The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 6
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five
The Apostle Paul writes that “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation” (Romans 1:16). He uses those words to explain why in the first half of the same verse that he is “not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.” Maybe you might think that when Paul is saying that he is not ashamed of the gospel, that there was no way he would be. Paul ends Ephesians and Colossians asking for the churches to pray for boldness for him to preach the gospel.
Not Ashamed of the Gospel: Worship
Paul could be ashamed, but he wasn’t, because the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. If he was ashamed, that meant less gospel preaching and then less salvation. What occurs when shame for the gospel brings less gospel preaching?
Earlier in Romans 1, Paul writes, “For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son.” His word “serve” translates the Greek word latreuo, which is translated “worship” elsewhere (Philippians 3:3). As the word “serve” it is the priestly service, which enacts the offerings and the sacrifices. The priests presented these to God as prescribed by Him in His Word. This hearkens to the language of Paul in Romans 12:1, “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”
To “present” is to “offer.” “Service” in Romans 12:1 is latreia, the noun form of the verb latreuo. It is reasonable worship. Worship is giving God what He wants. Priests in the Old Testament sacrificial system served, but it was the priestly service of offerings. They presented to God what He said in His ceremonial law.
Jesus made New Testament believers “priests” (Rev 1:6). As Peter wrote, New Testament believers are a holy priesthood, offering up spiritual sacrifices unto God (1 Peter 2:5). This equals or surpasses what Old Testament priests did. It isn’t lesser.
In Romans 1:9 the Apostle Paul says his gospel preaching is to worship with his spirit. Worship must be acceptable to God. His preaching of the gospel is acceptable unto God. Worship glorifies God.
The Missionary Psalm
The glory of God corresponds to the perfections of God’s attributes. His attributes are revealed before men. Glorifying God exalts those attributes by showing them. Preaching the gospel shows forth the attributes of God. With regard to this, I think of Psalm 67, what Spurgeon and others called and call “the missionary psalm.”
1 <To the chief Musician on Neginoth, A Psalm or Song.> God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us; Selah. 2 That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations. 3 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. 4 O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. Selah. 5 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. 6 Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us. 7 God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.
Spurgeon writes in his Treasury:
How admirably balanced are the parts of this missionary song! The people of God long to see all the nations participating in their privileges, “visited with God’s salvation, and gladdened with the gladness of his nation” (Ps 106:5). They long to hear all the nationalities giving thanks to the Lord, and hallowing his name; to see the face of the whole earth, which sin has darkened so long, smiling with the brightness of a second Eden.
Exalting God Before the Heathen
Evangelism makes God’s way “known upon the earth,” His “saving health among all nations” (verse 2). The point of this in the end (verse 7) is that “all the ends of the earth shall fear him.” Worship starts with knowing Who God is, which brings reverence of Him, respect of Him, lifting Him up to His rightful place in the imagination of men. The gospel shows who God is in all His attributes. This is worth consideration.
Believers can talk about the gospel among themselves. It’s worth it. However, God wants exaltation among the heathen, among the nations, and in the world. He made those people in His image. He created them for His pleasure. Even if they don’t believe the gospel, they should hear it. When believers preach it, the true gospel, they exalt God.
To be ashamed of the gospel is to be ashamed of the power of God, which is an attribute of God. However, salvation itself as told by the gospel also manifests attributes of God: His holiness, His righteousness, His love, His goodness. His justice, and more. Even if someone doesn’t receive the gospel. believers worship God by preaching it.
More to Come
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 5
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
In my own experience, people don’t use the word “salvation” much. Over time it became a distinctly religious or theological term. With a deathly illness, can a doctor save his patient? When he does, he saved his life. For a time, he saved him from physical death. He will still die later. A doctor saved him with a medication or a surgery. He still dies though, just later.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SALVATION
When Paul says “salvation” in Romans 1:16, he means eternal salvation. It is salvation from physical death, because of bodily resurrection. However, most of all it is salvation from sin, from spiritual death, and from eternal death. We can hardly fathom the immensity of trouble, pain, and loss of eternal death. Therefore, we can’t fully understand the full significance of the salvation that is eternal life.
People place temporal worldly gains above eternal heavenly ones. The Lord Jesus addresses this reality with His statements in the gospels about gaining the whole world but losing your own soul. Nothing is even close to as bad, including physical death, to eternal death. No loss is even close to as catastrophic as losing the eternal soul.
