nations in an uproar and the people’s devising a vain thing? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the LORD and against His Anointed, saying, ‘Let us tear their fetters apart and cast away their cords from us!’” (Ps 2:1-3). The hatred of God in the hands of the technocrats and policymakers is putting things in place for an ever more invasive culture of control through surveillance.

Such conditions may change our lives overnight, or in God’s patience, do so in the not-so distant future. The monitoring of purchases lends itself to establishing ‘social credit scores’ used to rate the citizen upon his or her level of loyalty to the state-sponsored narrative. The freezing of assets and/or the confiscation of personal property may someday be the consequence of refusing to endorse an agenda of Diversity-Equity-Inclusion. Christians having their possessions taken is a repeated theme in church history. “But remember the former days, when, after being enlightened, you endured a great conflict of sufferings, partly by being made a public spectacle through reproaches and tribulations, and partly by becoming sharers with those who were so treated. For you showed sympathy to the prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one” (Heb 10:32-34). But false Christians will deny the faith rather than endure this kind of temporal loss (Lu 14:25-35).

III. The global hatred of Israel and the Jews will increase exponentially in the last days (Zech 12:2-3).

This abhorrence of Israel is demonically inspired and will lead up to an invasion of Israel by a coalition of nations (Ezek 38-39). Within the international community, the condemnation of Israel’s occupation of the land will rise to a fever pitch. So great will this enmity be that families will give their sons to become members of the armies sent to exterminate Israel once and for all (Zech 12:1-3ff). Therefore, the cost of standing with Israel, befriending Jews, and seeking their salvation through the gospel will increase (note the social pressures upon Germany’s non-Jewish citizens during the Third Reich).

Remember, this historic antisemitism is satanically motivated (Rev 12:17)—both Jew and Christian are persecuted and slain during the Tribulation period (Rev 12:11; 13:7, 10, 15; 14:13; 18:24; 20:4). For the evil one knows that God has linked His unbreakable Word to His unbreakable promises to Israel. And God Almighty has synchronized the timing of Satan’s incarceration and ultimate destiny in the lake of fire with the redemption of Israel (Zech 12:10-13:1; Rev 12:12; 19:11-20:3).

IV. God will send a deluding influence throughout the world which will expose every person to eternal condemnation who has not received the love of the truth as it is in Christ.

Regarding the coming of the Day of the Lord and the saints gathering to Him, the apostle Paul declares,

Then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming; that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness” (2 Thess 2:8-12).

The Beast does not begin his campaign with a reign of terror, but instead with miracles and with promises! His initial lie will offer what men long for: peace, security, safety, supply (prosperity/resources) (1 Thess 5:3; 2 Thess 2:9; Rev 13:4). This deluding influence which God allows to be sent upon the world is so convincing that—if it were possible, even the elect would be deceived (Mt 24:24). ‘Attesting miracles’ will accompany the Beast’s platform of global, political, and religious unity (2 Thess 2:9-10; Rev 13:12-16). World peace, military disarmament, ecological breakthroughs collectively make the Antichrist’s ‘messiahship’ irresistible to earth’s inhabitants. The leader that the world has hoped for, appears to have arrived. This offering of worldwide human flourishing appears so convincing that to oppose it would make a person a veritable enemy of humanity.

V. The persecution of the true followers of Christ will occur throughout the whole earth.

Jesus said in John 15, “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” (Jn 15:19). “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death. You will be hated by all because of My name, but it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved” (Mt 10:21-22). As Paul Washer has said, our persecutors will not say that we are being martyred because we love Jesus, but rather because we have refused ‘what is best for humanity’, the worship of the will of the state. Christians will be cast as dangerous opponents of liberty and unity. Has today’s feel-good evangelicalism in any way prepared itself for this?

Under the pressures of persecution, false believers will fall away. Jesus warns in the parable of the soils that when faced with persecution, those who at first heard the gospel with joy will fall away because they have no firm root (Mt 13:20-21). Yes, true believers will not escape persecution (2 Tim 3:12), but they will persevere in faith because they are kept by faith and their Lord perseveres in preserving them (Phil 1:6).

VI. God will diligently test and refine His people.

Perhaps we would not expect to see this final catalyst of apostasy listed among the six. For, this sixth point is altogether a most positive influence in the perfecting of the saints. But it is noteworthy that the same severe tests that will prove the saints’ faith genuine will also move false believers to abandon their profession of faith. The apostle Peter states,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; and though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls (1 Pet 1:3-9).

