The Twin Poles of Error 2: "Law" and "Grace"

When it comes to the Law of God, and by this I mean the moral core of the thing, not the sacrificial ordinances which were fulfilled at Calvary, nor the acted parables for holiness, such as not mixing fabrics in one's dress, nor the food laws, when it comes to the Law as summarised in the Ten Commandments and then in Two Greatest commandments there are, it seems to me, two and only two responses that the carnal minds of us carnal Christians can make.

The first is to deny the law outright, to claim it has been abolished. This is not true for Jesus said the Law will never pass away. Those who deny the Law call this grace, but it is nothing of the kind. This is the heresy of the easy believist and is not even faith

The second is to try by force of will to keep the Law, to become legalists, thus feeling obliged to try by force of will to obey the commandments which the Bible clearly says are utterly impossible. This  those legalists,  so endeavouring,  call obedience to God, but this too is nothing of the kind. However neither is it Law for the Love of God and neighbour is lost in the preoccupation   with detail that is the heresy which is legalism.

The thing is both sides will cling to their understandings and resort to brutal name calling to any who dare contradict them, who may have learned the hard way that neither of these two are proper responses to the Law of God and that grace is something else.

So easy believists live like pagans and legalists  are dead set on showing that the Christian faith is everything the atheists think it is, namely a mind control death cult.

And no one really cares that the name of God is being blasphemed among the nations by the fact that we are one of the two errors I mention here. Moreover we are blind to the fact that if we are not one of the two it is because we have been led to repent of being one of the two and can testify to the living Grace of Christ which led to this.

I see that the greatest enemies of the gospel are in fact within the House of God and often the delusion is so powerful that not even the Holy Spirit will be heeded, and this to the perdition of those who flatly refuse the still small voice who still says "Come to Me you who are heavy laden [ either with Law for the legalist or  with  the common cares of life  for the easy believist]  and I will give you rest."

Alas, how we have fallen, how we have defiled the Oracles of God, and how we sanctimoniously deny that we even have; and how stubbornly we cling to our defilement  of these as if the muck of this ( the defilement of the Oracles, not the Oracles themselves) is all the spiritual food we can ever know.

Ontological Soup

One of my metaphorical fancies, for the making of an albeit serious point, mark you well, is to liken all of reality to a soup; and then to compare the differing cosmologies and ontologies to the differing consistencies of soup.

To clarify, an ontology is merely a view as to what exists and what not. Some people's ontology, for example, allows for such entities as spirits and others not

The thinnest of all these soups, IMO, is atheist materialism. It is just matter ( the basic stock) with a little salt thrown in. It is clear, but without nourishment.

To make my point I go to the extreme other end of the spectrum where entities are multiplied excessively, giving the soup the consistency of wet concrete and the digestibility (ie rational coherence) of the same. I speak of extreme pentecostal religion. There is the stock; there are personalities; there is God; there are morals.

So far so good, a good healthy nourishing meal. But then they multiply entities beyond all reason. words become reified essences that have "power" not because of their meaning but by intrinsic supernatural endowment. Curses float round in the ether also sharing such reified essence. And they attach themselves to family lines like they do in bad horror movies. Faith also shares this reified existence, for some say it s a substance, indeed even the substance reality is made of. But some of these people have seen the atmosphere infested thick with billions of demons, one for every sin that every person has ever been temped with and also the source for every evil thought and doubt that any person comes up with - the classic "devil made me do it" excuse. Some also hold that demons infest amulets and books. Where all these unemployed demons hung out when the population of the earth was about 100 million and printing was non existent is a question they never considered. So demons are summoned where none exist and the wild imagination of the undisciplined thinker is taken to be divine revelation.

And the soup gets thicker and thicker

So that which exists, this soup, is thick with unnecessary entities, all invoked by bible verses misused to the extent of ignoring those passages that give prosaic explanations of such things as doubt and fear.

Such thick, dense and stinking slop I could not digest, rationally or even emotionally.
It made me sick, and when I finally crawled out from the cheap joint where they served this  they cursed me

It has taken me years for this nonsense to be expelled from the relevant orifice.

