Apostasy from the Wedding Feast

J. C. Ryle drew back on the imagery of the chant of Hebrew women when they were celebrating David's military exploits: "Saul has killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands." Ryle was looking through the lens of the biblical doctrine of apostasy. He was looking at the "Christian" culture of his own day in Britain, and said:



"Open sin may kill its thousands, but indifference and negelct of the gospel kills their tens of thousands."



This Sunday at Ann Morrison Park, we will hear a sermon from the text in Matthew 22:1-14 on the Parable of the Wedding Feast. But will they hear? It seems that the most offensive idea in the church today is not necessarily Calvinism or Complementarianism per se, but that such ideas are ever related to the reality of apostasy. Apostasy is a word that we don't hear about much anymore: kind of like "unction." But perhaps there is no more unction because there is no more fear of apostasy. The word apostasy comes from the Greek word apostasia found in verses such as 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 and Acts 21:21.



Hyper-inductivists have pointed out that the word does not actually refer to a movement of false doctrine but only a separation (i.e. forsaking); but this assumes that doctrine is unrelated to the object from which one separates. How exactly can one "fall away" without something to fall away from? And how can one reasonably conclude what thing has been forsaken unless it is knowable? This is why no one should ever study Greek without first obtaining a working knowledge of philosophy! But that's another blog.



The book of Jude uses examples throughout redemptive history (even the "apostasy" of angels, if I may use the word correctly again) to warn the church to contend for, and persevere in, the content of the faith. In the parable of the wedding feast, we see that Israel was invited to the feast but was indifferent, and even violent toward the King's messengers. They were therefore judged. Their willful falling away was an ultimate result of the eternal division that God made (v. 14), yet this eternal division issued forth in a historic division (their willful rejection: vv. 3-6), which then resulted in a final historical separation (v. 7)--which most biblical scholars believe was fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.



At any rate, what does this have to do with modern Americans? That is what I hope will be clear in the application of this sermon: An American can be a Christian, and a Christian can be an American. But they are not the same thing! Most of the people who fill our churches every Sunday are simply deluded about their conversion and most of the preachers and teachers of (everything except the gospel!) whatever it is they are teaching are simply deluded about their calling. If we fall away, it is happening right now. And if we fall away, we are falling away from the most amazing good news imaginable, symbolized by such a feast, thrown completely in the celebration of the King's Son, yet unexpectedly including guests who do not deserve to be there...who are obligatied to be there...who are obligated to be there as ones who do not deserve to be there. There it is. There's the gospel.

What is the Immediate End of Pastoral Ministry?

Immediate ends are nothing more than penultimate (or subordinate) ends defined as that which the shepherd is doing right now. So, another way to ask the same question is: What is the main thing the pastor/shepherd is to be doing in the immediate?

If the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, then the immediate operation of the shepherd on a sheep is to prepare the soul for heaven, to prepare him for God. This is what the Puritans understood so well, that we seem not to understand at all. This is why when we open up a book by any Puritan and read a few sentences, it is as if the rest of the world beyond the boundaries of the page fade to blurry and black and white, while the black and white of the seemingly archaic print turns into a world of color and clarity. All that we had just been thinking is reduced to the tone of triviality that it always was. We needed the sanity of the dead man to show us.

Nothing so tempers the envy for sheer numbers in the pew like the stark reality that each of the people over whom we watch will stand next to us on judgment day. And what will their condition betray about us? What did we care about?

Not to be lost in the shuffle here is that even among shepherds there is a diversity of gifts. Hence, much of what each soul needs, I alone cannot give them, even as an instrument in the hands of the Spirit. So how do we combine the urgency of standing before the chief Shepherd with the contentment in how He has arranged the body and the humility that it does not finally depend upon us? It is a balance that only comes (from what I hear and am experiencing) from being corrected when we are on one or the other of those extremes--not enough urgency, too much micromanaging, too little prayerful dependence, too little strategic, organized planning.

This is why the shepherd needs the gospel every bit as much as his flock. This is why the cross of Christ is at the center of everything we say (1 Cor. 2:2) and our every boast (Gal. 6:14). So maybe our answer above needs to be refined. What is the immediate end of pastoral ministry?

