Written by R.C. Sproul |
Saturday, March 12, 2022
If you neglect what Jesus says, and you neglect what God proves, then we’re back to the theme. There is no escape. Beloved, if you come to church every Sunday, every single Sunday of your life, and go to Sunday school every week of your life, you may still be neglecting this great salvation. Is your heart in it? That’s what I’m asking you. I can’t answer that question for you. You know if you’re neglecting your salvation. I don’t have to tell it to you. I just have to tell you what the consequences are if you continue in that neglect. So I pray with all my heart that God will awaken each one of us today to the sweetness, the loveliness, the glory of the gospel declared by Christ.

Doctrine and Practice
Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will —Hebrews 2:1–4
Did you notice the “Therefore” that begins this text? What the author of Hebrews is getting at is the perfect marriage between doctrine and practice. If we believe the things that he has declared in the first chapter, that has radical implications for how we live our lives. He’s beginning to show that now when he says, “Therefore we must pay much closer attention.” There’s a little grammatical problem in the words of that particular translation. The tension of these words is because it’s not certain grammatically whether the author is using a comparative or a superlative. And so I would prefer that he would simply say that we therefore must pay the most possible attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.
Think of that image of drifting. Some people go fishing in boats, and they don’t set the anchor down. They allow the boat to move with the current, and they just drift. Where they end up can be somewhat problematic. The Scripture uses this kind of figurative language elsewhere when it talks about an anchor for our soul, which is the hope we have in Christ. Here he is saying, “Don’t allow yourselves to drift aimlessly away from what you’ve heard.” Again, he’s speaking about this marvelous comparison that he’s given in chapter 1 about the superiority of Jesus over the angels and over all created things. You’ve heard that. Don’t drift away from it; instead pay the closest possible attention to it. Verse 2 says, “For since the message declared by angels . . .” The author is referring back again to the Old Testament and the idea hinted at in Deuteronomy 33 of the law being mediated by the angels. When Moses received the law from God, there were myriads and myriads of angels present on that occasion.

So he says, “For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution . . .” Again, the comparison continues. If the law that came from the angels was ignored by the people in the Old Testament and received a just retribution, a punishment, how much more responsible are we to that which has come to us directly from Christ? Now, beloved, the central theme of this chapter, or at least this portion of the chapter, is the theme of escape. When you think of escape, you think of some kind of deliverance from a dire and threatening life situation, like escaping from a kidnapper. Or you think of soldiers who are surrounded in battle and finding a way to retreat safely. That’s an escape. But the most common idea with which we associate escape is imprisonment, not just from any jail, but from those prisons that are the most notoriously inescapable, such as the former condition of Alcatraz in this country, or Devil’s Island, or perhaps the most dreadful of all French prisons, the Château d’If.

A Great Escape
You remember the story; it’s my second-favorite novel. Edmond Dantes is falsely accused and unjustly convicted of a crime. He is sent forth to the most dreaded prison, Château d’If. There he suffered for years in solitary confinement, until one day he met a co-prisoner, an aged priest who had been there for decades and had spent much time trying to dig a tunnel to escape. But he didn’t do his math correctly and ended up burrowing into Dantes’s chamber. So the two met and had fellowship together. The old priest became Dantes’s mentor and counselor, teacher of science and philosophy and theology. The priest also told Dantes about a map that led to a vast treasure, hidden under the waters in the sea. The old priest died in prison. Through an extraordinary series of circumstances, the death of the priest led to the possible escape of Edmond Dantes from Château d’If. Dantes found the vast treasure that financed the rest of his life and his nom de plume became the Count of Monte Cristo.
What an escape story that one is. But as dire and as dreadful as the circumstances were in the Château d’If, there’s even a greater and more dreadful kind of captivity. The author of Hebrews speaks of an escape from this captivity when he asks the question, “How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?” Beloved, this is a rhetorical question. The answer to the question is simple. How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? The answer is, we can’t. Alcatraz could possibly be escaped from, or Devil’s Island, or even the Château d’If. But the one prison from which no one ever escapes is hell. There’s no escape route. You can’t dig under it. You can’t climb over it. No guard can be bribed. The sentence cannot be ameliorated. So the author of Hebrews is saying, “Do you realize what we have heard from the Word of God Himself about a great salvation?” We use that word salvation all the time in the church. What does it mean?
When somebody says to me, “Are you saved?” the first question I want to say is, “Saved from what?” The idea of salvation suggests the idea of some kind of escape or deliverance from a dire circumstance. The Greek verb sodzo in the New Testament is used in a variety of ways. If you are saved from a threatening illness, as people were in the New Testament by the touch of Jesus, Jesus might comment, “Your faith has saved you.” He’s not talking about eternal salvation. He’s speaking about their rescue from a dreadful disease.
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Written by Dr. Michael LeFebvre |
Friday, November 5, 2021
To understand the function of Torah in its Old Testament context is to discover the basis for its New Testament reception by the followers of Jesus. The Apostles saw the person of Jesus in the Law (Matt. 22:37–40). And when Christians understand the Law in its ancient Near Eastern context, it continues to be a source of delight for those who hope in Christ and wait for his Kingdom to be finished.

