Written by Scott N. Callaham |
Saturday, July 9, 2022
The Creator-King chooses to redeem his creation by creating a new people for himself. He elects them, saves them, imputes his own righteousness to them, blesses them, and lets them come to him. That’s not all. Mirroring the final act in the grand narrative of all of Scripture, Psalm 24 then shifts scenes. When the Creator-King has accomplished his purposes in redemption, he comes to dwell with his redeemed people, who receive him as their King of glory.

“Who is God?”—Ask such a question of any group, and you will likely receive a range of responses. A few respondents might reject the validity of the question and simply deny the existence of God. Most, though, will likely offer religiously-tinged answers. “God is all-knowing,” they might say. He is “all-powerful, all-loving.” A few more “all” expressions might then give way to the use of “omni,” like “omnipresent” or even the somewhat cumbersome “omnibenevolent.” Finally, the “alls” and the “omnis” may crescendo into an assertion of God’s perfection. What often gets lost in the course of the ensuing conversation is that stacking up thesephilosophical adjectives misses the point of the question.
Consider possible responses to “Who is the President of the United States?” Should someone answer with the words “important” and “well-dressed,” it is doubtful that the respondent actually knows much about the American presidency. In addition, despite the fact that these words accurately characterize whomever may hold that office in a general sense, it is safe to assume that the person who speaks this way and the sitting President are not mutually acquainted. Similarly, philosophical answers to the question “Who is God?” not only initially cast doubt upon whether the respondent knows of God, but also in the end upon whether the respondent actually knows God at all.
So, back to the question: “Who is God?”—or, as the psalmist puts it: “Who is this King of glory?”
The Creator-King
1 The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, 2 for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.
Creation theology includes a number of “givens” that many in atheistically- and scientifically-minded Western cultures find nearly impossible to accept. Among these “givens” is the unmediated, direct action of God in the creation of the world. Contrastingly, in Scripture God’s direct agency in creation is never in any doubt. God created on a grand scale; his “let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens . . .” speech act (Gen 1:14–16) ignited untold trillions of fusion reactions so that stars would blaze their heat and light throughout the universe. God also created on an intensely intimate scale; he fashioned the first man from dust and the first woman from that man (Gen 2:7 and 22). These acts are “givens” behind poetic allusion to the creation of land and sea in verse 2.
All the above having been said, it is important not to miss that the “givenness” of God’s creation appears after the “for” at the beginning of verse 2. This “for” means that the logic of Ps 24:1–2 is: because verse 2 is true, verse 1 is the necessary result. In other words, the fact that God is Creator (verse 2) entails that God rules over all (verse 1—His title as “King” appears later); the Creator is creation’s rightful ruler.
Even so, English word order might lead the reader to think that “the earth” is the focal point of the verse, and therefore that “the earth” is the psalmist’s major concern. Not so. Instead, the original language places the Lord in focus. The beginning half of verse 1 is an assertion that it is the Lord who owns the earth “and the fullness thereof.” The latter half then explains what this “fullness” (“that which fills it”) is: “those who dwell therein.” Therefore, since it is the Lord who rules the earth and those who dwell therein, whatever powers those “dwellers” may exercise, they are not the rulers of the earth. If any doubt on this point were to remain, verse 2 then falls like a hammer blow. Not only does verse 2 employ the “for” logic mentioned above, but it also emphasizes “he” in the original language beyond the capacity of an English translation to reflect. The cumulative effect is something like “It is the Lord who rules the earth, not those who dwell therein, because he created it!” Sandwiching humanity between two successive focused mentions of the Lord, the psalmist puts “those who dwell” in the world firmly in their place.
The One Who Seeks God
3 Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?
In light of the absolute sovereignty of the Lord laid out in verses 1 and 2, verse 3 asks two questions for which the reader already knows the likely answers. That is to say, no one would dare to do these things! No one would climb the hill upon which the Lord’s Temple would stand, and then brazenly enter into its sacred precincts uninvited. How could a mere creature of dust stand before the Lord in his holy place? Yet verse 4 jolts the unsuspecting reader by claiming that there is, in fact, such a person:
4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully.
