A New Law (Part 2)
In this episode
Scripture References
14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: 15 Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)
Works
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and we are picking up our conversation from last week about the work of God’s law.
We talked at length last week about how wonderful God’s law is, how perfect it is, what a delight it is to live consistently with, even though we all struggle to do so with consistency.
Both. I don’t see a difference there. It might be a distinction, but both is good.
We ended last week with turning to Romans 2. Greg, would you read us the passage in question?
Yes. Bryan had just been talking about the excellency of the law, particularly how it, being God’s law, fits in so perfectly with God’s universe as if they were made for one another, and living in God’s law is the best way to live in God’s universe. He was trying to remember the verse that said that, and the verse that he wanted was the verse that we were going to, which is this. This is Romans 2:14 –
For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves, which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another…
We have to be careful to straddle a dilemma, if dilemmas are straddled. I don’t know. There are two sides to this, as there so often are to biblical doctrines. We have to say, “Not this, but not that either.”
Man is the image of God. Man was not simply made the image of God and then lost it all. He continues to be the image of God. The Old and New Testaments build arguments in terms of man still being in the image of God. That’s his definition. If he could erase the image of God, he would erase himself. He would no longer exist. Part of that is the moral nature he has that in some measure, even after the fall, still reflects the justice and righteousness of God.
The problem is the other side of the thing. The man so depraved in his sin touches everything – his thoughts, his instincts, his values, his priorities, his ability to interpret God’s universe and to interpret God’s revelation. Here we can go back and survey Romans 1, but we’ve kind of done that in the past and I’m not inclined to repeat it at this point.
So as we look at the man who does not know Christ, but may be in many respects a good, honorable, and admirable sort of man, we have to say a couple things about him. We have to acknowledge what some call the common grace, the remnant of morality that God sustains in him, the voice of conscience that is kind of accurate about a lot of things, and yet we also acknowledge that he’s fallen and the things that he does right he does not do out of faith in Christ, he does not do for the glory of God. So in that sense at least, or at his best, they’re not works that are acceptable to God as far as giving him a proper standing of righteous before God.
Yes, and whatsoever is not of faith is sin. We are created for the glory of God, and when we do the things that are outwardly right but we do them because it makes us feel good, because we would feel guilty if we didn’t, because we love that person and we want to help them, or because we’re fundamentally good people and fundamentally good people do things like that…
I ran into a guy at the gas station last night who was not homeless, but I was wondering for a little bit. He came over and began making his excuses of, “I don’t want any money. I never ask for money, but I have no gas. If you could maybe just put some gas in my car…”
So I went over and I see his really nice car, nicer than mine, a Suburban I think, and skis on the top that look like really nice skis. He said, “I’m trying to sell those to get some money.”
So I’m putting it in, and he goes on and says, “Thank you, thank you.” And I don’t remember how it came up exactly, but he said, “You know, I try to do good things for people too, because I want to be a good person who does good things, because I know the good will come back to me. But I never tell anybody this because I don’t want to be known as somebody who touts his own goodness.”
The word ‘grace’ was all in my head. Unfortunately, I failed as a witness, honestly. I said, “Well, consider this a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name.”
Okay, you know religious language, that’s great. But here was this man, and I don’t know whether or not he really had any money for gas or not. I heard in my head the “cup of cold water” thing going on, so I thought, “It’s only $X. I’ll do this. God will do something with it.” I didn’t come full-blown as I should have and said, “You know, God’s grace doesn’t work the way you’re describing it. Got a minute? Let me tell you about grace.” I should have. Shame on me for not.
I think this gentleman reflected a very common attitude among at least Americans. “I am a good person. I do good things. I know that good people often do good things just to show off, but I’m not one of those, even though I’m telling you about all this.”
Again, this is not a righteousness acceptable to God. I would rather have this man doing good things, say not overdosing with his friends, that’s good, and not mugging people at the gas station and taking their money to get to Reno, that’s good. What he did is better than the alternatives or some of the alternatives, and yet he falls far short, as I did, of the glory of God in this incident.
The interesting thing about the self-concept there of “I’m a good person so I do these good things,” is that it creates a baseline which allows you to do things that you yourself don’t really approve of and say, “Well, it’s the exception. In general I’m a good person.”
