George Mueller is the one man outside of Jesus, the apostles, and the prophets, who has given me daily inspiration in walking along the narrow way.  His nearly unparalleled trust in God for daily provision led him to amazing works of sacrificial love, charity, and gospel ministry to many thousands of orphans (and to thousands of other people as well) during his lifetime of ministry. 

So it may surprise some (though not I) that Mueller’s walk with Christ was profoundly buoyed by a distinct alteration in his theology, brought upon by simple study of the Scriptures themselves.  If anything speaks to the “eminent practicality of right theology” (as my pastor says), it’s this quote from Mueller’s autobiography:

 “Before this period I had been much opposed to the doctrines of election, particular redemption and final persevering grace.  But now I was brought to examine these precious truths by the Word of God.  Being made willing to have no glory of my own in the conversion of sinners, but to consider myself merely an instrument; and being made willing to receive what the Scriptures said, I went to the Word, reading the New Testament from the beginning, with a particular reference to these truths.

 “To my great astonishment I found that the passages which speak decidedly for election and persevering grace were about four times as many as those which speak apparently against these truths; and even those few, shortly after, when I had examined and understood them, served to confirm me in the above doctrines.

  “As to the effect which my belief in these doctrines had on me, I am constrained to state for God’s glory, that though I am still exceedingly weak, and by no means so dead to the lusts of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, as I might be, and as I ought to be, yet, by the grace of God, I have walked more closely with Him since that period.  My life has not been so variable, and I may say that I have lived much more for God than before.”

George Mueller, Autobiography of George Mueller, (London: J. Nisbet and Co., 1906), 33-34, as quoted in John Piper, The Pleasures of God, (Multnomah Books, 2000), 122-123. 

What is shocking to me, but not at all surprising, is that the current, popular, abridged version of this autobiography has nothing of this information about Mueller, such that an entire generation of American Baptists (in a general sense, not a denominational sense) who revere Mueller, have no idea

1.  that he believed the doctrines of grace;

2.  that he came to his conclusions (and was even driven to the study itself) simply and finally from the Word of God; and

3.  that it had a tremendous impact for the good on his walk with Christ and his ministry for the rest of his life.

Let me preface this by saying I am not afraid of large words in general or specifically theological vocabulary.  For example, I am interested by debates on the difference between propitiation and expiation.  Rather, I’m coming from a pedagogical perspective.

The concept “Scripture interprets Scripture” (which is what the analogy of faith refers to, as I understand it) is a readily understood concept, and the title makes intuitive sense.  Nevertheless, even if I thoroughly understand the principle “Scripture interprets Scripture,” I may have no idea what someone may mean by the term “analogy of faith.”  It’s not an intuitive term. 

So I must create a new neural pathway that indicates “analogy of faith” = “Scripture interprets Scripture.”  But what is the value of doing this?  Is it only so that I can understand what the Reformers meant when they spoke of the analogy of faith?  Or is there another purpose I’m missing?

My 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter are growing up learning the concept “Scripture interprets Scripture.”  They can easily understand it (as could my 6-year-old, I expect, if I outlined it for her), and the 13-year-old could probably explain it pretty clearly if asked.  So why should I teach them the term “analogy of faith”?  Is the reasoning strictly historical?

I am not saying we shouldn’t criticize his policies if we disagree with him. I’m not saying we shouldn’t work to get others elected we agree with more. Our form of government gives us great power and responsibility, and we need to be responsible. What I am saying is that Christians who do these sorts of things publicly ought also to be following 1 Tim 2:1-2 publicly at least as much as they follow the other practices, since 1 Tim 2:1-2 is actually a written command of God. And even though many might be saying, “I already do those things in private,” even if you are, I certainly don’t see anywhere near as much giving thanks and prayers for President Obama in public by believers as I see vehement invective. This is how we lead by example as believers, and it is why people with influence are held to a stricter account (James 3:1). Maybe you are praying as much in private as you insult in public, but for those you have influence over, what are they seeing? What is done privately or what is done publicly? Jesus Himself said it would be better to have a millstone tied around your neck and be thrown into the sea than to lead one of His little ones astray.

