Members of the Board of Trustees, my colleagues
of the faculty and friends, when on this
occasion I speak to you of the certainty
of our faith, I have in mind the
faith of our fathers, the faith of Martin
Luther, the faith of John Calvin, the faith
of Gerardus Vos, and the faith, particularly, of
Jake Rathomachen, the chief founder of this institution
whom I would honor in a special sense
today.
I believe today, and I undertake to say
that all of you with me believe today
what these men believed in their day, and
it can all be summed up in one
single sentence, that Jesus Christ is the only
name given under heaven by which man must
be saved.
Secondly, when I speak to you of the
certainty of our faith, I am speaking of
the faith that we as the redeemed by
the blood of Jesus on the cross of
Calvary possess.
We have found grace in the sight of
God.
We believe that Jesus died for our sins
according to the scriptures, that he was raised
again according to the scriptures.
Paul speaks to us as he did to
the Corinthians, as beloved brethren, as fellow believers
in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead
and of our justification through it.
Paul says to us that we are sanctified
in Christ Jesus.
And we believe these things to be true
for ourselves because by the Holy Spirit of
God we have been born again, born from
the blood, born of God.
We have received the heritage, moreover, of the
reformed faith which must lead all others in
the service of Christ, the Redeemer of men.
Thirdly, when I speak of the certainty of
our faith, more particularly, I think of the
fact that we must speak to the world
about us, of our faith in Christ.
And I am thinking now particularly of the
graduating class and of their task to go
out and to proclaim to the world and
to an apostate church Christ Jesus and the
resurrection, Jesus the victor over sin and death,
Jesus establishing his kingdom, and that against the
powers of hell so that they cannot prevail
against it.
I am thinking, too, of the temptation that
will beset them in the nature of the
case of will to accommodate this gospel of
the cross of Christ and of his resurrection
to the taste of the natural man, to
be an effective minister, an able minister of
the new covenant of salvation.
One must be certain that this gospel is
not some cunningly devised fable, but is true
and that all truth anywhere springs from this
gospel.
Think for a moment of Martin Luther standing
at the Diet of Worms, standing before Charles
V, the emperor, refusing to recant what he
had written.
Think of John Calvin writing his institute and
sending it to Francis, the king of the
French, in order to make plain to them
that this was the faith that is subject
to or persecuted to thee.
And think of John Rogers, who went to
the stake as though he were walking to
his wedding.
Think of John Hooper, who was burned to
death because he believed in the once for
all atonement of Christ upon the cross for
sinners and therefore declared the pulpit's mass to
be an invention of men.
The Church of Rome, he has told the
people, was keeping from the people the merits
of the blood of Jesus Christ.
Or think with me of Nicholas Ridley and
Hugh Latimer, being tied back to back with
Ridley, Latimer said to him, Be of good
comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man.
We shall this day by God's grace light
a candle in England, such as I trust
shall never be put out.
As this graduating class goes out from this
place, they will be confronted with a world
that is more definitely committed to man's self
-sufficiency than it has ever been before in
the past and to a Church that is
more deeply and more widely apostate than it
was in the days of the Reformers.
The Confession of 1967, largely constructed under the
leadership of members of the faculty of Princeton
Theological Seminary and officially adopted by the United
Presbyterian Church, is calculated to erase from the
hearts of men the merit and the blood
of Jesus Christ as surely as was the
Church of Rome trying in the time of
the English Reformers to stifle the gospel of
the sovereign grace of God.
And now go back with me as we
reverse, go over these three points again, to
the institution of the supper of our Lord.
Jesus, during his days of service on earth,
during his ministry, had said that he was
the bread of life, who shall eateth my
flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life
and I will raise him up at the
last day.
And just before he was to give his
life a ransom for many, he met in
the upper chamber with the twelve disciples whom
he had chosen to proclaim the gospel of
his salvation through his cross to all men
everywhere in order to prepare them further for
this service.
Come with me for a moment, if you
will, and watch what was going on in
that upper room.
Some time before this, Jesus had already sent
out his twelve to raise the dead and
to heal the sick, to cleanse the lepers.
Go to the lost sheep of the house
of Israel, he told them, and tell them
that the kingdom of heaven is at hand,
freely you have received, freely give, but do
not expect that because you come to men
to do them good and to offer them
salvation in my name, as promised the promised
Messiah of Moses and the prophets, that they
will gladly receive you.
I am come as the light of the
world, but the men of the world love
darkness rather than light.
