The Law of Love

Life is all about relationships. A significant part of what it means for us to be created in the image of God is to be relational. God Himself is a relational being. Not only does He relate personally to us as His image-bearers, He also has enjoyed perfect relational harmony as Father, Son, and Spirit from all eternity.
Our greatest joys and sorrows come because of relationships. In order for us to live as we ought, we must have our relationships properly ordered. This means that we must relate to the right things in the right way. God has not left us to figure out on our own how to do this. He has spoken very simply and clearly about the essence and priority of all human relationships. Jesus explained it when answering a question from a lawyer.
“Which is the great commandment in the Law?” (Matt. 22:36). The question seems innocent enough until we consider its background and context. The Jewish leaders had plotted against Jesus and were trying to “entangle him in his talk” (v. 15). After turning the tables on them when they asked Him about taxes, exposing their ignorance of Scripture and God’s power concerning the resurrection, He entertained this question about the law.
Rabbis had lengthy debates over this question. They had divided the Mosaic Law into 613 commands — 248 positive ones and 365 negative ones. Their arguments focused on which ones are great and heavy versus those that are small and light.
In order for us to live as we ought, we must have our relationships properly ordered.
Jesus dismissed all of those niggling debates by giving a comprehensive answer that both satisfied the inquisitor and revealed God’s overarching will for those who bear His image. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt: 22:37–40).
Jesus’ answer gives the point and purpose of the whole law. He summarizes our complete responsibility in terms of relationships, specifically, our relationships to God and to people. The essence of all our relationships, He says, is love.
The first priority of love is God Himself. We are to love God comprehensively and supremely. Heart, soul, and mind are each qualified by “all,” indicating that we are obligated to love God with every part of every faculty that we possess.
What does such love look like? Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). So obedience is closely connected to loving the Lord, but it is not enough to say that they are the same thing. Love is more than an act of the will. It includes that, but it first arises in the affections.
John makes this connection in 1 John 5:3 where he writes, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.” Loving God involves keeping His commandments — not as a burden but as a delight. More than a dozen times this attitude of delighting in God’s law is expressed in Psalm 119.
Augustine described the love that we are to have for God as “the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one’s self and of one’s neighbor for the sake of God.” To love God is to enjoy Him above everything and everyone else and out of that joy to live in glad obedience to His will.
But Jesus does not stop there. He goes on to teach us that, after loving God supremely, our next greatest responsibility is to love people sincerely. Contrary to what some teach about this, Jesus is not commanding self-love. Nor should His words be taken to imply that we cannot love others until we learn to love ourselves.
To love God is to enjoy Him above everything and everyone else and out of that joy to live in glad obedience to His will.
Jesus assumes that we already do love ourselves. Paul explicitly makes this point by noting that “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it” (Eph. 5:29). This kind of natural self-love is manifested by the choices that we make to serve our own interests. No matter how destructive such choices are, they are expressions of self-love.
Once we understand the inevitability of self-love, Jesus’ command that we love others as much as we love ourselves becomes incredibly broad. The health, comfort, companionship, and benefits that I desire for myself I am also to desire for my neighbors.
This means that while I must never love people — even my closest relations — more than God, I must love them as much as I love myself.
All of this, of course, shows how completely dependent we are on the grace of Jesus Christ. We cannot love God supremely or people sincerely apart from His love first reaching us through the power of the Gospel. Only as we are so loved will we be set free to love in return.
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Is the SBC for Sale? How Progressive Money and Influence Is Subverting the SBC
This speech was given by Megan Basham at the 2024 SBC Event: SBC at a Crossroads, hosted by Founders Ministries and the Center for Baptist Leadership.
So I’d like you all to imagine for a moment. You’ve just started a new job and on your first day your supervisor tells you that at 2 pm every afternoon the entire company pauses to “carve out time for their spirits. To “connect with their divine source.” And to “honor the sacred world.”
As a Christian, this New Age jargon sets off alarm bells in your mind. But you decide to keep your reservations to yourself. (You don’t want to look like a fundamentalist!) Then your boss leads you to an all-white room he calls a “communal space” where he rings a “sacred meditation bell” three times.