“Clean hands” refers to righteous behavior (see Job 17:9) and is surely opposite to the idea of having blood on one’s hands (see Isa 59:3, Ezek 23:37): a biblical metaphor that has fittingly come over into English to expose obvious guilt. “Pure heart” then alludes to righteous motives (see Prov 20:9). Jesus’s pointed assertion of adultery taking place within one’s heart (Matt 5:27–28) underscores that a person can technically have “clean hands” and yet lack a “pure heart.” Indeed, these hand and heart standards in this first half of verse 4 are rather difficult to attain.
The second half of verse 4 drills deeper into the soil of what constitutes “clean hands” and a “pure heart.” The amplifying illustration of one with “clean hands” appears second; this person “does not swear deceitfully.” Entering into agreements (the purpose of swearing) with no intention of keeping one’s promises displays a character completely opposite that of the Lord, who never breaks his covenants with his people (see Judg 2:1). Such a “dirty-handed” person could never ascend the Lord’s hill and stand in his presence. After all, even before starting the ascent, this promise breaker has no intention to follow through on any vows made to the Lord.
Next, verse 4 describes what the opposite of a “pure heart” looks like; it is a person who “lifts up his soul to what is false.” Every other time the Psalms mention the lifting of the soul, the action has to do with worship of the Lord (see Ps 25:1, 86:4, 143:8). Accordingly, as in Jer 18:15, committing “false” worship acts can entail a false object of worship: any or all of the world’s imposter false gods. That said, humans can also try to worship the Lord in a false manner. The prohibition against taking the name of the Lord “in vain” in the Ten Commandments uses the same term for “what is false” as in Ps 24:4.
We see that in just a few words, Ps 24:4 lauds a person of righteous behavior and righteous motives. Breaking promises and either worshiping other gods or presuming to worship the Lord wrongly would conflict so much with this person’s character that these displays of contempt toward God would be unthinkable. So, of course, such a righteous person would be welcome in the presence of the Creator-King.
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Rome has repented nothing since 1517 and has only changed tactics in attempting to bring us under her tyranny. As with the Anglicans in 1977, so with many evangelicals today. These men have forgotten that false teachers come in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15); that bad company ruins good morals (1 Cor. 15:33); that Rome and the East have buried the gospel in human tradition (Matt. 15:1-6) and idolatry; that God curses those that alter the gospel (Gal. 1:6-9); and so many other things that we might say unto them: “about this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing” (Heb. 5:12).

I have before me a recently recovered sermon by Martyn Lloyd Jones from 1977, titled “The Sword and the Song.” Speaking before the British Evangelical Council, he addressed then recent developments among evangelicals in Britain. Regrettably, they sound remarkably like trends among some professing evangelicals today, albeit ones that are by no means limited to Britain. I recommend you listen to the entire sermon at the MLJ Trust and ponder its similarity to present circumstances.
He says, for example, that at the Evangelical Anglican Congress in April, 1977, there was a man who declared that the Reformation was the greatest tragedy in the history of the church (32:40). Similar things have been said recently. In 2018 Regent College, which describes itself as “both evangelical and orthodox,” saw its then J.I. Packer Professor of Theology, Hans Boersma,[1] state, “I think the Reformation is not something to celebrate but is primarily something that we should lament—that it is primarily a tragedy.”
Elsewhere Lloyd Jones quotes the then bishop of Leicester saying that “throughout the first 40 or 50 years of my life, one was accustomed to a fairly sharp divide between the evangelical and the catholic movements in our church,” but that “during these recent years these lines of demarcation have become blurred” (34:20). That also sounds familiar. In the Center for Classical Theology’s magazine Credo, one can read things like the following.
In a book review of Piercing the Clouds: Lectio Divina and Preparation for Ministry (which book is part of a Romanist press’s “Catholic Theological Formation Series”), the reviewer says:
The contributors argue not only that historical-grammatical and devotional readings of Scripture can happen together but that they should happen. Especially in the spiritual formation of budding Catholic priests. Drawing on the writings of the early church, medieval monks, and Pope Benedict XVI, they offer six essays building their case. . . there is plenty within these pages to be relevant for seminarians across ecclesial boundaries. (emphasis mine)
The reviewer, a member of a non-denominational church in Tennessee, sees no problem with Protestants using a book that is explicitly meant for training Roman priests to train their own seminarians. He later links the two explicitly, saying “what the church needs today are Catholic priests—and Protestant clergy—who are molded by exegetically-informed lectio.”[2] Err, no, we don’t need any Roman priests, so-called, and every man who serves in that capacity should promptly repent and begin to serve God in truth, laying aside the falsehoods of that communion to unite with God’s people as they are gathered in the churches of the Reformation.