God intends to test His people that He might reveal to them and to those around them the actual ‘species’ of their faith. Is theirs a genuine faith or a spurious faith? The cloud of witnesses described in Hebrews 11 bore witness by their lives of faith that God is worthy of worship, and that He is as good as His Word, both of His promises and His threats. God grants saving faith but does not leave it static. He develops it, stretches it, nurtures it, tests it, refines it, and proves it so that He might reward it (1 Pet 1:7-8). Blessed is the believer who knows that these are God’s ways! In his epistles,

Paul often wrote to believers who were being tested. He says to the Thessalonian believers, “We ourselves speak proudly of you among the churches of God for your perseverance and faith in the midst of all your persecutions and afflictions which you endure. This is a plain indication of God’s righteous judgment so that you will be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which indeed you are suffering” (2 Thess 1:4-5). In a very similar tone, Paul states in Acts 14, “After they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying, “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:21-22).

Mature believers are to strengthen growing saints (Heb 3:13-15). For God’s work of proving and refining faith is ‘par for the course’ for every true child of God. Consider these passages: Psalm 66:10; Proverbs 17:3; Daniel 11:33-35; 12:16; Romans 5:3-4; James 1:2-4; 1 Peter 4:12; Revelation 13:10; 14:12.

There is great value in studying and applying biblical prophecy (Rev 22:7).

But it seems that many Christians have little interest in this big picture theme of eschatology—namely of God vindicating His great Name in the judgment of the nations on the Day of the Lord. The sentiment tends to be, ‘end time prophecy is a confusing quagmire of views with esteemed Christian leaders in disagreement, I don’t have time to study that subject’. Yet, one cannot escape the big picture truth that if one is to live in light of the eschaton and the coming Kingdom of God, then certain edifying behaviors are required in view of the suddenness of the Day of the Lord. Is our focus as Christians the building up of one another unto endurance and perseverance? “But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb 3:13).

Are we prepared at all to step into local leadership if our neighborhood and community become characterized by chaos and anarchy? Or have we placed all of our eggs in the rapture basket, as if no preparation for opposition were needed? It is the opinion of the present authors that godly fathers who have habitually been leading spiritually will continue to lead faithfully within their sphere and community even in apostate times of judgment. The continuous cultivation of our spiritual habits and disciplines are crucial if we are to be ‘dressed in readiness’ (Lu 12:35-37ff.) and if we are to remain ‘on the alert’ (Mk 13:35). Our Lord through the author of Hebrews admonishes the persecuted church, “for you have need of endurance” (Heb 10:36). If God says this to the persecuted church, what would He say to us, the pampered church? A great falling away and severe opposition are coming, prepare yourselves.

The Apostles’ exhortations from end time prophecy are also directed at us.

When studying Scripture, these are the kinds of verbs we observe which describe what believers will have to endure. They will be worn down, arrested, flogged, killed, betrayed, taken before magistrates, assaulted with falsehood, imprisoned, falsely accused, abandoned by brethren, refined, and purified (see Dan 12:10; Mt 10; Mk 13; Lu 17; Lu 21; Jn 16 etc.). Christian ministry must become a more intense form of preparation if the saints are to be equipped in battle readiness. We are not really helping our brethren if our gatherings are aimed merely at socializing and friendship. We need deliberateness in preparing our brethren for what is to come. As the perilous times spoken of in 2 Timothy 3:1ff. unfold, the pressure to compromise to have ‘security’ will be overwhelming. The strength to stand for gospel truth when the majority is ridiculing you must come from very intentional preparation—from daily loyalty to Christ, the Lord, and from faithful equipping by the spiritually mature (1 Thess 2:1-13).

Paul the apostle seamlessly joins the eschatological, or ‘end time’ promises made to believers with the godly behaviors that are to characterize those who walk in fellowship with God:

Now as to the times and the epochs, brethren, you have no need of anything to be written to you. For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. While they are saying, “Peace and safety!” then destruction will come upon them suddenly like labor pains upon a woman with child, and they will not escape. But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day would overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness; so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober. For those who sleep do their sleeping at night, and those who get drunk get drunk at night. But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we will live together with Him. Therefore encourage one another and build up one another, just as you also are doing (1 Thess 5:1-11).

Our training and equipping of believers must incorporate the same eschatological dimensions exemplified by the apostles and by our Lord if we are to be faithful to the whole counsel of God. We must steady the saints who are worried and anxious, who have ‘overdosed’ on CNN. We must urge our brethren to ‘settle these things ahead of time’, before opposition hits the world of believers with vengeance. We must implore our brothers and sisters to stick with Christ and ‘ditch their idols now’ before affliction increases dramatically (2 Cor 2:1-11; 1 Thess 3:1-8).

