Archives for November 2017

After recently preaching a missions-themed sermon on John 10:16, I found the following post by Sam Storms. I think it dovetails nicely.

Someone recently asked me if I believe in what’s called “replacement” theology. This is a massively complex subject, but I tried to provide a brief answer. Here it is:

 

All biblical interpreters recognise that there’s development between the Old Testament and the New. Some say the Old Testament is the seed to which the New Testament provides the flower. Others speak of the relationship as one of symbol to substance, or type to anti-type. The point is that we must strive to understand the progress in redemptive history. And when I look at the relationship between Israel and the church I see something similar to the relationship between the caterpillar and the butterfly.

The butterfly doesn’t replace the caterpillar. The butterfly IS the caterpillar in a more developed and consummate form. The butterfly is what God all along intended the caterpillar to become. Likewise, the church doesn’t replace Israel. The church IS Israel as God always intended it to be. Let me explain that further.

I believe that what we see in the NT isn’t the replacement of Israel; it’s an expanded definition of who Israel is. During the time of the Old Testament one was an Israelite (primarily) because one was a physical, biological descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. One’s ethnicity was the deciding factor. But with the coming of Christ and the extension of the gospel to the Gentiles, the meaning of what constitutes a “true Jew” has undergone revision, or perhaps a better word would be expansion. Not one believing Jewish person has been replaced. Not one believing Jewish person has been set aside. Not one believing Jewish person has lost their promised inheritance.

Rather, God now says that a true Jew is one who is circumcised in heart and not just in one’s physical body (Rom. 2:28–29). The key passage is Galatians 3:16–18 and 3:25–29. There Paul says that the promises were made “to Abraham and to his offspring” (v. 16). I prefer the translation “seed” instead of “offspring” but either way the point is the same. In other words, when God gave the promises to Abraham and his seed in Genesis 12–17, it appeared he had in mind Abraham and all his physical progeny. But later we learn that he limited it to the progeny of Isaac and not Ishmael. Then we learn that he narrowed it down even further to be the progeny of Jacob and not Esau. By the time we get to the NT, Paul says God has narrowed it down even further, to only one Jewish person, Jesus. Here’s what Paul says:

“Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring/seed. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings/seeds,’ referring to many, but referring to one, ‘And to your offspring,’ who is Christ” (v. 16).

Wow! Paul is saying that God’s ultimate meaning in the Abrahamic covenant was that all the promises would be fulfilled in only “one” of Abraham’s physical seed/progeny – Jesus Christ! But just when you feel led to conclude that it’s impossibly narrow, Paul opens it up and says:

“for in Christ Jesus you are ALL sons of God, through faith. . . And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (i.e., the promise made to Abraham) (v. 28, 29).

So, the only relevant question now isn’t whose blood is in your veins (physically speaking) but whose faith is in your heart (spiritually speaking). If you’ve got faith in Jesus and thus are “in” him then you become the seed of Abraham that will inherit the promises! That means being an ethnic Jew or Gentile doesn’t matter when it comes to who inherits the promised blessings. What matters – the only thing that matters – is whether or not you are in Christ by grace through faith.

So, a true “seed” of Abraham or a “true Jew” isn’t a matter of physical descent but of spiritual new birth. No one has been replaced. All ethnic Jews who are in Christ by faith are the seed of Abraham and no less so is it true of all ethnic Gentiles who are in Christ through faith.

This is what God insists on in Ephesians 2:11–22. Believing Gentiles are now equal members of the “commonwealth of Israel” (2:12) and are “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (2:19). In Christ, God has torn down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile and “has made us both one” (Eph. 2:14). He has created “in himself one new man in place of the two” (Eph. 2:15). This “one new man” is the church of Jesus Christ. In the church are believing Jews and believing Gentiles, co-heirs of the promises made to the old testament patriarchs.

The old covenant ethnic, theocratic arrangement into which God entered with the physical descendants of Abraham was designed to be temporary “until” the coming of the Messiah and the New Covenant (Gal. 3:15–4:6). This is the consistent message of the book of Galatians. Now, anyone of any ethnicity has equal status as heirs of God’s promises so long as they believe in Jesus (Gal. 3:29).

