The Most Important Overlooked Doctrine?

What is the most important overlooked biblical doctrine? Without hesitation, I would suggest that it is the doctrine of definitive sanctification.1 It was the late Professor John Murray who first articulated and popularized this doctrine. As he studied the exegetical statements of the New Testament that spoke of believers having been sanctified through the death of Christ (e.g. 1 Corinthians 1:2; 6:11; Heb. 10:10, etc.), Murray suggested that “it is a fact too frequently overlooked that in the New Testament the most characteristic terms used with reference to sanctification are used not of a process but of a once-for-all definitive act,” and that  ”it would be, therefore, a deflection from biblical patterns of language and conception to think of sanctification exclusively in terms of a progressive work.” Still many tend to think of sanctification as something entirely progressive, and, therefore, miss out on understanding one of the richest and most spiritually impacting Gospel truths. In order for us to understand why this is the most important overlooked doctrine, it will help us to consider what definitive sanctification is, why it has frequently been overlooked and how it ought to impact our Christian lives.

What is Definitive Sanctification?

As he unfolded the meaning of definitive sanctification, Murray explained that certain portions of Scriptures, such as Romans 6:1-23, teach that “there is a once-for-all definitive and irreversible breach with the realm in which sin reigns in and unto death,” and “that our death to sin and newness of life are effected in our identification with Christ in his death and resurrection.” In further explaining how union with Christ makes definitive sanctification a reality, Murray wrote:

It is by virtue of our having died with Christ and our being raised with Him in His resurrection from the dead that the decisive breach with sin in its power, control, and defilement had been wrought…Christ in his death and resurrection broke the power of sin, triumphed over the god of this world, the prince of darkness, executed judgment upon the world and its ruler, and by that victory delivered all those who were united to him from the power of darkness and translated them into his own kingdom. So intimate is the union between Christ and his people that they were partakers with him in all these triumphal achievements and therefore died to sin, rose with Christ in the power of his resurrection…

When the Apostle Paul said of Christ that “the death that He died, He died to sin once for all” (Rom. 6:10) he was referring to something that happened to Jesus in His death, and which subsequently has had an impact on us by virtue of our faith-union with Him. While Jesus knew no personal sin, as our representative He subjected Himself to the guilt and power of sin. When He died, He died to the power of sin’s dominion. This is how we are set free from the power of sin’s dominion in our lives when we are united to Him by faith. Distinct from the blessing of justification–which deals with the guilt of sin–definitive sanctification deals with the power of sin…

The Original Source of All False Doctrine — Iain H. Murray

Murray,

Human conduct is not capable of being understood so long as it is imagined that man is self-contained and insulated from any power other than his own.

Worldliness, it is true, is the outcome of man’s fallen nature, but the same fall which introduced that nature also brought man under the control of Satan and demonic powers. Worldliness is no accident; it is the devil’s use of such idols as pride, selfishness, and pleasure, to maintain his dominion over men.

What Satan proposes for man’s happiness is, in truth, the result of implacable malice towards the whole human race. He means to exclude God and to destroy men, and the system he has devised to do this is so subtle that man is a willing and unconscious captive: ‘You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him’ (John 8:44).

Scripture says a great deal on the reality of the demonic, and yet the subject is today largely passed over in silence. Human wisdom has no place for the very idea and diverges completely from the revelation in Scripture.

The devil is a mere fable and superstition, so men believe; according to Scripture he is the unseen enemy who constitutes the greatest problem for men in general and for the churches in particular. Man is in the midst of a supernatural conflict; and the adversary – ‘the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience’ (Ephesians 2:2) – is vastly superior to all the intelligence and energies of men.

While we may expect unregenerate men to have no discernment on this issue, it has to be a matter of concern when – given the prominent warnings of the New Testament – the demonic ceases to be a vital part of the belief of professing Evangelicals.

For the apostles, understanding the existence and wiles of Satan was essential to Christian living: ‘Be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might … For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age’ (Ephesians 6:10, 12). This teaching determines the biblical view of human need.

