Why Grace Is More Offensive Than You Think – Rc Sproul Sermons On Prayer

This morning we're going to continue our study of the book of Acts and in the trial of the Apostle Paul. I will begin reading in chapter 24 verse 22 and read through chapter 25 verse 12. Acts 24:22 to 25:12.

But when Felix heard these things, having more accurate knowledge of the way, he adjourned the proceedings and said, "When Lysus, the commander, comes down, I will make a decision on your case." So he commanded the centurion to keep Paul and to let him have liberty and told him not to forbid any of his friends to provide for or visit him. And after some days when Felix came with his wife Drusilla, who was Jewish, he sent for Paul and heard him concerning the faith in Christ. Now, as he reasoned about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come, Felix was afraid and answered, "Go away for now. When I have a convenient time, I will call for you." Meanwhile, he also hoped that money would be given him by Paul that he might release him. Therefore, he sent for him more often and conversed with him.

But after two years, Porsius Fesus succeeded Felix. And Felix, wanting to do the Jews a favor, left Paul bound. Now when Fesus had come to the province, after three days he went up from Cesaria to Jerusalem. Then the high priest and the chief men of the Jews informed him against Paul. And they petitioned him, asking a favor against him that he would summon him to Jerusalem while they lay an ambush along the road to kill him. But Fesus answered that Paul should be kept at Cesaria and that he himself was going there shortly. Therefore he said, "Let those who have authority among you go down with me and accuse this man to see if there is any fault in him." And when he had remained among them more than 10 days, he went down to Cesaria. And the next day, sitting on the judgment seat, he commanded Paul to be brought. And when he had come, the Jews who had come down from Jerusalem stood about and laid many serious complaints against Paul, which they could not prove. And while he answered for himself, "Neither against the law of the Jews, nor against the temple, nor against Caesar, have I offended in anything at all."

But Fesus, wanting to do the Jews a favor, answered in Paul and said, "Are you willing to go up to Jerusalem and there be judged before me concerning these things?" So Paul said, "I stand at Caesar's judgment seat where I ought to be judged. To the Jews, I have done no wrong as you very well know. For if I am an offender or have committed anything deserving of death, I do not object to dying. But if there is nothing in these things of which these men accuse me, no one can deliver me to them. I appeal to Caesar." And Fesus, when he had conferred with his counsel, answered, "You have appealed to Caesar. To Caesar you shall go."

He who has ears to hear the word of God, let them hear. Let us pray again. Oh God, we invoke the aid and assistance of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit of truth, who inspired this record in the first place to illuminate for our understanding and application in this hour. We ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.

I hope no one is sitting there saying, "Oh, not again." We have to go through another hearing of the Apostle Paul. It seems like this is going on week after week after week as Paul is moved from one venue to another for this hearing and that hearing with the same charges being brought against him. You might even come to the conclusion that at this point the narrative of Luke's book of Acts is boring. Well, let me remind you that God has never uttered a boring word in all of eternity. And if it pleases the Holy Ghost to include all of these accounts for our edification, there must be something that is profitable for us in this record. So let us give attention to the text that we may learn something that is important for our understanding not only in learning the history of the early church and of the life of the apostle Paul but of principles and truths from that same word that apply to us even today.

We know that after the hearing before Felix when the Jews brought their charges and Paul defended himself, we know that Felix dismissed the accusers of Paul. And we read in verse 22 of chapter 24 that having a more accurate knowledge of the way, he addressed the proceedings and he said this: "When Lysus the commander comes down, I will make a decision on your case." Here he invokes the Roman principle known as amplus, which is the formal delay or reservation of a final judgment. Paul is not convicted in front of Felix, but Felix delays a final decision on the matter and orders that Paul be bound over to prison to await the further examination by Lysus and the final decision by Felix. Now, Luke doesn't tell us if Lysus ever even comes up and brings the testimony that Felix had asked for. But whether he did or whether he didn't, Felix still does not render a verdict and keeps Paul in captivity for two years. He waits in prison. Now, it's a liberal type of prison. Felix gives him permission to be dressed by his friends and relatives, that they could bring supplies to him and meet with him and so on. Some church historians speculate at this point that it was during this two years that Luke amassed much of his material that he incorporated in his gospel and in this record of the book of Acts. So Paul was not wasting time while he was in prison. But even today, we have an axiom in our culture that justice delayed is justice denied. And Paul is clearly being denied justice under the procrastination of Felix. And the first thing we want to know is why did he do it? Why did he put Paul in prison even though he knew that Paul was not guilty of the charges? Well, the clue comes a little bit later on in the text where it says in verse 27, "After two years, when Porsius Fesus succeeded Felix, Felix wanting to do the Jews a favor kept Paul bound." It was a political decision. Paul was kept in prison as a matter of political expediency. This Roman magistrate knew that under the law, Paul was innocent. But in order to appease the Jews who were screaming for the blood of the Apostle Paul and to seek some measure of peace among the people, he judged not by principle, by expediency. Was it any different in the trial of Jesus where after saying publicly, "I find no fault in the man," Pontius Pilate washes his hand but couldn't get the blood of Christ out of his hands because he compromised for political reasons to mollify the crowd? You see, in those occasions, Lady Justice peeked. She took the blindfold off and began to look around and to see who was who and which way the wind was blowing before she reached a verdict. But let's not be too hard on Felix or on Pontius Pilate because this has been the way of rulers in all generations. Whether they're in autocratic states or democratic states, rulers always keep one eye on public opinion. And when they're torn between justice and expediency, it's a rare ruler who will keep his eyes on justice.

I told the congregation a few years ago of a meeting I had with a very well-known senator in the United States Senate several years ago. I had dinner with the man and as we were eating, I was discussing certain problems that we were facing in the United States. And I said to this senator, "Can we do anything about such and such?" And he said, "Oh, that's a critical issue. We've got to address that, R.C., but we can't do it this year." I said, "Why not?" He said, "It's an election year." So, well, what about this? And I mentioned another problem that faced our nation. And he said, "Oh, you're absolutely right. We've got to correct that problem." She said, "But we can't do it this year. It's an election year." And I promise you, I'm not exaggerating. I heard that litany 15 times from this senator. And I finally said to him in utter frustration, "Senator, is there anybody up there who cares about the next generation instead of the next election?" And it doesn't matter which side of the aisle you're on. The idea of political expediency is a temptation that comes to everyone who's in a position of leadership and of power. And we face it ourselves and we feed it ourselves in our own culture.

Now, this man, Felix, was at least impressed enough by Paul to want to learn something from him. Let me just take a moment to give a little bit more background. We mentioned that his third wife was Drusilla, who's mentioned here in the text. And at the time that this conversation takes place between Paul and Felix when he brings his wife along, Drusilla is not even 20 years old. She's at the oldest 19 and she is Felix's third wife. Felix is her second husband. She had broken one engagement because the man to whom she was engaged did not embrace Judaism and she came from a family that embraced Judaism. So she broke that engagement and she married a lesser monarch from Syria to whom she remained married just a short period of time. She and when she was 16 years old, Felix finds her and persuades her to leave her husband and come and live with Felix. So even though she comes inquiring about Jesus and this faith, it's not like she's the paragon of virtue. By the way, Drusilla and Felix had a son whose name was Agrippa. And that son and Drusilla both died in the year 79 AD, buried by the ashes of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius of Pompeii and Herculaneum fame.

But in any case, the scriptures tell us that they come and they inquire about Jesus. And we are told that Paul explains to them about what it means to have faith in Jesus. But listen to what specifically he addresses. Now, as he reasoned about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come, Luke doesn't include everything that they discussed, but he emphasizes that where Paul was pointing, his emphasis was first of all on righteousness. And you might step back and be critical and say, "Wait a minute. What kind of an evangelist is the Apostle Paul? Why isn't he preaching the gospel? Why isn't he giving Felix the good news like he does to the Philippian jailer who says, 'What must they do to be saved?' 'Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, thou and thy house will be saved.'" No. Paul speaks of righteousness. Now, in his whole life, Felix, who's supposed to govern according to justice and righteousness, has never been so thoroughly tutored in the concept of righteousness. Can you imagine having your teacher in the law and of righteousness be Paul the Apostle? If you didn't know what righteousness was before you come into the presence of the Apostle Paul and he begins to explain what righteousness is, you better understand it by the time you leave. You see, before Paul gives the gospel, he gives the law because before the good news comes, there has to be an understanding of the bad news. And he addresses Felix at the point of Felix's sin, his unrighteousness. And he gives him a lecture on self-control, which Felix certainly didn't exercise when he took Drusilla from her previous husband. But then the coup de grâce is when he focuses attention on the last judgment. Here's Paul, who's being judged by this fellow in this world and is now in captivity, and he's speaking to his captor about the last judgment, and he's speaking to him about righteousness. And he's saying, "Felix, do you understand? You're not a righteous man. And you're going to have to stand before God. You're going to be judged not by Roman law, but by the law of God, by his righteousness. Are you going to be able to stand on that day?"

