The Seat of Scoffers | Psalm 1:1
Before we pride ourselves in avoiding such scoffers in our lives, I would make the argument that too many Christians today gladly sit in scoffing seats as they consume various forms of entertainment. The sad reality is that much of the media that we consume is produced by those who very much openly scoff at God’s wisdom as found within His Word and who actively seek to promote values antithetical to those in Scripture.
nor sits in the seat of scoffers
Psalm 1:1 ESV
The first verse of Psalm 1 concludes with a third description of the blessed man by way of negation. Those who walk in the favor of the LORD do not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor do they stand in the way of sinners. Finally, they do not sit in the seat of scoffers.
Scoffer is not a commonly word used today, but it is very common within the wisdom literature of the Bible. A scoffer is typically presented as a kind of fool, one who has rejected the wisdom of God entirely, with a particular emphasis upon his speech. Indeed, scoffer is sometimes used synonymously with mocker to describe a person who is so critical that they have soundly left wisdom behind.
If you have ever read The Last Battle (the final book in The Chronicles of Narnia), the dwarfs who scoff at risking their lives to defend Narnia and eventually scoff at the heavenly reality around them are great examples. Their self-imposed blindness is exactly how scoffers end up. “Claiming to be wise, they became fool” (Romans 1:22).
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The Resurrection
Paul did not preach the resurrection because it was popular. He preached it because it was true. The resurrection of Jesus confirmed the coming judgment but also secured blessing for the undeserving. However God is pleased to use this truth in the lives of unbelievers, the church’s task remains the same—to tell others that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.
The resurrection of the dead is anathema to the modern mind. Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most famous New Testament scholars of the twentieth century and a theological liberal, declared, “An historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable.” To the Apostle Paul, however, Christianity without the resurrection of Jesus from the dead was inconceivable (see 1 Cor. 15:1–11). In company with the other Apostles, Paul proclaimed the resurrection as the great fact upon which Christianity stands or falls.
How do we tell jaded and skeptical people about the resurrection? Luke’s account of Paul’s ministry in Athens (Acts 17:16–34) gives us much-needed direction. When Paul arrived in Athens, he preached at the synagogue, but he also went to the “marketplace,” where philosophers and teachers congregated to exchange ideas (v. 17). Paul persevered through initial misunderstanding and mockery, and he accepted an invitation to address the Areopagus, an august body of retired public officials.
In that address, Paul first gently but firmly exposes one of the fundamental and fatal weaknesses of polytheism. The altar “to the unknown god” was the Athenians’ standing acknowledgment that their religion was insufficient and inadequate. Paul then presents to the Athenians the solution that they need but never found on their own—the worship of the one true God.
Paul tells the Athenians about the sovereign and all-sufficient God who made and upholds the world and all that is in it (vv. 24–25). He also tells them about themselves (vv. 26–29). God has made all human beings from “one man,” and He has furthermore “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (17:26). The entirety of our lives is lived inescapably before the omnipresent God (17:28). We are, furthermore, His image-bearers (“offspring”; vv. 28–29).
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Three Applications of Christ’s Intercession
With Jesus Christ, you are never without an intercessor that can overcome all your enemies, comfort all your wounds, advocate for all your needs, and sustain even the greatest of doubts and the weakest moments of faith. You are covered in his grace from this day until the very last. You may feel weak and unworthy, but take heart, Jesus lives for you!
To intercede means to intervene on someone’s behalf. It means to entreat, to argue, to plead, and to stand in the gap between two people with a view of reconciliation. Intercession is prayer but of a specific kind. There is much that is mysterious about Jesus’s intercession, but the Bible and great theologians of church history offer some clarity. Referring to Christ’s intercession, the Puritan John Owen defined it as “his continual appearance for us in the presence of God, by virtue of his office as the ‘high priest over the house of God,’ representing the efficacy of his oblation [offering], accompanied with tender care, love, and desires for the welfare, supply, deliverance, and salvation of the church.”[1]
In other words, by virtue of his all-sufficient atoning sacrifice, Jesus stands at the Father’s right hand in heaven, working and praying for us to accomplish our full salvation.
Whenever we approach a biblical doctrine, there is the temptation to leave it in the realm of the intellectual. But it is good to consider how the doctrine applies to our lives. How does what we now know of Christ’s intercession make our hearts burn within us (Luke 24:32)?
Here I will make three primary applications.
Application 1: Christ’s Intercession Reveals His Heart for Sinners
Though we are justified in Christ for all time when we first trust his saving work, we do not stop sinning until the age to come when we are with him in glory. Though we know the truth of God’s love, we still have low thoughts of God, disbelieving, mistrusting, and doubting him. Though we know we are saved by Christ’s works, not our own, we still fall into the old ruts of our self-salvation projects, denying the power of his life, death, and resurrection. Our fleshly desires may wane, but they do not disappear, and we continue to use God’s good gifts for improper ends. Who will save us from this body of death (Rom. 7:24)? Jesus, by the power of his intercession.
John Bunyan wrote a whole book about Hebrews 7:25 called Christ a Complete Savior. In that book, he said,
“Many there be that begin with grace, and end with works, and think that this is the only way…But to be saved and brought to glory, to be carried through this dangerous world, from my first moving after Christ, until I set my foot within the gates of paradise, this is the work of my mediator, of my high priest and intercessor. It is he that fetches us again when we are run away; it is he that lifts us up when the devil and sin have thrown us down; it is he that quickens us when we grow cold; it is he that comforts us when we despair; it is he that obtains fresh pardon when we have contracted sin; and he that purges our consciences when they are loaded with guilt…We are saved by Christ; brought to glory by Christ; and all our works are no otherways made acceptable to God, but by the person and personal excellences and works of Christ.”