Whether or not God will save the last generations of living ethnic Jews before the second coming of Christ is a matter of debate. How does one properly interpret Romans 11? I hope that it is true! Who could possibly protest? But God-honouring, Bible-believing Christians end up with differing answers. Still, no matter what one concludes on that matter, the Bible insists that whoever gets saved, whether now, during the course of church history, or later before Christ returns, all will be members of the one body of Christ, the church, equal in their inheritance of all that God has promised.

So I don’t believe that God’s saving work among ethnic Jews means that he will reconstitute the old covenant theocracy of Israel. I believe that all believing ethnic Jews, together with all believing ethnic Gentiles, will together constitute the elect, the church of Jesus Christ, the one “holy nation” that is in covenant with God (1 Peter 2:9). And because they are all in him, the true seed of Abraham, they are all likewise the seed of Abraham and thus heirs of the promise.

I don’t believe in replacement theology. I believe in inclusion theology: believing Gentiles have now been included in the commonwealth of Israel and are as much “true Jews” as are believing ethnic Jews (Eph. 2:19; Gal. 6:15–16). It’s not replacement, but fulfilment, just as the butterfly fulfils and completes what God intended when he first made a caterpillar.

John Calvin beautifully summarises our duties in Christ in our differing vocations and stations in life:

Finally, let each one see to what extent he is in duty bound to others, and let him pay his debt faithfully.

For this reason let a people hold all its rulers in honour, patiently bearing their government, obeying their laws and commands, refusing nothing that can be borne without losing God’s favour [Rom. 13:1 ff.; 1 Peter 2:13ff.; Titus 3:1].

Again, let the rulers take care of their own common people, keep the public peace, protect the good, punish the evil. So let them manage all things as if they are about to render account of their services to God, the supreme Judge [cf. Deut. 17:19; 2 Chron. 19:6-7].

Let the ministers of churches faithfully attend to the ministry of the Word, not adulterating the teaching of salvation [cf. 2 Cor. 2:17], but delivering it pure and undefiled to God’s people. And let them instruct the people not only through teaching, but also through example of life. In short, let them exercise authority as good shepherds over their sheep [cf. 1 Tim. 3; 2 Tim. 2; 4; Titus 1:6ff.; 1 Peter 5].

Let  the people in their turn receive them as messengers and apostles of God, render to them that honour of which the highest Master has deemed them worthy, and give them those things necessary for their livelihood [cf. Matt. 10:10ff.; Rom. 10:15 and 15:15ff.; 1 Cor. 9; Gal. 6:6; 1 Thess. 5:12; 1 Tim. 5:17-18].

Let parents undertake to nourish, govern, and teach, their children committed to them by God, not provoking their minds with cruelty or turning them against their parents [Eph. 6:4; Col. 3:21]; but cherishing and embracing their children with such gentleness and kindness as becomes their character as parents.

As we have already said, children owe obedience to their parents.

Let youth reverence old age, as the Lord has willed that age to be worthy of honour.

Also, let the aged guide the insufficiency of youth with their own wisdom and experience wherein they excel the younger, not railing harshly and loudly against them but tempering their severity with mildness and gentleness.

Let servants show themselves diligent and eager to obey their masters—not for the eye, but from the heart, as if they were serving God.

Also, let masters not conduct themselves peevishly and intractably toward their servants, oppressing them with undue rigor, or treating them abusively. Rather, let them recognize them as their brothers, their co-servants under the Lord of heaven, whom they ought to love mutually and treat humanely [cf. Eph. 6:5-9; Col. 3:22-25; Titus 2:9-10; 1 Peter 2:18-20; Col. 4:1; Philemon 16].