Now, let me just stop here for a minute. If we think this is long ago and far away, what would happen to you if today the Apostle Paul came in and talked to you about righteousness, about self-control, and about the last judgment? We like to make plans, you know, planning what we're going to do tomorrow, next week, next month, God willing. We have plans for our children, our grandchildren, and we think about what's going to be like 10 years from now, 20 years from now. Let me ask you this: Where will you be? And what will you be doing 125 years from today? Where will you be? I hope that the consideration of where you're going to be 125 years from now is one that provokes in your soul nothing but absolute joy. I'm going to be in heaven. I'm going to be with my savior. I'm going to be with my departed loved ones, my brothers and sisters in Christ. I am going to be enjoying the felicity that only heaven can afford a human soul. But I don't know the state of anybody's soul in this room. The odds would have it, the statistics would indicate that some of you who are within the sound of my voice this morning, 125 years from now will be in hell because you will have failed on the day of judgment. Now, I can't think of anything, beloved, more terrifying than that. And here's Paul. I mean, this is far worse than Jonathan Edwards talking about sinners in the hands of an angry God. This is Paul talking to Felix about Felix in the hands of an angry God and on the day of judgment. And what happens to Felix? Read what it says. He became terrified, scared to death. The last thing he wanted to think about was facing God on the last judgment. And so what does he say? "Oh, give me the gospel, Paul. Where's the cross, Paul? Let me flee to the Savior, Paul." No. He says, "Stop right there. That's all I want to hear. I don't want to hear another word." And he goes, runs back to his quarters, talks to Drusilla, gets his friends around him, and they said, "Oh, did you hear what that guy said out there? Well, that's what you get from the radical right. That's what you get from these Christian extremists, these fundamentalists who are all hell and brimstone. You're certainly not going to pay any attention to him, are you?" But it nagged at him. The text says he kept coming back, having more and more conversations with the apostle. And do you think on any of those occasions that Paul would say to him, "Well, Felix, maybe I was a little too strong the last time when I warned you about the last judgment"? No. No. You know, we can sear our consciences. We can put calluses on our consciences. We can do everything in our power to suppress and repress the word of God. But we can't destroy it. We can flee from it. We can silence those who deliver it. But as Shakespeare's Hamlet understood, conscience doth make cowards of us all. And Felix had much to be afraid of. But what a tragedy, having the world's greatest theologian and the world's greatest evangelist explain the things of Christ to you and end up by saying, "Go away. I don't want to hear anymore."

After two years waiting, hoping that Paul would give him a bribe to get him out of jail, Felix was recalled to Rome. His brother, who had protected him, was no longer in power. Nero was now sitting on the throne of Rome. And nevertheless, though Paulus was no longer the head of the civic affairs in Rome, he still was a man of unbelievable wealth and influence in Rome. And we are told from the historians that when Felix was recalled, he was not punished for his failures in ruling in this territory in Israel. But then we're told that in his place comes Porsius Fesus, who appears just the opposite of Felix. Felix is known for his procrastination. "I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it next week. One of these days I'll render a verdict." But in the meantime, Paul's rotting in jail. Fesus comes and what does he do? After the arduous journey from Rome to Palestine, instead of going on a two weeks vacation, that's what I would have done after that travel, to get myself together. Three days after he arrives, he goes to Jerusalem. Now, this is wisdom. This is good diplomacy. If I'm going to govern over the Jews, I better get to know the Jewish officials and the Jewish authorities. And so, he goes to Jerusalem. He no sooner goes to Jerusalem, and the leaders in Jerusalem says, "Hey, there's a new fellow in town. We weren't able to get anywhere with Felix. Maybe Fesus will give us the head of Paul on a platter." And so these rulers of the Jews, who were supposed to be disciples of the law of God, are completely lawless and they say, "Let's have another trial." And they petition Fesus now to send Paul down to Jerusalem, or in this case, up to Jerusalem geographically, altitudinally, so that they could ambush and kill him. Well, at this point, Fesus fights for the angels. He said, "No, no, this is where his trial will be in Cesaria. I'll be going back to Cesaria in a few days, and you can send your officials up there, and I'll hear your case against Paul in Cesaria, not in Jerusalem." And so after 3 days, he went up from Cesaria, and the high priest and the chief rulers of the Jews again informed him against Paul. They petitioned him, asking a favor. Now they ask the governor a favor. "Do us a favor. Help us get rid of this guy, Paul, please." So again, all the same charges that had been leveled during the hearings before Felix were brought up again. And Paul gave his own defense. None of the charges could be proven against him. And so he said, "Neither against the law of the Jews, nor against the temple, nor against Caesar, have I offended in anything at all."

But Fesus, so far so good. Now he caves in. Fesus, wanting to do the Jews a favor. "You want a favor? You scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. You one hand washes the other. This is politics. We'll have a compromise." Fesus said, "Paul, how about this? I'll judge you, but we'll have a change of venue. Instead of doing it in Cesaria, let's go to Jerusalem and have your trial there." Now, there was a principle in Roman jurisprudence called the provocatio, which had been established in the 6th century BC at the very beginning of Rome as a city that granted the right of a citizen to appeal his case to Caesar. And so Paul says, "You think I'm crazy? You think I'm going to go down to Jerusalem? I don't care if you are the one that's going to be the judge. If I go down to Jerusalem, I'll probably never get there alive in the first place. And if I do, there's going to be this clamoring multitude with all these false charges. No, you're the representative of Rome. This is the Roman seat here in Cesaria. Judge me here. And if you won't do that, provocatio, I appeal to Caesar." Oh, you can almost feel the relief of Fesus at this point. He says, "I can finally get this guy out of my hands. You appeal to Caesar. Where do I check with my fellows?" He checks with them, came back. "You appeal to Caesar. To Caesar you shall go. And let Caesar worry about you, Paul. And I can wash my hands of the whole business."

Now, one thing's strange. You've got to be asking yourself the question, who is this Caesar that Paul is asking to hear his case? Nero, the wild beast as he was known in the first century. But remember that Nero came to power in the year 54. And we were told by Josephus and Tacitus both that between 54 and 59, Nero was being tutored by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, whose works still are read and studied today. And Seneca was instructing Nero on how to judge and how to rule. And for the first five years of Nero's reign, he was a model emperor. Then for reasons I don't know, he went nuts and became the bloodiest, most ruthless, most corrupt emperor in the history of Rome. But at this time, that corruption had not yet manifested itself. And Paul was doing a very intelligent thing by saying, "Let Nero hear my case." He didn't know that Nero was waiting for him with a sword. And so Paul is dismissed, at least temporarily, from the jurisdiction of Fesus. Though Fesus will subject Paul to one more hearing before a neighboring king, King Agrippa, that we'll read about, God willing, in the weeks to come. But again, he delivers the sentence decisively over to the hands of Caesar. And Paul has to wait again for his case to be decided. Beloved, it is the history of the church. It is the history of the world to be judged politically rather than by principle. We all do it. We all have it done to us. But we ought not to be like that.

Immediately he preached the Christ in the synagogues that he is the son of God. And then all who heard were amazed, and they said, "Isn't this not he who destroyed those who called on this name in Jerusalem, and has come here for that purpose, so that he might bring them bound to the chief priests?" But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who dwelt in Damascus, proving that this Jesus is the Christ. Now, after many days were passed, the Jews plotted to kill him. But their plot became known to Saul. And as they watched the gates day and night to kill him, the disciples took him by night and led him down through the wall in a large basket. And when Saul had come to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him and did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles. And he declared to them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and that he had spoken to him, and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus. And so he was with them at Jerusalem, coming in and going out. And he spoke boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus and disputed against the Hellenists. But they attempted to kill him. And when the brethren found out, they brought him down to Cesaria and sent him out to Tarsus. And then the churches throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and were edified. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, they were multiplied. The word of God for the people of God. Let us pray.

