The Battle Cry

The text of an excellent sermon delivered at Grace Valley Christian Center can be found here. Below is an excerpt from that sermon that discusses both expiation and propitiation:

“In the Greek, the word “to propitiate” is hilaskomai, which means to appease, to placate, to avert, to turn aside the wrath of an offended person by means of a sacrifice. Four things are involved in propitiation: First, there is an offended deity; second, an offending sinner; third, the offense committed; and fourth, the sacrifice which removes the offense and causes the offended person to be gracious to the one who offended him. Salvation, in the Christian sense of the term, requires one very definite type of sacrifice, namely, propitiation. It is directed toward God to turn away his wrath, which is revealed against our offense, that he may be gracious to us.

“For the past century and a half, the idea of a God who is wrathful and opposes sin and sinners has not been accepted by unbelieving theologians. They readily will choose the conception of God as love but want to forget about the idea that God is holy. The notion of an angry God, they say, is not Christian, but pagan. They say the God of Christianity, in their highly evolved conception of it, is always a loving, nice God. When they translate the Greek word hilasmos, as found in 1 John 2:2 and 4:10, they reject the word “propitiation,” preferring to use the word “expiation,” which has to do with the cancellation of sin, but has nothing to do with a sacrifice offered to God to turn away his wrath.

Expiation means that God has canceled our sin and now there is nothing to worry about, but it is not the same as propitiation. One scholar wrote, “Those who hold to the ‘fire and brimstone’ school of theology, who revel in ideas such as that Christ was made a sacrifice to appease an angry God, or that the cross was a legal transaction in which an innocent victim was made to pay the penalty for the crimes of others as a propitiation of a stern God, find no support in Paul. These notions came into Christian theology by way of the legalistic minds of the medieval churchmen.” We must ask: If Christ’s death on the cross was not propitiation, if this sacrifice was not offered to God to turn away his wrath that he may be gracious to us and forgive us our sins and restore us into his fellowship, if the liberals are right that God is love all the time and never angry at sinners, then what is the need for Christ’s death even as expiation? It is doing nothing to God. Why doesn’t God, being nice and loving, just forgive our sins almost automatically whenever we commit them?” Christ, Our Propitiation,1 John 2:1,2 | Sunday, January 14, 2001 By P. G. Mathew, M.A., M. Div., Th.M., Copyright © 2001 by P. G. Mathew

Below is an excerpt from a really good article by Bob DeWaay:

“Jesus made the following promise as He prepared his disciples for His departure: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to the Father” (John 14:12). Before we discuss the meaning of “works” and “greater works” in this verse, we should consider the significance of works in the Gospel of John. The previous verse tells us the key purpose of works: “Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me; otherwise believe on account of the works themselves” (John 14:11). The works that Jesus performed were to lead us to faith in Him as being God incarnate. We are to believe that He is one in essence with the Father. Jesus states this elsewhere in John: “But the witness which I have is greater than that of John; for the works which the Father has given Me to accomplish, the very works that I do, bear witness of Me, that the Father has sent Me” (John 5:36). The works bear witness to the person and mission of Christ. This must be kept in mind as we contemplate the “works and greater works” of John 14:12.

. . .The ones who do the works are believers in general: “he who believes in Me.” This promise is not restricted to a special class of elite Christians or latter day apostles. This is an important consideration. The purpose of the works is to lead people to faith in Christ. Many mistakenly think that their purpose is to validate the person doing them. We are called to go to a special meeting to hear a great “miracle worker” and find relief from various afflictions. Testimonies of those who have been healed are used to promote the healer. This is not at all the purpose of signs and works of God in the Bible. The contention being made by Christ and His apostles was that He was God Incarnate, the promised Jewish Messiah, and that only He could bring us to the Father (John 14:6). John was called the greatest prophet (Matthew 11:9-11) yet he did no miraculous works (John 10:41). John bore witness to Christ through his preaching and fulfilled God’s purposes. It was John the Baptist who said: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). The purpose of the works was not to make great the fame and fortune of the prophet, but to bear witness to the person and work of Christ. . . .