Non-Christians are in a condition of blindness and bondage. They are under a power greater than the will of man and from which only Christ can set them free. Here was the recognition which led the apostles to repudiate all the world’s methods for winning disciples.

Supernatural power had to be met with supernatural power: ‘For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds’ (2 Corinthians 10:3-4).

The biblical revelation on evil spirits is no less relevant to the way in which the church is to defend herself against the demonic. We are constantly warned that Satan works principally through doctrinal deception and falsehood. He was the inspiration for all the false prophets of the Old Testament: ‘He is a liar and the father of it’ (John 8:44).

His great intent is to bring darkness and confusion into the church as he did among the Jews. It was a lie of Satan which brought judgement into the infant church at Jerusalem (Acts 5:3). It was Satan who at Paphos opposed Paul on his first missionary journey by using a sorcerer ‘to turn away the proconsul from the faith’ (Acts 13:8).

The church at Corinth was in danger of allowing ‘a different gospel’ to be unopposed because ‘the serpent who deceived Eve by his craftiness’ was working to mislead her (2 Corinthians 11:3).

False prophets arise within the church yet they do not appear as such: ‘And no wonder!’, writes the apostle, ‘For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11:14).

The idea that Christianity stands chiefly in danger from the forces of materialism, or from secular philosophy, or from pagan religions, is not the teaching of the New Testament. The greatest danger comes rather from temptations within and from those who, using the name of Christ, are instruments of Satan to lead men to believe a lie. ‘False christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to deceive, if possible, even the elect’ (Matthew 24:24).

No one can rightly believe this without seeing the seriousness of error. Wrong belief is as dangerous as unbelief. To deny the deity and the work of Christ will shut men out of heaven as certainly as will the sin of murder (John 8:24; 1 John 2:22-23).

To preach ‘another gospel’ is to be ‘accursed’ (Galatians 1:6-9).Those who support heresies ‘will not inherit the kingdom of God’ (Galatians 5:20-21).This means that a large part of the preservation and defence of the church lies in resolute resistance to falsehood and in forthright teaching of the truth.

Such warnings as ‘beware of the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees’ (Matthew 16:12), for they ‘shut up the kingdom of God against men’ (Matthew 23:13), run right through the New Testament.

The apostles, filled with the Spirit of Christ, suffered no toleration of error. They opposed it wherever it arose and required the same spirit of all Christians. Eusebius, the early church historian, wrote of their outlook:

Such caution did the apostles and their disciples use, so as not even to have any communion, even in word, with any of those that thus mutilated the truth, according to the declaration of Paul: ‘An heretical man after the first and second admonition avoid, knowing that such a one is perverse, and that he sins, bringing condemnation on himself.’

Yet today this kind of witness against heresy and error, if not altogether silenced, has become muted to an extraordinary degree. ‘Even the mildest assertion of Christian truth today sounds like a thunderclap because the well-polished civility of our religious talk has kept us from hearing much of this kind of thing’ (Wells, No place for truth, p.10).

The explanation often given by Evangelicals for the lack of confrontation with error is that a harsh militancy has done more harm than good. As Christians, it is said, we do not want to be party to the kind of strident controversy which has too often marred the faith. Dr Billy Graham has often blamed ‘fundamentalists’ for this fault.

But the fact that what the New Testament says on love has been ignored, is no reason why its injunctions against error should not be obeyed. That some have followed these injunctions in a contentious spirit is no excuse for others not to follow them at all.

A biblical contending against error is fully consistent with love; indeed it is love for the souls of men which requires it. The command to contend for the faith is not abrogated because some have failed to speak the truth in love.

However, there would appear to be a far more probable reason for the contemporary absence of opposition to error. It is the way in which the instrumentality of the devil in corrupting the truth has been so widely overlooked.

In this, as I have already said, we differ widely from Scripture. Instead of believers in the apostolic age being directed to listen to all views ‘with an open mind’, they were told how to ‘test the spirits, whether they are of God’ (1 John 4:1). For there are ‘deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons’ (1 Timothy 4:1); false teachers ‘who will secretly bring in destructive heresies’ (2 Peter 2:1). There are words which ‘spread as a cancer’ (2 Timothy 2:17).