A “spiritual engagement coordinator” steps forward, lights incense and invites you, along with the rest of the staff, to sit in the lotus position and close your eyes. He then tells you that he is going to lead you through a 20-minute “sacred pause” designed to deepen your relationship with yourself. He tells you this “sacred” meditation with yourself (he really likes the word sacred) is being done to the benefit of all beings everywhere.
This little eastern mysticism scenario is not imaginary. This is the daily practice of The Fetzer Institute, a leftwing foundation who says its mission is to “build the spiritual foundation” of our world.
If it weren’t clear enough that Fetzer’s method for building that spiritual foundation is nothing like the Bible’s, another way it does so is by giving money to groups like the National LGBTQ Task Force.
Who else does it give money to? The ERLC.
In 2018, Fetzer gave the ERLC more than $346,000 to “collaborate” on research that would identify the “rhetorical framing” evangelicals use when it comes to democracy. That is, how we talk about politics. And it was then to share the insights from that political research with the ERLC’s national conference and with “churches under the Southern Baptist Convention.”
The following year, in 2019, Fetzer gave the ERLC another $200,000 to, among other things, conduct seminars on “how American evangelicals might contribute to healing political divides.”
In other words, Fetzer bought access to Southern Baptist conferences and churches through the ERLC in the form of an explicitly political project. And the ERLC earned its pay.
The research Fetzer bankrolled has been disseminated and promoted in ERLC material and at ERLC events. In one such document, the ERLC recommends we learn how to engage in civil political discourse from a fellow recipient of Fetzer funds–Cherie Harder, President of Trinity Forum and a prominent Never Trump voice.
At a February 2024 conference for a Never Trump Political Action Committee, she called the former President a “frankly evil and nihilistic leader.” She has never used such rhetoric to describe Biden, the most pro-abortion, pro-perversion, and anti-family president this nation has ever known.
Yet this is who the ERLC (and Fetzer) hold out as our model for civil, Christian discourse.
When we look at Fetzer’s political stances like its “unequivocal support of the LGBTQ community,” it’s clear that when they say they want evangelicals to “heal our political divides” what they mean is that they want Christians to soften their public positions on issues like marriage and sexuality.
According to Fetzer, Christians who are confident in our convictions harm democracy. Nor is Fetzer the only leftwing foundation that has managed to tie some purse-strings tothe ERLC.
The Democracy Fund was founded by Buddhist billionaire Pierre Omidyar. You might recognize him as the man who gave the world Ebay. His foundation gives grants to groups like Red Canary Song, which describes itself as a “grassroots collective of Asian & migrant sex workers.”
When Roe v Wade was overturned, the Democracy Fund put out a statement. It said the Dobbs decision proved “how vulnerable our political system is to perversion by leaders who are not committed to protecting and strengthening our democracy.”
Let me say that again—according to the Democracy Fund, protecting and strengthening our democracy means protecting and strengthening abortion.
In 2018, when the Democracy Fund was looking for evangelical leaders to help foster more “constructive politics” in the U.S., it, too, turned to the ERLC.The purpose of the $100,000 grant it gave them was to pursue “long-term action” against America’s alleged white supremacy problem.
The ERLC took it for granted that the Southern Baptists it is supposed to represent would agree that one of America’s most pressing problems is white supremacy.
It’s worth noting that independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, a liberal, was once a beneficiary of Omidyar himself. Omidyar bankrolled his left-leaning news outlet, The
Intercept. But Greenwald was forced to quit the company he co-founded when it wouldn’t let him publish stories critical of Joe Biden. Greenwald said this of Omidyar: “Liberal billionaires will only fund groups that advance liberal causes.”
So what cause did Omidyar want to advance through the ERLC?
Another liberal billionaire who has taken an interest in the ERLC–Mark Zuckerberg. In 2020, the Facebook founder spent over $400 million dollars turning out the vote in heavily Democratic areas in swing states. According to reporting in the New York Post, he did this by “funding a targeted, private takeover of government election operations through…nonprofit organizations.”
That same year, his foundation also gave the ERLC a $90,000 grant for an unspecified criminal justice reform project. How was the money used? We don’t know. The SBC lacks financial transparency and the ERLC has not disclosed this information. And the ERLC staffer who procured the grant left a short time later to join the Biden Campaign.