Men hate me, the master, and they will
hate you, my servant, too.
When Jesus saw the sake of men hating
him and of hating his servants, he was
thinking, of course, especially of Satan and his
work behind all those who were hating him.
He was thinking of Satan instigating this hatred.
In the case of Jesus' ministry, he sought
to destroy the work of salvation that he
had come to perform.
He tried in particular to make Jesus himself
believe that he did not need to suffer
on the cross in the place of men
to bear the wrath of God for them.
Satan proposed that he and Christ himself could
cooperate in a program of building the kingdom
of man.
And now toward the end of Jesus' ministry,
Satan was redoubling his efforts to defeat Jesus
and his work because he knew his time
was short.
And now more clearly than ever, he realized
that Jesus had all the while been out,
even from the beginning, to destroy his kingdom,
the kingdom of hell.
But Jesus had been quick always to detect
the Satanic spirit, even in the words of
his apostle Peter.
And when he said, Get thee behind me,
Satan, for thou savest not the things that
be of God, but those that be of
men.
And now, at the supper, Jesus forces the
issue, Will you, all twelve of you, be
my true servants and proclaim my name as
the one who shed his blood at
the time of the exodus of Egypt?
Take, eat, this is my body.
Take, drink, this is the new covenant in
my blood.
But one of you will betray me.
One of you will show himself to have
been a tool of Satan all the while.
One of you will soon openly choose the
side of the Pharisees who from the beginning
have been seeking to destroy me.
Choose you now for me or against me.
Am I really for you the Lamb of
God that takes away your sins?
Do you now see that I must be
wounded for your transgression and bruised for your
inequities?
The atmosphere in the upper room was getting
much too hot for Judas.
The others, too, were depressed.
They did not fully understand what Jesus had
come to do for them.
But in their hearts was true love for
their Lord, wrought by the Spirit of God,
in Judas, on the contrary, to have been
smoldering all the while the hatred for what
Jesus had wrought.
Judas goes out into the dark of night.
When Peter later in the courtyard denied that
he had known Jesus, he went out afterwards
and wept bitterly for this denial when Jesus
had prayed for them that he might not
be taken by Satan after Jesus looked at
him and the cockroach thrice the third time
Peter went out and he remembered his sad
betrayal.
But when Jesus at the supper handed the
morsel of bread and the cup of wine
to Judas, Satan entered into him and took
full possession of him.
Judas never found true repentance for his betrayal
of Jesus.
He merely threw his thirty pieces of silver
at the Pharisees as useless to him now.
He followed Satan and lost himself and all
that he had.
Now the faith of Dr. Mason was the
faith of Peter, not the faith of Judas.
And by the grace of God, the faith
of Peter, not the faith of Judas, is
also our faith today.
Our faith, like that of Dr. Mason, is
the faith of the old principal man, not
of the new.
The faith of the Hodges and of B
.B. Warfield, the faith of the founders of
this institution, of the first president of the
board of this institution, Frank H.
Stevenson, of Samuel G.
Craig, of Robert Dick Wilson, and of Oswald
T.
Ellis.
In short, the faith of all those who
once again, in recent times or in our
present day, are ready to stand up for
the merit of the blood of Jesus against
those who are with the men of modern
science and of modern philosophy and of modern
theology are seeking to construct the kingdom of
man.
All of us must, even across the ecclesiastical
borders, speak oft with one another of our
common heritage, our common past, and our common
hope.
And it is the faith of all of
us who believe in the merit of the
blood of Jesus to do this thing constantly.
Wholly committed to the reformed faith, Dr. Mason
was constantly rejoicing in the fellowship of those
not reformed but yet believing in the blood
and merit of Jesus Christ.
When Jesus had been crucified, it seemed as
though Satan had been victorious.
The Jews, led by their high priest, had
found him guilty of blasphemy.
Being a mere man, the high priest said
he had made himself God, equal with God.
Thus the leaders of the covenant people called
on him to be a light to the
Gentiles, sought to envelop that light in the
darkness of the nation.
The Pharisees said that Jesus could not be
the Messiah spoken of by Moses and the
prophets, so they handed him over to Pontius
Pilate.
And Pilate said, what is truth?
Do you claim to be the kingdom of
truth?
What nonsense is this?
The great philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and
others have told us that truth is utterly
beyond the reach and power of man.
No one knows the truth.
