Our good works

Photo by Tony Reinke from www.spurgeon.wordpress.com

From The Justification of God by John Piper (Piper, John. The Future of Justification A Response to N. T. Wright. New York: Crossway Books, 2007)

A few quotes from the Conclusion of Piper's work on justification in regards to "THE PLACE OF OUR GOOD WORKS IN GOD'S PURPOSES" (184).

Our relationship with God is with One who has become for us an omnipotent Father committed to working all things together for our everlasting enjoyment of him. This relationship was established at the point of our justification when God removed his judicial wrath from us, and imputed the obedience of his Son to us, and counted us as righteous in Christ, and forgave all our sins because he had punished them in the death of Jesus. (185)

All the benefits of Christ—all the blessings that flow from God being for us and not against us—rest on the redeeming work of Christ as our Substitute. If God is for us, who can be against us? With this confidence—that God is our omnipotent Father and is committed to working all things together for our everlasting joy in him—we will love others. God has so designed and ordered things that invisible faith, which embraces Christ as infinitely worthy, gives rise to acts of love that make the worth of Christ visible. Thus our sacrifices of love do not have any hand in establishing the fact that God is completely for us, now and forever. It’s the reverse: the fact that God is for us establishes our sacrifices of love. If he were not totally for us, we would not persevere in faith and would not therefore be able to make sacrifices of love. (185)

Our mind-set toward our own good works must always be: These works depend on God being totally for us. That’s what the blood and righteousness of Christ have secured and guaranteed forever. Therefore, we must resist every tendency to think of our works as establishing or securing the fact that God is for us forever. It is always the other way around. Because he is for us, he sustains our faith. And through that faith-sustaining work, the Holy Spirit bears the fruit of love. (186)

Our plight, a question, an answer

From The Justification of God by John Piper (Piper, John. The Future of Justification A Response to N. T. Wright. New York: Crossway Books, 2007)

Our plight:

Thus the moral righteousness he requires of us is the same—that we unwaveringly love and uphold the glory of God. He does not demand that we glorify him part of the time or that we glorify him with pretty good zeal. His demand is unwavering and complete allegiance of heart, soul, mind, and strength. But we have all failed. That is our unrighteousness. “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men . . . they did not glorify him as God . . . and [they] exchanged the glory of the immortal God” (Rom. 1:18, 21, 23, author’s translation). This is why we are on trial in God’s law-court. We have exchanged the glory of God for images and failed to glorify and thank him but have dishonored God by breaking the law (Rom. 2:23) and caused his name to be blasphemed among the nations (Rom. 2:24). So none of us is righteous, not even one (Rom. 3:10). That is the charge against every member of the human race. (164-5)

The question:

The question, then, that we posed earlier is: When the Judge finds in our favor, does he count us as having the required God-glorifying moral righteousness—an unwavering allegiance in heart and mind and behavior? And does this counting us as righteous happen because we meet this requirement for perfect God-glorifying allegiance in our own heart and mind and behavior, or because God’s righteousness is counted as ours in Christ? (165)

Piper's answer:

Yes, the latter is what I believe happens in justification. God counts us as having his righteousness in Christ because we are united to Christ by faith alone. That is, we are counted as perfectly honoring and displaying the glory of God, which is the essence of God’s righteousness, and which is also a perfect fulfilling of the law. This is what God imputes to us and counts us as having because we are in Christ who perfectly honored God in his sinless life. It is not nonsense. It is true and precious beyond words. (165)

Merry Christmas!

Hope everyone has a safe and amazing Christmas!

Thank you Lord for this season!

A Christmas "love note" from my daughter!

Dear Dad i
love u so much
and this is a love note for you!

your love is outsanding
like the whiteness
on a dove.
and i love u as
much more than the world.
and thanks for being
the best dad

- Adele St. John

Reading the Classics with Challies - Redemption Accomplished and Applied

One of the biggest hurdles I had with reformed theology in general, and Calvinism in particular, revolved around the fact that I wanted to participate in my own salvation. I was 'OK' with my role being minuscule and even secondary, but I wanted a part to play in my redemption and in my being 'born again'. I used to think that this desire was acceptable, intelligent, and even noble. As I look back on the years of wrestling with this concept, I realize that it was pride alone which fueled the need to believe that I was participating in a significant way in my regeneration. But now I can say, "Salvation is from the Lord." And I say it without reservation. However, not too long ago, a chapter like the one on Regeneration by Murray in Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Murray, John. Redemption Accomplished and Applied. Boston: Wm. B. Eerdmans Company, 1984)would have caused no small amount of consternation.