I do this all the time, especially with habits. “In general I do this,” when in reality have I done that? No. I’ve aspired to do that and every day I have not gone to bed on time or… name good habit here.
My bedtime is 10:30; however, I haven’t gotten to bed before 1 in the last three weeks.
Until you collapse and you can’t stay awake and your wife sends you to bed at 8:30.
This is the reality of man outside Christ. He wants to commend himself, and the funny thing is it doesn’t matter how wicked he is by other people’s standards. He will still tell you that he is fundamentally a good person. Yes, he’s had to cut some corners, but generally there were good reasons for it and there’s a bigger picture and bigger issues at stake. Yeah, he’s slipped now and then, but no one’s perfect. “I’m only human.” Excuse, excuse, excuse.
But God’s law demands perfection. It is one thing to say, “Here’s the perfect law of God. I know I fall short. That’s my sin and I need a Savior.” It’s something else to say, “Well, close enough is close enough, isn’t it?”
It also becomes a problem when you say, “And all of us who are close enough are going to get together and forge a civil constitution and a penal code that will be close enough to what this world needs. We’re going to ban murder, except for babies in the womb and really old people and people who are no longer a benefit to society. We’re going to ban theft, except of course by the government. We’re going to disapprove…oh, adultery is still in? Never mind. We’re not going to make any laws about sexual things because that would be unloving and we’re all about love,” and so it goes.
We forge our law codes and claim they are moral, that they represent the highest values and traditions of the West or of humanity or whatever, yet when we hold them up to God’s, or even up to simple definitions of “What do you mean by that?” we begin to find them very deficient.
Can I bring up a possible objection? We’ve talked in the past about the civil law of ancient Israel and how part of it actually depends on sort of being close enough. Capital punishment – you have a certain level of functionality, whether or not it’s perfect, and we’ve argued in the past that that is actually a strength of it, that it lets people get on with their lives. How does that square with what we’re saying now?
I’m not sure I’m following. Are you talking about the court system, which was less than perfect?
Interestingly enough, you just appealed to the Bible to give us exceptions. Even the Bible, when it comes to talk about civil government, says, “And you’re not going to get it perfect.” This is a good message to our so-called sovereign citizens who think that no civil government is good enough for them, and they are therefore free not to obey any. The Bible comes along and tells us in no uncertain terms that even the theocracy that God gave Israel wasn’t perfect. Its justice was not perfect. Its courts were not perfect.
Deal, because it is more important, as you say, to get on with life and be busy and to have a predictable if imperfect justice than it is to stand in line, like they used to do in the Soviet Union, for two or three days to get a pair of shoes or, in this case, to get a court settlement. Now we stand in line for months or years to get court settlements.
Standing in line, as it were, for years or decades to get a settlement, until all the money is gone. So even in Israel’s civil government there was a realization and acknowledgement by God that, “This is not a perfect world. You are sinners. You do not have omniscience, and whereas I do and could tell you, that’s not how I’m going to operate, so you guys are going to have to figure out some of this stuff.” And yet then he turns around and gives Israel a bunch of laws that tell them how in general to operate and how to distinguish some things from others.
You mentioned capital punishment. This is obviously going to be a point of contention when Christians talk to non-Christians. Non-Christians generally do not think that capital punishment is a Good Thing.
Exactly, glad you heard the capitals in there. They would argue that it is unloving, unkind, and does not accomplish anything because the murderer killed one person, so now you kill him and that’s two people dead. How is that better? Aren’t you doing exactly what the murderer did?
There are all kinds of arguments you could make, and some of them have a plausible sound, and yet God, with regard at least to first-degree murder, disagrees and says it does serve a function. And anyway, whether it serves us in any utilitarian way or not he says, “This is what you’re supposed to do.” All of our claims to be more loving and merciful than God show us to be self-righteous and in fact trying to take God’s place.
This is the kind of thing we’re looking at when people come to their own standards, however they have them. Whether it’s tradition, whether it’s common vote, whether it’s emotional feelings about a particular situation – “Oh, I can’t stand to see Granny getting old and sick. Can’t we just put her out of her misery?”