The entire article can be found at Critical Issues Commentary. It is an excellent, Scripture based treatment of miracles, signs and wonders and their purpose.

For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if
I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ. 
–Galatians 1:10

This is one of the marks of our modern time–that many are guilty of
merely “nibbling” at the truth of the Christian gospel.

I wonder if you realize that in many ways the preaching of the Word
of God is being pulled down to the level of the ignorant and
spiritually obtuse; that we must tell stories and jokes and entertain
and amuse in order to have a few people in the audience? We do these
things that we may have some reputation and that there may be money
in the treasury to meet the church bills….

In many churches Christianity has been watered down until the
solution is so weak that if it were poison it would not hurt anyone,
and if it were medicine it would not cure anyone!  I Talk Back to
the Devil, 30-31.

“Lord, don’t ever let me be guilty of watering down the truth or
playing to the crowds, concerned about my ‘reputation’ or ‘money in
the treasury.’ Amen.”

I have nothing to add to that tidbit from Tozer - Blessings to all! - B4B

In his book about the wonderful grace of God, Good News for Bad People, Roy Hession proposes that there are three classes of people:

1. “The bad who do not know they are bad. The great majority of us, whether we are in churches or out of them, do not regard ourselves as bad. Whatever our lifestyle or conduct, we have found some way to justify ourselves. . . . The fact that he may be religious only reinforces his good opinion of himself.”

2. “Bad people who are trying to be good. Sincere as their trying to be good may be, whatever direction their efforts may lie, it is vain for such [people to hope that it is going to improve their relationship with God at all, or that it will greatly change their personal experience.”

3. “The third class is composed of the group in whom the Holy Spirit has done a melting work, the bad humbly confessing to God that they are bad and not pleading any extenuating circumstances. As far as they are concerned, there is only one person at the bar before God and that is themselves. When they take that stand they immediately become candidates for the good news Jesus has for them and for the grace that is greater than all their sin. For them, Jesus is the end of their trying and the beginning of all their finding.”

Much of today’s evangelism, with all of the pop-psychology that is now part and parcel of it’s presentation either ignores the real problem of sin, or speaks of sin as if it’s some non-personal entity that merely separates us from God. Jesus died to remove the gulf or cloud between fallen man and God (expiation) rather than died in our place (propitiation).

I would offer the question - Which is it, expiation, propitiation, or are there elements of both to be found in scripture?

Here are a couple of excerpts I found here.

“Bible-believing Christians would do well to beware of the New Evangelicalism for four valid reasons.

• First, it is a movement born of compromise.
• Second, it is a movement nurtured in pride of intellect.
• Third, it is a movement growing on appeasement of evil; and
• Finally it is a movement doomed by the judgment of God’s Holy Word.

Strong language, this? Let us face the facts.”  William E. Ashbrook - 1958 (John E. Ashbrook’s father), The New Neutralism.

“I believe that the mainspring of new evangelicalism is found in three determinations of its founder which may be clearly traced in the state of things today.

• First, new evangelicalism determined to reject Biblical separation.
• Secondly, new evangelicalism determined to find acceptance by the world.
• Thirdly, new evangelicalism determined to add the social gospel to the Scriptural gospel….”  John E. Ashbrook - 1992, New Neutralism II

I  found the entire text of New Neutralism II online here. It’s an interesting read. In this post, I am not taking a particular stance, but am merely sharing the main points, which I find worthy of serious consideration.  The author’s conclusion reads in part:

“My grandfather, on whose farm I spent my summers, used to drill corn with a one row corn planter. One spring he had a young mare called Nellie pulling his planter. Nellie panicked and ran away with the planter. When she had finished her fling, she ended up where she began, and Grandfather finished the job. After the corn came up, we could stand on the hill overlooking the field and trace Nellie’s adventure. A great circle of corn was imposed on the orderly rows. When my father began his Evangelicalism: The New Neutralism in 1958, new evangelicalism was ten years old. As I write these lines in 1992, it is forty-four years old. After ten years it may be hard to see where a movement is going. After forty-four years it is easy to see where it has been.

