The Word of God in the First Epistle
to the Corinthians, 15th chapter, and reading from
the 12th verse.
1 Corinthians, chapter 15, and reading from verse
12.
Now if Christ be preached that he rose
from the dead, how say some among you
that there is no resurrection of the dead?
But if there be no resurrection of the
dead, then is Christ not risen?
And if Christ be not risen, then is
our preaching vain, and your faith is also
vain.
Yea, and we have found false witnesses of
God, because we have testified of God that
he raised up Christ, whom he raised not
up, if so be that the dead rise
not.
For if the dead rise not, then is
not Christ raised?
And if Christ be not raised, your faith
is vain, ye are yet in your sins,
then they also which are fallen asleep in
Christ are perished.
If in this life only we have hope
in Christ, we are of all men most
miserable.
But now is Christ risen from the dead,
and become the firstfruits of them that slept.
For since by man came death, by man
came also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, even so
in Christ shall all be made alive.
But every man in his own order, Christ
the firstfruits, afterward they that are Christ at
his coming.
Then come at the end, when he shall
have delivered up the kingdom to God, even
the Father.
When he shall have put down all rule
and all authority and power.
For he must reign till he has put
all enemies under his feet.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is
death.
For he that put all things under his
feet, that when he saith all things are
put under him, it is manifest that he
is accepted which be put all things under
him.
And when all things shall be subdued unto
him, then shall the Son also himself be
subject unto him that put all things under
him, that God may be all in all.
Else what shall they do which are baptized
for the dead, if the dead rise not
at all?
Why are they then baptized for the dead?
And why stand we in jeopardy every hour?
I protest by your rejoicing which I have
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I die daily.
If after the manner of men I have
fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is
it me if the dead rise not?
Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we
die.
Be not deceived, evil communication corrupt good manners.
Awake to righteousness and sin not, for some
have not the knowledge of God.
I speak this to your shame.
I want to speak this evening on knowledge
and piety.
Or the relationship between Christian truth and Christian
living.
And this subject is suggested by the statement
of the Apostle Paul here in the thirty
-third verse.
Be not deceived, evil communications corrupt good manners.
Now let us remind ourselves in a few
words of the drift of the Apostle's argument
in this chapter.
You will remember that he is here dealing
with the great doctrine of the resurrection of
the dead.
And in the opening verses of the chapter
he has shown that the resurrection of Christ
is a fundamental part of the Christian gospel.
He goes on to show that the implications
of Christ's resurrection are so momentous that every
part of the Christian's faith and hope is
dependent upon that truth.
If Christ be not risen, he says, then
faith is vain and testimony is vain and
preaching is vain.
And those that have fallen asleep in Christ
are perished.
If we are to take, or if we
are to permit the resurrection to be taken
from the gospel, we are of all men
the most miserable.
We have something left which would be vain
and futile.
And then Paul goes on to show why
the salvation of every believer is bound up
with the truth of the resurrection.
We have a beginning there in verse 21
and following to 28.
We have Paul stating to us the reasons
why this truth lies at the foundation of
our spiritual hope.
It is because, he says, that as in
the beginning Adam was united to a race
as the federal head of that race, and
therefore that when Adam fell, that race fell.
As in Adam, all die.
Even so, he goes on to say that
this gospel which we preach is a gospel
which says that men are to be saved
not by the works that they have done,
but by the works of him whom God
has appointed to be the federal head and
the representative of his people.
As in Adam all die, even so in
Christ.
And therefore, because of the representative nature of
our Lord's work, because he died for our
sins and rose again for our justification, because
when he rose and when he conquered death,
he did it not in his own name,
but on the behalf of his people, therefore
the representative work of Christ, and in particular
at this juncture his resurrection, is the guarantee
that death will be conquered for all who
are Christ.
Thus Paul works out in those momentous verses
the glorious parallel between Adam and Christ, that
as a race fell and died in Adam,
so a people are to live and to
rise in Jesus Christ.
At the end of that section in verse
28, Paul turns and he appeals to a
subsidiary argument in connection with the resurrection, and
it is the argument of Christian experience.
First of all, in that 29th verse, he
reminds the Corinthians of those who by God's
grace had come forward in the acknowledgement of
their faith and in the confession of Christ
in baptism.