Father, again we thank you for this record of holy boldness by which this new convert Saul was used as your chosen instrument to awaken multitudes of people to your identity. And we pray for that same kind of boldness in our lives, in our preaching, in our witness, in our own day. Speak to us now through this text. For we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Just to recapitulate where we've come in our study of the book of Acts, we remember that Saul had left Jerusalem on a mission to root out Christians in Damascus, and he got orders from the high priest that authorized him to drag them from their homes and bring them back. And so he left the city breathing out threats with an entourage, a retinue of mounted soldiers or helpers with him. And he left in strength, but was interrupted on the route to Damascus by the intrusion into his life by the risen Christ. And we looked at that episode in which the Apostle Paul was first converted, and he left Jerusalem in strength. He entered into Damascus being led by the hand because God had struck him blind. And recall that then he had been taken to the street named Straight, where there Ananias ministered to him, laid hands upon him, the Holy Ghost anointed him, and the scales like flakes fell from his eyes, and he was able to see. Then we read in the text this morning that this one who came blind into the city of Damascus being led by the hand became so powerful in such a short period of time that he had to leave the city because of a conspiracy there to kill him, and he left by way of being secreted out a window on the wall of the city and lowered down in a woven basket like so much dirty laundry. So you can imagine the radical shift in the circumstances and situation of the apostle from the time he first left Jerusalem in power, led in humility into Damascus, and then flees from the city in weakness in a basket that his life may be spared. But in between his entrance into Damascus and his departure by the basket, he had a mighty ministry. And I want to spend some time looking specifically at the first statement that Luke tells us about this interim period of the apostolic ministry in Damascus. "Immediately," we are told, "he preached the Christ in the synagogues that he is the son of God." I want to stop for a few moments and focus on this: that Paul's message the moment he began preaching in the synagogues there in Damascus was about Jesus as the Christ, and he declared to the Jewish people there that Jesus was the son of God. Now, it's important for us to notice this because this is the only time in the book of Acts that the title "Son of God" is used for Jesus. For many of you who were involved in our adult education class when we went in a biblical overview from dust to glory, you recall that I spent some amount of time talking about the titles that are given to Jesus in the New Testament, such as the title Christ, the title Lord, and I spent a lot of time on the significance of the title Son of Man because that's Jesus' favorite title for himself. Well, we see two titles juxtaposed in the New Testament with respect to Jesus. On the one hand, the title Son of Man. On the other, the title Son of God. And as I've mentioned to you before, it's tempting in light of the church's confession that we believe that Jesus was one person with two natures, a human nature and a divine nature. We reach back into church history to the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, where the church confessed her faith about Jesus, saying that Christ is verahomo veridus, truly man, truly God, and the two natures perfectly united in one person. Now, that's part of our confession as Christians. But the temptation is to think that when Jesus uses the term Son of Man, that that title refers to his human nature, and when he uses the title Son of God, that that title would refer to his divine nature. But if we draw that conclusion, we will be making a serious error. It's true that when Jesus is called the Son of Man, it has something to do with his human nature. But the principle and chief significance of that title Son of Man is that it refers to the Old Testament personage who is a heavenly character, a heavenly person who dwells in the presence of the Ancient of Days and who is sent from heaven to descend to the earth for a mission. So in a sense, the title Son of Man describes more of Jesus' divine nature than it does his human nature. Likewise, when we come to the title Son of God, we would assume that its primary reference would be to his deity. But again, we would trip over ourselves if we drew that inference without great care.

Now, I want to take some time this morning to look at it because here's how Paul announces Jesus in his beginning of his ministry. He preaches in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. What did he mean? Well, in the Old Testament, that title Son of God was used in several ways. In the first instance, the angels of heaven are called the sons of God. And the sons of God in that sense are still creatures. They're not divine beings. Then Israel herself as a nation is called the Son of God. Remember the quotation in the New Testament from the Old: "Out of Egypt have I called my son." So in God's redeeming of the people of Israel, he adopted them into his family and called the whole corporate nation his son. Kings in the Old Testament were called the sons of God. And also, as the concept of the Messiah developed over time in the Old Testament, the ministry of the Messiah who would come both as a king and as a suffering servant and so on, also became known as the one who would be known as the Son of God. And so when we get into the New Testament, we hear Jesus at his baptism, when he embraces all of the responsibilities to be the Messiah, when he's anointed by the Holy Ghost, God speaks audibly from the clouds and announces to those who are there, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." And then later on again, God speaks from heaven audibly saying basically the same message: "This is my beloved son. Hear him. Listen to him." And so what are we to make of this? Well, in the first instance in the New Testament, the idea of sonship is inseparably related to obedience. Remember the controversies that Jesus had with the Pharisees over their relationship with Abraham? You remember the Pharisees says, "We're the children of Abraham." Jesus says, "You are not. If you were the children of Abraham, you would do what Abraham would do. Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and you reject me every minute. And before Abraham even was, I am." Do you remember that interaction there? And then he said, "You are not the children of Abraham, but you are of your father, the devil." Now, that's quite a contrast between being called the children of Abraham and being called children of Satan. Why did Jesus say that these opponents of his were children of the devil? Well, he answers that question for us. He said, "You are the children of the one you obey. And you're obeying Satan, not Abraham, not Moses, not God. And since you obey Satan, it can be said that you're the children of Satan." Now, conversely, the same idea is used to describe sonship with respect to Jesus. "You are the child of the one whom you obey." Jesus is uniquely the Son of God in the sense that he, of all people in history, was completely and absolutely obedient to the Father in his humanity. He was the Son of God in his humanity because of his sinlessness and because of his perfect obedience, he warranted this title, the Son of God. And so we could just stop there and say, well, here the term Son of God has nothing to say about Jesus' divine nature. It simply refers to his human nature in his perfect obedience. No, no, no, no, no. Because the New Testament, though it clearly talks about his sonship in terms of obedience, nevertheless goes beyond it to the transcendent aspect of Christ's unique relationship to the Father.

Now, some of you will recall when we preached through the Gospel of John, that at the very beginning of our study of the Gospel of John, in the prologue to the Gospel of John, at the end of that, Jesus is described by John as the monogenes, the only begotten of the Father. Remember that? Now, that's a loaded term. It doesn't mean the first begotten, but the prefix mono means the uniquely begotten one. The only one that ever had been begotten of the Father, the only one that ever will be begotten of the Father. That there is a unique begottenness that is in view there with respect to Jesus. Now, it's that language of begottenness that provoked one of the most serious controversies in all of church history in the 4th century, that made it necessary for there to be an ecumenical council of the whole vast expanse of Christendom to come together to Nicaea to meet in council, out of which came the Nicene Creed. Now, just a few moments ago, we stood and we sang the Gloria. Do you remember that? Sure you do. Wasn't that long ago. And we sang the words, "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." And then when we sat down, our beloved pastor Tim got a little excited after we sang the doxology. And what did he say? Do you remember? "Take that, you Arians!" Because he was referring back to the 4th century dispute when Arius denied the deity of Jesus. Arius said that Jesus was a human being who was uniquely adopted by the Father for his mission, but he was not divine. He was not eternal. He was not of the same substance or essence as God. He was a creature. And how do we know it? Because the Bible says he was begotten. And the Greek verb to beget, gino, ginomai, means to be, become, or to happen. And it refers to those incidents and events that indicate the beginning of something in time and in space. And it's argued from the text, if the Bible says Jesus was begotten, that means he had a beginning. And if he had a beginning, he's not eternal. And if he's not eternal, he's not God. So we ought not to be attributing deity to Christ. That was what the Council of Nicaea was all about. That's what the Nicene Creed was all about. When the Nicene Creed responded with the famous phraseology that Christ was homousios, of the same substance, the same essence, the same stuff as the Father, declaring the faith of Christendom that Christ is co-substantial and co-eternal with the Father. And then it uses the language of begottenness where it says in the creed that Christ was "begotten, comma, not made." In other words, the church acknowledges that the Bible speaks of the begottenness of Jesus. But the begottenness here refers to an eternal relationship, an eternal begottenness that makes it set apart from any other kind of begottenness you ever follow by that term monogenes. That Christ is individually, singularly the only one ever uniquely begotten eternally of the Father because he is very God of very God. There never was a time when the Son was not. And so the church sang her confession saying, "Glory," a divine attribute. "Glory be to the Father and glory be to the Son and glory be to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, that is from all eternity, is still going on. God is still triune. He was always triune and he ever more shall be triune. He's now and ever more shall be, world without end. Amen."