I didn’t set out to write a book about the SBC. And despite the rumors, I did not write a book about the SBC. But the SBC does loom large in my new book. And that’s because the SBC looms large in the minds of the people I did set out to write about—the powerful progressive influences in the church. And I’m not just talking about the ministry leaders bringing in racial hiring quotas, female pastors, and pronoun hospitality.
I’m talking about leftwing billionaires and organizations who, in their long march through the institutions, have now set their sights on the Church. And too many leaders within the church are proving only too happy to help them.
When we see the secular foundations the ERLC is partnering with—those who work to see abortion, legal prostitution, every sort of LGBT perversion protected and promoted in our law, Southern Baptists should echo 2 Corinthians 6:14 and ask—what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? What fellowship has light with darkness?”
The ERLC was created to represent the interests of Southern Baptists to the secular political world. Instead, it is now taking money to represent the interests of the secular political world to Southern Baptists. Which must prompt us to wonder, just who does it see as its mission field?
Know this, it is not a coincidence that these leftwing influencers decided to work with the ERLC. They have been specifically strategizing about how to co-opt Southern Baptists for years.
Yes, they are talking about the SBC and its entities by name. And not just the ERLC.
In 2015, the George Soros- and Bill Gates-funded think tank, New America, released a report on efforts to pass climate change legislation.
The report noted that the strategy of the environmentalists was to recruit “elite evangelicals” who would then use their influence to give spiritual legitimacy to specific climate change policies. Their hope was that this advocacy for fossil fuel legislation would “trickle down” to ordinary Christians in the pews.
That is, the climate change activists wanted to use evangelical leaders in trusted organizations who know the lingo to persuasively sell a message to what would otherwise be an unreceptive audience. New America explained that the object is to “collect strange bedfellows” and “sort of sneakily break down” the faith coalition from the inside and “give cover to Republican members of Congress to support climate action.”
“Because” they wrote, “even just neutralizing the Southern Baptist Convention” could “disrupt the solid Republican opposition to measures like cap and trade.”
In the nine years since that report, the climate change activists have had significant success in convincing SBC institutions to take up their cause.
Southeastern Seminary, for example, has been particularly active in promoting climate change alarmism to its students.
Just one example of many, in 2022, it welcomed Jonathan Moo, Environmental Studiesprofessor, to give a guest lecture titled, “How to love our neighbor in the midst of the climate crisis.”
In it, Moo claimed that environmental activism is a necessary part of being “faithful to the Gospel.” He said the United States bears the lion’s share of guilt because of how “rich and prosperous” our use of fossil fuels has made us. And he told the students Americans are especially obligated to “sacrifice” by adopting emission-restricting policies.
The kinds of policies that are making everything from gas to groceries more expensive, not just for us, but also for those neighbors we’re supposed to be loving.
If Moo adding new environmental requirements to the Gospel weren’t shocking enough, he also suggested the students purchase indulgences for climate sins like traveling by airplane. In particular, he suggested they buy carbon credits from the environmentalist group A Rocha. On whose board Moo just so happens to sit.
Now A Rocha probably isn’t a familiar name to most of you. So I’ll tell you a little bit about it. Though it brands itself as a Christian ministry, it gets much of its funding from secular groups like the Annenberg Foundation, which also funds the National Abortion Rights Action League, Planned Parenthood, and the Center for Reproductive Rights.
As with many other major secular foundations, Annenberg’s interest in environmentalism is married to a desire to reduce the population through abortion.
And A Rocha’s leadership isn’t especially bothered by that goal. Its executive director, Ben Lowe, ran for Congress as a Democrat, assuring voters that despite claiming to be personally pro-life he would not support overturning Roe v. Wade. In other words, he took the same position Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have.
Then there are A Rocha’s strange hymns and prayers that sound more like Marxist Gaia worship (or something you’d hear at the Fetzer institute) than anything recognizably biblical.
Among the sins A Rocha calls humanity to repent from in its recommended prayers are “ecological violence” and humanity “act[ing] like parasites.” It suggests praying for the “courage to speak out against increased nuclear capability” and lamenting America’s “exploitive economic system.”
Listen to part of this prayer it published for distribution to churches and ask yourself whether you could imagine your congregation praying this together on a Sunday morning. It’s titled “Woe to the Unholy Trinity.”
…We have acted as cheerleaders and chaplains to the unholy trinity…
And so we name the unholy beast.
We renounce it.