That reminds me of the line from That Hideous Strength, and I can’t quote it exactly, but they’re courting one of the main characters to join the NICE, which for viewers who are unaware is the government in charge of morality, but bad.
There’s a line where they’re telling Mark what he would do. He’s a sociologist and they tell him, “We want you to write stuff about what we want to do.” There’s this line about, “It’s all about how you say it. Of course, once we have full control we won’t need to worry about how we say it, but while it’s still in the balance you need to phrase it carefully.”
It’s funny that experiment is a bad word, but experimental is a good word, because if you say we’re doing experiments on children it’s bad, but if you say we’ve put them in experimental education, suddenly they’re just lining up.
And have you ever noticed that Eustace and Jill were in experimental education? Yes, how you say things does matter a lot and we’ve seen that in our own country, particularly the last few years but for a long time now. If you call it social justice then it’s great. If you say you’re doing this because you love people, that’s wonderful, and how do you come back?
You mean if I disagree I’m unloving and evil and wicked? Or call somebody a Nazi, not that anybody today has the slightest idea who the Nazis were or what they believed or what their political stance was. About all they know is that Nazis are bad.
At least nobody wants to be a Nazi, and if you are pushing this you’re a Nazi.
“Oh, I don’t want to be a Nazi, so I’ll move far away from that and be over here.”
It’s all about emotional manipulation and philological manipulation. Use the right word to scare people off.
And it invites the backlash of people who are like, “Okay, you’re going to call me a Nazi? Well, maybe I’ll be one,” and that’s really bad. Nobody likes any part of the situation.
There’s also the additional aspect, which is if you start calling everyone a Nazi, then when an actual Nazi shows up and you call them a Nazi, they’re like, “Oh, that’s what you’ve been calling us so you must be on our side, I guess.” It just degrades everything.
And then there are some people who say, “Oh, that’s what I am? Thanks for giving me a name. I didn’t know. I’ll go find out about the Nazis and be more like them.” These tend to be uneducated people in certain parts of the country.
What we’re lacking here is a clear standard. We’re groping after something, or groping more accurately away from something. If you put some simple concrete scenarios before people, they’ll probably give you the right answer. “Should you steal this old lady’s car, go for a joyride and smash it, and walk away laughing and never have to do anything about that?” Most people would say, “No, that would be bad.”
“Should you shoot down a small child in cold blood for the fun of it?” Most people would also say, “That’s bad. It’s not something you should do. It makes me feel sad. It hurts me to think about it,” or whatever. But just push it a little further. “What about if the child in question is dying of leukemia and is in great pain, and I shot her to take away the pain? I am her savior.” Now what do we say?
Again, the Bible acknowledges this thing it calls the work of law. It doesn’t say the law, it says the work of the law. There’s a distinction, and different commentators have rendered that differently as to what that means. Some have said it means the acts themselves without the motivation and intent, or thinking of the law as the thing doing the work. The law has made its impress, but the law itself is absent.
Whatever it is, the apostle is making a distinction. He in other contexts speaks very clearly of God writing the law in our hearts, and so do the prophets. This is something that’s not that and yet is enough that it informs the human conscience, because it speaks here a couple times of conscience.
This is an easy confusion. I’ve rarely heard this articulated as a difference – the law of God written on your heart as distinct from the work of the law written on your heart.
It is a difference. The work of the Spirit is to write God’s law on our hearts, and it’s an ongoing progressive thing, but it begins at regeneration when we’re born again.
It’s promised in the covenant that this is what we lack. That’s the whole point. “You don’t have this, any more than you have forgiveness of sins, but God promises covenantally to supply these things, so whatever you had before wasn’t this, but it bears a vague similarity in that it is still God’s law, not some law you made up or your society made up or that seemed pragmatically useful at the time.”
It’s enough to inform your conscience that when you violate this work of law, when you violate your conscience, God says, “You know what? You thought that was right and you didn’t do it. You thought that was wrong and you did do it. You are guilty by your own standards. Let’s not even pay attention to my standards right now. Let’s look at your standards. You have standards, oddly enough, living in my universe, and you can’t even live up to them.”