Though their eschatological perspectives may differ, faithful Christian leaders can agree on this, that troubled times comprise a powerful message to the church to purify itself and to get its house in order (2 Pet 3:11-14). For, these last days announcements in Scripture tend not to move us as much in times of ease, but now these prophetic words have our ears. We are listening more attentively. The apostle Peter warns, “For it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And if it is with difficulty that the righteous is saved, what will become of the godless man and the sinner?” (1 Pet 4:17, 18). “The Lord has established His throne in heaven, and His sovereignty rules over all” (Ps 103:19).

There is not a maverick speck of dust in the galaxies that is not exactly where it has been appointed by our God. No man, no principality, no ruler can thwart the sovereign arm of the Lord. “There is no wisdom and no understanding and no counsel against the Lord” (Prov 21:30). “All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, but He does according to His will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth; and no one can ward off His hand or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’” (Dan 4:35).

There is no greater perspective from which to view world events than Christ’s glory.

The best vantage point from which to view these troubled times as well as our circumstances is from the glory seat of Christ. At the very center of biblical eschatology is the glory of Christ. For His return will be in blinding glory (Rev 1:7; 19:11-16; 2 Thess 1:6-10). His Father will vindicate the honor, glory, and majesty of His Son in the events of the glorious second advent and the Day of the Lord, and the coming messianic age. Consider that the last view the unbelieving world had of Christ was a man more marred than any man—mouth agape, hollow eyes, blood, dust, flies, spittle—a spectacle of shame, dereliction, and ignominy. This theme of the vindication of Christ for the unimaginable humiliation and suffering He endured fills the book of Revelation. For the thrust of this book is “the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Rev 1:1).

The exalted Christ enthroned in Jerusalem, with His church by His side, ruling the nations with a rod of iron is His vindication in time-space history (Rev 2:26-28; 3:21). For the true believer, the glory of Christ is not merely a theological topic, for to behold His glory has a transforming effect on the soul of every person united in Him (2 Cor 3:18). God has applied his own ‘brand’ on our hearts. His name is written upon His people (Rev 3:12). We are His—His precious possession—grafted into His Body forever (Eph 2:11-13; 19; 3:6)!

To think correctly of God’s sovereignty and His providence over injustices, recent atrocities, and hostile enemies is to recognize that God is who He says He is. He is good, righteous, just, and almighty and He is performing His will. He is providentially working through all things in order to bring about His full and timely purposes. His ways are infinitely wise, but His ways are not our ways (Is 55:8-9). The consummation of the age will tie up and bring together the disparate strands and ‘loose ends’ of history. For our Lord has said, “And the nations were enraged, and Your wrath came, and the time came for the dead to be judged, and the time to reward Your bond-servants the prophets and the saints and those who fear Your name, the small and the great, and to destroy those who destroy the earth” (Rev 11:18).

Therefore, we have great peace and comfort knowing that our God reigns over all events and is working them out for His glory and the eternal good of His people. Our Great High Priest is the perfect match to our ruin. A perfect savior for a sinful and cursed people (Heb 7:26-27). He bids us come in our distress and lay upon his bosom. Let all who know Him boast in this, that He is God, and we are the people of His pasture. Believers are the apple of His eye, a people for His own possession (Zech 2:8). Praise be to God that He is true, who exercises lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness on the earth (Jer 9:24).

The Cross-centered, Grace-based Christian Life

In salvation the heart of stone is replaced with a heart of flesh which loves God.

We need a new heart to love God. This ought to be preached when we proclaim the necessity of regeneration—the new birth is necessary to desire God with all our faculties. Consider that the gospel’s call for the new birth proposes that a man cannot know God and be saved unless there is a massive ‘invasion’ of the walled kingdom of self by the God of the universe. This ‘invasion’ grants a new nature; thus, it is designated, ‘being born from above’ (Jn 3:7). But the natural man opposes the new birth. The reason why is that he cherishes his imagined autonomy. But, when the work of the new birth passes upon the soul, the tyranny of self is deposed, the natural man’s ‘sovereignty’ is dethroned. The gracious result is that the government of God is installed in the soul—the newborn sinner now cherishes Christ’s throne rights there (1 Cor 2:15-16).