But to my point here, that which was the case in the 1970s Anglican church is also the case more generally now. Credo is primarily run by Baptists associated with Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Yet they have no qualms commending books that draw on writings by monks or the pope, nor in giving a platform to people like Boersma – whom they awarded with their “best theological retrieval” book award for 2023 – or members of Roman orders like the Dominicans (as here), nor, for that matter, women who are ordained in Protestant denominations renowned rather for their apostasy and decline than for any virtue, such as Jennifer McNutt of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. McNutt is also a professor at Wheaton College’s School of Biblical and Theological Studies, whose self-profession of evangelical faith needs no elaboration, but which is similarly suspect, not least since they employ two women professors who are also ordained in the Anglican Church in North America, one of whom seems to harbor some Romish sentiments about Mary (see my article here for an elaboration). Again, as in Lloyd Jones’s day, the “lines of demarcation seem to have become blurred.”
Or again, Lloyd Jones says that there was a difference in notions of scripture’s nature and authority in 1977 in comparison to the past, that people were arguing:
It’s not enough to have a translation in English, they say, of the Hebrew and the Greek. Oh no, you must have much more. You must know the cultural milieu, the cultural setting in which the scriptures were written. And they actually go so far as to say this, that you cannot understand the scriptures unless you know something about this cultural setting. Indeed, one of the leaders of this school on the continent of Europe has actually said this, that it is virtually impossible for any men to understand even the New Testament today, because we can never put ourselves into the cultural position and the thought forms of the people of the first century. (40:18)
That sounds like the need to ‘contextualize’ everything some people among us espouse, and reminds me of N.T. Wright’s argument that our previous perspective on Paul (esp. viz. justification) is wrong because we fail to understand the framework of his thought. Lloyd Jones helpfully contrasts this with “what the reformers called the perspicuity of the scriptures” (41:52), and notes that its logical outcome is a complete reliance on the perspective of scholars. In that vein he elsewhere notes the shift in notions about authority:
There has been this great change in the attitude of evangelicals. Towards what? Well, towards tradition. Not only scripture, but tradition. The old position of the Roman Catholic Church that you don’t merely assert the supremacy of the scriptures only, not sola scriptura, [but] tradition also as defined by them. (25:29)
These days it seems that every time one turns about he is being assailed with talk of “The Great Tradition.” There is a contemporary movement of what is called theological retrieval or ressourcement, and outlets like Credo and its associated contributors are at the center of it in the evangelical world. This movement says that this “Great Tradition” (which they always capitalize) that we ought to retrieve includes the ancient creeds and confessions, the catholic doctrine which the church has always believed, and that it provides the necessary framework to properly understand said creeds and confessions, and to be faithful adherents to the faith.
I have written about this elsewhere, including how the thing has its origin with Rome and her contemporary ecumenism, of how it includes Platonism, and of how it leads people to make some bizarre claims (regarding the aforementioned, Rome-sympathizing Boersma as Reformed; arguing that the Eastern communions’ notion of ‘deification’ is native to Reformed theology). It has also led to the present obsession with Aquinas, an idolater, whose fanatical partisans have portrayed him and the scholastics more generally in glowing terms as essential to reviving contemporary theology. Boersma actually has a chapter called “No Plato, No Scripture” in his book Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew, and Credo used the same formula to say “no Plato, no Augustine” in the introduction to its issue on Platonism:
Perceiving the philosophical truth within Platonism, the Great Tradition believed Platonism’s metaphysical commitments could serve Christianity. Consider Augustine, for example, whose conversion to Christianity may have been an impossibility apart from Platonism.
