Written by D. Blair Smith |
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
We live in a world that turns on influence. Thanks be to God, the decisive influence in His salvation economy is not a saint in heaven or faith on earth. The decisive influence is the Father’s electing sinners to receive His saving grace in His Son, Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

From the halls of high schools to the corridors of political power, our world is filled with those who fashion themselves persons of “influence.” In the last several years, the category of “social media influencer” has developed out of thin air. Our world values those who can influence others socially or economically. But what about religiously?
During the Middle Ages, an elaborate system developed in the Western church wherein saints in heaven, who were ostensibly closer to God than sinners on earth, were called on in prayer because of their positions of influence in relation to God. In their own way, medieval saints were believed to be people of influence. Thankfully, the theologians of the Reformation addressed this error through teaching Christ alone. Christ alone mediates our salvation, a salvation founded on God’s grace alone and received through faith alone. Salvation isn’t the result of a saint’s influencing a grudging God. Rather, salvation comes to the sinner because from all eternity God elected a people to be His own.
Election is unmistakably a biblical word (e.g., Matt. 24:22–31; Rom. 8:33; 9–11; 2 Tim. 2:10; Titus 1:1; 1 Peter 1:1; 2 Peter 1:10). Therefore, Christians of all stripes believe in election. But that doesn’t mean that all believe in the same theology of election. A theology of election is how one describes the doctrine and connects it to other doctrines, especially the doctrines of God, man, and salvation. Reformed theology has taught unconditional election, which is the U in the famous acronym TULIP, which summarizes the “five points of Calvinism” or “doctrines of grace.”
A foundational theological principle in Reformed theology is the sovereignty of God—sometimes called “big God theology.” Election is a subset of teaching on the sovereignty of God. If God sovereignly causes or permits all things that happen in the world, this includes the salvation of His people. Indeed, while Scripture teaches God’s sovereignty over all things, its authors are especially interested in communicating His sovereignty in the salvation of His people. One of the ways that Scripture does this is by highlighting God’s “election” of a people for salvation. If God is big enough to create all things that exist, if God is big enough to providentially care for all things that exist, He is big enough to redeem His people—a people that He has loved from all eternity.
The doctrine of election depends on the doctrine of God. Eternal in God are His unchanging attributes and His divine counsel containing His sovereign decrees. More general than election, predestination is a term referring to God’s decree by which He sovereignly ordains all things (Isa. 46:8–10). Election is more specific. According to Herman Bavinck, election is the “gracious purpose of God according to which He ordained those whom He had before known in love to be conformed to the image of Christ” (see Rom. 8:29). The doctrine of election focuses on God’s decree to elect or choose to save a people for Himself in Christ.
In addition to a certain understanding of God, the doctrine of election depends on a prior understanding of humanity. The T in TULIP stands for total depravity. Ever since the fall in the garden of Eden, humanity is naturally lost and separated from the loving presence of God. Because of depravity, humanity possesses no resources within itself for personal salvation. Furthermore, given that depravity touches all aspects of what it means to be human and that we are dead in our “trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), there remains in human beings no ability to choose or believe in God apart from His prior regenerating work in them.
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Written by D. Blair Smith |
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
Solus Christus was needed in the sixteenth century and is needed in the twenty-first century in order to press upon us the fact that our relationship with God can be mediated by none other than Christ alone.

Whatever age we live in, whether the age of the Reformers or the present age, we are tempted to pollute the beauty of Christ through our idols. John Calvin said it’s in our very nature: “Man’s nature…is a perpetual factory of idols…Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity.”
The doctrine of solus Christus was highlighted during the Reformation as the Reformers identified the problem of a church that was casting shade on Christ; of a church that was arrogating to itself prerogatives that belong to Christ alone. This problem impressed upon the Reformers the need to purge anything that would throw shade upon the absolute brilliance of Christ’s supremacy in our salvation. The Reformers clearly identified this problem and brought a biblical and theological solution that provides application for our own day.
The Problem of a Strong Church
In the early sixteenth century, the church was at the center of people’s lives in Western Europe. Over the previous centuries, the Roman Catholic Church had devolved from the “Company of the Saved” to the “Salvation Company.”