Men look to solve the problems they deem most serious. That’s where they spend their time, energy, effort, and money. The latter gives evidence of the former.
When men elevate to the most serious problems much lesser problems they take away the importance of what is really serious. Nothing is more serious than eternal death. The gospel is the only solution to that problem. If the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, and salvation is salvation from eternal death, then the gospel is the most important solution to mankind.
THE PRIORITY OF PREACHING THE GOSPEL
I write all of the above because of the priority of preaching the gospel. Only the gospel alleviates the worst to bring the best. When I say worst, I mean worst. This is no exaggeration. It isn’t close. And so when I say best, whatever you might think is best, this is far better.
People receive renown on earth for “saving” people from far less than what the salvation of Romans 1:16 saves them from. What they get in their temporal salvation doesn’t last. What someone gets from eternal salvation lasts through all eternity. Yet still, people, even Christians, elevate these lesser savings or salvations to greater than the eternal salvation of Romans 1:16.
Salvation of Romans 1:16 also means salvation from a wasted life and salvation from unfulfilled purpose for life. Man can’t glorify God or please God without the salvation of Romans 1:16. He may please himself and others, but not God.
The gospel brings the outstanding accomplishment of eternal salvation. God uses the person preaching the gospel to attain this greatest achievement. The world, however, touts and will laud the short term attainments. Someone donates for new uniforms. A wealthy man pays for a new wing at the hospital. A celebrity buys and then serves turkeys at Thanksgiving or Christmas time.
THE REWARDS FOR SALVATION
A war hero visits the White House for the Congressional medal of honor. Hollywood produces a film about a man who saved dozens from a concentration camp. The NFL honors a football player with a statue in the Hall of Fame. The NBA pays a star player 50 million dollars for one year. Biographies are written about leaders of human empires. Men build a museum to an inventor. Heaven though rejoices over the salvation of a single lost soul (Luke 15:7).
The gospel is the power of God unto the salvation over which heaven rejoices. The New Testament calls the presentation of the gospel, preaching. When someone preaches the gospel that saves, the one hearing often cringes or scowls. I saw that all the time in my life. Your reward for preaching the gospel is a cringe or scowl or worse. Many times someone yelled at me for showing up to preach the gospel to him. More than once someone said he would call the police if I didn’t walk away from his house, when there preaching the gospel.
Believers do not look for temporal rewards. They want the eternal ones. Few would even offer a temporal reward for preaching the gospel. Churches might pay a pastor, who does the work of the evangelist and equips his church for preaching the gospel. They might support a missionary to go and preach where they can’t or won’t preach the gospel. This aligns with the rejoicing and purpose of heaven.
More to Come
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 4
Scripture evinces a tendency to distrust the gospel. This reveals itself in trying other means than the gospel for salvations or increased numbers of conversions. When Paul writes, “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation,” he says that it is only the gospel that is the power of God unto salvation. No human instrument helps the gospel.
I explained the harmony of the working of the Holy Spirit with the gospel, their being the same. Love, compassion, and all of that, which accompany the gospel, are not accomplished by human means. They are God working “in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philip 2:13). God uses believers as instruments. As before mentioned, they are messengers (cf. Malachi 3:1). He uses hard or blessed providences to prepare men’s hearts.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3). The infliction of hard providences conditions hearts for reception. As Jesus said (Matt 9:12), “They that be whole need not a physician.” In Mark 2:17, He portrays the same truth: “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” We know that hard, worldly, and superficial heartedness affects reception of the gospel seed (Matthew 13:1-23). None of these truths detract from the truth of “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.
Many different ways professing believers or perhaps non-believers show their unbelief in the gospel as the power of God unto salvation, represented by various categories of manifestations of their unbelief.
Human Means or Methods Better Than the Gospel
For many and from a human perspective, the gospel is ineffective. It doesn’t work. Paul pointed out this error in 1 Corinthians 1-2. To the lost, he says “the preaching of the cross,” the gospel, “is foolishness” (1 Cor 1:18). They want either something more clever, inventive, or scholarly, what Paul calls “wisdom” (1:18-21), a human type, or a kind of ecstatic experience, quasi supernatural, that would indicate divine power, what Paul calls “signs” or “might” (1 Cor 1:19-27). The gospel doesn’t fit either demand of the world for persuasion.
