Get the "L" Out Of Here

Of the five points, "L", the central column upon which the other four depend, is the most hated, the most attacked, and really where the war will be won or lost.

This has been the attack point for those of the J316C. As we approach Christmas, the who and why for what to whom, is a question we should look into when contemplating the incarnation.

Follow John's links for some insight-filled listening and reading.

Remember the Arminian/4 Pointers Motto: Just Believe. The Gospel will become real, you are the power behind it, you make it efficacious. As long as you try, you always find it was worth it. Just believe...



Then again, the demons believe.

God is so...

1. THERE is but one, and only one, living and true God. He is self-existent and infinite in His being and His perfections. None but He can comprehend or understand His essence. He is pure spirit, invisible, and without body, parts, or the changeable feelings of men. He alone possesses immortality, and dwells amid the light insufferably bright to mortal men. He never changes. He is great beyond all our conceptions, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty and infinite. He is most holy, wise, free and absolute. All that He does is the out-working of His changeless, righteous will, and for His own glory. He is most loving, gracious, merciful and compassionate. He abounds in goodness and truth. He forgives iniquity, transgression and sin. He rewards those who seek Him diligently. But He hates sin. He will not overlook guilt or spare the guilty, and He is perfectly just in executing judgment.
   
   Gen. 17:1; Exod. 3:14; 34:6,7; Deut. 4:15,16; 6:4; 1 Kings 8:27; Neh.9:32,33; Ps. 5:5,6; 90:2; 115:3; Prov. 16:4; Isa. 6:3; 46:10; 48:12; Jer. 10:10; 23:23,24; Nah. 1:2,3; Mal. 3:6; John 4:24; Rom.11:36; 1 Cor. 8:4,6; 1 Tim.1:17; Heb. 11:6.


2. God is all-sufficient, and all life, glory, goodness and blessedness are found in Him and in Him alone. He does not stand in need of any of the creatures that He has made, nor does He derive any part of His glory from them. On the contrary, He manifests His own glory in and by them. He is the fountain-head of all being, and the origin, channel and end of all things. Over all His creatures He is sovereign. He uses them as He pleases, and does for them or to them all that He wills. His sight penetrates to the heart of all things. His knowledge is infinite and infallible. No single thing is to Him at risk or uncertain, for He is not dependent upon created things. In all His decisions, doings and demands He is most holy. Angels and men owe to Him as their creator all worship, service and obedience, and whatever else He may require at their hands.
   
   Job 22:2,3; Ps. 119:68; 145:17; 148:13; Ezek.11:5; Dan. 4:25,34,35; John 5:26; Acts 15:18; Rom. 11:34-36; Heb. 4:13; Rev. 5:12-14.


3. Three divine Persons constitute the Godhead-the Father, the Son (or the Word), and the Holy Spirit. They are one in substance, in power, and in eternity. Each is fully God, and yet the Godhead is one and indivisible. The Father owes His being to none. He is Father to the Son who is eternally begotten of Him. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. These Persons, one infinite and eternal God not to be divided in being, are distinguished in Scripture by their personal nature or in relations within the Godhead, and by the variety of works which they undertake. Their tri-unity (that is, the doctrine of the Trinity) is the essential basis of all our fellowship with God, and of the comfort we derive from our dependence upon Him.
   
   Exod. 3:14; Matt. 28:19; John 1:14,18; 14:11; 15:26; 1 Cor. 8:6; 2 Cor. 13:14; Gal. 4:6; 1 John 5:7.

If God is infinite in all his perfections then the finite is swallowed up in perfection. Moses, Moses what did you see? Only the hind parts, only a little?



As I write we are having a kind of storm that I have only known here in Wyoming. I call it snail with lightening and thunder but we also have slain storms with flashes and booms. Snail is snow and hail mixed while slain is snow, hail and rain. It is weird here, truly, and its not just the people. I've seen it rain across the street while basking in sun and have been rained on with a clear blue ski above. A few nights back there was not a cloud in the sky and it was snowing. Honestly. My boy and I were amazed to watch the snow flakes forming before our eyes. I have been in the Snowy Range in eighty degree weather, watched a cloud come over Long Lake and within an hour experienced every kind of precipitation imaginable, rain, hail, snow, Styrofoam snow (strange stuff; comes in all sizes), fog, sleet, with incredible lightening and wind and then watched the sun come back out to greet me with eighty degree temps again.

None of this wonder compares to the greatness of our God. Look at the description in the confession. Perfections, infinite perfections, that just bakes the noodle. We are used to thinking in terms of the finite; incapable as we are of comprehending infinity except as a vague mist of mind. Not so with God. God sees and knows infinity the way that we know finitude; a discrete package, all tidy and comprehensible. Is it any wonder that he is called light, unapproachable light. Paul writes of it like this: the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. That we can know this is unspeakable joy. It is a miracle. Why is it then that God is mindful of in man except that in him we have been created, blessed above all blessings; to know what otherwise remains hidden.

What I want you to take away from this is that even though the essence of all Truth is transcendent, abiding only in God, what God has done in his especial creation -man- is to create a perfect image of himself. Though finite, it was perfectly represented for us in Jesus Christ the image bearer into whose likeness we are being transformed, glory to glory. Being a perfect creation though, that image which we will be, remains a creation and unlike the creator does not contain the infinitudinal nature of God; unchanging in all his being, penetrating to every reach of conception of knowledge, space and time.