Francis Shaeffer gave a great summary of the 10 Commandments; it is to love God enough to always say thank you and to love neighbor enough not to covet. In a truly saved person, God’s cause, His glory, becomes the believer’s cause. The true Christian has daily amazement that God accomplishes His glory and our good together in Christ. Jonathan Edwards argued that true salvation must have a foundation that goes deeper than self-interest. Genuine salvation is characterized by a Spirit-engendered sight and savor of God’s glory. Hypocrites and false religionists lack this mark of salvation. In his book, The Religious Affections, Edwards presses his case stating that the truly converted man has seen Christ spiritually whereas the world has not seen Christ in this way. Explaining further, he notes that the religious affections are the fruit of a new heart and that these affections are what moves the Christian life. Satan cannot counterfeit this sentiment—no natural man sees God’s glory and the creature’s happiness woven together in Christ.

Though this article is dedicated to grace-based living, it does not mean that the consecration our Lord requires will be ignored. For our Lord has said, “You must hate your life in this world in order to keep it to life eternal” (Jn 12:25). The hating in this context means we are releasing our cherished way of doing things, our manipulations, defenses, and trusted areas of self-protection. Those attitudes and behaviors belong to the ‘old me’. But, now as a new creation, I am to daily consent to receive love from the Lord that I might love Him and the brethren in return. When Paul said, “Not I but Christ,” he was constantly looking to the Savior as the source of his spiritual life, vitality, righteousness, and favor with God (Gal 2:20).

The grace of God purchased at Calvary exalts God’s justice as well as His love.

One of the common misconceptions about God’s grace is that God has relaxed His strict justice. This error can lead to thinking in categories that accompany a reductionistic gospel. But like the apostle Paul, true recipients of grace yearn to study their Lord from the perspective of His cross—from the vantage point of propitiation. The apostle states, “For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). “But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal 6:14). In John’s first epistle we are told that the propitiation is the height of God’s love

Established in the Gospel

to undeserving sinners. “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10).

The justice of God satisfied at the cross gives believers permission to deal with their sin honestly and courageously.

The cross was a spectacle to men and angels. It was unfathomable that Christ was abandoned on the cross by God the Father. Our Savior’s cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” touches the very apex of God’s dealing decisively with the human condition of lostness and alienation (Ps 22:1). For, in the Son’s experience of crushing wrath and dereliction, He was accomplishing a guilt-exchange for His people. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor 5:21). “He who conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will find compassion” (Prov 28:13). “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn 1:9).

Not only does the cross instill us with heroism in dealing with personal sin, the cross also allows us to be honest with God. Author Paul Zahl urges believers to follow the example of the Psalmist who was willing to pray the negatives in his life to God rather than splitting off from them. In fact, if we choose to escape from, and deny our pain instead of processing our care and negativity in prayer, we lose some of our humanness. In other words, if we only deal with negativity by stoically shoving it back down inside, rather than giving it an interface with God, we are missing out on God ministering His faithfulness and lovingkindness to us. Paul could say of the frequent discomfort in his life, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor 1:3-4). Joyful integration comes when, instead of splitting off from the negativity in our lives, we allow that negativity to come in contact with Christ and His compassion, and the spiritual wealth of His cross.

The whole of Christ’s redemptive work is the cure for our sin.

It is baffling to natural sense and reason that for Christ to become our Great Physician it was necessary He prepare ‘a medicine’ for sin out of His own dereliction and agony. Now, contrast this to the litany of false philosophies, false religions, and spiritual quackery of the world’s would-be healers. Paul did not preach a gospel of ‘common sense’ but instead proclaims, “. . .we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles, foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor 1:23-25).

Nothing humbles like the cross. For, in its message we discover the truth that Christ was abandoned there because of, and for our dereliction, defilement, and rebellion. When the Holy Spirit applies this truth to you, there is a grace awakening. In that burst of understanding, a realization washes over the soul that God’s grace in the cross is perfectly suited to your situation—redemption in Christ perfectly answer your ruin by reason of sin. Saving faith and ongoing gospel faith involve a continual consent to God’s purpose in giving Christ as your only eligibility for endless installments of grace (Eph 2:4-7). But reckoning this truth is a spiritual discipline—a faith choice to daily receive this grace. As Jerry Bridges has said, it is the discipline of grace. It means consenting to have Christ as your merit and standing before God. It also means that since Christ carries your favor with God, you need to stop endless mental disputing about your qualification for God’s love and acceptance.