In this manner, I say, let each man consider what, in his rank and station, he owes to his neighbours, and pay what he owes. Moreover, our mind must always have regard for the Lawgiver, that we may know that this rule was established for our hearts as well as for our hands, in order that men may strive to protect and promote the well-being and interests of others. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.viii.46)

Lectures delivered in March, 2012 by Dr. Guy Waters of Reformed Theological Seminary at the Church of the Redeemer, Mesa, Arizona, USA

God Cares About the Church and So Should We: The Importance of the Church – Dr. Guy Waters

To Be or Not To Be a Church Member: A Biblical Case for Church Membership – Dr. Guy Waters

Soup Kitchens or Saving Souls? The Mission of the Church – Dr. Guy Waters

Parting Words, Matthew 28:16-20 – Dr. Guy Waters

Geoffrey Thomas writes:

The group was singing earnestly, the drums were pounding, the guitarists were strumming away, and the audience was tapping their feet – but the Spirit was not there. They sang songs for an hour, building up to a great crescendo and sitting down to an aura of well-being – but the Spirit was not there. The preacher gave his message, told his stories, made them laugh, and made them cry – but the Spirit was not there. He began his appeal and worked them over – some needed to come to the front to be saved, others to rededicate their lives, others for inner healing, others to talk to counsellors about their problems. A crowd gathered. A man said to himself, “I want to be happy like these people,” and he went forward – but the Spirit was not there. After the service was over, the people talked to one another about their activities and plans, and nobody realised that again the Spirit was not in their midst.

Down the road in another church, the congregation sang the hymns of Watts and Toplady and metrical Psalms – but the Spirit was not there. The English Standard Version was read – but the Spirit was not there. The preacher prayed for the congregation and the community; he thanked God for the gospel – but the Spirit was not there. Afterwards the congregation quietly went home, as aware as the minister had been that things were not as they should be, nor as they could be in the church of the living God.

When the blessing of God is removed from a gospel church which is worshipping in the old ways, the results are immediate and pathetic. If the Spirit of God is not inhabiting the praise of the people and the proclamation of the preacher, there’s nothing left but bare walls. However, when the Spirit is driven out of a church which has hand-clapping, “loadsachoruses,” a band, racy sermons, laughter, and altar calls, it will be about a millennium or two before anyone notices that he has gone – because even when he’s not there, they act as if he were, the atmosphere feels “religious.”

One day the preacher fell before God and cried, “Lord, I can’t go on without your blessing. David said of you, ‘He restores my soul.’ My soul stands in need of restoring. I seem to do everything like a religious robot, without even thinking of you or invoking your aid” – and the Spirit began to move.

The preacher searched the Bible, asking, What are the marks of the Spirit’s presence? He learned that defiant sin in his own life or blatant sin tolerated in the congregation quenches the Spirit. If he misrepresented God and his way of salvation, or if he fellowshipped with the ungodly, he found that he would grieve God the Spirit. He discovered that if he boldly preached on sin and righteousness and judgement, the Spirit himself came in his preaching and testified of these sober realities. Most important of all, if he glorified the Lord Jesus Christ and spoke much of him as God the Son and the Saviour of all who trust in him, then that work which the Spirit most delightfully assisted and blessed was apparent.

The great lesson he learned, as if for the first time, was that the Spirit is given to those who pursue God. He sought painfully to change his ways, discipline his life, be more resolute in studying the Word of God, spending longer in the presence of his Saviour, avoiding those patterns of life that left him morose before the TV to the neglect of his family. He went out after people who had been long on the fringes of the church and talked to them about their need of Christ. He gave more time to preparing his sermons, thinking of the people he was preaching to and the God in whose presence he stood when he spoke his Word. He continually acknowledged his own need of the Spirit – “without you I can do nothing.”

One Sunday he stood before his congregation and prayed, “Lord, we fear going through this service hearing just the voice of men – our own singing of hymns, and the preacher’s speaking his own words. We dread the thought that we’ll leave this building in an hour and not have known the fellowship and secret sovereign testimony of your Holy Spirit to our hearts. We confess our sins to you. We cry out in our helplessness and in our need of you. Please come and have mercy upon us. We can only erect an altar. You must send the fire.”

Then the forgiving Spirit, long grieved, modestly returned and breathed on them all. “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20).

Reprinted (slightly edited) from New Horizons, June 2001.

Alas, few churches heeded the exhortation Paul H. Alexander wrote a number of decades ago. If God graciously grants reformation and revival, will we see a revival of strong support of the Sunday evening service?