Truth is at best an idea that men
may set for themselves in order to accomplish
something as they row their rowboat on a
shoreless and a bottomless ocean.
Thus the Jews, the covenant people so called,
the people to whom the oracles of God
had been revealed, joined with the Gentiles in
saying that Jesus was not, because he could
not be, the promised prophet, priest, and king
through whom salvation should be accomplished for men.
All of them were instruments of Satan.
Through them the powers of hell were seeking
to establish the kingdom of men instead of
the kingdom of God.
But notice now the certainty with which after
Christ's resurrection the apostles and their followers proclaimed
the name of Jesus as that only name
which is given under heaven by which they
must be saved.
Listen to the words of the early church.
Believers, the kings of the earth stood up
and all the rulers were gathered together against
the Lord and against his anointed, his Christ.
For of the truth against thy holy child
Jesus whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and
Pontius Pilate with the Gentiles and the people
of Israel were gathered together for to do
whatever thy counsel, thy hand and counsel before
is determined to be done.
The certainty of our faith should be the
certainty of fearlessness in the face of opposition
such as these early churchmen had.
We ask then for the third time about
the substance, the nature, the content, the object
of our faith.
Where is your God and where is your
Christ in this scorny world?
And an apostate church says to us today,
our answer is that the object of our
faith is the self-attesting Christ of the
scriptures as the Lord of history, as the
victory over Satan and all his hope.
The whole course of history we contend and
tell the world in true humility we trust
but also with utter fearlessness is an all
-out war between Christ and Satan for the
souls of men with Christ the victor and
Satan the vanquished.
In short, when we assert that all things
are from Christ and through Christ and unto
Christ, we give in word our total philosophy
of history.
With respect to the past we say all
things are created by God as John tells
us in the prologue of his gospel.
As for the present, listen to the apostle,
all things were created in him by him
and by him all things consist.
And finally as to the future, listen again
to Paul because he hath appointed a day
in which he will judge the world in
righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained
wherein he hath given assurance and that he
hath raised him from the dead.
We realize that none but those who accept
the scriptures as unproblematic authority in terms of
which they understand the world will believe with
us in this way.
But we do believe in the existence of
Satan, the world does not, and we believe
in his deceit on the cross.
At no stage of the whole course of
history was Satan able to win more than
a sham victory.
Now this victory of Christ over Satan also
spells our victory with him.
For history is now for me and for
all those who in partaking of the supper
as he instituted it really to eat his
flesh and to drink his blood.
We are now in a staircase that leads
upward to our Savior's presence.
Did he not tell his disciples, and through
them tell us, Let not your heart be
troubled.
Ye believe in God, believe also in me.
In my Father's house are many mansions.
If it were not so, I would have
told you.
I go to prepare a place for you.
Seated at the right hand of the Father,
my Savior now intercedes for me, appealing to
the Father on the basis of his finished
work that he wrought for me on Calvary's
cross, and the Spirit, too, makes intercession for
me and prays within me and for me
with groaning unutterable.
The Heidelberg Catechism expresses my conviction marvelously well.
What is your only comfort in life and
in death?
The answer is that I, with body and
soul, for time and for eternity, in life
and in death, am not my own but
belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ who
with his precious blood has fully satisfied for
all my sins and redeemed me from all
the powers of the devil and so preserves
me that without the will of my heavenly
Father, not a hair can fall from my
head.
Yea, that all things work together for my
salvation.
Wherefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures
me of eternal life and makes me heartily
willing and ready henceforth to live unto him.
It is our faith as believers in the
merit and the blood of Jesus that we
confess today before the world and before an
apostate church.
We are now more conscious, deeply conscious than
ever before that we must hold to this
faith in the opposition to the combined forces
that are against us.
Now when I think again at last upon
my faith in the self-attesting Christ of
Scripture as the Lord of history to whom
all power on heaven and on earth is
given and who will soon return in the
clouds of heaven to judge the quick and
the dead, then I ask thee finally again
of the certainty of this my faith.
Do I, do we, do we dare, does
this class graduating dare fearlessly to set our
philosophy of history, our view of Christ and
of the scriptures and the scriptures of the
Christ over against that of the unbeliever and
challenge him to forsake the wisdom of this
world?
Does not the prevailing philosophy of our day
assure us that no one knows our truth?
Is not this prevailing philosophy more skeptical than
Pontius Pilate possibly could have been in his
day?
Are we not told that science cannot operate
except in an open universe?