As you said earlier, “I generally do this, 5 times out of 11 or so.” God says 9 times out of 10 is not enough because God demands holiness. He demands perfection. He demands perfect righteousness. And working out of our own stuff, out of our own intuitions, out of our own values, we don’t deliver. We don’t even deliver what we say we believe in.
In James the Bible says, “To him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.”
Yes. Now, we can be very glad that human beings have this work of the law in their heart, and that it is stronger generally where Christianity has been a social influence than in other places. There are exceptions, but if you grew up going to Sunday School, if you grew up in an earlier age when even the Bible was read in public schools and where even TV programs were supposed to present some kind of civil morality, your conscience might be a little better informed than someone growing up today in the modern public school system, who’s never seen a church, never seen a Sunday School, and doesn’t know the word Jesus except as a swear word.
That doesn’t help with regard to your eternal destiny, but it does make life a little nicer for those people who have to live around you. I would rather live by a man, whether he be Buddhist, Hindu, or atheist, who is honest in his dealings, than by a Christian who cheats his neighbors and his creditors all the time.
That sounds like something Van Til wrote. “I’d rather be neighbor to someone with an extraordinary amount of common grace and no special grace at all, than someone with an abundance of special grace but no common grace.”
The thing is the special grace does produce character consistent with God’s law eventually, but sanctification is a process. There are Christians – and in some respects we all sometimes fall into this – where we see what we ought to do, or maybe we don’t because of other sins and unbelief our judgement is clouded at the moment, and we fail big time and we hurt the people around us.
Afterwards, if we’re truly believers, we are embarrassed and ashamed. We recognize our guilt and we run to God for forgiveness. We come to the cross again, and then we turn to our neighbors and ask their forgiveness and try to make things right.
As Christians we’re not claiming we are perfect citizens or perfect neighbors, and yet in general we work at it. We’re supposed to work at it. We’re supposed to try to be, and because of that we’re kind of used to it. We know that it’s valuable, and when unbelievers who do not have the law, who have never been taught God’s law but nonetheless live noble honorable lives, then we count that a blessing. You can call it common grace. You can call it the work of the law. You can call it the Spirit of God striving with man.
This hearkens back to something you mentioned before we started recording, the Babylon Bee designating Jordan Peterson an honorary Christian.
Yes, because he is one of the greatest defenders of Christian morality on the planet at the beginning of the 21st century, although he himself does not claim to be a Christian. As far as I know, he has said very plainly that he’s not a Christian. Has that changed?
I think that may have changed. He gets very particular in his semantics, so who knows.
I’ve seen a lot of people try to mine his answers and be like, “See? This means he’s a Christian now,” and it’s very unconvincing.
Because generally Christians who are Christians will come out and say, “I’m a Christian.”
“I’m a Christian and I’m baptized and I go to this church and am under the authority of these elders.”
But still, I’d rather have Jordan Peterson as a neighbor than Adolf Hitler. It is real and honest to recognize these differences, and again I’m not completely comfortable with the term ‘common grace,’ but I’ll use it and assume we all know that in general it means the overflow of God’s special grace into the community and people around us.
I would rather live next to someone who has a good deal of common grace, who’s honest and hardworking and doesn’t trash the neighborhood and doesn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, at least out where I can hear it, who doesn’t worship idols or sacrifice his children, who doesn’t take his daughter every month or so to get an abortion – I would much rather not have that kind of person as a neighbor, but have the person who is honorable, for obvious reasons.
This goes back to what Bryan was saying at the end of the last episode. I think when you put it that way, most (not all) people would say, “Well yeah, that’s obvious.” Yes, it is, because God’s law fits God’s universe. To live in a world where people don’t steal, kill, rape, covet, defraud, embezzle, or sacrifice children on altars – I think we’ve all got (or most of us have got) that that’s a good, more peaceful, and safer kind of universe to live in.
But as sinners we start fudging, as I said before. “Well, we’re not going to kill except – well, you might think this is killing, but it doesn’t count for reasons X, Y, and Z.” Ten years ago you could say, “You might think this is adultery, but it’s completely justified because my wife deserved everything I just gave her.” Now we can’t even talk about adultery because we don’t even know what men and women are, apparently. The standards are slipping.