I also believe that people who compare themselves to Christ and His rebukes of the Pharisees are missing that He rebuked the Pharisees directly, in person, not passively, in such indirect mass comments on Facebook. The language Christ spoke directly to them was a rebuke only after calling on them directly many times to repent.

Many would also say Martin Luther used far harsher language in criticizing leaders of his day than any believers today are using. Those people would be correct. However, in the same way that we cannot hold Luther and others of his day to our cultural standards today, by the same logic we cannot appropriate standards that were accepted in his culture and unilaterally claim they’re acceptable in our culture. One cannot have it both ways. At any rate, though I don’t have a primary source reference for this, I believe Luther had repented of having written too harshly of individuals.

Finally, here is a question for any professing Christian – which do you care about more? The U.S. Constitution, an excellent though man-made document, or the Holy Word of God, breathed by the Holy Spirit, a Word that cannot be broken? It seems to me we shouldn’t be compromising the Word for the sake of anything else, even the safety of the U.S. Constitution. If we cannot save the Constitution without breaking the Word of God, I’d have to say God cares more about us following His Word.

“No truth more loudly calls for pastoral holiness than the linkage of a preacher’s character and the sermon’s reception.  I must recognize that if I were to return to churches I have pastored it is unlikely that people will remember many specifics I said.  They may remember a particularly vivid illustration, the way a verse had a telling effect at some crisis moment in their lives, or the impression a particular message left on their minds.  Yet, not one person will remember a dozen words of the thousands I have spoken through the years.  The people will not remember what I said, they will remember me and whether my life gave credence to the message of Scripture.”

Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching (p.29)

Referencing John 6:26, Piper says,

“The essence of the prosperity gospel of every shade is that it leaves people unchanged in their old appetites and then provides Jesus to meet them, which is what the gospel of John is all about not doing.   God help us.  Are your existing appetites just the same as they always were before you came to Jesus, and He’s just useful now?  Better business, better marriage, better kids, better everything I wanted before?!  Then you don’t know Him.  He didn’t come to serve your unregenerate appetites; He came to give you new appetites.  That’s the meaning of being ‘born again.’” 

“…And so many leave people untransformed in what they crave, and then add the power of Jesus to get it.  That’s not the gospel.  It’s the kind of acclamation that Jesus walks away from.”

I’ve never heard it said better.

Evolutionary Equivocation

I’ve included my response just after the break.  Of course, I’ve edited out a few personal comments and the dreaded typo (one of which drastically changed the meaning of what I had intended to say!), and done some editorial cleaning up here and there.  There are few passions as near and dear to my heart as this one.

“Why creation evangelism? Why not just evangelism? Why the emphasis on creation?”

Excellent, excellent question.  There is an elder in my church (a wise, humble, Godly man with an amazing servant’s heart) who has asked me variations of this question more than once.  People who have been believers since they were young and/or come from many generations of believers, or at least were churched from the time they were young, often don’t understand the need for an emphasis on creation.  It’s not their fault.

The emphasis comes from looking at the difference between the way Peter evangelized the nation of Israel (e.g. in Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost) contrasted with the way Paul evangelized the Greeks on Mars Hill in Athens (in Acts 17).
 
Peter was speaking to a people (the Jewish diaspora, gathered in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, just a handful of weeks after the crucifixion of Jesus), a people who understood who the One True God was, they understood the authority of their Scriptures, they knew what sin was, they knew they needed a messiah…they just missed the Messiah when He came.  In essence, they already understood the bad news.  So Peter’s message to them, paraphrased, is “Repent from your sin…you who killed your own Messiah!”  And thousands were saved and added to the church that day.  They recognized the bad news, then heard the good news.  They believed and were saved.
 
