Alistair Begg and the Loving Thing
This wonderful, faithful preacher made a grave error and then, when in the face of an outpouring of grief, has tried to defend his position with a misuse of Scripture—something Jesus would never approve.
Alistair Begg’s preaching has been one of the most strengthening gifts to me over the past 20 years. The bit of New York where I live seems like the part of Ohio where he pastors, though his parts are probably flatter with better restaurants. Gently decaying towns and depressed cities, people whose families built the infrastructure that now so desperately needs renewal, middle-class, hard-working, as they say, salt of the earth. Listening to Begg preach to his congregation over the airwaves helped me to become acclimatized to living here. I gradually learned not to despise ways of life I didn’t understand and didn’t yet appreciate. It took me seven years to stop hating the hometown of my six children, and another seven beyond that to feel content about the garden. At the 21-year mark, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night anxious that God will force me to move somewhere awful and hot, like Florida. Begg’s preaching cadence somehow made the sanctifying medicine of accepting a people and a place go down more smoothly.
Listening to this latest recording, it seems that the aftermath of the interview he gave—what he called a storm in a teacup—has aged him. His voice is shaky. He sounds on the edge of tears. Obviously, he did not expect what he said to be so controversial and was therefore deeply grieved to find an outpouring of, from his perspective, opprobrium, with some small amount of praise.
Before I go any further, I should say that I am grateful and heartened that Begg reiterated his orthodox position on human sexuality, and that he is not giving a blanket council for Christians to go to the weddings of same-sex people. I hope that someone he trusts is sparing no effort to try to work through the complexity of these issues, to help him understand why people who listen to him and love him are so upset.
I am grieved, though, that he was caught off guard. For a portion of the sermon, he recounts how often he has been at the forefront of preaching about sexuality. He has recently gone through Romans 1. In the past has gone up against some of the biggest cultural influencers on the subject of sexuality, people like Ellen DeGeneres. If that’s so, how does he not have a sense of how volatile this subject is, how what we say and do is under a microscope, how every day more famous and notable Christians are capitulating to the lie?
Which brings me to my problems with his sermon. Begg falls into at least one, if not more, category errors. Many Evangelicals today, he says, have succumbed to the trap of the first-century Pharisee who acted like the older brother in Luke 15. When the younger brother came home, the older brother would not come and greet him, but in anger sent a servant, and then accused the father of ungenerosity towards himself. The choice, Begg says, for Christians today is between condemnation and compassion. The grace of God is for both the younger and the older. In this vein, he spoke movingly on the subject of the grace of God.
-
The New Heavens And The New Earth
Read Revelation chapters 21 and 22, and you’ll see that at the heart of heaven is a wedding. The love story that began in Genesis chapter 1 reaches its climax. The promise God made to Abraham, that He would draw to Himself a multiethnic group from every different social class and background, from across every era of history—this is where we see it finally fulfilled.
In 2014, a group of artists and musicians in the United Kingdom asked thousands of people one question and based a live show on the answers. The question was, What is your happiest memory?
As you might imagine, there were lots of first dates, first dances, first loves, first houses. Memories of weddings. Memories of births—lots of births, apparently. Then there were memories of glorious holidays, and memories of precious faces—the faces of loved ones now lost.
And as they collected these memories of happiness, the creators of the show noticed three things.
The first was that less than 1 percent of these happy memories had anything to do with material things.
Secondly, the memories were nearly always about relationships of one kind or another. Family or friends or lovers.
They discovered the third thing when they fed all the happy memories into a database and looked for recurring words and phrases. The word that came up most often was the word “home.”
So anyway, they put the show on; they toured it all round the U.K. And when the director was interviewed afterwards, he said that the performances were extraordinary—like a cross between a wedding and a wake. It was a celebration, but it was mixed with sadness—sadness, because of course these were memories of happiness. The happiness had gone; it had faded into nostalgia.
What was left was a longing for relationship, and a longing for home.
Why do we have these desires? Could it be that we were made for another world, one in which these longings are fully and finally satisfied?
We were. Open up Revelation chapters 21 and 22, and you’ll catch a stunning glimpse of the world you were made for.
Read More -
Trojan Horse Christians
Though we may deceive ourselves and those around us, God will not be mocked. We may have avoided a few traps, but we have jumped right into the most damning trap of them all, and there is only one way of escape.