The slippery slope ceases to be a fallacy when it’s historically demonstrable.
And when it’s innate in man’s character. Man will ‘slippery slope’ down the path of disobedience. He will corrupt himself more and more. The wheat becomes more evidently wheat. Unless God intervenes, unless there’s a move of God’s Spirit bringing saving grace that overflows, then this is what will happen. It’s not a fallacy, it’s just the way human nature works.
So as we talk about speaking not just the gospel but being a disciple of Christ, which of course is rooted and powered by the gospel into the lives of our community, sooner or later we have to talk about the answer to a very simple question: How shall we then live? What does it mean to be a disciple of Christ?
What are the standards? What are the standards for me personally in my thought life, in my interactions with my wife and my children, my good friends, my community, how about my town and my city? How about as a citizen of the United States of America? How about if I’m elected as a judge or a governor or a legislator? How does the Bible affect all of that? Am I left to say, “Well, you know, good enough is good enough.”
Now, here is the warning. “That means we have to have a perfect biblical government before we have to listen to anybody.” No, that is not what I said. When the gospel came into the Roman world, Israel was not perfect. Rome was far from perfect. Actually, it was Israel who killed Christ, so neither one of them. They got Rome to do it, so everybody was guilty. Everybody helped kill the Messiah. And yet Paul and Jesus said, “Obey those who have the rule over you.”
But there’s a difference between saying, “This is where we are. This is where we begin. This is what we have to deal with,” and saying, “Oh, but now you’re given an opportunity to make a change. Will you?” Or will you say, “Well, what we’ve always done is good enough because it represents what most people believe. To change would be controversial. It might look like a mixing of church and state.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to impose our beliefs on people who don’t share them.” One of the great lines for defending abortion is, “Well, I personally don’t believe in it, but I can’t impose my opinions on…”
Yes, what are laws if they are not imposing your opinions, beliefs, and values on other people? You could say, “Well, it has to be the majority.” Well, practically it probably does, but how do you know you don’t have a majority if you don’t even try?
The majority argument also falls apart because the majority of German citizens in the Third Reich supported the hideous acts and science that led to things like the Holocaust and various war-mongering things they did in addition to that. Majority is not a logically viable argument.
This is your semi-annual reminder that democracy means the rule of the mob.
It’s a funny thing. When I was growing up, when you wanted to face relativism the one card you could always play was the Holocaust. If people said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s all a matter of opinion,” you said, “Six million Jews dead.” They would say, “Oh, uh, well, except for that…umm…” and they’d back-pedal and didn’t want to be associated with that.
Within the last 10 or 15 years or so, we’ve found that most people don’t know what the Holocaust was. They don’t really know who Hitler was or what he did. They obviously do not know who Nazis were. It’s just kind of a swear word these days.
If you actually explain to them, “This was a whole country that decided it was politically expedient to eliminate six million people from their population,” we’re getting to the point where young people are saying, “Oh. Well, I guess if the society thought that was the right thing to do, it was okay for them.”
What I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for the past few years is how the Nazis enjoy (for lack of a better term) the status of being utterly reprehensible, without people even knowing what they did or what they thought or why they did it, while other heinous acts like the Great Leap Forward in China, which killed even more people, or the Holodomor in Ukraine are totally unmentioned. It’s just not reckoned with at all, so that this idea of society’s greater good is never dealt with, never refuted. That’s not quite the word I’m looking for.
Yes. I have a book and I’m not sure this is the title, but I think it’s The Black Book of Communism. There’s a similar book that’s The Black Book of Death or something like that. Anyway, these books are records of how many people died in the 20th century and what political agendas brought about their death, and it is a sheer enumeration country-by-country, from Cambodia to Russia, from China to Nazi Germany.
What the figures show is that although Nazi Germany did kill a great many people, on the order of millions, Communism way out-distanced them. The Nazis have slain their millions, and the Communists have slain their tens of millions, more or less.
The book was published in France and got a lot of heat. It was going to be banned, and maybe it was banned from the French school system because it obviously supported Fascism over against Communism, because it said the Nazis weren’t as bad as the Communists because they didn’t murder as many people. The authors of this book had to write a preface and said, “Look, we’re not talking political agendas.”