This spiritual discipline of preaching the gospel to yourself touches upon the N.T. concept of abiding in Christ. For, when abiding in Christ, you are consenting to be held by Christ right down to the depth of your being (Jn 15:4-5). You are yielding to Him the areas that you used to manage on your own. Without that daily decision of trust, you are not really abiding in Him. You can’t enjoy God while haunted by guilt and fixated on endless disputing about your worth. Apart from abiding in Christ who is the True Vine, we are ‘pitiful plants’ (John Piper, Desiring God).

The gospel is a mystery which could not be discovered by human wisdom and investigation; it had to be revealed by God (Rom 1:16-17).

The gospel of grace is a mystery that requires the fiat work of the Spirit to comprehend. The gospel is so radically counter-intuitive, that sinners do not imagine for a moment that the chief way God is glorifying Himself is in His Son’s work in saving sinners. And what is even more baffling is that this work of redemption is not a fiat action of God (a bare declaration of intent) which occurs apart from human suffering and obedience. For, the way God saves necessarily involves the humiliation and sacrifice of the Son of God as He radically identifies Himself with His people. He endures pain, sweat, blood, tears, shame, and rejection. And all of this is vicarious. He is standing in our room and place as our Substitute in all aspects of His obedience. “But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed” (Is 53:5).

The Father places believing sinners in the Son so that they are united with Him. This union is so close that God contemplates the saints as in His Son. But many Christians are not tasting the nectar in this flower of grace. The bitter things in their life are not sweetened by the abundant grace that Christ has purchased. These troubled saints have not dared to believe such glorious and majestic promises of the Father in making believers one with the Son. Consequently, they are living off the dry crumbs of carnal reasoning. The primary symptom of this graceless way of thinking is found in their tireless effort to manage their own dereliction, inadequacy, eligibility, and defectiveness. By contrast, the grace-based believer doesn’t spend a lot of time mentally disputing his lovability. Instead, he consciously builds upon Christ as His qualification for divine favor. He obeys the injunction found in Hebrews 12:2, “Looking unto Jesus.” He seeks to be constantly renewed in his mind by these gracious truths purchased by the cross.

For, the cross of Christ possesses healing power for the sin-abused soul. “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” (Ps 22:1a). Christ’s abandonment on Calvary’s cross is the divine answer to my ill-desert (the judgment I deserve as a habitual sinner). Christ’s dereliction is the cure for my dereliction. This is such a short, succinct clause, but it requires an explanation. Christ’s dereliction was His forsakenness while under the wrath of God. Dereliction means abandonment, being discarded as dysfunctional and useless. What a thought! The Son of God, the Creator endures our dereliction so that we might be forgiven and adopted as sons of God. These two immense ‘dots’— Christ’s bearing our dereliction by His dereliction are connected in the gospel and are only perceived by the Spirit’s work. Let us explore further why the healing health of the gospel is centered in the cross—and why Christ’s dereliction is the cure for our dereliction.

1 Peter 3:18 states that ‘by His stripes we are healed’. By His bloody death, Christ bore the penalty for my sinful habits, my uselessness to God, my unfruitfulness—all the things about me which I’d like to hide from my conscious thought life. This is why the cross is so humbling; the glorious and majestic Creator of the cosmos hung on that cross for the worst and most vile things about me. That is radically humbling. But, first and foremost the cross is not intended to heal me as its priority; its first purpose is to give you the saving knowledge of God. For, the cross makes God known as Just and Justifier of the one who had faith in Jesus (Rom 3:26). Thus, we find that this theological mountain peak of propitiation (Christ’s atoning sacrifice) communicates to darkened sinners the saving knowledge of God. Thus, the cross effectively declares to us the ‘two major prongs’ of God’s character, His justice and mercy.

How God saves by His Son’s cross is the grandest revelation of who God is.

It is incredibly significant that God propitiates (satisfies and quenches) His own wrath on behalf of the elect. And, then as our Great High Priest He dispenses the benefits of His propitiation to His Bride chosen by His heavenly Father (Eph 5:25-27). Now, against this backdrop of gospel grace, we ought to be able to see the folly of seeking to earn favor with God. For, the infinite benefit of Christ’s propitiation is communicated and applied to the elect by the regenerating work of the Spirit. This means that every facet of the atonement translates into a benefit for God’s people. These benefits are ours by virtue of our union with Christ’s Person. It is His indestructible life as our Great High Priest which ensures He will save His own to the uttermost (forever, completely) (Heb 7:23-28). We will never outgrow the fact that God wills to be known by the satisfaction of His unchanging standard of righteousness through the Substitute whom He has appointed. Our right-standing with God rests fully upon the sacrifice and merits of Christ who stood in our place and now represents us before the Father’s throne (Rom 8:32-34; Heb 6:19-20; 9:11-14; 10:19-22).