He seems as it were to draw a
picture of the church as a throne, and
there are some who have already died in
Christ, but even as they pass from this
earth, there are others who are being baptized
unto the dead, or rather in the place
of the dead, if that is the true
sense of the word.
It is of course a difficult verse, the
29th verse, but the main point is quite
clear.
It is the evidence of those who against
the opposition of the world, and in spite
of the suffering which they bring upon themselves,
they press forward to confess their faith in
the Lord Jesus Christ, else otherwise what shall
they do?
What meaning, what significance, Paul says, can there
be in the baptism of believers if the
dead rise not at all?
And then in those tremendous words, he speaks
for a moment of his own experience, and
why he says, in jeopardy every hour.
Why did Paul endure what he did for
the propagation of the gospel?
Why, he says to us, why should he
fight as it were with beef at Ephesus?
A reference to the intensity of his suffering
on the behalf of the work of God's
kingdom.
Why, he says, what advantage is it me
if the dead rise not?
So that there in verses 29 to 32
we have an appeal to Christian experience, and
it is following that appeal that the apostle
comes in with this dramatic warning.
Do not deceive, he says, evil communications corrupt
good manners.
Evil communications corrupt good manners.
Now as we come to look at those
words, let us just note in the first
place, that Paul in this chapter is not
dealing with the resurrection, because there were some
in Corinth who denied the resurrection of Christ.
That was not the situation.
There is no indication that there were any
in Corinth who denied the resurrection of Christ.
Nor was there any denial of the immortality
of the soul, and of life after death.
The error which Paul is dealing with is
an error which is more subtle than that.
What Paul is dealing with in this first
Corinthians chapter 15 is the error of those
who were saying that there could be no
continuity between the bodily condition in which we
now live and the condition in which we
must live in eternity.
Or, put more simply, he is here denouncing
the error of those who did not believe
in the survival of the body in eternity.
That is the point which is under consideration.
And in contrast to that point, it is
the apostle's purpose in this chapter to demonstrate
that there is indeed a continuity in the
most concrete form between life in the conditions
in which we now live, and the life
which will be ours in the world to
come.
That the body which we now possess, that
same body changed, and yet the same in
identity, will be with us to all the
ages of eternity.
It is the resurrection, then, of the human
body which Paul is dealing with.
And in dealing with that truth, he shows
that a belief in a particular resurrection, namely
the resurrection of Christ, that a belief in
the particular resurrection of Christ is inevitably linked
to a belief in a general, universal resurrection.
And that is the purpose of his saying
that if we deny the resurrection of the
human body in a general sense, that the
whole tendency of that error will be to
abandon faith ultimately in the resurrection of Christ
himself.
It's a very interesting thing, is it not?
How the truths of Scripture are so interdependent
and so interrelated that though we may not
immediately see it, if we weaken or if
we deny one truth, we may well be
opening a door to rendering the gospel itself
as something which is no longer the gospel
of Christ.
The principle, then, that is in these words,
in the thirty-third verse, we may state
in this way.
Evil communications corrupt good manners.
I don't know what version you have on
your lap.
The word translated communications is in a number
of versions translated company.
Evil company corrupts good manners.
But I believe that the authorised version here
is more correct and more helpful in the
word communications.
At any rate, the word can be translated,
you see, in either sense, but what Paul
is dealing with here is the danger of
false ideas.
It is the propagation, it is the circulation
of ideas, of speeches, of communications which are
false.
But Paul has in mind it is not
merely a matter of company, it is more
directly the ideas which are communicated by words,
and therefore the translation communications is a better
translation than the word company.
What he is saying to us here is
that erroneous opinions corrupt good manners.
Now, the word manners is the word, the
word translated manners is the same word from
which we get our word ethics, and the
sense is surely quite clear.
Erroneous opinions, he says, corrupt character, they corrupt
morals.
Erroneous opinions, the dissemination of error inevitably, when
it is imbibed, results in a deterioration of
moral and righteous living.
Evil communications corrupt good manners.
And therefore the principle in the verse is
quite clear.
It is that our character and our conduct
is moulded by the doctrine and the truth
which we believe.
Be not deceived, evil communications corrupt good manners.
Now, when Paul uses these words you may
remember that he is using a statement, a
proverb that was familiar to the Greeks.
A statement which was used amongst the heathen
poets.
