I do not know about you, but I pray daily that the Lord would return quickly. Yet sometimes I wonder if he ever will return – at least in my lifetime. I just really want to see this evil world come to a conclusion.

Some Musings on the Difference between My Clock and God’s Clock
We are very impatient people here in the West. We want instant everything. We want everything and we want it now. Christians are not immune to this way of doing things. They too can demand that everything happens immediately. For example, they can expect instant Christian maturity or they can demand instant answers to their prayers.
But God is on his own timetable, not ours. He does things when they need to be done, not when we think they should be done. So we have need for some patience here, among other things. That means not always rushing around, but actually letting God set the timetable and not us.
And we need to learn how to wait on God – the gist of which is just that: waiting. Some famous passages come to mind here about this:
Wait for the Lord;be strong, and let your heart take courage;wait for the Lord!Psalm 27:14
I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry.Psalm 40:1
But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.Isaiah 40:31
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.Lamentations 3:25
Consider the issue of prayer and what seems like unanswered prayer, or a long delay in getting some sort of answer. I do not know about you, but I pray daily that the Lord would return quickly. Yet sometimes I wonder if he ever will return – at least in my lifetime. I just really want to see this evil world come to a conclusion.
I guess I am rather like those talked about in 2 Peter 3. There Peter discusses scoffers, and he says this in verses 4-10:
They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief…
I hate to say it, but sometimes I sorta think and feel the same way as the scoffers do: “All things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.” It seems the evil and suffering and misery and pain just keep on coming – relentlessly. I just want it all to come to an end and I wish God would hurry things up a bit!
But plenty of prayers that we offer up to God may seem to be getting nowhere fast in terms of some kind of answer. Often we have to wait quite a while before we see God acting on our behalf. One passage which speaks to this and is rather mysterious (I will need to write a separate article on it one day), is what we find in Daniel 10:10-14:
And behold, a hand touched me and set me trembling on my hands and knees. And he said to me, “O Daniel, man greatly loved, understand the words that I speak to you, and stand upright, for now I have been sent to you.” And when he had spoken this word to me, I stood up trembling. Then he said to me, “Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there with the kings of Persia, and came to make you understand what is to happen to your people in the latter days. For the vision is for days yet to come.”
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, November 27, 2023
A time of social upheaval and chaos such as ours is likely to send even the most devout Christians into despair unless they can place the terrifying flux of life in the earthly city against the unchanging reality of the sovereign God himself. It is the same with personal suffering. What patient suffering from cancer wants a doctor who has cancer too? They want a doctor who can overcome their illness. That is the God of classical theism. He does not need to suffer as God. He needs to take human flesh and overcome death in that flesh. 

Last Monday I had the pleasure of delivering the opening lecture for the newly-founded Center for Classical Theology. The brainchild of Matthew Barrett, of Midwestern Baptist Seminary, its aim is to reinvigorate Protestantism by reconnecting it to its historical and theological roots in the patristic and medieval periods. Unfortunately, much of modern evangelicalism sorely needs to recover “classical theology”—the term Barrett uses to describe orthodox Christian doctrines as set forth by the creeds, the Great Tradition of theology exemplified by the ancient ecumenical councils, and traditional Protestant confessions such as the Westminster Confession. 
Recent scholarship in both the ancient church and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism have exposed an unfortunate problem with large swathes of the conservative, and especially evangelical, Protestant world. Much good work was done over the last century in both articulating a high view of the authority of Scripture and developing more self-conscious and sophisticated theological approaches to biblical interpretation. But at the same time, many Protestants became disconnected from creedal and confessional teaching on the doctrine of God (and thus by inference, from Christology). Many conservative Protestants did not even notice that this was the case, as their understanding of what the creeds and confessions actually claimed was refracted through a biblicist lens that was detached from the history of doctrinal debate behind these documents. 
Hence, doctrines such as simplicity, immutability, and eternal generation have been redefined or have vanished altogether in certain Protestant communities, even as many who played a role in this maintained a verbal commitment to the Nicene Creed or the Westminster Confession of Faith. The conservative criticism of liberal Christians—that they use orthodox words but mean something different—somehow did not apply when the people doing so affirmed the historical resurrection but rejected the basic elements of the classical doctrine of God. 
A recovery of classical theology is thus long overdue for a variety of reasons. The language of confessional Protestantism and orthodox evangelicalism was historically rooted in these classical doctrines. The Reformers and their hearers took it for granted that theology is always to be done in careful dialogue with the past and, as much as possible, in continuity with it. But this is simply counter-intuitive to an evangelicalism shaped more by revivalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the fundamentalist-modernist strife of the early twentieth. 
That points toward one of the reasons classical theology and classical theism now seem implausible to many. True to its roots, evangelical Christianity in our modern day is too often impatient with language that seems speculative and abstract and with doctrine that cannot be easily instrumentalized.
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Spurgeon was solidly on the side of “simple people who believed in plenary inspiration” and the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. And he was willing to align himself in battles for truth with gospel-loving Christians…with whom he differed on important but somewhat lesser matters. Spurgeon was a fighter and a lover. In this, he is instructive to us on where and how to draw battle lines.

Charles Spurgeon should not be interpreted as a theological sadist, deriving pleasure from pummeling his doctrinal opponents. That he was a notable defender of the faith, is without question. He fought against baptismal regeneration and the undermining of essential evangelical doctrines, which he saw as threats to the gospel. He was outspoken and took strong stands on many issues, but his primary target was false teachings that tinkered with the fundamentals of the faith, doctrines such as the deity of Christ, the inspiration of Scripture, and the reality and horrors of Hell. Beyond that, he enjoyed a rather broad communion with fellow gospel-lovers with whom he disagreed on secondary or tertiary doctrines. If one loved and treasured the gospel, Spurgeon claimed him as a friend.
Spurgeon fearlessly defended truth while displaying gospel unity. One example is evident in his book review of The Doctrines of Annihilation and Universalism, viewed in the Light of Reason, Analogy, and Revelation by Thomas Wood of the Wesleyan Conference. Spurgeon writes, “part of his [Wood’s] argument bears hard upon Calvinists, but we can very well endure all that he can say on that point, and yet thank him for service rendered in slaying the deadly error.” Spurgeon was a Calvinist. Wood was Arminian. Significant differences stand between Calvinism and Arminianism. Spurgeon even closely equated Calvinism with the gospel. That said, even with his high regard for Calvinistic theology, he was most concerned about the “deadly error” which undermined the gospel. In fighting the serious errors of annihilation and universalism, he was one with his fellow gospel advocate, Thomas Wood.
Spurgeon valued Wood’s book, finding essential agreement with its main arguments. To deny eternal punishment for the wicked was to cut at the heart of the gospel that saves men from such judgment. Spurgeon, the Calvinist, understood the stakes and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Thomas Wood, the Arminian, in opposing damnable heresy.
Reflecting on Wood’s book Spurgeon wrote,
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