The gospel is the prescribed method of God for salvation because it gives glory to God. Its inexplicability leaves God only as the source of its work and effects. Then “no flesh should glory in his presence” (1 Cor 1:29). “He that glorieth. . . glorie(s) in the Lord” (1 Cor 1:31).
Part of the wisdom of man, his personal nobility, manifests itself in impressive rhetorical flourish or “excellency of speech or of wisdom” (1 Cor 2:1). The speech is the style and the wisdom is the superior intellect. The gospel is not an exercise in amazing speech and human ingenuity. It is a fulfillment of faithfulness, the one rowing in the galley of the ship (cf. 1 Cor 4:1-2), keeping his hands on the oar. It isn’t beyond a believer to do.
God gifts some more to do it (gifts of prophecy and teaching, verbal gifts, 1 Cor 12, Rom 12, 1 Pet 4), but everyone can do it because it requires only faithfulness. This may and does include studying scripture to the extent that he shows himself a “workman that needeth not to be ashamed” (2 Timothy 2:15).
Playing Along with Unbelievers
Using other means than the gospel plays along with unbelievers, accrediting their rejection of or indifference to it. The world wants something smart and something amazing to it. A professing believer or just an unbeliever, who claims to be a believer, thinks or says:
The world likes this. It likes this when I do it. The world then responds to this. My group gets bigger because of this. It’s smart and amazing. The world recognizes this. This is what I should.
This too is human wisdom and seeking after signs, when no one is getting signs. It glorifies the one who came up with the acceptable idea, going along with the world liking what it accepts. This doesn’t glorify the Lord though and it doesn’t even work, even though it looks like it’s working, part of its deceit.
What really works makes someone the offscouring of the world and hated, as Christ talked about to begin the Sermon on the Mount (1 Cor 4:13, Matt 5:10-12). Depending on God for His work gets a reaction like someone in the world would never want to have. He knows he will get it, so he moves a different direction, the broad road, to avoid it. Becoming hated doesn’t seem like an effective method. Being liked looks more like what will work, so instead of faithful service, professing believers and probably unbelievers signal their own virtue with their methods.
More to Come
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 3
If the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, then what does that say about the Holy Spirit and His work? Does He have a part? The gospel is a message from the Bible and the Holy Spirit works through that message. The Holy Spirit speaks through the Bible. I have appreciated the language, “the mouthpiece of the text.” In Ephesians 6:17 language, the Word of God is the sword of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit works, but He works through the Word of God. This helps explain one aspect of how the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.
The Substance of the Preaching of the Gospel
Furthermore, the gospel made of scripture or the declaration of scripture itself is powerful, as Hebrews 4:12 says. “The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.” This couples or harmonizes well with Romans 10:17, “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Faith comes by hearing the Word of God.
The gospel is the power of God unto salvation, not some kind of work of the Holy Spirit separate from words. I’m speaking of the unbiblical teaching of “regeneration precedes faith.” No. The gospel is the power of God unto regeneration, part of salvation. Even though scripture does not teach regeneration preceding faith, it says gospel preaching precedes faith. The Holy Spirit uses the message to regenerate, just like the Word of God generated the world in Genesis 1.
The Greek term for “word” in “word of God” in Romans 10:17 is rhema, not logos, both translated “word” in the New Testament. Rhema does not speak of scripture or the Bible as a whole, but an individual passage. Faith does not come from opening the pages of the entire book, but using the specific texts of scripture in the appropriate manner. There isn’t power in a wrong interpretation as if the Bible is a kind of talisman with magical qualities. The power comes through its message, what the text actually says.
What I’m writing fits with 1 Corinthians 1:21, when Paul says “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” This again corresponds to Romans 1:16, written also by the Apostle Paul. “Preaching” isn’t a tone or a style, yelling or bellowing forth. It is the Greek word, kerugma, which refers to the substance of the communication. It is not preaching the act, but preaching as in the message of the declaration. The preaching is what is being said, not how it is being said.
More people are not converted because someone is more clever in his speaking. People are saved because they hear the truth, the right content, and they respond to that. As you read this, you might think that something else could help the gospel along. I don’t think we should separate sincerity and compassion from the message itself. Paul uses the terminology, “speak the truth in love,” in Ephesians 4:15.