We repent of it.
Unrestrained Capitalism,
Consumerism,
Individualism . . .
This unholy trinity
That oppresses the poor,
Ransacks the Earth.
One has to wonder what average Southern Baptists would have thought had they known their “unholy” capitalist tithes, which help support Southeastern Seminary, were going to pay the lecture fees of a representative from A Rocha. Who then used that invite to do a bit of capitalist carbon trading himself.
While researching the multiple guest lectures and conferences Southeastern has dedicated to the subject of climate change, I never found a single speaker who challenged the progressive position that it is an existential crisis. Yet there is legitimate evidence for skepticism about this claim. And reputable evangelical organizations whose members include NASA climate scientists would be only too happy to explain to an audience of seminary students just what that evidence is.
Yet for some reason, Southeastern Seminary students have never heard from those NASA climate scientists.
Is the degree to which humans are impacting the climate an issue on which Christians of good faith can disagree? Of course. The problem is demanding consensus on the subject by abusing and manipulating scripture. The problem is an SBC seminary, whose ostensible mission is educating students on the full breadth of Christian thought, promoting only one view. And it just so happens to be the view that aligns with nearly every major corporation, A-list Hollywood, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the most powerful progressive foundations on the planet.
Then it seems less like debating debatable issues and more like turning our temples over to the environmentalist moneychangers.
But alarming as it is that these powerful secular left institutions have managed to harness the SBC for their purposes, it is even more disturbing that some of our leaders are covering their tracks for them.
Perhaps some of you will remember in 2020 when Baptist Press published an explainer claiming that “not a penny” of Soros money has ever gone to the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), which is a side project of the secular progressive group, the National Immigration Forum. The EIT is not, as you might suppose from the name, a group that preaches the gospel to or provides for the material needs of immigrants. No, it is a political coalition that includes the ERLC, JD Greear, Kevin Ezell, and Danny Akin, to name just a few of the SBC leaders involved. Through lobbying legislators and distributing material to churches and ministries it promotes amnesty policies for illegal immigrants.
In 2016, the internal board books for Soros’ foundation, Open Society, leaked. They revealed that it had given $200,000 to a program the EIT was a part of, known as Bibles, Badges, and Business. The report also noted future plans to divide an additional million between that program and another initiative because, Open Society said, “evangelical support [has been] highly influential in engaging conservative lawmakers.”
The 2016 Soros board book also said this:
“In the course of our work, we were able to generate engagement by some conservative voices such as evangelical Christians and Southern Baptists through grantee National Immigration Forum.”
Which, again, is the umbrella organization over the Evangelical Immigration Table.
As ERLC trustee Jon Whitehead, a Harvard trained attorney by the way, told me after he reviewed these documents, “Southern Baptists were shamelessly hung out for sale by these leaders. In exchange for subsidized meetings with their EIT friends, they looked the other way as their churches and pews were exploited. They even used Baptist Press to mislead people, claiming ‘not a penny’ of Soros money went toward EIT. It looks more like tens of millions of pennies!”
If we give Baptist Press the benefit of the doubt, they were negligently mistaken. The only other alternative is that they were lying.
And Soros’ Open Society is only one of the hard left NGOs that has supported the EIT. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Tides foundations–all groups that also support abortion, the LGBT agenda, and a host of other anti-biblical goals—have contributed over a million dollars to the EIT’s project to mobilize evangelical support for open borders policies.
The secular left powerbrokers see American Christians as a captive audience. Maybe the last captive audience they have not conquered. Their desire is to have SBC churches and ministries for their political projects, and we have leaders who are more than willing to give them that access.
As the largest Protestant association in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention is uniquely positioned to influence the U.S. toward godliness. In an era in which almost the whole of our mainstream culture has been engulfed by confusion and darkness, we should stand out all the more for our willingness to cut against the cultural grain.
Instead, so many of our SBC leaders warn that to look different from our neighbors—by, say, rejecting feminist demands to open the pastorate to women—will damage our witness. (As if God didn’t know what would be “damaging” to His Church when He laid down his proscription against women pastors.)
According to the latest religion statistics, just over 5 percent of U.S. adults are Southern Baptists. That’s nearly 13 million Americans. Coincidentally, that’s almost the exact same number of American adults who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.