One of the small pleasures of my early childhood was playing with other children outside the church after Sunday evening worship. For a half hour or more, the adults seemed to forget their parental responsibilities and we ran wild and free in the soft summer air of a Kansas evening. While our parents pursued more mature interests, we captured lightning bugs, played tag, or chased girls with toads we had caught. It was one of the high points of the week. Life without Sunday evening worship would have been a drag!

Fewer and fewer children would think so today. Sunday evening worship is not a part of their lives because an increasing number of churches are not including it in their schedules. Sunday evening worship seems to be on the endangered species list, and there is a lot more at stake than a child’s game of tag. Sunday evening worship can meet important needs in the lives of God’s people.

True, Sunday evening worship is nowhere specifically prescribed by Scripture – but then, neither is Sunday morning worship. Both services are established at the discretion and on the authority of the elders of the church on the basis of such texts as Hebrews 10:25–26 and 13:17. The historic fact is that the practice of worshiping twice on Sunday is a firmly established tradition in evangelical and Reformed churches. What has changed that would warrant a departure from the wisdom of our godly forefathers, who established and maintained this practice for so many centuries?

Below are four reasons which, I hope, may persuade us to keep this tradition alive, or revive it, as the case may require.

1. The Importance of Frequent Public Preaching

The need for the frequent preaching and teaching of God’s Word is the primary reason for maintaining both morning and evening worship services. The apostle Paul urges Timothy: “Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage – with great patience and careful instruction” (2 Tim. 4:2). In this concluding and climactic challenge of his apostolic ministry, Paul is following the example of Moses and all the prophets of the Old Testament, as well as that of our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles. These great servants of God were pre-eminently preachers and teachers of God’s Word. Preaching was the key tool they used to advance the kingdom, and they were at it incessantly.

Since the Reformation of the sixteenth century, Reformed churches have led the way in emphasizing the necessity for the frequent public preaching of God’s Word. John Calvin exemplified this principle in his own practice of preaching nearly every day of the week, as well as on Sunday. First in Britain and then in the American colonies, our Puritan forefathers followed Calvin’s example by preaching twice nearly every Sunday and often at a weeknight service called “the lecture.” This pattern has characterized Reformed churches (and other evangelicals as well) until very recent times.

The preaching of God’s Word, therefore, in both morning and evening worship services on the Lord’s Day, has been regarded as an important application of this “frequent preaching” principle, crucial to the life of the church. Granted, this principle might be fulfilled at other times than Sunday evening, but experience has shown this to be the time that best suits most Christians. This practice has been regarded as axiomatic for Bible-believing churches and went almost unchallenged for nearly four centuries.

Not so today! “Church growth” experts are advising us that the evening service (and frequent preaching in general) is excess baggage, inhibiting evangelism and getting in the way of “small group” ministries now deemed more important than preaching. We are being advised that “the culture has changed,” that evening worship no longer meets the “felt needs” of our contemporaries, and that we need a great variety of programs to meet the needs of every age and interest in our world. If we do not change with the culture, it seems, we will be consigned to the trash heap of irrelevance, or, what may be even worse, to smallness, a fate worse than death to the “church growth” mind.

We should be asking if this is really the time to reduce our own efforts at preaching, the means God has ordained and blessed for communicating his Word. Our times have been called “the information age” because of the rapid growth of data in every field of knowledge. The mass media are propagandizing us intensively with amoral as well as immoral messages that are quite obviously impacting our church people as well as the world. Add to this the vast bulk of distracting trivia that the media peddle as important, and we have a seriously confused populace. To reduce our preaching either in quality or in quantity at this point in history appears to be a concession to the worst side of modernity. It is a dangerous experiment. The tried and true method of frequent preaching is being cast to one side for the sake of an unproven methodology – right when there is the most crying need for the preaching of God’s Word.

Writing in 1971, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones spoke clearly to this issue when he said, “The most urgent need in the Christian church today is true preaching; and as it is the greatest and most urgent need in the church, it is obviously the greatest need of the world also.” A bit later in the same book, he said, “What is it that always heralds the dawn of a Reformation or of a Revival? It is renewed preaching. Not only a new interest in preaching but a new kind of preaching. A revival of true preaching has always heralded these great movements in the history of the church” (Preaching and Preachers, 1971, pp. 9, 24–25). This is the kind of guidance we need today.