Compassion or the Lack and More Either Diminish or Adorn as Part of the Message
First, it is love to speak the truth, as opposed to (1) speaking error and (2) not speaking it, remaining silent. Jesus spoke the truth. Paul spoke the truth. Also though, someone could speak the truth without love or do it with some other wrong motive. This is one of the wrong motives referred by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. Though you speak with the great eloquence, that is, with the tongues of men and angels, if you don’t do it with love, it is “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
Sounding brass, what I like to call a gong, and tinkling cymbals, which imagines banging on forged metal platters, both percussion types of instruments, don’t have meaning without accompanying instruments that would offer a melody. They also dissipate upon striking, needing to be hit again. Without love, our communication is temporal.
Jude writes at the end of his epistle (v. 22) that compassion makes a difference to the presentation. How does this harmonize with the gospel being the power of God unto salvation? Is it better put, gospel and love are the power of God unto salvation? No, love itself is part of the message. Romans 1:16 stands. This fits with an adaption of the Marshall McLuhan statement, “the medium is the message.” The absence of love lessens the message, diminishes it. I believe accompanying truths buttress this.
Peter says that good works themselves, when beheld in a believer, have an effect of their “glorify[ing] God in their day of visitation” (1 Pet 2:11-12). The absence of the good works undermine the message. They are part of the message of the gospel. Paul speaks in Titus 2:10 of “adorn[ing] the doctrine of God our Saviour” with “all good fidelity.” “Fidelity” translates the word for “faith.” Several other passages provide further evidence for this point.
Good works alone, fidelity, compassion and other accompanying traits of the message do not act as “the gospel.” They are not “the gospel.” Paul extols the preaching of the gospel by those with a bad motive. He says in Philippians 1:15-16 that men preached “Christ even of envy and strife” and “of contention, not sincerely.” Paul rejoiced that they preached the gospel. He didn’t say their message should not have been preached at all.
People are often quick to judge the works and the motives of those who preach the gospel. They did that with Paul himself. I write to make this point though, that the gospel doesn’t need the accompanying aspects of a good motive, good works, and effective style to work. If it is the gospel, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.
Every professing Christian at times thinks of himself or feels he is not worthy to preach the gospel. He could not possibly represent it with his life. That is not to say he should not strive to live a life that matches or correlates with a true gospel that he preaches.
I’m saying that a weak confidence due to personal struggle with the flesh should not impede or stop gospel preaching. This is one reason why someone puts on the helmet of salvation before he picks up the sword of the Spirit in Ephesians 6. The helmet protects the head, the source of thoughts that debilitate spiritual warfare, using the Word of God.
More to Come
The Gospel Is the Power of God Unto Salvation, pt. 2
The gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16). The gospel is a message. The power of God is in the message of the gospel. The power occurs only when someone delivers the message.
“Power” in Romans 1:16 is the Greek word, dunamis. Dunamis is ability. People will make the point of the English word dynamite, but God gave and gives the gospel, His message, the ability to save. That surpasses dynamite, even though it’s true that the English word came from dunamis. God provides more than dynamite. It’s His ability. He created with His ability all space and matter with His spoken word.
The problem of sin and death goes beyond human ability. The gospel goes beyond human ability because it goes with the ability of God. God saves people with and through the gospel. They are not able to save themselves. No one else can save them, but God is able (Hebrews 7:25).
If the gospel was an antidote for a sure death, undoing a deadly poison, you’d want someone to get it. The poisoned person and the antidote must come together. That means someone must deliver the antidote to the poisoned person. Sin subjects man to sure death. The gospel is the antidote. Someone must deliver that antidote in the one delivery system, communicating the message.
The sinful, dead and dying people need the gospel. However, they don’t know that or receive that reality. That’s different than a deadly poison and an antidote. When people know that, most would want that antidote. They don’t look at the gospel the same. The gospel to them is like the poison rather than the remedy for the poison. A majority won’t want to hear it.
Perhaps the delivery of the gospel fails most, not because of people not wanting to hear it, but because Christians won’t deliver it. They don’t know the gospel themselves well enough to preach it. Professing believers are afraid of the reaction they will get. They are not convinced to deliver it.
More to Come
Dialectics, Triangulation, and Triage as a Pattern for Biblical Belief and Practice, pt. 2
Early in my life, I often heard the term “balance” to describe a superior way to live as a Christian. I think there is a biblical concept of balance, but also an unbiblical one. For instance, we don’t come to an interpretation of scripture or a biblical belief and practice by using balance. Advocates say that the truth, the right interpretation, the actual text of scripture lies in the middle somewhere in between the extremes.