Murray brings this issue to the forefront in an interesting way. He begins by presenting a problem to the reader:

An effectual call, however, must carry along with it the appropriate response on the part of the person called. It is God who calls but it is not God who answers the call; it is the person to whom the call is addressed. And this response must enlist the exercise of the heart and mind and will of the person concerned. It is at this point that we are compelled to ask the question: how can a person who is dead in trespasses and sins, whose mind is enmity against God, and who cannot do that which is well-pleasing to God answer a call to the fellowship of Christ?...And how can a person whose heart is depraved and whose mind is enmity against God embrace him who is the supreme manifestation of the glory of God? (95)

Murray 'rolls up his sleeves' and begins the serious work with the answer to that question: "The answer to this question is that the believing and loving response which the calling requires is a moral and spiritual impossibility on the part of one who is dead in trespasses and sin." (95) Murray, in his style that I am beginning to appreciate more and more, makes his position clear stating, "The fact is that there is a complete incongruity between the glory and virtue to which sinners are called, on the one hand, and the moral and spiritual condition of the called, on the other." (95) Murray furthers the discussion with another question: "How is this incongruity to be resolved and the impossibility overcome?" (95)

The answer to this questions strikes at the heart of the dilemma I struggled with when I wanted to believe that I participated in a primary manner in my own salvation.

It is the glory of the gospel of God's grace that it provides for this incongruity. God's call, since it is effectual, carries with it the operative grace whereby the person called is enabled to answer the call and to embrace Jesus Christ as he is freely offered in the gospel. God's grace reaches down to the lowest depths of our need and meets all the exigencies of the moral and spiritual impossibility which inheres in our depravity and inability. And that grace is the grace of regeneration. (96)

Murray goes on, adding,

God effects a change which is radical and all-pervasive, a change which cannot be explained in terms of any combination, permutation, or accumulation of human resources, a change which is nothing less than a new creation by him who calls the things that be not as though they were, who spake and it was done, who commanded and it stood fast. This, in a word, is regeneration. (96)

This, in another word, is glorious. What once sounded to me ridiculous and ignorant, now sounds to me like God's wonderful and beautiful, logical and necessary, grace.

Murray goes on to sum up my sentiments nicely:

It has often been said that we are passive in regeneration. This is a true and proper statement. For it is simply the precipitate of what our Lord has taught us here. We may not like it. We mat recoil against it. It may not fit into our way of thinking and it may not accord with the time-worn expressions which are the coin of our evangelism. But if we recoil against it, we do well to remember that this recoil is recoil against Christ. And what shall we answer when we appear before him whose truth we rejected and with whose gospel we tampered? But blessed be God that the gospel of Christ is one of sovereign, efficacious, irresistible regeneration. If it were not the case that in regeneration we are passive, the subjects of an action of which God alone is the agent, there would be no gospel at all. For unless God by sovereign, operative grace had turned our enmity to love and our disbelief to faith we would never yield the response of faith and love. (99-100)

Piper on God's Righteouseness

From The Future of Justification (Piper, John. The Future of Justification A Response to N. T. Wright. New York: Crossway Books, 2007).

Piper is discussing how God's righteousness should be defined. He begins with a 'simple' definition: "The simple way is to say that God’s righteousness consists in his unswerving commitment to do what is right." (63)

Piper, however, recognizes that this definition, though true, may not be satisfying.

"It is not very satisfying simply to say that God’s righteousness is his commitment to do what is right, because it leaves the term “right” undefined. We don’t feel like we have gained very much in defining “righteousness” if we use the word “right” to define it." (63)

And this definition, according to Piper, may not be ultimately satisfying because it leads one to questions such as these: “How does God decide what is right? Who tells God what is right? Is there a book of laws or rules that God has to obey?” ((63) The answer to these questions is where Piper is heading, "Answering those questions gets at the deeper meaning of righteousness. What is the “right” to which God is unswervingly committed?" (64)

And the following is the conclusion, written as only Piper can write it, to the investigation into God's righteousness:

The answer is that there is no book of laws or rules that God consults to know what is right. He wrote the book. What we find therefore in the Old Testament and in Paul is that God defines “right” in terms of himself. There is no other standard to consult than his own infinitely worthy being. Thus, what is right, most ultimately, is what upholds the value and honor of God—what esteems and honors God’s glory.