Through their tremendous commitment to their cause, they have transformed America from the steps of the White House to the smallest local library. No corner of this country has not been touched by their influence.
Why can’t we say the same?
Can you imagine the transformation we might see in this nation if the whole of the SBC had the same courage of its convictions that the LGBT movement has?
If Southern Baptists uniformly demanded that their pastors, professors, seminary administrators, and national leaders stayed passionately focused on the cause of Christ and His Word, rather than taking up the preoccupations of billionaires, businesses, and lawmakers, it would be enough to see a new Reformation in the American Church.
We have a choice, we will either fulfill our commission to be salt and light, which starts with choosing biblical distinctiveness and holding our leaders accountable for what they do in our name. Or we will continue diluting our mission with the world’s priorities until we disappear into the crowd entirely.
Order Megan’s book: Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda
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Ruminations on Revelation: Apostolic Accomplishment
Paul’s knowledge of the gospel was a gift of immediate special revelation. He made specific claims to this throughout his ministry and by implication virtually everywhere. In Galatians 1 Paul defended his apostleship by showing that his knowledge of the gospel came, not from any secondary source, but from revelation (Galatians 1:1, 8, 9, 12, 16). This claim is reiterated in 1 Corinthians 2 where Paul wrote, “These things God revealed to us through the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:10) and “We impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit interpreting spiritual truths in spiritual words” (13). Paul reminded the Ephesians, “The mystery was made known to me by revelation,” following it with words such as “my insight into the mystery of Christ . . .as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:3-5).
Other phrases imply the absolute revelatory authority of the message given to the apostles and their immediate circle of New Covenant prophets. These phrases appear as elements of arguments or admonitions that assume Paul’s absolute truthfulness as a recipient of divine revelation: “the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:25); “Now to him who is able to strengthen you, according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations” (Romans 16:25, 26); “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 14:35); “Our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant” (2 Corinthians 3:5, 6); “We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word” (2 Corinthians 4:2); “that words may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel” (Ephesians 6:19); “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now , . ,. “ (Philippians 2:12); “not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul became a minister” Colossians 1:23); “and when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans, and see that you also read the letter from Laodicea” (Colossians 4:16); “when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers” (1 Thessalonians 2: 13); “If anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, take note of that person, and have nothing to do with him” (2 Thessalonians 3:14); “the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted” (1 Timothy 1:11); “I charge you in the presence of God, . . . to keep the commandments unstained, . . . guard the deposit entrusted to you” (1 Timothy 6:13, 20); “the gospel for which I was appointed a preacher and apostle and teacher; . . . he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me. Follow the pattern of sound words you have heard from me” (2 Timothy 1:11-13); “You, however, have followed my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith; . . . continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings [Holy Scriptures]” (2 Timothy 3:10, 15); “at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior” (Titus 1:3). Many others could be added to these, but the assumption is plain and simple that Paul ministered and taught under the persuasion that he was the recipient of divine revelation—the content of which distinguished between truth and falsehood, trustworthiness and deceit, certainty and speculation, life and death, heaven and hell.
Paul’s engagement with the entire process of revelation necessarily involved a principle of continuity with the past. While being a steward of the New Covenant (1 Corinthians 4:1, 2), he was bound to show how the present expansion of both revelation and the redemptive plan had perfect continuity with the past. In his first engagement after his conversion, he went to the synagogue to prove that Jesus “is the Son of God,” by “proving that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 9:20, 22). Acts 13:16-41 gives a summary of a sermon in which Paul did exactly that. As Paul met with the Jews in Rome, Acts 28:23 says, “From morning to evening, he expounded to them testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus from both the Law of Moses and from the Prophets.” The nature of Paul’s arguments from the previous revelation to its mature meaning in the apostolic revelation shows the seamless continuity of truth and purpose and the centrality of a Christological grasp of the Old Testament as an intention of the Holy Spirit. Examples of this could be found in each of his epistles, but particularly in Galatians and Romans Paul’s strong claims to having received his message by immediate revelation shows that the revelatory process is not independent of other factors as they developed in the progress of revelation. The necessity of the careful use of human thought, knowledge of the details of previous revelation, knowledge of the historical manifestation of Christ’s person, words, actions, and works, and deduction from the consistency of the Jesus phenomenon as exclusively expressive of the expectations of previous revelation all constitute the Spirit’s work in bringing revelation to its culminating purpose.