And you don’t have to compare. Yes, the Nazis were evil. These other people were also evil. There’s no statement of greater or lesser evil here.
We don’t have to be talking options, and right wing and left wing do not necessarily mean Marxists and Nazi, but the established media has learned to use these words and words like left wing and right wing as signal words or connotation words that just say, “This is really bad. Don’t go there.”
The same people and the same banking institutions were funding both Russia and Germany during the Second World War, and also funded the rise of FDR, until it was clear that Hitler was going to lose, at which point all of the western prejudice turned against Germany because we don’t like losers, but we kept up the pretense that the Marxists somehow were not that. Then somehow the press managed to slap Nazi Germany with right wing, whatever that means in this context.
I have an old high school history book that compares communism and Fascism (Nazism). By the way, Nazis are fascist.
I will quibble with that. I’m always reminding people that fascism is an Italian-specific system of thought.
Alright. Well, they’re both national socialists, which is the point. Communists are international socialists, and Italian fascism and Nazism, which by the way is short for National Socialist Party, are national socialists.
So here’s the thing. The communists wanted to take over the world and make it all socialist, and Germany and Italy were content to take over their areas of influence and make it socialist.
They didn’t even want to take over the world in particular. They wanted to go as far as they could safely, until someone stood up to them and then they tended to back down. But the Marxists had it on their plate. “Here’s our agenda for the conquest of the world.” This was not a secret, but people kept pretending, “Oh, that’s just exaggeration and elaboration. The revolutions come on their own. There’s no conspiracy. There’s no funding of third-world powers.” Yeah, right.
Yes, very good point. Anyway, this textbook goes on and compares them, and basically it says the same thing about each of them. Once it gets past the national and international, they basically come down to, “The one real difference is the Nazis hated the communists and the communists hated the Nazis. There you go.” Well, if you’re both trying to take over Europe, you know, you probably might hate each other.
Anyhow, we need to talk about that sometime but maybe now we should get back to the main point, which I think we’ve nearly exhausted, which is this. There can be no appeal to some law in man’s nature which once we get together and talk it over we’ll all agree on. We’ll nail it down at least semi-perfectly, from which we can construct a culture, a civilization, and a law order – and here’s the thing – which will be pleasing to God and will somehow be acceptable to Jesus Christ, even though it’s not really going to name him, acknowledge him, or have a place for him. “For Jesus, close enough is close enough. He never said anything about making all nations his disciples, after all. He just wants us all to be fundamentally good people and have happy civilizations.”
That’s not the gospel. The gospel is about the conquest of the world to Christ through justification by faith, sanctification by the Spirit, rooted in the revealed Word of God, in the power of Holy Spirit.
Tear any of those apart, pluck any one out, and you no longer have the gospel and you no longer have good news. “Jesus came to save you so you can go to heaven when you die, while the world burns” may be good news for you, but it’s not the same good news that God preached to Abraham when he said, “In you will all nations be blessed.”
So as we wrap up this conversation, you have to be something called a theonomist to believe this. No, go back and read the confessions of the Reformation. Read the 39 articles of the Church of England. Read the Formula of Concord. Read the Augsburg Confession. They’re Lutheran. Read the Heidelberg Catechism or the Westminster Confession and the shorter and larger catechisms. They are full of it.
They all insist that God has a moral law to which all men are bound, and this was the common voice of the Reformation. And oddly enough, it was also the common voice of Christendom during the Middle Ages. Rome began to get mired in natural law theory through Thomas Aquinas, and yet fundamentally everybody agreed that Christianity does have the answers.
It took the Enlightenment to say, “Yeah, but your answers keep getting people killed in wars of religion. We have better ideas that won’t get anybody killed. Please ignore the communists and Marxists right behind us.”
I will quibble with one thing that you said. Aquinas also believed that you needed special revelation.
One of the things I’ve been interested to discover in the past year or so is that natural law, at least as far as Christian theology considers it, is not, “Oh, everyone has the law of God in their heart, so we need to find all the common bits that everyone believes in, and that’s what will order society.”
“No, no, no. You need special revelation for God’s moral law and his moral character.”