2. Greater Breadth in Our Preaching/Teaching Ministry

Sunday evening worship provides an appropriate opportunity for pastors to present a broader scope of teaching and preaching than is possible in the Sunday morning worship service. The Sunday morning worship service has long been regarded as the time for a quite formal sermonic style. Given the majesty and holiness of God, and the awesome significance of the gospel, this is most appropriate. God deserves a worship characterized by deep reverence and high dignity, and the gospel is the most weighty issue before mankind.

Without departing from due reverence, it is also appropriate to employ a somewhat more informal style in the preaching and teaching of God’s Word on such occasions as the evening service. Here the pastor may adopt a more conversational approach, such as our Saviour employed on occasion in teaching his disciples. An evening service may have somewhat the atmosphere of an adult Sunday school class, using a variety of teaching aids such as an overhead projector and even questions and answers from the congregation.

This also has roots in Puritan practice. Our colonial fathers often used the “lecture” method as their Sunday afternoon or evening style of preaching. This meant that they would address topics of timely and practical interest that might not seem appropriate to the Sunday morning worship.

Whether or not a more informal or more topical style is used on Sunday evening, the point should be obvious that we need a greater breadth of biblical and theological instruction than can be given within the confines of the Sunday morning sermon. Our Christian colleges and seminaries are reporting that an increasing percentage of young people applying for training lack the basic Bible knowledge that used to characterize applicants. Failure to maintain Sunday evening worship and preaching will only add to the growing ignorance of the Bible and our confessional standards prevalent among too many of our people. To feed God’s flock anything like an adequate diet of preaching and teaching, Sunday evening worship seems to be an absolute necessity. This is one of the things it takes to produce the kind of strong, well-rounded disciples needed to advance the kingdom.

3. Keeping the Lord’s Day Holy

Morning and evening worship on Sunday is a valuable means of preserving the biblical observance of the Lord’s Day. Like the morning and evening sacrifice which Israel offered to God, morning and evening worship marks the whole day as holy, setting brackets around it to remind us of its special purpose in God’s plan. While we may differ on the details of Sabbath observance, some being more strict, others more lenient, surely we all agree that God requires us to keep this day holy.

This is my shortest point, but not the least important. The fourth commandment is of equal importance with the other nine. To treat it with contempt or indifference is to treat the whole of God’s law and God himself with contempt and indifference (James 2:10). Those who may not accept the full teaching of the Westminster standards at this point, are, nevertheless, under a compelling biblical mandate to discover and practice what Scripture teaches on the keeping of the Lord’s Day. To decry every other kind of moral decay without recognizing Sabbath desecration as a great evil is to betray our whole cause.

We must keep the Lord’s Day holy. God requires it and we need it. We were created with a need for the Sabbath, and Jesus reminds us of this need in Mark 2:27. Against a culture that seems bent on despising the Lord’s Day and all else that is holy, we need all the help we can get to hold our ground. The history of both ancient Israel (Ezek. 20) and the modern church provides sufficient evidence to convince us that to lose the Sabbath will eventually mean to lose all biblical distinctive and to lose our faith itself. The practice of morning and evening worship is conducive to preserving the sacred meaning of the day and, thus, the sacredness of all of life.

The ordained elders of Christ’s church have been calling his people to worship twice on the Lord’s Day for many centuries. If we will continue to hear that call, he will continue to bless us. This point leads naturally into the next. The preaching of the Word and the keeping of the Sabbath are keys to Christian culture, a whole way of life that blossoms and spreads through the faithful use of these means.

4. Maintaining and Propagating Our Christian Culture

There is a quality of spiritual life that develops and thrives around the worship of God twice on the Lord’s Day. Something about being in church with God’s people twice every Sunday has a wonderfully positive effect, producing not only Christian individuals but a whole Christian culture, a community lifestyle distinguished by its caring, Christ-like quality, and a missionary zeal that reaches out to the whole world.

Such a church is modelled for us in Acts 2:42–47. Here is a beautiful example of a “normal” Christian church community. Frequent preaching and teaching of God’s Word is obviously the very heart of this early church, and it was wonderfully productive of that first Christian culture, setting the pattern for healthy, self-propagating church life from that day to this. Churches that develop along these lines can expect God’s blessing for generations to come.