Early in this book I stated that the mainspring of new evangelicalism is to be found in three determinations of its founder. First, new evangelicalism determined to reject Biblical separation. This determination removed the fences God had ordained to protect the church. From the hilltop of history it is easy to see that new evangelicalism, like Nellie, has traced a great circle back to the fellowship of apostasy The heroes of the 1930’s led their followers to separate from apostasy New evangelicalism has led back into the apostasy their forefathers left. Worse still, the reformation has been vitiated, and the Pope is ready to welcome the wanderers home. The doctrinal fence which kept the charismatic movement in another pasture has been rolled up. New evangelicalism is moving toward one flock, no matter what men believe.

…

Satan is building the one-world church of the end time.  . . . The effect of new evangelicalism has been to deliver much of this portion back to the devil’s program. Neutralism is an attack on Biblical obedience. When Biblical obedience is destroyed, it eventually destroys Biblical faith.

Secondly, new evangelicalism determined to find acceptance by the world. At first this was a craving for acceptance in scholarship and intellectual esteem. Soon that desire for acceptance moved on to culture, music and life style. The desire for acceptance has led to absorption into the world.

One of the key thoughts of new evangelicalism is toleration. That thought has led to the toleration of almost anything in the name of Christianity. Scripture does not say that God is tolerant, but it does say that God is holy. God said, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” A craving for the world’s acceptance, even in scholarship, will displace love for the Lord. “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (I John 2:15).

The third determination of new evangelicalism was to add the social gospel to the scriptural gospel. … Contemporary new evangelicalism has forgotten that distinction and set the saving gospel and the social gospel side by side as equally important. Since man is a fallen creature, the social gospel will win the day. Man is always more concerned with the needs of his body than with the needs of his soul.”

I find that last statement rather compelling. It might explain, in part, today’s evangelicalism’s intense me-centeredness, including the almost exclusive use of temporal “blessings’ in much of our evangelism.

In every generation, the church is commanded to “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” That is no easy task, and it is complicated by the multiple attacks upon Christian truth that mark our contemporary age. Assaults upon the Christian faith are no longer directed only at isolated doctrines. The entire structure of Christian truth is now under attack by those who would subvert Christianity’s theological integrity.

Today’s Christian faces the daunting task of strategizing which Christian doctrines and theological issues are to be given highest priority in terms of our contemporary context. This applies both to the public defense of Christianity in face of the secular challenge and the internal responsibility of dealing with doctrinal disagreements. Neither is an easy task, but theological seriousness and maturity demand that we consider doctrinal issues in terms of their relative importance. God’s truth is to be defended at every point and in every detail, but responsible Christians must determine which issues deserve first-rank attention in a time of theological crisis.

A trip to the local hospital Emergency Room some years ago alerted me to an intellectual tool that is most helpful in fulfilling our theological responsibility. In recent years, emergency medical personnel have practiced a discipline known as triage - a process that allows trained personnel to make a quick evaluation of relative medical urgency. Given the chaos of an Emergency Room reception area, someone must be armed with the medical expertise to make an immediate determination of medical priority. Which patients should be rushed into surgery? Which patients can wait for a less urgent examination? Medical personnel cannot flinch from asking these questions, and from taking responsibility to give the patients with the most critical needs top priority in terms of treatment.

The same discipline that brings order to the hectic arena of the Emergency Room can also offer great assistance to Christians defending truth in the present   age. A discipline of theological triage would require Christians to determine a scale of theological urgency that would correspond to the medical world’s framework for medical priority. With this in mind, I would suggest three different levels of theological urgency, each corresponding to a set of issues and theological priorities found in current doctrinal debates.