If the Greeks had delivered their gift to the people of Troy and said, “This is a huge wooden horse filled with soldiers ready to kill you.” the people of Troy would have known what they were getting. Instead, a real Trojan horse involves deception; it involves treachery you would not see coming.
Here is the problem with deception. As much as we try to see the snares laid out for us, there is often someone more clever than us trying to trap us. What might look like a snare may be a cleverly laid decoy to move us right into another, more dangerous trap.
Take, for example, the temptation to cheat on your taxes. Suppose something came across your path that showed you a way to fudge the numbers and not only avoid paying the government but receive a windfall from them instead. It is foolproof, and after all, we have all heard people say taxation is theft. This act would be a way to take back what is rightfully yours.
After careful consideration, you wisely avoid the temptation. Even if you could get away with it, you realize that it would put your family at risk, destroy your peace, and, more importantly, be an affront to God. You file your taxes as you should, you give Caesar what is Caesar’s, and you breathe a sigh of satisfaction as you do it.
You have successfully sidestepped temptation, and you thank God for it. “Lord, thank you that you have made me righteous enough to avoid these temptations.” As you live out your life, there are many moments like this. Snare after snare, trap after trap, you are a bird that always seems to escape the fowler. You protect your nest, and your family lives a long and joy-filled life because of your decisions and guidance.
Others are not so wise. As you go along life’s journey, you hear story after story of shipwrecked lives on the sea of temptation. As you watch some of them pick up the pieces, you see them beat their breast before God and say, “Lord have mercy upon me, a sinner.” Then they claim to have found it. They claim to be a friend of God. You do not exactly know what to do with those claims, but if it gives them peace, so be it. You are only glad God gave you enough wisdom to avoid their fate.
Read More -
Keeping the Gospel at the Center of Your Bible Study
The Bible is not a handbook for life or an encyclopedia to which we turn when we don’t know what to do. The Bible is not a love letter from God. The Bible is one continuous story of God bringing about the gospel. As Jen Wilkin puts it in her book Women of the Word, “The Bible purposes to tell us this Big Story in a thousand smaller stories, from its first page to its last.”[3]
Do you struggle to connect the dots in your Bible reading? As you work through the Old Testament into the New Testament, does it feel like there’s a gaping hole between them of stories, events, and laws that don’t seem to fit together?
Maybe you read the Bible like this: The Old Testament is law and wrath, but when Jesus finally appeared in the New Testament, everything became about grace and good news. Then the Bible ends with some rules and promises and a terrifying and cryptic picture of the end times and eternity.
The best we can do is say that we’re not really sure what this means. Perhaps God was angrier back then; Israel is special; you’re David and your problem is Goliath; Jesus saves; follow these rules; and you’re unsure how it will all go down, but you’ll be walking on gold pavement. Sound accurate? Can you relate?
That’s how I understood the Bible. I avoided the Old Testament because I couldn’t make sense of it, and I really didn’t like how angry God seemed. There were times when the New Testament left me baffled and with more questions than answers (for example, the entire book of Hebrews). This disconnect begins when we forget the narrative arch of Scripture: the gospel. We need to read our Bibles with a bird’s eye view that sees how the gospel stretches over the pages of Scripture from beginning to end.
Jesus is revealed from Genesis to Revelation.
After Jesus’ crucifixion, the disciples were downtrodden. They thought the Messiah had finally come—they were so certain that they had left everything behind to follow him. Yet, three days prior he was crucified and placed in a tomb. Then something strange happened. The women went to the tomb and found it empty, and an angel announced that Jesus was alive. Peter and John checked the tomb themselves and found only the grave clothes.
Two of these downtrodden and perplexed disciples were walking on the road to Emmaus when their Savior (though with his identity veiled from them) approached them. When they explained their sadness over the events that had taken place, he rebuked them.“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:25-27).
The thick thread that binds the entire Bible together is Jesus himself.
“Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” What does this tell us about the Bible? Jesus doesn’t enter at the New Testament—Jesus is present throughout the entire Bible. Jesus isn’t the climax or falling action of the story—he is the entire story.[1] That thick thread that binds the entire Bible together is Jesus himself.
Eden wasn’t simply a foiled plan A and the gospel plan B. Before the foundations of the earth, the gospel was already in place. As Michael Brown and Zach Keele write in Sacred Bond: Covenant Theology Explored,Before the creation of the world, a plan was already in place to send the Son as the second Adam to remedy the disastrous results of the first Adam’s failure to fulfill the covenant of works in the garden of Eden and bring humankind to glory.
Read More
Related Posts:
