09.12.09
Making the Gospel Relevant!
This term immediately makes the conservative suspicious and the liberal excited. It is resisted as an innovation by one and taken as a mandate to innovate by the other. In a quest to make the Gospel relevant to the culture we live in, biblical principles of worship have been set aside and, in total contradiction to the intended goal, the Gospel has been emptied of its content and therefore of its power.
This is not to say we must not still strive to make the Gospel relevant to the culture we live in. We need to study to understand society so as to address the needs of the people we seek to witness to. If a missionary is sent to labour in a foreign land a huge emphasis is placed upon their coming to understand the customs, beliefs and worldview of the people they seek to reach. But something has happened in our conservative reformed Churches in the last century; and that is we have not come to grips with the cultural drift in our own societies. We preach to a neo-pagan culture as if it were still Christian. In terms of the evangelism of the New Testament Church in the book of Acts – we preach to Greeks as though they had all the categories of the Jews.
In our evangelism then it is imperative that we study the particular needs of our society and address them without compromising in any way the inviolable principles and doctrines of the Word of God. Gordon Keddie when examining Paul’s method of evangelism in Athens writes ‘If we merely trot out our canned Gospel message or moral outrage, without identifying the sinners specific need, we shall only be talking to ourselves. Paul never preached the Gospel in the abstract, he scratched were people itched.’
G.B.
09.03.09
Musing and Amusing are Opposites.
Neil Postman is well known for his cultural commentary ‘Amusing ourselves to Death.’ Gresham Machen beat him to it however, and that from a Christian perspective, writing in 1934. I think it will help you to stop clicking the internet icon on your computer as often as you do in those silent, quiet moments. It could be you have become dependent on your 10 minute internet fix, and if the bell does not chirp frequently enough to let you know something has landed in your inbox – you check and check and check again. Here’s Machen then, followed by Asaph and David.
‘I think the man who above all should be pitied is the man who has never learned to amuse himself without mechanical assistance when he is alone. Even babies are sometimes taught to amuse themselves. I remember when I was at Princeton I used to watch the baby of one of the professors on the Seminary campus. That self-reliant little mite of humanity would spend the entire morning in the middle of that great lesson how to use his lesuire time. He did not need to have anybody else rattle his rattle for him. Thankyou, if he needed a rattle at all, he could rattle his own rattle for himself. He was getting a good preparation for life. A person who can rattle his own rattle when he is a baby is very apt to be able to paddle his own canoe when he becomes a man.
‘The average American, however, remains a baby all his life. He is unable to rattle his own rattle. He has to have somebody else amuse him all the time. Leave him alone for five minutes, and he has to turn on his radio. It seems to make very little difference to him what the radio gives forth. All he wants is that some kind of physical impact shall be made on his eardrums – and incidently on everybody else’s eardrums – just to keep him from having one moment to himself. Turn off his radio even for a moment and the appalling emptiness of his life is at once revealed.’
Compare this with Asaph in Ps 77 ‘I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search’ v6. ‘I will remember the works of the Lord: surely I will remember thy wonders of old. I will meditate also of all thy work, and talk of all thy doings.’ v10-11.
Or With David in Ps 143:5 ‘I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the works of thy hands.’
Ultimately Musing and Amusing (or being amused) are opposites!
G.B.
09.01.09
Covenant Children – What’s the difference anyway?
When I have in the past attempted to explain to non-paedobaptists the significance of seeing our children as in the Covenant of Grace, I have learned that they often see little difference in practice between how they view their children and how many paedo-baptists view their children. I can understand this because many paedo-baptists simply baptise their children and then do not view their children any differently in practice than Baptists. Both groups confine their view of the child as being privileged to be brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and as more ‘privileged’ than the children of unbelievers only in so far as they are exposed to the means of grace and a Christian home. However the doctrine of children in the covenant is more than this.
Recently I have been reading ‘Foundations of Christian Education’ by Van-Til and Berkhof and in Berkhof’s chapter on Education and the Covenant of Grace he deals wonderfully with the issues we address above.
On the Promises of the Covenant he says ‘There are promises for the present and for the future, promises for days of prosperity and for seasons of adversity, promises for the living and they dying. There are promises of renewed strength for those whose strength seems to fail, promises of courage for the faint hearted and of rest for the weary. There are promises of guidance through life and of deliverance out of temptations, promises of the support of the everlasting arms and of the good cheer for the afflicted and the discouraged, promises of security for storm tossed souls, promises too of an everlasting home for weary pilgrims…. And the promises – all the promises, as many promises as there are and that are yea and amen in Christ Jesus – are for us and for our children.’
Then he deals with the Requirements of the Covenant, introducing the concept of CONDITIONALITY. We must believe in the mediator of the Covenant, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is only by saving faith that we become conscious partakers of the covenant life. This faith is wrought by the Spirit of God and of itself merits nothing. It is at this point that Berkhof deals with the issue of Covenant Children.
‘It is in this connection it is highly necessary to bear in mind that living in the covenant relationship is something more than living under the gospel, under the free offer of salvation. There is here something more than an offer, something more than a promise [made to all in that offer G.B]; there is an agreement. The covenant is an established covenant, a covenant agreeed to, agreed to by parents also for their children…. This means that, for the children of the covenant, the covenant is not merely an offer which they can accept or reject, but an agreement which they have entered; and that, if they do not live up to the terms of the agreeement, they are covenant breakers.’
Parents make the promise on their children’s behalf that they will be the Lord’s. In one sense they promise more than they can accomplish because they cannot give new life to their children, yet their promise is to devote their seed to God and to train them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord within the pale of the covenant. They make this promise entirely on the strength of the promises of the Lord and fulfil their obligation in trustful reliance on the Lord to give them a new heart and faith in Christ. Training their children in the way they should go, they look with expectancy that when those children are old they will not depart from this way.
G.B.
