Don’t Make Me Open This

I haven’t had time to blog a lot lately. Between my pulpit ministry burdens, teaching responsibilities, eldership duties, counseling, meetings, and parenting, I just haven’t had the time to put into writing my current thoughts. But my heart has been full of thoughts.

Humility, for example. All my life I have been surrounded by very competent and confident people. These people have that “it” factor that has made them special – in life in general as well as in the ministry. Gifted, wise, grounded, and down-to-earth are just a few of the ways I could describe them. But none of them, not a single one can take credit for his or her life.

Can any of us honestly say that we know everything we know because we just taught ourselves – “Just my Bible and a concordance!!” Ha!

No, everything we are and everything we do must be attributed to God. He deserves all the credit. How often we forget our complete dependence upon God? How often do we commit cosmic plagiarism (Humility, Mahaney, p.80), stealing God’s glory? Thinking that we are so wise and successful, we look upon others with disbelief that they could be so stupid.

Let me give you a secular example, being the election season. I often get disgusted in my spirit when I hear some “arm-chair” pundit on TV questioning everything our military is doing to win the war on terror. They never actually offer any useable stratagem; they are never original in their thinking; they are never talking about how to solve conflicts. All they do is criticize what has been done now that they have the privilege of hindsight, and build their arguments off of the successes and failures of others who were actually brave enough to engage the conflict. Yes, these pundits have a right to do it, but they don’t have any basis for considering themselves so called “experts” and everyone else moronic.

But lately I have seen the same practice among Christian scholars. It is no doubt that our religious education is making advances – especially if you only compare it to the advances of the 1900’s. But, brothers, if we are more advanced in our Biblical education such as our hermeneutic skills, it is only because greater scholars than us gave us the tools we have. And many of those men did it at the expense of their own lives. We may now sit around and say that great preachers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were good preachers but poor exegetes, but I think we should check our pride. Without their exegetical work what would we know? We may say, “Ah, they were good at preaching their systems of theology, but we preach the text.” Yeah, sure you do. I am sure if the Bezas and Gills and Owens of old were alive today they would just step out of the pulpit ministry and humbly sit at our feet, O Great Expositors.

Those men who have gone before us faithfully and successfully fought mysticism, sacramentalism, rationalism, orthodoxism, politicism, ecumenism, revivalism, experientialism, subjectivism, and pragmatism – all with the Word of God. They didn’t have internet software or two millennia of good resource materials and textbooks. They didn’t have conferences, workshops, scores of seminaries, monthly scholarship journals, CD ministries, and so on. Yet, many of these men knew Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German, French, and English. Many of these men spent unhealthy hours studying, meditating, and praying over God’s Word. They weren’t looking for a rapture but a return; they weren’t speaking in unknown tongues in a prayer closet but preaching nearly every day in public gatherings; they weren’t trying to find ways to connect with the culture but were helping people separate themselves from this world’s ways.

Of course these men expected us to improve upon their theological and exegetical work and forge our own ministries. But to act like we are superior to these men… To act like we are more enlightened in the meaning of the text because these men weren’t far enough removed from the Dark Ages… To act like we have this whole thing figured out and those poor guys just pointed us in the right direction but never actually got there themselves… Well, that is just an attitude that makes me angry. Yes, angry. Such an attitude will only put blinders on our scholarship advances.

Besides, I am not sure we are even at par with were those men were in education, much less surpassed them. I’m afraid we took some steps backwards in the 1900’s. Our pastors now think that “Purpose Driven Life” is a profound theological work. Seminary presidents like Dr. Caner don’t even know the Biblical definition of grace. Syncretism has infected all the major denominations. And yet we boast…. and even worse, criticize the men of old who found the 5 solas more precious than life itself. Oh, I’m not saying they didn’t have their shortcomings, but can we really say we are smarter?

With every new theological revision I find myself less impressed with our so-called advances. In fact, I find myself most impressed each time I pick up a book by Augustine, or Calvin, or Pink, or Hodge, or Buchanan, or hear some quote from a man who died about 300 years ago. I love to hear Sproul talk about Luther and Piper talk about Edwards and Phil Johnson talk about Spurgeon. We find that these men actually saw the truth in Scripture in such a profound way that we either must quote them or short-change our hearers. We study diligently the text, only to open the writings of these men to “check” our work. Oh sure we find they made some errors… but will anybody be using our sermons to check their work? Will anybody say, “You know Spurgeon was a great preacher, but that Jason, now he was a real preacher of the Word!” As I said before — Ha.

Humility. It would do us good to remember were it not for the grace of God and the scholars He has graced us with through the centuries, we would probably all be teaching psychology, selling life insurance – and taking pride in it.