What is meant by “Salvation Company”? Luther recognized that in his day people had become enslaved to the sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church, and instead of looking to Christ for their standing before God they looked to the Church. It was thought that because of Christ, Mary, and the saints there was a storehouse of grace in the Catholic Church. Priests were its sole dispensers and the faithful had to come to them.
In 1520, Luther wrote The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, where he attacked the sacramental system of the church. That system, Luther said, represented a captivity that had become its own Babylon, holding captive the people of God from cradle to grave: In the church one was baptized as an infant, confirmed as a youth, married as a mature person, and received extreme unction on one’s deathbed. Each of these sacraments, along with ordination, were seen as conveying grace when administered by a priest. The grace conferred was supplemented throughout one’s life by two further sacraments: regular confession of sin to a priest and the reception of the Eucharist through a priestly Mass.
From cradle to the grave, the Christian was dependent upon the Catholic Church, tethered to the sacraments in order to receive the grace by which one can be saved.
Luther looked to Scripture and saw only two sacraments. The effect of his teaching was to shift focus from the Catholic Church and its clergy to Christ alone—salvation not from a company with priests turning on the taps of grace, as it were, but salvation in a singular person: Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Stripped of this ornate sacramentology, one might ask where one went for grace? If the Catholic Church had it very wrong, what were believers to do? Where would Reformers such as Luther point them?
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The longing a lover feels for his beloved is what the psalmist feels in Psalm 84. His language is love language: “How lovely is your dwelling place. . . . My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord” (emphasis added).
This psalmist knows God and has been, one could say, wounded by His presence, so that the only balm is to return to that presence. He longs for it. He yearns for it.
The great church father Gregory of Nazianzus described this feeling in his poem De rebus suis as knowing in his inmost being “the sharp stab of desire for the King.” C.S. Lewis gave fine expression to this desire in his Reflections on the Psalms: “I have rather—though the expression may seem harsh to some—called this the ‘appetite for God’ than ‘the love of God.’ The ‘love of God’ too easily suggests the world ‘spiritual’ in all those negative or restrictive senses which it has unhappily acquired . . . [the appetite for God] has all the cheerful spontaneity of a natural, even a physical, desire. It is [happy] and jocund.”
The psalmist knows that his true happiness—blessedness—is found there, in the presence of the King. Scripture is incredibly clear on where true, profound, enduring happiness is found, and this is because the Bible addresses our deepest longings and desires.
Augustine said in his Confessions that “all men want to be happy” and do what they do in order to be happy. But not all are happy, because they do not seek happiness in the place where it can be found. The Bible tells us where it can be found. Psalm 84 tells us where it can be found. The source of happiness is in God’s presence and its receptor in man’s heart. The context of Psalm 84 is pilgrimage, something required of the faithful Israelite, yes, but also something greatly desired because of what it means for the lover of God—he is celebrating pilgrimage to worship God in His temple.
The Hope of the Psalmist
In the first four verses of Psalm 84, the immediate reference for the psalmist’s hope is the temple, seen in imagery: dwelling place, altars, courts, house. Why? Because God’s presence is concentrated there. He is homesick to return.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
My soul longs, yes, faints
for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and flesh sing for joy
to the living God.
Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O LORD of hosts,
my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house,
ever singing your praise!
The psalmist is comforted that he will find rest and shelter in the temple by the tender reality that even birds find a home there. He is most likely recalling the literal temple with its stone facades and eaves where birds find shelter in crevices, just as might be seen today in grand stone building facades in the great cities of the West.
If a bird can find rest and shelter there, certainly a humble follower of God made in His image can.
The Experience of the Psalmist
The experience of the psalmist confirms his hope for God’s presence. God’s presence is something he knows, allowing him to exclaim, “Blessed are those whose strength is in you” (Ps. 84:5). His experience is the flip side of the first beatitude—“Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). Indeed, it goes from strength to strength (Ps. 84:7).
There is a dynamism, a growth, a freshness that comes from frequency in God’s presence.