The cross humbles us as nothing else can do, for the cross proclaims that we cannot fix our own dereliction and brokenness by sin. Yet, over the last 100 years psychology has told us that we can repair ourselves. But it is God’s infallible perspective that is authoritative, and He has stated in Scripture that we are beyond self-help (Jer 13:23). Our restoration came by the cross which is a spectacle before men and angels. For, it is a scene of ignominy, shame, horror, agony, abandonment, victimization, and reproach. To the natural carnal mind, there is not a thing there that is attractive. In fact, the cross repels those addicted to self-help philosophies and self-improvement therapies. The cross strikes not only at our self-righteousness, but also at our strategies of self-reformation and self-repair. The cross leaves us off balance and staggered as we attempt to contemplate what God was doing there, in His Son’s humiliation.

Only the message of the cross has the power to cancel our natural legal working.

When the full force of the cross is realized, it strikes a death blow to all our legal working. Yes, the cross humbles deeply. It causes us to ‘come clean’ regarding our trusted places of refuge and performance. It humbles because it demonstrates how low the Son of God has stooped in order to bend down, cleanse, and revive His people. The cross digs up and exposes to the light of day all the faulty dialog we have habitually engaged in to quiet our troubled consciences. We are humbled by the cross because we cannot seem to comprehend the link between Christ’s infinite worthiness and our immeasurable unworthiness. What was being accomplished by the abandonment of the Son? The answer lies in His voluntary humiliation. So closely did our Lord identify with us, that He became (by imputation) the dereliction of the sinner. As it says in Galatians 3:13, the curse of God’s broken law rested upon Him, He became the curse the disobedient deserved, the anathema pronounced against transgressors of God’s law. The endless list of charges against us which justly called for our condemnation, was nailed to His cross by God Himself (Col 2:14).

The Son of God experienced the wrath of God against His body and soul. The spiritual, psychical, physical, emotional, and relational consequences of sin crushed Him to the depth of His being. Our dereliction—which is our failure to live as the image of God, fell upon Him. He became, by imputation the derelict, useless (to God), guilty, defiled, condemned rebel, so that in our place, He was treated as the worst criminal who ever lived. Our dereliction (of duty), and alienation (dis-relatedness) was charged to His account as He perished under the curse of the law. But how many Christians daily live upon these truths, feeding upon them as Christ urged in John chapter six verses 47 through 63? Why do we resist the healing power of the cross favoring powerless placebos instead? The cross is just too humbling for us. We secretly despise being an object of divine pity, an object of compassion, a daily ‘charity case’.

I think of my experience in the prisons in which the present author ministered. Often after preaching the Word, inmates would come up to tell me that they planned to do better. They would promise, “This time I am truly repenting: no more substance abuse, no more spousal abuse and neglect, no more running with felons upon my release.” Most of those men did not change. It was the rare inmate who testified of what Christ has done for him. How humbling it is to receive into one’s whole person the truth that Christ was shamed, tortured, and abandoned for the likes of me—the Great Physician took on the penalty and eternal consequences of my ‘sin disease’ that I might be healed of it (Mk 2:17). We recoil from such radical love. We are reluctant to leverage all upon a divine Person and His vicarious suffering. We are slow to release our cherished forms of self-protection—often preferring to be entangled in mental disputes about our defectiveness, rather than trusting that real, God-satisfying justice has been accomplished at the cross in the case of our personal sins.

Christ’s work as Substitute has perfectly fitted Him to be our Great Physician.

The cross is not a spiritual pharmacy where we get a prescription filled for the improvement of spiritual health. The cross deals comprehensively with everything in us that alienates us from God— including our hiding from Him! In the realm of medicine, we know how anti-venom is made to treat snakebites. A mammal, such as a horse, is given small doses of snake venom over a period of time until its resistance is strong enough to combat the venom. Then, serum is drawn from the animal in order to provide lifesaving antivenom to humans bitten by poisonous snakes. In a related way, our Lord compares His own crucifixion to the brass serpent on the pole which Moses lifted up in the wilderness in order to bring recovery from the deadly bites of ‘fiery serpents’ (Jn 3:14-15). Gazing on the brass serpent which was lifted on a pole brought physical healing to Israelites who were bitten (Num 21:9). But, looking in faith upon Christ who was lifted up in crucifixion brings spiritual healing so that believers will live spiritually and eternally (MacArthur Study Bible, p. 1581).