Does not the prevailing thought of our day
tell me that my body together with the
life of plants and of animals has come
into this world by a process of evolution
from the world of chance and do not
the leading theologians of our day, both Roman
Catholic and Protestant, inform me that when we
cry out O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?
That we are fooling ourselves, deluding ourselves and
setting our hopes on nothing but fairytales which
no mature person can take as representing the
fact of our world.
And I think now again especially of our
graduating class.
At least a number of them will soon
be called upon to preach Christ and crucify
Christ in the resurrection.
They will soon be called upon not to
set forth cunningly devised fables but to speak
the truth as it is in Jesus.
They will be called upon to say to
those to whom all things are relative and
who assume with pride that no one knows
and no one can know the truth who
especially assure us that what we believe cannot
be true, that the Christ of the scriptures
is the way, the truth and the life,
and that without him life is worse than
vain.
Will they dare to say with full assurance
of its truth that Christ is risen from
the dead and has become the firstfruits of
them that slept as servants of Christ as
those who will on the final day give
an account of what they have sent to
men and what they have proclaimed to men.
They will continue to hear the solemn words
of Paul.
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, unmovable, always
discerning in the work of the Lord for
as much not as you guess or think
but for as much as you know that
your labor is not in vain in the
Lord.
Will they dare to be able to say
I know whom I have believed and that
he is able to keep that which I
have committed unto him against that day.
Well, after Easter and after Pentecost, how can
any servant of Christ be anything but servant
of this faith.
It is in this way that our graduates,
this seminary and we all with them, each
in his own way and in his own
station and place, must speak today to those
who are green as where the Pharisees when
Peter spoke to them of Jesus.
When they hear of the Christ and of
him crucified for the sins of his people
and raised from the dead for their justification.
And it will be the responsibility of this
institution in days to have come and of
all of us who have in the providence
and grace of God found in the reformed
faith the fullest expression of this faith to
lead all other believers in the service of
this sovereign God of Scripture.
And finally if fear should at any time
threaten to keep us from being steadfast and
immovable abounding in the work of the Lord
then let us look at that cloud of
witnesses some of whom were stoned and thorn
of thunder were tempted were slain with a
sword who wandered about in sheep skins and
goat skins being destitute, tormented, afflicted of whom
the world was not worthy but who received
not the promise God having provided some better
thing for us that they without us should
not be made perfect.
Think for a moment with me of Noah
the man of God.
Noah differed from the men of his time
because he had received grace in the sight
of God.
That was the source of the difference and
alone the source of the difference.
With grace in his heart he lived among
his fellow covenant breakers as the only covenant
keeper.
He preached and practiced righteousness among those who
preached and practiced lawlessness.
Obeying the vision that God had given him
to build an ark for the saving of
his house and for the warning to those
that forsaken their creator redeemer he labored and
labored on witnessing to his generation fearlessly.
The faith of Noah involved the whole philosophy
of history the philosophy of origin, of the
past the philosophy of the present and the
philosophy of the future.
But Noah's contemporaries ridiculed him.
What did he mean by building an ark
on top of a mountain and thinking that
he could actually float it in the water.
There had been no such flood there had
been bad floods to be sure but empirical
evidence did not indicate even the possibility of
such a flood as Noah spake of.
And what on earth did anything that pertains
to my internal moral life have to do
with rain and with sunshine.
Noah you are ridiculous beyond words.
Said Jesus as were the days of Noah
so shall the days of the son of
man be for as in the days that
were before the flood they were eating and
drinking marrying and giving and marriage until the
day that Noah entered the ark and knew
not until the flood came and took them
all away so shall also the coming of
the son of man be.
The men of Noah's days paid no attention
to the warning that Noah gave them.
They simply assumed that the claims of Noah
about the coming judgment were the product of
an overheated imagination.
Today too men simply assume that the word
of Jesus about this second coming as being
like the time of the first flood is
all delusion at best.
In Noah's days the line of separation between
the church and the world had worn out.
There was no more evidence there was intermarriage
between the children and the descendants of Cain
and the descendants of Seth.
As the Jews and the Gentiles were united
in their common effort to destroy Jesus and
his claim to be the son of God
and son of man coming as judge of
men so a false church as did the
men of Noah's time and an apostate world
are singing in chorus that nobody knows anything
about anything but all know that the faith
of such men as Lutheran of Calvin and
of Machen cannot possibly be true and that
their own faith therefore must be true.