It also doesn’t contradict this. Because of the fact that God’s world is the one that he made, it’s consistent, like what I mentioned at the end of the last episode.
Yeah. When God made Adam, the law of God was written in his heart and it was a pure and complete law that was perfectly in harmony with everything God had said. That’s man’s natural state, his created state. Sin is not natural. Sin has pulled us away from this.
This is why we all, for instance, say that it’s wrong to murder and yet we all tweak that, but we all tweak it in different ways. In every culture and every generation we tweak it in different ways, and yet there’s this constant tug back to something deeper and real, but our sins keep us from it.
The Bible comes along and says, “I’m going to tell you that what you’re groping after or groping away from is this. Through the blood of Christ and by the power of God’s Spirit I’m going to give you the power to go back to it and to live it out – imperfectly, forgiven – until I raise you to glory at the Second Coming.”
I wanted to go back as well to the other thing you said, about how if you remove any one piece it throws it all out of balance. There are multiple possible ways to fall into error when it comes to anything, when it comes to this in particular, because you can say with the Anabaptists, “It only matters for your personal relationship. Nations don’t matter. Familial relationships are at best secondary.”
You can also fall into the other error, which is to say, “Well, we need the nation to be institutionally Christianized to the exclusion of anything else that matters,” which is something that the Third Reich tried to do, as a matter of fact.
So like with issues of Christology and the Trinity, it is about keeping things at the same time. Even though they appear to us to be in tension, they actually aren’t.
They aren’t because they find their unity in God and we have to receive that by faith and not think that we can figure it all out. That’s again why we need the scriptures to tell us, “Not this but that. Not that but this.”
When we try to trust our own logic and reason we get into trouble, both because of the ineffability of God’s nature and our need for special revelation, but also because we’re stinkers and we want to screw things up, so we need Jesus.
I think this is the problem with Aquinas, as it is with every other Christian thinker. Everything you say can be taken to an error. I’m not a fan of Aquinas. I have a knee-jerk reaction against Aquinas, but was he a Christian? Yup.
He’s not responsible necessarily for the errors that grow out of his really important work.
But I think about certain errors that have come into certain sects of Christianity that can only come about because of one certain true doctrine that’s held very strongly. That’s really abstract. Let me just make this concrete and then it will actually communicate. The doctrine of covenantal representation is the bedrock of Federal Vision. You can’t have Federal Vision without a view of covenantal representation.
But you cannot have it without the wrong view of covenantal representation, but it has to be a category of thought or you’re never going to get there. Anabaptists aren’t going to come up with it. They may come up with the same kind of rules, but not for the same reasons. It will be a different kind of thing.
Yes, and that’s a tricky thing. I think that’s why education is necessarily a progressive thing, that you keep learning and you keep learning to distinguish. That’s the challenge. You can’t just put people in boxes of “These are good people to listen to, and these people – just stay as far away from them as possible.”
That’s also why pretty much every area of study ends up becoming a history course as well, because you go through, “Here’s what they used to think and here’s where this got corrected.” Every science class included a history lesson, that I can remember. Obviously, philosophy ends up being mostly history because you’re tracking the development of general thought.
I think that we really do ourselves a disservice when we treat theology unlike all those other sciences. In the medieval period theology was called the queen of the sciences. It was the one that gave order and meaning to the rest of them.
I don’t know where that sentence was going, but I got a lot of sub-points in.
I have one for once. I am on the distribution list for a Presbyterian Reformed publishing company, and I don’t often see something that really draws me, but occasionally they have some really great stuff.
P&R. There’s a new book to me, it’s probably been out for a while, by O. Palmer Robertson, who I assume you probably know. He wrote The Christ of the Covenants. It came out in 2015 so it’s an old book, I guess, but it’s called The Flow of the Psalms: Discovering Their Structure and Theology. And unlike most theology books, I’m actually reading it in order line-by-line and am about halfway through it, and it is an absolutely fabulous book.
Recommendation: The Flow of the Psalms: Discovering Their Structure and TheologyThis is the book of his old age and it reflects not only all of his learning, but his humility, his wisdom, and his realization that sometimes you have to say something three times before people get it. There’s a lot of repetition. “You just said that, and oh, you’re saying it again, okay. I’m going to remember it now.”