First-level theological issues would include those doctrines most central and essential to the Christian faith. Included among these most crucial doctrines would be doctrines such as the Trinity, the full deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, justification by faith, and the authority of Scripture.

In the earliest centuries of the Christian movement, heretics directed their most dangerous attacks upon the church’s understanding of who Jesus is, and in what sense He is the very Son of God. Other crucial debates concerned the question of how the Son is related to the Father and the Holy Spirit. At historic turning-points such as the councils at Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon, orthodoxy was vindicated and heresy was condemned - and these councils dealt with doctrines of unquestionable first-order importance. Christianity stands or falls on the affirmation that Jesus Christ is fully man and fully God.

The church quickly moved to affirm that the full deity and full humanity of Jesus Christ are absolutely necessary to the Christian faith. Any denial of what has become known as Nicaean-Chalcedonian Christology is, by definition, condemned as a heresy. The essential truths of the incarnation include the death, burial, and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who deny these revealed truths are, by definition, not Christians.

The same is true with the doctrine of the Trinity. The early church clarified and codified its understanding of the one true and living God by affirming the full deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - while insisting that the Bible reveals one God in three persons. In addition to the Christological and Trinitarian doctrines, the doctrine of justification by faith must also be included among these first-order truths. Without this doctrine, we are left with a denial of the Gospel itself, and salvation is transformed into some structure of human righteousness.

The truthfulness and authority of the Holy Scriptures must also rank as a first-order doctrine, for without an affirmation of the Bible as the very Word of God, we are left without any adequate authority for distinguishing truth from error.

These first-order doctrines represent the most fundamental truths of the Christian faith, and a denial of these doctrines represents nothing less than an eventual denial of Christianity itself.

The set of second-order doctrines is distinguished from the first-order set by the fact that believing Christians may disagree on the second-order issues, though this disagreement will create significant boundaries between believers. When Christians organize themselves into congregations and denominational forms, these boundaries become evident.

Second-order issues would include the meaning and mode of baptism. Baptists and Presbyterians, for example, fervently disagree over the most basic understanding of Christian baptism. The practice of infant baptism is inconceivable to the Baptist mind, while Presbyterians trace infant baptism to their most basic understanding of the covenant. Standing together on the first-order doctrines, Baptists and Presbyterians eagerly recognize each other as believing Christians, but recognize that disagreement on issues of this importance will prevent fellowship within the same congregation or denomination.

Christians across a vast denominational range can stand together on the first-order doctrines and recognize each other as authentic Christians, while understanding that the existence of second-order disagreements prevents the closeness of fellowship we would otherwise enjoy. A church either will recognize infant baptism, or it will not. That choice immediately creates a second-order conflict with those who take the other position by conviction.

In recent years, the issue of women serving as pastors has emerged as another second-order issue. Again, a church or denomination either will ordain women to the pastorate, or it will not. Second-order issues resist easy settlement by those who would prefer an either/or approach. Many of the most heated disagreements among serious believers take place at the second-order level, for these issues frame our understanding of the church and its ordering by the Word of God.

Third-order issues are doctrines over which Christians may disagree and remain in close fellowship, even within local congregations. I would put most of the debates over eschatology, for example, in this category. Christians who affirm the bodily, historical and victorious return of the Lord Jesus Christ may differ over timetable and sequence without rupturing the fellowship of the church. Christians may find themselves in disagreement over any number of issues related to the interpretation of difficult texts or the understanding of matters of common disagreement. Nevertheless, standing together on issues of more urgent
importance, believers are able to accept one another without compromise when third-order issues are in question.

A structure of theological triage does not imply that Christians may take any biblical truth with less than full seriousness. We are charged to embrace and to teach the comprehensive truthfulness of the Christian faith as revealed in the Holy Scriptures. There are no insignificant doctrines revealed in the Bible, but there is an essential foundation of truth that undergirds the entire system of biblical truth.