The concept that I’ve described in part one and in this second part finds itself in history at least with the terminology of dialectics, triangulation, and triage. Philosophers and others used these words to communicate the way to determine what’s right or wrong and what to believe and practice or not. Theologians at one time crafted the English word, “syncretism,” which means synthesizing pagan religion with biblical worship.
Let’s see. The world likes worldly country music. Let’s mix that with Christian lyrics. People will like it more. It gives them a feeling. Let’s just say that’s the Holy Spirit. Syncretism occurred. This is dialectics, triangulation, and triage very often found in people who say they’re opposed to what I’m writing here.
John Frame writes that triangulation was the method of liberal Yale theological seminary when he attended in the mid-1960s. The school urged its students to triangulate. He said that fundamentalism and orthodox Protestant theology provided the antithesis, a reference to Hegelian dialectics. They encouraged students to “develop their own distinctive brands of theology. He expressed concern that this method now characterizes evangelical theology.
Another metaphor I’ve heard through my life is that you as a Christian need to decide what hill or hills you’re going to die on. Someone else told me, “Kent, you don’t want to burn all of your bridges.” Leave the bridge open to something you don’t believe and practice. If you burn all those bridges, you’ll be left with a much smaller coalition of allies or friends.
Should you refuse to die on a hill because of a biblical belief or practice? You want to live. Perhaps you’ll live longer if you reduce the number of things for which you might die. Jesus addressed this concept. He said, fear man more than God. Man can destroy your body. God can destroy both body and soul in hell forever.
I understand that Christians grow and churches grow. Not everyone stands at the same position. I’ve changed through the years, but I would call the old position unbiblical, whether it was more or less strict than the former belief or practice.
Many truths of the Bible are embarrassing for professing Christians to the world, especially now. Could believers do better with the world if they shaved off the more unpopular teachings of the Bible or reinterpreted them to move closer to the world? God knows that you’re doing it and He exalts His Word above His own name. He doesn’t accept this dialectic, triangulation, and triage approach to His teachings and practices. If it’s the truth, you don’t move from it, but if it isn’t, then you can and do.
The Error or Falsehood of Balancing the Extremes to Come to the Truth
In my lifetime, I’ve lost things. I found them by searching between two places on the extreme of where I’d been. Some call it retracing your steps. It couldn’t have been somewhere beyond the two places, so I looked in between, somewhere in the middle.
In the same way, we do not find or know the truth by searching somewhere between two extremes. Jesus said, “Thy Word is truth” (John 17:17). Scripture tells the truth. That’s how we find or know the truth, by looking at the Bible and understanding what it says.
When I was a boy, my family ate through a sheet cake until one piece was left. My brother and I both wanted the piece, so we must split it in half. We had a deal. Whoever measured, the other got the first choice of his piece. The goal was to cut the cake exactly down the middle. That was fair. It was the closest to what both sides wanted. If you wanted both sides happy, you had to look to the middle.
Men want what they want. The best way to get closest to what most people want is by looking to the middle somewhere, to moderate somewhere between the extremes. Men don’t get along because they want what they want and they clash over their desires. To find peace between men, it makes sense to get as close as possible between two contradicting opinions.
Scripture starts with the wants of God. Usually we call this the will of God, which is also the pleasure of God, what pleases Him. Very often God’s desire is one of the extremes, even more extreme than the most extreme desire of men. Not always though. Sometimes the will of God is one of greater liberty than what man will give. Because of lust, man doesn’t want what God wants. Men would want whatever extreme that they could get if possible, but to live with one another, they negotiate somewhere between each other for the greatest satisfaction between them.
As a method, is this moderation or negotiation the will of God? Is this how God operates? It isn’t. Very often the way of God is foolishness to man. He rejects objective truth, because it clashes with what he wants.
What I’ve described so far, you can see in history, and I give you three explanations that are essentially the same, known by different names.
Dialectics
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, born in Stuttgart in 1770 and died in Berlin in 1831. Hegel said that nothing was truth that could not pass a test of experience. He believed self-determination the essence of humanity. In seminary in Tubingen, Hegel disliked the strictness or narrowness and rejected orthodoxy. He viewed mystical experience instead as the reality of Christianity.
Philosophers give Hegel credit for dialectic methodology, which he considered “speculative.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte took Hegel’s method and refined it with three terms — thesis, antithesis, and synthesis — which are now called a Hegelian dialectic. The idea behind this is that truth arises from error in the course of historical development. A constant refinement occurs through moderation, which is a synthesis of thesis and antithesis. This replays again and again, forming a new synthesis, which becomes a new thesis and so on.