Paul, in his various missionary journeys, would often reason the very same way in the synagogues where he travelled.  But when he arrived in Athens, and spoke on Mars Hill with the Stoics and Epicureans, he knew he was speaking among a people who had no idea who the True God was, they had no clue what sin was, and hence no understanding of a need for a savior, certainly not one who would have to die.  This is why the gospel is “foolishness” to the Greeks while a “stumbling block” to the Jews (1 Cor 1:23).  The Jews misunderstood what their own Scriptures had said about the Messiah, but the Greeks were completely lost from the get-go.
 
So what did Paul do?  He took them all the way back to creation and explained to them who the True God was (used their own culture – sculptures and poetry – to do so), explained what sin was, and why there was a need for a savior.  He gave them the bad news, from the beginning, so he could then preach the gospel to them. 

What was the result?  A few believed, right away.  More people wanted to hear him out another time.  And, of course, as always happens when the gospel is presented in a mass setting, a few scoffed.  All in all, a pretty good response.
 
Unfortunately, many Bible colleges, seminaries, and missionary organizations over the last several decades have literally taught their students, “Look at how foolish Paul was.  He got all intellectual with his listeners, and only a few believed.  In contrast, Peter boldly declared, ‘Repent, you sinners,’ and thousands believed.  So don’t evangelize like Paul, evangelize like Peter.”
 
Unfortunately, our western culture, especially since the 1950s or so, has become radically more like the culture of the Greeks on Mars Hill than the Jews in Jerusalem on Pentecost.  A vast number of people today have no concept of who the One True God really is.  They’ve been bombarded by postmodernism and by eastern religious thought. They have no proper understanding of sin.  The Bible is not an authority to them.  So to simply come and preach the gospel without laying the proper groundwork leads almost always to immediately ignoring or scoffing, or at best (maybe at worst) crisis-based conversions that don’t last because they had no root (as in Mark 4:5-6, 16-17). 
 
The stakes are raised when you consider the stranglehold that evolutionary teaching has on our culture.  Every western governmental school curriculum and museum is founded on evolution.  It’s being taught (as established fact) earlier and earlier.  Its concepts are found in nearly every popular movie and TV show.  What do evangelists for atheism like Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and all the rest push as the reason for completely waving away Christianity?  The belief (in their minds, the fact) that evolution is undeniably true.  If people grow up from the very earliest ages simply accepting evolution as fact, then they simply toss away the gospel as just one of many quaint, ancient, unnecessary, irrelevant myths. 
 
In fact, most atheists understand the critical importance of the Genesis creation account as the foundation for the whole Christian faith better than many professing Christians do!  If Adam and Eve were not actual people created in an actual garden, and didn’t reject an actual command of God by eating forbidden fruit (that is, if they didn’t actually sin), egged on by an actual serpent, then people would not need saving from anything, and hence there would be no need for a savior.  The entire Christian faith hangs on the Genesis creation account being true.  If it’s not true, everything else is totally unnecessary. 

And not only every foundational Christian doctrine, look at some of the less obvious things.  Why wear clothes (if you don’t live in ND winters)?  Because of what happened in the garden.  Why do we need to work to survive?  Same reason.  Why is marriage between one man and one woman, and nothing else?  Because of how God created.  You can keep going with these sorts of questions.  They all hang on Genesis being true.

Even this one - nearly every culture in the world operates on a 7-day week.  Why?  Is there any facet of astronomy that would lead us towards a 7-day week?
 
a.  The year is based on the revolution of the earth about the sun. 
b.  The month is based on the revolution of the moon about the earth.  
c.  The day is based on the rotation of the earth about its own axis. 
d.  What about the week?  

There is nothing…except this:  “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:11).  The nearly ubiquitous nature of the 7-day week across cultures lends enormous weight to a human race that has descended from one family (Noah’s) after a global flood, and dispersed about the earth from the Tower of Babel.  Also, this statement from Exodus (later written down on tablets of stone by the very finger of God Himself – Exodus 31:18), becomes meaningless if those seven days were not days as we have always understood them, rather than some literary framework or monstrously large periods of time. 
 