Our point is that Christ received the full sting of death into His own being that He might deliver believers from the sting of death (1 Cor 15:54-57). Christ’s Person and work is like no other love story. In eternity past, our Lord agreed to take upon Himself, the liabilities, curse, alienation, wrath, death, and damnation of His bride. He willingly took upon Himself the crushing suffering from which in divine justice, there was no escape. He drank the cup to its fullest, absorbing into His own Person the crushing suffering and unmixed wrath His bride deserved (Rom 2:5-9). John Flavel, a Puritan theologian, imaginatively recreates the conversation between God the Father and God the Son in eternity past before time began.

Father: My Son, here is a company of poor miserable souls that have utterly undone themselves and now lie open to my justice. Justice demands satisfaction for them, or will satisfy itself in the eternal ruin of them. What shall be done for these souls? Son: O my Father, such is my love to and pity for them that rather than they shall perish eternally, I will be responsible for them as their Guarantee. Bring all your bills, so that I may see what they owe you. Lord, bring them all in, that there may be no after-reckonings with them. At my hand you will require it. I would rather choose to suffer your wrath than they suffer it. Upon me, my Father, upon me be all their debt. Father: But my Son, if you undertake for them, you must pay the last penny. Expect no discounts. If I spare them, I will not spare you. Son: I am willing, Father. Let it be so. Charge it all to me. I am able to pay their debt. And though it will undo me, though it will impoverish all my riches and empty all my accounts, yet I am content to undertake it” (Quoted in The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ, by Ray Ortlund, p. 42).

God did not spare His own Son as Isaac was spared in the last moments (Rom 8:32). The ‘knife’ of God’s wrath was plunged into our Savior’s soul and body. The Father’s giving of Christ for guilty sinners is the heart of the gospel, and it is heaven’s logic which stands behind the promise of endless installments of grace for believing sinners (Eph 2:7). For, if God did not withhold the most precious gift, His only begotten Son, then all lesser gifts will follow. But how does the cross ‘heal us’ of our ‘terminal sin disease’? How does it change those who are the objects of its transforming power? In 1 Peter 3:18, it says that by His stripes we are healed. But how did the open wounds and bleeding welts on Christ’s back heal us? The answer is that under God’s moral government the bondage of sin is not cancelled until the wages of sin are fully paid for. The cross joins pardon with payment. Christ’s sacrificial death ‘cuts the chains of sin’s bondage’ for all whom it is intended. To be healed by Christ’s agonies is the work of redemption. By the tearing of Christ’s flesh believing sinners are brought from a place of legal guilt and condemnation to a status before God of righteousness and favor (Rom 6:22-23).

The way in which God saves sinners puts His divine attributes and perfections on display. Therefore, the true believer loves the way God saves.

We were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ (Rom 7:4-6). In Christ’s sacrifice God was reconciling the world to Himself by not counting their transgressions against them (2 Cor 5:19). He paid the ultimate price for this reconciling peace. And He did so while we were enemies of God (Rom 5:10). In our natural state our hearts and minds were brimming with hostility toward our Creator (Col 1:21). It is no exaggeration to say that the unbeliever wishes he could overthrow God’s moral government. For the sinner imagines a heaven in which the Ten Commandments no longer apply. The sinner is offended by the rigor of God’s law—that its searching prosecutorial function extends to thoughts, glances, and attitudes. And, to show how deep his rebellion really goes, the unbeliever would rather shake his fist and demand that God stop being God than receive a blood-bought reconciliation to an infinitely holy God.

Consider that religious sinners steer wide of the cross, thinking that they may appease God with a carnal, relative righteousness (Rom 10:1-4). But it is only the cross applied to the sinner by the Spirit that makes new creatures, the cross applied ‘buys’ transformed lives (Titus 2:14). The guilt-transfer at Calvary was also a transfer of righteousness so that believers are clothed with the righteousness of Another (2 Cor 5:21; 1 Pet 2:24). A Christian is a person who is righteous by faith (Hab 2:4). As new creatures that have received a ‘heart transplant’ (Ez 36:26), God’s cause (the extending of His glory) is now the believer’s cause and passion. This is all attributable to the finished work of Christ, for the cross makes God’s holiness beautiful to sinners, and the cross makes blood-washed sinners beautiful to God.