I cannot live on salt and water but it turns out the Bible describes a reality that is more rational than the crazed claims of the charismaniacs

The Question

The commandments make it clear that certain things must be done or be produced in our lives.

If, for example, we never forgive anyone who sinned against us what will be our fate

Easy believism is not an option  for faith is a relationship not merely assent to a proposition, therefore a relationship where God does not act is out of the question and ignoring the commandments as if they were irrelevant is easy believism

The question is this:

Does this mean that we do it invoking His help?

Or does He does it invoking only our consent as the occasion requires.

I believe I know the answer.

Do you?

 

The Most Perfect Picture

The most perfect picture of the love of God the Father I have ever known, short of direct divine revelation, came from an incident in my childhood, a kindness from my own father which I never forgot  even though I was and am  still slow to draw the meaning from it as applies to the love of God.

I was about 10 years old, so this was in or near 1968. The family was going out, though I cannot remember where, but that is not the point of this remembrance. I had taken some childish fit of sulks and would not come with them.

So I was sitting on the sofa in the kitchen/diner (I can picture it now, more than 45 years later) crying, as small boys do, and Mum Dad and my brother (there were only the four of us) were outside.

What did my father do?

He always was very good with small children. He delighted in them and they loved him.

He came in, spoke softly and gently to me, wiped the tears from my eyes and persuaded me to change my mind and come with them on the outing.

Though I have not yet grasped in my heart of hearts the acted parable that  this was  or at least could be seen to be,  it became clear  at least on a cerebral level, years after I was  converted,  that this is how the grace of God works.

If church teaching were true and my father were acting as the churches preach God's grace, he would either have left me in the empty house (there were no home alone laws then), shouted at me to "make the act of will" to get out there, come in and dragged me out or even beaten me.

But he did none of these.

He came in and comforted a distressed small boy and by personal persuasion had me change my mind and consent to come with him.

The problem with the standard teaching of grace is that it leads men to make the decision then grace, viewed as some kind of abstract power or energy, will enable the person to act.

But this skirts the fact that the will of man is the problem, not the solution. We cannot make ourselves genuinely and heartily willing by what C S Lewis condemned as maistry, but when we are told that God will not make our decisions for us, the way it is framed leaves us with no other choice.

The grace of God is not a power we get after we have chosen, it is the direct, personal and above all relational intervention whereby he persuades us to repent, that is where He persuades us to choose and that  in one on one counsel. For He is among other things Wonderful Counsellor, as said Isaiah the Prophet.

In taking my issues to the Lord the Spirit of Christ in prayer, which  for me ceased  some thirty years ago to be the typical church sanctioned recitation of a formulaic shopping list aimed at the ceiling, I have seen that He has been all kindness, patience and gentleness in His dealing with me.

I repent, that is to say change my mind,  as He persuades me to do so in one on one conversation, which conversation has been going on for more than thirty years now. As this is gentle personal persuasion it does not   violate my freedom of will. He is not tinkering with a mechanism,  neither from a distance or even up close, He is  interacting with a person, a child. But if he did not intervene in this fashion I would be bereft, lumbered with impulses which, if I am responsible for them, and scripture is most plain that I am,  are the true set of my will  and which, in the sense that the church preaches this matter, He has not raised a finger to help.

No, I am not denying grace. I am saying it is something else entirely.

It is personal one on one relationship and when we are in it He is all kindness and patience.

Just like my now late father at least in this instance, who never was a Christian.

My only regret is that he died before I remembered to thank him for this, the Most Perfect Picture.

Carnal Christians?

Some insist that there  is no such thing as a carnal Christian.

And one preacher insisting this quoted out of context the very passage which establishes with absolute clarity that such are real.

The irony of those who insist that there is no such thing as a carnal Christian are themselves the most carnal of all, religious terrorists and fanatics, extreme legalists who think that the claim of carnality is  a copout, but in their legalist zeal their own sin has been stirred up and made even worse than it ever was.

I do not use hyperbole when I call them terrorists. I am referring to the likes of Ray Comfort and Paul Washer. The first has repeatedly said, and in my own hearing, for we share a home town and I sat under his preaching for many years before he moved to the US, he said that it was his job to terrify people into becoming Christians.

