Bully's Blog

If someone is reading God-honouring Christian books (as opposed to the theological Christian treacle which most Christian bookstores specialise in today), those books will admonish, advise, teach, and instruct. But above all, they will do what all godly teaching does — drive their readers back to the Scriptures. And that will result in more books.

- Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk, p.209.

Claims of apostolic succession by themselves, then, are not only meaningless, they can easily become idolatrous, substituting temporal continuity for the discontinuous new-creating work of the Spirit. According to the Creed, only the Spirit is the “Lord and Giver of life.”

Thus, we should not be surprised when it turns out to be relatively new churches that are the true heirs of the wealth of the past. It is what we should expect, when we realize that our God “makes all things new.”

James B. Jordan, The Sociology of the Church, p. 132.
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Institutionally, the Roman church is a memorial to the dividing, life-preserving judgment of God. It is an empty cicada shell, now gold-plated by men to cover the word Ichabod engraved on its forehead. And all churches are subject to such assessment.

“God’s creation of Israel was like his creation of the world. The cosmos has an order that will someday be undone. Israel had an order that was undone. And so the un-creation of Israel is sometimes described in the analogous cosmic terms.

Jeremiah was the prophet on duty when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and the temple was destroyed. Israel was de-created. No more son of David on the throne. No more temple in Jerusalem. No more people in the land. Jeremiah describes this coming cataclysm in terms of cosmic creation: 4:23 “I looked upon the earth and behold it was formless and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.”

Jeremiah is not the only prophet to talk like this. And unless we understand that this is part of the prophetic vocabulary, we will come to the book of Revelation and read about stars falling from heaven and other cosmic disasters, and we will not immediately think, “Oh, so Jerusalem and the temple are going to be destroyed and the people removed from the land again. Ah.”

(This is not a new thought here, at all. But American evangelicals have a very persistent misunderstanding in this matter.)”

Keith Ghormley, http://presbyteer.blogspot.com

“When they persecute you in this city, flee to another. For assuredly, I say to you,you will not have gone through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes.” (Matthew 10:23)

“One of the most important lessons any Christian reader of the Old Testament must learn in order to truly understand its message is its connection to the New Testament. Jesus himself said that the whole Old Testament looked forward to his coming suffering and glorification (Luke 24:25-27, 44-48), but it is surprising how many ignore this crucial principle of interpretation.”

Tremper Longman III, Robert H. Gundry Professor of Religious Studies at Westmont College, author of Making Sense of the Old Testament

Some postmillennial POPtimisim from Newsboys:

Wherever we go, the dumb get wise
And the crime rates drop
And the markets rise
It’s a curious thing
But it’s just our thing

Bullies make nice, crooks repent
And the ozone layer shows improvement
It’s a curious thing
And it’s humbling

Wherever we’re led
All the Living Dead
Wanna leave their Zombie Mob
It’s a touching scene when they all come clean
God help us, we just love our job

Lyrics from Wherever We Go

[Posted by Gordon Cheng at www.solapanel.org]

I’ve appreciated reading the sermons of 19th-century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon over the years, and have quoted him on my blog a number of times (not as much as the Pyromaniacs, but still a bit).

So when I came down with the flu and found myself in bed for three days straight, I thought it would be encouraging to pick up Arnold Dallimore’s short, well-researched biography of the man himself. Sick Calvinists of the world, unite. Spurgeon, so it happens, was a lot sicker than me for most of his life. He was seriously and often crippingly and painfully ill, both mentally (with depression) and physically, from his mid-30s until his death from illnesses at age 57. The same went for his wife Susannah who, because of chronic illness, was more often than not unable to attend the meetings where he preached.

If you haven’t ever read any Spurgeon, do yourself a favour and pick up a book of his sermons where you can, or click through on some of the links in the first paragraph of this post to get just a small taste for his straight-talking, gospel-centred style. Of his Calvinism, Dallimore quotes him (p. 67 of my 1991 Banner of Truth edition) saying

We only use the term ‘Calvinism’ for shortness. That doctrine we call ‘Calvinism’ did not spring from Calvin; we believe that it sprang from the great founder of all truth.

Spurgeon never received any formal theological training, although he’d begun reading Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs from the age of six, and progressed on to later Puritan writers such as John Owen and Richard Sibbes by the time he was 10.

Here are some other facts and figures I picked up on the way: Continue reading

Live More Than the Length of It

The life that Christ has called us into is a life that is not just everlasting in duration. The eternal life that He welcomes us into is qualitative. Jesus says that He is the resurrection and the life, and that life is one that the Holy Spirit weaves us into. This affects the texture and the breadth of our lives — or it is intended to. Our natural resistance to this is one the things that God deals with in us.

We want to walk with our heads down, as though we were walking along a railroad track, keeping our balance there, we don’t want to live expansively, the way a Christian ought to live. We forget that God is sovereign over all things, and we forget that He is the God of dangers, the God of adventures, the God of the unexpected. The wrong kind of concern for safety, for security, for a life of predictable and cozy conservatism is, at the end of the day, a form of idolatry.

Think of it this way. Remember this exhortation as you understand the tasks before you — your vocation, your family life, your worship of God. Everyone here will live the entire length of their lives. Everyone lives until their dying day. All of us go the appointed distance. But not all of us live the width of our lives.

Doug Wilson, www.dougwils.com

“Salvation is a gift. Damnation is a paycheque.”

Douglas Wilson on preaching to the whole man

In his great book The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis prophetically wrote of what has become one of the defining sins of our age. We veer erratically between two extremes — rationalism is arid and dry, and ultimately unsatisfying, and this provokes a reaction into swamp-like mysticism and emotionalism. Neo-classicism begets the rebellious child romanticism, and romanticism begets the rebellious child of a can-do technopoly. As we swing from one extreme to another, we miss the point of balance, which is that of having our affections under the authority of the God who made the world the way He did.

Lewis’ words are both blunt and revealing. He says we laugh at honor but then are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. The end result is what Lewis called “men without chests.” This has come about because an arrogant rationalism has dismissed all notions of sentiment, loyalty, and affection as “nothing but” mere sensation, without any objective connection to the outside world. This in turn provokes a revolt of the emotions, a revolt that wallows in those sensations, but does so in a way as to prove the point of the rationalists.

One of the chief culprits in allowing this state of affairs to develop has been the delinquency of the pulpit. Continue reading