In 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. Once the tomb was opened, Carter uncovered piles of breathtaking treasures inside. Among those treasures, he found 130 ornately carved staffs.
Some believed those staffs were symbols of power, like scepters. But in 2010, CT scans of the pharaoh’s mummy revealed that he had a malformed foot. This finding combined with others confirmed that the staffs were walking sticks the pharaoh actually used. They weren’t symbols of power after all, but reminders of frailty.
Interpreting the artifacts of past cultures requires alertness to their original context—as well as caution against imported assumptions.
One of the most important biblical artifacts to understand in context is the “Torah,” Israel’s law collection found in the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). The Hebrew word torah roughly translates to “law” in English. But biblical law is not like modern legislation.1
To understand the Torah, we must observe how it was used in its own context in Old Testament Israel—and how law in the New Testament period came to be used differently. In fact, distinguishing the original use of the Law from its reinterpretation in the Greco-Roman era offers important insight into the conflicts between Jesus and the Temple leaders of his day. Many who read how Jesus challenged the scribes and pharisees think that Jesus was introducing new interpretations of the Law in the New Testament. It turns out, Jesus was reaffirming the original understanding of the Law.
Law Books, Now and Then
Today, law books are used for regulation. Modern nations compile law codes to establish social order, and they enforce those law codes by police and courts. But nowhere in the biblical narratives do we find law writings used in this way. Israel’s written law served several purposes, but not as legislation to be used by judges and cited in courts.
One of the scholars working in this field, Bernard Jackson, catalogued references to judges and to law books in the Bible. He found that Israel’s law books were used for archival, didactic, and ritual purposes, but not to adjudicate justice.2 Based on the records in the Bible, Hebrew judges enforced unwritten norms, but there is no indication that they enforced law using written texts. When some of those unwritten norms were written down (as in the Mosaic law writings), they were written for public instruction not for judicial enforcement. Thus the written law faithfully reflects Israel’s judicial norms, even if not itself the basis for rendering verdicts.
In fact, as far as we know, written law was not used in courtrooms anywhere in the ancient world until the fifth century B.C. That was when Greece invented democracy and the rule of law.3 Law collections in Israel and other ancient lands were compiled to inspire the people’s hope and to instruct their obedience to God’s ways, but not for civic regulation.
The Psalms as Guide to the Law’s Use
The Psalms provide a helpful window into Israel’s use of the Torah. In fact, the book of Psalms is structured into five parts as a companion for the five-book Torah.4 And the first psalm introduces the Law’s purpose to inspire hope. “Blessed [or happy] is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked . . . but his delight is in the law of the Lord” (Psa 1:1­–2).
The individual in that psalm is surrounded by injustice. Wickedness, sin, and scoffing are on every side (v. 1). The Law is clearly not regulating that society. Nor is the Law something the person in that psalm appeals to for justice in court.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, October 25, 2024
Evangelicalism’s culture is not even contiguous with that of mainline Protestantism, much less classical Protestantism. It is very populist and dominated by charismatic pitchman type pastors. It tends to emphasize a therapeutic gospel over a strict ethic. In fact, any type of moral or behavioral code followed too seriously is likely to draw a caution for being legalistic. It’s very aligned with American consumer culture, and American culture generally. And of course it is anti-intellectual, something well-documented in such work as Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

Reading James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity rekindled a feeling that I’ve had many times before in reading books like this. Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.
Hunter writes in his book:
For most Americans—whether deist or Calvinist, rationalist and intellectual or revivalist and popular, high church establishmentarian or sectarian—there was a God more or less active in the universe and in human affairs. Indeed, this God was, for most, Christian and, even more, Protestant. Though hegemonic and certainly oppressive to those who dissented, this belief nevertheless provided a language and an ontology that framed understandings of both public and private life. And yet this was also a culture, following Weber and so many others, that was inner-worldly in its orientation and ascetic in its general ethical disposition, an ethic that shunned extravagance, opulence, and self-indulgence and prized hard work, discipline, and utility. In ethics it was individualistic, to be sure, but informed by biblical and republican traditions that tempered individual interest and moved it toward the public interest and common goods. [emphasis added]
It’s certainly hard to argue that contemporary American culture generally, or evangelicalism in particular, are ascetic and oriented towards a traditional disciplined WASP ethic. Undoubtedly, they are if not opulent, consumerist in orientation. I’d be lying if I said I were any different.
You see this change in ethical outlook on life in basically any book on the topic. It’s a move away from the old Calvinist outlook and behaviors and towards modern American post-bourgeois consumerism.
In his famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber describes how Calvinism’s concept of calling and election – which he distinguishes from that of Lutheranism – led to furious activity to attempt to objectively demonstrate that one was among the elect.
The religious believer can make himself sure of his state of grace either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action; Luther stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter. The Calvinist also wanted to be saved sola fide. But since Calvin viewed all pure feelings and emotions, no matter how exalted they might seem to be, with suspicion, faith had to be proved by its objective results in order to provide a firm foundation for the certitudo salutis….Thus, however useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation, for even the elect remain beings of the flesh, and everything they do falls infinitely short of divine standards, nevertheless, they are indispensable as a sign of election. They are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation.
He describes how this manifested itself in various ways, such as in the Puritan ethics of Richard Baxter:
Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. It does not yet hold, with [Benjamin] Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. Thus inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one’s daily work. For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling. Besides, Sunday is provided for that, and, according to Baxter, it is always those who are not diligent in their callings who have no time for God when the occasion demands it.
The mention of Benjamin Franklin shows that this was one form in which these values were transmitted to American culture. Again, far from contemporary America, which puts a high premium on leisure and consumption over asceticism and production.
Weber’s book is actually short and readable, so is very much worth picking up.
We see the same in French writer Emmanuel Todd’s provocative book The Defeat of the West, which I wrote about earlier this year. Todd sees Protestantism as the foundation of the modern West, and describes it similarly to Weber:
Let us conclude our review of the main characteristics of Protestantism. It is an ethic of work: we are not on earth to have fun, but to work and save. Here we are at the antipodes of the consumer society. Protestantism has also long been synonymous with sexual puritanism.
He sees the collapse of Protestantism as the core factor in the decline of the West, one which lies underneath many of today’s social pathologies.
The original religious matrix was slowly built between the end of the Roman Empire and the central Middle Ages, and then ultimately thickened by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
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