When churches have been in a healthy state they have always been watchful in this regard. In the great persecutions of the first three centuries, for example, Cyprian (c. 200- 258), bishop of Carthage, is to be found writing as follows:

It is not persecution alone that we ought to fear, nor those forces that in open warfare range abroad to overthrow and defeat the servants of God. It is easy enough to be on one’s guard when the danger is obvious; one can stir up one’s courage for the fight when the Enemy shows himself in his true colours. There is more need to fear and beware of the Enemy when he creeps up secretly, when he beguiles us by a show of peace and steals forward by those hidden approaches which have earned him the name of the “Serpent”…Light had come to the gentiles and the lamp of salvation was shining for the deliverance of mankind …Thereupon the Enemy, seeing his idols abandoned and his temples and haunts deserted by the ever growing numbers of the faithful, devised a fresh deceit, using the Christian name itself to mislead the unwary.  He invented heresies and schisms so as to undermine the faith, to corrupt the truth, to sunder our unity. Those whom he failed to keep in the blindness of their old ways he beguiles, and leads them up a new road of illusion.

taken from: Worldliness by Iain H. Murray which was excerpted from: Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2000.

9 Traces of the Doctrine of the Trinity in the Old Testament

In chapter 3 of his Reformed Dogmatics (vol. 1), Geerhardus Vos set out 9 “traces of the doctrine of the Trinity…in the Old Testament.” Among the most noteworthy observations are those concerning the “Angel of the LORD” and the personification of Wisdom in the Proverbs:

1. The distinction between the names Elohim and Yahweh. Elohim is God as He works among both Israel and the heathen by creation and providence. Yahweh is God as He has made Himself known by theocratic guidance and revelation. Compare Genesis 1:1 with 2:4. Where God reveals Himself, He therefore bears another name, that is, one knows Him in that respect not only more than elsewhere but also as another.

2. The plural form of this name Elohim (see Eloah).

Since Peter Lombard many have found a proof for the Trinity in this form. For example, Luther, but not Calvin. Elohim, however, is used of Father and Son (see Psa 45:8); the name also appears for people and idols (Exod. 22:8, 1 Sam 28:13). The plural is to be understood intensively, as “heavens,” “waters” are extensive. It points to the inexhaustible fullness of God, and is therefore a pluralis majestatis in the deeper sense of the word.

3. The concept of the angel of the Lord ???????? ???????.

Concerning this are the following hypotheses:

a. The Angel of the Lord is a finite spirit, a created angel. Thus Augustine, Jerome, and later Kurtz and Delitzsch. This Angel, they say, can speak as if He were God, as the messenger speaks ex persona for the one who has sent Him and is identified with Him. However, how could such a messenger receive religious honor for the one who sent Him? Judg 6:11, 18, 22–23.

b. The Angel of the Lord is the Logos, the second Person of the Trinity. Thus Irenaeus, Tertullian, and later, Lutheran and Reformed dogmaticians (Calvin hesitates at some places, yet seems to choose 1 above), Hengstenberg. Some assume that the Logos has personally united Himself for a time with a created being.

c. The Angel of the Lord is not a person but only an impersonal appearance of God, a momentary entering of God into the sphere of the visible. ???????? is to be understood as an abstract noun.

We accept the interpretation under 2 since only it does justice to all the givens. Additionally, however, we also note:

a. Those who shared in this appearance did not have a clear and distinct concept of the doctrine of the Trinity.

b. The Angel, the Messenger, was uncreated, the eternal Logos, but the visible form in which He revealed Himself was created, and the Logos was not personally united with it, as He was with the human nature assumed later.

The grounds for this interpretation are as follows:

a. The Angel speaks with God’s authority (Gen 16:13).

b. He is addressed as God (Gen 16:13).

c. He does divine works (Exod 23:20).

d. He has divine attributes (Gen 16:8).

e. He accepts divine honor (Josh 5:14).

f. He is distinguished from a created angel, Exodus 33, where the Angel of the Presence is distinguished from an ordinary angel (Isa 63:9; Deut 4:37).

g. His name alternates with the name Elohim (Zech 12:8).

h. The concept of Chokma, ???????, “wisdom,” as it appears in Proverbs 8:22 and following and Job 28:12–27. Here wisdom is personified, so that it becomes objective for God Himself and yet it stands in the closest relation to Him. It is the image of His thought, the perfect imprint of His inner existence—within Him and outside of Him at the same time. In the Prologue of the Gospel of John such things are said of the Logos.

4. To the word of God in the Old Testament are also ascribed divine attributes (e.g., Psa 33:4; Isa 40:8; Psa 119:105).

5. The doctrine of the Spirit of God in the Old Testament. The Spirit is the principle of the natural, rational, reasonable life of the world and thus represents the self-conscious immanence of God. He is also the Spirit of revelation. Finally, He is also the Spirit who lives with each believer (see Pss 51:13; 143:10). The Spirit acts as a person standing objectively vis-à-vis God (Isa 63:10; 48:16).

6. Old Testament passages in which God speaks of Himself in the plural. The church has always had a Trinitarian conception of these passages. The following are diverging sentiments:

a. It is a pluralis majestatis as the Oriental rulers used of themselves. There are no antecedents for this in Scripture. Only relatively late does something like this appear (Gen 20:15; cf. Ezra 6:8).

b. It is a pluralis communicationis by which God includes Himself together with the angels (cf. Isa 6:8); thus Philo, also the younger Delitzsch. However, in Gen 1:26 one cannot attribute an active part in creation to the angels.

c. It is a pluralis of self-generation, in which the subject considers and addresses Himself as object, so that the appearance of a plurality arises. See Hitzig. This is unproved, see Gen 2:18; Psa 12:5.

7. Old Testament passages where more than one person is expressly named; Pss 45:6–7; 110:1. Heb 1:8–9 shows that these passages must be understood in this way.

8. Passages that speak of three persons; Num 6:24–26; compare 2 Cor 13:14; Psa 33:6; Isa 61:1; 63:9–10.

Church should be high on fun, relevance and low on doctrine; then there’s Hebrews 5

Many churches consider expository preaching (preaching systematically through whole books of the bible) and/or doctrinal preaching to be too boring, too irrelevant, too divisive, too unappealing for modern men.  Believers and unbelievers alike, they reason, just don’t have the interest or patience for it.  Better to let preachers pick topics themselves so the bible (if it is used much) can be picked through, pulling out only  a verse here and there that folks today might find helpful in their worldly pursuits, interesting, entertaining, and so forth.  But sermons that spend careful time wrestling with biblical doctrine and theology, no matter how theo-centric they may be, just do not work anymore.  Too much bible, too much doctrine, makes Jack tune out after all.  Right?

The author of Hebrews knew just such a sentiment well.  He spends the first four chapters presenting us with the bible’s most developed and highest degree of Christology.  Drawing from revelation from OT prophets and new revelation from Christ and His apostles, we are told of Christ’s supremacy, deity, sufficiency.  We are told of his activity, his revelation, his mission.  We are told of his rule, his servant-hood, his intercession.  We are told of his place in history, his relationship to Moses, Melchizedek, the angels, men, the Father, the High Priest.

But suddenly the author takes a break from this theological steak dinner to comment on human nature.  He knows that this kind of study, this kind of theological analysis, this mysterious revelation from God, is likely to fascinate very few worldly believers, walking more by the flesh than by the Spirit.  He says of all this Christology (chapter 5),

11 About this we have much [more] to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. 12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

So what does the author lament?  It pains him, as it does a tender-hearted pastor, that his flock will not be able or willing to handle serious theological truth, and they must receive, indeed they prefer, milk to solid food.  They prefer to remain easily satisfied and entertained babes than fully mature adults.  I wonder what the author Hebrews would say to churches that, with good intentions no doubt, seek to organize church around the spiritually simple-minded?  A church that is prone to preaching lofty spiritually-minded sermons is seen by many to be a great turnoff.  People in a modern materialistic world can’t be spiritual-minded, but are given to material concerns almost exclusively, so church must follow suit if it wants to win friends and influence people.  Church, sermons, lessons, had better be this-worldly, of practical use, not boring by any means.  High lofty mysterious other-worldly truths just can’t be part of modern man’s diet.  But it seems rather clear, does it not, that the author of Hebrews would never celebrate a church that organizes itself this way, around the wants of immature carnal minded Christians, let alone the unchurched.