It's that radical message. And I use the term radical carefully, coming from the Latin radix, which means root. It is that root message that the Apostle Paul immediately proclaimed where he saw Jesus as an enemy to the purity of Jewish monotheistic religion. Now it dawned on him that the Messiah of Israel was nothing less than God incarnate. And so when he was preaching in the synagogues that Jesus was the Son of God, he was using that title in the fullest measure that it could be used to apply to Christ. And of course, when he did that, when he made that declaration, he was met with astonishment and amazement by his hearers. First of all, because of his about-face, they said, "Isn't this the one who destroyed everybody who called on this name Jesus in Jerusalem and had come here for that purpose that he might bring him bound to the chief priests?" And the answer to that question, ladies and gentlemen, was yes. Yes, this is the same guy. This is the guy who came here to bind the followers of Jesus and drag them back to Jerusalem. And when he left Jerusalem, he didn't come as a one-man vigilante against Christians. He came with the full authorization of the high priest. He came with the warrant for the arrests of Christians issued by the highest authority in Israel, the high priest at Jerusalem. However, something happened between the beginning of that mission and his arrival in Damascus. What happened simply was this: He met the high priest. He met the eternal high priest. The high priest who is high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, who will never retire, who will never abdicate his office, who will never leave his office by dying, as all the lines of high priests in Israel had one after another. Their term was limited. Their duration was finite. But the high priest changed the orders, gave a new commission, overruled and trumped the high priest in Jerusalem, and gave Paul a whole new mission, which he began to carry out, we are told, immediately.

And so first he was greeted by amazement. But we are told, "Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who dwelt in Damascus, proving that Jesus is the Christ." This went on for just a few days until the astonishment of the local Jewish community turned to rage, and they plotted to kill him. But Paul heard of the plot, and we saw already that he escaped their hands by being let down from a house. In those days, the city walls would often include within them homes that were built right on the wall that were part of the wall. And so the friends of Paul took him into the house and dropped him out of the window in this basket in the midst of the night so that he could escape. So we are told, "When Saul came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they're afraid of him because they still don't know what's taking place. But Barnabas, whose name means son of encouragement, interceded for Paul, vouched for Paul to the disciples who were gathered here in Jerusalem and told how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus." And so again, we are told, "He spoke boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus in Jerusalem and disputing against the Greek-speaking Jews, the Hellenists, and then they tried to kill him. But when the disciples found this out, they brought him down to Cesaria and sent him out to Tarsus." Then this brief interlude, "the churches in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace, and they were edified. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, they were multiplied."

Now, before we heard of the conversion of Saul following on the martyrdom of St. Stephen, we had heard something of Peter's ministry in Jerusalem. And then we have this brief interval where we're introduced to Saul, read of his conversion and of his brief ministry there in Damascus, and then back to Jerusalem for a short while until he's then sent back to Tarsus. And so then the text goes back, as we will see, God willing, next week, to focus attention again on Peter and his ministry in Jerusalem before it will pick up afresh later and take us along with Paul and his fellow workers on his missionary journeys. But his ministry began in Damascus, and it began proving that Christ was the Messiah. And it began proclaiming Jesus in his fullness, in his perfect humanity and his perfect deity as the Son of the living God. And beloved, that's why we're here today. That's why we're assembled in this building because we are people who are persuaded that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God. What Paul declared there in Damascus is the same thing that Peter declared before Jesus at Caesarea Philippi confession. You remember when Jesus said, "Who do you say that I am?" And Simon said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Beloved, God hates religion because religion is something that humans invent and religious behavior is something that we conjure up. But what Christianity is about is devotion to our creed, not because it's written down, but because of the substance of the truth that's contained therein. We are to be people who are persuaded that Jesus is the Christ, that God's Son, his only begotten Son, came into this world for us and for our salvation. And we come now each Sabbath day to give the sacrifice of praise, to give honor, to give worship, and to give adoration to him.

And finally, this last thing. One of my things I had to do this week was write a table talk article for several months from now. You have to do them in advance. And it's on worship. And I was asked to write about how the nature of God should teach us anything about worship. And I thought back. Was Francis Schaeffer three-fourths of the way through the 20th century, he wrote a book entitled "How Shall We Then Live?" Do you remember that? In light of the impact of modernity and postmodernism, Schaeffer was musing on that. How are we going to live as Christians in a strange and foreign land in this day and age? How should we then live? Well, I think the question now is, how should we then worship? That's the question. How? But if you're a journalist and you're writing a story, you have to look at certain things as you investigate the facts. You want to know the answer to certain questions like who, what, where, when, how, and so on. Well, the big question today is the who question. Who do we worship? Because who we worship defines how we worship. I'll tell you what, I almost cry when I go past churches and I'll see on their advertising outside they'll say, "9:30 service, traditional. 11:00 service, contemporary." Or I'll see on the sign, "Our worship is blended." That's the language of the contemporary church. I look at that and I want to weep, and I say, "Why would anybody have blended worship? Why would anybody say, 'Here, we're an ecclesiastical cafeteria. If you want one style, you come at 9:30. If you want another style, you come at 11:00'?" The reason I weep is because I know what's going on. I know what's driving the changes, the church growth movement that asks the question always and everywhere, "What do the people want?" Ladies and gentlemen, God doesn't care what you want. The issue is, what does he want? Who is it that we're here for? We're not here to please unbelievers. You can try to reach them in evangelism and during the week, but corporate worship on Sunday morning is for the body of Christ, for believers. And it is for believers to be brought before the living God and to approach him as one who is holy. So the how question must always be answered by the who question, and that should be true in every aspect of our lives. That how we live our Christian lives should be determined by who we understand God to be. And who Jesus is, we have to do with the Son of God. And though we're called to enter boldly into his presence, and that we shouldn't be terrified by him, and even though God is not only transcendent but he's immanent, and he's close to us, and he dwells with us, and he comforts us, and says, "Come ye to us." He never, ever, ever, as close as we get to him, and as nice as he is to us, and as nice that we can call him Father and all of that, he never stops being holy. And that should be manifested in how we worship him. Because I believe that how people worship God speaks louder about their understanding of who he is than any creed or any theology that could ever be written. God grant that the people of St. Andrews will know who he is and who it is we have to do when we enter into his house with the sacrifice of praise. Let's pray.

Our Father and our God, we have trivialized who you are. We have failed to show reverence and awe before you. We have not regarded the sanctuary as a holy place. We have not regarded you as holy. So change our souls and our understandings of thee that immediately, like Saul, we will regard you as God, and Christ as your Son. For we ask it in his name. Amen.

As we continue now with our study of the Trinity, we've seen now something of the doctrine as it's found in the Old Testament scriptures and then the New Testament scriptures, and how the doctrine developed in terms of church history and the early centuries of Christian reflection. But we've noted along the way that the constant criticism of the Trinity is that it's irrational, that it involves a contradiction. And you recall earlier I responded to that by saying that to call it a contradiction is to misapply the law of non-contradiction to the formula because the formula for the Trinity teaches that God is one in essence and three in person. So that it's one in one thing, three in another. What we would say one in A, three in B, which does not violate the categories of rational thought or the law of non-contradiction. Nevertheless, people continue persistently to make the charge that the Trinity is irrational. In fact, I just got a letter yesterday from somebody making that charge against historic Christianity. And so I want to take a couple of moments today to say why it is I think that people make this error in accusing Christianity of being irrational or contradictory with respect to our doctrine of the Trinity. In other classes, I have taken the time to explore three distinct categories that we need to understand and differentiate from one another. And those categories are the contradiction, the paradox.

And the mystery. These three words represent three distinct ideas or concepts, but they are so closely related that all three of them are often confused one with the other.

A paradox. The prefix parah means alongside of and the root comes from the Greek doc which means to seem to think or to appear. A paradox is something that sounds contradictory. Maybe the first time you hear it, but upon closer scrutiny, the uh tension is resolved. Jesus, you know, the New Testament says for us to be free, we have to become slaves or servants to Christ. That sounds contradictory, but upon closer examination, we're seeing that Jesus is saying to be free in one sense, you have to be a servant in another sense. And so there's no violation here of the rules of logic.

But uh where we really see the problem and the tension is between the mystery and the contradiction. And here's the reason. In the term mystery, we refer to mysteries as to things that we as yet do not understand. We believe them to be true, but we don't understand how it is that they are true or why it is that they are true. We know that there is such a thing as gravity, but the whole essence of gravity remains something as a of a mystery to us. Even something as basic and fundamental as motion, which we uh notice every day and build our lives upon, defies an acute analysis of its reality when one looks at it philosophically. We say that there is a mysterious element to that, as well as to many other things that we experience in our everyday lives. And so a mystery is something that we uh affirm is true, but we don't understand all of the ramifications of it.