The immediate end of the pastoral ministry is to prepare the soul for heaven by preaching the gospel to myself and everyone around me every day.

Shepherds College

Why another Bible college? The negative side of my answer is two-fold, concerning the entire current model: 1) it isn't biblical, 2) it doesn't work. The positive side of my answer is that we are in the midst of a great move of the Holy Spirit and our institutions must have institutional expectations proportionate to something so great.

The contemporary Bible College/Seminary is unbiblical and inept for the same reason that the dominant model of the parachurch is unbiblical and inept (note that I am not saying that either needs to be unbiblical per se). It follows the assumption of Neo-Evangelicalism that our fundamental organizational task is to build a cultural consensus. This practical theology has the inevitable effect of gutting the worldview out of the cultural engagement in question. Since such endeavors must court funds and other support, a lowest common denominator approach to potential donors is standard fair. It also follows the assumptions of a confessional Christianity that is simply ill-equipped to compete in the new global-tribal world. It believes that denominations are supremely qualified to safeguard the integrity of the faculty. Their resume in the modern West is atrocious. The reason is fairly intuitive. Two-thousand miles (away from home), fifty-thousand dollars (minimum tuition), a traditionally dead urban spiritual environment, and a leadership removed from the local church itself was bound to distance itself from the original purposes of the confession. Such a system also communicates that God only uses the wealthy and the accumulated debt for a job that only pays if you sell out is good stewardship. That is flat-out wicked. It ignores the fact that most second or third generation church kids in the midst of affluence have a comatose faith (at best) during the years where they would apply, and most seminaries require recommendations of doctrinal and character kinds upon application. If the seminary cannot assess, in four years, whether someone has a base-level life and doctrine, then why on earth are they in charge of who watches over people's souls anyway! Have I mentioned the definition of insanity?

The Shepherds College at The Well begins next Wednesday morning with a 14-week course entitled "Titus and Pastoral Ministry" in which we study that Pastoral Letter expositionally, supplemented by two texts: Richard Baxter's The Reformed Pastor and John Piper's Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. In preparation for my own soul's position toward this endeavor I have combined my prayers and rough sketches with some very good messages on similar subjects. Piper's message entitled "The Earth is the Lord's" from Psalm 24:1 was especially helpful in how he charted out the purpose for the Bethlehem Institute. We are not unaware of the trappings and temptations of such a project. I am persuaded that one of the chief tasks of a church planter with my particular skill set is to train up as many young men to be shepherds as I can get my hands on. That is justification enough. We are going at it cautiously, one class at a time. Here is one more way to say the same thing:

When R. Kent Hughes was offered a chair of the Practical Theology department at a large seminary, he phoned the head of that institution and asked, "What do you think: Do you think I can influence men toward preaching the gospel by staying in my pulpit or do you think I can do it more by going to a seminary." And the head responded: "You ought to stay where you are...You will not influence men to teach the word of God unless the rest of the faculty members are believers and convinced that it is the highest of intellectual endeavors."1

That is precisely why a man called to reconstruct and shape on the level of the total worldview, who is also called to preach, must see the local church and seminary in an urban area as essentially complementary. The one way to have the faculty that is needed is to make it (and shake it, if necessary). The concept of the seminary (Latin - seminarium) is identical to the depositing, guarding, and passing on of the seed of the teaching. It is identical to Paul's commission of Timothy in the first chapter of his second letter. The local church is much more than a seminary, but it is not less.

1 R. Kent Hughes, "The Study and the Sermon," 1996 Desiring God Pastors Conference

The New Definition of Extremist

Extremist (n.) - ex / tree / mist - 1. synonym for terrorist; 2. an evangelical who actually takes the Bible literally; 3. a single-issue voter (especially if it is the issue of life in the womb); 4. someone who believes that each article in the Bill of Rights is coherent with the document as a whole--i.e. the first and tenth amendments; 5. an owner of firearms; 6. anyone who has ever been right about anything in history and acted on it.

Notice that the new definition of an extremist pretty much eliminates history. I don't mean the study of history, but history itself. Each major player and revolutionary idea was, by definition, in the overwhelming minority. Each thought and said and did what they did in the face of the coventional wisdom and often the armed resolve of the masses that surrounded them.