It is the task of our graduating class
and of this seminary and of all of
us in days ahead to dare to stand
alone as Noah stood alone against those who
believed his words to be followed.
They who hold to the faith and to
Christ of the scriptures must do so in
the faith of well-nigh universal doubt indifference
and unbelief.
Surely they must hold on to the promise
fear not little flock it is the will
of the Father to give unto you the
kingdom.
And when we are afraid and when we
doubt let us look at one more of
the heroes of the faith namely at Abraham
the father of the believers in obedience to
the heavenly vision.
He left his home without knowing whither he
went.
By faith he sojourned in the land of
promise with Isaac and Jacob the heirs with
him of the promise for he looked for
the city that hath foundation.
Our Lord says of Abraham that he longed
to see his dame and that he saw
him.
To Abraham and to his seed were the
promises made.
He said not as to seeds as of
many but as of one and that seed
is Christ.
Through Christ the promised seed of Abraham will
the nations of the world be blessed.
But who believes this today?
The world says that nobody can predict the
future.
Those who believe that Christ has redeemed us
from the curse of the law being made
a curse for us so that the blessings
of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through
Jesus Christ that we might receive the promise
of the spirit of faith must do so
in the face of the opposition of the
God of this age.
Listen for one moment as I read to
you and indicate to you some of these
modern prophets.
Think of Soren Kierkegaard.
By church men he is said to have
brought men back from vain worldly philosophies to
the Christ of the scriptures.
Nothing less is true than that that is
simply not in accordance with the facts.
Arnold Coyne, the Abbot of Churchmen speaks as
a Christian historian nevertheless says that the traditions,
the Greek traditions in their view of the
suffering had the same idea as Jesus that
all suffering not just Christ's suffering but all
suffering sanctified and purified.
Seeker von Hofer who is today one of
the saints as it were of modern Jesus
so are all orthodox Churchmen different essentially from
Kierkegaard and Karl Barth to the effect that
all men are in here in Christ and
Christ is the act of salvation of all
men everywhere whether they have heard of Jesus
or have not heard of Jesus.
And Jacques Maritain the Roman Catholic counselor of
the Pope who is by church men said
to be leading or having led the Pope
in the right direction toward appreciation of the
gospel actually gives us Aristotle not pure and
simple but modified by Thomas Aquinas but nothing
better than that.
Thus the modern Protestants and the modern Roman
Catholic theologians today do what the Pharisees did
in Jesus' day.
They deny the efficacy the need and the
efficacy of the merit of the blood of
Jesus.
The task now facing this seminary and facing
all of us is obviously to be obedient
as were Noah and Abraham obedient and as
were all the heroes of the faith obedient
to the heavenly vision pertaining to the Christ
him crucified the Christ of the scriptures the
Christ risen from the dead.
To be obedient to that heavenly vision means
for us to proclaim Jesus and him crucified
Jesus in the resurrection Jesus ascended to glory
to heaven Jesus as again about to return
on the clouds of heaven.
Modern man is paralyzed in doubt and in
fear.
His wisdom has been made foolishness with God.
Taking for granted he must start all his
efforts to know himself and his world from
himself he cannot even find himself.
He is as a drop of water or
a white cap on an ocean produced by
a storm that comes from the blue above.
He's not different in substance from the water
that surrounds him.
Soon he will disappear in the blue that
surrounds him.
That's all that man can say about himself.
He's come by chance.
He's oozing out of ooze as fast as
and he's oozing back into ooze.
And that's the wisdom of the world.
It has been made foolishness with God.
It is to the world and that lies
in darkness and to an apostate church that
has reduced the gospel of the one who
once for all became a curse for men
and their slaves to an event in darkness
that we can especially sense by the grace
of God we have the vision of the
sovereign grace of God must bring the message
of hope and of gladness.
Let us then run with patience the race
that is set before us looking unto Jesus
the author and finisher of our faith who
for the joy that was set before him
endured the cross despising the shame and is
set down at the right hand of God.
My friends, my friends of the Board of
Trustees, my friends of the faculty, my friends
here one and all, lift up your hearts
with me as John the Baptist imprisoned and
set aside by the world on lonely Patmos
Isles lifted up his face to heaven and
there he saw the one on the throne
of glory and the twenty-four elders and
the four living creatures surrounding him about to
sing Moses and the Lamb the song of
Moses and the Lamb worthy art thou our
Lord and our God to receive the glory
and the honor and the power for by
thy will they are and were created.
Amen.