Now, biblical Christianity certainly has its share of mysteries. We don't understand how God can be uh infinite in his being, and yet we affirm that he is. And there are many truths that God reveals to us about himself that are beyond our capacity to understand. In fact, some of these truths we may never fully understand, even in heaven. As we get new information and new knowledge, things that formerly were mysterious to us are then unraveled with new insight and new information. And we have seen real progress in knowledge in the history of science, in the history of uh theology, and other disciplines as we increase our knowledge. But uh even as we increase our knowledge to the maximal point in human experience, even in heaven, we will remain finite creatures who will not have an ability to have a full comprehension of the nature of God. And so it shouldn't surprise us, given the difference between the character of God and humanness, that there would be mysterious elements of truth with respect to God.

But again, there's a difference between a mystery and a contradiction. What they have in common, however, is this: nobody understands a contradiction, and mysteries are not understood either. And so we can rush to judgment and say, "If I don't understand something, it must be irrational. It must be a contradiction." But that's not the case at all. The reason why contradictions are not understood is that because they are inherently unintelligible. Nobody can understand a contradiction because contradictions cannot be understood.

I've told the story before, the seminary professor I had who wrinkled his brow and spoke in hushed terms and made the announcement in our class. He said, "God is absolutely immutable in his essence." And God is absolutely mutable in his essence. And there was a collective sigh by the students. They said, "That's deep." I said, "No, that's nuts. That's wacky." But if you have enough education and a position of authority in the academic world, you can make nonsense statements and have people walk away impressed by how profound you are. But that is profoundly nonsensical to say that God is absolutely mutable and absolutely immutable at the same time and in the same relationship. All the degrees in the world can't make sense out of that because it's a nonsense statement.

Now, no human being has the capacity to understand a contradiction because, as I say, they're inherently unintelligible. And not only God, I mean, can understand a contradiction. Some people say, "Well, that's the difference between God and man, where our minds are limited by the laws of logic. In God's mind, God can transcend the laws of logic, and God can understand something as an 'A' and not an 'A' at the same time in the same relationship." Now, you may think that you're exalting God by saying that he is so wonderful in his intelligence and so transcendent in his wisdom that he's able to understand contradictions. No, what you've done is you've just slandered the deity because you have said that in the mind of God resides nonsense and chaos, which is not the case.

But what we mean is that there are things we don't understand that are mysterious to us, that God, from his perspective and with his omniscience, his knowledge, can readily understand. That is, for God, there is no mystery. There's also no contradictions because he doesn't think in those categories. But again, the point of contact is we cannot understand a mystery, but it may be that at some point, with more information and a higher perspective, that mystery will be unraveled. And again, God can understand it. God understands gravity. God understands motion. God understands ultimate reality and being, where we have not been able to penetrate to these things completely.

So I hope you understand that we need to be careful when we say the the Trinity is something I don't understand. I don't know how a person can be one person and have two natures, a divine nature and a human nature. I have no reference point for that in my human experience. In every person that I've ever met, that person has only had one nature. It's like one to a customer. And yet, when we affirm the dual nature of Christ, we are affirming something that is that is unique to him, that differs from normal experience of humanity. And so it's mysterious. As we said when we looked at the Council of Chalcedon, we can affirm the negatives that the two natures are without confusion and mixture, division and separation, and so on. But that pretty much limits our understanding by saying what it isn't. We don't know how it really uh functions in the two natures of Christ. And likewise, when we come to the Trinity, we say, because we have to say based on the revelation of scripture, that there is one sense in which God is one, and another sense in which he is three. And we must be careful to point out that those two senses are not the same. If they were the same, then we would have a contradiction unworthy of our faith. But we point to the mystery of the of the nature of God, who is one in essence and three in person.

Now, a second objection that is raised constantly against the doctrine of the Trinity is linguistic in this in this degree. The argument is that the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, never uses the term Trinity. And so the term Trinity is an extrabiblical word imposed upon the text of scripture. And therefore, it involves an intrusion into the Hebraic mind of of the scriptures from outside the biblical framework. It's an invasion of abstract Greek categories into New Testament Christianity. We hear this all the time, as if the Holy Spirit could not justly ever use the Greek language as a medium of communicating truth, which in fact, we know is not the case, since the New Testament was written in the Greek language. And so sometimes today, theologians and philosophers have more trouble with Greek than God does.

But in any case, the idea that the term Trinity doesn't occur in the scriptures has caused some people to raise eyebrows. But the question is, does what this word mean? Does the concept appear in the Bible? All the word Trinity does is focus linguistically, as a word, to capture within it the content of the scriptures that teach, as we have seen already, the unity of God and the tri-personality of God. And so we search for a word that will accurately communicate uh those two assertions: unity and tripersonality. And we come up with the idea of triunity, three in oneness, and we get this word, Trinity. And so it really, it's naive to uh object that the word itself isn't found in the scripture, as long as we can demonstrate that the concept is found in the scripture and is taught by the scripture.

Now, let me just say something at this point about these theological terms that arise in church history and why they arise in church history. They arise principally because of the church's commitment to theological precision. John Calvin made the observation in his Institutes that words like Trinity have arisen in church history because of what he described as the slippery snakes that try to distort the teaching of scripture by heresy. I mean, you have somebody, as we've already seen, like Arius, who didn't hesitate to call Jesus the Son of God, who didn't hesitate to to give personal devotion and worship to Jesus as the Son of God, who didn't hesitate in saying that Jesus was like God. Yet, he argued that Jesus was a creature. So that he used the language of the church, such as at the Council of Nicaea or the Synod of Antioch in 267, where the term *homoousios* was introduced as opposed to *homoiousios*. Arius didn't hesitate to use the language of previous uh councils, but he filled that language with a different content. And that's what heretics do all the time. And the favorite trick of the heretic is what we call the studied ambiguity. The studied ambiguity. The studied ambiguity is a means of communication whereby something, a word, is used to leave the concept intentionally ambiguous.

In the 16th century, the greatest theological controversy in the history of the church broke out at the time of the Reformation over the doctrine of justification. And the basic issue was, what was the grounds of our justification? Is our justification grounded in a righteousness that inheres within us, or is it grounded in a righteousness that is uh achieved apart from us, outside of us? *Extra nos*, that is. Is our righteousness from within, or is it from Christ, in terms of his perfect act of righteousness, where his righteousness is imputed to us or counted to us? The whole controversy came down to one word: imputation, where the Reformers were saying the only way any person can be justified is to have the righteousness of Jesus Christ transferred to their account.

Now, in efforts to resolve the dispute, many people said, "Well, let's just write up the let's write it this way: that we're justified by Christ." We both agree that we're justified by Christ. So let's hold hands, sing hymns, pray together, and stay together by just having a common formula that we're justified by Christ. And that's ambiguous enough that people who believe you're justified by the infusion of the righteousness of Jesus that you cooperate with to become inherently righteous, you can hold on to that. And you who believe that you're justified by Christ by virtue of the imputation of his righteousness, where these two views of justification are as far from each other as the east is from the west. We can avoid the controversy. We can avoid the dispute. We can maintain Christian unity by using a formula that is intentionally ambiguous, that you can interpret your way and you can interpret your way. That's what happens with the studied ambiguity. And historically, again, Calvin was right in saying that the studied ambiguity is the hiding place for the heretic.

And so the reason why the church insisted upon this term historically was again to stop the mouths of the heretics, to stop the Monophysites, I mean, the Modalists, to stop the Dynamic Monarchians, to stop those who were teaching tritheism, that is, that there are three gods, and also to stop the mouths of those who were denying the tripersonality of God by insisting on some view of Unitarianism. And therefore, we see the church coming down on a concept that, in a very real sense, functions as a shibboleth. Remember what the what the purpose of the shibboleth was? The purpose of the shibboleth was as a password to get by a sentry. When the enemies of Israel were trying to send their undercover agents and spies into the land, anybody who came in was asked to pronounce the word "shibboleth," and their neighbors were not able to pronounce that word. And so their stumbling with the language gave them away. And so that's what we say a shibboleth is. It's a test word to find out if someone is authentic.