Christ’s intercession is there to save us from the sin that remains. God did not expect us to become perfect and never again struggle after our conversion. He factored our ongoing fight against sin into the equation and provided the intercession of Christ to preserve and encourage us. That shows how great the love of Christ is for us sinners. Why would he intercede if he didn’t care? Why would we be continually on his mind if he did not love us? As a parent loves a child and thinks about them all the time, so Christ considers us and always thinks of our good. He prays on our behalf. He takes our prayers and rewords them on the way up (Rom. 8:26). He holds the door to heaven open for us. He is more committed to our salvation than we are, and he will never leave us nor forsake us. He cares for us and sends affirmations of that care to us by his Spirit.
The Puritan Thomas Goodwin spoke of 1 Corinthians 2:16, where Paul says we have the “mind of Christ.” You know those moments when you sense a word from the Lord, a verse of Scripture, or a reminder of the love of Christ, those seemingly invasive thoughts that remind you of God’s love? Those are Spirit-sent thoughts from Jesus himself. They are sent down from heaven to tell us what he is thinking of us and for us in that very moment. Those are holy moments with our interceding Christ.
And in those moments when we find ourselves weak and wounded because of sin, when we long for a holy moment but fear we have blown it big-time, we must remember his intercession. We must remember his heart for sinners and sufferers, how gentle and careful he is with us. Hear Goodwin describe it.
“Your very sins move him to pity more than to anger…For he suffers with us under our infirmities, and by infirmities are meant sins, as well as other miseries…”
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A Prophet of School Choice
Written by Matthew H. Lee |
Thursday, December 7, 2023For Machen, the great benefit of these school choice reforms was that they would empower parents to oversee their children’s education. As he stated to the Sentinels, the hope is that “we may return to the principle of freedom for individual parents in the education of their children in accordance with their conscience.” School choice policies enacted and expanded this year promote this noble end and serve as an unexpected tribute to Machen on the hundredth anniversary of Christianity and Liberalism.
This year is the centennial of J. Gresham Machen’s magnum opus, Christianity and Liberalism.
Originally published in 1923, Machen wrote the book in response to a rising tide of theological liberalism and modernism in the United States. Machen’s views ultimately led him out of his denomination and out of Princeton Seminary, both of which accepted more liberal and modernist tendencies, and led him to help found two enduring institutions—Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936).
While Machen’s achievements are chiefly theological, he wrote and spoke extensively about education, where he observed some of the deteriorating effects of liberalism. One hundred years of policy and research have proven Machen prescient in his views on education policy, which can largely be grouped into three themes: resistance against standardization, opposition to centralization, and insistence on parental choice.
Resistance Against Standardization
First, Machen resisted trends to standardize both the teaching profession and student learning. The Lusk Laws in New York, for example, required teachers to obtain certification from the commissioner of education and made them subject to state visitation. Though repealed in 1923, less than two years after they passed, the spirit of the Lusk Laws endures. Nearly every state requires teachers to obtain some certification, often in addition to holding a degree in the field of education, despite the fact that research fails to document evidence of a meaningful link between certification and teacher quality.
Machen believed the modernist trend of training teachers in the science of education, rather than with content in their disciplines, marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of what teaching is. He lamented that the primary preparation of modern teachers was not “to study the subject that he is going to teach. Instead of studying the subject that he is going to teach, he studies ‘education.’”
In Machen’s view, the great danger in standardization and in emphasizing methodology over content is that it would place the child “under the control of psychological experts, themselves without the slightest acquaintance with the higher realms of human life, who proceed to prevent any such acquaintance being gained by those who come under their care.”
Treating education as a mechanistic process would result in “intellectual as well as moral decline” because in such a context, morality is based “upon experience, instead of upon an absolute distinction between right and wrong,” Machen said in a 1926 address to the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian organization dedicated to resisting federal overreach.
To compensate for the meagerness of character formation in modern education, psychological experts instead try to inject civic and moral values into a standardized, secularized curriculum. Machen wrote about such “morality codes” in a 1925 essay titled “Reforming the Government Schools.” He observed that these codes were “making the situation tenfold worse; far from checking the ravages of immorality, they are for the most part themselves non-moral at the root.” Today, morality codes have many faces, but the same empty core. Social and emotional learning (SEL), for example, provides analogs for cardinal virtues promoted by classical and Christian education, but absent the thick moral context of religion.
Opposition to Centralization
Machen was also opposed to the centralization of oversight of education in the federal government, a natural extension of his resistance to standardization. In February 1926, a month after his Sentinels address, Machen provided expert testimony on behalf of the Sentinels for a Congressional hearing dealing with several issues, including the formation of a federal Department of Education, which he predicted that if enacted, would be “the worst fate into which any country can fall.” While he helped defeat the proposal for a federal department, his victory was merely temporary, as a federal department of education would eventually be formed as a cabinet-level department in 1980.
Machen was not being hyperbolic in his assessment. Since the establishment of the first federal agency in 1867, which started with only a commissioner and a staff of three, the federal role in education has ballooned. For 2023–24, the Department of Education budgeted over $270 billion in spending—all the more alarming when one considers that the Department of Education accounts for only three-fifths of all federal spending on education. Again, Machen has been vindicated by research, which has failed to document a reliable link between spending and student outcomes.
A common argument for centralized control over education, both in Machen’s day and today, is easily addressed.
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