The true believer loves the way that God saves because the cross puts on display a host of God’s holy perfections (Rom 3:24-26). The true believer is ‘a friend of the cross’—he is a friend because he is enabled by the cross to cooperate with its purposes to make its recipients holy. Therefore, every friend of the cross hates sin and zealously mortifies what remains of indwelling sin. Conversely, those who are enemies of the cross permit their lusts and passions to set the standard for their behavior; they set their minds on earthly things (Phil 3:17-19). Therefore, a genuine believer is aligned with the purpose of the cross which is to conform us to the image of Christ (Rom 8:29-30). The Son of God is the Father’s unspeakable gift (2 Cor 9:15). Throughout eternity we will still be exploring what Christ has done for redeemed humanity. For, God has determined to commune with us after our form—meaning Christ will dwell with us in our nature for all eternity (Isaac Ambrose, Looking unto Jesus).

In contemplating the Person and work and perfections of his Savior, the believer gains insights into the glories of the future eternal state.

Christ stooped to be born in our human nature that He might be glorified in our nature, raising it above that of angels (Heb 2:5). The beatific vision (seeing Him in glory as He truly is, 1 Jn 3:2) will be looking upon God in our nature glorified, with the marks of our atonement still on His body. ‘Beatific’ refers to a magnitude of bliss only possible in heaven when believers behold the glory of their Lord (Jn 17:24). There are no words to describe and capture this wealth of glory. The Son of God has assumed our nature to give us the greatest gift of all, God Himself (John Piper, God is the Gospel). God has ‘packaged’ His perfections in Christ, so that our Savior is “. . .the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb 1:3). We see God’s glory ‘in the face of Christ’ in order that the glorified saints may experience for all eternity the unbroken communication of God’s glory to them in a perfectly perceptible way through the Son (2 Cor 4:6).

Christ the Lord is our ‘Man in glory’; He is a priest after the order of Melchizedek (Heb 6:17-20). Martin Luther noted that sin and Satan mercilessly beat us up each day. And as a result of the evil one’s insinuations, and our lack of gospel literacy, we find ourselves frequently marooned on a spiritual ‘desert island’—on which we endlessly dispute our eligibility for God’s favor. We sit in this state of dereliction like a castaway scanning the horizon for possible rescue. We cannot see the forest for the trees, we are too timid to aggressively roll the entire welfare of our souls upon Christ again each day. But the solution is very near. We must take heart from Hebrews chapter six, that our Great High Priest has entered within the veil for us with His own blood. Christ is our City of Refuge who protects us from the unbending justice of God’s avenging Law.

In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil, where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek (Heb 6:17-20).

The Law of God is relentless, it cannot rest until it sees justice done, and witnesses the vindication of God’s holy honor.

There is much paradox here for Paul tells us in Romans 7 that the Law is good and spiritual and holy. But the Law is also the uncompromising avenger of God’s trampled glory and honor. Our High Priest is our ‘City of Refuge’. With the Law’s condemnation in pursuit, the believer in gospel faith has fled into Christ the City of Refuge from the judgment of the Law. Christ, our High Priest intercedes for those for whom He has died so that no charge can be brought against them (Rom 8:33-34). But my friends there is courage needed to daily bank on this, and to hour by hour receive this exotic species of love (1 Jn 3:1).

Some trauma is involved in appropriating this love because it is apprehended by faith. By contrast, there is no faith required to be conversant with our unworthiness, failure, and accusations of a troubled conscience. But much faith is needed to be conversant with Christ’s worthiness and perfect fitness as our Advocate. Guilt may rightly move us to repentance, but it cannot sanctify us. In fact, no sin can be crucified in heart or life until we know that it is forgiven (James Haldane, Scottish theologian). How true, the word of His grace is counterintuitive—we prefer legal working rather than reckoning the finished work of our blessed Substitute.

No one accidently stumbles upon grace-based gospel living. It requires a kind of ‘gospel fluency’ in which the believer learns to preach the gospel to himself each day. For, apart from daily confidence in that blood-bought pardon, a believing person can be easily caught on a treadmill of performance, penance, and failure. Legal repentance cannot cleanse from guilt, nor can it plant spiritual delight in the affections. The saint who experiences daily comfort from his Lord has learned the blessed habit of confessing and forsaking his sins, of permitting the Spirit to point him to the blood yet again—of matching his sinner-ship with Christ’s Saviorhood. Wonder of wonders, in the mind and heart of Almighty God, He determined that it was fitting that we should have such a perfect Savior. How marvelous that our holy God planned that believing sinners should have a Savior who is perfectly fitted to save them from sin and bring them to glory.

Therefore, He is able also to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting for us to have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens; who does not need daily, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the sins of the people, because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself (Hebrews 7:25-27).