In Holland, during the period of the occupation, when uh Holland was under domination of of Germany for several years during World War II, they had their shibboleth. They have a seaport uh uh sea coast resort town in in Holland called, See if I can do it and make it past the sentry, because you almost have to have postnasal drip to be able to speak it. But the name of this sea coast was Scheveningen. Did you hear that? And uh the Germans, just for the life of them, couldn't do it. They could speak Dutch and get by and pass as Dutch under most cases. You ask them to say Scheveningen, and they stumble all over themselves, just like I am uh right now. And so that became a shibboleth, and that's what the church has had to do.

You take words like "inerrancy" when it comes to the scripture. J.I. Packer once said, "Yes, inerrancy is a shibboleth. You want to ask, find out real quick where a person stands with respect to their view of sacred scripture. You don't ask them, 'Do you believe in the scripture's inspiration?' You ask him, 'Do you believe in the scripture's inerrancy?'" Because people will choke on that word before they'll affirm it. Now, granted, there's never been a confession written. There's never been a formula expressed in all of its precision that dishonest people can't fudge on. Weasel words happen all the time. And my own ordination, I remember a fellow who asked me before his ordination exams, he said to me, "Should I go with the resurrection or not?" I said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Do you believe in the resurrection?" He said, "Well, of course not." I said, "Well, then that's what you have to say." But he didn't want to be disqualified from ordination, so he fudged. He crossed his fingers when he was under examination. That happens all the time.

And again, the reason why the church has come back to words like Trinity is to set the standard as precisely as we possibly can. And what drives the church to precision in every generation has been the assault on the truth of God from the heretic. That's what heresy does. It forces the church to be careful and clear and precise in her confession. Well, in our next session, we will look again at this formula, "one in essence, three in person," and see if we can at least unravel the theological content of what is meant by those terms that are used.

A few years ago, a professor from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, north of Boston, Dr. David Wells, published a book that fell like a bombshell on the playground of the nation's theologians. And the name of the book was *No Place for Truth*. Now, the subtitle, I think, is significant, as he wrote in the subtitle, "Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?" And in this book that caused quite a stir in the evangelical world, Dr. Wells outlined his concern for the demise of confessional theology in the life of the church today. And I'd like to begin our series by reading a brief comment from that book by Dr. Wells. He makes this statement: "The disappearance of theology from the life of the church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift from God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, and in its reveling in the irrational."

I recently attended a meeting in Philadelphia of the board of an organization known by the acronym ACE, which is the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which was brought together in the first place largely through the stimulus provided by Dr. Wells's book. For this group is concerned to help call the church back to its confessional foundation, understanding that Christianity has a theology. Now, the purpose of this series that we're beginning today is to give an overview, a kind of a glimpse of the essence of that theology that is called Reformed Theology, as distinguished from other branches of historic Christianity. Now, we won't have the time or the opportunity to go into all the details of Reformed Theology, but I want to give sort of a compendium, an introduction to the main ideas that we find in Reformed Theology. And the first thing I want to say today is that Reformed Theology is a theology. Now, that sounds rather redundant. I realize that. But I want to make this distinction clear: that there is a difference between religion and theology.

One of my favorite illustrations of this comes from a personal experience that I had several years ago when I was invited by the faculty and the administration of a college in the Midwest that was a Christian college, and they were without a president at the time. And as a result, the school was going through a period of self-evaluation. And they asked me to come to address the faculty on the subject, "What is a Christian College?" And when I appeared on the campus, the dean greeted me and gave me the cook's tour of the facilities. And as we were going through the faculty office building, I noticed one of the office doors had the name stenciled across the top of the door: "Department of Religion." And I didn't say anything. I just sort of filed it back in my mind for a few moments. And then later on that evening, as I addressed the faculty on the question, "What is a Christian College?" Before I began my message, I asked them a question. I said, "I noticed this afternoon that you have here at this institution a Department of Religion. And my question is, has this department always been called the Department of Religion?" And there was an elderly professor in the back of the room who raised his hand, and he said, "No, it used to be called the Department of Theology, but we changed it about 30 years ago to the Department of Religion." And I said, "Well, why did you change it?" And he didn't know. And I asked the rest of the faculty, and they began to guess why they changed it. They said, "Well, maybe it's to make it easier for our students to transfer their academic credits from our institution to other universities and so on."

But I took off on that point to to address the question, "What is a Christian College?" or "What is Christian education?" And I reminded my colleagues that evening that there is a profound difference between the study of religion and the study of theology. Now, for those who are watching this presentation, I have put on my blackboard uh a brief diagram where I distinguish between two approaches to the question of faith. One I call God-centered, and the other I call man-centered. And the illustration that I use here has a circle with the word "Theology" in it, and a line coming underneath it to a sub-circle which says "Anthropology." And the purpose of my diagram is to show that in a God-centered approach to faith, the discipline or the study of humanity, the science of anthropology, is subsumed under the science of theology. This reflects something of the way in which university courses were structured in the Middle Ages, when it was said that theology was the queen of the sciences. The idea being that all other disciplines in education are subsumed under the search for ultimate truth that is found in the study of the nature and character of God. And it assumed that the study of humanity was always to be pursued in light of our understanding of God, since man is created by God, and that we are the imagebearers of God. To have a proper understanding of what it means to be human, we have to first study the prototype rather than looking at the reflection of that.

And then below the center line, I have the man-centered approach to things, indicated by a circle that reads "Anthropology," and then under that is a smaller circle that says "Religion." If we go to secular universities today and study religion, usually that study will take place in the context of the department of sociology or of anthropology. And the difference is this: the study of theology is the study of God himself, first and foremost. The study of religion is the study of a particular type of human behavior. We notice that there are all kinds of religions in the world. And when people are involved in religion, they're involved in certain characteristic things like prayer and worship and sacrifice and uh singing and devotions and that sort of thing, all of which belong to the trappings of human religion. And when we study religion from a human perspective, we are examining how people who have certain beliefs about the supernatural behave in their personal lives and in their cultic lives.

But when I say at the outset that Reformed Theology, when I say that Reformed Theology is a theology, not a religion, I mean by that that it is not simply a way of behaving that we can determine by studying the affairs of men. But rather, it is a belief system. It is a belief system that is indeed an entire life and worldview with God at the center. Now, we live in a culture that has certain axioms and adages that are popular in the uh nomenclature of the day. You know, you've heard it said, "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere." And that idea communicates that what God is really concerned about with us is that we be religious. Doesn't matter what the religion is, as long as we're sincerely religious. Well, that idea is on a collision course with biblical Christianity.

Because, in the first instance, the Bible acknowledges that man is incurably religious. He's *homo religiosus*, and that wherever we look in the world, we find all kinds of manifestations of religion. When the Jewish people were called by God and consecrated and set apart to be a holy nation, they were not the only religious people in the world. All the nations around them had their peculiar religions. But when God made his covenant with his people and called them to be holy, to be different, at the very beginning of his law, he made certain things absolutely clear. The first being is, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." And the second, "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image." At the very beginning of the Old Testament uh covenant at Sinai was an emphasis on faith that was to be different from other religions, a faith that would be focused and centered on the character of God himself.

Now, we know what happened very early in the history of Israel in the Old Testament. We recently had a conference in Orlando on the essentials of the Christian faith, where I called attention to an incident that is recorded for us in the 32nd chapter of the book of Exodus. And I'll read a part of this uh episode to you, beginning at verse 17. We read this: "Now when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, 'There is a noise of war in the camp.' 'It is not the noise of the shout of victory, nor the noise of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.'" Now, imagine this scenario. Moses is just now returning from Mount Sinai. He has been alone with God, conversing with God, as it were, face to face. And when he comes down from the mountain, he meets Joshua. And Joshua comes to Moses and he says, "I hear this loud noise coming from the camp." And Joshua's first instinct was to guess that there was some kind of war going on, because you don't hear this kind of hooping and hollering and shouting from a mass of people except on the field of combat. But as he drew closer, he said, "Wait a minute. It's not the sound of victory. It's not the sound of defeat. It's the sound of singing that I hear." And he realized that he was approaching the whole assembly of the people of Israel as they were gathered for religious observances, singing lustily in their celebration of their religion. But it was a celebration that centered on a golden calf. A golden calf that the people had imposed and begged the high priest Aaron to make for them, that they could have a god like all of the other nations, a god that was tangible, a god they could see, a god that was contemporary, a god that was relevant, a god they could get excited about. And the first high priest, consecrated by God himself, acceded to these demands from the people and built them a golden calf.