Their broad argument is that the “Great Tradition” is necessary to understand both scripture and the confessions and to escape the stifling intellectual climate of ‘modernity’ that skews our understanding of everything. Enter Craig Carter, whose Substack is called “The Great Tradition” and who is producing a trilogy of “Great Tradition” books, the second of which won the best “Theological Studies” book award from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Journal in 2021. At Creedo he has an article, “The Metaphysics Behind the Reformed Confessions,” that argues this way, speaking of “recovering the riches of seventeenth-century continental and English pastors and theologians who utilized the metaphysics of the Great Tradition to do theology and write and expound the great confessions of Protestantism.”
Compare Lloyd Jones again: “tradition, as defined by them.” Yet this is what leading contemporary Protestant theologians are enamored of just now. Just the other day Credo posted a video titled “Why we love the Bible (and read it with the Great Tradition).” They say that to read scripture for oneself apart from this tradition is to be a ‘biblicist,’ their favorite bogeyman. They say that to be a biblicist is to become a sectarian separated from the church, to risk becoming anti-intellectual and falling into all manner of heresy like anti-Trinitarian and Socinian errors. And so the guardrail to prevent that, on their view, is this “Great Tradition.”
Now I do not consider myself a biblicist, nor propose to enter fully into that debate, but I do say that this bears a frightful similarity to what Lloyd Jones observed in his own day. Leading Protestant theologians are taking their intellectual cues from Rome and falling all over themselves to hobnob with her scholars. Look at what he said of some of the evangelical Anglicans in 1977 on this point:
They’re actually proclaiming and boasting of the fact that their attitude to the Roman church and the Greek Orthodox church and the Russian Orthodox church has undergone an entire change. (32:20)
And:
We are not prepared to recognize all who call themselves Christians as being Christians. This is what these people are doing. They assume that if a man says, I am a Christian and he belongs to a church, it doesn’t matter what he believes, doesn’t matter what he denies. (45:05)
And again, reading what was said by one of its leaders at the birth of the United Reformed Church:[3]
This is a congregationalist speaking, a successor of the men ejected in 1662.[4] “No one,” he says, “who was present at the inauguration of the United Reformed Church in Westminster Abbey is likely to forget the moment when the archbishop of Canterbury, the [Roman] cardinal archbishop of Westminster, and the moderator of the Free Church Federal Council pledged themselves to pursue together that fuller unity of which the URC was a small foretaste.” (17:20)
Union among Protestants was just the first step in a larger movement for union among all professing believers, hence why the leaders of the Anglicans and English Romanists were present.
A similar ecumenical strain marks certain corners of the contemporary Protestant theological academy. They frequently commend members of Rome and the East and give them platforms and awards. Lewis Ayres, professor of Catholic and Historical Theology at Durham University in England, has lectured at Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando. Credo editor Matthew Barrett’s The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church bears on its jacket the good words of the Roman professor Matthew Levering, a central figure in the ressourcement movement, who says Barrett’s “argument may offer promising ecumenical potential.” Imagine that, a book on the Reformation, and the Romans themselves laud it and say it offers “ecumenical potential”![5] In closing, we might well ask with Lloyd Jones:
What has produced this change? Is there something new? Has there been some new discovery? The answer is, there is nothing new at all. There has been no new discovery.
So it is with us. Rome has repented nothing since 1517 and has only changed tactics in attempting to bring us under her tyranny. As with the Anglicans in 1977, so with many evangelicals today. These men have forgotten that false teachers come in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15); that bad company ruins good morals (1 Cor. 15:33); that Rome and the East have buried the gospel in human tradition (Matt. 15:1-6) and idolatry; that God curses those that alter the gospel (Gal. 1:6-9);[6] and so many other things that we might say unto them: “about this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing” (Heb. 5:12). Heartbreaking, all of it, and we should pray God will grant repentance (2 Tim. 2:25) and raise up witnesses (Matt. 9:35-38), lest he remove the church from our lands (Rev. 2:5) and give us over to unbelief and falsehood (2 Thess 2:11) in punishment for such compromise with the false teaching of Rome and the East (Rev. 2:14-16; 20-23).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks/Simpsonville (Greenville Co.), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation. 
[1] Boersma is ordained in the Anglican Church in North America
[2] This is a slight reworking of what I have written elsewhere on this topic: https://tomhervey.substack.com/p/across-the-tiber-and-into-the-cloister#_ftn1
[3] Not to be mistaken with the more recent United Reformed Churches in North America, which bears a more consistently Reformed character, having largely formed out of the Christian Reformed Church in response to scripturally unfaithful developments in her midst in the 1990s.