Many believe American pragmatism, as seen in John Dewey (father of Dewey decimal system), the founder of modernist American education system or philosophy. Subject matter came from intellectual pursuit, tinkering and improving, all according to human reason.
I believe man comes to these compromises with a yearning for absolute truth, while rejecting objective truth. The receipt of objective truth starts with God. Because of his rejection of God, man becomes God and formulates truth according to his reason. Since men cannot unify around one truth without God, they invent a new way to grasp truth, which they need for satisfaction. The quest and the outcome never fulfill. As Paul wrote, he ever learns but never comes to the knowledge of the truth, indicating the longtime existence of a kind of dialectic.
Triangulation
The first I remember hearing of triangulation came when President Bill Clinton reshaped his politics to win the 1996 election. He was very unpopular during the 1994 midterm election, but with the counsel of his political operatives, he employed what they called, triangulation.
I did not know that triangulation already existed as a scientific or philosophical concept. It actually started, as you might assume, as a geometric concept, used in surveying. Triangles have three points, and if you have two points already, you triangulate to get the third. You very often now hear the language, “finding the sweet spot between two points.” I use this in economics, when the economists look for the perfect sweet spot for a tax rate.
In Clintonian politics, triangulation involved incorporating the ideas of a political opponent. If you stand at 43 percent and can’t win a popular election, you try to raise your popularity by attracting more people by using their ideas. You come to the right position by triangulating between two opposing opinions. This surely sounds similar to Hegelian dialectics.
Churches now use triangulation and I have noticed they do this by stating core values. The core saws off the extremes. Someone reading the core values won’t be offended by certain specifics. Those offenses are left out. You see the brochure with the very happy family, leaving out the hard parts. The core attempts to draw together as many people as possible in a Dewey-like pragmatism.
Triage
Triage is like triangulation, but proceeds from a medical analogy. I had not considered triage before I heard Al Mohler use the metaphor to describe the balance between apparent essential and non-essential truths. What you imagine is a bad war situation where casualties arrive and are prioritized according to how serious the wounds and how close they are to death. The doctors can save this one, not this one, and they shuffle people into their various places, using the triage to save the most possible. It is a form of pragmatism or what some might call a hierarchical ethic, the ethic of doing the most good for the most people.
The triage reminds me of the tomato trucks that drive down Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley of California. As you follow one of these trucks, tomatoes are hopping off onto the road and the side of the road all over the place. The drivers don’t stop to retrieve the lost tomatoes. They are casualties of this method.
Al Mohler’s triage treats certain truths like so many tomatoes falling off the back of a tomato truck. The thought is that we can’t keep or follow everything, so we choose what is most important. This creates a coalition of the largest number of people based upon a fewer number of truths. Man need not live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, just the ones he deems important.
Maybe you with me notice the shrinking number of important truths and the growing number of less important. With this method, churches decide whether to keep their homosexual members. They relegate wokeism with the triage to non-essential. This pulls together a larger coalition, which allows for bigger offerings and a larger work. This must be what God wants to do. He wouldn’t want smaller would He?
The Text of Scripture
Today men determine what the Bible says according to two poles, radical skepticism and absolute certainty. They say those are both wrong. This is read from Dan Wallace in the introduction of a book, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism. He wrote:
These two attitudes—radical skepticism and absolute certainty—must be avoided when we examine the New Testament text. We do not have now—in our critical Greek texts or any translations—exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Even if we did, we would not know it. There are many, many places in which the text of the New Testament is uncertain. But we also do not need to be overly skeptical. Where we should land between these two extremes is what this book addresses.
This isn’t new. I heard it a lot. It reflects the above three concepts I laid out. As you read, you might think God works in absolute certainty. You would be right. This is a Christian worldview. It arises from scripture.
The goal in modern textual criticism is to fall somewhere between radical skepticism and absolute certainty. It sees “absolute certainty” as an extreme. If the text of the Bible is not certain, and men defer to that position, somewhere, however, north of radical skepticism, one would see how that the inspiration, interpretation, and application of scripture are also not certain. How does someone live by faith in something uncertain as such? This occurs when man applies his dialectic, triangulates, or forms a triage based on human reason.