There is such a continuity between the life and thought of the apostle and the content of the revelation that even personal references that make their way into the text serve their discreet purpose in confirming the truth. “I do not know whether I baptized anyone else,” is a deeply personal operation of Paul’s mind, but also serves in sealing the point that he is making about avoiding division in the church. “When you come, bring the cloak that I left that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments” (2 Timothy 4:13). Slices of life that show the personal relations of the apostle, his physical needs, and his desire for continued study and writing give the life context within which apostolic revelation arises and the kind of personal awareness that interpenetrate that process of the Spirit.
This should make us contemplate the relation between revelation and inspiration. All Scripture is inspired. This includes the received canon of the Old Testament and the writings of the apostolic community responsible for preaching and writing the revealed mysteries of the New Testament (2 Timothy 3:14-17). So, whether the words are matters of absolutely unknowable propositions apart from their being revealed or whether the words concern events and personal experiences already known through observation or deduction, their presence in the biblical account comes from the divine determination of inclusion for a specific purpose of edifying, instructive, contextual connections within the larger corpus of revealed truth.
A passage of pure revelation, therefore, is preeminently a revealed truth to the mind and thought of the preacher/writer but it also is inspired in the verbal communication to other persons and subsequent generations: “He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:15, 16). That is simple, unalloyed revelatory truth and the language in which the revelation is given is inspired language. In this way, revelation and inspiration coalesce so that the inspired text itself consists of revealed truth.
In the same way, a text like this can be considered as revealed truth because of the peculiar purpose that God had in inspiring it to be included in the written text: “And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding” (Colossians 1:9). Paul gives a historical report of his having heard of their conversion through the ministry of Epaphras and his consequent ceaseless prayers for them. The content of his prayer explored an important aspect of revealed truth concerning how one discerns God’s will. Not every aspect of that statement is revealed truth for Paul is reporting something that emerged in the context of his own knowledge and experience. The report, nevertheless, is a part of the inspired text and, therefore, bears the mark of God’s intention that the church in all generations would know this Pauline comment and be edified by it. Its inspiration, therefore, embraces the comment into the sphere of revelation.
Jesus spoke many words, gave many teachings to his apostles which were not recorded (John 21:25). Without contradiction such words from Jesus would be of canonical quality and would be unvarnished revelation. These words were not “written,” however, and so never became inspired Scripture. John saw a revelation from a mighty angel and seven thunders. He reported, “I was about the write, but I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down’” (Revelation 10:4). He received a revelation but was not directed to write it down, so the revelation never became part of inspired Scripture. Inspiration, therefore, since it is the means by which revelation is preserved and accurately transmitted, may be seen as of revelatory in quality.
To receive all of Scripture, therefore, as the written revelation of God accurately and faithfully conforms to the Bible’s witness to itself. For the knowledge of the triune God and his gospel, for the health of the soul, for pure worship and devotion, for Christ-centered maturity, and for works that conform to divine regulation, the Bible is the lamp unto our feet and the light to our path.
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Christian Realism in this Vale of Tears
The key to living well in this fallen world is Christian realism. I could just say, “realism,” because the real world, as it has been revealed by God and believed by Christians is the only world we have. The fact that atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, or secularists do not believe in it does not make it any less real. It’s like gravity. Deny it all you want on whatever grounds you want but when you step off a ten-story building your anti-gravity convictions will not save you from reality.
The reality to which I refer is described in the Bible, beginning (but hardly ending) in Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” So, this world was created by God and for God. Everything that exists, exists by Him and for Him. Reality consists of Creator and creation; God and not-God; or what Peter Jones calls, “twoism.”
Just as your eyesight allows you to access the beauty of a sunset so your faith allows you to access the power of the resurrection.
Coupled with this, and extending from it, is what the rest of Scripture teaches about “the things that are unseen” (2 Corinthians 4:18). These are the realities that Paul said kept him from losing heart as he focused on them. What are the unseen realities? They include divine promises like the assurance that God works all things together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28-30) and that having once begun a good work in His children, He will most certainly bring that work to completion (Philippians 1:6). Add to this, teachings such as God’s meticulous providence that governs our lives (as taught in Matthew 10:29-31 and Ephesians 1:11), the resurrection of the dead (which Jesus’ historically validated resurrection guarantees, 1 Corinthians 15:3-23), and the future new heavens and earth when Christ will return to make all things new (Revelation 21:1-8).