He talks about the five books that make up the Psalms and shows certain patterns in each of them. The placing of a messianic psalm – an obviously messianic psalm; they’re all messianic, but obviously messianic psalm – right next to a psalm on the word of God, and then shows the psalms that follow, and then shows that then you run into an acrostic psalm and then things change from that point on.
Anyway, I’ve only gotten through the first two books, but suddenly Psalms is looking really, really organized, to the point of saying, “Oh, you know if I learn these marker psalms, I’m going to be able to tell better where this is going. There is a theme to each of these five books. There is an emphasis.”
I’m anxious to finish reading the book, and I think for those of you who want to know more about the Psalms, not as individual pieces or prayers or hymns but as a book that actually has a flow and a point, this is an excellent place to start. I know there are some other books that try this. Right now this looks like the simplest most straightforward evangelical approach – The Flow of the Psalms by O. Palmer Robertson.
Great. I’m going to recommend The Muppet Show, on a totally different note. We’ve had fun Googling each guest star before we watch the episode so we know who they are and what they’re referencing, because it’s all before our time.
This is how my girls learned a lot of stars and starlets of an earlier generation. “How do you know that person?”
David’s never watched The Muppet Show, but one of my favorites is when Alice Cooper is on.
Recommendation: The Muppet ShowI think I’m going to recommend following niche hobbyists on YouTube. Actually, right before I hopped on to this episode with you all I was looking for stuff on YouTube to watch with my wife, who was eating dinner with me, and we found this video. It was an hour and 40 minutes long and we watched all of it.
We sat down at first like, “Let’s just watch the first few minutes. This will be interesting,” and then we were so invested. It was about a guy in Bristol, England who lives with his parents, and one winter he started beekeeping. We were watching this and we were just like, “Look at this guy go.” He was going through the course of about a year and a half of learning how to keep bees.
He had one hive, and the hive swarmed and he was able to stop them from swarming fully at first, and then a few days later they successfully swarmed. If you don’t know, and I only found out an hour ago when I watched this, swarming is when a hive gets too large and they start making cells for queen bees to hatch from. Then the old one leaves and takes a bunch of the bees with her and they go make a hive somewhere else.
Anyway, he goes through all this stuff. He buys the equipment to harvest the honey. He’s in America for a week on vacation and the hive swarms a second time and he loses a whole bunch of the bees, and before they swarmed they also ate a bunch of the honey that they had stored that he had seen. But by the winter is almost there and he’s going to harvest the honey, he got like 25 or 27 pounds worth of honey out of these things.
It was really adorable to watch because he’s probably not even 22 years old who has a hobby now. He’s like, “You know, my parents let me live here and I just figured maybe they get a free gardener, a free chef, and a free beekeeper in exchange for a bed and a bathroom that they let me use. I think that’s fair.”
It’s really fun, and my wife Emily wants to keep bees now for sure. It was already in her mind and now she’s like, “Oh, for sure this is happening.”
My friend Virginia’s dad keeps bees. That’s his retirement hobby. He gave us a little jar of honey one time and it had his custom label that said, “The family beeziness.”
Bryan, when you first introduced this what did you call it, because I didn’t recognize the word you were saying.
It’s so great. He opens each video with, “Hi, my name is Jeb and I’m a gardener,” and it’s like an hour and a half long, just him doing a gardening thing like here’s how his strawberries grew this summer. It’s always set to some really cinematic music. It’s really wonderful.
The other one I love – I forget his last name, but his first name is Gerald. He’s a pensioner who lives on the Isle of Man. I don’t think he does anything on YouTube, but he posts video to Twitter and he’s just like, “I’m just harvesting my onions from this year. These are some lovely ones.” He pulls up an onion and he’s like, “It’s beautiful!”
Then he’ll give you tips like, “If you really want good carrots, you should give them plenty of…” this mineral or whatever, and then he ends every video with, “Cheers,” and he gives a thumbs up really close to his chest. He’s adorable and we need to protect him at all costs.
Sounds good. Thank you. This has been a delightful conversation. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling and buying us really nice new mics.
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