The reasoning goes like this: The ultimate value in the universe is God—the whole panorama of all his perfections. Another name for this is God’s holiness (viewed as the intrinsic and infinite worth of his perfect beauty) or God’s glory (viewed as the out-streaming manifestation of that beauty). Therefore, “right” must be ultimately defined in relation to this ultimate value, the holiness or the glory of God—this is the highest standard for “right” in the universe. Therefore, what is right is what upholds in proper proportion the value of what is infinitely valuable, namely, God. “Right” actions are those that flow from a proper esteem for God’s glory and that uphold his glory as the most valuable reality there is. This means that the essence of the righteousness of God is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of his name. And human righteousness is the same: the unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of God. (64)

Caution from Piper in The Future of Justification

In CHAPTER ONE of the book The Future of Justification (Piper, John. The Future of Justification A Response to N. T. Wright. New York: Crossway Books, 2007), author John Piper provides a caution for the reader which he states:

Most scholars are aware that methods and categories of thought taken from historical and systematic theology may control and distort the way one reads the Bible. But we don’t hear as often the caution that the methods and categories of biblical theology can do the same. Neither systematic nor biblical theology must distort our exegesis. But both can. (33)

Piper goes on to explain three ways in which biblical theology, in contrast to systematic theology, might be distorted.

1. Misunderstanding the Sources
2. Assuming Agreement with a Source When There Is No Agreement
3. Misapplying the Meaning of a Source

First, the interpreter may misunderstand the first-century idea. It is remarkable how frequently there is the tacit assumption that we can be more confident about how we interpret secondary first-century sources than we are of how we interpret the New Testament writers themselves. But it seems to me that there is a prima facie case for thinking that our interpretations of extra-biblical literature are more tenuous than our interpretations of the New Testament. In general, this literature has been less studied than the Bible and does not come with a contextual awareness matching what most scholars bring to the Bible. Moreover, the Scripture comes with the added hope that there is coherency because of divine inspiration and that the Holy Spirit will illumine Scripture through humble efforts to know God’s mind for the sake of the glory of Christ. (34-5)

A second reason why an external first-century idea may distort or silence what the New Testament teaches is that while it may accurately reflect certain first-century documents, nevertheless it may reflect only one among many first-century views. Whether a New Testament writer embraced the particular way of thinking that a scholar has found in the first century is not obvious from the mere existence of that way of thinking. (35-6)

A third reason why external first-century ideas may distort or silence what the New Testament teaches is that while the New Testament writer may embrace the external idea in general, a scholar may misapply it to the biblical text. (36)

Photo by Tony Reinke as seen at www.spurgeon.wordpress.com

O Holy Night - Third Day

Watch the Approaches of Temptation

From Triumph Over Temptation (Houston, John M. Triumph Over Temptation. Colorado Springs: Victor, 2005)

"It is not enough to watch our circumstances to detect the times of temptation. We must also watch our hearts to know when temptation might approach us." (170)

"It is an advantage to know oneself, because temptations often lie in one's natural disposition and personality." (171)

"To avoid temptation, we each need to understand our natural temperament. by doing this, we guard against the natural treacheries within us" (171)

"Just as people have differing and distinctive personalities, so they are also affected by distinctive temptations. These relate to their nature, education, and other factors. Unless we are conscious of these propensities, relationships, and dynamic possibilities, temptation will constantly entangle us. This is why it is so important to know ourselves-our temperaments and our attitudes." (171)

"If people did not remain strangers to themselves, they would not maintain all their lives in the same paralyzed state. But they give flattering names to their own natural weaknesses. They try to justify, palliate, or excuse the evils of their own hearts, rather than uproot and destroy them ruthlessly. They never gain a realistic view of themselves. Ineffective lives and scandal grow like branches out of this root of self-ignorance. How few truly seek to know themselves or possess the courage to do so." (172)