And yet, Paul is not using this statement
just in a way in which the world
would understand it.
For example, if we were to use this
proverb in a general kind of moral sense,
if I was to say, for example, that
if we can, in our speculative reasoning, if
we can see any rightness in, say, suicide
or in adultery, you will at once perceive
that in the circulation of those ideas there
is a legitimacy which is being given to
crime and to sin.
Evil communications are going to legitimatize that which
is sinful.
Now, we see that all around us today.
That's quite clear.
False ideas will corrupt the light.
And yet, you know, Paul is saying something
here that is higher than that.
He wouldn't need to say, be not deceived,
to Christians on that kind of point.
What Paul is dealing with here is the
denial of a doctrine of revelation, of a
particular part of biblical truth.
And he is using this proverb to underline
the fact that if we lose that part
of biblical truth, then we will see a
deterioration in godliness and in character.
Let me give you the words of John
Brown, the last century commentator on this point.
He says, Clear apprehensions, strong persuasions, in reference
to Christian truth, are, as it were, the
root, and a holy life is the fruit
of the tree of Christian experience.
Clear apprehensions are the root, and a holy
life is the fruit of the tree of
Christian experience.
Or, in C.
H.
Spurgeon's words, Spurgeon says, Those who do away
with Christian doctrine are, whether they are aware
of it or not, the worst enemies of
Christian living.
The godliness of Puritanism will not long survive
the fond doctrine of Puritanism.
The codes of orthodoxy are necessary
to the fires of piety.
Now, taking this subject up, then, I just
have two main points.
Let us think for a little while of
the general importance of this subject.
As I was sitting in my room in
my home thousands of miles away, I frankly
found it difficult to know what subject could
possibly be the most useful to speak on
here in Carlisle this evening.
A place I've never been to, a continent
I've never visited, and this was the subject
which seemed to me to be so immensely
important in our own day.
We are living, as we know, in a
great crisis in human history, and the real
nature of that crisis and the seriousness of
it is indicated by the lapsed character of
our people.
That in an age of progress in science
and materialism and education, we are at the
same time witnessing a return on the moral
level to standards which are paid, a return,
as it were, to the dark age.
And the reason for that return, for that
fall in our nation, in both our nations,
without any doubt, is that we have abandoned
the doctrinal foundation upon which the pattern of
life in our land used to be lived.
In other words, we have turned our backs
upon the truth, which is stated by the
apostle here in this thirty-third verse.
When we think of what the Reformation did
for Britain, then what it did for America,
we are immediately conscious that here was a
doctrinal movement which had the momentum to lift
up nations to standards of purity and righteousness
which were high above the standards of those
nations which remained under Catholicism.
We see in the Reformation movement the rising
up of integrity, of purity.
We have the testimony of secular historians like
Proud and others that Calvinism purged nations, how
Calvinism threw down from their thrones godless and
evil men.
You know these testimonies.
But these testimonies are telling us that the
moral power and the godliness which once lived
in our land like salt, that that power
and that momentum sprang from the truth which
God gave to his people once more in
the sixteenth century.
And in contrast to that, we see today
in our nation that deterioration in righteousness and
that fall in the character of our people.
And as we see it, we have to
ask the question, how this change ever took
place and at what point did the Protestantism
of the English-speaking world begin to lose
its moral power?
Now that's the question.
We haven't time to go into that question,
but perhaps in a few words I could
try to summarize the way I see it.
After the Puritan movement, after the suppression of
Orthodox Protestant belief and doctrine in the year
1662, after that period you had that elegant
school of divinity, those men that were known
as the Caroline Divines.
The Divines, the theology of the Restoration period,
a period which was led by people like
Archbishop Tillotson and others, and this affected America
almost as much as it did England.
There was a very interesting action which illustrates
the power of books.
There was a wealthy Englishman who donated to
Yale College early in the eighteenth century.
He donated a library of books which were
largely made up of the theology of the
Caroline Divines, and the result of the distribution
of those books in Yale was the disruption
of Yale in the year 1722 when men
like Charles Chauncey and others openly began to
follow the new divinity.
Now that divinity, in a nutshell, it was
really no divinity at all.
It was a belief which said that Christian
good works and Christian piety could be preserved
without the harsh, creedal statements of Calvinism and
of the old Protestantism.
And that was preached for eighty years.