It’s even harder to help believers who already know evolution isn’t true to understand why the millions/billions-of-years scenario is so harmful.  But if death and bloodshed came through sin and sin came through one man, the first man, Adam (Romans 5:12), then how could there have been millions of years of death and bloodshed before there even was man or sin? 
 
Finally, for myself, once I understood all this, I found that it became much, much easier to engage just about any person in a conversation that could lead neatly to a ripe moment for evangelism.  It became natural for me to evangelize, because even though people don’t really care what I think about religion, most people love to talk about what they believe, and it’s actually quite easy to get them talking about what they believe until they have to face a crisis point where their belief system doesn’t square up with the reality they know they see.  Some people simply go on living with this cognitive dissonance (isn’t that what postmodernism and eastern thought is all about?  As in, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”).  But others accept the gospel message and are saved, all because the evolutionary deception has been exposed for them. 
 
I freely admit not every Christian is called to evangelize this way.  But I am.  And in this culture, creation evangelism has taken on an incredibly important role, since we’re speaking to an audience more like the one Paul spoke to on Mars Hill rather than like the audience Peter spoke to in Jerusalem on Pentecost.  It has, however, taken me years to allow God to equip me with the necessary maturity and humility to evangelize this way, because the danger is always to become conceited, or to forget that the gospel is the true aim (see my previous post, Keeping the gospel central).  Leading someone to believe that there is a creator but never pointing them to Christ is just as tragic as them never accepting there’s a creator.

There have been many times while reading this book when I’ve had to put it down to pray, thank the Lord, and then pray again.  But tonight, while reading, I just had to put it down after being completely overwhelmed, not emotionally, but intellectually, by this section, in which Brother Yun is describing the training certain missionaries receive from their efforts:

Each…missionary receives training in several main subjects.  These include:

1.  How to suffer and die for the Lord.  We examine what the Bible says about suffering, and look at how the Lord’s people have laid down their lives for the advance of the gospel throughout history.

2.  How to witness for the Lord.  We teach how to witness for the Lord under any circumstance, on trains or buses, or even in the back of a police van on our way to the execution ground.

3.  How to escape for the Lord.  We know that sometimes it is the Lord who sends us to prison to witness for him, but we also believe the devil sometimes wants us to go to prison to stop the ministry God has called us to do.  We teach the missionaries special skills such as how to free themselves from handcuffs, and how to jump from second-storey [sic] windows without injuring themselves.

This is not a normal seminary or Bible College!
(p. 290)

I should say not!  I literally had to put the book down at this point because I just couldn’t get my mind around the difference between this training and what the typical Western seminary training involves.  Is there any wonder why their lives are filled with the awesome power of the Holy Spirit and the rapid spread of the gospel?  Their hearts are set on the spread of the gospel no matter the cost to themselves.  This is a far cry from most American Christianity, especially the health/wealth gospel.

However, I don’t want to just take shots at the health/wealth folks here.  All American Christians need a healthy dose of seeing what being a Christian means in many parts of the world.  This book has been eye-opening in that regard, and for some reason, it hit home to me in the above section.

Wrongly Convicted in Texas Paid $80G for Each Year Spent in Prison Under New State Law

“So the only way to tell the truth is to lie.”

Now this wasn’t a politician, believe it or not.  Let’s give a bit more context from the quote:

“Everyone lies online. In fact, readers expect you to lie. If you don’t, they’ll think you make less than you actually do. So the only way to tell the truth is to lie.”

I suppose this makes it not even one’s own fault.  It’s everyone else’s fault that we have to lie online!

Who is this brilliant pundit, this social commentator, this wise philosopher, this moral giant?

Our revered Brad Pitt.  Somewhere, George Orwell is saying, “I told you so.”

You can read the entire article here.