And Paul Washer's stock in trade is the screaming rant whereby he thinks he is serving God by, for example,  telling young people that most of them will be in hell 100 years from now.

Both also deny carnality, but the weapons of their warfare are purely carnal as is their fruit.

Where is the biblical passage that speaks so clearly?

It can be found in I Corinthians 3:1 and onwards to verse 4


1Co 3:1 And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto you were not able to bear it,, neither yet now are ye able.  For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?  For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?
Paul Washer can be found on youtube quoting "Are you not carnal?" but does it to give a negative answer to the question. In other words Washer draws from this the implied answer "No, you are not carnal, if you are born again at all."  But in so doing he completely ignores the immediate context which in this instance includes the very sentence from whence this quote comes:  " you are still carnal for when there are  . . . strifes  . . . among you are you not carnal?" Paul said in verse 1 that they were carnal when he first preached to them and  still so even at the time of his writing of this letter, that they could not take and still could not take the meat of the gospel because "you are yet, or still, carnal. Moreover he gives examples of what constitutes carnality, namely envying, strifes and divisions.

This is the context of the question "Are you not carnal?" And the answer is clearly a resounding yes

 

Who was the letter addressed to?

1Co 1:1 Paul, called as an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, to the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called  saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours:  Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

For the logic is clear: if there are no such people as  carnal Christians then Paul was not addressing his letter to the Church at Corinth, for he was writing to address a problem in the church, which problem simply wouldn't be there if they were spiritual.  This is so as these behaviours are the fruit of the flesh, and no good tree bears bad fruit. The problem was in fact carnality as manifested by envying, strifes and divisions, also by such enormities as getting drunk in commuinion meals and that gross immorality of a man, in invoking freedom in Christ, who was having sexual relations with his step mother.

 

Was he in fact writing to the non believing hangers-on in the Church? There is no hint of this in his opening, "to the church of God in Corinth . . sanctified, called as saints"

 

A simple reading of the whole passage without cherry picking  shows that carnal Christians do in fact exist. That the phrase "Carnal Christians" does not appear in the Bible is irrelevant, an example of nave literalism that knows no regard for logic,  context nor synonym. The term "Trinity" does not appear in the Bible either, nor is the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition actually called The Antichrist, but both are perfectly valid summaries of what the Bible actually says.

The question may be asked. what does it matter?

It matters a  good deal, for at the core of the matter is a doctrine as to what happens at conversion. If the change occurring then is over estimated then a person is forced into the pretence of acting according to this change that  is no change to the extent that it is over estimated. This is by definition hypocrisy and it also causes strain.

Although it is written that if any be in Christ he is a new creation how does the carnal Christian fit into this? For in acting like a mere man (which St Paul rebukes, therefore appealing to being merely or only human is  no excuse) how is such a person a new creation?

To me it is clear that we who are carnal are not. Does the scripture err then? Clearly not. But I think the distinction between manifest and imputed righteousness applies here. God views us as righteous not because we are but because he reckons us so (the meaning of the term imputation) as part of our changed standing before Him on the basis of our faith.

Either we become sinless at conversion that we may indeed be new creations through being in Christ, or we are imputed as new creations, which thus is a synonym for righteousness, which is itself imputed. The work of the Holy Spirit is to change us into being in reality what we are imputed as being, but this is an on going process.

The worst upshot of denying carnality is that those who think they are spiritual  because being Christians they  by definition be spiritual have become so blinded as to have no insight into their own natures. Of course seeking to live to a change that has not happened in them they are under law as they attempt to force the pretence their doctrine requires.  This of course stirs up their sin and makes them worse than they were as unbelievers.

Were they to admit their carnality  they could be led to repent of it at the Lord's behest. But this they refuse because their definitions preclude it.

The flip side of this view is the total despair of those who know their sin, are trapped in the experience of Romans chapter seven and, believing that there are no such things as carnal Christians, believe that they are not saved  and thus feel that they have no access to the throne of grace. Such a view drives people insane.

Finally, if there is no such thing as  carnal Christian then I do not know any Christians for in thirty six years I have never met any and I myself certainly am not a Christian.