Os Guiness sees the opposite in the modern “church growth” movement – the movement that, more than any other influence, has contributed to the abandonment of Sunday evening worship. Guiness warns that such churches may have “no grandchildren” because “the tools of modernity are successful in one generation but cannot be sustained to the third generation” (No God but God, 1992, p. 157). We should stay with the established pattern. It has proven itself.

Evangelical and Reformed churches of recent history have come in for their share of just criticism. We have been far from perfect. At the same time, we should be reminded that it is those churches, with their “twice every Sunday” pattern of preaching and teaching, that have produced the many positive benefits of the Reformed and evangelical movement. These “twice every Sunday” churches were all we had until about twenty years ago. This older model may not have grown as fast as the new streamlined “once on Sunday” types, but they produced nearly all of our present pastors and denominational leaders, just about every Christian college and seminary professor you or I ever met, and the entire modern missionary movement. This is no small achievement.

Experience also supports this point. Please forgive me for being just a little autobiographical at this point, but thirty-seven years in one pastorate has given me a somewhat unusual perspective. I have been able to watch people in my congregation grow up, get married, raise children, and finish careers – in short, live out large parts of their lives – during that lengthy tenure. My generalizations about my parishioners may seem too narrow a database to satisfy all the demands of contemporary scholarship, and I am sure that I am lacking in total objectivity. At the same time, I am confident of one conclusion: Those who regularly participate in morning and evening worship over a period of years are the most stable and productive Christians. They are, furthermore, the most joyful and effective.

Our present membership is three hundred. Over the years, more than a thousand have come and gone, largely because of the nature of employment in Huntsville. Among those who have come to church twice on Sunday, there is a remarkable record of family stability and spiritual productivity. Of course there have been exceptions, but from these families has flowed a constant stream of children who have grown to maturity honoring the Lord, marrying in Christ, and following the Lord in their vocations. This is what it’s all about.

Another interesting fact is that in all those years there have been only three divorces among those who have been regular in our morning and evening worship. I have been reluctant in the past to tell such a statistic in public for fear the Devil would attack more of our marriages just to embarrass us. Confident that we can trust the Lord to protect our people, I tell it now in order to give praise to the Lord and to the means of grace he has given us to make us strong in him. Participation in Sunday morning and evening worship is a proven means of helping God’s people to be “strong in the Lord and in his mighty power” (Eph. 6:10). It certainly is not the only thing we need, but it is an important source of strength and blessing to those who have used it.

Courage, Friends!

I have written this to encourage church members, officers, and pastors wondering about the present shift away from evening worship. I believe that we are seeing a major paradigm shift away from a tried, tested, and proven means of practicing our faith. Advocates for this change have not provided adequate reasons for us to follow them. Such changes in the past have proven disastrous. We have every reason to keep the course we have been following and to persuade those who might be wavering to return to this established pattern.

J.C. Ryle, a great evangelical leader of the last century, described a leader of the first Great Awakening in terms that should encourage us all in this direction. Ryle said, “The good old apostolical plan of incessant preaching, both publicly and from house to house, was nearly the only machine that he could use. He was forced to be pre-eminently a man of one thing, and a soldier with one weapon, a perpetual preacher of God’s word. Whether in the long run the minister of the last century did not do more good with his one weapon than many do in modern times [late nineteenth century] with an immense train of parochial machinery, is a question which admits of much doubt. My own private opinion is, that we have too much lost sight of the apostolical simplicity in our ministerial work. We want more men of ‘one thing’ and ‘one book,’ men who make everything secondary to preaching the Word. It is hard to have many irons in the fire at once, and keep them all hot. It is quite possible to make an idol of parochial machinery, and for the sake of it to slight the pulpit” (Christian Leaders of the 18th Century, pp. 269–70).

Let’s Keep Our Sunday Evening Worship!

We should reaffirm this practice and continue it. Last Sunday night, as I walked out of church, there were the children – out on the lawn catching lightning bugs, playing tag, and chasing girls with toads. I am praying it will still be that way until the Lord comes back. I am praying that all of you will join me in working to that end.

Mr. Alexander was a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Reprinted from New Horizons, February 1996.