And yet you know the strange thing, and
yet it's not strange, is the fact that
in the period when these men were preaching
week by week the need of Christian ethics
and good living, it was a period of
increasing sensuality.
It was a period when morals were declining
and going down.
If you want to know what the divinity
of that period was in one word, or
rather in one couplet, let me remind you
of the words of Alexander Pope, the poet
of the 18th century.
His oft-quoted words, For modes of faith
let graceless bigots fight.
He can't be wrong whose life is in
the right.
That is the typical divinity of the period,
that we do not contend for modes of
faith, but if our life is right, that
is the Christian position.
But I say that that was the position
which was bankrupt of moral power.
And it was then, in the late 1730s,
when God, by the outpouring of his Spirit,
raised up George Whitefield and the Wesleys and
others, it was with the revival of apostolic
doctrine that there was a revival of apostolic
Christianity.
The other day I came across a very
interesting quotation of George Whitefield.
You probably have read in Whitefield's life or
journals the statements which caused such a sensation,
but at the beginning of that revival, George
Whitefield actually charged Archbishop Tillotson with being guilty
of spreading evil communication.
In truth, Whitefield said, as to the method
of our acceptance with God, and our justification
by faith alone, Tillotson was as ignorant thereof
as Mohamed himself.
And when the clergy and the bishops replied
to Whitefield with great gusto, the line of
their attack on Whitefield was more than once
to say that Whitefield was simply reviving controversial,
dogmatic, theoretical issues that were, as it were,
quite apart from Christian living.
And this is how Whitefield answers that charge,
writing to one of his critics.
He says, You are pleased, reverend sir, to
say that I have revived the old Calvinistic
disputes concerning predestination, etc., which you say had
happily slept for so many years.
But if this be my shame, I glory
in it, for what is this but reviving
the essential articles of the Church of England,
which undoubtedly are Calvinistic, and which, by your
own confession, have happily slept for so many
years?
This is too true.
But however you may count this a happiness,
yet, in my opinion, it is one of
the greatest judgments which has before us.
The eighteenth-century revival was a reassertion of
the truth in 1 Corinthians 15.43, the
truth that it is the doctrine which moulds
the life.
Now, in the nineteenth century, there was a
repetition of the same type of thought that
happened with the Caroline Divine, and yet it
was more subtle, and it is still powerfully
with us today.
There was, outside the Church in the nineteenth
century, a movement of philosophers who argued like
this.
They said that morality should be followed for
its own sake.
They said it was more praiseworthy to be
virtuous, not out of any regard to reward
or retribution in the world to come, but
for its own sake.
And they went as far as charging the
Apostle Paul with selfishness, because Paul said, if
in this life only we have hope and
trust.
In other words, they were teaching that morality
and righteousness can be separated from doctrine and
from revealed truth.
Now, in the Church there was...
In other words, they were teaching that morality
and righteousness can be separated from doctrine and
from revealed truth.
Now, in the Church those same beliefs, or
rather those same attitudes, were introduced from a
different direction.
The theology of Germany was a theology which
gave emphasis to the possibility of true Christian
experience without any commitment, finally, to Christian or
biblical doctrine.
There was that movement to drive a wedge
between experience and what we may actually believe,
so that people began to say that the
trustworthiness of Christ is not the same thing
as the trustworthiness of statements about Christ, that
it is Christ that we believe, and not
doctrinal statements about him.
There's a famous poem by John Oxenham, which
you may have heard, which again puts this
perfectly.
Oxenham wrote, Not what, but whom I do
believe, Not what, but whom I do believe,
That in my darkest hour of need Gives
comfort which no mortal creed to mortal man
may give.
Not what, but whom, For Christ is more
than all the creeds, And Christ with all
his gentle deeds Shall all the creeds outlive.
Now, this sound is very beautiful and almost
quiet, but this was the very move which
has led to the situation prevailing in Protestantism
at the present time.
It led to people saying that issues like
creation or evolution, scriptural inerrancy or scriptural fallibility,
on eternal punishment or annihilation, that these are
theoretical and speculative matters which do not vitally
affect our Christian faith and our Christian faith,
that is, in terms of our experience.
So that men like Henry Ward Beecher, the
famous preacher of the late last century, was
spoken of as the prince of preachers, and
he was spoken of by evangelicals in that
way, although Beecher denied so many biblical truths.