Moreover, the biggest extremist of all is God. God's thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways. So far above our thoughts and ways are his, that no generation will ever form a consensus that welcomes his thoughts and ways.

Actually this definition is not new. What is new (at least in the last generation) is the equation of such thought crimes to the "enemy of the state" level. That ought to alarm us. Of course, since it only alarms the overwhelming minority, I suppose that bringing it up is just another extreme position. Even this is not unheard of in American history. The first Adams' administration (1797-1801) had passed the Alien and Sedition Acts presumably to quell the internal rabble-rousing of French revolutionary sympathizers, yet historians note that its real motive was to smear Thomas Jefferson and his aspirations for the next election. Jefferson countered with the language of the Kentucky and Virgina Resolutions of 1798. Their expressed purpose was to dust of the Tenth Amendment after only a decade of neglect.

That motion is being reconsidered by a new generation of extremists. We shall see. Tea Party's are not new either. My suspicion is that half of their antendees were just playing hooky from school. Extremists.

Why Must the Secularist Always Correctly Diagnose Us?

In the past month, Time and Newsweek have peaked the interest of the Evangelical community with the articles, "Ten Ideas that are Changing the World" and "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." Their analysis is accurate not so much on the theological, but rather sociological, level. One thing is clear however. If the cumulative sociological perspective of these two articles is accurate--as I think it is--then Christianity (as Calvinists understand it) is on the rise, and Neo-Evangelicalism (as reflective Calvinists have criticized it) is going extinct. And that is just another way to say that Calvinism--properly defined--is biblical Christianity and Neo-Evangelicalism has been the serious departure from the historic faith that its Reformed critics have always claimed it was. One may not like that conclusion, but to what other conclusion can one arrive?



Then again, it is mildly irritating to rely on the secularist to always offer more penetrating analysis of our total condition than do Evangelical scholars and pastors. A few years ago during the Super Bowl halftime show, a commercial for The Simpsons featured an advertisement of its own, with a scantily dressed lady leaning over as she pumped gas into her car. As guys were staring at her and she got up, a necklace with a large cross was now showing from where her cleavage was. The caption of the commercial announced: "Church--We're changing how we do things!" Naturally Lisa looked over at Bart and offered her usual out of place for a little girl profound commentary. Many other examples of op-ed pieces in secular newspapers or SNL satires could be enlisted to make the same point. Why is it that the church is the only one that doesn't get that our message is uniquely powerful and powerfully unique!



I have no thrilling conclusion to these two paragraphs. It's just making me do some thinking about future teaching, etc.

Long Time, No Blog

So, no sense in listing all the books I got for Christmas and Birthday until I read them. Here are the three I have gotten into so far: 1) David Wells, No Place for Truth, 2) Michael Horton, Christless Christianity, and 3) John Piper, Spectacular Sins. Done with Wells and Horton, but only 3 chapters into Piper, which I'm using to study for a 4-week class we're doing on The Sovereignty of God. This morning, I've just cracked open Mark Dever's latest, Twelve Challenges Churches Face, which is apparently a sort of loose exposition of 1 Corinthians and the similar problems that church faced. Oh yeah, and on Christmas morning I tore through the first five chapters of John Owen's Temptation. Sadly, though I was riveted and convicted, my right hand highlighting studiously, my left hand was extracting the chocolates from my stocking. What did Pascal say about man being a mass of contradictions? I didn't mean to. And stop judging me.

Anyway, Wells and Horton got me doing a lot of thinking: mostly about my dumb little book, Doctrine and Division. It's pretty much already been said before by guys like Wells and Horton, and Os Guinness and Mark Noll and John MacArthur, and yet to put it all together in one place! Ah, what's the use? I have no time to do serious writing now---3 kids, church plant, you get the idea. So there you have it.

At The Well, we're 6 sermons into an 8-part vision-building series called "Church from the Ground Up." Listen to it at www.thewellboise.com In spite of all the ways we get distracted, God is good and continues to give us undeserved blessings in our family and church.

Maybe I'll remember to blog a bit more this year!