There is nowhere David said, that he is not. By that he cannot be moved. To the contrary he is the divine mover. By that also, he can make what is described in the 1689 known. Christ who said that the Father always hears his prayers, prayed that they would be in us, and we in them, unmovable. We are made to be like him who cannot be diminished or increased, rock solid. So much like him we have been made to be. Too wonderful is that knowledge that we have been given to know.

At the same time, man can be moved, as all created, finite things can. And that is where we will go next. For now let it suffice to say that man in some form or fashion is in the likeness of God in all his attributes. But, what is particular to God could not be, and cannot be divested and reinvested in another; his essence and being is unique and unmixable and irreducible. Such is his power, and the ability to make man most perfectly like his creator in his infinite perfectons.

Wayne Grudem says of the image that an extensive explanation is unnecessary:

...we realize that a full understanding of man's likeness to God would require a full understanding of who God is in his being and in his action and full understanding of who man is and what he does. The more we know about God and man the more similarities we will recognize...in the image of God. The expression refers to every way in which man is like God.

That image/likeness is as inexahaustible as the knowledge of God. As the confession states:

All that He does is the out-working of His changeless, righteous will, and for His own glory.

All those works prepared in God that we should walk in them, that is the image, and our assurance that when he appears we shall be like him.

We Love God But Not Like We Love Our Freedom

The 1689 LBC has this to say about the Fall:

Although God created man upright and perfect, and gave him a righteous law, which had been unto life had he kept it, and threatened death upon the breach thereof, yet he did not long abide in this honour; Satan using the subtlety of the serpent to subdue Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who, without any compulsion, did willfully transgress the law of their creation, and the command given unto them, in eating the forbidden fruit, which God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel to permit, having purposed to order it to his own glory.
( Genesis 2:16, 17; Genesis 3:12,13; 2 Corinthians 11:3 )

Along with this I will include the 1689 statement on the will.

One of the things that is often breezed by is the nature of the fall, pre and post condition of man. It will take some development to establish what I am going to say later about a notable Southern Baptist whose influence must be widely credited with the establishment of the SBC majoritarian party's doctrinal position, today. Right now I have to establish a framework.

First, we need to discover what the estate of man was prior to the fall. The 1689 states:

After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, rendering them fit unto that life to God for which they were created; being made after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness; having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfil it, and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject to change...Besides the law written in their hearts, they received a command not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which whilst they kept, they were happy in their communion with God, and had dominion over the creatures.

Things that need to be noticed here are: image, fit, immortality, knowledge, righteousness, true holiness. There is much more to the likeness. Let's take a look at these, but briefly, since what I want to establish is that man was created after the image of God. He was not created, god, but after the image of God. Like all things in creation, man shows forth God's glory, Romans 1 and elsewhere. To sum it up man was made perfectly perfect as a expression of God's creation.

The character and attributes of God are developed throughout Scripture, and here we see some as expressed in the make up of man. This immediately throws us upon a dilemma. We know from the commandments that we are not to make images of the likeness of God. We are told that God is not a man. Therefore we need a definition of image that is compatible. The descriptors actually give us that definition, with some qualifications. The qualifications can be summed up in the fact that man is a creature, a product of creation and by definition cannot be what created it. He can be like the maker, but not the maker.

Qualifications:

Immortality is not inherent in man. Eternal life is inherent only in God; 1 John 5:11; 1 John 5:20. In him alone is life. Man is made, and being made is mortal. The continuance of the soul of man is established, not in man, but in the power of God to sustain it. In other words if God so chose, he could destroy the soul. And, I for one believe that he does, for believers in the new birth. But I digress.

Knowledge again is not something that is inherent in man. God alone is the ground of all knowledge. What man does know is what God has given him; Job 21:22. That too can be taken or added according to God's good pleasure.

Righteousness and true holiness are again not inherent in man, they have their beginning and terminus in God. The One who alone is good; Luke 18:19, is also the One who alone is righteous; Isaiah 45:24. But here we must pause and question the difference between righteousness and holiness. If we want we might capture the sense of difference as that which Jesus said,

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

Holiness we might say is that which does, and righteousness, that which is done. Holiness and righteousness are not without each other. Again, though, what we have is man created who is not inherently these things, but he is made to be this image or likeness.

The beginning quote contains this incredible statement:

God created man upright and perfect

As I have tried to emphasize, what is inherent in God is not inherent in man. But there is an image, or likeness, that was perfect. It was perfect in the reflection of the communicable attributes of God, it was perfectly made, suited, "fit" the word used in the confession, to glorify God in his creation. As the apex, all that was made had been perfected in man, to be the summation of all that God wanted to communicate with man about Himself. We find him upright. Later though we will find him fallen. The NT term for resurrection, anastasis means to stand one again upon his feet. Though man was meant to worship his God in the humility of heart that is fitting a creature of his creator, God had created man to stand in his presence.

That is enough to get us started. We will look next at the nature of God so that we might learn more about man and what really took place and what was the tragedy and extent of the fall.