Now we might just say, well things change.  Different cultures you know.  But the author of Hebrews was writing about something far more ominous than fluff sermon topics.  He was writing about how to avoid apostasy.

The Glorious Doctrine of Irresistible Grace

Those who proclaim the gospel preach in a graveyard. Lazarus cannot obey Christ’s command until he is given new life, and this is something only God can do (John 11:1-44). When Lazarus is given new life, he immediately responds and exits the tomb. In the same way, the spiritually dead sinner cannot respond to the gospel until he is given new life through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. Once he is regenerated, however, he immediately responds, placing his faith in Jesus. He is then justified by God.

Those who proclaim the gospel preach in a graveyard

Irresistible, or efficacious, grace is not a dry and dusty old doctrine that was invented by curmudgeonly Calvinists. It is, in fact, a glorious biblical doctrine, for without the efficacious work of the Holy Spirit, we would all be without hope in this world and the next. When we come to a full understanding of how serious our situation is as fallen human beings, our perspective on these doctrines changes dramatically. If we view fallen man as merely disabled or sick, we will never understand the full riches of God’s grace. When we see ourselves as God sees us, however, the truth of the matter is sobering. When we realize that we were spiritually stillborn, rebels against the Almighty and Most Holy God, the Creator of heaven and earth, wicked to our core, we will not have an overinflated sense of our own goodness and abilities. We will not delude ourselves into thinking that God chose us because of some innate goodness within us. We will not flatter ourselves in thinking that we are saved because we made the first move to come to God.

On the contrary, we will fall down on our knees and thank God every day for His amazing grace. We will thank God that He came to our tomb, when we were dead and helpless in sin, and cried out to us, “Come forth!” We will thank Him for giving us new life, for turning our wills from evil, for granting us faith and repentance, for bringing us out of the tomb and loosing us from the burial cloths in which we were bound. If we walked out of the tomb, it was not because of any power in us. It was not because we made a decision for Christ. Rather, it was solely because of the irresistible grace of God, the sovereign and mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, who gave us new life. When we finally learn this, we will, with Calvin and our Reformed forefathers, ascribe all glory to God alone for our salvation.

An excerpt from John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology by Burk Parsons.

Reinterpreting Doctrine

As members of the church, we must always be on guard for false teaching. Yet not all false teaching is equally easy to spot. In reacting to the mainline Presbyterian church’s revisions to the Westminster Standards in 1967, Cornelius Van Til reminds us that even though something may be packaged with the appearance of orthodoxy, something much different may be contained therein.

Dr. Hendry’s book, The Westminster Confession for Today, seeks to give a “contemporary interpretation” of the Westminster Confession. His “contemporary interpretation” however is, in effect, a reinterpretation in terms of dimensional philosophy. In other words, Hendry’s “contemporary interpretation” amounts to a substitution of a man-centered theology for a God and Christ-centered one.

To give “interpretations” of this sort is now the vogue. The Germans speak of it as Umdeutung. Liberals were not very good at this sort of thing. When they didn’t like the doctrine of Christ’s virgin birth or of his substitutionary atonement, they would reject these teachings. This rejection excited the fundamentalists and they reacted noisily.

Neo-orthodoxy knows better than, in this manner, to offend the fundamentalists openly. Don’t just throw the milk out of the bottle and put polluted water in it. Give your polluted water the color of milk. Hang up the portair of Warfield on your wall and tell the church that, together with him, you revere the standars of the church. Having done this the fundamentalists will not likely notice the fact that, in your contemporary interpretation, you have, in effect, substituted a modern man-centered theology for the historic Christian faith.

Cornelius Van Til, The Confession of 1967: Its Theological Background and Ecumenical Significance, pp. 15-16.