This structure of theological triage may also help to explain how confusion can often occur in the midst of doctrinal debate. If the relative urgency of these truths is not taken into account, the debate can quickly become unhelpful. The error of theological liberalism is evident in a basic disrespect for biblical authority and the church’s treasury of truth. The mark of true liberalism is the refusal to admit that first-order theological issues even exist. Liberals treat
first-order doctrines as if they were merely third-order in importance, and doctrinal ambiguity is the inevitable result.

Fundamentalism, on the other hand, tends toward the opposite error. The misjudgment of true fundamentalism is the belief that all disagreements concern first-order doctrines. Thus, third-order issues are raised to a first-order importance, and Christians are wrongly and harmfully divided. Living in an age of widespread doctrinal denial and intense theological confusion, thinking Christians must rise to the challenge of Christian maturity, even in the midst of a theological emergency. We must sort the issues with a trained mind and a humble heart, in order to protect what the Apostle Paul called the “treasure” that has been entrusted to us. Given the urgency of this challenge, a lesson from the Emergency Room just might help.

R. Albert Mohler Jr. is the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues with Timeless Truth (Multnomah).

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 Southern Seminary Magazine.

Dan Phillips over at Pyromaniacs devoted a couple of blog posts to thoughts concerning the latest Florida ‘Revival’. In the second blog post I found this morning, concerning the path of a Christian’s growth to maturity:

We start out wrong about everything important. We have an innate sense of God, but we suppress and pervert it (Romans 1:1-32). We’re dead and blind (Ephesians 2:1-3; 4:17-19). In this condition, even if we hear the Word of God, nothing savingly significant happens (Matthew 13:4-7, 18-22).

1. God sovereignly gives us life (Ephesians 2:5), causes His word to be life to us (1 Peter 1:23-25), enables us to see what we had been unable to see (2 Corinthians 4:3-6), and saves us by grace through faith as a gift (Ephesians 2:8-10).
2. Thus awakened and made alive, we respond to God’s word in faith (Romans 10:17), yoke ourselves to Christ in repentant faith (Matthew 11:28-30; Acts 11:18; 17:31), in witness to which we are baptized and committed to a lifelong process of learning His word (Matthew 28:18-20; John 8:31-32).
3. Our goal then becomes to grow to maturity in and unto Christ (Ephesians 4:15-16; 2 Peter 3:18).
4. Specifically, what this maturity looks like involves (among other things) a grounded stability in God’s revealed truth that is resistant to the gusty winds of fad and fashion (Ephesians 4:13-14), and a well-practiced adeptness in the Word of God that enables us to assess, discern, and judge right from wrong, good from evil, and truth from falsehood (Hebrews 4:12; 5:14).

On conversion, the new believer lays down as a basic premise the Lordship of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 12:3b). This is the controlling consideration for all that follows (Colossians 2:6-7). Insofar as he is true to his birthright and call as a Christian, he begins building a framework of truth, and continues building all his life (Proverbs 1:2-6). His goal is to be able to test all things, internal and external, in the light of God’s Word (Psalm 119:9, 11; Hebrews 4:12).

His hero isn’t Indiana Jones, so his motto isn’t “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go.” His hero is Jesus Christ, whose life was a symphony of pursuit of His Father’s will (John 4:34).

And so he doesn’t drop his Bible and dance the Headless Chicken Jig every time —

• someone tells a hair-raising barn-burner of a story; or
• some World-Class Scholar (or mega-church pastor) writes a Newest, Greatest, Everything-Must-Change book; or
• popular opinion turns against a truth he’s convinced of from Scripture; or
• everyone who’s anyone is embracing a teaching he’s not convinced of from Scripture; or
• the secular media’s fitful fascination lights briefly on some new religious entertainment.

The disciple’s goal is not conformity to the fickle fads of the world, secular or religious. Rather, it is (to coin a word) transformity, into the likeness of the mind, will, and character of God (Romans 12:1-2; 2 Corinthians 3:18).