Or the doctrine made by such is false and those doing do have put themselves under Law and forsaken Christ because in their heart of hears they refuse to acknowledge that they are sinners.

A doctrine that claims to be spiritual and in fact being so savagely cruel is what in essence a heresy is

 

Coming Soon: The Twin Poles of Error 2: Cessationist versus Charismaniac

These two named errors are both errors, as I shall demonstrate. And they feed off each other.

Cessationism is the easiest to deal with.

I Cor 13 speaks of when tongues and the like shall cease: they shall cease "when the perfect has come."

What is this perfect thing? Cessationists insist this is the scripture itself, but this I  will demonstrate to be  an out of context reading.

A good look at the passage in question is called for:

1Co 13:8  Love never fails: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abides faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is love
 

The sentence they appeal to is here: "But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away."  But has it come yet? To answer this one must ask what will happen when it has come.  "For now we see through a glass, darkly."  This turn of phrase is so well known as to have entered the English language as an idiom, so, to continue  "but then face to face ."  But when? When is the "then" spoken of here? Clearly "when the perfect has come." In true Hebrew style Paul then repeats himself in a parallel passage immediately following : "now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

 

And now the clinching question must be raised? Are there any alive who  know God face to face (for it is clearly God Who is being spoken of in the passage), who see unmediated and not as if through a glass darkly and who know as they are known?

 

To know as one is known, that is to say to know as God knows, this is the result of what will be when the perfect has come. Until then it can be seen as a mightily tall order. So I ask again: is there any who know in this fashion (mad boastings of the  super spiritual notwithstanding)?  To any with even an ounce humility and realism the answer is clear. No there is not. We all see through a glass darkly and none has exhaustive knowledge of anything, let alone of God Himself

 

Therefore the perfect as not come, for though the scripture is perfect it is not the perfect that scripture spoke of.

 

Therefore miracles, prophecy, tongues and the like should not have ceased. If they did it is because of our unbelief and backsliding, and we  run the risk of having quenched the Spirit. What is claimed to be a virtue by the Cessationists is in fact a most grievous sin.

 

Whoever put the chapter headings and verse numbering in scripture back in the medieval period or so did this issue a great disservice.

 

Although it may be a grand rhetorical gesture to end the thirteenth chapter of this letter where it is ended  to do so disrupts the logical flow of the letter in its original form. For the very next verse after the passage quoted is

 

 

1Co 14:1 Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy.

Not only is Paul completely unaware that his writings will help in bringing and end to prophecy, tongues and miracles, he is commanding his people to seek these things  when surely insofar as his own writings were scripture (and that indeed they are!)  the need for them should be that much diminished  by his letter.

 

Some can argue that miracles can only ceased when the canon is complete, but again that is refuted by  showing what will be the state of the Christian believer when  the perfect has come. One does not and indeed cannot in logic produce writings which are to end, or contribute to the ending of,  a phenomenon then command the readers  in the selfsame letter to seek the very thing that is to be ended.

 

Cessationism is refuted. They do despise prophecy and insofar as the Holy Spirit would speak to them on the matter they have quenched the Spirit, both of which are forbidden in I Thessalonians 5:19-20.  Of course to simply believe error in good faith is not to quench the Spirit, and this situation can be remedied.  If we are commanded to seek the gifts of the Spirit when the idea that they ceased with the Apostles is refuted then at least such are in disobedience. It does depend on the individual relationship with the Spirit, however, whether this leads to sins more dire. Error of itself does not imply being unteachable by the Holy Spirit.

For as always, and I am a living testimony to this, He is merciful, and I know this because of my own extreme legalism which  made me as great a fool as the Galatians

 

To be fair, however, there is indeed madness in the charismatic movements which has risen from time to time over the centuries and although it is not logically valid to react against them as  is all too often done it is understandable.

 

One of the first and indeed still the most infamous schism produced between a charismatic extreme and a panicked church reacting against it was the Montanist schism of the 2nd (3rd) century

 

(mention montanist schism, reaction of charismatics to madness then fdeal with charismania)

 



Coming Soon: True and False Security

:There is security in Christ, but Once Saved Always Saved is not this.

This I will demonstrate from scripture