And you know how Henry Drummond, who abandoned
so much of historic Christian belief, that he
was described by D.L. Moody as the
most Christ-like man I ever met.
Now, this is the outworking of the moon,
that although these men have given up so
much truth, nevertheless they were held up as
examples of Christian conduct and morality and experience.
Now, of course, this did not happen without
solemn protest being raised by the old rearguard
of the old Orthodox, a rearguard that was
small in number, and yet a rearguard of
men whose names we would seek to honor
today in thankfulness to God.
Now, if you read through the testimonies of
such men like Spurgeon in England and John
Kennedy in Scotland and others, you will find
that this warning is continually coming through.
But I want to give you now two
quotations from two American divines who made up
part of that old rearguard, which puts this
exactly in the way that I would like
to try and put it myself.
The first quotation is from William G.T.
Shedd in his book that was printed, I
think, first in 1893, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy.
Now, Shedd says in his preface to that
book, Heterodoxy is perhaps more violent and resolute
at the close of this century than ever
before, and it is favored by the comparative
apathy of Orthodoxy.
In the previous conflict, the church has stood
alone by itself, holding its creed determinedly and
fighting its foe unflinchingly.
There has been no admixture of truth and
error.
Now the danger is that the Orthodox shall
weaken and tolerate and yield.
And then he follows this up with a
great chapter which is called The Connection Between
Infidelity and Sensuality, and Shedd starts that chapter
with this quotation from Richard Baxter, The Purity.
Richard Baxter makes the following remark, respecting himself.
I observed, said Baxter, easily in myself, that
if at any time Satan did more than
at other times weaken my belief of Scripture
and the life to come, my zeal in
religious duty abated with it, and I grew
more indifferent in religion than before.
And Shedd comments on that.
This connection between infidel opinions and sinful practice,
noticed by the devout Baxter, should be kept
in view.
If men would remember that if they do
anything to weaken their belief in the word
of God and the reality of another life,
they thereby remove a positive restraint upon their
appetites and passions and promote sensuality, either refined
or gross, they would be more likely to
think twice before doing, that is, before weakening
their belief.
They would be more careful to regard the
books that they read and the teachers that
they listened to.
Instead of toiling and studying to weaken their
Orthodoxy, they would toil and study to strengthen.
So far Shedd.
My second quotation is from Robert Louis Dabney.
Dabney spent the last ten years of his
life in total blindness, and yet in those
last years he, by dictation, recorded one or
two of his finest articles.
I want to quote you now from something
that he wrote just before his death in
1891.
He says, American Protestantism is characterized by a
peculiar evil which I may describe by the
term furious revivalism.
It has been often called the new measure
system.
The common mischief resulting from all its forms
is the over-hasty reception into the communion
of churches of multitudes of persons whom time
proves to have experienced no spiritual change.
This lamentable art has grown in America to
great dimensions.
The victims of its deception are to be
counted by myriads.
Its effects for good are so short-lived
that a religious profession has become contemptible in
the eyes of critical worldly men.
Many churches are loaded down with dead members.
Church discipline becomes impracticable.
This nominal membership includes tens of thousands of
silent infidels who have inferred from the manifold
deceitfulness of their own hot religious experience the
deceptiveness of the gospel itself.
The average standard of Christian morals is degraded
throughout the country.
The experience of a long life compels me
sorrowfully to testify against this method of accession
as the grand peril and curse of American
Protestantism.
It has shorn the gospel among us of
the larger part of its purifying power and
Christ of His Honour, until our average Protestantism
can scarcely boast of higher moral results than
American potpourri.
The mortifying result is, says Dabney, that after
ninety years of boasted activity and asserted success
in this species of evangelism in these United
States, breeding and good manners, domestic purity, temperance,
business morals and political morals are at a
lower ebb than in any nation in Protestant
Christendom.
The evil has become gigantic and demands solemn
protest and resistance.
I know it is an unpopular thing, he
concludes.
I know it is an unpopular thing for
a minister of the gospel to bear this
account, but it is true and my regard
for that account which I must render at
a more awful bar than that of arrogant
public opinion demands its utterance.
That is in an article which Dabney wrote
on the standard of ordination.
As I said earlier, in the year 1891.