Now, in the meantime, while this was going on, and initially, Moses, you recall, had been on Sinai in a relationship with God. And God knew what was going on at the foot of the mountain. Moses didn't. Listen to what God says to Moses in verse 7: "And the Lord said to Moses, 'Go, get down, for your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. And they have made themselves a molded calf and worshiped it and sacrificed to it.' And they said, 'This is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt.'" And the Lord said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and indeed it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore, let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them, and I will consume them."

Now, the people were engaged in religion, but the religion they were celebrating was a religion that had a theology of this world. A theology that distorted and corrupted the very character of God. A theology that moved away from true and honorable worship of God to the worship of creaturely, man-made things. And God said to Moses, "Look at this. They're worshiping this calf and they're saying, 'This is the God who brought us out of the land of Egypt,' as if that calf, made by their own hands, could have delivered them from anything. They prayed to the calf. They offered worship and sacrifices to this calf. And the calf was deaf. The calf was dumb. It couldn't see anything. It couldn't do anything. It was not omnipotent, but impotent. But it was a substitute for the living God."

Now, in the first chapter of Romans, the Apostle Paul says that God has revealed himself through the things that are made so clearly and so manifestly that everyone in this world knows the eternal power and deity of God. And yet, the primary sin of the human race is to take that knowledge of God and to push it down, to do what the what the Apostle says in Romans: to suppress the truth and hold it in unrighteousness, and then exchange that truth for a lie and serve the creature rather than the Creator. The exchange is between the uncorruptible, transcendent, holy God, who is for the corruption of creaturely things. In other words, friends, the most basic sin that we, not just pagans in far-off aboriginal lands or in primitive tribes, commit, but that we commit, is the besetting sin, the proclivity for idolatry. And idolatry involves religion. But even the Christian religion can be idolatrous when we strip God of his true attributes and place at the center of our worship something other than God himself.

Now, if we're going to look at the essence of of Reformed Theology, I have to say to you that the most strict focus of Reformed Theology is on theology, on the knowledge of the true God. We live in a day when people say theology doesn't matter. This is what David Wells was decrying in his book, *No Place for Truth*. What counts is feeling good, being ministered unto in our psychological needs, having a place where we can feel the warmth and and of fellowship and have a sense of belonging and of relevance. And theology is something that divides, something that stirs up controversy and debates. "We don't need doctrine," we are told, "we need life." Well, at the heart of Reformed Theology is the affirmation that theology is life, because theology is the knowledge of God, and there is no more important knowledge that exists to inform our lives than the knowledge of God.

This is what the Protestant Reformation was all about. There were scandals in the priesthood. There were problems of there were problems of immorality both among the Roman Catholic people and among the Protestant people. And Luther, at that time, said, "Erasmus attacked the Pope in his belly. I've attacked him in his doctrine." And Luther even admitted, he said, "We find scandalous behavior among our own people, but what we're trying to do first is come to a sound understanding of God. Because our lives will never be reformed. Our lives will never be brought into conformity to Christ until we first have a clear understanding of the original form, of the model, of the ideal of true humanity that is found in Christ." And that's a matter of theology. So we start with the clear acknowledgment that the Reformed faith is a theology. A theology that permeates the whole structure.

Several years ago, I was working on the staff of a church, and we received a new curriculum for junior high school Sunday school that the denomination had sent down to us. And I was asked by the session of the church to read through the curriculum and see whether we wanted to use it. And as I was reading the curriculum, it began to talk about some of the things we read in the Old Testament where God seems so fierce in the manifestation of his wrath, where he kills people instantly and things of that sort. And the uh curriculum was teaching the children this: It said, "When we read these stories in the Old Testament, we have to remember that things didn't really happen like this. That these were myths that were articulated by the Old Testament writers because these were Jewish people who were warriors, and they were somewhat fierce in their uh bellicosity and so on, and they uh were primitive, pre-scientific people who didn't really understand the love of God. And so we have to understand these passages in light of what we know about God from the New Testament: that he's a God of love, that he's a God of mercy, that he's a God of grace and a God of kindness, and not anything like this mean God of the Old Testament."

Well, needless to say, we didn't use that curriculum. But you hear this attitude voiced all the time, like there are two different gods, a New Testament God and an Old Testament God, and we just have a difficult time relating to the God of the Old Testament because of certain narratives that we encounter uh therein. And I'd like to call attention to a couple of those stories that we read in the Old Testament that cause people to react so negatively to the character of God. The first one is found in the book of Leviticus, in the 10th chapter, where I'll be reading verses 1-7. And this is the story of what happened to the sons of Aaron, the high priest. We read in verse 1 of chapter 10 of Leviticus: "Then Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, put incense on it, and offered profane fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. And so fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord."

And Moses said to Aaron, "This is what the Lord spoke." Now, before I read what Moses said to Aaron, let's reconstruct the story. Here are the two sons of Aaron who have followed in their father's footsteps. They have become consecrated to the priesthood, and they are attending the altar, and they bring this strange fire that was not part of the uh regular ritual of the altar, and they're sort of playing around and experimenting with profane or secular, unconsecrated, unholy stuff. And they bring this stuff and they put it on the altar. And as soon as they do, the fire from the altar gushes up and consumes them and burns them to death on the spot. Now, sometimes when the Bible tells stories like this, they the Bible does it in a terse uh manner, doesn't fill in all the details, but you can imagine how Aaron felt when he hears that God has just executed his two sons for this prank at the altar. And so what does Aaron do? He goes to Moses. And the Bible doesn't tell us what he says to Moses. So let me have a little license here, and let me speculate a little bit. I can imagine what Aaron said to Moses. I can hear Aaron going into the tent of Moses and looking at Moses and saying, "What's going on here? I give my life to the service of God. My sons are giving their life to the service of God. One little mistake, and God kills them on the spot." What kind of a God is that?

Let's read what Moses said. Moses said to Aaron, "This is what the Lord spoke, saying, 'By those who come near me, I will be regarded as holy, and before all the people I will be glorified.'" And then we read after that, "And Aaron held his peace." It's like when he came in all upset, said, "What's God doing here?" Moses said, "Aaron, don't you remember? Don't you remember your own ordination? Don't you remember the elaborate process that we had to go through to be set aside for this sacred task of priesthood? And don't you remember the commandment of the Lord when he said, 'I will be regarded as holy by all of those who come in my presence, and I will be glorified in front of all the people'?" Yeah. And he shut his mouth. It was the end of the protest.

That's not the only story like that. I won't read the text this time, but you remember in in uh in the book of 2 Samuel, in the sixth chapter, we have the the story of Uzzah. Do you remember him? The Ark of the Covenant was being brought towards Jerusalem for celebration. David wanted to bring it there. And so Uzzah and his friends are responsible for transporting the Ark of the Covenant. You remember the Ark of the Covenant was the most sacred vessel in Israel. It was the throne of God. And normally, the Ark was kept inside the tabernacle in the Holy of Holies. And it was there on the top of the Ark of the Covenant, on the mercy seat, that the blood was sprinkled by the high priest on the Day of Atonement. Do you remember?

Well, we also remember that the tabernacle was a big tent. And whenever the tabernacle was moved from one place to another, they had to take the tent down and then reassemble it and reconstruct it at their next stop. The Kohathites were that subgroup of the Levites who were responsible to move these sacred articles. And if you would read the description of the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament when it was first fashioned, the Ark of the Covenant had rings at its edges. And those rings served a purpose. These poles were inserted through the rings so that those who carried the Ark of the Covenant could put the poles over their shoulder and walk down the road carrying the Ark without ever touching the sacred vessel.

But on this occasion, they're in a hurry to get the Ark into Jerusalem. So they put the Ark of the Covenant on an ox cart. And the story tells us as while the ox cart is moving down the road toward Jerusalem, one of the oxen stumbles, and the ox cart starts to teeter, and it looks like the Ark of the Covenant is going to fall off of the cart into the mud and be marred and blemished. That this would be a terrible sacrilege to allow this holy vessel to become made filthy by the dirt. And so instinctively, what does Uzzah do? The Ark's starting to fall onto into the mud. He reaches out to steady the Ark. And as soon as he touches, what does the Bible say? A voice comes from heaven saying, "Thank you, Uzzah, for saving my Ark." No, that's not what happened. The second he touches it, God kills him on the spot.