Man-centered philosophies are not faith. They also put man above God. Rather than follow the truth of scripture, man judges God and comes to a better, more pragmatic position. It’s a way to preserve Christianity from itself.
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 7
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six
Going door-to-door the first year, I met Geri Singleton, a black woman about 45-50 years old. I preached the gospel to her. She received it. I came back. She still showed interest. She came to church, not faithfully at first. We baptized her and her teenaged son the same night as Art Anabo. Geri grew and grew. She became a faithful member. She is still one, and since that beginning, she taught Sunday School and discipled several women in our church.
After a year and a half, I informed all of the churches that supported us, we were self-supporting. This was in the Spring of 1989. Even though we had buildings, were still a new church plant. We barely had enough in expensive California to support a pastor and only one who lived in a tiny apartment with a wife and no children. Bridget also continued working at the bank.
While evangelizing in Hercules that first year, I talked to a man, who said he bought his house after selling his mobile home. I came home that day and told my wife the story. That very night we drove to a mobile home park and found a single wide, just for sale that very day. The owner died and left the home to her brother, who was eager to sell fast, and offered it for 10,000 dollars. We bought it and moved in.
The San Francisco Bay Area had Fleet Week every year because of the Alameda Naval Air Station, which closed in the early nineties during the Clinton Presidency. In the early days we had up to five families attend our church from the Naval base, and one faithful family in particular, the Ruckels, bought us carpet for our new tiny mobile home. The same year we bought it, the park voted to become 55 or older and we were now the only twenty somethings there. The timing was perfect. A few years later we sold the mobile home for 19,000 as a down payment for a two bedroom condominium.
Evangelizing door-to-door in Pinole, I met Brenda Rose. She came to a service. She was saved. Shortly thereafter she met a Navy man, who grew up in Arkansas in the Church of Christ. I met with both and Doug Stracener was saved. The two went to Bible college, trained, and then went back to Arkansas. There Doug discipled dozens of people using a thirty week discipleship I wrote and our church used.
I was never a carpenter, but suddenly with new buildings and no construction types in our church, repairing and maintaining the buildings was difficult. We had a tiny nursery spot right next to the meeting room and the babies were loud. We decided to split our only other large room into a nursery and a classroom, which required building a wall. About that time, a homeless man knocked on the door and asked if he could do any work. He said he didn’t want money, just a place to sleep and milk and cookies.
Scott had been a successful general contractor, who became disabled in a work accident and he wasn’t covered by insurance. He couldn’t do most of the work to build a new nursery, but he could tell me what to do. I would preach to him while I worked and every day bring him milk and cookies. He slept in the nursery.
In October 17, 1989, one day before our second anniversary of the church, I sat in front of the mobile home after supper with my wife in our running Subaru, talking before I went to work at the church building. That year the Oakland A’s played the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. Most people were already at home to watch the Bay Bridge Series.
Someone, I thought, as a practical joke began to jump up and down on the bumper of our car. As our car rocked violently, I saw the road in the mobile home park like a ribbon rolling in front of me. It threw our neighbors cat way up in the air and it shrieked as it flew in the sky. What was happening? It was the biggest earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early twentieth century San Francisco Quake. They called it the Loma Prieta quake.
I had never experienced an earthquake before, except for the typical minor tremors anyone will feel in the Bay Area from time to time. This was a Big One, albeit not The big one. I left my wife at the mobile home, not really knowing how serious this was. My first stop at a hardware store to pick up some things revealed the extent. Almost everything on the shelves was now on the floor. The rolling quake scattered nuts, screws, paint, glass, and bolts all over the store. After seeing that, I drove to the church building to see.
Everything at church was fine. I could only imagine how much the building moved. Our mobile home rode the wave, but up on stilts it was in a better position than some houses. It was the only moment I remember wishing I was in the air rather than on the ground. It was not terra firma that October evening.
What I found was that a church member was stuck on the Bay Bridge because part of it collapsed. He couldn’t get home that night. Over a hundred died on Highway 880 near Oakland, only ten minutes from us, when the top deck collapsed on to the bottom. Many across the country saw Candlestick Park swaying on national television right before the Series game began. The timing saved hundreds from death, as the highways were half as crowded as normal, fans from both side of the Bay already sitting on their couch to watch.
Anyone could wish that an earthquake would grab the attention of the lost. I can report that it did little to nothing for constructive introspection. More than anything, people in the Bay were, one, angry, and, two, determined to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
To Be Continued
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