Now I don't know how you're feeling and
whether you're feeling as hot as I am,
but the second part I'll try to cut
down and just to give it to you
more in outline.
What I wanted to do now was to
go on to show how those doctrines which
we speak of as the reformed faith or
the doctrines of grace, that these doctrines, every
bit as much as the particular doctrine which
Paul is dealing with here in 1 Corinthians,
that they vitally affect the character and the
piety of the people of God.
And that just as Paul warns the Corinthian
Christians to be not deceived, that if they
let slip this truth then they would see
a corruption in good man, in Christian living.
So I think we have abundant reason to
say that the surrender of those doctrines which
were once the glory of our Protestant inheritance,
that the surrender of those doctrines contributes directly,
as Dabney has just said, to the decline
of the moral standards of our church.
Now, let's take the doctrine of God.
Paul says here in verse 34, Awake to
righteousness and sin not, for some have not
the knowledge of God.
I speak this to your shame.
The knowledge of God, the root of their
error with regard to the denial of physical
resurrection was due to ignorance of God.
As Jesus said once to the Pharisees, you
do err not knowing the scriptures nor the
power of God.
And all error ultimately comes back to error
or ignorance concerning God.
Take for a moment the doctrine the scripture
gives us concerning the righteousness and the holiness
of God.
That doctrine is so presented to us in
the scripture that we are led, if we
rightly follow the scripture, to understand that there
is an obligation in the Godhead.
There is an obligation to love righteousness and
to hate iniquity.
There is a divine obligation arising out of
the very character of God to punish the
sinner and to bring judgment upon those that
do break God's law.
I say that arises, according to scripture, out
of the very nature of God.
As the fifth psalm tells us, thou art
not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness,
neither shall evil dwell with thee.
God abhors the bloody and the deceitful man.
Thou shalt destroy all them that speak lewdly.
The eleventh psalm tells us that upon the
wicked God will pour fire and brimstone on
a horrible tempest.
This shall be the portion of their cup,
for the righteous Lord loveth righteousness.
Here then we have a statement about God
in his righteousness, which undergirds the whole gospel
which is to be preached.
But when we realize that God is such
a God, we begin to understand there can
be no expediency in the Godhead.
And we are able, in the light of
these truths, to come to the atonement and
to come to the cross of Calvary and
to behold there the truth that God is
bound by his very being and by his
holiness to punish transgression.
And so in the smiting of Christ and
in the bruising of his own son, we
are being shown that God does and God
will punish sin.
Now we live in a generation of evangelicals
who do not see that necessity.
It is quite possible for the gospel, in
a certain sense, to be preached, and people
also to accept it, and yet never to
have seen the necessity of that gospel in
terms of the vindication of God's glory in
his holiness and in his righteousness.
And our churches are filled with people, they
are in England, who though they profess to
be Christians, they have no fear, they have
no trembling, they have no true respect for
the law of God, because they have never
seen that law as an expression of the
divine character, and they have never heard of
the cross of Christ in terms of a
vindication of God's law.
And therefore you have antinomianism, you have carelessness,
you have worldliness in the church.
Here then is one example arising out of
an erroneous belief concerning an attribute of God,
you are led immediately into carelessness and laxity
of life.
Or take the truth of God's incomprehensibility, or
as the shorter Catechism says, God is a
spirit infinite, eternal, unchangeable.
God is an infinite God.
Now as the scripture presents that truth to
us, it reminds us that with God is
terrible magic.
Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counsel?
But as we come to the works and
the ways of God, we are coming to
that one who is infinitely exalted, who has
known the mind of the Lord.
Now I say, if we do not have
that knowledge of God, when we come to
particular doctrines of scripture, we shall soon stumble
up.
The doctrine of God's sovereignty, by a sovereign
disposition of God, the guilt of Adam was
imputed to his race.
That is an act of divine sovereignty.
That is not an act of which God
gives account to sinful men.
So also was the imputation of the sins
of believers to Christ.
We read there in Romans 9, that the
children being not yet born, neither having done
good nor evil, that the purpose of God
according to election might stand as it is
written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have
I hated.
Now take the second part of that sentence.
Esau have I hated.
But my friends, if we don't take that
statement in the light of what we are
told about the incomprehensibility of God, that is
to say, if we think that we can
bring God to our bar of judgment, and
if we think that we can press God
to say why He in holy and sovereign
wisdom has chosen to pass by some and
to judge them for their sins, I say
if we approach that verse in that light,
we will immediately stumble.