These and many other unseen things are just as real as rain, trees, cancer, death, deceit, sin, and betrayal. Seen realities can be accessed by our senses and experience. Unseen realities can only be accessed by faith. That does not mean that faith creates them. It means that faith accesses them. Just as your eyesight allows you to access the beauty of a sunset or the wickedness of a crime so your faith allows you to access the power of the resurrection, the comfort of the risen Christ’s unending presence with His people, or the assurance of God’s sovereign, meticulous, personal, and loving rule over the details of your life.
Faith does not create those realities. It accesses them. In that way faith is like a radio tuner. The tuner allows you to listen to music through the airwaves. The radio doesn’t create the music. The music is already there. The radio lets you access it.
In a similar way Christians are believers. We live by faith. That is, by taking God at His Word we are enabled to order our lives according to unseen realities. We are not relegated to having our thoughts, affections, or aspirations governed only by the material world. Yes, we live in the seen world as full participants in it, subject to all the joys and sorrows that go with life east of Eden. But we also know about and have access to the unseen world with all its promises, blessings, and assurances.
By taking God at His Word we are enabled to order our lives according to unseen realities.
Because of this Christians can let the realities of both the seen and unseen worlds shape our attitudes, choices, hopes, and emotions. This is particularly helpful when dealing the trials, sorrows, and loss that inevitably come in this fallen world. Christians do not have to deny the painful realities of the seen world. We have no need to pretend or to downplay the grief that tribulations bring. We are creatures of like nature with other people (Acts 14:15). We know what it is to lament, to weep, and to suffer. It would be a denial of reality—the things which are seen—not to let oneself respond with normal human emotion when going through trials. But, we need not be cast into hopeless despair, either.
Why? Because there is more to reality than what can be measured by our senses. Unseen realities—those things that have been revealed to us and that can be genuinely accessed by faith—must also be factored into our thinking and emotions.
Are you suffering sickness, death of a loved one, or some other kind of painful loss? As you face your trial honestly—realistically—do not forget the unseen, eternal realities that are also true. As a child of God, you are eternally loved by Him. Your life is in His hands. He is orchestrating even painful events in ways that will result in what He deems best for you. Though you have not chosen this path of sorrow, you can know for certain, just as assuredly as you know the pain you cannot deny, that your loving Heavenly Father has ordained it for you and has done so for your eternal welfare.
Where this all comes together in sharp focus is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. The seen realities were obvious. He has betrayed, hated, ridiculed, mocked, beaten, treated unjustly, and executed on a Roman cross. But the unseen realities cannot be denied. In that murderous event, the greatest miscarriage of human justice in history, God was doing His deepest work of redemption. Though not apparent to the senses God was reconciling the world to Himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). He was making a full atonement for the sins of His people (Hebrews 10:10-25). He was securing justification for all who trust Jesus as Lord (Romans 3:20-25).
Though you have not chosen this path of sorrow, you can know for certain, that your loving Heavenly Father has ordained it for you and has done so for your eternal welfare.
There was more going on than met the eye. The same is true in all our trials. That unseen “more,” which we know by faith, is an essential part of reality.
For Christians who are determined to live in reality, there is only one path forward. We must learn with Paul to be “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10). Sorrowful when we suffer loss and our hopes and plans have been overturned, yet rejoicing because Christ lives. He rules. He loves us and cares for us and is working to make certain that no promise given to us will fail.
This is undoubtedly the hardest emotional path, but it is the best one. It is also the right one. Far easier to calibrate your emotions by only one set of realities to the exclusion of the other. You can deny the pain of what your senses assure you is true and often feel spiritual in the process because you allow only unseen realities be felt. Or you can let what you see and experience overwhelm you to the point of despair as if that there are no unseen realities to be taken into account. In other words, you can respond to trials with either sorrow or rejoicing exclusively. But both of those paths consider only part of reality. To let yourself be both “sorrowful” and “rejoicing” is the path that takes into consideration all reality—both seen and unseen. As such it enables Christians to display genuine faith in our crucified, risen Savior as we continue our walk through this vale of tears.