[4] A reference to the Great Ejection of 1662, in which 2,000 Puritans were cast from their pulpits by the English government.
[5] Boersma similarly honored J.I. Packer as “a great Puritan,” not because, like the original Puritans, he worked for a pure doctrine, worship, and church that was purified of Romish and other errors, but because of his “ecumenical conviction” that “drove him to irenic dialogue with Catholics and Orthodox in the 1990s” and  recognized such as  “fellow Christians who upheld the church’s Great Tradition.”
[6] As many do when they say things like “the gospel is indispensable for addressing the complex social, cultural, and political challenges facing the nation,” thus contradicting Jesus’ claim that his “kingdom is not of this world” (Jn. 18:36). If his kingdom is not of this world, how could the gospel of that kingdom be concerned with worldly cares like political and social challenges? Only if one distorts the meaning of that gospel and the nature of that kingdom can it be so.

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If you want to see how liberalism is wrecking everything, this is it writ large. Don’t think I mean “liberal” like America uses it. I mean hyper-individualist liberalism. Neoliberals, driven by nothing but economic output, salivate over this stuff. Matthew Parris said quite bluntly, it is time we realised economically useless lives should end and the cost of keeping them alive is not worth it. Gross, but honest.

As I was scrolling through the news yesterday, I came across this story in the Guardian. As most will know, the Netherlands has brought assisted dying into law. As many will also know, this is currently a live discussion in the UK and it seems almost inevitable that we will follow suit. The debates are currently happening but it seems like one of those campaigning issues that is all over the media now and has a whiff of sad inevitability about it. I would love to be proven wrong, I just suspect I won’t be.
Anyway, this Dutch woman hit the news because she has just won a landmark judgement granting her request for assisted dying. What makes this a landmark judgement, as opposed to just another run of the mill permission to be killed (what a horrible half sentence that is), is that she has been granted her request on the grounds of ‘unbearable mental suffering’. She suffers from chronic depression, anxiety, trauma and an unspecified personality disorder. In other words, her suicidal ideation and self-harm are no longer viewed as symptoms of her mental disorder to be relieved but as the very cure to the underlying mental health issues she currently faces.
Last month, I wrote this concerning such moves in Britain:
As many of you will know, I suffer from quite serious depressive illness. I have made more than one serious attempt on my own life and actively planned many more. Fortunately, I am alive today because I was not very effective at killing myself on my own and I now have some helpful medication that keeps me broadly on a level. The threat of assisted dying has some serious and real implications for people like me.
I went on:
If we are comfortable with people killing themselves, even encouraging some to do so, it will be hard to view as tragic those who do so as they struggle with mental illness. As we consider it less tragic, we may well find ourselves caring less about intervening with mental health services to avert it. If we follow the reasoning of Matthew Parris, the mentally ill are useless to society and, therefore, not worth saving. Not only is the cost of keeping them alive on benefits not worth it on such thinking, the broader cost of mental health interventions will similarly not be worth it. Just as some trumpeted abortion as health care because it is cheaper than paying out benefits and providing high level children’s and family services, so it won’t be long before we twig that the cheapest solution to mental health problems is to not bother intervening and then trumpet assisted dying as a form of health care too.
On a more personal note, I am alive today because I was not very competent in trying to kill myself. I am quite confident that if assisted dying were legalised and someone was willing to help, I would have been much more effective. If that someone is a doctor, it is nigh on guaranteed. If the grounds for assisted dying is the desire of the individual to die, and their willingness to be put out of their misery, it is hard to imagine anything other than a queue of severely ill, mentally tormented people not lining up to take advantage of the provisions. We should be at least a bit troubled by the prospect of doctors being less concerned about how we might treat one’s suicidal ideation so much as proposing how they can help their patients most effectively carry it out!
Well, somewhat predictably, here we are looking at exactly that being proposed in the Netherlands. Indeed, not only proposed, but legally granted by court injunction. This, I think, really should make any British politician sit up and take notice. It should similarly make the British public sit up and take notice.
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