But take the earlier part of the verse.
You know it's been said, by some in
answer to those that object to the second
part of the statement, or have greater difficulty
with the first part, Jacob have I loved.
Here is the incomprehensible God also.
Jacob, before our works, in spite of all
sin, God in sovereign majesty has predestinated to
make this man a vessel to his glory.
I say this is the infinite God.
And what does that truth concerning God's infinite
and incomprehensible majesty, what practical effect does it
have?
By surely, humility of mind.
Humility of mind.
The way we come to His word is
changed.
The way we come to pray is changed.
Here again is the most direct practical influence
from the belief of the truth.
I think for a moment of the immutability
of God.
The unchanging nature of God's great purposes and
plans.
If we were to ask the question, whether
sinners, whether believers are saved because
of their belief, does God predestinate those who
believe?
Or does God predestinate those who shall be
believed?
Does God's predestination lead to our belief?
Or does God predestinate those who He sees
will believe?
There are many who will say that that
is purely a theoretical question.
It has no great practical consequence.
But you know, the very opposite is the
truth.
According to the way that we answer that
question, so will be affected and influenced our
whole view of salvation.
If we answer the question that men are
predestinated because they believe, then the type of
gospel that we will believe is a gospel
which has for its tendency.
Now, we know that the tendency of a
thing does not always fully appear, and that
God is gracious in restraining the errors of
His people, and this we must fully acknowledge.
But in its tendency, that gospel will put
man at the center.
And in conversion, we will be self-conscious.
And in sanctification, we will be self-conscious.
Man will be there in the middle.
But if we say that God has predestinated
those that believe, we've got something very different.
We've got God in the center.
We've got man at base.
We've got humiliation.
We've got the practical effect of that truth,
which Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 1,
that Christ of God is made unto us
wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, that,
according as it is written, He that glorieth,
let him glory in the Lord.
The practical effect of whether or not we
believe that God predestinates all things according to
the counsel of His own will, the practical
effect is enormous.
And so I think we should take with
considerable caution the statement, for example, that an
Arminian and a Calvinist are the same when
they're on their knees.
I don't think that is really true.
The way that we pray, the way that
we think of God, will be influenced by
our theology at this point.
The doctrine, my friends, of God.
I think I should leave it there.
Perhaps with just one further word.
This truth concerning the doctrine of God, what
an influence it has on our view of
sanctification.
Sanctification is obedience to Scripture.
That's it.
We live in a day when sanctification is
thought of far too often as a kind
of self-appointed works, self-appointed piety.
Sanctification is the concrete obedience to divine requirements,
so that in terms of a Christian mother,
her godliness is seen in her kitchen, in
what she does with her children, in terms
of a worker, in terms of a master,
an employer, and so on.
Godliness is in our submission to the requirements
of God's work.
Now we live in a day which is
drifted far from this.
Take it in terms of worship.
The old Protestant view was that godliness is
expressed above all else in our worship.
We worship God in our family.
We worship God in the church.
But as we do this, we are not
doing this to express our piety, but we
are doing it out of obedience to God's
requirements.
That true sanctification and true godliness is an
unconscious thing.
That self-conscious piety is an abomination in
Scripture.
That is the piety of the Pharisees.
But the piety which springs, you see, from
these great doctrines is the piety which leads
to unconsciousness of self.
And that shows itself in worship.
Well, you've been very patient in listening so
well.
I'm sure you're tired.
I'm amazed that you've listened as you have.
Thank you very much.
And I can't put into words how much
we're looking forward to this conference and to
the enjoyment of it and to the privilege
of being with you.
Shall we pray?
O Lord, our God and heavenly Father, we
would seek to come into Thy presence with
thanksgiving and with praise.
We ask Thee to help us to understand
Thy Word and that Thou wilt in this
time of fellowship together through these days, that
Thou wilt draw especially near to us that
we may be able to glorify Thee with
heart and with mind and with voice.
Do Thou keep us from sin, cleanse us
in all that we shall seek to do
and say, and receive our thanks and praise
for all Thine mercies which have surrounded us
and kept us until this present hour.
We ask it with the forgiveness of sin
through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.
Amen.