NOTE: Dan Phillips initial blog about the Florida revival is here.

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, written during this imprisonment, is the spiritual autobiography of Bunyan, the traveling tinker who became the eminent preacher and author. It is in the genre of Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. It is not a detailed account of Bunyan’s early life, for it tells us very little of his youth, education, military experiences, and marriages.

Written in 1666, Grace Abounding chronicles Bunyan’s spiritual journey from a profane life filled with cursing, blasphemy, and Sabbath desecration to a new creation in Christ Jesus.

The Conclusion:

Of all the temptations that ever I met with in my life, to question the being of God, and the truth of His gospel, is the worst, and the worst to be borne; when this temptation comes, it takes away my girdle from me, and removes the foundations from under me. Oh, I have often thought of that word, ‘Have your loins girt about with truth’; and of that, ‘When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?’

Sometimes, when, after sin committed, I have looked for sore chastisement from the hand of God, the very next that I have had from Him hath been the discovery of His grace. Sometimes, when I have been comforted, I have called myself a fool for my so sinking under trouble. And then, again, when I have been cast down, I thought I was not wise to give such way to comfort. With such strength and weight have both these been upon me.

I have wondered much at this one thing, that though God doth visit my soul with never so blessed a discovery of Himself, yet I have found again, that such hours have attended me afterwards, that I have been in my spirit so filled with darkness, that I could not so much as once conceive what that God and that comfort was with which I have been refreshed.

I have sometimes seen more in a line of the Bible than I could well tell how to stand under, and yet at another time the whole Bible hath been to me as dry as a stick; or rather, my heart hath been so dead and dry unto it, that I could not conceive the least dram of refreshment, though I have looked it all over.

Of all tears, they are the best that are made by the blood of Christ; and of all joy, that is the sweetest that is mixed with mourning over Christ. Oh! it is a goodly thing to be on our knees, with Christ in our arms, before God. I hope I know something of these things.

I find to this day seven abominations in my heart:

• Inclinings to unbelief.
• Suddenly to forget the love and mercy that Christ manifests.
• A leaning to the works of the law.
• Wanderings and coldness in prayer.
• To forget to watch for that I pray for. (
• Apt to murmur because I have no more, and yet ready to abuse what I have.
• I can do none of those things which God commands me, but my corruptions will thrust in themselves, ‘When I would do good, evil is present with me.’

These things I continually see and feel, and am afflicted and oppressed with; yet the wisdom of God doth order them for my good.

• They make me abhor myself.
• They keep me from trusting my heart.
• They convince me of the insufficiency of all inherent righteousness.
• They show me the necessity of flying to Jesus.
• They press me to pray unto God.
• They show me the need I have to watch and be sober.
• And provoke me to look to God, through Christ, to help me, and carry me through this world. Amen.

Found a couple of thought provoking quotes over at Reformed Voices:

“The postmodern individual may be the easiest sinner in 200 years to interest in the faith. Yet he is capable of living with contradictions. He can claim to have received Jesus but not believe in his historical existence. He can claim to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture but deny absolute truth. When the gospel is presented as a means of improving self-image, giving us a spiritual and thrilling experience, providing a source for success and fulfillment, or helping us overcome loneliness, we may be speaking the language of the age; however, we have trivialized and distorted the gospel message as to make it meaningless.”
…
“Perhaps there has never been a time when it has been more vital to present the gospel message clearly and without apology. That Christ died on the cross to save us from our sins and give us his righteousness is the good news, which the sinner must understand. The issue on the table is sin, not felt needs. Our postmodern generation needs to hear that we have offended a holy God and are thus separated from him. If we do not tell them this we are in danger of preaching another gospel (Gal. 1:9).”
-Gary E. Gilley, This Little Church Stayed Home p50-51

NOTE: Gary Gilley has been Pastor of Southern View Chapel in Springfield, Illinois since 1975 and has written several books about current trends in evangelicalism.