Now again, critics go back and read that story and they say, "Well, see, that's the way primitive people interpreted events. What really happened was Uzzah, when he touched that sacred object, was so frightened he scared himself to death. He had a heart attack and he dropped dead there in his tracks." Because certainly, God would never ever kill somebody just for stabilizing the Ark. Jonathan Edwards preached on this text many years ago, and he talked about the presumptuousness, the pride of Uzzah, where Uzzah assumed that what would desecrate the Ark of the Covenant would be the dirt on the ground, forgetting that the dirt is in obedience to God. There's nothing profane or unholy or evil about dirt. Dirt does what dirt is supposed to do. When you put water on dirt, it makes mud because it obeys the natural laws that God has decreed for dirt and water when they mix. No, the thing that God commanded so clearly in Israel that should never come in contact with his throne, with his sacred Ark, was not the mud, but the touch of man. It is the touch of man that would mar the holiness of the throne of God. And so God had decreed that no human being would ever be allowed to touch that Ark. And if they did, they would die. Uzzah touched it. Uzzah died.

Again, still we struggle with this. Why does God do this? A Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Küng, in one of his books, talks about these episodes, as well as others, such as the flood, or the *cherem*, which involved the conquest of Canaan. And you read in the Old Testament how God commanded that the Israelites would go into Canaan and slaughter all the people there, men, women, and children, and burn down their villages and get rid of them. He put the ban on these people so that there'd be no mixture between the pagan culture of the Canaanites with his holy people. And you look at the the civil sanctions in the Old Testament, and you'll see that there are about 35 crimes in Old Testament Israel that were capital offenses that were punished by death. If you went and consulted a fortune teller, if you went and had your palm read, you could be put to death. If you blasphemed the name of God publicly, you could be put to death. If you were an unruly, sassy, disobedient child to your parents, you'd be put to death. If you were engaged in homosexual activities, you'd be put to death. Thirty-some crimes were delineated as being capital offenses, whereas in the New Testament, it seems that that list is greatly reduced. And there's a whole different atmosphere in the New Testament of persevering patience and so on.

So again, the question is that Küng was struggling with: why these eruptions of fury by God in the Old Testament and not only in the Old Testament, in the New Testament? Remember Ananias and Sapphira, when they lied to the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts? What did God do? Executed them on the spot. Well, Hans Küng said, "Here's what happens. We think that the Old Testament list of 35 sins as being capital offenses is cruel, severe, harsh, and barbaric." In contrast to the New Testament, where it's so loving and kind, forgetting that the number of capital crimes that are found in the Old Testament already represents a massive reduction in the number of capital offenses. Hans Küng reminds us that in creation, in creation, every sin is a capital offense. God said at the beginning, "The soul that sins shall die." And that if God were to treat the human race strictly according to his justice, every one of us would have been executed a long time ago.

But Küng says that what happens is that God does not institute the death penalty for every sin that deserves it. We don't really believe we deserve to be killed for our sins, do we? There are few sins that are or crimes that are capital crimes in America: murder, still. But there's another one, folks: high treason. And God is the King of the universe. And every time we refuse to obey his law, we are engaged in treason. We are setting ourselves up as having more authority than he has. And we're saying, "You have no right to govern me. And not only am I going to do what I want to do rather than what you want to do, but I dare you to do anything about me. You're not going to kill me." And he says that the basic way that God relates to his people after the fall is with his forbearance, with his mercy, with his grace, with his tenderness. And instead of killing them every time they sin, he is long-suffering and patient and patient towards them. And the Bible says that that patience that God gives to us is to is designed to give us time to repent, to turn from our rebellion to him.

But instead, what happens is the nicer God is to people, the harder our hearts become, the more callous we become in our sinfulness. In fact, Jeremiah said this. He said to the people of Israel, "You have received the forehead of a harlot." What's he mean? He said, "You've lost your ability to blush." How do you think that harlot felt the first time she was engaged in sex that was prohibited by God? She was probably sick in her stomach. Her hands probably trembled because she had a crisis now of her own identity because she realized she had violated God's holiness. But she did it again. Didn't feel so bad the second time, encouraged her friends to get involved, get her culture to accept it, and through repeated offenses, she could now be engaged in the worst kind of sexual activity and not even blush about it. See, that's true. Not only the harlot, that's true of the human who takes advantage of the mercy of God.

And so what Küng says is that because we do this, that from time to time in redemptive history, God will send his justice instead of his mercy to remind the people of the difference between justice and mercy. You may never become professional theologians, but if there are any two concepts in the Bible that you need to get clear in your mind, it is those concepts uh and the difference between the concepts of justice and mercy.

My favorite illustration that took place when I was teaching in a college uh a hundred years ago. I was teaching a class of freshmen, the introduction to the Old Testament, and I had 250 students in my class. And the only room that was big enough on the campus to have 250 students in one class was the chapel. So, first day of classes for the freshmen, I have to give them their their instructions and give them their syllabus. And I said, "We have three little term papers during the course of this semester. The first one's due in September 30th at noon. The second one, October 3rd. The third one, November 30th." And I, they're all Philadelphia lawyers. So I had to explain to them, you know, this I want it on my desk 12:00 September the 30th, unless you're physically confined to the infirmary or the hospital, or there's a death in the immediate family. Does everybody understand? Right. If you don't turn it in on that day, what you get is an F for that assignment. Does everybody understand? They understand.

September 30th came. 225 students come with their term paper, dutifully, appropriately. 25 trembling students are in the back of the room, scared to death, because they don't have their papers done. "Oh, Professor Sproul, we didn't budget our time right. We didn't make the transition from high school to college like we should have. Please don't flunk us for this. Give us two more days to get the paper done, and we'll never let it happen again." I said, "Okay, I'll do it. But you better have your paper in on time next." "Oh, we will."

October the 30th came. 200 students came in class with their term papers. 50 of them don't have their term papers. "Where are your term papers?" "Oh, Professor, this was uh this was homecoming week, and we were all caught up with the excitement of homecoming. Besides that, it was our, had all these midterm exams, and all we professors had papers due, and we're so sorry, but we'll have them in two days. Please give us one more chance." And they're begging me. I said, "Okay, but this is the last time. If we don't get it in next month on time, it's an F for sure. Does everybody understand?" You know what they did? They started to sing spontaneously, "We love you, Prof. Oh, yes we do." I was Mr. Popularity on the faculty because I gave them a break the second time.

November 30th came. You tell me what happened. That's right. 150 students come with their term paper, and a hundred of them don't have them, and they're casually strolling in the back door of the chapel, you know, just as cool as they could be. I say, "Hey, where's your term papers?" They say, "Hey, Prof. No sweat. Cool. We'll have them for you in a couple days. Don't worry about it." I said, "Johnson, where's the term paper?" He said, "I don't have it." I took my little black book, you know, the most dreaded object that the professor has, and I opened it up to J for Johnson. I wrote, "Johnson, F." McIntyre, where's your paper? "I don't have it, sir." McIntyre, F. Llewellyn, where's your paper? "Don't have." F.

Now, what do you suppose they shouted? That's not what? Tell me. "Fair." I said, "What did you say?" "We said that's not fair." I said, "Johnson, did you just say that's not fair?" And he said, "Yeah." He said, "Oh, do I remember correctly, Johnson, that you didn't have your paper in on time last month either?" And he said, "That's right." I said, "Okay, the last thing I want to be to you people is unfair. Johnson, if it's justice that you want, it's justice that you shall get." And I opened up the book and I said, "I'm going to change last month's grade to your just grade: F." I said, "Now, who else in here wants justice?" Nobody raised their hand.

What happens is we get accustomed to God's grace. At first, we're amazed by it. The second time, not quite so much surprised. By the third or the fourth time, we begin to expect it. Then we assume it. And then we demand it. And we're angry if we don't get it. Because the greatest distortion in our thinking, dear friends, is thinking that God owes us mercy, that God is somehow obligated to be gracious to us. But think about that. The minute the idea comes in your head that God owes you mercy or owes you grace, let a bell go off in your brain that says, "Whoops, I'm confusing these concepts." Because grace, by its very definition, is voluntary. God is not required to be merciful. He reserves the right to be merciful to whom he will be merciful, and to be gracious to whom he is gracious. You can plead for grace. You can beg for mercy. But you can never, ever demand it. Justice may be required, but never, ever mercy.

And it's because God is holy that anytime he withholds justice, he is giving grace. If he were not holy, then perhaps his grace would not really be grace. But that's the point of the scriptures is what what Moses was saying to Aaron is on this occasion, Aaron, God was not gracious to Nadab and Abihu. He was just. On this occasion, God was not merciful to us. He was just. And the one thing I warn you, please don't ever ask God for justice. You might get it. It'd be the worst thing that could possibly befall you.